The Lie of White Identity [Was: Why Fascists Have No Right To Free Speech Whatsoever]

[Razer]

> WHITENESS began not as a racial or ethnic or national identity
> emerging from a people’s shared experience, but as a legal construct.
> Whiteness was designed to distinguish between poor English-speaking
> men brought to North America as indentured servants (after their
> communal lands were privatized by law and force) and people kidnapped
> from Africa and enslaved by the wealthy.
>
> Neither group could vote before or after the “American revolution,”
> but the former Englishmen (and English-speaking lowland Scots) could
> eventually “earn” their freedom, buying their way into citizenship by
> acquiring land after paying off their bond. On the other hand,
> abducted Africans were doomed to spend their whole lives in slavery;
> in the rare event they were “granted” freedom by their enslavers, they
> still would not be welcomed as participants in civil society.
>
> The intent and effect of legislating a new division of people was to
> create an overseer class, a class of poor “white” men who believed
> that they had an interest in enforcing the enslavement of Africans and
> their descendants.  Laws granted them a degree of privilege, the
> promise of greater wealth and freedom if they made society (including
> the torture of Black people and the eradiation of Indigenous people)
> continue to run smoothly.
>
> Whiteness has its antecedent in the British colonial policy in Ireland
> which put displaced lowland Scots in the position of enforcing British
> rule. Ireland’s long internal conflicts are religious only to the
> degree that the Irish brand of Catholicism maintains elements of
> indigenous relationship to the land, while the Presbyterianism of the
> ethnically Scottish inhabitants of Ireland is sparser, more
> conventionally monotheistic, and bears no association with holy places
> or Pagan festivals. Many of the poor European people conscripted into
> enforcing slavery were members of this English-speaking Scottish
> diaspora, displaced again from the first land they were used to
> colonize, relocated to the American south.
>
> FOR LATER generations of European immigrants, becoming white was a
> privilege granted only after passing through a painful process of
> assimilation, sacrificing identity, memory, custom, and language. They
> also had to agree to participate in the enforcement of white
> supremacism. James Baldwin wrote:
>
>     “No one was white before he/she came to America.  It took
> generations, and a vast amount of coercion, before this became a white
> country.”
>
> My great-grandparents came from a colonized country where their
> language was outlawed and children were taken from their families to
> be indoctrinated in English.  My great-grandfather had taken up arms
> against the occuppiers.   My great-grandmother spoke no English even
> decades after the last other Irish speakers she knew had died.  They
> lived on the top of the highest hill in Lynn, MA, so they could always
> look down and see if anyone was coming for them.
>
> It was the Ku Klux Klan that did come, burning a cross at High Rock
> Tower to try to drive the Irish out.  My grandfather watched while my
> great-grandfather kept him quiet and still.  To the Klan, the Irish
> were not white. Nor were they white to the Anglo-American Christians,
> including the famously liberal Rev. Henry Ward Beecher, who vilified
> the Irish “race” a generation before.
>
> My grandfather spoke no Irish. He worked for General Electric. In his
> lifetime an Irish-American became President. And he cursed the first
> and second generation immigrants from Europe who were not yet white –
> the Jews whose whiteness remains contested among the alt-right now.
>
> So what is whiteness? 


Find out before the alt-right says you ain't white enough:
https://itsgoingdown.org/lie-white-identity/
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