Haha. Ben is also friends with the SemCo-op on Facebook.
Chapter 14: The Invention of the Stand Mixer
I don't know anything about the book, but the author is a well-known scholar. (I haven't read anything by her, so can't say much more than that.)
Chapter One: "Since time began white people have yearned to ..."
Au contraire, Chapter One begins, "Webster's New International Dictionary defines 'white people' as..."
Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to be white
Huh, apparently I read what became a chapter of the book a few years ago when it was discussed in a seminar. It was about Blumenbach.
I can't remember really. It was one of those in-progress, do not cite or circulate without permission thingies - the author wasn't there, but a colleague working on related subjects suggested the reading - so of course there was room for improvement. But it was serious scholarship-in-progress. That was way back in 2004 or so, and what's in the book could be substantially different. I'm just guessing based on the table of contents and my recollection of that reading.
Coincidentally, I just got sent a copy of Painter's book to review. And having read only a bit of it, I'm going to pass on the assignment. It's my sense -- again, based on little more than a preliminary once-over -- that Martin Mull's remains the definitive treatment of the subject.
The book may be excellent, but the "enormous gap" language seems ... overstated. Whiteness studies are at least 20 years old (David Roediger's The Wages of Whiteness came out in 1991) and examinations of racial ideology in the formation of the US are even older. Parenthetical or ari would know better than I, but the suggestion of a gaping lacuna here seems weird.
16: OMG. Yes. Martin Mull, Tuesday Weld, Bill Macy, Sally Kellerman, etc. explain UMC Marin Co. white people in the 70s to us.
20: Serial was an appealing little movie. In an alternate universe, Martin Mull has achieved the near-universal popularity of Steve Martin.
I had a bizarre experience with this yesterday. A woman, about 45,whom I work with, has told me that she is mostly of Italian and Russian-Jewish extraction, and I think she would be considered "white", if tan, by most Americans. Yesterday she started going off about how "it sucks to have skin like ours," (meaning hers and mine) because it scars so easily. "I mean look at us, we'll just scar and scar and scar. Those pale white people, their scars go away like *that*. I mean look at me, I'm sooooo dark," (and here she waved her hand in my face),"and see these scars!!" She went on about this for a good five minutes. I could only nod mutely. I'd say she was apprxomiately as dark as, say, Elizabeth Taylor. I am atleast as dark as Konkona Sen Sharma. I mean, I'm not even pale for an Indian. I do not think we are up for white person status any time soon. I wasn't really sure what she was getting at. It was very strange. Maybe this was what she was talking about, and I should read this book.
Can't say who's next without first agreeing on who's already in the boat. Today we celebrate the acceptance of the Irish as white. It has not long been so.
Ok, that's an exaggeration. Virginia was long willing to accept the descendants of Pocohontas as white.
23: I know unambiguously socially-white people who get easily that dark in the summers. I don't know from the scarring issue, but if dark-within-the-possible-spectrum-of-socially-'white' skin does affect scarring, and in a way that makes it behave more like subcontinental-Indian skin than bright-pink-and-melanin-free skin, then what she said doesn't sound weird at all. She wasn't claiming to be socially non-white like you, just to have skin with physical commonalities with yours.
26: Yeah, I mean, I guess so. But it came out of now where, I think she just caught her reflection in some surface while we were talking about work, and she kept saying, "dark skin like ours," vs. "those pale white people." It was jarring.
But the Irish had that "pale skin that burns easily" thing going for them, so I don't think keeping them out of the club was really feasible once they had been here a few generations.
I already have Indian friends that I basically think of as white. I also have Indian friends that I don't. It partly maps to skin color, but also to whether they grew up the the US.
Also, Bobby Jindal is apparently white enough for the Republican party.
Yeah, this isn't new, although the book does sound kind of interesting. I was just reading an article about this sort of thing in the context of the early-nineteenth-century South.
But the Irish had that "pale skin that burns easily" thing going for them, so I don't think keeping them out of the club was really feasible once they had been here a few generations.
Interestingly, there are a lot of early modern English references to the swarthiness of the Irish. White ain't just a color.
Interestingly, there are a lot of early modern English references to the swarthiness of the Irish.
