"The History of White People" NYT book review

[alfredo]

Every We is someone's Other.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/books/review/Gordon-t.html?pagewanted=1&nl=books&emc=booksupdateema1

In the same period, anarchist or socialist beliefs became a sign of racial inferiority, a premise strengthened by the presence of many immigrants and Jews among early-20th-century radicals. Whiteness thus became a method of stigmatizing dissenting ideas, a marker of ideological respectability; Painter should have investigated this phenomenon further. Also missing from the book is an analysis of the all-important question: Who benefits and how from the imprimatur of whiteness? Political elites and employers of low-wage labor, to choose just two groups, actively policed the boundaries of whiteness.

[Xipe Totec]

1. There was a time when Irish and Italians were not considered white

You had to be a WASP to be white.

Times have changed, and will continue to change.

[hedgehog]

2. Which explains why some of us feel left out on the Census form.

Are we "white" or "other"?

[Xipe Totec]

3. Indeed!

I have a friend who's having a heck of a time filling his out. Three separate questions.

1.- Are you Hispanic?

Yes.

2.- Are you Mexican?

Yes.

3.- What race are you?

Uh...

He is almost pure Mesoamerican indian blood, but cannot choose Native American because he would need to state which tribe he belongs to.

He has no idea.

So, like you, he chose other.

[alfredo]

5. I'm a mutt and I like it.

[Odin2005]

7. Yep, the "Race" catagorization system the US uses is moronic.

A saner categorization of genetic ancestry one would be something like:

European
SW Asian/North African
Western, Central or Southern African
East African
Amerindian (your friend would go here)
South Asian
East Asian/South-East Asian/Central Asian
Pacific Islander
Latin-American Mixed Ancestry (this would fit most Latinos in the US)
Other Mixed Ancestry
Other

[Xipe Totec]

12. Sadly, the categorization is not scientific, but political

It's all about identifying groups that can possibly coalesce into political voting blocks.

That's why they keep pushing these weird categories, hoping that enough people identify with them to check off the boxes.

10 years from now, come the next census, these will be meaningless.

[Hardrada]

13. And subdivide European into Northern (Nordic) & Southern (Mediterranean)

I would be 100% in the Nordic category. My entire high school too (save for a few Scots-Irish).

[alfredo]

4. Neighbors weren't sure what we were so we became "Jews."

[Xipe Totec]

6. Ethnically, I'm Semitic

Religiously, I'm Catholic.

Culturally, I'm Mexican.

Philosophically, I'm an American.

[alfredo]

8. It appears my family got mixed in with the Ottoman Empire

[MountainLaurel]

10. In my mother's hometown in WV

Into the 1960s, if you bought a house in certain neighborhoods, you had to sign a covenant stating that you wouldn't sell to an Italian.

[Xipe Totec]

11. The Great Arizona Orphan Abduction

In 1859, the New York Times termed urban orphans the "ulcers of society." By 1864, child welfare crusaders were advocating their adoption by rural families and sending trains full of orphaned and abandoned children westward. As Gordon documents in this compelling account, they were often dumped at the end of the line, where they were taken in by whoever needed or wanted a child for any purpose. By the end of the 19th century, the Sisters of Charity's New York Foundling Hospital was cleaning up this well-established practice by carefully matching children with families selected by parish priests. Focusing on the delivery of 40 "white" orphans to Mexican Catholic adoptive families in the Arizona mining towns of Clifton and Morenci in 1904, Gordon vividly describes how the Anglo women of the town all of them Protestants became enraged and instigated a mass abduction of the children, often carried out at gunpoint. A trial ensued, pitting the Foundling Hospital against the Anglo powers of Arizona, which ended up in the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court held that the abduction was legal, and that placing the children with Mexican families had been tantamount to child abuse.

http://www.amazon.com/Great-Arizona-Orphan-Abduction/dp/067400535X

[Nikki Stone1]

9. Another great book:

http://www.amazon.com/Possessive-Investment-Whiteness-Identity-Politics/dp/1592134947/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1269658044&sr=8-1

The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics, Revised and Expanded Edition (Paperback)

[alfredo]

14. That looks interesting. That seems to be more focused

on US racial politics.