Black and white

[matrixmann]

Critical question towards the intersectionalists and Identity Politics fanatics: What do you actually mean if you talk about "white"? Which kind of people are all included in this?
Is it only Central Europeans? Do people from Asia fall into the same category for you too?
What about Eastern Europeans or Russians? Or about Italians, Spaniards, Greeks?
Does "white" mean "all non-black people" - or is it the title only for a particular group of people (among "whites")?

And, if talking about "black" - what are you thinking of in that point? Does this include only sub-Saharan Africans - or also people with a comparable dark skin tone (like e. g. Cubans)?
Or is everyone automatically "black" if he cannot fit the category "white"? If his skin tone is too dark for that?

Comments

[maadmike.livejournal.com]

I don't know if I am in the categories you've mentioned to speak about it but I remember one short term LJ friend from USA was speaking that she feels more comfortable in USA having white skin while her roots are Hispanic...
All this shit with black and whites comes from USA... for educated people from Europe there is nothing like this. Yes, all countries have some degree of racism but it differs from country to country. I am certain that there are different slang and views in all the countries - Japan, China, Russia, Europe, even Africa and South America there is no doubt have their own definitions.
If to speak about Russia we or better to say Russians are using the term "black" to our Caucasian guests which are less educated, Muslim and hence are behaving at cetral Russia arrogant for our standart but the situation has improved profoundly for last decades cause our authorities are having the dates for all the criminals and here we have only normal, working guys. For Africans we are using the term "negr" as we were taught in school but there is very low degree of aggression to nigers here in Russia cause we have very small amount of them and they presumably are very intelligent and rich students. Asians are called Asians but again there is no aggression against them also in cetral Russia, maycorthere is more in Siberia to their predatory actions to plunder our lands and forests I don't know. Through the late our tensions with Ukraine which is very popular between our mass media propaganda TV stations there is negative term to Ukrainians "hohol" which means between Russians - mean, unreliable, disliking Russians, but speaking Russian, stealing as soon as possible, etc... they are calling us "moskal" or "kaccap" which means the same on their agenda... ;)

[matrixmann]

This is what I'm catching from this mumbo jumbo too.
These categories apply to the US, and only to the society structure of the US.
The particular images that are around these days about these terms, they're just what people from the US would think in.
But, thought wider than their definitions, there'd be many other sorts of people out there which would objectively have to get sorted into these categories too, if you wanted to practice that intersectionalism seriously, but those who worship it don't do that (as they never waste a thought about them and their place in the spectrum).
So... this kind of thinking is a whole lot of nonsense.
At least for the rest of the world than America.

In America, black people have no other thing linking them than their blackness and the experiences they make based on that - barely anyone of them really knows which part of Africa his ancestors came from, what would be his "original" culture and heritage and what would be "his people" so he'd develope another link.
Same are a lot of white people in America. (Although among them, they know more often which country of Europe or Asia their roots lead to.)
So there is nothing else between them than to draw a link based on race and skin color or religion - otherwise they'd only be just "Americans" (and this, perhaps, is too vague an identity).

Other parts of the world aren't like this because there are other things which can link people and turn them into a community.
So that's why in the rest of the world, in all fairness, it can be possible that black people kill other black people or are hostile to them, just like among white people too, because they're different tribes/nationalities and those don't like each other.

[maadmike.livejournal.com]

"Other parts of the world aren't like this because there are other things which can link people and turn them into a community.
So that's why in the rest of the world, in all fairness, it can be possible that black people kill other black people or are hostile to them, just like among white people too, because they're different tribes/nationalities and those don't like each other."

Yes, yes and yes - divide and rule - wise people are telling about it all the time - the more divided the country, the easier it is to rule it, plus the USA is on the brink of financial collapse, so while the authorities and banks workers are doing their best to lie about things to make more money and flee somewhere - the country is going to pieces... I've just thought about Germany - what were the real reasons of fast growth of Fascism in Germany instead of the wish of USA to become the first country and so on - the real reasons are the poverty, uncertainty, financial instability of Germans at the moment desided that the Jews, crazy, drug addicts are to blame with all their problems while the Germany were paying all free money for the first world war reparations...

Part I

[matrixmann]

Multi-factor and complex situation.

First, you have the results of the Great War.
The Kaiser had to step down, the war was lost, a new political system was installed that didn't have any tradition here previously until that point.
Then you had the duties that arose from that - reparations.
In this point, the "winning" nations were a bit shameless, but that also was based on their situation on being socially and materially ruined through the war.
As there was one to grab all that from, of course they enforced that burden onto the freshly born Weimar Republic. More than was good for it.
This played a big role in the Republic not really leaving crisis, even more in the point of the population "grumbling" under the occupiers' reign and longing for "revenge" and a "rematch" about Eastern Europe ("Operation Barbarossa").

