Social Justice 101: Power Privilege and Oppression

[Elfdude]

That's not what I'm suggesting however. I'm suggesting awareness of bias as the first step to addressing the underlying issue which legislation alone has failed to rectify (or rather the political will to use legislative means to rectify it only goes so far). I think it's pretty convincing to see that racial and gender disparities disappear when this sort of learning and education has emphasis. I'm also irritated by the lack of understanding of, why is that a racial/class/gender issue? when it's obvious that racial/class/gender disparities exist hence making it a racial/class/gender issue.

[Border Patrol]

Can't give you a real response for a few days, but did you just say that 'narco music' was a racist term?

I'll just leave this here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcocorrido

[Derpy Hooves]

Is it cultural appropriation for a Native American to wear medieval knight armor?
If not, would it still be cultural appropriation for a white American to wear Native American dress?

[Phier]

Is it cultural appropriation for a Native American to wear medieval knight armor?
If not, would it still be cultural appropriation for a white American to wear Native American dress?

Why does it have to be a knight armor? Why not a neck tie, or jeans, or mini skirt? Check your privilege!

[Derpy Hooves]

Dammit Phier, that was going to be part of my response

[chriscase]

This is kind of like the argument that it's wrong for a pregnant woman to have the choice to abort her unborn child when the father does not have the same choice. In a detached, abstract way yeah it's unfair. However, contact with reality shows the two situations are materially different.

I don't use certain words - not because I am afraid of social embarrassment or whatever, but out of respect for history. As a white descendant of the English who came to America, there isn't a lot I can do about the holocaust of native Americans that my ancestors precipitated. If we were really serious about reparations we'd just give all the land back. Anyone who considers himself a dedicated warrior for social justice and has just paid off his house - I'd like to hear back on how you feel about that ;-)

But when the descendants of the Oglala Sioux say they do not want me to parade around in a ceremonial headdress and sweat in a hot tent so I can feel "spiritual", I think they have a valid point. It's offensive and disrespectful of the history.

[Elfdude]

Can't give you a real response for a few days, but did you just say that 'narco music' was a racist term?

I'll just leave this here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcocorrido

Narco = drug
Corrido = music/ballad

Narcocorrido is a genre of northern mexican music evolving out of the mexican drug trade, immigration, corruption and etc. It's compared to 'gangster rap' except with a distinctly hispanic romantic influence. Specifically speaking, when a White American Teenager says something like, "I don't listen to Narco Music therefore I'm not mexican" they are being racist in the same way using gangster rap as representative of black people is racist. It doesn't seem that hard. You might as well said you hadn't swam across the border, or that you didn't have hydraulics on your car.

Is it cultural appropriation for a Native American to wear medieval knight armor?
If not, would it still be cultural appropriation for a white American to wear Native American dress?

Look, I've stated this multiple times now and in multiple ways, I don't really give a sht about cultural appropriation. In the case of cultural appropriation I feel I can come up with "good" and "bad" examples. Good example is the cultural exchange of knowledge i.e. the evolution of the medieval knight armor was a complex evolution consisting of the interplay between chinese cultural, arab culture and european culture. I.E. the medieval knight's armor evolved out of a combination of middle eastern armor (which itself evolved from asian armors and african influences) and essentially Roman throwbacks. The amount of 'cultural' appropriation in the development of the final form of knight armor is vast. I don't really care about that. On the other hand the exploitation of blacks for Jazz, Bluegrass, RocknRoll, R&B and Hiphop by predominantly white media which isolated the black community from benefitting from their contribution to society I feel is a bad form of cultural appropriation. To me, had black media been in the control of black creators we would see black CEO's who today owned a large deal of resultant media.

Regardless, I'm at a loss of what this has to do with anything. If the medieval knight's armor being worn by a native is cultural appropriation, the next thing we would ask is if it's oppression. Doesn't seem like there's anyway even the entire culture of natives wearing Medieval knight's armor would diminish in anyway the contribution of our culture to that armor, their population is simply not large enough to steal an object from another culture and re-define it. The irritating thing for many cultures with "white" culture is that "white subcultures" are often larger than the originating culture that the subculture was appropriated from. In the end I must say that in terms of oppression the Native's use of medieval armor is cultural export, while White's use of native american ceremonial headgarb is cultural appropriation. Were both populations similar in size, wealth and political representation that would be difficult to decide upon but luckily we don't need to get that specific because the gap is this large. For example, when china steals American ideas and when America steals chinese ideas I feel we're in a sort of mutual cultural appropriation loop where both cultures are equally inconvenienced/benefit from the actions of doing so.

[Phier]

But when the descendants of the Oglala Sioux say they do not want me to parade around in a ceremonial headdress and sweat in a hot tent so I can feel "spiritual", I think they have a valid point. It's offensive and disrespectful of the history.

