This is probably far too complex a subject to deal with in a post. I will attempt to respectfully, and with some concern for the facts, as I understand them, bring up an issue I've been interested in lately.
At least one post somewhere in this thread suggested that the students were kicked out of the minority lounge based on their ancestry. While that may have been the intention of the people doing the "kicking out", I don't think it's strictly true. I think they asked the "white" or "Caucasian" students to leave based on their interpretation of the students' appearance.
Haven't we all seen people whom we couldn't identify as belonging to a specific "color" or "race"? But what is "race"? With apologies to those who have used it as shorthand in this discussion, I would say race is a construct of lazy minds.
My ancestors may have once come down out of the Caucasus mountains and driven chariots over much of Europe in the Iron Age; but I hardly feel a connection to the Caucasus mountains. Over the vast passage of time since then, my ancestors gradually became marginalized and discriminated against, in a Europe dominated by others, clinging to the western fringes of the landmass in places where the terrain was bad, like Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and Brittany. For thousands of years the Celts were treated as completely "other" by Normans, Vikings, Goths, and all kinds of "races" or "tribes" of people we now lump together as "white". And make no mistake -- most of the people of Europe felt they could quite clearly identify a Celt by appearance, by language skills, and by dress and behavior; and at certain times the Celts were held to be lazy, prone to superstition, musically talented but not smart, inherently poor, and geneologically (before there was a concept of genetics) inferior. Sound familiar?
How did the Celts, once overlords of the chariot, but later a despised minority, perform this magic trick and become "white" alongside the Norman French, the Saxons, the Jutes?
I've seen reviews of, but not read, an interesting-looking book (can't recall the title) which seems to assert, if I am correctly interpreting what I see, that the concept of "white" arose (perhaps unconsciously) to maintain a dominant position in the social hierarchy. A lot of tribes or groups that had been outcast minorities were "admitted" to white status to swell the "white" population base and ensure (again, unconsciously) that it remain in the majority, and thus not slip down the social pecking order.
This may be complete claptrap -- or I may even be misreading what little I've seen of this theory -- but it sounds interesting to me. *Somehow* the Welsh and the Scots and even the Irish (*grin*) became "respectable" and even became The Man, here in America. And America is really where slavery, a practice as old as mankind, had become permanently associated with race: previously it was associated mainly with military defeat. For example, individual Greek ("white") slaves served Roman ("white") masters, but it never really became a Roman habit to consider the Greeks as suitable only for enslavement (although the Romans had contempt for everyone not Roman, this wasn't specifically aimed at people they'd enslaved, it was just part of being Roman.)
But in America, where enslaved Africans remained in chains long after slavery had been abandoned or renounced by most of the increasingly empathtic "civilized" world, slavery became associated with skin color, probably because out of some kind of necessary mental defense against their own guilty consicences, the slaveholders had to find some reason to justify their behavior. Unable, or too lazy, to distinguish between the Hutu, Tutsi, Bantu, Taureg, Ibo, or any of the other physically and culturally diverse Africans, the slaveholders settled on really arbitrary differences in skin color and built a myth of inferiority. Yes, I'm vastly oversimplifying here.
So *if I am understanding* this claim, once skin color became a pretext for discrimination, hatred, and most relevant to this discussion, class division, there arose the question of who was in which group, sort of like picking teams for a sport (silly metaphor for such an awful subject, I know). It was at that point that (consciously or not) the Celts and the Italians and the Magyars and the Ostrogoths and the rest somehow got lumped in with the Scandinavians as "white" despite huge differences in language, culture, hair color and even skin color.
Well, a thought-provoking topic, to me at least. I know I've just skimmed the outline of it. I hope I haven't offended any Celts or Ostrogoths.
Sailboat
At least one post somewhere in this thread suggested that the students were kicked out of the minority lounge based on their ancestry. While that may have been the intention of the people doing the "kicking out", I don't think it's strictly true. I think they asked the "white" or "Caucasian" students to leave based on their interpretation of the students' appearance.
Haven't we all seen people whom we couldn't identify as belonging to a specific "color" or "race"? But what is "race"? With apologies to those who have used it as shorthand in this discussion, I would say race is a construct of lazy minds.
My ancestors may have once come down out of the Caucasus mountains and driven chariots over much of Europe in the Iron Age; but I hardly feel a connection to the Caucasus mountains. Over the vast passage of time since then, my ancestors gradually became marginalized and discriminated against, in a Europe dominated by others, clinging to the western fringes of the landmass in places where the terrain was bad, like Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and Brittany. For thousands of years the Celts were treated as completely "other" by Normans, Vikings, Goths, and all kinds of "races" or "tribes" of people we now lump together as "white". And make no mistake -- most of the people of Europe felt they could quite clearly identify a Celt by appearance, by language skills, and by dress and behavior; and at certain times the Celts were held to be lazy, prone to superstition, musically talented but not smart, inherently poor, and geneologically (before there was a concept of genetics) inferior. Sound familiar?
How did the Celts, once overlords of the chariot, but later a despised minority, perform this magic trick and become "white" alongside the Norman French, the Saxons, the Jutes?
I've seen reviews of, but not read, an interesting-looking book (can't recall the title) which seems to assert, if I am correctly interpreting what I see, that the concept of "white" arose (perhaps unconsciously) to maintain a dominant position in the social hierarchy. A lot of tribes or groups that had been outcast minorities were "admitted" to white status to swell the "white" population base and ensure (again, unconsciously) that it remain in the majority, and thus not slip down the social pecking order.
This may be complete claptrap -- or I may even be misreading what little I've seen of this theory -- but it sounds interesting to me. *Somehow* the Welsh and the Scots and even the Irish (*grin*) became "respectable" and even became The Man, here in America. And America is really where slavery, a practice as old as mankind, had become permanently associated with race: previously it was associated mainly with military defeat. For example, individual Greek ("white") slaves served Roman ("white") masters, but it never really became a Roman habit to consider the Greeks as suitable only for enslavement (although the Romans had contempt for everyone not Roman, this wasn't specifically aimed at people they'd enslaved, it was just part of being Roman.)
But in America, where enslaved Africans remained in chains long after slavery had been abandoned or renounced by most of the increasingly empathtic "civilized" world, slavery became associated with skin color, probably because out of some kind of necessary mental defense against their own guilty consicences, the slaveholders had to find some reason to justify their behavior. Unable, or too lazy, to distinguish between the Hutu, Tutsi, Bantu, Taureg, Ibo, or any of the other physically and culturally diverse Africans, the slaveholders settled on really arbitrary differences in skin color and built a myth of inferiority. Yes, I'm vastly oversimplifying here.
So *if I am understanding* this claim, once skin color became a pretext for discrimination, hatred, and most relevant to this discussion, class division, there arose the question of who was in which group, sort of like picking teams for a sport (silly metaphor for such an awful subject, I know). It was at that point that (consciously or not) the Celts and the Italians and the Magyars and the Ostrogoths and the rest somehow got lumped in with the Scandinavians as "white" despite huge differences in language, culture, hair color and even skin color.
Well, a thought-provoking topic, to me at least. I know I've just skimmed the outline of it. I hope I haven't offended any Celts or Ostrogoths.
Sailboat