Good video on the insubstantiality of white identity

[Apparition of Jack]

 

[RendHeaven]

Excellent set up exploring the ambiguity of race (and questioning its relative and arbitrary nature) but it's a shame that his conclusions were at a content-level instead of a structure-level.

If he had fully parsed out this exploration, he would have seen that all racial categories are projections of the mind with no objective grounding, including non-white races.

It seemed to me that he destroyed "whiteness" while allowing for the validity of "non-whiteness." Structurally, these categories are no different. It's ALL a sham.

[Leo Gura]

If being human is an illusion, certainly being white is an illuison.

100 years ago Einstein showed that time and space were relative. And yet today people still think being a white human is grounded in something real? Lol

If freaking time and space ain't real, what chance do you have of being real?

[crab12]

He does a good job showing racial identity is an arbitrarily drawn category which only exists in people's thoughts, and not in reality. However, he lost me when he started implying other racial identities are valid. I think he misunderstands what fundamentally drives people together - it's not the illusion of shared identity but shared needs. Beings that have a subset of shared needs recognize that their needs can get met more efficiently if they all work together, and that's why they stick together, and only later they create the idea of shared identity around that. And those needs are authentic, can't get rid of them. Denying those needs would be inauthentic. Self-sacrifice / self-denial / acceptance of LOSE-WIN is inauthentic.

[Rilles]

Such an interesting topic to me, Austrians are usually considered white yet Hungarians who live next door arent, where is the line drawn?

[Dumuzzi]

1 hour ago, Rilles said:

Such an interesting topic to me, Austrians are usually considered white yet Hungarians who live next door arent, where is the line drawn?

Que?

WTF?!?

Of course we are considered white, who told you that bullshit?

Generally everybody in Europe is considered white, except maybe for the Roma, who are sort of Brownish and originate in South Asia.

Btw, Austrians and Hungarians are largely identical genetically, this is pretty clear from genetic studies and any genetic map of Europe you'd care to look at. The real difference is in language and culture, which is admittedly, very different.

 

[Rilles]

23 minutes ago, Dumuzzi said:

Que?

WTF?!?

Of course we are considered white, who told you that bullshit?

Of course its BS, its all BS, thats the point, race is a construct and we cant even agree on what white even means.  

Generally everybody in Europe is considered white, except maybe for the Roma, who are sort of Brownish and originate in South Asia.

Why not the Roma? If you live on the border of Rumania/Hungary, are you less white? What does it mean to be less white? Are black albinos white?

Btw, Austrians and Hungarians are largely identical genetically, this is pretty clear from genetic studies and any genetic map of Europe you'd care to look at. The real difference is in language and culture, which is admittedly, very different.

 

[Yog]

The Huns.... quite a mess they made

Edited February 11, 2020 by Yog

[crab12]

8 hours ago, Rilles said:

Why not the Roma? If you live on the border of Rumania/Hungary, are you less white? What does it mean to be less white? Are black albinos white?

You could argue all day about this without reaching satisfactory conclusion. However, throw people into a violent prison and they instinctively form gangs based on their ethnicity because that's the safest. This much deeper ingrained in humans than thoughts or intellectual debate.

edit:

Quote

Austrians are usually considered white yet Hungarians who live next door arent, where is the line drawn?

You can only have this confusion if you have an abstract idea of an "Hungarian". If you meet actual people with Hungarian descent, it's obvious they are similar to the rest of the europeans on a visceral level.

Edited February 11, 2020 by crab12

[Hansu]

Whites, blacks, yellows.

African American is not South African and Hungarian is not Spanish.

Fuck this. How about we stop categorizing people based on the color of the skin and start speaking of cultures instead? Or is this some kind of American thing Im too European to understand?

[Dumuzzi]

This video has created a cognitive dissonance in me. 

Watching it was enough to make me want to join the white nationalist movement, but simultaneously, it really made me hate white people. 

[Emerald]

On 2/11/2020 at 10:24 AM, Rilles said:

Such an interesting topic to me, Austrians are usually considered white yet Hungarians who live next door arent, where is the line drawn?

My husband is Hungarian and is super white. I've been to Hungary, and the population is like 92% White 7% Roma (Gypsy) and 1% everyone else.

 

[Apparition of Jack]

On 2/12/2020 at 2:24 AM, Rilles said:

Such an interesting topic to me, Austrians are usually considered white yet Hungarians who live next door arent, where is the line drawn?

The point is that there isn't one. "Whiteness" is a social construct that's only a few hundred years old at most, and exists because the people coming up with it had specific survival interests in promoting it. That's not to say there aren't distinct European (or European-descended) ethnic groups out there, just that labelling them all as "white" only works in very limited contexts and ultimately ends up causing more confusion than it gets rid of.

Edited February 13, 2020 by Apparition of Jack

[Yog]

On 2/12/2020 at 11:59 AM, Hansu said:

 Or is this some kind of American thing Im too European to understand?

I was thinking the same thing. Racial talk is very rare around here, If it had to go in that direction it would most likely become nationalistic/ethnocentric. It feels quite foreign to me too, or most people I know.

On the other hand it is starting to become more common these days, especially with the youngest of millennials and gen Z. I would say it is because of the rise of SD green, which at this time has a lot of influence from the US. It is there that you hear a lot of loud race talk that is pushed to the mainstream, which in turn generates the white-right. Catastrophic immigration decisions that lead to rape, deaths, car/building burning only made this problem far worse.

In this sense I do understand why it is becoming popular, though it is still foreign thing, especially for +30 yrs old.
I do hope that we will get more healthy greens, or even some yellows soon.
 

[Dumuzzi]

For some perspective, if you move to Singapore, you'll have to indicate your race on your national ID card or Employment Pass (which is what I had). The standard options are Chinese, Malay, Indian, Eurasian, Caucasian or African. 

This is stamped into everybody's compulsory form of ID and will affect your chances of getting employment or housing. E.g. Malays are considered indigenous and will get certain jobs in the public sector or public housing, as a priority before other races.

It is also instructive that Chinese, Malay and Indian are considered separate races, whereas in the rest of the world, they would all be grouped under "Asian". I guess that proves the point of the OP.