As someone with a good deal of Scandinavian DNA I don't find this offensive but there are groups who would. Should we censor a guy doing this any more then a guy doing this

[Elfdude]

You realize that one is a ceremonial dress, and that the other is imagery created in the 1800's for an OPERA which has nothing to do with your scandanavian roots other than managing to be a poor representation of your culture right?

[Himster]

This is kind of like the argument that it's wrong for a pregnant woman to have the choice to abort her unborn child when the father does not have the same choice. In a detached, abstract way yeah it's unfair. However, contact with reality shows the two situations are materially different.

Contact with reality?
Offense is always abstract.

I don't use certain words - not because I am afraid of social embarrassment or whatever, but out of respect for history. As a white descendant of the English who came to America, there isn't a lot I can do about the holocaust of native Americans that my ancestors precipitated. If we were really serious about reparations we'd just give all the land back. Anyone who considers himself a dedicated warrior for social justice and has just paid off his house - I'd like to hear back on how you feel about that ;-)

Haha, I can say all I want. Some dented my car last night. That is one pale mother in over there.
Reparations? Maybe all mankind should give back all land outside Eritrea to the "native" organisms that randomly happened to live there at the point in time when humans started migrating? Why stop there? Why not go even more absurdly and pointlessly back in time hunting for arbitrary reparations that can be doled out: let's give Pangaea back to the T-Rex, our (probably white) microbial ancestors certainly had a hand in their downfall, why stop there? Go further back and further back and further back.

But when the descendants of the Oglala Sioux say they do not want me to parade around in a ceremonial headdress and sweat in a hot tent so I can feel "spiritual", I think they have a valid point. It's offensive and disrespectful of the history.

It sucks to be them.
The concepts of headdresses and sweating are not theirs, they don't belong to any one group.
So they don't want to share and play nice, they'd rather be :wub:s? Because the sins of the father..bla bla wa wa wa.. Fine, let them be :wub:s, I'll make my own headdresses and get all sweaty, and there'll be black-jack and hookers... oh wait, that sounds familiar.

[chriscase]

Well that would appear to prove my point. You find it offensive too, you just don't give a .

[Phier]

You realize that dress was given to the university by an Indian tribe for that use right? No of corse not.

[Elfdude]

You realize I don't care about cultural appropriation regardless, just saying you're comparing apples to oranges.

[fkizz]

Elfdude, which one of the two helped the more to ease world suffering;

Your work with Doctors without Borders,

Or your preaching about social justice?

[Copperknickers II]

In the search to torture the statistics to suit ideology, we're now subdividing ethnicity so that Colleges can be criticized for having the wrong kind of Black People.

Torturing statistics to suit ideology? There absolutely is a wrong kind of black people to be including in US statistics, because anyone who lumps immigrant Africans/West Indians with African Americans is utterly misunderstanding the socioeconomic position of the latter. Immigrants and native black people are totally separate groups, primarily because African Americans are generally from deprived inner city or poor rural backgrounds, whereas black immigrants, like all other US immigrants, are subject to tight controls which place them in a totally different category. Black immigrants are either highly educated or highly skilled people with good jobs and relatively wealthy backgrounds. Plus they're immigrants which means they're likely to be pushed harder by their parents and have more drive because of the type of person that moves thousands of miles to go to another culture. So it's not torturing the statistics to separate African Americans from black immigrants, it's misunderstanding of the word 'black'.

The native African American community might share an experience of visual racism with other black Americans, but by far the more important problem is the fact that they are the descendants of slaves and have a 400 year history of being considered unfit for education and aspiration due to segregation, and have been relegated to the position of an underclass due to the post-industrial unemployment epidemic common to all former working class people in the Western World. These things are a problem that black immigrants simply do not have, so lumping them in with African Americans in statistics completely defeats the purpose of having those statistics in the first place.

[Roma_Victrix]

Native to europe in what ways? The modern Genotypes of europe aren't native either, in fact most places have had entire populations and cultures supplanted multiple times in what seems to be waves of colonization, imperialism and colonization. Current make up of europe has little to nothing do with historical make up. Culture under the rule of Rome was far more diverse than the europe which came after. Durring Rome POC (light olive tone) dominated with whiter germans and celts being of obvious barbarian heritage.

It is true that the West went through the turbulent "Migration Period" from the roughly the late 4th to early 9th centuries AD, which brought in a significant population of new Germanic tribes of various Goths as well as people who weren't even Indo-European, like the Magyars (modern-day Hungarians). However, you are completely wrong in assuming that these newcomers supplanted entire populations via forced resettlement or genocide (the only two possible options there if they were supplanted). Usually the influx of new people and conquerors were relatively smaller than the people already settled in fixed locations, so even if their culture came to dominate, their genes didn't necessarily do so (instead melding in with the local population over time). Take for instance the Norman invaders of England who conquered the Anglo-Saxons, introducing into the British Isles a far smaller number of Normans compared to the overall existing native population. Obviously the Normans (who themselves were "Romanized" and "Gallicized" descendants of Vikings and Salian Franks) didn't kill every Anglo-Saxon to a man; they ruled over the Anglo-Saxons and their cultures eventually blended to form Anglo-Norman and finally English proper by the 14th century. Fun fact: a lot of those "Anglo-Saxons" themselves weren't even descended from the original Anglo-Saxons, but native Celtic Britons who appropriated their culture after the Anglo-Saxons conquered sub-Roman Britain. In either case, Europe's DNA on the whole isn't that different from ancient Europe, according to this study.