Then there was much discord inside the previous nation politically following the results of the Great War - all the monarchs who still were in power were downed in that process.
A bit of influence internationally of what to do else also came from the October Revolution in your country, strengthening communist ideas in general. So that's how the Bavarian Soviet Republic ("Bayrische Räterepublik") was born for a short time in 1919.
Say, seeing how the reign of the monarchs devastated Europe as a whole (worse than ever before), it was time to put an end to this.
And as there already was an example where that happened, it gave inspiration and a feeling of "now more than ever!" to that people which found themselves in a comparable situation with their nobles who only bring the country to ruin.

Then, a short time later, you had the Great Depression as a phenomenon that impacted the whole world.
The war and the behavior of the winning nations already didn't leave the Weimar Republic with good circumstances to live in, but the crisis, and especially the crisis of the currency here, made it distinctly worse for the people.
A high rate of unemployment developed quickly, modern social welfare from the state didn't already exist, so this was a huge problem in terms of poverty and social misery (as well as all other things that come with that).
(It wasn't until after this crisis that they came up with something in this point, otherwise you only had the kind of welfare like soup kitchens that was carried out by the known charity organizations.)
So to say, the situation quickly grew, over a few years, into that of a powder barrel because people were hungry, people lost their base for a living.
Something had to be done fast, but politics were so drown in its own trench wars, paralyzed because they couldn't agree on anything that would work, and then there was the chain of reparations on their leg.

In between that, the brown shirts emerged with a simple concept and simple answers how to achieve that.
First, they tried to overthrow the government by force, but that ended Hitler and a few known friends up in jail; the next time they tried it the legal way by getting officially elected.
The first time, they also were like one of those political splitter groups which existed numerously at that time; they had no real social support or sponsors behind them.
That was different when they started showing off as a usual political party.
They had the support of the big industry (because their concepts promised to overcome the crisis with favorable conditions for the industry), they had it socially (because somewhen they started to maintain their own soup kitches and help people with their base concerns), statewise they stood for an end of the occupiers' politics and all other things which simple minds could deem to be the origin of the country's problems.
Labor market politics were simple - send the women home to their traditional task field, then there's enough jobs for all men again. That's how you get rid of the unemployed.

Part II

[matrixmann]

How they came upon Jews as an enemy image, I don't know fully - but, I can think of something.
The Great Depression was a problem of the financial markets mainly (and of state debt), and traditionally Jews occupied jobs which had to do with either trade or finances. (That was rather less a choice, but a thing forced upon them over centuries - because Christians weren't allowed to take interest on lent-out money, they placed Jews as non-Christians into these jobs so they could do that. And Jews suffered from suppression at all centuries because "they killed the messiah", even weren't allowed to work. So, of course they took those few jobs they were allowed to do.)
So - without looking at these historical backgrounds -, they created or undertook the shortsighted view that "Jews are responsible for the economical crisis and the misery that arose from it" and so... "punished" them severely for that.
(Actually this is reforming a saying of the communists which have always proclaimed "get rid of capital in private ownership, this is what causes big social misery". Only that this was linked to a particular group which always had its troubles in society instead of calling shit out as what it is: There are also other people than Jews which are rich and act like a boar with humans.)

Ah, just saying - they didn't call themselves "national socialists" for nothing.
That was also a move to try to surf upon the wave of popularity that socialists had at that time.
They only adapted some stuff what they have always preached to be the problem of capitalism and exchanged the enemy images reponsible for that with other scapegoats, what, in the end, didn't really endanger the wheelings and dealings of the old order anymore. Putting blame on these was just a shift in order to make capitalism go on as usual, or better say: Even get more radical now, but nobody would be interested as "now the right people get into the meat grinder".

You see, it's complex to answer that question...

[onb2017.livejournal.com]

It is actually a very good question! Especially Hispanics--they are definitely white like hell and not even the different race but why are they included in the different group.

Ha-ha, obviously it must be how dark your skin is. I once got really tan after a vacation at the Black Sea, so I guess at some point I also was black!

[matrixmann]

"Hispanics", if often talked about, actually only means "people from South America", not people from the Mediterranean area. And this, again, is an artificial term from the US... As someone told me around here, people in South America from one nation also don't want to be thrown together in the same pot from other particular nations there. Just - just as Germans don't want to be thrown together with Frenchmen, Poles, Hungarians or people from Belarus.
So... what of a nonsense is all that stuff.

Btw, taking a look at East Asia - Japanese, Chinese and people from the Philippines also don't look the same, except maybe that they got slitted eyes as a body feature.
Sure nobody from Indonesia or so would see himself linked with sub-Saharan Africans just because they have a pretty dark skin color from living in an area around the earth's equator.
Africans would be the same; they don't even regard themselves as "one race, one people" inside all of Africa itself.