Sorry about not posting much lately. My excuse de jour? I’ve been working a lot, trying to get ahead financially – and then I was notified that they’ve set a date for this year’s American Renaissance conference. That’ll set me back a bit, but it’s okay; I’m sure it’ll be lots of fun. This time it’s at the end of July. Maybe I’ll bring a swimsuit, so that I can take a dip in the waters of Montgomery Bell State Park. If any of y’all are flying into Nashville for the conference on July 30th, let me know so that we can share a rental car.
Al-Jazeera just had an interesting article about Sudanese-Americans. According to the article, anybody whose native language is Arabic is classified as “white” by the US census department. The author, one Hind Makki, complains that this deprives her of being black.
One might think that such a matter is trivial – except that Hind works as an “interfaith and anti-racism educator.” So it must be part of her job to find racism in every nook and cranny, real or imagined. One might think that, since whites are (supposedly) privileged, she would be honored to be considered one of us. But no. Instead, she writes:
Identity erasure
My elementary school wanted to designate me as white because Arabic is my mother tongue, but no one was under any illusion that I actually was a white person. Rather, the question was: as an Afro-Arab, am I black enough to be considered racially black in America?
Sudanese Americans racial identities are often erased. Ahmed Mohamed, the so-called Clock Boy, was described as “brown” by many commentators as if he was South Asian.
Famously, Aziz Ansari, the Indian American actor, tweeted that he stands with Ahmed, “because I was once a brown kid in the south, too.”
I am a Muslim woman who wears a headscarf; I cannot point to an Afro to prove my blackness. Like Ahmed, my racial identity is often erased and transformed into an amorphous brown “other”.
Having your racial identity erased means hearing racial slurs against your community in your own language. It can also lead to absurdly ironic situations.
It may be that “Clock Boy’s” father is from Sudan, but he sure doesn’t look black to me. He’s clearly of largely Middle-Eastern blood, and he really IS brown. By implying that he’s black, Hind is “erasing HIS identity.” Admittedly, Clock Boy is black enough to play the “ghetto lottery.”
I have nothing against Sudan, or the Sudanese. In fact, I enjoy some of their music very much, and I’d love to visit Sudan some day. But if this young lady feels out of place, or confused, by American policies and history, then maybe she should consider returning to her ancestral home. I’m sure there’s plenty of racial/religious strife over there for her to alleviate.
Thanks for telling me about the American Renaissance conference.
I think I will google that and see what it is about. It might be interesting.
It hasn’t been officially announced yet, and I wouldn’t have mentioned it, but for the fact that Richard Spencer already spilled the beans.
She aint white so this classification can only be racist post Obama politrix.
How is this white disenfranchisement?
It’s not. Since whites have been disenfranchised, nobody wants to be considered “white” anymore. She’s upset that she’s called “white” by the government.
Right, that’s Steve Sailer’s “flight from white”. She knows being called white on paper means she won’t get affirmative action points or have as much street cred or whatever.
Who can blame her? She isn’t “dancing around” anything, she’s uncritically accepting the situation in front of her and forming her ideas from other inputs, just like most people do.
I’d also say “disenfranchised” is not the right word for what you’re meaning to say about the status of whites.
@Well…
Yes, “disenfranchised” is much less accurate than Wilmot Robertson’s “dispossessed.”
As in his seminal, “Dispossessed Majority.”
Re: Well, you wrote “She knows being called white on paper means she won’t get affirmative action points or have as much street cred or whatever.” Yet she never comes out and says anything like that. Instead, she’d have us believe that she’s had her heritage stolen from her, or something like that.
As for using the word “disenfranchised,” I think it’s very appropriate. In the past, whites enjoyed preferential treatment within the societies they built. This is the norm, and has been so, for all of history. One definition of the word is “to deprive (a person, place, etc) of any franchise or right.” A privileged place within a civilization that one’s own people/ancestors built is (in my opinion) a right. These days, governments have been replacing true birthright with a thing called “citizenship.” In reality, this concept of “citizenship” is a means of disenfranchising the rightful heirs of civilizations by granting those same rights to anybody who can acquire a piece of paper from the government. In the case of whites in the Western world, not only are whites no longer privileged, but we are second-class citizens.
Put yourself in her shoes. From her standpoint it does feel like she’s had her heritage stolen from her. That’s how she’s been taught to interpret the situation anyway, and she has no reason not to. Losing affirmative action points is probably something she’s never explicitly thought about, but rather lurks vaguely in her subconscious, or else she considers it a secondary issue. Nobody wants to think of themselves as someone whose identity is formed around scoring points in an obviously contrived game.
As a white person I don’t feel like a second-class citizen, and neither do any of the other white people I know (my circle of white friends, family, and acquaintances is incredibly diverse so you can’t chalk that up to politics). Yes, when I mark “white” on a form I know it means I could lose out in some quota system, but that doesn’t hold me back. And yes, there are words and thoughts I’m not allowed to say out loud. Oh well. That would be true anyway. I can’t point to any material disadvantage any of this causes me. (And even if I could, I know it would only be a superficial obstacle until I find some other way to advance myself, since I’m not a mental invalid.) The most I can say is that it’s not fair, that it’s not in line with the spirit of our constitution, that it’s hypocritical, etc. but that’s all just thumb-sucking.
If anything it’s racial minorities who are harmed by this stuff in the long run. And anyway, as I like to remind myself, nothing in the universe is distributed equally or equally randomly, and privilege is no different. It’s childish to expect otherwise.
At the end of the day what we’re concerned with is our ability to form families and raise our children. (If you want a whiter country that’d be a good way to get there!) White people have as much opportunity to do this as any other group–but many of us simply choose not to, and to instead whine and quibble about being disenfranchised. To anyone who does this, I always suggest you quit complaining and get to work having more kids and raising them with your values. If you’re afraid this means you won’t be able to afford your iPhone 7 and your brand new SUV and your McMansion, well maybe you should man up and reassess your priorities. (I don’t mean you personally.)
As I said on my blog, an ounce of natalism now is worth a pound of nativism later. Blaming other people for your hurt feelings is comforting, I guess, but in the meantime you’re being outbred–i.e. you’re not having your country taken from you, you’re giving it away.
“White people have as much opportunity to do this as any other group”
That’s incorrect. Statutory discrimination against the white population has existed since the 60s and has expanded at an almost exponential rate in the last couple of decades. Affirmative Action, Racial Quotas, Diversity Programming designed to coerce the young white people into a stultified state of shame, forced integration, subsidized immigration targeting white countries, cities, and communities, and most importantly the disparate cultural impact of what you’re describing here: ignoring the problem or pretending it doesn’t exist.
Name a way any of that has kept you from having kids and raising them right.
There’s a big difference between pretending a problem doesn’t exist and deciding it doesn’t rule you.