"The History of White People": What it means to be white

[BrazenMuse]

Understood if I had a white parent it would be tough for me to honestly look at the system of racism and white supremacy in a truthful way without feeling like I am indicting my parent or white relatives.

and if your parents had white forebears?

I'm hoping you aren't implying any dishonesty on my part, by the way...

[rhodey]

and if your parents had white forebears?

I'm hoping you aren't implying any dishonesty on my part, by the way...

I do, many non whites do. I also believe you believe what you believe. But I also believemost nonwhites (including myself) are confused about what racsim/white supremacy is and what it DOES. One way to combat it , I believe is to learn as much as possible about it. Notice how silent our fellow white posters have been lately. You wonder why?

[BrazenMuse]

I do, many non whites do. I also believe you believe what you believe. But I also believemost nonwhites (including myself) are confused about what racsim/white supremacy is and what it DOES. One way to combat it , I believe is to learn as much as possible about it. Notice how silent our fellow white posters have been lately. You wonder why?

I don't wonder why. I do wonder which question the "I do" is a response to.

I do also believe that racism is a vehicle for the economics. So long as folk are busy chasing their tails over race, we are not uniting to work toward bettering the socioeconomics.

[rhodey]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgR41dO9HHw

I recommend those looking to couter racism/whitesupremacy study the geographical area commonly known as "Brazil".

Why?

Because contrary to popular perception, white supremacy may be operating in a more refined manner in that area; it may be "the future of racism".

HOW?

I suspect that as the numerical population of white people falls, the white supremacists may expand the definition of white to include just a few more people; and by doing so, maintain the "equity" in the white classification.

Evidence of this may be seen in the term "white Hispanic"; which I suspect is the preliminary step in a "Hispanic" becoming a white person.

Also, because the white supremacists in Brazil did not formally codify their practice of racism under the umbrella of state sponsorship, nor promote groups like the Klu Klux Klan; and a white person will admit to having a black anscestor...

You have a situation where instead of blaming racism and the white supremacists, black people say: "the problem is I just don't have any money"

"its not racism"

Do you see how confused nonwhite people can be about racism when the white people run around saying "of course everybody has African ancsetory...my grandmother..."

If you want to marry a white woman, go for it.

If you want to buy an expensive house, go for it...

But at the end of the day, wealth is concentrated among the light skinned people, and poverty and suffering is concentrated among the dark skinned people.

[AK]

March 28, 2010
Who’s White?

By LINDA GORDON
THE HISTORY OF WHITE PEOPLE


By Nell Irvin Painter

Illustrated. 496 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $27.95

Nell Irvin Painter’s title, “The History of White People,” is a provocation in several ways: it’s monumental in sweep, and its absurd grandiosity should call to mind the fact that writing a “History of Black People” might seem perfectly reasonable to white people. But the title is literally accurate, because the book traces characterizations of the lighter-skinned people we call white today, starting with the ancient Scythians. For those who have not yet registered how much these characterizations have changed, let me assure you that sensory observation was not the basis of racial nomenclature.

Some ancient descriptions did note color, as when the ancient Greeks recognized that their “barbaric” northern neighbors, Scythians and Celts, had lighter skin than Greeks considered normal. Most ancient peoples defined population differences culturally, not physically, and often regarded lighter people as less civilized. Centuries later, European travel writers regarded the light-skinned Circassians, a k a Caucasians, as people best fit only for slavery, yet at the same time labeled Circassian slave women the epitome of beauty. Exoticizing and sexualizing women of allegedly inferior “races” has a long and continuous history in racial thought; it’s just that today they are usually darker-skinned women.

“Whiteness studies” have so proliferated in the last two decades that historians might be forgiven a yawn in response to being told that racial divisions are fundamentally arbitrary, and that deciding who is white has been not only fluid but also heavily influenced by class and culture. In some Latin American countries, for example, the term blanquearse, to bleach oneself, is used to mean moving upward in class status. But this concept — the social and cultural construction of race over time — remains harder for many people to understand than, say, the notion that gender is a social and cultural construction, unlike sex. As recently as 10 years ago, some of my undergraduate students at the University of Wisconsin heard my explanations of critical race theory as a denial of observable physical differences.

I wish I had had this book to offer them. Painter, a renowned historian recently retired from Princeton, has written an unusual study: an intellectual history, with occasional excursions to examine vernacular usage, for popular audiences. It has much to teach everyone, including whiteness experts, but it is accessible and breezy, its coverage broad and therefore necessarily superficial.

