fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #2695 ]

[ SECRET POST #2695 ]

⌈ Secret Post #2695 ⌋

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So it was possible for someone to have white skin, but still be classed as "Not White" [a good example is how first generation immigrants were treated for a long time].

This has always confused me. If you're white, you're white. It doesn't make any sense to me how, for example, white European immigrants are considered "not white" just because they're originally from another country. White does not equal "white person that was born in the US".

It's the difference between "white" as a skin color and "white" as a category of people relative to the social strata.

ayrt

"white" as a category of people relative to the social strata

But WHY and how is that a thing? White is a race, period. It doesn't make sense otherwise. Would a black person in the same social category actually be considered white?

To my knowledge it's very much a historical thing. As we use the term now, white refers to a race, but during the Colonial Period and during all the immigration to the US from Europe, there was a social dichotomy of White vs Other. If a person fell into the social category of Other, not welcome or perceived as lesser, which included various European immigrant groups at different times, they would not be classified as white, because a person couldn't be both white and Other. As various groups were accepted into society, like the Irish, they became recategorized as white, because they now fit. It's not going to make sense based on our usage of white as a race.

One thing it's interesting to see is how much the racial caricatures look like each other. Early 19th c. Irish caricatures look A LOT like the black caricatures that were going around at the same time, even though actual ethnic Irish people and actual black people don't tend to look that much alike in RL -- the cartoon versions shared a lot of physical features like apelike mouths, big feet, long arms. . . Anti-immigrant cartoons from 1900 of scary Mediterraneans look A LOT like anti-immigrant cartoons today of scary Mexicans, and so on. It's all about the Other vs. "our" jobs, women, religion, culture; who gets otherized changes according to a bunch of factors.

It's not really, though, if by "race" you're thinking "group of people closely related to one another genetically" or something like that. Whiteness in the US at least is more like a fraternity that's picky about how you look, but also about how you act and who your friends are. "Italian" and "Greek" worked their way into the fraternity, while "Mexican" and "Lebanese" (for example) were kicked out -- but not because the range of skin tones was particularly different among those groups.

Some very pale black people passed for white and became socially white -- but this meant cutting off ties with friends and family, since a blonde, blue-eyed person with one or more black parents would not be considered white. Walter F. White, an early NNACP organizer, had blonde hair and blue eyes and sometimes passed as white for his own safety, but he lived in black neighborhoods and identified as black because his parents had been slaves. His family was able to escape the 1909 race riot in Atlanta because they looked white, but if they had stayed in their own neighborhood they would have been attacked along with their neighbors.

It's complicated I guess is the answer. . . sorry to tl;dr

In that context it's more of a cultural thing than specifically about the way someone looks, which makes sense. I kind of see "white European immigrants" as different than "black people who can pass for white" although I can't quite explain how.

I thought Walter F. White was mixed race? From my experience mixed race people usually seem to be seen as whatever race they appear to be. Like pretty much everyone considers Barack Obama to be black ("the first black president" and all that stuff) even though his mother was white. But then when you get into fractions and who's what percentage of what race it all seems to kind of lose meaning almost, like what's even the point of categorizing people by race?

I don't know, I guess you're right...it's complicated.

Yes, he was mixed race -- but so were a very large number, maybe the majority, of "black" former slaves in the US. He was "black" because his parents had been slaves and their parents were slaves (and slavery in the US was racialized ,and they chose to live in a "black" neighborhood and maintain relationships with their black friends and family) even though he looked indistinguishable from or "whiter" than the white-supremacy crowd.

Walter F. White is an extreme example, but not an overwhelmingly uncommon one. One of the things abolitionists liked to shock people with was the very large number of white-appearing young slave women who were sold to brothels. They were popular with brothelgoers because they looked white, but were "really" black and therefore were enslavable and seen as having no intrinsic honor to lose.

us race relations have a long history and it's a history made entirely out of fucked-upness, what can I say.

I'm not sure if this is right, but I think a more specific criteria would be that immigrants who were not Anglo-Saxon/Germanic protestants were looked down on. So these European immigrants were still white, they just weren't the right kind of white.

still white, they just weren't the right kind of white

Well that's just fucked up.

That's a good way of putting succinctly what I was trying to say.

DA

yep.

But Germans had a hard go of it in some places, too - hate for everyone!

When the US entered WWI, the anti-German prejudice got a new lease on life (and lots of traditionally bilingual communities became monolingual within a generation -- including German-speaking towns that had been founded by socialist utopians in the 1850s and could not have been less sympathetic to the Kaiser):

Yes. They also got a lot of crap during the twenties because of the 'beer gardens', and during the Civil War by Southern soldiers/sympathizers, because it was assumed that the Germans were automatically Union. Missouri was divided, but St.Louis - a very German town - was 'the Northern city in the Southern state'.

Sadly, this meant Germans *outside* of St. Louis were often just killed by any Southern soldiers or sympathizers.

And now we have our Oktoberfests. Life is weird.

Er...not entirely true, as far as the whole killing thing goes. It depended on context in a lot of ways because my family [father's side]? Very, very german - to the point they were still speaking german when WW2 rolled around...but they didn't really have that issue during the Civil War. And yes, they were in a confederate state.

So, it depended on the situation.

I didn't know that about anti-German violence in the South during the Civil War! Do you have any books / articles to recommend on the subject?

I don't, really, I'm sorry. Years and years ago, i read Daniel Woodrell's 'Woe to Live On' and first encountered it, and over time i've read bits and pieces of things that showed that the anti-German sentiment wasn't uncommon. There *were* German fighters on both sides, but the North had nearly 200,000 German soldiers, many new immigrants, and even before the war, there was 'anti-Dutch' sentiment across the entire country, due to religion (and no religion) and cultural differences.

The author well remembers the speech of Judge William Price. He told him that the lopeared Dutch had reached Rolla, Missouri, the terminus of the railroad, and that they were complete heathens; that Abraham Lincoln had given the state of Missouri to them, if they would send enough lopeared Dutch to conquer the state, and that to his knoweldge they had gone out into the country and taken men's wives and daughters and brought them into the camps, and that he saw them, in the presence of the mothers, run bayonets through their infant children and hoist them up and carry them around on their bayonets...

From "A History of Southern Missouri and Northern Arkansas" by William Monks.

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[ SECRET POST #2695 ]

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