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I'm not intending to derail the point you're making in this larger thread, but I come to you with open curiosity.
I am an American of mixed race; my mother is white, my father is black. My mother's side of the family has been in the US since the 1700s, her genealogy contains Revolutionary and Civil War veterans. As descendants of American slaves in Alabama, presumably my father's side of the family has been in the US since some date before it became illegal to import new slaves (1808 officially, though illegal smuggling continued into the 1840s and 50s).
When forms ask me for race information, I select "black", "multiple races", or some combination of those depending on what the form allows, but in general, I do consider myself "black" and I don't consider myself "white". If it's relevant to you, I have the complexion of a Lenny Kravitz or Barack Obama. That I don't consider myself "white" was not a choice I made and imposed on myself - I've never heard a definition of "white" that doesn't exclude me. Generally, my experience is that other people tell you what racial category or categories you belong to, and you say "okay, thanks".
I grew up around black and white (and biracial) kids. The neighborhood I grew up in was mixed, the public schools I went to were mixed, and the social circles I keep in my adulthood are not self-segregated by race. None of the black Americans I have ever known, even the ones at the radical ends of the political spectrum, have given me the impression that in their day to day life they think of themselves as part of a separate, distinct black 'nation' in the way you describe. Maybe this was more broadly true in, say, the late 19th and early 20th century? I don't want to imply the perspective doesn't exist period, just that I don't think it is a predictive way to model the modal black American experience and viewpoint.
I have always primarily considered myself an American. (For the purposes of this discussion, I mean -- 'human' comes strictly before 'American', but you know what I mean.)
Would you say that's factually wrong? (And does this hold true for my descendants? Would the race of my kids' mother dictate what their fate as potential unqualified Americans would be - does it change if my lineage bends toward 'whiter', toward 'blacker', or becomes further diluted by another race?)
Would the answer change based on whether I did or didn't think of myself as "black" or "African-American"? Is it more about self-identification than about actual ancestry? Do I have to "choose a side" so to speak? Can I choose?
Again, it isn't my intention to derail here, and I hope I haven't pulled too far off the topic of Civil War statues (I think opposing Confederate public monuments is not morally imperative, but not morally damning - my perspective on that isn't very interesting). This is just the first time I've come across this particular viewpoint re: black Americans not being full Americans.
Btw, I have no idea what the black national anthem is.
EDIT: Oh, Lift Every Voice and Sing? Well, I won't lie, I know the song and I've always thought it was beautiful. We sung it in our (mixed) elementary school choir in the early 1990s. I knew it was a black Christian hymn written in the early 1900s about liberation from slavery, and that it was a go-to hymn during the Civil Rights era. It looks like the NAACP said it was the 'black national anthem' in 1919. That's news to me, but okay.
This is a good post with good points and I want to respond with honesty.
I am making a distinction in the words I choose to use in order to say something about myself, and to claim some piece of territory for those I consider close or like to me. I do this in response to what I see as encroachment by people unlike me. Naturally this brings the question of what is like to me, and what is unlike to me, and that is not an easy question for me to answer.
I'd like to parallel this sentence for effect and reciprocation.
I am an American of mixed race; my mother is white, my father is white. My patrilineal lines on both sides have been in the US since the 1700s, but there are white immigrant wives up both sides of the line, from the Baltic to the Mediterranean. Catholics, too.
The bold part is the second-most important piece of information I'm using to determine how you or I can identify like. You don't consider yourself to be the same race as the woman who gave birth to you, which is baffling to me. I understand it, I suppose, in the regular way that something odd you've lived with your whole life is normal while still remaining odd. To contrast you to Barack Obama: you both have white American mothers. Both of them are what I would consider American in the same way that much but not all of my ancestry was. Your father I would consider African American, while Barack's is not American in any way but rather foreign. I would consider you both Mulatto, were that word not considered in poor taste.
Which brings me along nicely to your last point. In your experience people tell you what race you are and you say OK. In my experience what I'm expected to call people changes frequently. I've gone through several iterations of the euphemism treadmill in just my lifetime, and I can see how it worked in the past.
Me too, I just didn't consider my race to be American my whole life. That came much more recently.
Unequivocally yes. Your parents, grandparents, and so on were all born here, going back centuries, though not millennia. You're more American than I am, as I have so many white immigrants marrying in to the Native American stock. I should lampshade the know-nothings, as it was that movement that inspired my reconsideration of what I could consider myself. I'm making American distinct from African American, which are both distinct from Indian (not to be confused with Bharat), and the three of which I consider the three groups who can be considered native to this continent.
