This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
So, as one of the most vocally white-identitarian (I don’t use the self-descriptor “white nationalist”) posters here, you might imagine that I agree with your simple “white=European ancestry” model, but I actually believe it’s woefully limited and does not capture the complexities of the world as it is rapidly becoming.
I have laid out my expansive concentric-circles model of whiteness before, and as far as I’m concerned, several of the groups you ruled out as absolutely-not-white are, in actuality, either already white - at least conditionally/contextually so - or are approaching the transition to whiteness.
For example, you state definitively that both Jews and Armenians are non-white, but I don’t think that actually captures the way that the vast majority of Jews and Armenians are perceived. After all, Scarlett Johansson is fully 50% Ashkenazi, and it’s the correct (maternal) half to be considered halachically Jewish. Not a single person on Earth does not believe that Scarlett Johansson is white. Johansson’s ancestry is fairly bog-standard for the Jewish diaspora, and as non-Orthodox non-Israeli Jews continue their massive levels of out-marriage, the gentile percentage of their ancestry will only continue to cascade upward until more and more Jews look every bit as pale and indistinguishable-from-gentiles as Scarlett Johansson does. Similarly, Shavo Odadjian, bassist for System Of A Down, is fully ethnically-Armenian and was born in Armenia, yet his skin and (beard) hair are lighter than mine!
I’m slightly more sympathetic toward your stance that someone cannot be white if they have a black ancestor - I’ve commented elsewhere on this site (it already took me forever to find my past comment that I linked to, and I’m not going to go searching again for this one) that the ultimate criterion for Whiteness in the future will be “people who have no significant African/Negrito ancestry” - but I do think you’re not taking seriously enough the complicated question of just how significant and how recent the black ancestry needs to be. For example, during the Obama presidency, amusing commentary was made about the fact that Obama was, contrary to popular perception, descended from at least one American slave, but it was through his white mother’s side! Apparently she had some black ancestor 150+ years back. Again, not a single person would clock her as anything but fully white, and this obscure revelation about her distant ancestor does absolutely nothing to change that.
So, given that basically everybody accepts that if the black ancestry is far enough back that your phenotype doesn’t show any signs of it - and after all, all of us have African ancestry if you go far enough back, assuming that the Out-Of-Africa theory is in fact true - at this point we’re haggling over the definition of how to define the cut-off. I can easily imagine a Castizo Futurism that embraces people with 25% black ancestry as white, provided that such an individual also accepts and embraces that identification. And such a model could even embrace people of 100% East Asian descent as white, like I did in my concentric-circles model. This model of whiteness might strike you as eccentric and far-fetched now, but you may want to consider that things might like very different in even less than a century.
More options
Context Copy link