The modern intellectual history of whiteness began among the 18th-century German scholars who invented racial “science.” Johann Joachim Winckelmann made the ancient Greeks his models of beauty by imagining them white-skinned; he may even have suppressed his own (correct) suspicion that their statues, though copied by the Romans in white marble, had originally been painted. The Dutchman Petrus Camper calculated the proportions and angles of the ideal face and skull, and produced a scale that awarded a perfect rating to the head of a Greek god and ranked Europeans as the runners-up, earning 80 out of 100. The Englishman Charles White collected skulls that he arranged from lowest to highest degree of perfection. He did not think he was seeing the gradual improvement of the human species, but assumed rather the polygenesis theory: the different races arose from separate divine creations and were designed with a range of quality.

The modern concept of a Caucasian race, which students my age were taught in school, came from Johann Friedrich Blumenbach of Göttingen, the most influential of this generation of race scholars. Switching from skulls to skin, he divided humans into five races by color — white, yellow, copper, tawny, and tawny-black to jet-black — but he ascribed these differences to climate. Still convinced that people of the Caucasus were the paragons of beauty, he placed residents of North Africa and India in the Caucasian category, sliding into a linguistic analysis based on the common derivation of Indo-European languages. That category, Painter notes, soon slipped free of any geographic or linguistic moorings and became a quasi- scientific term for a race known as “white.”

Some great American heroes, notably Thomas Jefferson and Ralph Waldo Emerson, absorbed Blumenbach’s influence but relabeled the categories of white superiority. They adopted the Saxons as their ideal, imagining Americans as direct and unalloyed descendants of the English, later including the Germans. In general, Western labels for racial superiority moved thus: Caucasian → Saxon → Teutonic → Nordic → Aryan → white/Anglo.

The spread of evolutionary theory required a series of theoretical shifts, to cope with changing understandings of what is heritable. When hereditary thought produced eugenics, the effort to breed superior human beings, it relied mostly on inaccurate genetics. Nevertheless, eugenic “science” became authoritative from the late 19th century through the 1930s. Eugenics gave rise to laws in at least 30 states authorizing forced sterilization of the ostensibly feeble-minded and the hereditarily criminal. Painter cites an estimate of 65,000 sterilized against their will by 1968, after which a combined feminist and civil rights campaign succeeded in radically restricting forced sterilization. While blacks and American Indians were disproportionately victimized, intelligence testing added many immigrants and others of “inferior stock,” predominantly Appalachian whites, to the rolls of the surgically sterilized.

In the long run, the project of measuring “intelligence” probably did more than eugenics to stigmatize and hold back the nonwhite. Researchers gave I.Q. tests to 1,750,000 recruits in World War I and found that the average mental age, for those 18 and over, was 13.08 years. That experiment in mass testing failed owing to the Army’s insistence that even the lowest ranked usually became model soldiers. But I.Q. testing achieved success in driving the anti-immigration movement. The tests allowed calibrated rankings of Americans of different ancestries — the English at the top, Poles on the bottom. Returning to head measurements, other researchers computed with new categories the proportion of different “blood” in people of different races: Belgians were 60 percent Nordic (the superior European race) and 40 percent Alpine, while the Irish were 30 percent Nordic and 70 percent Mediterranean (the inferior European race). Sometimes politics produced immediate changes in these supposedly objective findings: World War I caused the downgrading of Germans from heavily Nordic to heavily Alpine.

Painter points out, but without adequate discussion, that the adoration of whiteness became particularly problematic for women, as pale blue-eyed blondes became, like so many unattainable desires, a reminder of what was second-class about the rest of us. Among the painfully comic absurdities that racial science produced was the “beauty map” constructed by Francis Galton around the turn of the 20th century: he classified people as good, medium or bad; he categorized those he saw by using pushpins and thus demonstrated that London ranked highest and Aberdeen lowest in average beauty.

Rankings of intelligence and beauty supported escalating anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism in early-20th-century America. Both prejudices racialized non-Protestant groups. But Painter misses some crucial regional differences. While Jews and Italians were nonwhite in the East, they had long been white in San Francisco, where the racial “inferiors” were the Chinese. Although the United States census categorized Mexican-Americans as white through 1930, census enumerators in the Southwest, working from a different racial under standing, ignored those instructions and marked them “M” for Mexican.

