Quote:
Originally posted by webmaster x
Exactly! Now, how the Irish (and Jews and Italians, and basically all other non-Wasp (white anglo saxon protestant) but European subgroups) became WHITE is when WHITE stopped being more or less about physical appearance but focused more on Social privilege.
To illustrate the point: A Catholic Sicilian Italian would get laughed at by "polite society" (as the historic WASPs would call it) if he claimed he was WHITE back in the 1800s all the way to as recent as 1940. AFTER 1940 (and the US psychic revulsion at the EXTREMES racialist Nazis took), an Italian saying he's white would still be laughed at but more at the fact that he's claiming something that is 'obvious'.
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I see what you're saying and what the author is saying but I think he is applying too academic an approach. It hasn't quite worked like that. Differentiation into categories of white and non-white are still entrenched solely on skin color.
While an Irish man with red hair may look different than one with blonde or brown hair (the wasp), and may have at one point been discriminated based on this quality, the discrimination resulted more I think with customs and language barriers. For instance even Russians and Germans were once discriminated against when they were newcomers to North America. The social priviledge softened or even eradicated this, but it wouldn't work that way for a black man with black skin. Regardless of his social standing his blackness is immediately salient and with that (especially in this culture) often comes with certain stereotypes.
In other words poor or wealthy Irish, Wasp, and Italians can probably join an all white organization, but a black man cannot. That is a distinction that goes beyond social priviledge right back to the raw seperation based on color.
Sometimes academics write a lot of jibberish and get lost in it and overlook the obvious and the theories rather than reailties that they should be basing their work around.