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PaperclipPerfector  27d ago (text post)   32100 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 10, 2025

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They're starting to remind me of native Americans. I do not mean that as a compliment.

Native Americans are indigenous. It used to be their land. And it's not anymore. We're here, get used to it.

Likewise, America was founded by white Christians. Today, they're 44% of the population and declining fast.[1] And that 44% includes "protect trans kids" mainline Protestants, Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, and others people like Walsh won't consider "real" Christians. Maybe 33% of the American population qualifies as "real" white Christians. And Matt Walsh tells this population they should not go to college,[2] checking out of positions of power and influence. A population of farmers and plumbers living in left-behind parts of the country, locked out of power, pining for the glory days when they ran the country and praying for supernatural deliverance, is this the vision that "nationalists" want?

Native American advocates will do a motte-and-bailey with "native Americans are the indigenous population of America" and "therefore they should get special privileges." Walshites motte-and-bailey with "white Christians founded America" and "therefore the remaining white Christians deserve political authority over the rest of America." Well, the rest of America isn't having it.

  1. https://www.prri.org/research/2020-census-of-american-religion/

  2. https://x.com/MattWalshBlog/status/1854647166184067201

Hey look at that, an actual argument! Sort of! And we didn't have to waste our time involving the mods!

Sadly, I can't give you the same praise for your argument. You're starting to remind me of native Americans. I do not mean that as a compliment.

Neoliberal controlled opposition are incompetent. It used to be their party. And it's not anymore. We're here, get used to it.

Turokites motte and bailey with "But I went to COLLEGE!!!" and "I don't know how to argue without appeals to authority, I built my entire life around appeals to authority!!" Well the rest of America isn't having it.

Where was the "appeal to authority" in my post?

Just after the quote of Matt Walsh saying "white Christians deserve political authority over the rest of America".

To resolve any confusion, the post contains neither.

Today, they're 44% of the population and declining fast.

America will always be a white country, because the definition of “white” is constantly being adjusted and every new ethnic group that comes into the country ends up eventually becoming white. The Irish and the Lithuanians and the Jews were definitely not white when they first got off the boats. In 20 years Latinos will be considered white, and another 20 years after that so will Indians.

Latinos are mostly not white though, and neither are Indians. A white person is someone from whose ancestors are from Europe. The reason Indians were and are not considered white in America ,while Lithuanians and Irish were, is because they look different from white Europeans and always will look different from white Europeans. From United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, a court case where an Indian man argued he should be able to be naturalized because he is Aryan:

"What we now hold is that the words 'free white persons' are words of common speech, to be interpreted in accordance with the understanding of the common man, synonymous with the word 'Caucasian' only as that word is popularly understood. As so understood and used, whatever may be the speculations of the ethnologist, it does not include the body of people to whom the appellee belongs. It is a matter of familiar observation and knowledge that the physical group characteristics of the Hindus render them readily distinguishable from the various groups of persons in this country commonly recognized as white. The children of English, French, German, Italian, Scandinavian, and other European parentage, quickly merge into the mass of our population and lose the distincitive hallmarks of their European origin. On the other hand, it cannot be doubted that the children born in this country of Hindu parents would retain indefinitely the clear evidence of their ancestry. It is very far from our thought to suggest the slightest question of racial superiority or inferiority. What we suggest is merely racial difference, and it is of such character and extent that the great body of our people instinctively recognize it and reject the thought of assimilation."

"They imply, as we have said, a racial test; but the term 'race' is one which, for the practical purposes of the statute, must be applied to a group of living persons now possessing in common the requisite characteristics, not to groups of persons who are supposed to be or really are descended from some remote, common ancestor, but who, whether they both resemble him to a greater or less extent, have, at any rate, ceased altogether to resemble one another. It may be true that the blond Scandinavian and the brown Hindu have a common ancestor in the dim reaches of antiquity, but the average man knows perfectly well that there are unmistakable and profound differences between them to-day; and it is not impossible, if that common ancestor could be materialized in the flesh, we should discover that he was himself sufficiently differentiated from both of his descendants to preclude his racial classification with either."

(Non-white) Latinos and Hindus do not look like white people, hence they are not white.

A slim majority of the median Hispanic’s genetic makeup is european(mostly Iberian). We’re used to seeing Hispanics as brown laborers but those things are connected- they’re tanned from working out in the sun all day. They look whiter when they have office jobs. And when they interbreed with normal American whites most of them have kids that just look white.

You’re way overstating the impact on the American phenotype.

Do you think Enrique Peña Nieto or AMLO (who are much whiter than the average Mexican-American) have "American" phenotypes?