In the same period, anarchist or socialist beliefs became a sign of racial inferiority, a premise strengthened by the presence of many immigrants and Jews among early-20th-century radicals. Whiteness thus became a method of stigmatizing dissenting ideas, a marker of ideological respectability; Painter should have investigated this phenomenon further. Also missing from the book is an analysis of the all-important question: Who benefits and how from the imprimatur of whiteness? Political elites and employers of low-wage labor, to choose just two groups, actively policed the boundaries of whiteness.

But I cannot fault Nell Painter’s choices — omissions to keep a book widely readable. Often, scholarly interpretation is transmitted through textbooks that oversimplify and even bore their readers with vague generalities. Far better for a large audience to learn about whiteness from a distinguished scholar in an insightful and lively exposition.

[DeesKo]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fgR41dO9HHw

I recommend those looking to couter racism/whitesupremacy study the geographical area commonly known as "Brazil".

Why?

Because contrary to popular perception, white supremacy may be operating in a more refined manner in that area; it may be "the future of racism".

Also, because the white supremacists in Brazil did not formally codify their practice of racism under the umbrella of state sponsorship, nor promote groups like the Klu Klux Klan; and a white person will admit to having a black anscestor...

You have a situation where instead of blaming racism and the white supremacists, black people say: "the problem is I just don't have any money"

"its not racism"

I'm extremely curious in regards to your use of Brazil, refined racism and codifying the practice of racism under the umbrella of state sponsorship.

Are you proposing that racism in Brazil is more refined, meaning less obvious/more subtle/harder to pinpoint/less ingrained in the way the state operates than say here in the US?

As someone who has spent multiple, decent lengths of time in Brasil, I can assure you modern day racism in Brasil is more rampant, more in your face, more state sponsored, has a much longer reach and is far more destructive to a person's health & life than anything anyone is dealing with here in modern America.

I truly can not fathom how you would come to the conclusion that the future face of an advanced form of racism is found in Brasil. People can't even get running water in their houses, live surrounded by open air sewage & entire swaths of the city are systematically and COMPLETELY ignored by the state government until such time that they decide to raid a flavela and kill a bunch of their own citizens.


As for your assumingly rhetorical question about why whites aren't discussing racism in this thread as if we're shunning the topic to protect our system....

The top two, if not 3 or 4 posters in this thread are white. I'm white. I've posted multiple comments directly too you attempting to engage you and you have not responded to any of them.

Perhaps whitey has disengaged this thread because there's no much to do here but listen to you declare that we're all white supremecists and you're the victim. You have every right to your opinion but it's not like there's much to discuss.

Whitey=Bad.

Thread closed.

[Nay Sayer]

Non-White People, under the SYSTEM of racism (white supremacy) ARE money...

Economics transcends "race".

Cash rules everything around me...

[alvin]

Alvined.

Idance

what's this like the 10,000,000+ time you guys have mentioned my name in a thread that I have nothing to do with...LOL

I'm gonna have to start charging a users fee...

[AMc]

But I also believemost nonwhites (including myself) are confused about what racsim/white supremacy is and what it DOES.

I also believe most whites are confused about this as well, which means there are a whole lot of people on the same page - no matter their heritage.

[BrazenMuse]

March 28, 2010
Who’s White?

By LINDA GORDON
THE HISTORY OF WHITE PEOPLE


By Nell Irvin Painter

Illustrated. 496 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $27.95

Nell Irvin Painter’s title, “The History of White People,” is a provocation in several ways: it’s monumental in sweep, and its absurd grandiosity should call to mind the fact that writing a “History of Black People” might seem perfectly reasonable to white people. But the title is literally accurate, because the book traces characterizations of the lighter-skinned people we call white today, starting with the ancient Scythians. For those who have not yet registered how much these characterizations have changed, let me assure you that sensory observation was not the basis of racial nomenclature.

Some ancient descriptions did note color, as when the ancient Greeks recognized that their “barbaric” northern neighbors, Scythians and Celts, had lighter skin than Greeks considered normal. Most ancient peoples defined population differences culturally, not physically, and often regarded lighter people as less civilized. Centuries later, European travel writers regarded the light-skinned Circassians, a k a Caucasians, as people best fit only for slavery, yet at the same time labeled Circassian slave women the epitome of beauty. Exoticizing and sexualizing women of allegedly inferior “races” has a long and continuous history in racial thought; it’s just that today they are usually darker-skinned women.