As for Mediterranean people being olive-skinned compared to people descended from Celtic and Germanic people (enormous numbers of whom became Roman citizens), I think you're playing up the differences here a bit too much. Are modern-day Swedes different genetically from the population groups of northern Italians? Sure; even their facial phenotypes, hair, and eyes are sometimes easy to tell apart. That doesn't negate the fact that all European peoples share some level of genetic affinity, or the fact that there are plenty of blonde-haired, blue-eyed Italians. Take for instance one of my favorite Italians, Chiara Ferragni:



Even in Roman times this genetic diversity more or less matched modern-day European territories that were once ruled by Rome. An ancient mural from Herculaneum:



The blonde dude on the right is a Roman, not a Swede.

After the fall of Rome Europe was largely dominated by Black and Middle Eastern cultures. Only after the fall of the arabs did the celts, germans, franks etc. ever become respectable peoples.

What? Now you've absolutely lost me, bro. Jesus, I think my IQ just dropped a notch after reading this. When was Europe ever "largely dominated" by "Black" cultures aside from present-day African-American hip hop culture? Dear God, I hope you're not one of those people who think that the medieval Moors who invaded Sicily and Iberia were Sub-Saharan "blacks" instead of brown North African Berbers. I think you've been watching Dennis Hopper in the movie True Romance a few too many times.



Genetic studies show that roughly 7% of modern-day Portuguese, Spaniards, and Sicilians share genetic affinity (via male-inherited Y-Chromosomal DNA) with North African Berbers, not sub-Saharan blacks. The Ghana and Mali Empires existed in West Africa at the time (true black civilization there), but they had little to no bearing on what was happening in Iberia before the Spanish Reconquista, and certainly were not the same people as the Berber-speaking Moors. Your argument is also strange for assuming that Middle Eastern culture dominated all of Europe in the early Middle Ages, when the Muslims didn't even manage to conquer all of Visigothic Iberia (the Christian Kingdom of Asturias still existed in the north, which gradually morphed into the Kingdom of Leon and Castile). Moorish rule over Sicily was even more ephemeral and short-lived, with the Normans booting them out in the 11th-century (two centuries before Islamic Cordoba fell to Christian Castile, meaning only the small territory in and around Granada was held by the Muslims in Spain from the 13th to 15th centuries). By "Middle Eastern" I hope you're not honestly suggesting or lumping them in with the Byzantines in Greece and the Balkans.

And the Celts and Germanic peoples like the Franks weren't "respectable" peoples? WTF are you talking about? WTF does this even mean? The Franks established their own kingdom in Gaul with Clovis I (r. 509-511), long before the late medieval decline of the Arab world and Islamic Golden Age. The Franks were eventually responsible for the establishment of the Carolingian Empire under Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire in the 9th century AD. Meanwhile, Celts in early medieval Ireland (before the Norman invasion) produced some of the most influential monasteries in the region that sent missions into the British Isles and theologian scholars like John Scottus Eriugena (815-877 AD) to the court of the Carolingian kings in France. Honestly, where the hell are you getting these bizarre ideas about history? From a modern-day Saudi elementary school textbook?

I'm not sure what you're suggesting a source on. The only "white" oppression I can think of in history was the brief stint of Arab oppression after the Dark Ages. What examples can you think of? Asian culture, while superior for a long time, never truly oppressed white society due to their isolationist tendancies.

Seriously? That's what you think? It's okay if you don't know much about East Asian history, but being a fan of it myself, I can't let this slide.

For starters, the Ottoman Turks continued enslaving Europeans (and making Christians convert to Islam via the Janissary corps) well into the Early Modern Era, long after they conquered the last vestiges of Byzantium at Constantinople. So there you go, that's one example after the Arabs you ignored (or were fantastically ignorant about).