No, not really, but I think that's heavily influenced by how they present themselves (hair, fashion, etc). I do think if they married white Americans the resultant children would be more-or-less indistinguishable from other white Americans (especially if you're including e.g. Italians in your "white American" bucket).

AMLO? Yes, undoubtedly. Nieto? I'd probably guess him as being Spanish or Italian from a picture with no captions, but he has a very Latin haircut and a more Euro-looking suit.

Claudia Sheinbaum looks Mexican, but she does her hair and makeup in a very Mexican way. Bukele looks Hispanic, but the beard is a tell. A lot of the "Mexican phenotype" is sartorial more than it is genetic.

The Irish and the Lithuanians and the Jews were definitely not white when they first got off the boats

This meme really needs to die. Americans hundreds of years absolutely recognised that non-English European ethnic groups were in fact, also European. They weren't morons. The Anglo-American majority may have had negative opinions about some European immigrant groups at first, but that's very different from making the argument that Lithuanians were negros or something. There were literally Irishmen on the Mayflower!

'White' identity came about because the European groups who had previously thought of themselves as English, Germans, Jews etc united around a common conflict the Indians.

'Latinos' may well be considered white (i.e. European) because they are either overwhelming Spanish or partly Spanish. And Spain is in Europe.

‘Latino’, like ‘Arab’, is not a racial marker, it refers to native language. The vast majority of Latinos are either white or mixed race, and most of the mixed race ones are majority euro. But there are black, Asian, pure Indio Latinos.

Yeah I know, that's why I put it in scare quotes.

@Crowstep @07mk @DradisPing @sodiummuffin @AlexanderTurok

Exactly the kind of ahistorical revisionist cope brigade I would expect from the [[[Insidious Hibernian]]]. Whisky soaked, rosary-clutching, practically simian Irish fingers typed these posts. Back to the Emerald Isle with ye all!

I'm not sure how this responds to my comment? I didn't even make any claims about... anything, really, including history. Is it your prediction that this category of "white" will eventually include people whose skin color is very far away from what we think of as "white" people right now (arguably this is happening now or has happened with Hispanics)? And if that proportion gets very high, do you think the actual term will change, or will Americans just keep using that term?

I'm curious, do you think that this "white" group will eventually consist of a very high proportion, if not a majority, of people whose skin color and other phenotypical features that are described by "white?" E.g. even with lots of mixing, I don't know that descendants of Indian-Americans in the next 40 years will appear as what someone might naively expect from the term "white person." And if so, do you think we'll come up with a different term instead of "white?"

People who are 1/4 Indian and 3/4 European by ancestry look pretty white to me, even when that 1/4 is dark-skinned South Indian. Same for people who are 1/4 East or Southeast Asian. For Hispanics, even 1/2 is enough to look indistinguishable from the average white American unless the Hispanic parent has an unusual amount of indigenous ancestry e.g. from Guatemala or Bolivia. I would not expect the future majority population to exceed those proportions, although I imagine at some point they will just be called "American" instead of "white."

It's actually been going the other way as there are special benefits to identifying as non-white these days. Back when there were restrictions on non-white immigration Indians fought to be classified as white and won. Similarly hispanics includes a lot of people with 80%+ European ancestry. A nearly 100% European ancestry kid who doesn't speak Spanish gets to identify as hispanic for college applications because his grandparents were born in Latin America.

Steve Sailer has a bunch of articles on "the flight from white" that are worth reading.

One of the interesting battles within the Democratic Party has been about how Jewish activists see themselves as non-white, but a lot of the activist base sees them as white.

The Irish and the Lithuanians and the Jews were definitely not white when they first got off the boats.

The Irish/Jews/etc. were considered white, the idea that they weren't is a psuedo-historical myth advanced by certain activist historians like Noel Ignatiev. The main trick they pull is to define "whiteness" as not being discriminated against or "othered", point out that the Irish were discriminated against, and thus define them as not white. But the actual historical people who did the discriminating did not define white people that way, they both considered Irish to be a subcategory of white people and also discriminated against them. Being white was of real legal and social relevance, and groups such as the Irish were unquestionably included in that category.

The Volokh Conspiracy: Sorry, but the Irish were always ‘white’ (and so were Italians, Jews and so on)

Here are some objective tests as to whether a group was historically considered “white” in the United States: Were members of the group allowed to go to “whites-only” schools in the South, or otherwise partake of the advantages that accrued to whites under Jim Crow? Were they ever segregated in schools by law, anywhere in the United States, such that “whites” went to one school, and the group in question was relegated to another? When laws banned interracial marriage in many states (not just in the South), if a white Anglo-Saxon wanted to marry a member of the group, would that have been against the law? Some labor unions restricted their membership to whites. Did such unions exclude members of the group in question? Were members of the group ever entirely excluded from being able to immigrate to the United States, or face special bans or restrictions in becoming citizens?