It would depend on the trichotomy I outlined. I don't think anyone whose ancestors weren't on this continent before it stretched from sea to shining sea can claim to be American. If you marry a French woman, then your children will be less American than you, even if they are Whiter. If you marry a Swede, you will have Swedish children, half American.
Yes, unequivocally. If you specifically think that you do not share your race with your mother, then I am not going to argue with you. If you want to lay claim to her heritage, you need to lay claim to her heritage. And yes again, picking a side is critical, which is why I'm trying to choose my own, and I'm doing it in response to what I see as blacks, mostly, but increasingly other minorities in America, choosing a side that doesn't include me, and doesn't include your mother, and doesn't include Robert Lee. Self-identification is a necessary condition,
Not at all, it's not about the statue and it never was. It's about the people.
As for the postscript, the Black National Anthem is not something I had ever heard of either, and it wasn't the NAACP that brought it to my attention, and nothing in 1919 matters to the discussion. It was the NFL that did that. They had the National Anthem sung at the beginning of each week 1 game as usual, but then followed it with the Black National Anthem. It had a real impact on me, because it laid bare in the starkest terms that the anthem protests of the last eight years started. These people who protest really do not feel represented by the anthem. They felt it so strongly that they got another anthem to be played in sequence, as if it were the Canadian anthem when the Blue Jays visit, or the national anthems are played at the Olympics.
(First of all, thank you for the informative and honest reply - and I apologize for my relentless edit-preening of my own posts - luckily I'm pretty sure I didn't add or remove anything of substance while you were replying, just streamlining phrasing and other minor choices.)
This is interesting. I see your reasoning here completely. In a vacuum, I think a world-naive version of me would happily claim that I'm both white and black, because my parents are white and black. If my parents were Korean and Mexican I'd be both asian and hispanic.
The non-naive me understands that this would run directly counter to just about all messaging I've ever seen about what it means to be white in America, in the historical record through my childhood and into the present, from white people and from black people, from segregationists and from integrationists, from people who are firmly opposed to race-mixing and from people who are a little overenthusiastic about it.
My impression is that claiming whiteness for myself would be widely seen as not only incorrect, but essentially fraudulent - whiteness, as it exists in the American perspective, is about not being mixed-race. It's what I understand the point of whiteness to be. I don't mean to point this out in a way that implies that it's unjust or that I feel that I deserve entry into whiteness and that it is being denied to me - it is what it is, value-neutral.
I concede that I might be wrong about this, and that say, Barack Obama could've been welcomed with open arms into the 'white' (or 'American') racial ingroup had he simply chosen to, but I am skeptical.
(Maybe one difference between the traditional 'white' ethnic group and your 'American' ethnic group is that biracial people can opt-in to the latter and not the former.)
Neither of my parents ever explicitly called me anything but "mixed" -- that was the terminology of the day, I think "biracial" has superseded it, I don't really know or keep up either. Neither side of the family ever called me white, but interestingly, neither side of the family ever called me black, either. That I picked up afterward, from friends (white and black and otherwise) calling me black, then later sampling the broader world for clues about what I ought to call myself. It always boiled down to "If you're half black, you're black. And, if you're half black, you're not white."
So, I don't know on this point. Like I said, in a vacuum, I agree with you that it should be equally appropriate for me to claim the race of either or both of my parents.
Yeah I'm more or less with you on this one, although I also think the treadmill is inevitable. I can't tell you the last time I heard someone unironically call themselves "African-American" in a casual context. To me it sounds impersonally clinical and weird, like when someone says "females" instead of "women" in a casual conversation.
But I'm on the back end of the treadmill, too. "People of color" has always been a very clunky phrase to me, and makes me feel bad for how disorienting it must be for people who had to unlearn "colored people" within their own lifetimes. Plus it's too broad, since it just means "not white people" it implies a coalition or community that doesn't exist for any practical purpose. I'll take it over "BIPOC" (black people, indigenous people, and people of color), which I don't see having a lot of mileage outside of identity activist spaces, but hey, I've been wrong before.
In actual American black communities, people don't say "people of color" unless they're specifically doing race identity coalition activism, which they ... usually aren't. And anecdotally, the very small number of people I've ever heard say "BIPOC" out loud have been white terminally online leftists. We're ... safe from that one I think, fingers crossed. My condolences to all the Latinxs out there.
The good news I bring is that it's fine to say 'black', it's fine to say 'black' if you're white, it's way simpler than anything else, it seems pretty stable as an identifier, and it's what the vast majority of black people in the US talk about and think of themselves as.