“Whiteness studies” have so proliferated in the last two decades that historians might be forgiven a yawn in response to being told that racial divisions are fundamentally arbitrary, and that deciding who is white has been not only fluid but also heavily influenced by class and culture. In some Latin American countries, for example, the term blanquearse, to bleach oneself, is used to mean moving upward in class status. But this concept — the social and cultural construction of race over time — remains harder for many people to understand than, say, the notion that gender is a social and cultural construction, unlike sex. As recently as 10 years ago, some of my undergraduate students at the University of Wisconsin heard my explanations of critical race theory as a denial of observable physical differences.

I wish I had had this book to offer them. Painter, a renowned historian recently retired from Princeton, has written an unusual study: an intellectual history, with occasional excursions to examine vernacular usage, for popular audiences. It has much to teach everyone, including whiteness experts, but it is accessible and breezy, its coverage broad and therefore necessarily superficial.

The modern intellectual history of whiteness began among the 18th-century German scholars who invented racial “science.” Johann Joachim Winckelmann made the ancient Greeks his models of beauty by imagining them white-skinned; he may even have suppressed his own (correct) suspicion that their statues, though copied by the Romans in white marble, had originally been painted. The Dutchman Petrus Camper calculated the proportions and angles of the ideal face and skull, and produced a scale that awarded a perfect rating to the head of a Greek god and ranked Europeans as the runners-up, earning 80 out of 100. The Englishman Charles White collected skulls that he arranged from lowest to highest degree of perfection. He did not think he was seeing the gradual improvement of the human species, but assumed rather the polygenesis theory: the different races arose from separate divine creations and were designed with a range of quality.

The modern concept of a Caucasian race, which students my age were taught in school, came from Johann Friedrich Blumenbach of Göttingen, the most influential of this generation of race scholars. Switching from skulls to skin, he divided humans into five races by color — white, yellow, copper, tawny, and tawny-black to jet-black — but he ascribed these differences to climate. Still convinced that people of the Caucasus were the paragons of beauty, he placed residents of North Africa and India in the Caucasian category, sliding into a linguistic analysis based on the common derivation of Indo-European languages. That category, Painter notes, soon slipped free of any geographic or linguistic moorings and became a quasi- scientific term for a race known as “white.”

Some great American heroes, notably Thomas Jefferson and Ralph Waldo Emerson, absorbed Blumenbach’s influence but relabeled the categories of white superiority. They adopted the Saxons as their ideal, imagining Americans as direct and unalloyed descendants of the English, later including the Germans. In general, Western labels for racial superiority moved thus: Caucasian → Saxon → Teutonic → Nordic → Aryan → white/Anglo.

The spread of evolutionary theory required a series of theoretical shifts, to cope with changing understandings of what is heritable. When hereditary thought produced eugenics, the effort to breed superior human beings, it relied mostly on inaccurate genetics. Nevertheless, eugenic “science” became authoritative from the late 19th century through the 1930s. Eugenics gave rise to laws in at least 30 states authorizing forced sterilization of the ostensibly feeble-minded and the hereditarily criminal. Painter cites an estimate of 65,000 sterilized against their will by 1968, after which a combined feminist and civil rights campaign succeeded in radically restricting forced sterilization. While blacks and American Indians were disproportionately victimized, intelligence testing added many immigrants and others of “inferior stock,” predominantly Appalachian whites, to the rolls of the surgically sterilized.

In the long run, the project of measuring “intelligence” probably did more than eugenics to stigmatize and hold back the nonwhite. Researchers gave I.Q. tests to 1,750,000 recruits in World War I and found that the average mental age, for those 18 and over, was 13.08 years. That experiment in mass testing failed owing to the Army’s insistence that even the lowest ranked usually became model soldiers. But I.Q. testing achieved success in driving the anti-immigration movement. The tests allowed calibrated rankings of Americans of different ancestries — the English at the top, Poles on the bottom. Returning to head measurements, other researchers computed with new categories the proportion of different “blood” in people of different races: Belgians were 60 percent Nordic (the superior European race) and 40 percent Alpine, while the Irish were 30 percent Nordic and 70 percent Mediterranean (the inferior European race). Sometimes politics produced immediate changes in these supposedly objective findings: World War I caused the downgrading of Germans from heavily Nordic to heavily Alpine.

Painter points out, but without adequate discussion, that the adoration of whiteness became particularly problematic for women, as pale blue-eyed blondes became, like so many unattainable desires, a reminder of what was second-class about the rest of us. Among the painfully comic absurdities that racial science produced was the “beauty map” constructed by Francis Galton around the turn of the 20th century: he classified people as good, medium or bad; he categorized those he saw by using pushpins and thus demonstrated that London ranked highest and Aberdeen lowest in average beauty.

