Race- Privilege, Relations, Racism, etc.

My mother was from the white trash kind of background. My mother's family was a mix of Irish, Russian, and Scottish I think. That part of my family is pretty toxic though. There is only five relatives that I can count from that side of my family that I would consider good people and that is out of like twenty that I know of. My great grandfather from that side of the family was smart enough that he could of made the family rich but he spent most of his time getting flipping drunk (and he was an angry alcoholic too) and being a backwards conservative.

My father on the other hand is just a ridiculous mix of cultures and ethnicities. I have Asian relatives, African relatives, Native relatives, Latino Relatives, Indian relatives, and oh so many more (it's kinda mind boggling to see how diverse my family is at reunions). I am by blood very mixed but appearance wise look like a white kid (unless I tan myself) with mixed features. I have met a few bad people from that side as well....

Both sides of my family were poor. I never really understood the concept of racism. I will admit that I am somewhat jealous of other people's privileges but that's not really a problem I have with them as people per say. I just didn't get the best hand. The only time I have an issue is if they are snooty or pretentious about being higher class....

Pretending that groups don't deal with problems from society is only going to make sure they continue.

I know other groups face problems. Hence the strategy of trying not to be in those groups. There's a reason I don't wear wife beaters and that reason is I'm consciously trying to distance myself from "my heritage."

You can definitely be "what you really aren't." Barack Obama comes to mind as someone who puts on airs very successfully, what with being leader of the free world and all.

....I am not quite sure what your arguing here. The whole intention behind my posts is that my interracial family shaped my perspective on this. I didn't understand the concept of racism or white privilege for years because my family for the most part has none of that. I didn't understand for the longest time why some kids would accuse me of being privileged or not white enough. Only in my late high school years I started to understand what exactly I was getting heat from

....I find my heritage interesting, not something to be proud of. Not sure were you got that idea that I was proud of my heritage....

Are you speaking to me?

I think taking pride in something inherited is idiotic. One should only take pride in one's own deeds and their consequences.

That way of thinking makes it really hard to take pride in your nation, which is kinda bad for mantaining social cohesion.

No it doesn't; you can take pride in your contribution to a project that you admire, but which does not belong to you. A good society has everyone participate to it in a way that they can be individually proud of.

I always thought that taking pride in one's own nation was an inherently dangerous thing to do, as it leads to wars and violence and inhumane economic practices.

Nationalism was invented relatively recently, and directly led to a bunch of wars in the 20th century. It also doesn't help social cohesion all that much: people with pride in their nation are perfectly happy to blame all of its problems on minorities living within it. Enthusiastic even. Basically all you're doing is creating a cult of tribalism, where we are inherently great through past actions we personally had no part in, and the other is a monstrous, corrupting influence that needs to be shut down to maintain our past greatness. Rather than striving to improve the world for everyone around you, you're motivated primarily to maintain the purity of something you already know is great. I wouldn't recommend it.

edited 5th May '16 6:10:51 AM by Clarste

Murdering all the minorities has gotten much less common in the modern age. Seriously, read some history. The things that end in oppression and micro aggression today are the same things that ended in that hill tribe being thrown off the cliffs in pretty much every other era.

One of the things the Romans were famous for was mercy towards enemies, for example, and that meant that a lot of the time they only forced you into military service, treated you as a second class citizen and raped a minority of the women folk. If you pissed them off, they usually "only" enslaved everyone. Even if you really, really pissed them off, they only killed all the males. At the time, this was considered very liberal. Until at least the 18th century, it was THE high water mark for liberal treatment of minorities.

Unless (wait for it) you are the Mongols.

Genocide is less common because military conquest is less common. Genocide is a (still horrible) answer to a couple of possible problems that come with conquest. First, the trouble is ensuring the loyalty of those you conquer. The second is funding the cost of the conquest, including paying off the soldiers who helped you do it. Genocide sidesteps the first issue - don't have to worry about the loyalty of dead men - and then solves the second because you can freely help yourself to whatever the people you just killed owned.

