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Sounds like white guilt to me; and you are justifying the horrendous past of this country towards blacks, that is a separate discussion. We are discussing why whites are not called European Americans.
I accepted that poster OPINION because it was articulate thoroughly and he support his POV with accurate interpretation of historical information. He made a connection with labeling to justify racism, you just talked about how every society at one time or another had slaves.
White guilt?
My goodness, I do not have guilty bone in my body over slavery. That would be true even if my great grandfather or beyond did own slaves. Heck read my previous post to get an idea how I not only don't have guilt, but deride others who assume that just because a persons skin is white, they somehow were connected to slavery in a bad way.
Tell me when our country has ever held the sins of a father, much less a great grandfather against the son
Tell me why most whites are not assumed to have fought to end slavery instead of being guilty of it
Tell me why many whites ancestors are not presumed to have come here less than 150 years ago, thereby incapable of being connected to slavery
It is like just because someone has white skin, they all are assumed to be guilty of the possible past deeds of their ancestors with no proof whatsoever.
Remember I am responding to another posters assertion which you apparently agreed with. So then don't try to say my discussion is off topic when you didn't make the same assertion toward their post!
You say had as in past tense. Didn't you even read my post One of the worst, if not the worst place for slavery today is in Africa, being perpetrated by blacks against their own skin color.
Lastly, as to this whole hyphenated-American PC rubbish, I like to quote one of the great past presidents who both (R's) & (D's) respect;
Teddy Roosevelt: "No Room in This Country for Hyphenated Americans"
“There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. When I refer tohyphenated Americans, I do not refer to naturalized Americans. Some of the very best Americans I have ever known were naturalized Americans, Americans born abroad. But a hyphenated American is not an American at all.”
“This is just as true of the man who puts “native” before the hyphen as of the man who puts German or Irish or English or French before the hyphen. Americanism is a matter of the spirit and of the soul. Our allegiance must be purely to the United States. We must unsparingly condemn any man who holds any other allegiance.”
“But if he is heartily and singly loyal to this Republic, then no matter where he was born, he is just as good an American as any one else.”
“The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English- Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian- Americans, or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality than with the other citizens of the American Republic.”
“The men who do not become Americans and nothing else are hyphenated Americans; and there ought to be no room for them in this country. The man who calls himself an American citizen and who yet shows by his actions that he is primarily the citizen of a foreign land, plays a thoroughly mischievous part in the life of our body politic. He has no place here; and the sooner he returns to the land to which he feels his real heart-allegiance, the better it will be for every good American.” Theodore Roosevelt Address to the Knights of Columbus New York City- October 12th, 1915
my family came from glasow Scotland in 1648. so I guess I would be Scottish American, but they had to come to Scotland from somewhere else, so would I be celric American or angles-saxon American, maybe northland-Scottish American. when does it stop.
Nowhere did I imply or even state that a white person living today is responsible for slavery, but I take issue with someone who will not admit that there is some possibility of his ancestor's involvement in slavery.
First, I was not replying to you, but all who make the argument that all whites are responsible for what some whites did sometime. When only the upper class owned slaves and in not in every area of the country and there was big increase in immigration after the Civil War, it's very rare that a white person today's distant relatives held slaves. It's much more likely that a white person today ancestor was an indentured servant. Why do you keep bringing up what some white's ancestors did unless you are trying to hold people today responsible?
I never call somebody African American unless they were born in Africa and now live in the USA. Black and African American are two different descriptions.
I don't like it, referring to a person as some hyphenated American, just because they don't have lily-white skin, is disrespectful in my view. But dividing up Americans by their skin color, ethnicity, sexual proclivities, etc... that is mission of the liberal progressives.
Libs in the media will ask Rubio or Cruz what their favorite Cuban foods are, in an obvious attempt to see whether those men are Hispanic enough. Or they will write newspaper articles and internet blogs, asking whether half-white, half-black Obama is black enough. But theses same libs will never ask Hilary what her favorite Welsh foods are, to claim she is not Welsh enough, nor do the same with Bernie Sanders to claim he is not Polish enough.
Not that Wiki is a reliable source (they are cited), but what do you make of these historical analyses:
**** Edith Sanders in 1969 cited the Babylonian Talmud, which divides mankind between the three sons of Noah, stating that "the descendants of Ham are cursed by being black, and [it] depicts Ham as a sinful man and his progeny as degenerates."[107]....
**** ... the earliest appearance of dark skin as a punishment for the descendants of Ham directly related to "Black Africans" does not appear until the 9th or 10th century ...
**** ... Bernard Lewis has cited the Greek philosopher Aristotle who, in his discussion of slavery, stated that while Greeks are free by nature, 'barbarians' (non-Greeks) are slaves by nature, in that it is in their nature to be more willing to submit to despotic government.[109] Though Aristotle does not specify any particular races, he argues that people from outside Greece are more prone to the burden of slavery than those from Greece.[110] ... This proto-racism is seen as an important precursor to modern racism by classicist Benjamin Isaac.
**** ... The Ancient Hebrews, in referring to all who were not Hebrews as Gentiles, were indulging in ethnocentrism
These, and a bunch more, if not pointing to early racism, most certainly point to the possibility of a division in the cultures based on racial lines. Many of these references refer to "proto-racism" and "ethnocentrism."
