Down With Race, Up With Ethnicity

Repost from the old site. In the comments threads, James Schipper, one our fine commenters who usually has something brilliant to say, opines:

One of the most politically correct countries in the world is Sweden. How many Jews are there in Sweden? The Netherlands also used to be very PC, but its Jewish minority is not even 0. I don’t think that we should confuse ethnocentricity with racism. An ethnic group is not a race. An ethnic group can be composed of several races and a race can be divided into many ethnic groups. The Brazilians are an ethnic group, but they aren’t one race. Europeans in 1950 were for practical purposes all white, but they were divided in numerous ethnic groups. Nobody in the British Isles, for instance, said: “We are all one ethnic group because we are all white. The French across the Channel are white too, so they are also part of our ethnic group.” It is only in the Americas and the colonies that Whites started to think racially and to confuse race and ethnicity. Remember, if two groups are racially different, they are usually also ethnically different.If that is the case, the ethnic rivalry will also acquire a racial coloration. If the French were black, the ethnic rivalry between the English and French would also have acquired a racial dimension, even though it is ethnic at bottom. It is inevitable that human beings will be ethnocentric to some extent, but it is not inevitable that this ethnocentricity will be expressed racially. If multiracial countries want to acquire cohesion, they should practice racially inclusive ethnocentricity. This is also why race-based rights such as affirmative action should be abolished. They undermine ethnic unity and promote racial solidarity instead of multiracial ethnic solidarity. Down with race and up with ethnicity.

He makes some very interesting comments. Growing up in California in the 1960’s and 1970’s, no one of us ever thought of ourselves as White. We more or less assimilated to a California culture, which, as I think back on it now, was largely a White culture. But I never realized it at the time. White culture was married with California or American culture to the point where one scarcely knew where one ended and the other began. No one even thought of themselves as White, and we had many friends who were non-Whites. I even dated non-Whites, in particular American Indians and Hispanics. The American Indians, NE Asians, Filipinos, Hispanics and Puerto Ricans were for all intents and purposes “White” because they didn’t really behave any differently from anyone else, mostly because they were not recent immigrants and were very well assimilated. Maybe they ate some ethnic food; maybe their parents spoke some of the old tongue. We were all just “Californians” and then “Americans”. I think what made Whites junk this and start seeing themselves as White was the mass immigration that flooded our state. In my city, it becomes obvious to me very quickly that I am a minority. Due to my UK, French and German heritage? No, because I am a “non-Hispanic White”. With a little bit of multiculturalism, national identity is still possible and can transcend ethnic identity. With overnight mass immigration, it becomes harder and harder. Mass immigration also forced many of us Whites to reminisce about the California we grew up in and how and why it is not like that anymore. It also reminds us that what we grew up with, now gone forever, was something of real value. What did we grow up with? Not so much a White California, but a California with a White culture that most others just de facto embraced. The reason it’s gone, and replaced with something inferior, is due to mass immigration transforming this state into Tijuana North. We never thought about Hispanics much before, but now the issue is so shoved in our faces 24-7 that we can scarcely ignore it. When a poor White neighborhood continues to be a better place to live than a poor Hispanic neighborhood, which in turn is a much better place to live than a poor Black neighborhood, it’s hard not to think of “White” as a race. Whatever it is, even if not a race, it’s something tangible and real, with hard reality consequences all the way down the line. James is correct that many ethnic Whites have only recently been taken into the White fold and have started to think of themselves as White, instead of Irish, Portuguese, Italian, Armenian or whatnot. That’s an interesting subject right there. How The Irish Became White is supposed to be a good book on that. Noel Ignatiev, a Harvard professor, is a difficult and disturbing thinker, but this looks like a good book. Anyway, Ignatiev’s position is similar to Schipper’s above. He doesn’t want to get rid of Whites physically. Like Schipper, he just wants to get rid of the whole notion and category of White people, which he says has no meaning. Ignatiev has aroused fury in White nationalist circles due to his publishing a journal called Race Traitor. Ignatiev is Jewish. The reviews at the link are very interesting.

