Race under fire: Is being white something you can learn?

Race under fire: Is being white something you can learn?

What does it mean to be white? An explosive new book by an American academic argues that whiteness isn't biological at all – in fact, it can be learned. Precious Williams disagrees

Monday, 17 May 2010

It is tempting to tell ourselves that we're on the verge of an inclusive, multicultural new age.

An era where colour doesn't matter all that much, where race doesn't define us. After all, society is changing. Radically. The Conservative Party's first-ever black female MP, Helen Grant, has just been elected. And across the pond, there is a black man in the White House. Or is there?

A controversial new book, The History of White People, claims that Barack Obama is, to all intents and purposes, white. Not because he had a white mother but because of his educational background, his income, his power, his status. The book's author, the eminent black American historian Nell Irvin Painter, has written a fascinating, sprawling history of the concept of race, looking specifically at the idea of a white race and at why and how whites have dominated other, darker-skinned races throughout recent centuries. The conclusion of Painter's book – which has taken more than a decade to research and write – is explosive. Race, she argues, is a fluid social construct, entirely unsupported by scientific fact. Like beauty, it is merely skin-deep.

Technically, she has a point. The $3bn Human Genome Project revealed in 2003 that every human being has a unique DNA sequence which differs from that of any fellow human being by just 0.1 per cent, regardless of ethnic origin. Thus, all humans beings are 99.9 per cent the same and, from a scientific viewpoint, there is no such thing as racial difference.

And now along comes this weighty history of white people, written by a 67-year-old black woman, telling us that the white race has never really existed. Unsurprisingly, America's far-right are furious. On the white supremacist group Stormfront's internet forum, one member complained that the book: "will likely win a Pulitzer – just look at how they patronise and indulge these negroes". Another member said Painter "is just jealous of our history and of the beauty of white women".

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/race-under-fire-is-being-white-something-you-can-learn-1974929.html

I totally agree with the book's argument - especially about Obama. Although classism may be assigned by race - I have seen enough poor whites to challenge the notion that class assignment is solely based on race. Furthermore the inability of the US poor to rise above poverty especially in this age of globalization also supports this thesis.

Race is an artificial construct to distract class-losers into thinking they are the race-winners. If you are defending your "race" from illegal aliens, or whatever the current teabag rant is, you are less cognizant, even oblivious of how the class-winners are taking you to the cleaners.

I discovered was that Catholics and Protestants in the upper-class neighborhoods, for the most part, mingled easily and got along fine. It was only in the working-class neighborhoods that they bounced bricks off of each others' heads.

As he says, he's a "mutt". If a black person gets a good education, a measure of success, earns money and attains power he's no longer black? I dunno about that. Seems kind of a silly contention to me.

Sadly, some blacks feel if another black individuals speaks proper English and lives in an area other than a black area they have sold out. They believe that successful individual acts white and sounds white. It doesn't matter what hue of the blackness.

On the white side if blacks get an education and start moving up the social ladder then that black is considered uppity and stepping out of place.

I can say this because it has happened to me. I have learned that I don't give a damn about what others think of me. Fuck em!

thinks that way. Enough people, black and white, liked Obama enough to put him in the White House. And that tells me that this country is still changing and changing for the better.

if a brown person gets a good education, a measure of success, and power....then leverages that in a way that emulates the historical relation of the white upper class to capital...then they are honorary white people.

He certainly was not reared as a typical urban African American.

Some things, once very ethnic, have become quite universal. Some good chicken soup, you should be having. Ask your Mother...

Motherhood trandscends even species, I think.