If nothing else, in reading all of the articles on the topic, what I noted is that there is not complete agreement by anthropologists, historians, sociologists, etc, as to exactly when "racism" began in earnest. You state that it was middle age Europe. Perhaps. Perhaps not. I see no conclusive discussion of that by these cited experts. I think you are taking a theory and running with it before it is proven. IMO, there is just as much evidence (at least that I see at this point) for the idea of "racism" to have began far, far earlier than that. I think, if nothing else, there is a good case for the Greek period and Greece to have certainly shown those tendencies.
Ultimately, none of us were there. So we have to rely on after-the-fact evidence that has deteriorated for thousands of years. I see that even the experts cited do not agree. How can you, then, present your version as fact?
Those references simply do not prove your point. The idea of race was invented during the enlightenment. This is historical fact. Your pretending that this isn't known doesn't change that it is known.
The idea of race really came to be a powerful idea in the world during the transatlantic slave trade.
Racial identities were new precisely because they have no history and no heritage.
There was no thing called white history/heritage for the vast majority of European history.
Europeans wouldn't have recognized that what the French did versus what the Gernans did were all shared accomplishments by skin color. They would have taken that idea as completely alien.
This was true around the world.
The idea that oh because I look like you we are the same is just not an idea that existed in world for the vast majority of human history.
And we can see it by how nation's who had populations that were very very similar, related to one another. If you would have told these groups that they and their neighbors were apart of the same group based on shared skin color they would have again vehemently disagreed as evidence by all the wars fought by two or more groups that looked exactly the same as far as skin color.
Historically there is no documentation of nations thinking oh they are just like us, we are one people united by skin color.
Those references simply do not prove your point. The idea of race was invented during the enlightenment. This is historical fact. Your pretending that this isn't known doesn't change that it is known.
The idea of race really came to be a powerful idea in the world during the transatlantic slave trade.
Racial identities were new precisely because they have no history and no heritage.
There was no thing called white history/heritage for the vast majority of European history.
Europeans wouldn't have recognized that what the French did versus what the Gernans did were all shared accomplishments by skin color. They would have taken that idea as completely alien.
This was true around the world.
The idea that oh because I look like you we are the same is just not an idea that existed in world for the vast majority of human history.
And we can see it by how nation's who had populations that were very very similar, related to one another. If you would have told these groups that they and their neighbors were apart of the same group based on shared skin color they would have again vehemently disagreed as evidence by all the wars fought by two or more groups that looked exactly the same as far as skin color.
Historically there is no documentation of nations thinking oh they are just like us, we are one people united by skin color.
This idea of race is relatively new.
Just keep repeating the same fallacy and hope everyone will believe it. All the other races noticed the races looked different and were suspicious outsiders to them. Amerindians always called whites "pale", "white man" for example. You are trying to claim only white people judge on appearance and that's untrue. And you're trying to say whites only judge people on skin color and not a whole list of other things. Not true. Your views are anti-white, anti-European and racist.
Excellent post. People do not really understand how recent discrimination based purely on skin color is, and how it originated as the justification for slavery & genocide in America. Prior, people were oppressed based on their religion, nationality or culture...there was no wide-spread concept of superiority or subhuman-ness based strictly on skin tone.
This history is not hidden.
People want to look away, by pretending that the creation of the idea of human races is older and involved more than one group, people can in their minds pretend that idea of human races isn't based on racism and tells us something vitally important about human beings.
Which then justifies the existence of Huge racial disparities, well because x group with this skin color is collectively lacking something and that is why x group with that skin color is not successful.
See how the thinking is circular?
We create racial identities to justify disparate treatment of groups of people, then when those groups have vastly different outcomes, those outcomes, caused by the disparate treatment, are used as evidenced that something is wrong within the disadvantaged group which justifies that they receive disparate treatment.
There is difference between "race" and "tribe" (or ethnicity)
We in American see all things as color. That is why back in the heyday of racism, the white racists made the mistake of categorizing dark complexioned people from India as "black".
Ok, I don't see how that relates to my post but thanks
We create racial identities to justify disparate treatment of groups of people, then when those groups have vastly different outcomes, those outcomes, caused by the disparate treatment, are used as evidenced that something is wrong within the disadvantaged group which justifies that they receive disparate treatment.
That sounds like affirmative action. Your assertions are backed up by nothing and just thinly veiled racism against whites.
Damn!!! That is some real stuff right there. Wow!! I like the connection or lack thereof between blacks and Americans being seen as different for the purpose of supporting racial stereotyping and prejudices.
Every discussion about what's wrong with the black race, discards our American heritage.
Problems are discussed as if they have no relation to American society what's so ever
As if black Americans are these isolated insular foreigners, with our own weird backwards culture which is completely divorced from mainstream American culture.
American social problems are normally discussed as evidence of collective black racial failings.
Americans used to call it the Negro problem, meaning these Negroes are so messed up they are causing us white Americans problems.
And the problems of Negroes was never understood to be a problem of American citizens, cause we weren't considered citizens by large swaths of the population for like 80% of this nation's history, so these social problems have always been seen as outside of America.
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