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0 thoughts on “Down With Race, Up With Ethnicity”

  1. im familiar with that sack of shit. his fundamental premise is wrong. For thousands of years, white has been understood to be those that are indigenous to Europe. Nobody ever said Irish werent white. there was discrimination against them, but they were granted citizenship on account for being “free white men”. the Irish never “became” white, they just are. what a load of racist crock. these kinds of despicable bigots really piss me off and make me very sympathetic to White Nationalists. His book is simply false, anti-white propaganda. the fact that he has his university position speaks volumes about how anti-white the power structure is. if this man dies a horrible death, i wont shed a tear.

  2. Ignatiev ruined the anti-racist left. Thanks to his simple-minded call to “abolish the white race” idiotic upper middle class grad students can reduce the history of the world to “people of color good, white people bad”.
    For example, Ignatiev gave this knucklehead the incentive to erase the history of non-white colonialism and boost his own questionable victim status:
    http://zuky.tumblr.com/post/1336844839/i-studied-abroad-in-africa
    Generally speaking, white people are funny. White people who lack social-political-historical self-awareness while interacting with brown people in brown countries, are especially funny. White people who have not yet distanced themselves enough from their own whiteness to see the dark humor in the role of white people in the world, are extremely funny.
    This isn’t harsh. Know what’s harsh? The actual role of white people in the world. Colonialism. Racism. Slavery. Genocide. Imperialism. White supremacist corporatist neo-colonialism. Know what’s funny? White people who are unable to see their own place in that social-political-historical context, and yet remain so immersed in its ideology that they feel qualified to huffily instruct brown people not to laugh at the ridiculous antics of white people who are guests in brown countries.

    Though I don’t see many “ridiculous antics” from the white people they’re mocking on that site, it doesn’t bother me that they’re joking about them. I just wonder what would satisfy someone like Zuky. You’d think that the son of Chinese academics would have a better grasp of world history. But for him there are evil white people and sainted POCs and that is it.
    Thanks to people like him and some intensive study of world history, I have come to embrace being European American. “White” is just shorthand for “person of European descent”. Now I just laugh at people who speak of “whiteness” as a state of sinfulness that must be overcome with the help of professional anti-racists.

    1. You’d think that the son of Chinese academics would have a better grasp of world history. But for him there are evil white people and sainted POCs and that is it.
      Lol! You’d THINK.
      Oh, and by the way, I actually think that Zuky is a she.
      At least one commenter over at Jew Among You trolls her blog, and he claims that Zuky’s a woman.

      1. I thought for a long time that Zuky was a woman, but he’s actually a guy named Kai Chang. He’s posted pictures of himself before.

      2. I stand corrected.
        My dad has a long time Asian friend who’s similar, though less extreme than Zuky.
        He too sees himself as a “person of color” and regards himself as oppressed and slighted.
        He and I actually get along okay, though we never discuss race in each other’s presence. That wouldn’t go over too well!

        1. From what I hear, Zuky tries to practice a liberal version of “race realism,” but apparently fails miserably.

    2. Thanks to people like him and some intensive study of world history, I have come to embrace being European American.
      Good for you! Me too. I just recently got into White ethnocentrism too, and man it sure feels good. I spent decades being one of these White race-denier types.
      I don’t exactly want to encourage Whites to become ethnocentric, because most of them will just turn more conservative as a result and vote more Republican, but I don’t think it should be pathologized. If Whites want to be ethnocentric, so be it.

    3. Now I just laugh at people who speak of “whiteness” as a state of sinfulness that must be overcome with the help of professional anti-racists.

      It really is like some religious cult. All these rantings about “white privilege” are similar to daily incantations in the process of sacrificing to the gods your cult worships.
      By the way, as you’ve pointed out, I find it hilarious the way Zuky thinks she’s somehow exempt from any kind of “privilege” on account of being a “person of color.”
      Newsflash to her: You too live on stolen Indian land and enjoy the benefits of living in a 1st world country. Your language is the dominant language of the world and people have to cater to your language, but not vice versa.
      To echo Thad, these anti-racist “people of color” types enjoy far more advantages and privileges than the overwhelming majority of the world’s inhabitants, and yet you don’t see any soul searching from them or attempts to “deconstruct” their “privilege.”
      Yet somehow, a white factory worker needs to come to grips with his “white privilege.”
      Shit like this is the reason why the left has become a bad joke.