Now for East Asia: there's not a huge laundry list of historical episodes of "white oppression" in East Asia, because "whites" were in limited supply there throughout the centuries, naturally. That doesn't mean we can't point to some known examples. Let's start with the Tarim Basin, modern-day Xinjiang, that was conquered by the Chinese Han Dynasty in the 1st century BC at the conclusion of their long struggle with the rival nomadic Xiongnu (originally of Mongolia, perhaps related to the Huns). The oasis city states like Kucha and Kashgar, which originally bowed to the Xiongnu, now paid tribute to the Han emperors of China that imposed the Protectorate of the Western Regions over these Indo-European peoples descended from Tocharians. Although the Han Dynasty fell in 220 AD, the region was also brought into the Chinese sphere of influence and control in later dynasties like the Tang, while the Mongol-led Yuan Dynasty and Manchu-led Qing Dynasty also controlled the Tarim Basin. During the Tang Dynasty, although the Turkic tribes like the Gokturks had previously moved in and taken over, there were still plenty of Tocharian peoples living in the region. The Tang Empire imposed lots of strict marriage laws on these foreign peoples and others when it came to marrying native Han Chinese women. Just for fun, here's a 9th-century mural from Bezeklik, Xinjiang showing a red-haired, blue-eyed Caucasian Buddhist monk praying with a Chinese one:



And LOL at the idea that East Asians have always been isolationists. That might have been the case in certain periods, like when the Ming Dynasty stopped all foreign trade and tributary missions except for maintaining a handful of seaports along the South and East China Seas. However, this was the same Ming Dynasty that invaded Sri Lanka in the Indian Ocean in the year 1411 with Zheng He's Treasure Fleet and replaced the Sinhalese ruling house with a ruler friendly to Ming China. How about Imperial China's various attempts to conquer Mongolia, Vietnam, Korea, even Japan? How about the Eastern Han's brief war with the Kushan Empire of Afghanistan and northern India in 90 AD (the Chinese commanded by protector general Ban Chao)? Jesus Christ, man, how about the 13th-14th century MONGOL EMPIRE: do those two words even need more explanation? How about the Mongols conquering most of Ukraine and Russia and subjugating whites there from the 13th to 15th centuries? Let alone the Mongol invasions of Georgia, Armenia, and the rest of the Caucuses.

You want other examples, outside of China? Okay. How about medieval Japan, where the Ainu people (a Caucasian people) native to Hokkaido and formerly northern Honshu were eventually conquered and subjected by the "Wajin" (i.e. the Japanese) from the 14th to 16th centuries, including the suppressing of revolts to Japanese rule? The Japanese imposed exclusionary laws on the Ainu to make sure their communities operated separately from the Japanese. Punishment of Ainu for revolting was often very brutal.

Should we consider the Arab conquest and occupation of Sassanid Persia an instance of "whites" being oppressed? The Persians have historically been considered "Aryan" after all. Iran's current supreme leader Khamenei certainly looks white to me.



Just remove the turban and give him a John Deere hat, and he'll be as Murican as they come.

[Elfdude]

It is true that the West went through the turbulent "Migration Period" from the roughly the late 4th to early 9th centuries AD, which brought in a significant population of new Germanic tribes of various Goths as well as people who weren't even Indo-European, like the Magyars (modern-day Hungarians). However, you are completely wrong in assuming that these newcomers supplanted entire populations via forced resettlement or genocide (the only two possible options there if they were supplanted). Usually the influx of new people and conquerors were relatively smaller than the people already settled in fixed locations, so even if their culture came to dominate, their genes didn't necessarily do so (instead melding in with the local population over time). Take for instance the Norman invaders of England who conquered the Anglo-Saxons, introducing into the British Isles a far smaller number of Normans compared to the overall existing native population. Obviously the Normans (who themselves were "Romanized" and "Gallicized" descendants of Vikings and Salian Franks) didn't kill every Anglo-Saxon to a man; they ruled over the Anglo-Saxons and their cultures eventually blended to form Anglo-Norman and finally English proper by the 14th century. Fun fact: a lot of those "Anglo-Saxons" themselves weren't even descended from the original Anglo-Saxons, but native Celtic Britons who appropriated their culture after the Anglo-Saxons conquered sub-Roman Britain. In either case, Europe's DNA on the whole isn't that different from ancient Europe, according to this study.

Fair enough, skin color however should not be equated to genetic difference as when we compare the two interesting conclusions abound. I wouldn't say that the people were killed off or supplanted, integrated is a good term however often to only a small extent, many features are easily dominated by genetic traits of another culture and while they persist in equal distribution in the population they are easily flooded by the new phenotype. That's the reason why when we trace genetic lineages of peoples back to sources we find enormous amounts of people presumably directly descended from only a small handful of people. Go back far enough and this bias traces back to Y chromosomal adam and Mitochondrial Eve. This is not to say the genetics of others died out, they were incorporated into the dominate lineage.

As for Mediterranean people being olive-skinned compared to people descended from Celtic and Germanic people (enormous numbers of whom became Roman citizens), I think you're playing up the differences here a bit too much. Are modern-day Swedes different genetically from the population groups of northern Italians? Sure; even their facial phenotypes, hair, and eyes are sometimes easy to tell apart. That doesn't negate the fact that all European peoples share some level of genetic affinity, or the fact that there are plenty of blonde-haired, blue-eyed Italians. Take for instance one of my favorite Italians, Chiara Ferragni:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Even in Roman times this genetic diversity more or less matched modern-day European territories that were once ruled by Rome. An ancient mural from Herculaneum:



The blonde dude on the right is a Roman, not a Swede.

