Most White people don’t realize the backwash, the repercussions, of classifying others by the socially constructed concept of race: White people were then race-d themselves. And White cultures, in general, have been erased by the Other, race-d, people.
Ok, let’s back up to the get go of the insanity that is race and racial designation—-that race exists.
The only biological difference between human beings is blood type and ear wax type (flakey or waxy).
The Birth of Modern Race As an Exclusionary Model and Legality
Race was created by the land owning gentry of the new America in the early 1500sto 1600s to essentially stop a brewing class war. Before that, before slavery, folk from everywhere would come to America as indentured servants—-generally with a long term contract of say, 10 years. You’d work someone’s farm for room and board, but you were a free human being. You were tied to your contract which may’ve gotten you passage/a contract from your original European, African or South American, Indian, Chinese country/continent to America, but you were free.
Geographic separation from the empires and corporations across the Atlantic both strengthened and diluted the power of their representatives in America, particularly the gentry. Soon the indentured servants vastly outnumbered the ruling class (managers/owners) and there were rumblings of discord. Such and such being in charge simply because his father was the King of thousands of miles away, doesn’t hold a lot of water or grain, in America, so indentured servants were essentially trying to form what we would call a union.
How to union bust?
What if you could divide and conquer the masses by highlighting and rewarding and empowering one state of being and disempower the other?
The most noticeable trait was skin color. Hence racialization was invented. (There was also the added possibility of creating more workers, who weren’t indentured servants, thereby, who would have no rights at all——slaves—-if you could get the other side of the masses, indentured servants, to ostensibly agree to the division and disempowerment. Which would then directly inflate profits.) The gentry then, controlling and mandating the laws——and it’s also important to note that until the early 1900s only 25% of the American population were literate—-you can then say everyone who looks like this—-White—-
- are protected by the laws,
- no one darker than them may own land, steal or harm a White person
- A White person can own, harm or even kill a darker person because they are not considered “human”
- and the darker folk, can be considered property, not indentured servitude, of White people.
What this does is create a permanent division amongst people and bribes the Whiter folk with greater rights, privileges and prosperity to not oppose the law. (How many of you at your job would refuse to work if they doubled your salary, but didn’t double it for your coworkers?)
Now race as it will come to be known, which is fundamentally a financial-capitalistic designation for separation, is invented. This allows the gentry to control people, creates multiple social classes, ruled by the gentry AND allows for cheap labor to be imported who are smarter than animals, so they can do complex agricultural and household work, giving them tradable value by a currency structure to sell the person back and forth, but have no rights, just as animals don’t. It’s a win-win situation for capitalism in America and then elsewhere.
BUTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT
Time passes. And as time passes, as happens with all human beings—-things both change to diverge and also calcified, from history. The divergence is that the Americas are slowly mapped over a hundred years—-now the seated world powers and empires know what this foreign land “looks” like and merely have to invest resources (ships, men, slaves, industry) into travelling here, buying land, working the land, etc.. People from mainly European lands come here, more and more, because it being so large, it becomes prosperous and distant enough that its origin progenitors from those investing empires, their grip weakens, conciliations of control and power have to be made—-it’s essentially a funded blank slate if you can get here. It even gets to the point that the United States, now united states, moves to succeed from its’ origin progenitors empires’. More and more people keep coming through these centuries.
Times passes. The racial laws that have been calcified into the country’s laws are undone by the fact that the law itself is not static. More people, more industries, more places, more laws—-laws get changed, ratified, amended, advanced—-the Hammurabi system which US law is based upon is designed intentionally to not be perfect but to allow challenge and redress—-which is America's fundamental weakness, in its’ fundament structure. This means race, calcified in the beginning, is amended and changed by the surrounding issues and social setting.
What none considered is that you can race someone—-we’ll call him John. John is darker skinned—-so your USA laws designate John as Black, for simplification, non-ethnicity, purposes. But to attribute rights and such to a static concept, a created construct as race, is a double edged sword. In order to race John as Black, and Xi’an as not White but Yellow (the Asian community took it all the way to the Supreme Court to have their “race” designated White and were knocked down to non-White——yellow—-they did it mainly for labor and business purposes and then consolidated into enclaves throughout America focusing on Asian businesses—-laundries, etc..) and Native Americans as brown, non-White, Indians and east Indians non-White, and Mexicans and Central Americans and South Americans as Hispanic/Latins, then that leaves everyone NOT brown (or yellow) as….White.
The premise of following race was to flatten everyone to very crude categories but its intention was to separate a large group and make almost natural enemies out of them by giving one an advantage over the other and the less advantaged, punishment, for trying to take advantage.
What it didn’t consider, because it lacked foresight beyond the creators lifetimes, was what happens when people who are not brown flood into the system where the stamp on your forehead is one of a handful of race descriptors.
Then million arrived, millions of Italians, Jews, Spaniards, Polish, Dutch, English, French, Russians, etc.—-when your initial legal design was for only maybe one or two ethnic groups that were here in America besides Natives, Hispanics and Africans, it didn’t matter by numbers of Whites. The exclusionary club suddenly by its’ own rules MUST accept all the people who fit its’ criteria based upon race (which is where you see American enforcement of no Jews coming into play, no Italians, no Irish, etc.) Eventually the racialization laws begin to collapse not based upon skin color, but based upon complexity and population, and complexity of the population.
What this conversely does back to those designated Black, Native, Hispanic, Asian, is that sitting in their category boxes, they can self-identify. But in that self-identification they can see who does not fit the parameters of the boxes they’re in—-White, Whiteness, White folk, White people.
Race was intended to empower one group of initial White people here in America and elsewhere (if they came here) but what the greater population of the planet have done is subvert the race rule—-we play along by the idea of racing folk and thereby race the people who originally raced everyone else.
White people, we generally don’t distinguish the complexities and intricacies of their ethnicities and cultures—-as they/their laws do not do to the rest of us who aren’t White, have been flattened to a generic White. All of them. Everywhere. White, White, White, White. And there are 3–5x more people who are NOT White on the planet than are.
Race, as a structured concept is slowly, as time passes, backfiring because it was designed in alignment to legality/laws which is historically mutable as humans grow, evolve, move from land to land. The superiority of Whiteness was not anticipated to dwindle by its’ original progenitors.
In order to control, identify, divide the actual masses of the world—-we have ethnic and cultural origins but the specialness of Whiteness is sort of like a spoiled child who didn’t want to share on the playground—-the other children never forgot. So the Others, recognizing discrimination, as humans do, discriminate
(I’m often amazed at the ironic expectation by White people to expect people they have historically designated as non-White and denied rights and privileges, to be morally superior immediately, when the tables are turned. How about this, to consider or have benefitted from the context of Whiteness you recognize now—-as I think we can see in supremacy groups, exclusionary groups, etc.——that the continued survival as a mass, a culture, an ethnicity, depends upon the moral goodwill and social advancement of those once oppressed, gives us, the oppressed, who are slowly birthing into rightful freedoms, 500–700 years, to “get it right” as White's have. Yeah, that’s a scary prospect isn’t it—-what was good for the goose, now good for the gander?)
will have to mature and sympathize, having been oppressed and you know what?———that takes time…and time passes…..slowly. Which is kinda ironic when you think about it. lol
#KylePhoenix
#TheKylePhoenixShow
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