Its probably not a whole lot different from Japanese attitudes about Koreans (i.e., slightly different looking, neighboring colonisees). Do/did the Japananese consider Koreans a different race?
White ain't just a color.
The Irish, like the Italians, have blackness conferred on them by their devotion to the Pope.
Chapter 42 - The Whiteness of The Whale
"What the white whale was to Ahab, has been hinted; what, at times, he was to me, as yet remains unsaid. "
The Irish, like the Italians, haved blackness conferred on them by the English their devotion to the Pope.
The Catholic thing didn't help, though.
Were it not for the fact that my books are packed away in preparation for moving, I'd pull out and re-read my copy of Nothing But the Same Old Story: The Roots of Anti-Irish Racism in honor of St. Patrick and me granddaddy Ma/guire.
Don't forget that working all day outside and living in homes with poor ventilation and lots of smoke without all that frequent of bathing also might lead to not just an inferred swarthiness but an actual swarthiness, even with the fair skin of the Irish.
As for the book, agreed that it isn't actually filling an enormous gap, but I think it is true that there's not necessarily a great synthetic work out there for non-historians on whiteness. (Though certainly something like Matthew Fr/ye Jacob/son's work is easily accessible.) I happen to love some of Painter's earlier work.
And some Irish tan eventually. I don't -- two years in the )(#&$#()$!! South Pacific and I just kept on burning -- but I'm fair even in my family. My sister tans, and my mother tans. (I'm not all that pale -- I'm ruddy enough that I don't come off as white-white -- but no melanin except on the freckles.)
I realized that I forgot to actually get to the point that I was trying to make about the potential actual swarthiness of Irish, which is that it would mark them out as lower class - servant status - which also gets all bound up with ideas about race.
Do/did the Japananese consider Koreans a different race?
I'm not sure Japanese conceptions of race map well to Anglo ones, but basically yes. There have been little bursts of distress in some quarters in Japan every time some new bit of evidence turns up showing that the non-Ainu Japanese originally came from Korea.
Appropos of nothing: I spent much of the morning commute composing a lovely rant about "Why do they make such a big deal of St. Patrick when the only time they mention St. Andrew is to blame earthquakes in California on him" but haven't had the opportunity to use it. Probably because the only green thing I was wearing was my scarf, which is in my clan tartan.
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I don't have a cite or link, but Obama last year said there would be a huge foreign policy initiative in 2010, that would amaze? complicate? I forget. But I have been waiting and expecting something really really big, and expecting it to be something that would enrage a large constituency.
Like cutting off funding to Israel until they reach a settlement. Something that big, that controversial.
Or Something Else ...read the comments, absurd amounts of oil sitting in storage with no price decline
Just to be fair, Obama looks like he will get his insurance corruption bill passed anyway, so he may not need an extraordinary measure to persuade Senators..
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"Why do they make such a big deal of St. Patrick when the only time they mention St. Andrew is to blame earthquakes in California on him"
Because vastly more Americans are of Irish than of Scottish descent, perhaps?
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Jane Hamsher is so innocent and naive it's kinda sweet.
Rather than actually helping the poor, this bill is a dangerous and unprecedented step on the road to domination of government by private corporate players who use it to suppress competition and secure their profits -- the textbook definition of fascism.When we launched the public option campaign in June of 2009, I made several assumptions. One, that the White House ultimately cared more about preserving the Democratic majority than they did about passing a corporate bailout and when forced to choose between the two they would pick the former. And two, that members of Congress have a base interest in keeping their seats and would not cast a vote that jeopardize them.
Both of those assumptions were wrong. Members of Congress are dealing their seats away, planning to retire after the vote is cast in exchange for appointments or other sinecures from the administration. The alternative, as Dennis Kucinich found out, was to be hounded from office by liberal interest groups whose job is now apparently to play enforcer on the left so the President can follow through with his PhRMA and AHIP deals.
This bill has already triggered an electoral crisis that will continue, not only for members of Congress in 2010 but for Democrats across the country.Polling indicates that Democrats plan to stay home just as they did after the passage of NAFTA in 1994. Down ticket races are at serious risk of the "Coakley effect" as independents flock to the GOP. While members of Congress in strong Democratic districts may feel safe from the repercussions, state legislatures that progressive activists have worked so hard to take over the past few years could become casualties of war.