That's interesting, it challenges my assumptions. I overgeneralized.

What? Now you've absolutely lost me, bro. Jesus, I think my IQ just dropped a notch after reading this. When was Europe ever "largely dominated" by "Black" cultures aside from present-day African-American hip hop culture? Dear God, I hope you're not one of those people who think that the medieval Moors who invaded Sicily and Iberia were Sub-Saharan "blacks" instead of brown North African Berbers. I think you've been watching Dennis Hopper in the movie True Romance a few too many times.

I wouldn't say black cultures exclusively however I would say these cultures at the time dominated the white cultures in terms of technological advancement, resources and etc. This domination led to an extraction of wealth from the north and an import of slaves from the north to the south. It's not exactly a reversal so much as a shift in overall power center of mass.

Genetic studies show that roughly 7% of modern-day Portuguese, Spaniards, and Sicilians share genetic affinity (via male-inherited Y-Chromosomal DNA) with North African Berbers, not sub-Saharan blacks. The Ghana and Mali Empires existed in West Africa at the time (true black civilization there), but they had little to no bearing on what was happening in Iberia before the Spanish Reconquista, and certainly were not the same people as the Berber-speaking Moors. Your argument is also strange for assuming that Middle Eastern culture dominated all of Europe in the early Middle Ages, when the Muslims didn't even manage to conquer all of Visigothic Iberia (the Christian Kingdom of Asturias still existed in the north, which gradually morphed into the Kingdom of Leon and Castile). Moorish rule over Sicily was even more ephemeral and short-lived, with the Normans booting them out in the 11th-century (two centuries before Islamic Cordoba fell to Christian Castile, meaning only the small territory in and around Granada was held by the Muslims in Spain from the 13th to 15th centuries). By "Middle Eastern" I hope you're not honestly suggesting or lumping them in with the Byzantines in Greece and the Balkans.

I was under the impression the tuaregs, mozabite, riffians, chlouhs etc were also berber peoples. I'm curious what the make up of that is but I get my generalization was overstated.

And the Celts and Germanic peoples like the Franks weren't "respectable" peoples? WTF are you talking about? WTF does this even mean? The Franks established their own kingdom in Gaul with Clovis I (r. 509-511), long before the late medieval decline of the Arab world and Islamic Golden Age. The Franks were eventually responsible for the establishment of the Carolingian Empire under Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire in the 9th century AD. Meanwhile, Celts in early medieval Ireland (before the Norman invasion) produced some of the most influential monasteries in the region that sent missions into the British Isles and theologian scholars like John Scottus Eriugena (815-877 AD) to the court of the Carolingian kings in France. Honestly, where the hell are you getting these bizarre ideas about history? From a modern-day Saudi elementary school textbook?

I meant that it wasn't until the fall of the arabs and the eventual domination of christianity did the flow of wealth and power go back the other way. I understand some enormous empires were created, those empires eventually shifted the balance.

Seriously? That's what you think? It's okay if you don't know much about East Asian history, but being a fan of it myself, I can't let this slide.

For starters, the Ottoman Turks continued enslaving Europeans (and making Christians convert to Islam via the Janissary corps) well into the Early Modern Era, long after they conquered the last vestiges of Byzantium at Constantinople. So there you go, that's one example after the Arabs you ignored (or were fantastically ignorant about).

I thought I mentioned this domination.

Now for East Asia: there's not a huge laundry list of historical episodes of "white oppression" in East Asia, because "whites" were in limited supply there throughout the centuries, naturally. That doesn't mean we can't point to some known examples. Let's start with the Tarim Basin, modern-day Xinjiang, that was conquered by the Chinese Han Dynasty in the 1st century BC at the conclusion of their long struggle with the rival nomadic Xiongnu (originally of Mongolia, perhaps related to the Huns). The oasis city states like Kucha and Kashgar, which originally bowed to the Xiongnu, now paid tribute to the Han emperors of China that imposed the Protectorate of the Western Regions over these Indo-European peoples descended from Tocharians. Although the Han Dynasty fell in 220 AD, the region was also brought into the Chinese sphere of influence and control in later dynasties like the Tang, while the Mongol-led Yuan Dynasty and Manchu-led Qing Dynasty also controlled the Tarim Basin. During the Tang Dynasty, although the Turkic tribes like the Gokturks had previously moved in and taken over, there were still plenty of Tocharian peoples living in the region. The Tang Empire imposed lots of strict marriage laws on these foreign peoples and others when it came to marrying native Han Chinese women. Just for fun, here's a 9th-century mural from Bezeklik, Xinjiang showing a red-haired, blue-eyed Caucasian Buddhist monk praying with a Chinese one:

That's interesting and I wasn't aware of any of it.

