Re: Whiteness?

At 9:40 pm -0400 3/9/00, Nik Taylor wrote:
>Mike Adams wrote:
>>
>> Hum, if it is wrong to be american-european/european-american, then why
>> is it not wrong to be african-american?
>
>Did anyone say it was wrong?  Just a couple of people pointed out that
>the normal format would be European-American, not American-European
..and I pointed out that (a) I didn't understand what "American-European"
means, and (b) "white" is not synonymous with it, whetever it means.

But tho terms like European-American, African-American (and, presumably
Asian-American, which IMHO is pretty vague) are obviously used - whether
rightly or wrongly - I can't help thinking that there seems to be a greater
concern with the "pluribus" and too little with "unum" in "e pluribus
unum".
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At 4:09 pm -0800 3/9/00, Mike Adams wrote:
[....]
>Me, I am an American, just happen to have most of my ancestors that I
>know of, came from Europe.
If European-American meant no more and no less than that, I could not care
less.  But what little I understand - and maybe I've misunderstood - leads
me to believe these terms carry with them the garbage of the 19th century
"racial" myth.  I mean things like:

>Am I a white man, or a American-European?
>Means basically the same thing, but in the end result it does not?
...seem to me to confirm this opinion.

Would someone whose family has lived in the UK for three or more
generations but whose skin happened to be blackish get classified as
European-American if s/he settled in the US and got US citizenship?
Similarly would a 'white' Zimbabwean get classified as African-American.
IF NOT, WHY NOT?

---------------------------------------------
So why do I find all the recent correspondence rather depressing?

Let me remind you what Jonathan Chang wrote on 1st Sept.:
>>     The whole idea of a "White race" and "White-ness" is a myth. There
>>are no
>> "White" people.
>>     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...
..and my reply on the same day:
[.....]
>The time has long, long been overdue IMHO.
  <snip>
>Oh yes - let's dump the obscene garbage (tho saddly its stench will linger
>some while).
<sigh> One would like to have thought that places like Auschwitz-Birkenau
would've made plain to the world what an utter obscenity racism is.

Can we not, at least, on this list dump this load of garbage and, er, maybe
get back to constructing languages?

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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