Monday, September 01, 2008

Down With Race, Up With Ethnicity

The latest death toll figures from Hurricane Katrina can be seen on this website here. The famous Russian neo-Nazi video is on this blog here.

Updated September 2:

In the comments threads, James Schipper, one our fine commenters who usually has something brilliant to say, discusses the post, On the Non-persistence of Any Jewish Agenda:
One of the most politically correct countries in the world is Sweden. How many Jews are there in Sweden? The Netherlands also used to be very PC, but its Jewish minority is not even 0.5% of population. As you said, it is to easy to blame PC on Jews. It makes Gentiles look like innocent children that can be manipulated at will by the Chosen Ones.

I don't think that we should confuse ethnocentricity with racism. An ethnic group is not a race. An ethnic group can be composed of several races and a race can be divided into many ethnic groups. The Brazilians are an ethnic group, but they aren't one race.

Europeans in 1950 were for practical purposes all white, but they were divided in numerous ethnic groups. Nobody in the British Isles, for instance, said: "We are all one ethnic group because we are all white. The French across the Channel are white too, so they are also part of our ethnic group."

It is only in the Americas and the colonies that Whites started to think racially and to confuse race and ethnicity. Remember, if two groups are racially different, they are usually also ethnically different.If that is the case, the ethnic rivalry will also acquire a racial coloration. If the French were black, the ethnic rivalry between the English and French would also have acquired a racial dimension, even though it is ethnic at bottom.

It is inevitable that human beings will be ethnocentric to some extent, but it is not inevitable that this ethnocentricity will be expressed racially. If multiracial countries want to acquire cohesion, they should practice racially inclusive ethnocentricity.

This is also why race-based rights such as affirmative action should be abolished. They undermine ethnic unity and promote racial solidarity instead of multiracial ethnic solidarity. Down with race and up with ethnicity.
He makes some very interesting comments. Growing up in California in the 1960's and 1970's, no one of us ever thought of ourselves as White. We more or less assimilated to a California culture, which, as I think back on it now, was largely a White culture. But I never realized it at the time.

White culture was married with California or American culture to the point where one scarcely knew where one ended and the other began. No one even thought of themselves as White, and we had many friends who were non-Whites. I even dated non-Whites, in particular American Indians and Hispanics.

The American Indians, NE Asians, Filipinos, Hispanics and Puerto Ricans were for all intents and purposes "White" because they didn't really behave any differently from anyone else, mostly because they were not recent immigrants and were very well assimilated. Maybe they ate some ethnic food; maybe their parents spoke some of the old tongue. We were all just "Californians" and then "Americans".

I think what made Whites junk this and start seeing themselves as White was the mass immigration that flooded our state. In my city, it becomes obvious to me very quickly that I am a minority. Due to my UK, French and German heritage? No, because I am a "non-Hispanic White".

With a little bit of multiculturalism, national identity is still possible and can transcend ethnic identity. With overnight mass immigration, it becomes harder and harder.

Mass immigration also forced many of us Whites to reminisce about the California we grew up in and how and why it is not like that anymore. It also reminds us that what we grew up with, now gone forever, was something of real value. What did we grow up with? Not so much a White California, but a California with a White culture that most others just de facto embraced.

The reason it's gone, and replaced with something inferior, is due to mass immigration transforming this state into Tijuana North. We never thought about Hispanics much before, but now the issue is so shoved in our faces 24-7 that we can scarcely ignore it.

When a poor White neighborhood continues to be a better place to live than a poor Hispanic neighborhood, which in turn is a much better place to live than a poor Black neighborhood, it's hard not to think of "White" as a race. Whatever it is, even if not a race, it's something tangible and real, with hard reality consequences all the way down the line.

James is correct that many ethnic Whites have only recently been taken into the White fold and have started to think of themselves as White, instead of Irish, Portuguese, Italian, Armenian or whatnot. That's an interesting subject right there. How The Irish Became White is supposed to be a good book on that.

Noel Ignatiev, a Harvard professor, is a difficult and disturbing thinker, but this looks like a good book.

Anyway, Ignatiev's position is similar to Schipper's above. He doesn't want to get rid of Whites physically. Like Schipper, he just wants to get rid of the whole notion and category of White people, which he says has no meaning. Ignatiev has aroused fury in White nationalist circles due to his publishing a journal called Race Traitor. Ignatiev is Jewish. The reviews at the link are very interesting.

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