Personally I think 'mulatto' should be allowed back and should bring fun hyperspecific terms like 'quadroon' and 'octoroon' back along with it, but I don't control these things.
I'll give it to you that your perspective is self-consistent from where I'm standing. I think it's an unusual method of identitycraft, but I understand where you're coming from and why you want to do it and see it come into being. I was thinking at first, is there any particular reason you don't think of your new ingroup as "White American" or "Anglo-American" (vs. just "American") if American blacks and indians both have comparable and non-exclusive claims of ethnic primacy on the American continent? But I am assuming "American" in this sense has to do with the specific founding stock of the American colonial project and specifically its state system and cultural institutions, and has nothing at all to do with people who are white or European who weren't part of the country at the time of its founding or soon after. I can also see why there is not really an intuitive term for that.
Your position made a lot more sense to me once I understood that you are defining the bounds of a new ethnic group based on ancestral proximity to a particular series of people and events at a particular place at a particular time in history, and are not defining terms of entry into an existing political or cultural class, or defining what US citizenship should mean (at least not inherently, I'm sure you separately have a perspective about that).
From that perspective I understand completely why Robert E. Lee is within the bounds of that group - his ancestors were part of the founding settler stock of the United States, and that's what it means to be within the bounds of the group. (I don't actually specifically know anything about Robert E. Lee's genealogy but I assume you know this to be the case.)
I think your project is understandable and worthwhile, and I don't know how I would solve your terminology problem (what I see as a terminology problem) any better.
Btw, I read about the NFL anthem thing while looking into the matter to reply to your post, and I'm as disappointed as you are in that use of it, and I also believe it signals the thing you think it signals. I don't think the people who agitated for that to happen are as representative of the views of the average black person in America as they believe they are, and I think the distinction is important, but there's no way around conceding that that contingent does exist and they are apparently making things like that happen.
I've always thought that BIPOC meant only Black and Indigenous people of color, excluding Asians and White Hispanics by omission.
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I hate everything about this. I truly do. I sincerely wish you felt all the benefits of whiteness as defined by activist were available to you. The rugged individualism, the family structure, the emphasis on the scientific method, the work ethic, the future orientation, the system of justice, the written tradition. I'm even increasingly coming around to Christianity not being half bad. It's at least better than the hellscape my edgy atheist leanings have ushered in.
I loathe beyond words I can speak here how seemingly all pro-social behavior has become coded "white". Where as antisocial behavior, either be implication, or occasionally explicitly, has been coded "black". And naturally, white is bad and black is good. And I sincerely wish we didn't live in a world where you felt your birthright to a pro-social society was denied you. I swear, in the 90's, it didn't used to be this way. At least, I'm pretty sure it wasn't.
I don't know if it makes you feel better or not, but my life is very much a product of, and continues to be oriented around, the same rugged individualism, family structure (to some extent), emphasis on the scientific method, work ethic, written tradition, etc that you are pointing toward here. Those are strong values that I hold and respect, and I am grateful to those before me who established them.
(I'm not a Christian in any real sense but I share both your edgy atheist history and your coming-around to view it as a net positive.)
This does not really factor into the equation for me in terms of my racial identity.
There have been people in my life who have told me that I "act white" in a pejorative way because of how I speak or write or what kinds of things I like or don't like, especially other young people growing up, but I never really gave that too much weight, and those people were few and far between. I always wrote it off as inconsequential.
It's unfortunate that it seems like there is in fact a growing current of thought that really does seem to resent and push back against those values as inherently suspect and unwanted. I think it's a real problem and I worry that a lot of young people are growing up right now being told that it's racist for people to want you to do well on standardized tests or to ask you to be polite. That was not happening while I was growing up at all, it would've been borderline if not completely offensive, but I think it's clear that the kind of kids who would've told me I "acted white" pejoratively have in fact not grown up to be inconsequential at all and apparently have captured the messaging of institutions like the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.
But this type of mentality is not what I mean when I say that the world has made it clear to me that 'white' is not a word that's accurate for me to use about myself. My impression of what whiteness means as a racial identity, and what the boundaries of it are, mostly come from people who assign a positive or neutral value to whiteness.
The values you consider 'benefits of whiteness' here, I would maybe describe as 'benefits of western civilization'? I have no problem thinking of myself as a beneficiary of, product of, and cultural heir to, western civilization. (That terminology is complicated by the fact that I can point to non-western cultures who also can claim many or all of these virtues as a people, but I still think 'western' is at least a better proxy for what you're pointing at than 'white' to me.)
