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Originally posted by Symmetric Chaos
Show of hands. Who thinks 2damn should learn to think for him/her self?

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Originally posted by 2damnloud
…whence came all these people? They are a mixture of English, Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans, and Swedes. From this promiscuous breed, that race now called Americans have arisen. What, then, is the American, this new man? He is neither an European nor the descendant of an European; hence that strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country. I could point out to you a family whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and whose present four sons have now four wives of different nations. He is an American, who, leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. . . . The Americans were once scattered all over Europe; here they are incorporated into one of the finest systems of populations which has ever appeared.
No longer a European, the American represents a new race made from the stock of various European nations. No mention is made of Africans or Indians, perhaps because this new American race does indeed receive new prejudices from the new mode of life it has embraced. Crevecoeur candidly describes the process by which the American race originated as a white race; or rather, the way in which the descendants of Europeans constructed a myth of themselves as a white race with special claim on the answer to the question "What is an American?" An American was a white man. Just as importantly, America was that place where the downtrodden classes of Europe could throw off the oppression of aristocrats and attain not only fraternal equality among themselves, but superiority over those who were not of the new white race. When the Constitution of the United States was written, it thus specifically enshrined slavery into law and denied citizenship to enslaved Africans. When the Naturalization Act of 1789 was made law, it stipulated that only "whites" were eligible for naturalization as citizens (a clause persistently contested by people of Chinese and Japanese ancestry for the next 150 years).

In a fascinating, provocative book called How the Irish Became White, Noel Ignatiev describes this process of Europeans becoming white in the case of the Irish immigrants of the ninetheenth century. Ireland was a colony devastated by English imperialism, and by a racial stereotyping of the Irish as backward, primitive, savage, and barbarian (in no small measure because of their Catholicism). When the Irish set foot in America, they were still subject to much of the racial prejudice and discrimination they had suffered at home at the hands of the British. Irish immigrants to America occupied a position only just above that of the blacks, alongside whom they often labored on the docks or railroads. For the Irish, becoming white would offer many advantages, not least of which would be the elimination of their major competitors for jobs. The Irish began to organize the exclusion of Northern free blacks from shipyard or factory employment, and continued this discrimination in later generations when the Irish dominated the police and firemen's unions in most cities. The Irish formed a key ingredient in the pro-slavery coalition that sat at the core of the Democratic Party in America before the Civil War, and which was brought to full power by the Indian killer and Southern patriot Andrew Jackson. White working class men, many of them Irish, opposed the abolition of slavery because of the threat they believed free blacks would pose to their economic prosperity, just as they opposed the extension of slavery into the new territories because of the threat slavery would pose to the creation of high wage jobs in the West. The hostility between the Irish and the blacks that lives on until today has its roots in this early history of how the Irish became white, and of how various Irish-dominated institutions in urban America -- especially police and fire departments and labor unions -- prospered through racial discrimination.

Whiteness, of course, is a delusion -- as the insane Captain Ahab of Moby Dick demonstrates. Scientists today agree that there is no such thing as "race," at least when analyzed in terms of genetics or behavioral variation. Every human population is a mongrel population, full of people descended from various places and with widely differing physical qualities. Racial purity is the most absurd delusion, since intermarriage and miscegenation have been far more the norm than the exception throughout human ethnic history. "Race," then, is what academics like to call a "socially constructed" reality. Race is a reality in the sense that people experience it as real and base much of their behavior on it. Race, however, is only real because certain social institutions and practices make it real. Race is real in the same way that a building or a religion or a political ideology is real, as each is the result of human effort, not a prescription from nature or God. Thus the concept of race can have little or no foundation, yet it can still be the force that makes or breaks someone's life, or the life of a people or a nation.

For white people, race functions as a large ensemble of practices and rules that give white people all sorts of small and large advantages in life. Whiteness is the source of many privileges, which is one reason people have trouble giving it up. It is important to stress that to criticize whiteness is not necessarily to engage in a massive orchestration of guilt. Guilt is often a distracting and mistaken emotion, especially when it comes to race. White people are fond of pointing out that as individuals they have never practiced discrimination, or that their ancestors never owned slaves. White people tend to cast the question of race in terms of guilt in part because of the American ideology of individualism, by which I mean our tendency to want to believe that individuals determine their own destinies and responsibilities. In this sense it is un-American to insist that white Americans benefit every day from their whiteness, whether or not they intend to do so. But that is the reality. Guilt, then, has nothing to do with whiteness in this sense of benefitting from structural racism and built-in privileges. I may not intend anything racial when I apply for a loan, or walk into a store, or hail a cab, or ask for a job -- but in every circumstance my whiteness will play a role in the outcome, however "liberal" or "anti-racist" I imagine myself to be. White men have enormous economic advantages because of the disadvantages faced by women and minorities, no matter what any individual white men may intend. If discrimination means that fewer qualified applicants compete with you for the job, you benefit. You do not have to be a racist to benefit from being white. You just have to look the part.

The privileges of whiteness are the not-so-secret dirty truth about race relations in America. Three decades after Dr. King, we should be able to see that our blindness to whiteness has crippled us in our walk toward equality and justice and freedom. As the national conversation on race continues, let us resolve to make whiteness an issue, and not just on this holiday or during Black History Month. When we talk about race in America, we should be talking about the invention of whiteness, and about what David Roediger calls the "abolition of whiteness." From this perspective, the end of racism will not come when America grants equal rights to minorities. Racism will end only with the abolition of whiteness, when the white whale that has been the source of so many delusions is finally left to disappear beneath the sea of time forever.

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Originally posted by Symmetric Chaos
Show of hands. Who thinks 2damn should learn to think for him/her self?

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Originally posted by Creshosk
You really should give credit where credit is do. It's not nice to rip off idea's like that. s'called plagerism.

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.%22&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us]2damnloud's text came from here[/url]

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Originally posted by 2damnloud
It should be very interesting to see the reactions when we delve into matters such as this.

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Originally posted by 2damnloud
The ironic thing is......

Are you ready for this................?









The guy who wrote that is "white"! http://www.uwm.edu/~gjay/

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Originally posted by 2damnloud
The ironic thing is.......


Are you ready for this................?

The guy who wrote that is "white"! http://www.uwm.edu/~gjay/

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Originally posted by 2damnloud
It's ITALICIZED dumbass, which denotes it's not my words.

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Originally posted by Creshosk
Doesn't matter how you display it, without giving credit its still called plagiarism.

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Originally posted by Alfheim
Er but I think the point was that its not plagarism because the italics means its not his work..................

You dont neccesarily have to say where you got it from but as long as you dont pass it off as your own its not plagrism. Anyway he stated where he got it from afterwards.

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Originally posted by Alfheim
Er but I think the point was that its not plagarism because the italics means its not his work..................

You dont neccesarily have to say where you got it from but as long as you dont pass it off as your own its not plagrism. Anyway he stated where he got it from afterwards.

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Originally posted by Creshosk
Without saying that its not your work you give off the implication that it is since that is the natural state within a forum. We do not natuarlly assume that every post a person makes is not their own words, now do we?

It's part of the reason when we quote a person something to the effect of "Originally posted by" pops up within it.

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Originally posted by Apolloknight
Ok you win, just drop it, another pointless debate.

But, did you read it?

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Originally posted by Apolloknight
did you read it?

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Originally posted by Creshosk
Without saying that its not your work you give off the implication that it is since that is the natural state within a forum. We do not natuarlly assume that every post a person makes is not their own words, now do we?

It's part of the reason when we quote a person something to the effect of "Originally posted by" pops up within it.