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theoretically speaking...
May 2, 2008 - 4:34pm
[ 03 May 2008: Message edited by: CMOT Dibbler ]
But as for race, since it is not something that exists, biologically, it is socially defined. I studied a lot of Italian social history, and the contortions the Italian fascists went through to declare themselves pure Aryans would have been funny if they didn't have serious consequences.
Or resentment and anger over centuries of oppression (of Scotland, by England).
[ 02 May 2008: Message edited by: RosaL ]
Rubbish.The Scots were baggage men for the British Empire. They were never oppressed the way the Irish were for example. They were allowed to keep their legal and education systems.
I take huge exception to this false notion, my family, mom's side, had to flee for their lives into a new uncharted and unsettled country and whose ancestors went on to bring Irish famine sufferers to Canada, because they knew from their family's experiences, and the consequences they themselves experienced, what it was like to bear the brunt of oppression and destruction at the hands of the English colonist empire!
Well my great uncle was a baggage man, I don't know about yours. Were your ancestors highlanders?
Well, that is an anecdotal broadbrush, that illuminates a lack of knowledge about what happened to, and in, Scotland. The following links are just a snippet and should help, if you are interested, and there are ebooks on line found at the first link.
http://www.undiscoveredscotland.co.uk/siteindex.html
http://web.pdx.edu/~bettiet/Battledates.html
http://www.electricscotland.com/history/killiecrankie.htm
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/lennich/jacobite.htm
http://www.angelfire.com/film/bhearthistory/Characters/Bruce.htm
My ancestors have long eminity with England.
Some Scots were bagmen for the British empire, some African Americans were bagmen for the American empire, some Indians were bagmen for the British empire, some Chinese were bagmen for the British empire, some Iraquis are bagmen for the American empire .... In short, there are always a few. That doesn't mean that the nation they come from wasn't or isn't oppressed.
In any case, this whole line of thought is exceedingly simplistic. I don't hold "the English" responsible for the British empire either. I hold the English ruling class responsible. There were masses of oppressed English people and the British empire depended on their oppression.
[ 03 May 2008: Message edited by: RosaL ]
First part not technicaly correct, second half. I am fully aware of just who colonized Canada and what their actions were.
You bet it can be argued with absolute truth.Mmmmm!
It was England that occupied Ireland. They did so more than once. The English had a problem, though. The people they sent over to govern the emerald isle had a bad habit of falling in love with the land and the people and then joining forces with them to drive the English out.
I think it was the third invasion when the English arrived at an antidote for that problem. They settled part of the land with Scottish Presbyterians who viewed the Pope as the anti-christ and thus Catholics, papists, as folowers of Satan. The problem of the invaders again joining forces with the invaded was finally solved.
That the Presbyterians were Scots was really inconsequential. They could have just as easily been Welsh. What was important was that they represented an ethnic divide that even after hundreds of years, it has not been fully bridged.
[ 03 May 2008: Message edited by: Frustrated Mess ]
The entire construction of race was a necessity and a product of colonialism, the construction of white identity was built determining the extent to which certain groups had access to power and resources, as it was built around ensuring conflict between different degrees of marginalization and poverty.
[ 03 May 2008: Message edited by: RosaL ]
No, they'd be making an accurate assessment. Now, if that person insisted that the Mexican justice system were inevitably corrupt because of some sort of built-in quality of Mexicans, that would be racist.
Why didn't England bring settlers from Wales to colonize Nothern Ireland?
engines.
Remind: My post about Ulster and the Canadian conquest must have seemed patronizing. I apologize.
There is no need to belittle or deny those as "faraway" in order to fight racism, enslavement and genocide against Aboriginal peoples of the Americans or Africans brought over as slaves.
Those are not phony conflicts "among whites". After all, most of Nazi racism was "among Whites", though some might have had a wee bit more melanin than others.
And the oppressions of the Celtic peoples had a lot of resonance around here. Friend talked about the English "sending over their Celts against the French crown's Celts" (Cartier was a Breton, after all).
Once again, antiracism isn't a race, or a competition.
Racism is a discourse, not a criteria. It is a dynamic of power and oppression. If these pressures are not in operation, any hypotheticals simply do not apply.
[ 03 May 2008: Message edited by: CMOT Dibbler ]
There was also intercinine conflict among many FN peoples all over the Americas. There was little in North America of the kind of permanenet subjegation such as was visited upon the Irish. But plenty further south, and for some of the more effeciently warmaking peoples of the northeat, it wasn't for lack of trying.
Would you call that racism? I think the honest reaction would be that it doesn't make sense.
Racism has its genesis in an explicit white supremacist ideology yoked to colonization, often with the addition of moving peoples of colour about, whether or not as [formal] slave labour.
Whenever you have one group of people exploiting and oppressing another, there is a supremacist ideology involved. (I'm not talking about "internecine conflict"; I'm talking about exploitation and oppression.) Sometimes it's racial, sometimes it's ethnic, sometimes cultural, sometimes it's religious, sometimes it's an ideology of the moral or genetic inferiority of the poor and exploited, etc. I don't see that one supremacist ideology is better or worse than another.
What would you call the serfdom endured by the Russian peasantry? This was hardly an "internecine conflict". They were slaves. It was no less terrible, and their suffering was not less, because the supremacist ideology involved was not a racial one.
[ 03 May 2008: Message edited by: RosaL ]