Request from the Finnophile

[mrissa]

I'm trying to keep this polite, but:

Yes, most dominant cultures on the planet currently and for the last several centuries have been European.

BUT NO, that does NOT mean that all European cultures are dominant cultures. Using "European" and/or "white" as a shorthand for "widely known, assumed, and dominant" is easy, and also wrong.

Ask the Saami. If you don't know who that is, ask the Lapps. Same group, and most people only know them by ethnic slur, not by actual name.

Mighty dominant culture, that.

There are more oppressed minorities in Europe than most people have ever heard of. Some of them have done their share of oppressing in recorded history. Some haven't. Just like non-European, non-white cultures elsewhere on the planet. (Pop quiz: the Chinese, oppressors or oppressed? As usual, the answer is both and neither and which "Chinese"? and when? and with regard to whom?)

"Whiteness" is relevant to some cultural situations -- I'm not saying that it isn't. But I am saying that it is not the only possible categorization of fair-skinned people that can be relevant, especially not to discussions of cultural dominance, subjugation, appropriation, etc. And that using "European" as shorthand for "dominant" is not really very accurate, so if you could please refrain from doing it, I would appreciate that very much.

ETA: Since this has been quoted elsewhere, to people who don't necessarily know me, let me add: I am not claiming not to be part of a locally dominant cultural/ethnic group myself. ScanAm woman in Minnesota! And as much as I have my Haugean disputes, I am officially a member of an ELCA church as well. So -- locally dominant ethnic group? Um, yah. You could say so. This does not make the Saami rights movement irrelevant or nonexistent or even, sadly, totally unique.

Comments

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

Agreed, lots.

For example, Irish != white, and anybody who fails to get this is cordially invited to look for lodgings in the less upmarket parts of London giving a recognisably Irish surname.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I actually muttered this at the computer when someone was making reference to dominant cultures and then to various Irish stories in close proximity -- I muttered, "Oh, yes, the Irish, no one's ever oppressed them."

Irish-American, on the other hand, is clearly a white ethnicity in the US -- but hasn't been for very long, and the process of it getting there fascinates me and prompts me to speculate about which Asian-American ethnicities will be "white" to my grandkids.

[nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com]

to speculate about which Asian-American ethnicities will be "white" to my grandkids

Koreans, def.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

Irish-American is clearly an ethnicity of its own, yes, and does clearly seem to register as "white" in the US. [ How people of some Irish ancestry and some not screw up my Catholic/Protestant radar is a different and hard-to-qualify thing. ]

nth generation Irish-Americans claiming to be Irish really violently upset me, but that's a different argument.

[barondave.livejournal.com]

And to further muddy the waters, just what do you mean by "European"? It's a completely arbitrary set of lines on a map loosely based on the writings of Herodotus. There's no reason at all why Egyptians and Israelis are 'from' different continents while Irish and Serbs are 'from' the same one.

And what do you mean "white"? I'm not a mime.

And why is "century" an important time period... but I'm getting in too deep...

[cadithial.livejournal.com]

Hmm, so Lapplander is actually a slur of Saami? At least, I though Lapp was short for Lapplander

[papersky.livejournal.com]

I was thinking about this in terms of my post-Colonial theory (Ireland, the model and hope for Africa...) -- people don't consider Welsh, Scottish, and Irish literature as post-Colonial, even though they were just as colonised, and for longer, and there are ways you can quite sensibly compare them.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

One of the very few films about Ireland to get that level of stuff right - and also the first time I had the experience of seeing places I knew well in reality on a cinema screen, which was a bit of a boggle. That's where I grew up, really. [ Mind you, living in Montreal you see it playing New York's stunt double a lot, which is not quite the same thing; also, there's Jesus of Montreal, which has perhaps the best use of place ever. ]

[orbitalmechanic.livejournal.com]

My dad (Jewish) likes to say that Asians are becoming the new Jews: not white, slightly exotic, but really acceptable in that middle-class professional well-educated kind of a way. But still different, or at least still possessing the possibility of difference in a way that I kind of think Irish-Americans don't.

I also wonder whether post-colonial work done in Britain is different; certainly the one time I visited Scotland, when they had just been granted (!) their own Parliament or something, people had quite a bit to say about it. But perhaps they're not the academics in this field, huh.

[badger2305.livejournal.com]

Interesting you should make this point. I say pretty much the same thing when I teach race and ethnicity each semester. I also point out that "whiteness" as a concept is constructed from a position of dominance, however. Your questions to help clarify the issue are quite good.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

No, a Lapplander is often of Saami ancestry, but can also be an ethnic Norwegian (Swede, Finn/Kven -- hell, Turk, whatever) who lives in a region named Lappland. It's called Lappland because that's where the "Lapps" are. The ethnic slur is so ingrained that it is incorporated into the name of their region. If you want to use a non-offensive term for that region (other than "northern Scandinavia"), some variant of "Saamemaa" is the term most Saami groups prefer.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I have often claimed to be the only white Caucasian I know. And it's not even true for me. Mostly. Sort of.

Close, though.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Irish-Americans don't now, but in the past, people certainly seem to have thought they could tell the difference, and that it was non-negligible.

But yes, if you read some groups' commentary on the number of Chinese-Americans at prestigious universities right now, and then you remove "Chinese" and put in "Jewish," the arguments match up more or less exactly. Scary but true.

[zalena.livejournal.com]

I'm bemused by the "non-Hispanic white" classification I see on a lot of demographic papers. "Hispanic" means "Spanish speaking," which would make my bilingual brother "Hispanic white" although our family (as clear as I can tell) is not of Latin American origin.

Latino/a is a much better word, especially as a lot of people with Latin American heritage don't speak Spanish.