      1. The “privilege” of people of color in the first world wasn’t built upon the backs of their brethren back home. However white privilege WAS built upon the backs of non-whites. Not only in slavery and genocide, but the raping of resources from their countries that were used to build America and Europe.
        Even though I’m an environmental type guy that wants CO2 emissions cut, I can see why places like India and China think it’s bullshit. Europe got imperialize the world, cut all these forests, take all this coal, oil and minerals at gun point and build their economies, now when developing countries want to use these resources to build their economies, the whites say, “oh no you don’t, you’re polluting the planet! Cut your emissions!” I can see why this pisses off the developing world, even though I totally believe in global warming.

  3. LaFleur, I am shocked. all this time I, for some reason, have been thinking that you are a middle-aged Black woman. They way these people talk about Whites is sickening, like how Nazis must talk about Jews. Imagine if they talked about any other people like this. How common is Noel’s way of thinking among Americans?

    1. I’ve never met a single person in real life who talks this way, but then I don’t hang out with academics or yuppies. As far as I know, extremists like Zuky are confined to parts of academia and the internet.
      However, white “anti-racist” speakers like Tim Wise, Robert Jensen and Peggy McIntosh are raking in big bucks on the diversity training circuit. They have a captive audience of college students and cube serfs who are forced to attend their lectures.
      Ignatiev was admitted to Harvard’s masters program in education without having finished a bachelor’s degree. I wonder how common this is. Harvard seems to have been a hotbed of Maoist Third Worldism. The nutjobs known as the Maoist Internationalist Movement started there. I’d like to see a history of the evolution of the modern CRT/whiteness studies field, including its abandonment of class analysis for obsession with “white skin privilege”.

      1. People who listen to Wise, McIntosh, and Jensen fall under one of the following categories:
        1) They already agree with them to begin with, so there’s no point in them listening.
        2) They hate their guts, which means that they’ll never be convinced by one of their lectures.
        3) They were forced to listen to them by professors or bosses, which will only engender resentment on their part.
        With regards to how this began, I think you can trace its origins to the Frankfurt school of Cultural Marxism as well as Trotsky (Robert posted an article a while back, which discussed how Trotsky bashed white workers and increasingly placed heavier emphasis on race over class). After all, most leftists in the U.S. were Trotskyites.
        Then you have Herbert Marcuse (member of the Frankfurt school) mentoring Angela Davis (iconic black feminist activist), who basically was a racial Marxist. All she did was substitute race and gender for class, which is essentially Cultural Marxism.
        These Angela Davis types became influential on college campuses, and there you have it.
        S.F. State, not too far from where I live, was a hotbed of this Maoist Third Worldism.
        You combine black power activism with Jewish Frankfurt school style Cultural Marxism, and what you have is Maoist 3rd Worldism.
        That’s my take on it.
        If I’m wrong, Robert could do a post correcting my errors and explaining the actual origins of this Critical Race Theory and this obsession with “white privilege.”

        1. More on our hero Herbert Marcuse.
          http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Marcuse#The_New_Left_and_radical_politics
          Marcuse argues that genuine tolerance does not tolerate support for repression, since doing so ensures that marginalized voices will remain unheard. He characterizes tolerance of repressive speech as “inauthentic.” Instead, he advocates a discriminatory form of tolerance that does not allow so-called “repressive” intolerance to be voiced.
          In other words, it’s from Marcuse what we get this whole notion of “hate speech” and freedom of speech restrictions for “haters.”
          Anyone who’s pissed about Critical Race Theory, hate speech laws, and the inauthentic, race obsessed left, should take issue with the Frankfurt school and its followers.

          1. Smart people who live long enough will figure out what’s wrong with a lot of this ultra-liberal thinking. Nobody has to care at all about this Frankfurt School people like to invoke.

        2. And this is yet another reason why certain white nationalists who worship Hitler are insane.
          It was BECAUSE of Hitler and Nazi Germany that the Frankfurt school left. And guess where they came? Yup, here!
          Yeah Hitler, thanks a lot, fucker.