Obama & Rahm still have another big play to give us a Republican/Blue Dog America, Jane, another way to keep progressives at home and moderate Democrats complicit or corrupted, another chance for Matt and Ezra and liberals to call the DFH's insane traitors.
C'mon folks, when the bombs start dropping, you know you won't turn on President Hopeychange.
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the textbook definition of fascism.
What textbook?
On other news, zombie Wayne Morse, interrupting his spinning, shambles from the grave to say:"Dennis has shown me my error! All those other Democrats could not have been wrong. I wany to change my vote."
44:"Corporatism" would have been closer, looking to 20s Italy. We have the militarism, but still, and I think will, lack the necessary nationalism.
Jane, and probably Neiwert and others, just aren't looking back far enough. Around 1880-1900 would be better. Globalized Imperialism, Bismarckism (yah, social welfare programs!) with the repressive state police of Austria-Hungary might be a better fit.
The fascism will come in 2012.
But don't feed the trolls, terza.
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~ 65 bad bar jokes
#47 skwid
An Englishman, a Scotsman, and an Irishman walk into a bar. Each orders a Guinness, and as they're served, a fly lands in each pint.
The Englishman sniffs at the affrontery of the fly and pushes his beer away in disgust.
The Scotsman blinks for a moment, shrugs, and tosses the pint back.
The Irishman turns bright red, fishes the fly out of the beer, and holds it over his glass shouting at it: "SPIT IT OUT, YE WEE BUGGER! SPIT IT OUT!"
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I agree with most of Parenthetical's 36.2 The "fills an enormous gap" language seems like marketing rather than a valid claim, but while there are many whiteness studies out there, there really hasn't been a big synthetic work. Wages of Whiteness is a pretty narrow book as far as coverage goes, for instance. Which I guess brings up the other thing, that some of history really is about stuff that happened, rather than making a new argument, so some books are just about more stuff than about making new points.
Anyway, I haven't yet finished reading a whiteness book where I found its strongest arguments particularly well-supported by its evidence. I never did finish Jacob/son's, but sad to say I wasn't really liking that one either.
Because vastly more Americans are of Irish than of Scottish descent, perhaps?
I think this is unlikely to be true.
The Scots have been settling America for about the same amount of time as the Protestant Irish, i.e. a very long time, so most of the population except for those descended entirely from recent immigrants are going to have some Scottish ancestry.
The Scots have certainly been settling America for a very long time, but in very small numbers, and concentrated geographically in largely rural areas in such a way that few people in most parts of the country have any Scottish ancestry. Irish immigration in the nineteenth century, on the other hand, was massive, and while it was also relatively concentrated geographically, it was mostly in the densely populated cities which have since seen considerable outmigration to other regions. The number of people claiming Scottish ancestry on the Census (which, admittedly, is likely an undercount) is tiny compared to the number claiming Irish ancestry.
When we discussed this in another thread recently someone linked to a good table on the Census website which I haven't been able to find either here or there. I did find this table, however, which has the numbers from the 2000 Census, as well as this pdf, which has a lot of detailed information, along with a fascinating map of ancestry by county.
along with a fascinating map of ancestry by county
I am curious what the generic "American" ancestory indicates on that map.
I seem to recall reading somewhere that it usually means Scots-Irish, which would make sense geographically.
That is, people of primarily Scots-Irish descent are most likely to identify themselves simply as "American."
Scots-Irish sort of complicates the question of whether more Americans are of Scottish or Irish descent, doesn't it?
Or at least possibly brings it up to the same order of magnitude.
OTOH, the recency (is this a word) and scale of Irish immigration, not to mention the drama associated with it then and subsequently, means that you're more likely to know about Irish ancestry than Scottish ancestry. You remember Grandma's stories about how her parents came over to the US in a coffin ship full of famine refugees; it's unlikely that you'd even know that Great-Great-Great-Grandpa's surname was MacNeill and he was a failed farmer in Argyll before he decided to try farming in Pennsylvania instead.
59: True enough, but there are also historical records and stuff.