Every genocide before the 20th century has elements of at least one of those two factors, and frequently both. This is part of why the genocides in the past 100 years come off as especially horrific - not only because they have become more rare, they're also increasingly less and less about "practical" concerns and more about just sticking it to some other group. Even historians, who do catalog a lot of older genocides, tend to treat them more favorably than I'd like.

edited 5th May '16 10:13:42 AM by TotemicHero

I didn't mean to imply that racism is a recent invention, I only meant that nationalism does very little to stop it. In the worst case they just get genocided anyway.

Edit: And as Totemic mentions, it's the difference between "I won, so I can do whatever I want with your stuff (including lives)" and "your people are a cancer on our nation that needs to be removed".

edited 5th May '16 9:14:20 AM by Clarste

Have anyone here speak with a extreme nacionalist, I did and piss me off by the sheer way of moral myopia(like saying native american genocide was good because it was not their land but what white people marrie with minority is genocide) it can get, really but REALLY creepy

To go along with the usual crap this election season, a Texas cemetery refused to bury a Hispanic man, citing a "Whites Only" policy. Video at the link, too.

Donald trump is the most extreme nationalist I know, as in have seen say things. And he is not even halfway that bad.

Although I think that what you are describing is straight up racism. Nationalism and racism are separate things. That sometimes go together. But this is not necessary.

Nah, Trump is a best and populist authoritarian, he will swich speech at will, before people consider him a democrat.

And that guy said that Hitler,Musolini and Horoito where good people because they want the best for the people and if they said so is true(but granted comunist is a lie to slave people for....reasons) Nationalism and racism can(and they have) go hand with hand for a lot of time, since it reduce thing to "If I feel good, everything is good" I recomend you the short essay of orwell about it, is very educated

Not even Donald Trump would say that Hitler and Mussolini are good people. He did agree with one of their quotes. I am actually impressed by his guts on that one. But there is a large gap between liking a person and liking one of their quotes.

By most definitions, Trump is very nationalist.

Read George Orwell's essay? I already read Nineteen Eighty-Four.

edited 6th May '16 3:45:50 PM by war877

Here: http://orwell.ru/library/essays/nationalism/english/e_nat

here are some gems

"the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognising no other duty than that of advancing its interests"

" Every nationalist is capable of the most flagrant dishonesty, but he is also — since he is conscious of serving something bigger than himself — unshakeably certain of being in the right."

"Political or military commentators, like astrologers, can survive almost any mistake, because their more devoted followers do not look to them for an appraisal of the facts but for the stimulation of nationalistic loyalties"

"God, the King, the Empire, the Union Jack — all the overthrown idols can reappear under different names, and because they are not recognised for what they are they can be worshipped with a good conscience. Transferred nationalism, like the use of scapegoats, is a way of attaining salvation without altering one's conduct."

and my favorites

" Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side."

"the nationalist is often somewhat uninterested in what happens in the real world. What he wants is to feel that his own unit is getting the better of some other unit, and he can more easily do this by scoring off an adversary than by examining the facts to see whether they support him. All nationalist controversy is at the debating-society level. It is always entirely inconclusive, since each contestant invariably believes himself to have won the victory. Some nationalists are not far from schizophrenia, living quite happily amid dreams of power and conquest which have no connection with the physical world."

When I talk with nacionalist, specially the ones who are racist, I saw all that signs around, I also saw it it my socialist country(venezuela) and I pissed me off so much that it become my berserket button.

edited 6th May '16 5:43:07 PM by unknowing

Your grammatical is much diverted.

In his defense English does not seem to be his first language.

There, I fixed, my english get crappy when I write long posts, it get really annoying after a while....

edited 6th May '16 5:44:25 PM by unknowing

I was like you when I joined, it gets easier with time.

@That cemetery thing; the fact that they think they can get away with that (the legal precedent is clearly against them) is mind boggling.

I suspect that they were expecting the family to just find somewhere else, banking on grieving families being so consumed with grief that they don't make a court case out of the situation isn't a bad bet.