        3. No, all this shit came straight out of Marcuse.
          Angela Davis is problematic, but she’s a Marxist, all right. I assure you of that. She also helped to murder a judge.
          This shit got going in the 1960’s and just moved on from there. And many CRT types are actually Marxists or Leftists. That’s a fact. To say that they substitute race for class is not really true. At least the real ones are really leftwingers and talk about class a lot.
          The main thing is that they see the US as a capitalist, racist country. They see racism in the US as being just as big a problem as capitalism. And all of the problems of Blacks, etc, are all because of racism.
          I know some CRT types who talk about class a lot. One of them I know is a Marxist. He’s a member of the Communist Party USA.
          I don’t think Trots were too much into this stuff if you ask me. This stuff all grew out of the 1960’s with Identity Politics. Radical feminism decided that males were the enemy. Radical Blacks and Latinos decided that White people were the enemy.

        4. The thing is, black activists are not a monolithic group. Many of the Black Panthers were completely against the kind of pork-chop nationalism that much of the CRT blogosphere now wallows in. There’s a good clip on YouTube of Fred Hampton, a committed socialist, where he says that a black leader isn’t necessarily better than a white one. He said nationalism was no replacement for education:
          “You can’t build a revolution with no education. Jomo Kenyatta did this in Africa and because the people were not educated he became as much an oppressor as the people he overthrew. Look at Papa Doc Duvalier in Haiti. He got everyone to hate whites and he turned into the dictator himself. How will people end up without education?”
          As for Davis, it’s been a long time since I read Women, Race and Class but as I recall her main point was that women, working class people and people of color have to work together for equality. She confronted the racism and classism of white feminists. As Robert said, she maybe be problematic, but she wasn’t a cultural Marxist like modern anti-racist activists are.
          It was people like Tim Wise who ditched class struggle for the idea that white people must”give up” white privilege to save our souls. As some black anti-racists have complained about Wise, it’s a way for white people to see themselves as central to solving the issue. Wise dodges this by saying that people of color will free themselves with or without the help of white people. However, he still sees his services as necessary for some reason.
          Someone on another forum made the observation that perhaps the Shirky Principle is applicable to the Wise/Jensen school of anti-racist activism:
          Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.
          For a guy who’s expressed such contempt for Christianity, it is hilarious to me to hear him frame the issue in religious terms. It’s like whiteness is our original sin, and we must confess that sin to anti-racist priests like Wise and Robert Jensen to be cleansed of that sin.
          Adolph Reed is a good example of a black Marxist who writes about racism without the weird essentialism that anti-racism has degenerated into.
          A lot of what anti-racist activists write is true. The problem is that their focus is too narrow and that the field has been hijacked by yuppie academics who are mainly motivated by their will to power in the pursuit of their own personal agendas.

  4. I think its ironic that there is no cultural Marxism in the former USSR and Eastern Europe. Try talking to a Pole, Serb or Russian(!) about “white privelege”. There are no Tim Wises in Russia. This is actually one of Russia’s great advantages over the US, we dont pander to our minorities and we dont hate our own skin. Affirmative action and diversity quotas cost America billions. There is a feeling in America of decline, and twilight. While Putin’s Russia is optimistic, growing demographically and economically, and brimming with Slavic pride. I, like Robert Lindsay, want whites to decline to a minority in America. I have recently thought about it and decided this. I dont think it will bring a socialist Utopia, as a social democracy works best with a high IQ population, but it will lower the morale of White America, and destroy American culture. Think California plus Detroit times 100! America will split into ethnic enclaves, different regions will grow apart racially and culturally, Mexicans will conquer the Southwest, and before the 22nd century America will cease to exist. It will break up not like the USSR, but like Iraq or the Balkans. Pat Buchanon is right, and I am celebrating. We will see a new world order, not one that is unipolar and dominated by America, but a more democratic, multipolar world, especially with the rise of China, Russia, and possibly Venezuela and Iran and India and Brazil and god knows who else will rise to fill the power vaccuum. Let me repeat this, the decline of USA is happening right now. People feel it. People know it. It is unstoppable, inevitable. Glory to Russia!