Rankings of intelligence and beauty supported escalating anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism in early-20th-century America. Both prejudices racialized non-Protestant groups. But Painter misses some crucial regional differences. While Jews and Italians were nonwhite in the East, they had long been white in San Francisco, where the racial “inferiors” were the Chinese. Although the United States census categorized Mexican-Americans as white through 1930, census enumerators in the Southwest, working from a different racial under standing, ignored those instructions and marked them “M” for Mexican.

In the same period, anarchist or socialist beliefs became a sign of racial inferiority, a premise strengthened by the presence of many immigrants and Jews among early-20th-century radicals. Whiteness thus became a method of stigmatizing dissenting ideas, a marker of ideological respectability; Painter should have investigated this phenomenon further. Also missing from the book is an analysis of the all-important question: Who benefits and how from the imprimatur of whiteness? Political elites and employers of low-wage labor, to choose just two groups, actively policed the boundaries of whiteness.

But I cannot fault Nell Painter’s choices — omissions to keep a book widely readable. Often, scholarly interpretation is transmitted through textbooks that oversimplify and even bore their readers with vague generalities. Far better for a large audience to learn about whiteness from a distinguished scholar in an insightful and lively exposition.

So, whiteness is far too slippery and local, too dependent on ECONOMIC and SOCIAL conditions, to be an absolute category? What's white in New York might not be white in Atlanta, San Francisco or small cities in the MidWest... it still seems to me that the bottom line is economic and that the dynamic that must be paid attention to is socioeconomic.

Deesko...I tend to agree with your reading of Brasil, based on the Brazilian people I have met and who have laid out an image of the socioeconomic landscape that jibes with yours, not the oversimplified version Rhodey is postulating here. In Brazil, there is a saying that money whitens...which clearly ties both social and economic conditions to each other. I would argue that some of that is held over from colonial times. That seems more realistic to me.

In India, there certainly is a complexion complex. Whitening creams sell like mad there. Yet and still, India is a country in which people of about medium brown to light complexions are "advantaged" in terms of the caste system (which may have been legislated out of existence, but hasn't really gone anywhere much)...and we could talk about colonialism and its role in the valuation of complexion there as well...

[DaBownca]

Remember in school when egroid, Mongoloid, and caucasoid..and that all nationalities were borne from these...what happened to that simple way of thinking

[DeesKo]

Deesko...I tend to agree with your reading of Brasil, based on the Brazilian people I have met and who have laid out an image of the socioeconomic landscape that jibes with yours, not the oversimplified version Rhodey is postulating here. In Brazil, there is a saying that money whitens...which clearly ties both social and economic conditions to each other. I would argue that some of that is held over from colonial times. That seems more realistic to me.

...

While I was there I learned there was a actually a physical trait other than skin color used in the differentiation process since Brasilian people are naturally born with such a wide range of skin colors.

[BrazenMuse]

While I was there I learned there was a actually a physical trait other than skin color used in the differentiation process since Brasilian people are naturally born with such a wide range of skin colors.

ok...spill! what trait?

Note: The American 'race' dynamic is not universal. In Spanish speaking countries, there are other factors. Our problem in this case, as Americans, is in recognizing other values that are in the equation...

[ngeso]

Note: The American 'race' dynamic is not universal.

...

[Bill Blake]

So, whiteness is far too slippery and local, too dependent on ECONOMIC and SOCIAL

She's arguing that large variable is aesthetics: "classical" Greek beauty, running down through the ages.

[rhodey]

I'm extremely curious in regards to your use of Brazil, refined racism and codifying the practice of racism under the umbrella of state sponsorship.

Are you proposing that racism in Brazil is more refined, meaning less obvious/more subtle/harder to pinpoint/less ingrained in the way the state operates than say here in the US?

As someone who has spent multiple, decent lengths of time in Brasil, I can assure you modern day racism in Brasil is more rampant, more in your face, more state sponsored, has a much longer reach and is far more destructive to a person's health & life than anything anyone is dealing with here in modern America.

Exactly it is more rampant, more everything , yet it's practice has been refined to the point where many it's victims don't see the issue as racism/whitesupremacy many see it as an purely "economic issue" with no correlation to their "race". That is deception , refined racism at it's best in my opinion. Eerily similar to the sentiments spoken here. But I could be incorrect as I am still learning.