If you use such objective tests, you find that Irish, Jews, Italians and other white ethnics were indeed considered white by law and by custom (as in the case of labor unions). Indeed, some lighter-skinned African Americans of mixed heritage “passed” as white by claiming they were of Arab descent and that explained their relative swarthiness, showing that Arab Americans, another group whose “whiteness” has been questioned, were considered white. By contrast, persons of African, Asian, Mexican and Native American descent faced various degrees of exclusion from public schools and labor unions, bans on marriage and direct restrictions on immigration and citizenship.

This might be true legally but you can go back and see (as I've pointed out several times on here) that excluding "tawny" foreigners such as the French and Spanish from the definition of "white" was a real thing:

Which leads me to add one Remark: That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth.

So yeah, unless Ben Franklin was a very weird outlier, I would say there's been an "expansion" of "whiteness" over time.

So yeah, unless Ben Franklin was a very weird outlier, I would say there's been an "expansion" of "whiteness" over time.

He's claiming Swedes aren't white. Swedes are obviously completely maxed out on whiteness genetically like all other Northern Europeans. We know Swedes, Germans and Russians are pale as can be and Franklin is an outlier and just plain wrong here.

I believe Sweden at the time included parts of Finland, the native inhabitants of which I am given to understand actually aren't all that white. (Regardless I don't think the Swedes are maxed out on whiteness genetically, I believe that is the Irish.)

Similar deal in Russia, too, which has groups that don't exactly code as "white."

I don't think his is entirely a minority view, at least as regards Italians, Spanish, etc.

Sweden had lost Finland to Russia relatively recently, and both Sami and Finns are extremely northern euro looking. Russia had also not expanded as much into Central Asia and Siberia as it later would.

Just from Wikipedia, the older photographs of Sami people often look a bit like the Inuit to me (of course, they are black-and-white photographs!).

I found one article that says it used to be common to suspect the Sami were of Mongol extraction, and some of them do appear similar, but (at least according to one theory) this is because the Sami were not an agricultural people and so they retained facial features that largely disappeared in other Europeans.

That seems sufficient to me to explain why, despite the Sami often having pale skin, Race Enthusiasts tended to classify the Sami as non-white.

Well, the fact that is the one quote always cited to make that argument certainly makes it seem like an outlier. And even it only says that they are not "purely white" since they are supposedly darker in complexion. That doesn't seem like a quote from a society where "French people aren't members of the white race" was a mainstream view, and indeed that wouldn't make sense with how people interpreted laws and rules explicitly referring to "White" people. It seems like him drawing a novel distinction between the different white races based on skin-tone to argue some of them are more white.

I think something like this is probably correct. I think that Franklin would probably have lumped French or Spanish people in with "whites" if he was talking about, say, "red" men (Native Americans), but here he seems pretty happy to split them since he has a specific preference for English people.

I'm working up a bit more of an effort-full reply to GeneralElephant, so keep an eye out if you're interested.

Why do people think this is the definitive view in the 1700s and not the equivalent of 4chan troll post given Irish Catholics signed both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution?

Surely someone somewhere would have remarked on the incongruity of non-Whites signing the Declaration of Independence and Constitution had Franklin’s views been the prevailing opinions of the time?

Since you seem super confident on this point can you guide me to contemporary sources besides this one work by Franklin that demonstrates this belief that French and Irish people were non-white especially given French and Irish people were integral to the American revolution in a governing capacity and were in Congress when the Naturalization Act of 1790 was passed limiting naturalization to “free, White men”? Surely the fact that Congress had non-White members at the time would have provoked some comment?

Why do people think this is the definitive view in the 1700s and not the equivalent of 4chan troll post given Irish Catholics signed both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution? Since you seem super confident on this point can you guide me to contemporary sources besides this one work by Franklin that demonstrates this belief that French and Irish people were non-white especially given French and Irish people were integral to the American revolution in a governing capacity and were in Congress when the Naturalization Act of 1790 was passed limiting naturalization to “free, White men”? Surely the fact that Congress had non-White members at the time would have provoked some comment?