    1. Yes but he also allowed millions of Muslims into Russia from Central Asian states an insane policy given the fact that all these Central Asian and North Caucasus groups are inter- connected. Chechens were involved in the incident in Uzbekistan in 2005 trying to break out militants from an Uzbek prison and Uzbek and Chechen militants train in the same camps in Afghanistan and Waziristan region with all these Central Asian groups fighting in Chechnya.
      It was a Tajik national that killed the Russian priest that was converting radical Muslims in Moscow.
      At least he is trying measures to increase the ethnic Russian population.
      You would never get this kind of stuff in the US or Britain.
      http://takimag.com/article/motherland

  5. The big thing now in the WN community seems to be the whole Solutrean thesis that Europeans where the first inhabitants of America and I think it was Indians who emigrated from Siberia killed of the white population.
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXAkN2hS7A4
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02TTCXGT5Vo
    Not sure how accurately viable this claim is but apparently there is some scientific research to back it up.
    Tom Sunic over at Voice of Reason recently did an interview with Kyle Bristow who wrote a fictional novel on this thesis.
    I haven’t listened to the broadcast yet so I can’t comment on it but sound’s interesting.
    http://reasonradionetwork.com/?p=9247

  6. im listening to it right now. that Croatian guy sounds like a square and Kyle Bristow sounds like a friendless virgin. Also, there is no real evidence for this “Solutrean” theory that whites are the real native americans. I read that takimag article, and it doesnt surprise me, and makes me pretty happy. The audio quality is horrible on the Croatian guys part.

    1. I like Tom Sunic his program as well as Mathew Raphael Johnson and sometimes Robert Stark depending on the guest he has.
      Interesting that Communism under Stalin instituted a mass program to try to raise the birth rate across the Soviet Union.
      I was going to include a comment about Stalin but do you believe the main stream western narrative number of those killed or the number of 3.5 million that Lindsay posted citing John Arch Getty?
      Do you think the famine of 32-33 was deliberately engineered in Ukraine or resulted of bad policy, harvest, etc?

  7. I am not a historian, I dont know. I belive Stalin killed millions, how many? not sure. ah, the Holodomor was genocide. im only half-Ukrainian, but I want the reunification of Ukraine and Russia. Im far from a Ukrainian nationalist, but yes it was genocide against Ukraine orchestrated by Stalin. certain people deny the Holodomor, they are just as bad as Holocaust deniers.

    1. @AJ
      But it was proven as a phoney at the time based on Nazi/Hearst pro-fascist propaganda.
      Do you know the history and origins of the engineered famine?
      http://chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/vv.html
      Most history up until the 1980’s agreed it was not a deliberate act of genocide until Robert Conquest wrote the book Harvest of Sorrows in the 1980’s and Ukrainian nationalists financed a documentary Harvest of Despair and “research” at a University in Canada.
      I only discovered the truth about Stalin because of uncovering the origin of the famine narrative and seeking answers to questions covered in the main stream media that does not make much logical sense.
      I don’t think it is the same as denying the Holocaust as to this day they have been unable to find any evidence of orders that Stalin deliberately engineered it and given all the other counter arguments against it that it was not a deliberate genocide targeted at Ukraine like the fact it hit agricultural sectors the most and not limited to Ukraine, effected mostly the Russian East not pro-nationalist West, the origin of the original story as referenced above and that there was periodic famines across the USSR since Volga famine in 1920-1921, 1924, 1927, and in 1928.
      The Collectivisation process was intended to stop this which after 1933 with the exception of after WW2 in 46-47 there was no major famine outbreaks.
      Mark Tauger, professor at West Virginia University has done extensive work on famine research in the Soviet Union.
      http://www.geotimes.ge/index.php?m=home&newsid=22947
      John Arch Getty did a good Q & A regarding some of the issues raised by engineered famine supporters.
      http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=H-Russia&month=0205&week=a&msg=G9gRj0I/eXnblGCPQyYXlA&user=&pw=