And LOL at the idea that East Asians have always been isolationists. That might have been the case in certain periods, like when the Ming Dynasty stopped all foreign trade and tributary missions except for maintaining a handful of seaports along the South and East China Seas. However, this was the same Ming Dynasty that invaded Sri Lanka in the Indian Ocean in the year 1411 with Zheng He's Treasure Fleet and replaced the Sinhalese ruling house with a ruler friendly to Ming China. How about Imperial China's various attempts to conquer Mongolia, Vietnam, Korea, even Japan? How about the Eastern Han's brief war with the Kushan Empire of Afghanistan and northern India in 90 AD (the Chinese commanded by protector general Ban Chao)? Jesus Christ, man, how about the 13th-14th century MONGOL EMPIRE: do those two words even need more explanation? How about the Mongols conquering most of Ukraine and Russia and subjugating whites there from the 13th to 15th centuries? Let alone the Mongol invasions of Georgia, Armenia, and the rest of the Caucuses.

Yeah, I did know about the mongols, huns and tartars, my bad.

You want other examples, outside of China? Okay. How about medieval Japan, where the Ainu people (a Caucasian people) native to Hokkaido and formerly northern Honshu were eventually conquered and subjected by the "Wajin" (i.e. the Japanese) from the 14th to 16th centuries, including the suppressing of revolts to Japanese rule? The Japanese imposed exclusionary laws on the Ainu to make sure their communities operated separately from the Japanese. Punishment of Ainu for revolting was often very brutal.

Did not know that either. That's interesting.

Should we consider the Arab conquest and occupation of Sassanid Persia an instance of "whites" being oppressed? The Persians have historically been considered "Aryan" after all. Iran's current supreme leader Khamenei certainly looks white to me.

Just remove the turban and give him a John Deere hat, and he'll be as Murican as they come.

Yeah, that's a hard debate, I would say the average people are significantly darker than that guy but that would be an example of shadism. It's interesting when we consider where white and POC boundaries blurr.

[Copperknickers II]

It is true that the West went through the turbulent "Migration Period" from the roughly the late 4th to early 9th centuries AD, which brought in a significant population of new Germanic tribes of various Goths as well as people who weren't even Indo-European, like the Magyars (modern-day Hungarians). However, you are completely wrong in assuming that these newcomers supplanted entire populations via forced resettlement or genocide (the only two possible options there if they were supplanted). Usually the influx of new people and conquerors were relatively smaller than the people already settled in fixed locations, so even if their culture came to dominate, their genes didn't necessarily do so (instead melding in with the local population over time). Take for instance the Norman invaders of England who conquered the Anglo-Saxons, introducing into the British Isles a far smaller number of Normans compared to the overall existing native population. Obviously the Normans (who themselves were "Romanized" and "Gallicized" descendants of Vikings and Salian Franks) didn't kill every Anglo-Saxon to a man; they ruled over the Anglo-Saxons and their cultures eventually blended to form Anglo-Norman and finally English proper by the 14th century. Fun fact: a lot of those "Anglo-Saxons" themselves weren't even descended from the original Anglo-Saxons, but native Celtic Britons who appropriated their culture after the Anglo-Saxons conquered sub-Roman Britain. In either case, Europe's DNA on the whole isn't that different from ancient Europe, according to this study.

As for Mediterranean people being olive-skinned compared to people descended from Celtic and Germanic people (enormous numbers of whom became Roman citizens), I think you're playing up the differences here a bit too much. Are modern-day Swedes different genetically from the population groups of northern Italians? Sure; even their facial phenotypes, hair, and eyes are sometimes easy to tell apart. That doesn't negate the fact that all European peoples share some level of genetic affinity, or the fact that there are plenty of blonde-haired, blue-eyed Italians. Take for instance one of my favorite Italians, Chiara Ferragni:



Even in Roman times this genetic diversity more or less matched modern-day European territories that were once ruled by Rome. An ancient mural from Herculaneum:



The blonde dude on the right is a Roman, not a Swede.



What? Now you've absolutely lost me, bro. Jesus, I think my IQ just dropped a notch after reading this. When was Europe ever "largely dominated" by "Black" cultures aside from present-day African-American hip hop culture? Dear God, I hope you're not one of those people who think that the medieval Moors who invaded Sicily and Iberia were Sub-Saharan "blacks" instead of brown North African Berbers. I think you've been watching Dennis Hopper in the movie True Romance a few too many times.