Well, the Irish aren't mentioned here, for one thing, either by me or by Franklin, so neither of us are making that argument. Also, note that I specifically disavowed the argument that e.g. French people didn't count as "white" legally, so I am disinclined to attempt to prove a view I've already set aside as regards the Naturalization Act of 1790. However, although I'm not sure I was as confident as you think, given my hedging, I think I can find some stuff that suggest Franklin's rhetoric was not unique.

(As an aside, I am a little surprised that you didn't mention that Ben Franklin was ambassador to France.)

First, here's some excerpts from John Adams to his wife, which I think suggest something of a private sentiment:

I met Mr. Gardoqui, and his secretary Mr. Randon, who, if common report says true, is soon to marry Miss Marshall (Mrs. Rucker’s Sister.) Much good may do her, with the swarthy Don: his complexion and his looks: show sufficiently, from what country he is. How happens it, that revenge stares through the eyes of every Spaniard?

(One week later)

Miss Marshall is very agreeable: I cannot help pitying her, when I am told she is about to marry, that swarthy Don.

Source here

Now, Adams doesn't say "oh and by the way Mr. Gardoqui isn't white" but the way he speaks seems, I think, to suggest that he's viewing a Spanish person differently than he might an English one specifically because of his complexion. (Note of course that the individual in question perhaps might have had e.g. a lot of Moorish blood). Adams elsewhere refers to the Spanish as having "dark" complexions, which I think makes a pretty natural contrast a "white" or "fair" complexion.

Setting aside Founding Fathers' private sentiments for a moment, let's get to public sentiment and an English book I found printed in the late 1700s which has a helpful essay "On the Causes of the Difference of Complexion" (see pages 327 - 335) that has a taxonomy that might suit our purpose. You'll note that he diverges from Franklin on the question of the Swedes and Germans but not the Spaniards. Here's the taxonomy:

BLACK. Africans under the line; inhabitants of New Guinea; inhabitants of New Holland.

SWARTHY.-The Moors in the northern parts of Africa; the Hottentots in the fouthern parts of it.

COPPER-COLOURED.- The East Indians.

RED-COLOURED. - The Americans.

BROWN-COLOURED.-Tartars, Persians, Arabs, Africans on the coast of the Mediterranean, Chinese.

BROWNISH.- The inhabitants of the southern parts of Europe; as Sicilians, Abyslinians, Spaniards, Turks, and likewise the Samoiedes and Laplanders.

WHITE. WHITE. Most of the European nations; as Swedes, Danes, English, Germans, Poles, &c. Kabardinski, Georgians; inhabitants of the islands in the Pacific Ocean.

(Note that I believe the Samoiedes are a Uralic people, or, in other words, a Russian ethnic minority. The Laplanders: an ethnic group in Sweden, Finland, Russia. Perhaps Franklin was thinking of these sorts of groups when he specified Swedes and Russians.)

The essay goes on to make a fairly predictable argument that skin color derives from climate, although it's a more subtle argument than "hot = dark." Notably for our purposes, he says

The Europeans are the fairest inhabitants of the world. Those situated in the most southern regions of Europe, have in their rete mucofum a tinge of the dark hue of their African neighbours: hence the epidemic complexion, prevalent among them, is nearly of the colour of the pickled Spanish olive; while in this country, and those situated nearer the north pole, it appears to be nearly, if not absolutely, white.

In other words, we're again driving a distinction between different European people groups. I suppose if you want you can complain the taxonomy above doesn't specify where the French fall and doesn't entirely line up with Ben Franklin's. But I think it demonstrates my point, which is that "whiteness" has expanded over time, or at a minimum the idea that the inhabitants of the European Mediterranean were perhaps "swarthy" in a way distinguishable from white a real one. Possibly one confined just Ben Franklin and our complexion essayist - but I kinda doubt it.

If you aren't happy with my digging, I'd be very interested to see what you can find!

Jews were officially excluded from golf courses and in some cases were denied hotel rooms. And there was the open “No Irish need apply” signs. It’s really not as simple as “whelp, you were allowed in a white public space, therefore you are white.”

As I said:

The main trick they pull is to define "whiteness" as not being discriminated against or "othered", point out that the Irish were discriminated against, and thus define them as not white. But the actual historical people who did the discriminating did not define white people that way, they both considered Irish to be a subcategory of white people and also discriminated against them.

They were always considered white, even before 1776. The three main racial categories in America have always been white, black and native.

However, it’s also true that in the context of modern day white ethnonationalism in the US, groups that were considered ‘white’ in 1776 like Jews and Arabs aren’t considered white by the proponents of these movements (rare exceptions like Jared Taylor aside).

The Irish and the Lithuanians and the Jews were definitely not white when they first got off the boats

Will this tired old myth never die?

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