  8. From what I hear, Zuky tries to practice a liberal version of “race realism,” but apparently fails miserably.
    BAG, I took a look at Jew Among You. The Chinese blogger Fred was talking about is Restructure, not Zuky. Restructure is definitely a woman, as you said.
    Her blog has been linked to by Tim Wise. All these people know each other and comment on each other’s sites.
    This is the thread that Fred was talking about, and what do you know, the first comment is by Zuky (real name Kai), in which you see his version of race realism:
    http://restructure.wordpress.com/2010/05/04/white-people-lack-empathy-for-brown-people-brain-research-shows/
    Whiteness works as it does because it was constructed precisely to NOT feel human empathy when brown people are bombed, kidnapped, enslaved, exploited, raped, tortured, by White Empire. This is not a side effect of race, it is literally the raison d’etre of 500 years of whiteness.
    I’m confident that the same test conducted on people of color would produce dramatically different results. I wouldn’t be surprised if a shockingly high percentage of POC actually empathize more with white people than with fellow POC. Perhaps a small minority of POC would fail to exhibit mirror-neuron activity while watching white people, but I’d bet on a VERY low number.

    How does Zuky explain away China’s invasion of Tibet, for starters?
    He’s very quick to put a positive spin on China’s recent expansion into Africa and elsewhere:
    http://zuky.tumblr.com/post/1359931122/could-a-rusty-coin-re-write-chinese-african-history
    I grew up hearing about this history at the kitchen table after dinner. I still remember that history lesson, tracing the maritime route from China to the Horn of Africa, an extension of the Silk Road. Maybe partly because my grandparents and my father lived in Ethiopia and regarded it as a great and ancient civilization, which is not the image of Ethiopia generally presented by white mass media.
    Oh sure they did. I’m a little suspicious of the BBC article he quoted:
    “Because they came with gifts from the emperor, it shows they saw us as equals. It shows that Kenya was already a dynamic trading power with strong links to the outside world long before the Portuguese arrived,” he said.
    Most of the reports about Chinese participation in the African land grab have been less positive:
    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/personal-view/3642345/Why-China-is-trying-to-colonise-Africa.html
    As one of the commenters noted:
    It is not just in Africa that Chinese colonialism and exploitation is increasing, and is resented. There is significant expansion in the South Pacific – both in terms of exploitation of natural resources and of the presence of (mostly illegal) Mainland Chinese immigrant traders. In Papua New Guinea, there was (fortunately) huge adverse publicity in late 2006 about the Ramu Nickel Mine, which brings almost no benefits to PNG (except for cash in the hands of some corrupt politicians). The living and working conditions for the PNG labourers were disgusting, and the disregard for Occupational Health & Safety total. One cannot but suspect that, as in Africa, the Chinese expected that the politicians they paid off would see to it that local unrest was quelled. Fortunately, that doesn’t happen here, and changes had to be made. Nevertheless, the increasing presence of Mainland China (as opposed to long-established Chinese traders) is causing great disquiet. The immigrants ignore local laws, spread corruption and bribery and destroy local markets. It is notable that, in last year’s riots in Honiara in the Solomon Islands, the “new” Chinese businesses were looted and burned. The long-established ones were unscathed.
    So I really don’t know where Zuky gets his fanciful ideas of naturally empathetic POC. It looks like he only dislikes colonialism when white people do it. Apparently Asian Empire is A-OK with him.

  9. China is not going to colonize Africa. China doesn’t really want to colonize anyone- more often than not it’s foreigners dumping even more foreigners into the hands of the Han and then they have to babysit them, inheriting all their stupid tribal grudges that have lead the Chinese into countless wars.

  10. As for the so-called “Free Tibet” movement, for a readership that claims to dislike the taste of liberal kool-aid, I’d expect you to be able to spot batshit-crazy propaganda better.
    1.2 million killed in Tibet? Don’t make me laugh. The difference between this number and all the others is that there is absolutely no proof whatsoever to the nonsensical “Tibetan genocide” claim.
    China has exterminated people (who really, really deserved it) in the past, and they never do a sloppy job. If the Chinese wanted to kill off all the Tibetans they’d have been done 300 years ago.

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