As for your assumingly rhetorical question about why whites aren't discussing racism in this thread as if we're shunning the topic to protect our system....

The top two, if not 3 or 4 posters in this thread are white. I'm white

When did you first realize you were white?

Perhaps whitey has disengaged this thread because there's no much to do here but listen to you declare that we're all white supremacists and you're the victim. You have every right to your opinion but it's not like there's much to discuss.

Whitey=Bad.

Where have I said all whites were white supremacists? Where have I said whitey=Bad. I suspect you are practicing racism/white supremacy in the form of deception. I did not say these things nor did I refer to white people as "whitey".

Thread closed.

Deeesko do you feel that being white gives you the power to close this thread?

[BrazenMuse]

She's arguing that large variable is aesthetics: "classical" Greek beauty, running down through the ages.

I think I want to agree...but I don't know that it's only a "classical greek" aesthetic...but her argument is interesting...

When most people worked outdoors, being pale was an elite characteristic. Now that most don't have to, having a tan is an elite characteristic. When food was scarce, heavier people were seen in a different light than they are today...

[ngeso]

When did you first realize you were white?

I suspect you are practicing racism/white supremacy in the form of deception. I did not say these things nor did I refer to white people as "whitey".

Deeesko do you feel that being white gives you the power to close this thread?

This is beginning to sound like an inquisition.

...

[DaBownca]

This is beginning to sound like an inquisition.

...

[Bill Blake]

I think I want to agree...but I don't know that it's only a "classical greek" aesthetic...but her argument is interesting...

When most people worked outdoors, being pale was an elite characteristic. Now that most don't have to, having a tan is an elite characteristic. When food was scarce, heavier people were seen in a different light than they are today...

Well, it would seem that white equated with beauty would also be about balance, proportion (anatomical illusions) and other characteristics common to Greek, and thus Western art—aesthetic ideas not challenged in the West until the 19th century. If she has an argument, the idea of “science” being driven by aesthetics is pretty fascinating.

[Bill Blake]

This is beginning to sound like an inquisition.

...

Be a good German and analyze the logical integrity of this statement, so I can move on:

"All non-African people are simply a sub-set of East African DNA."

[BrazenMuse]

what's this like the 10,000,000+ time you guys have mentioned my name in a thread that I have nothing to do with...LOL

I'm gonna have to start charging a users fee...

Note also: Ngeso, I miss you when you aren't around. Hope all is well with you and yours!

[DeesKo]

Exactly it is more rampant, more everything , yet it's practice has been refined to the point where many it's victims don't see the issue as racism/whitesupremacy many see it as an purely "economic issue" with no correlation to their "race". That is deception , refined racism at it's best in my opinion. Eerily similar to the sentiments spoken here. But I could be incorrect as I am still learning. ?

While I can't speak for everyone in Brasil, my experience there would indicate the exact opposite. The folks I met and interacted with were quite aware. Those exerting that discrimination were far more brazen and in your face, those experiencing the effects were quite aware of how & why it was happening.

Don't you remember all of the concern over violence in Rio when the Olympics come to Rio?

When did you first realize you were white?

Are we talking white, as in the color white or white as in the white supremist white because I'm pasty white thanks to my Irish heritage but didn't grow up any more privledged than you.

Where have I said all whites were white supremacists? Where have I said whitey=Bad. I suspect you are practicing racism/white supremacy in the form of deception. I did not say these things nor did I refer to white people as "whitey".

Your rhetoric coupled with the way you use & interchange certain terms implies certain things. Just like your comment above, it is written in such a way that you have just accused me of being a white supremist, while also leaving you the out of "that's not the way I meant it, your not reading my words correctly."

Deeesko do you feel that being white gives you the power to close this thread?

Nope, but considering all of my comments in this thread, it's funny you choose to come at me like that. Find that source for your 90/10 claim yet or is it racist for me to ask for a source?

[BrazenMuse]

[DeesKo]

ok...spill! what trait?

Note: The American 'race' dynamic is not universal. In Spanish speaking countries, there are other factors. Our problem in this case, as Americans, is in recognizing other values that are in the equation...

Curliness of the hair.

The tighter the curl, the more the disdain. It obviously turns out to be functionally the same as delineating based on skin color a large percentage of the time, but particularly in Brasil there are also a good number of people that are more latin than african skin color wise, but with tight curls and they are treated with the same disdain and likewise, you could have someone with more african than latin skin color but with straighter hair and they are not subject to the disdain.