Re: "Whiteness" Re: Obseneties

At 1:42 pm -0400 1/9/00, Jonathan Chang wrote:
>In a message dated 2000:08:31 8:36:12 PM, abrigon@YAHOO.COM writes:
>
>>Am I a white man,
Possibly, if you're a snowman (or a ghost?).

>>or a American-European?
Eh? How in the name of all logic can someone be an American European???  Am
I missing something, or is that not a fairly large pond between America &
Europe?  Aren't they different places.

My daughter-in-law is European; she was born and brought up in the centre
of France.  My daughter's boyfriend is American; he was born and brought up
in New York State.  I understand that.

>>Means basically the same thing,
Er - white = American-European?  Don't think the upholders of Apartheid in
the old South Africa (now, thankfully, a thing of history) would quite go
along with that.  Afrikaaners considered themselves 'white', but certainly
not American-European (whatever that may mean).

And what has either being American or being European got to do with whiteness?

[...]
>
>    The whole idea of a "White race" and "White-ness" is a myth. There are no
>"White" people.
Hear, hear.  I'm mighty glad that I most clearly lack one of the essential
criteria to be labelled a WASP; often I wish I clearly lacked more in the.
The whole thing is, at best, a load of irrelevant nonsense and at
worse.........

>    Racial classification ideas are cultural artifacts of Romantic Era
>(Romantic Error) "science" and "biology" and have no basis in real science
>and biology.
>    Time to dump this load of garbage...
The time has long, long been overdue IMHO.  Auschwitz-Birkenau, which I
visited this summer, is a surviving testimony to the utter pollution this
garbage causes.  I am glad I did not duck out of the visit, that I could,
in some way, honor the thousands who were murdered there.  But I would far
rather that the plave had never existed (but it did, and its existence must
never IMO be denied).

Oh yes - let's dump the obscene garbage (tho saddly its stench will linger
some while).

Ray.


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A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
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