Once I filled out some employment papers with using the phrase "Euro-American." That really confused them.

I don't understand the whole Irish-American thing. I figure if it's further back than anyone in living memory, you might as well be American, or regional-American. I strongly associate myself with the Rocky Mountain West, even though the rest of my family is either from the mid-west or south.

Still, I had a teacher who loved to guess people's origins by their regional dialect. I introduced myself and he said, "Pennsylvania, Jewish."

Bemused, I told the anecdote to my mother who said, "Oh yes, my father's family comes from that region almost 200 years ago." And, unbeknownst to me, gpa was also Jewish.

Weird.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I am white. I don't get pulled over for imagined traffic infractions, people don't pull their purses away when I get on public transit, etc. etc. et-majority-privilege-c.

But I am white as a multiethnic cultural grouping which is sometimes quite highly relevant. White as an ethnicity is something else, and it's something I'm not. Ethnically I am ScanAm. And one of the things that bothered me about living in California is that no one knew the difference, and sometimes when you tried to explain that there was a difference, they wouldn't believe it.

When people like Mona Charen write newspaper columns about These Mexicans And How They Won't Assimilate, I mentally substitute in "Norwegian" every time she says "Mexican" or "Spanish," and all of a sudden I'm reading a column about my great-grands. They babble on in their own language, which no one can understand, and they do menial labor no one else in the immediate area wants to do (except other ethnic types), and the only ones of them who go on to get education are part of their funny religion which is sort of like ours only completely different because it has those people in it. Their stores sell food I don't know about. They have such large families. Etc. I swear, it's my great-grands or my great-greats, but, y'know, less likely to get skin cancer.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I don't understand the whole Irish-American thing. I figure if it's further back than anyone in living memory, you might as well be American, or regional-American.

"Might as well be" is something of a choice. Some Americans whose ancestors were Irish are ethnically white. Some are ethnically Irish-American. Some are ethnically Irish, if they came over recently enough or have strong enough ties to the "old country." Some are ethnically Polish-American or Greek-American or African-American, depending on where the rest of their ancestors came from and how they behave culturally and how they self-identify. And yah, some are really Californians or New Yorkers or whatever, as an ethnic category. But it's up to the individual people how important those things are.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

"Whiteness" is constructed from a position of dominance -- I agree with what I think you mean by that, but can you clarify anyway?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

What are they teaching them in -- oh, wait, that's somebody else.

[orbitalmechanic.livejournal.com]

You can also see a lot of prejudice--milder, but definitely racial--about Eastern Europeans in the 1920s. The Polacks, the Bohemians, all strange and different and non-English-speaking and tight-knit.

I do think it's fascinating that, as you note, in the US there's such an overwhelmingly visual assessment that all those groups--well, pass, I guess. To open another fantastic can of worms! I've read a very small amount of excellent work on how passing functioned in the American South during the time that the official mixed-race classifications (mulatto, quadroon, octoroon) were being legally and socially phased out. That same question of how people become white and who that protects.

[ckd]

This brings to mind one of the great bits in Bend It Like Beckham:

Jess: She called me a Paki. But I guess that's something you wouldn't understand.
Joe: Jess, I'm Irish. Of course I understand what that feels like.

[badger2305.livejournal.com]

The concept of "whiteness" derives from the dominant position of Anglo-Saxon Protestants in early American society, and was gradually expanded over time to include other northern European ethnic groups. This process was by no means unified or consistent, but went hand-in-hand with definitions of "blackness" such as hypodescent, know more colloquially as the "one-drop rule", to create now-discredited notions of racial distinction.

Sorry if that's just as turgid, but I hope it helps.

[brooksmoses]

Does "white as an ethnicity" actually exist in that sense, though? I'd always just assumed that all it was was a sort of heterogeneous conglomerate of different things (like ScanAm) rather than being something homogeneous -- and that anybody who talked about white as a single ethnicity was just inaccurately extrapolating from the people they knew.

(This is also a bit complicated for me, because I'm the first generation of my family who had "assimilated" parents, in some sense, though not into some prevailing countrywide culture exactly -- they grew up in families that were ethnically not much different from the ones their parents grew up in, and so on back and sideways for quite a while, and the people around them spoke the same culture. Whereas I grew up a university kid away from my extended family, and my parents raised me in large part in the university culture. So the culture of the rest of my family is to some extent foreign to me, and I've always been aware of the existence of that difference. And, for that matter, the town I grew up in was rural farmland; the contrast between the farmers and the university professors -- and between me and the children of the farmers -- was something I couldn't possibly miss.)

[zwol.livejournal.com]

Irish-American, on the other hand, is clearly a white ethnicity in the US -- but hasn't been for very long, and the process of it getting there fascinates me...

Then you'll be wanting to read How The Irish Became White by Noel Ignatiev, if you haven't already.

[batwrangler.livejournal.com]

I am white. I don't get pulled over for imagined traffic infractions, people don't pull their purses away when I get on public transit, etc. etc. et-majority-privilege-c.

I have just put my finger on something that has been bothering me about this discussion: those things that are being tagged as "majority privilege" are basic, Constitutionally guaranteed, human rights (innocent until proven guilt, life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, etc), and by describing people whose rights to those things are not infringed as being privileged puts all of us into a harmful and unnecessary adversarial relationship.

(At the same time, I can certainly see the rhetorical value in doing it, and I suppose it helps to shock and outrage people who don't realize this stuff is going on....)

[timprov.livejournal.com]

Yup. Ethnically white American, here. It is a heterogeneous conglomerate, but it's similar enough to the other heterogenous conglomerates that together they counts as an ethnicity, I think.