Bear Down Wildcats

CalStateTempe wrote:How do they get your DNA?

Merkin wrote:Here is how my new sis found me. We thought maybe it was one of my mom's brothers that hooked up with her, but comparing our DNA history, we only matched on my dad's side, not my mom's.

That 1st cousin blond is a cousin on my mom's said, and not on her list. Don't know the other blond.

ProfessorFate wrote:

Merkin wrote:Here is how my new sis found me. We thought maybe it was one of my mom's brothers that hooked up with her, but comparing our DNA history, we only matched on my dad's side, not my mom's.

That 1st cousin blond is a cousin on my mom's said, and not on her list. Don't know the other blond.

Hey Merk, is the one at the top with "Close family - 1st cousins" your half-sister?

scumdevils86 wrote:
Has anyone seen the PBS show Finding Your Roots? I like it because of a lot of the focus is on black family history and how hard it is to find with how awful this country has been for generations. Same thing for families of Jewish descent from eastern Europe.

Longhorned wrote:Those results are why I capitalize "Black" but never capitalize "white" unless I start a sentence with it.

Being white is a mixture of lots of peoples, becoming both an assumed default and the opposite of what it means to have an ethnicity.

Being Black means you're part of a heritage that created one of the most recognizable and amazing cultures in the history of humanity, in spite of whites doing everything in their unearned and undeserved power to stop it.

When a white person like me wants to admire a culture, they have to look to the accomplishments of Mexicans, modern Harlem or New Orleans, medieval Italians, early modern Dutch, the French revolutionaries, and being a portion of the amazing World War II Americans, etc.

Otherwise, we're mixed bags of flesh with no cause for any pride associated with "whiteness." To have white pride is to be a complete fucking idiot, in addition to being evil.

Longhorned wrote:Those results are why I capitalize "Black" but never capitalize "white" unless I start a sentence with it.

Being white is a mixture of lots of peoples, becoming both an assumed default and the opposite of what it means to have an ethnicity.

Being Black means you're part of a heritage that created one of the most recognizable and amazing cultures in the history of humanity, in spite of whites doing everything in their unearned and undeserved power to stop it.

When a white person like me wants to admire a culture, they have to look to the accomplishments of 20th century Harlem or New Orleans, medieval Italians, early modern Dutch, the French revolutionaries, and being a portion of the amazing World War II Americans, etc.

Otherwise, we're mixed bags of flesh with no cause for any pride associated with "whiteness." To have white pride is to be a complete fucking idiot, in addition to being evil.

pc in NM wrote: People of my heritage - the Irish - were not “white” in the 1800’s USA, and were pitted against African-Americans in competition for cheap labor. Similar transitions occurred with Spanish, Italian and other national groups...

All eventually became “white”, and in the case of most Irish Catholics, with a vengeance....

Merkin wrote:

pc in NM wrote: People of my heritage - the Irish - were not “white” in the 1800’s USA, and were pitted against African-Americans in competition for cheap labor. Similar transitions occurred with Spanish, Italian and other national groups...

All eventually became “white”, and in the case of most Irish Catholics, with a vengeance....

I recall reading about that years ago. The Irish actually contributed greatly to racism against African Americans since they were competing for the same jobs.

Anyone not a WASP could not get a good job, including southern Italians which had their own racial census category for some time. Paddy, the stereotypical Irish NYPD cop, was one of the few jobs a Catholic could get, back when being a cop was not a good profession. The Italians and Irish were forced into NYC ghettos since they could not get housing elsewhere. Jews of course were treated very similarly in terms of housing and jobs. African Americans were obviously treated worst of all. Treatment of Asians in California was also awful. We all know about the Japanese Americans during WW2, but the Chinese building the railroads were also denied housing and good jobs. Along with an immigration act targeting Chinese.

Noel Ignatiev’s Long Fight Against Whiteness

By Jay Caspian Kang
November 15, 2019

Noel Ignatiev.

In 1995, Noel Ignatiev, a recent graduate of the doctoral program in history at Harvard, published his dissertation with Routledge, an academic press. Many such books appear, then disappear, subsumed into the endless paper shuffling of the academic credentialling process. But Ignatiev was not a typical graduate student, and his book, “How the Irish Became White,” was not meant to stay within the academy. A fifty-four-year-old Marxist radical, Ignatiev had come to the academy after two decades of work in steel mills and factories. The provocative argument at the center of his book—that whiteness was not a biological fact but rather a social construction with boundaries that shifted over time—had emerged, in large part, out of his observations of how workers from every conceivable background had interacted on the factory floor. Ignatiev wasn’t merely describing these dynamics; he wanted to change them. If whiteness could be created, it could also be destroyed.

“How the Irish Became White” quickly broke out of the academic-publishing bubble. Writing in the Washington Post, the historian Nell Irvin Painter called it “the most interesting history book of 1995.” Mumia Abu-Jamal, the activist and death-row inmate, provided an enthusiastic back-cover blurb. Today, many of the ideas Ignatiev proposed or refined—about the nature of whiteness, and about the racial dynamics that unfold among immigrant workers—are taken for granted in classrooms; they influence films, literature, and art. But Ignatiev found it hard to accept the academic rewards that came with his book’s success. Committed to radicalism, he spent much of his time in academia doing what he had done on the factory floor: publishing leaflets and zines about the possibilities of revolutionary change.

Read it all - https://www.newyorker.com/news/postscri ... -whiteness" target="_blank