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Re: "Whiteness" Re: Obseneties

From:Raymond Brown <ray.brown@...>
Date:Friday, September 1, 2000, 19:57
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. ========================================= A mind which thinks at its own expense will always interfere with language. [J.G. Hamann 1760] =========================================