To reiterate, I don't think any of the virtues that you associate with 'white' here are in any way not available to me, and I hold and value the majority of them exactly as I suspect I would if I had two white parents or two black parents. It's the specific racial category 'white' that I don't seem to fall within the accepted bounding conditions of, not any of the values I (or the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture) might associate with whiteness.
I want to be absolutely clear. I do not consider those values "white", but I was pointing out the framing activist use. I hate everything about it. I hate how much it increasingly dominates the terms of the argument, and even institutional policy. And I hate how it confuses what exactly you mean when you say you identify as "black" despite having a "white" mother.
I don't even consider those prosocial values inherently western. At least most of them, save Christianity. Asian cultures and Indian culture has a lot of the same values, with many of the same, and a few unique, foibles that we in the west have towards them as well. Nobody is perfect, but at least these cultures appear to acknowledge there are prosocial and antisocial behaviors, and you should encourage prosocial behavior. It's hard to say the same about the current state of the art crop of racial activist.
I'm glad to you hear you are older and haven't been sucked into the self inflicted systemic dysfunction of the modern "black" identifying community.
Understood, I wasn't sure initially if you were saying that yes, these are white values, but they're obviously good instead of bad.
It's probably clear from my indecisive wording that I also don't really think of them as inherently western values any more than I think of them as white values, so I think we're actually totally on the same page here.
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I always thought of identity as mostly imposed anyway. You don’t really get to pick. What my race, class, religion (unless I specifically rejected it and make a declaration of it) and social class are not things that one chooses for oneself but things that through interactions with society you’re taught. Especially if you’re visually distinct, as minority groups tend to be, the wider society doesn’t exactly let you ignore it. A black person is black no matter what because we’ve somehow decided that black and Hispanic and Native and Indian ancestry makes you not white.
I’m not personally in favor of Bipoc simply because it sort of implies that every person of color has an identical experience— that the Chinese students in California have the same experience as the Latino in Arizona, the Native in Wyoming, or the black in Chicago. It’s a political term, more or less, much like LGBT is; meant to unite the people in those groups into a polity for the purpose of gaining power and rights in American electoral politics. But I think for me at least in nonpolitical conversation, it’s much more useful to consider the needs of any groups individually, and to consider the person you’re talking about as a specific type of bipoc within the whole.
Currently we've decided that Hispanic ancestry is orthogonal to white ... and for that matter I'm not sure we demand an ancestry component to that ethnicity. Many people with 75% native Mesoamerican ancestry are still universally accepted as part of an ethnicity named after the Hispania region of Europe, on the basis that the assimilation into the culture descended from that region is more important than the genes from that region. If someone with 100% native ancestry is equally assimilated and self-identifies as Hispanic, would anyone really argue it?
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This thread has been hugely educational about how non-idiots see race relations in America. Thank you to KMC and rallycar-jepsen for having an incredibly polite conversation about an incredibly fraught topic, and to everyone on the Motte for creating a community where they feel safe to have it.
@KMC did indeed come in hot, but to be fair, when confronted with someone who didn't just slot into his preconceived idea of black people, he cooled off and engaged civilly and a good conversation followed. That is the purpose of the Motte: mission accomplished. You seem like you are just trying to go back and reignite things.
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The word is so overused (mostly, it must be said, by the left) that I now treat it as a fnord. I realise I managed to read the OP without noticing it, and had to go back to check that it was there after reading your post.
FWIW, my own opinion is that melting down the statue is a good start, but I would prefer if it was publically blown up on the 4th July with red, white and blue pyrotechnics while a military band played Battle Hymn of the Republic. But I'm not American, so it doesn't matter.
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He admittedly could have done better, but you're probably being just as if not more inflammatory with your description. KMC managed to find his footing and have a civil and productive conversation, you seem to be determine to derail it again.
I'm talking about "a statute glorifying a war over the right to own people "
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It may be worth noting that when the NAACP declared “Lift Every Voice and Sing” the “Negro/black national anthem,” the US didn’t even have an official national anthem yet, as the Star-Spangled Banner wasn’t officially adopted until 1931. Since the US didn’t have a national anthem, it probably didn’t seem as anti-American to adopt a second, racial national anthem as it would today. That said, I still find it incredibly distasteful and divisive whenever I hear anyone refer to it as that today.
Yeah, learning about modern BLM type activists leaning into it was a little disheartening, even if not surprising. I think the song is worse off for the association. The circumstances that the hymn was written in were specific, but the lyrics themselves aren't. The imagery is of the liberation of the biblical Israelites from bondage in Egypt, like a lot of early black American spiritual music and poetry was.
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