57, 58: Theoretically, yes, but if you look at the numbers (at least the self-reported Census ones) it doesn't make much difference. If you add up "Scottish," "Scots-Irish" and "American" you still only get a little more than half of the Irish number. Which I guess could be considered the same order of magnitude, but still demonstrably smaller.
53,54: This Wikipedia page has a bunch of maps of individual ancestries derived from the same 2000 Census data (it has Irish, Scottish and Scots-Irish). When we talked about this before we hypothesized than many Anglos (in the South especially) went with the "American" category.
I, personally, have lots of known, documented Scottish ancestors and no known Irish ones. So by extrapolating from that, we can see that obviously all Americans are partly Scottish, and if any of them are Irish, they don't know it.
Let me speculate that this "ethnic group" will continue to lead in growth from 2000-2010, both due to ongoing decreases in identification with 19th/early 20th century immigrant roots for many and fuckwit Tea-Partyism by others.
Scottish, Irish and English are genetically identical, so regardless of historical patterns of immigration, teo and ajay are both right!
Also see the table at the bottom of this Wikipedia article which purports to show foreign-born population from different countries at various censuses (although since it is by country it lists United Kingdom--so the Scots are not broken out). It appears that the source data has been collected at this nice site at UVa so the motivated (i.e. teo--and me when I'm not at work) can dig deeper.
The inhabitants of the West Euros all look alike to me.
What ajay seems to be arguing here is that even relatively low-level Scottish immigration, starting early on and continuing for a long time, resulted in a subtle seepage of Scottishness into the American gene pool such that a large number of Americans have Scottish ancestry but don't know it (since we obviously can see from the Census that not very many Americans actually think of themselves as having Scottish ancestry).
That's plausible enough on first glance, but I think it's still wrong for historical reasons. There was very little Scottish immigration to the New World before 1700, the main instances being the unsuccessful colonies in South Carolina and Panama and the relatively successful but small-scale colony of East New Jersey.
Large-scale Scottish immigration came in the eighteenth century, but those immigrants (many of whom were Scots-Irish) mostly founded their own rather insular communities in the South, from which they began to spread westward into the Appalachians. (That article, btw, addresses the issue of undercounting and lack of knowledge of Scottish ancestry, as well as the "American" self-identification.)
Overall, then, while there is plenty of evidence that Scottish ancestry is undercounted, large-scale Scottish immigration didn't start all that much earlier than large-scale Irish immigration, never reached anywhere close to the same absolute level, and was primarily directed at a part of the country that was and remains largely rural and isolated, which limited the opportunity for Scottish infiltration of the American gene pool. So yeah, I feel comfortable saying that there are a lot more Americans with Irish than with Scottish ancestry.
IME, ignorance of more 25% of the identity of one's 5th generation ancestors (n=32) is pretty pervasive. People think they can guess ethnicity for the rest, but even with recent immigrants, this isn't always going to be right.
If you add up "Scottish," "Scots-Irish" and "American" you still only get a little more than half of the Irish number.
1.7% + 1.5% + 7.2% vs. 10.8%, with the 2000 numbers. The 1990 numbers look very different, though. Don't know what the change means.
I guess I have to figure out what ancestry to claim for the census. Presumably I can go with my geographic roots and identify myself as "American".
66 -- This is funny, because it is very common to see 'Scotland' given as place of birth in the census between 1850 and 1930, and I don't think I've ever seen UK. (Or GB).
70.last: Presumably I can go with my geographic roots and identify myself as "American".
Per CC, that would certainly be the most accurate for me (or melange of Northern European).
I'm of Scottish, Irish, and Scots-Irish descent. Therefore I am automatically the expert on all questions raised herein. And the answer is... dunno. I would let the fly have some of my beer, though.
Looking at my 32, I see that 4 were born in Scotland, 4 in Quebec, 3 in England, 1 in Northern Ireland, and of the 20 born in the US, 4 would have identified as Scots-Irish, and the rest English.
That's 9/32ds Scottish. Not enough to get on the map.
About half my ancestry can be traced back to William Penn's grant (German + Scots-Irish?) and half to the potato famine Irish, with a 32nd or 64th Native-American.
65:Scottish, Irish and English are genetically identical, so regardless of historical patterns of immigration, teo and ajay are both right!