Genetic studies show that roughly 7% of modern-day Portuguese, Spaniards, and Sicilians share genetic affinity (via male-inherited Y-Chromosomal DNA) with North African Berbers, not sub-Saharan blacks. The Ghana and Mali Empires existed in West Africa at the time (true black civilization there), but they had little to no bearing on what was happening in Iberia before the Spanish Reconquista, and certainly were not the same people as the Berber-speaking Moors. Your argument is also strange for assuming that Middle Eastern culture dominated all of Europe in the early Middle Ages, when the Muslims didn't even manage to conquer all of Visigothic Iberia (the Christian Kingdom of Asturias still existed in the north, which gradually morphed into the Kingdom of Leon and Castile). Moorish rule over Sicily was even more ephemeral and short-lived, with the Normans booting them out in the 11th-century (two centuries before Islamic Cordoba fell to Christian Castile, meaning only the small territory in and around Granada was held by the Muslims in Spain from the 13th to 15th centuries). By "Middle Eastern" I hope you're not honestly suggesting or lumping them in with the Byzantines in Greece and the Balkans.

And the Celts and Germanic peoples like the Franks weren't "respectable" peoples? WTF are you talking about? WTF does this even mean? The Franks established their own kingdom in Gaul with Clovis I (r. 509-511), long before the late medieval decline of the Arab world and Islamic Golden Age. The Franks were eventually responsible for the establishment of the Carolingian Empire under Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire in the 9th century AD. Meanwhile, Celts in early medieval Ireland (before the Norman invasion) produced some of the most influential monasteries in the region that sent missions into the British Isles and theologian scholars like John Scottus Eriugena (815-877 AD) to the court of the Carolingian kings in France. Honestly, where the hell are you getting these bizarre ideas about history? From a modern-day Saudi elementary school textbook?



Seriously? That's what you think? It's okay if you don't know much about East Asian history, but being a fan of it myself, I can't let this slide.

For starters, the Ottoman Turks continued enslaving Europeans (and making Christians convert to Islam via the Janissary corps) well into the Early Modern Era, long after they conquered the last vestiges of Byzantium at Constantinople. So there you go, that's one example after the Arabs you ignored (or were fantastically ignorant about).

Now for East Asia: there's not a huge laundry list of historical episodes of "white oppression" in East Asia, because "whites" were in limited supply there throughout the centuries, naturally. That doesn't mean we can't point to some known examples. Let's start with the Tarim Basin, modern-day Xinjiang, that was conquered by the Chinese Han Dynasty in the 1st century BC at the conclusion of their long struggle with the rival nomadic Xiongnu (originally of Mongolia, perhaps related to the Huns). The oasis city states like Kucha and Kashgar, which originally bowed to the Xiongnu, now paid tribute to the Han emperors of China that imposed the Protectorate of the Western Regions over these Indo-European peoples descended from Tocharians. Although the Han Dynasty fell in 220 AD, the region was also brought into the Chinese sphere of influence and control in later dynasties like the Tang, while the Mongol-led Yuan Dynasty and Manchu-led Qing Dynasty also controlled the Tarim Basin. During the Tang Dynasty, although the Turkic tribes like the Gokturks had previously moved in and taken over, there were still plenty of Tocharian peoples living in the region. The Tang Empire imposed lots of strict marriage laws on these foreign peoples and others when it came to marrying native Han Chinese women. Just for fun, here's a 9th-century mural from Bezeklik, Xinjiang showing a red-haired, blue-eyed Caucasian Buddhist monk praying with a Chinese one:



And LOL at the idea that East Asians have always been isolationists. That might have been the case in certain periods, like when the Ming Dynasty stopped all foreign trade and tributary missions except for maintaining a handful of seaports along the South and East China Seas. However, this was the same Ming Dynasty that invaded Sri Lanka in the Indian Ocean in the year 1411 with Zheng He's Treasure Fleet and replaced the Sinhalese ruling house with a ruler friendly to Ming China. How about Imperial China's various attempts to conquer Mongolia, Vietnam, Korea, even Japan? How about the Eastern Han's brief war with the Kushan Empire of Afghanistan and northern India in 90 AD (the Chinese commanded by protector general Ban Chao)? Jesus Christ, man, how about the 13th-14th century MONGOL EMPIRE: do those two words even need more explanation? How about the Mongols conquering most of Ukraine and Russia and subjugating whites there from the 13th to 15th centuries? Let alone the Mongol invasions of Georgia, Armenia, and the rest of the Caucuses.

You want other examples, outside of China? Okay. How about medieval Japan, where the Ainu people (a Caucasian people) native to Hokkaido and formerly northern Honshu were eventually conquered and subjected by the "Wajin" (i.e. the Japanese) from the 14th to 16th centuries, including the suppressing of revolts to Japanese rule? The Japanese imposed exclusionary laws on the Ainu to make sure their communities operated separately from the Japanese. Punishment of Ainu for revolting was often very brutal.

Should we consider the Arab conquest and occupation of Sassanid Persia an instance of "whites" being oppressed? The Persians have historically been considered "Aryan" after all. Iran's current supreme leader Khamenei certainly looks white to me.



Just remove the turban and give him a John Deere hat, and he'll be as Murican as they come.

Well he is quite old, racial distinctions get blurred as people get older. Here he is when younger:

[sumskilz]

*sigh*

Are you really going to play at that?

I never said the book had a single author, I said the book was based on a single lady's work. That is true because only one person uses pathological altruism in any form in any sort of scientific literature that I've found.

Her work (in collaboration with others) only constitutes 3 of the 31 essays. I can see now that you also didn't read the chapter abstracts I posted a link to. You're really compromising your credibility here. It's probably best to let it go. Lying in support of one's ideals is sort of falling into a cliché already associated with these types of perspectives. I would have given you the benefit of the doubt if there was any reason for doubt.

Anyway, seems we have some agreement:

Exactly, so what are the SJW's real motives?

Self interest.

So I don't doubt your grasp of biological altruism.

Advocacy research - I'm not sure what you mean by this but I'm assuming you're implying it's agenda driven research, I would say highly that this is not the case. For example a lot of the research consists of researchers who are ambivalent about the concept.

These people appear not to be good examples of that:

So the authors of this study give white teachers this essay to read by the woman I said was the source of all this privilege BS. Now remember this essay is written by an English major and cites no empirical evidence and no sociological theory, but the study looks at how white teachers construct their denial of the essay's assumed factuality.

And who are these scientists?

R. Patrick Solomon was an associate professor of education at York University, co-author of Brave New Teachers: Doing Social Justice Work in Neoliberal Times

Arlene Campbell is an assistant professor of English at Prince Sultan University, co-author of Brave New Teachers: Doing Social Justice Work in Neoliberal Times

Beverly-Jean Daniel is a program coordinator for the Community and Justice Services Diploma Program at Humber College

John P. Portelli is professor in the Department of Humanities, Social Science and Social Justice Education at the University of Toronto, author of The dangers of liberal/rationalist policy discourse and the role of the philosopher in disrupting it

There absolutely is a wrong kind of black people to be including in US statistics, because anyone who lumps immigrant Africans/West Indians with African Americans is utterly misunderstanding the socioeconomic position of the latter. Immigrants and native black people are totally separate groups, primarily because African Americans are generally from deprived inner city or poor rural backgrounds, whereas black immigrants, like all other US immigrants, are subject to tight controls which place them in a totally different category. Black immigrants are either highly educated or highly skilled people with good jobs and relatively wealthy backgrounds. Plus they're immigrants which means they're likely to be pushed harder by their parents and have more drive because of the type of person that moves thousands of miles to go to another culture. So it's not torturing the statistics to separate African Americans from black immigrants, it's misunderstanding of the word 'black'.

You are correct of course. My point in posting that was that the assumption that being in the same race category means coming from the same background is seriously flawed. In that sense, I think War lord is right to be appalled at the whole absurdity of the thing. Thomas Sowell claims that the African Americans who do benefit from college admissions affirmative action tend to be upper middle class. I'm sure he backs that up with statistics in one of his books, but obviously I can't link to it. I don't know if anyone has actually studied this, but the belief among Ashkenazi Jews from South and Central America that I've met, is that calling themselves Hispanic on their application to an American university is a guaranteed in - White Hispanic privilege.

[Copperknickers II]

Her work (in collaboration with others) only constitutes 3 of the 31 essays. I can see now that you also didn't read the chapter abstracts I posted a link to. You're really compromising your credibility here. It's probably best to let it go. Lying in support of one's ideals is sort of falling into a cliché already associated with these types of perspectives. I would have given you the benefit of the doubt if there was any reason for doubt.

Anyway, seems we have some agreement:


So I don't doubt your grasp of biological altruism.

These people appear not to be good examples of that:



You are correct of course. My point in posting that was that the assumption that being in the same race category means coming from the same background is seriously flawed. In that sense, I think War lord is right to be appalled at the whole absurdity of the thing. Thomas Sowell claims that the African Americans who do benefit from college admissions affirmative action tend to be upper middle class. I'm sure he backs that up with statistics in one of his books, but obviously I can't link to it. I don't know if anyone has actually studied this, but the belief among Ashkenazi Jews from South and Central America that I've met, is that calling themselves Hispanic on their application to an American university is a guaranteed in - White Hispanic privilege.

In fairness, I don't see a real problem with minorities taking advantage of affirmative action schemes, that is after all the point of them. Even if it is only middle class black people benefitting, that's better than no black people benefitting which would be the case without affirmative action. There's a lot of work still to do but it's a start.

As for the second point, I don't know the first thing about Ashkenazi Jews in Latin America or anywhere else. Are they not subject to similar disadvantages to other Hispanics? The situation with Hispanics is rather different to that of blacks, because in their case discrimination has a high superficial degree and a smaller socioeconomic basis (not to say it doesn't have a socioeconomic basis, since immigrants from Latin America are considerably less filtered in the US for well known reasons). My point is, if Ashkenazi Jews have Hispanic sounding names and look Hispanic despite not being quite the same as a non-Jewish Hispanic person, that's considerably more relevant than black Africans/Jamaicans having the same appearance as African Americans.