Yes, I found the study that showed the Normans, Saxons, Norse etc had little lasting effect to be very interesting.
Despite apparently one of the more genealogically aware commenters here, I only seem to know five generations back on a couple of lines. I know I figured out a couple others that far when I was researching this more actively, but I've forgotten them.
I think I've met more people who identify as Scottish based on 20th century immigrant parents and grandparents than I have people who identify as such because or 18th or 19th century immigrant ancestors. Interesting, given how small families are nowadays.
Certainly, based on what I know of my own family tree (which is kind of a lot, as my mother is an avid genealogist), Scottish and English people didn't waste much time intermarrying in America, to the point where it gets awfully confusing to say whether you have more of one ethnicity or the other. (That is, if your family has been here since the Mayflower landed, as mine has.)
me granddaddy Ma/guire
Any relation to the founder of Labor Day (one of two possible founders, anyway)? 'Twould be fitting.
I admit that actually looking into this, even just on the superficial and not necessarily reliable Wikipedia level, has made me considerably less certain of my position than I was when I made the initial comment. I didn't even know about the Scottish origins of East New Jersey, which is where I live. So I dunno.
And even that is ephemeral: my kids are 4.5/32ds Scottish. Not enough to notice.
In Scotland it goes 30,31,32, many.
My first Scottish ancestor in America was shipped to Maine by the English in 1651, after being taken as a prisoner of war by Oliver Cromwell's army in the Battle of Dunbar. There were about 1400 other Scots prisoners from that battle who suffered a similar fate, and they were spread throughout the various New World colonies.
Given that families of that era had massive amounts of children, I think it is likely that 1400 Scots diffused through the colonies in 1651 made a pretty significant dent in the American gene pool. At the same time, they would have been effectively dissolved in a larger sea of Englishness, so their Scottish identity wouldn't necessarily have left much imprint.
71: This is funny, because it is very common to see 'Scotland' given as place of birth in the census between 1850 and 1930, and I don't think I've ever seen UK.
Yes, from a quick look at the source data the person who made the Wikipedia table must have aggregated it, since the data at UVa has "Scotland", "Wales", "England".
For some reason, I thought the Scottish made up a higher proportion of Canadian immigrant than American immigrants. But this says nothing about proportions relative to Irish immigrants.
85: I have the impression that bogus-Scottishness is much more common among Canadians with a smattering of Scottish ancestry than it is in the US, in the way that bogus-Irishness among third/fourth generation Irish-Americans is common here. That would suggest that they have more Scots-Canadians than we have Scots-Americans, but I don't actually know.
According to the 2001 Census of Canada, the number of Canadians claiming full or partial Scottish descent is 4,719,850, or 15.10% of the nation's total population, however this is said to be a major underestimation.
So now I've realized that I was wrong when I said:
I guess I have to figure out what ancestry to claim for the census. Presumably I can go with my geographic roots and identify myself as "American".
Wrong because (a) the ancestry question was only on the "long form" census and (b) the "long form" census no longer exists. I find this disappointing. I want to give the government lots of data!
Folks watching the Griz game? Giving the Lobos a good run for their money, anyway.
I am now that Wake Forest just won. I'm so glad that no one in this country cares about college basketball, so the internet rights have not been restricted to the U.S.
Montana's not making the best of their chances
Yeah, they had a couple good ones. Oh well, they were 14 seed for a reason.
We do seem to be beating New Mexico at something, though.
From way up in the thread: Interestingly, there are a lot of early modern English references to the swarthiness of the Irish.
Any chance that could have referred, at least partly, to all of those Moorish raids and their consequences?
16/20/22.
In an alternate universe, Martin Mull has achieved the near-universal popularity of Steve Martin.
Cast in an alternate universe:
Is this link too obvious ?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089277/
95: I was thinking of Fernwood, a small industrial city in the Ohio province of Uqbar on Tlön,
94: I would think the Moorish raids tended to take people away, not leave babies behind. They were slavers, not rape-and-pillagers.
I was all set to admit that teo almost certainly is more right than me due to his superior number of facts. But then I read 79...
Oh, don't worry, I'm still quite certain I'm right and you're wrong, ajay. Just not as certain as I was when I started out.
Kobe is kind of swarthy. NTTAWWT.
