[evollove]

This is mostly for non-US board members.

In the US, it has been common for a while to hyphenate one's identity when one opts to do so or when circumstances demand it. Italian-American, Jewish-American, and so on have been perfectly acceptable terms for decades.

Does this happen elsewhere? Does anyone call themselves a Paki-Irish? A Jewish-Spaniard? A French-German?

In the US, the term African-American is preferred by, mostly, well-intentioned but hopelessly naive whites. Again, does this translate? Is there such a thing as an African-Brit?


Editorial:
What a stupid term, by the way, "African-American." There are white Africans, right? I wonder how it works in Africa. Is a white person an African and a black an African-African?

It seems that since "white" and "black" are both neutral, both on even ground, this is a perfectly acceptable way to go about things. The black people I know agree. "Just don't call me nigger and we'll get along fine," is what I hear most often when I bring this up. Overeducated/underexperienced honky lefties refuse to believe me when I tell them this, but one bright day, they might actually engage in conversation with a black person and all that time spend with academic theory will get flushed down the drain.

And let us all agree that "person of color" is a racist term, in that it assumes that "white" is normal and anything else is not. Maybe we were all meant to be black, and white is the abnormality. Ever think of that, Mr. Politically Correct? Do you think the majority in a country with an overwhelming amount of non-whites call themselves "people of color?" I doubt it.

There is no normal.

[ni'k]

edit.

and then i went on to read the rest of your post, the editoral part... i know its so hard for you trying to keep these things real with all those evil lefties with their books and theory who dont know the ghetto truth like yourself out there with their ideas that they dont force upon you in any way. i know its so terribly desperately hard for you to keep it real with all these ideas floating around that might tempt you into the mental realm of thinking about them and considering them, all i can say is STAY STRONG and continue in your bewilderning ignorance and reactionary anger against some invisible leftist opressor who doesnt know the ghetto truth like yourself because you ACTUALLY TALKED to a person with brown skin and that makes you privy to the authentic semantic truth unlike these ivory tower ALL WHITE leftists. can you not just meet someone and when interacting with them downt bring up identity politics? its not like these guys have brown skin and you have to be able to make some comment about it, and there has to be some word to articulate the massive difference this makes. its not like you cant just have friends, you have to have friends and black friends, but with your black friends you never call them something so insulting as african american, so they can just be black, thus proving how fucking down you are with the REAL people, not those horrible white leftists. it seems like you have just managed to maintain the verbal definitions that create the idea of their even being race thus contributing to the endless perpetuation of this bullshit but managed to do it in such a way that shows how down you are with real black people. you have managed to shift the blame for some problem you seem to have with categorising people based on race onto leftists. congratufuckinglations, you have used racism to be self righteous.

maybe somewhere at the start you were groping towards a point about how identity politics is actually a waste of energy and that the ideas of tolerant society - eg. anti racism anti sexism anti homophobia are really just a way of maintaining an unspoken white male heteronormative reality and letting said people enjoy the narcissitic priveledge of being tolerant in polite society to all these abberations that have to be sealed off in their own categories which we have nothing against and are thus so saintly, obfuscating our dominance and wasting energy in endless and pointless verbal games about how one is supposed to articulate this division. but you quickly fell into an i am down with black people cos i dont call them african americans schtick. nice move trying to blame it all on leftists tho, the people who are generally less inclined to have said racist sympathies and often are even biased on the side of the opressed minorities even if they dont quite realise that this bias can contribute to maintaining the very minority position. do you not think that seeing this as the problem, not say the idea of race itself and those who are prejudiced along these imaginary lines is how you manage to maintain a problem? do you really think that scorn of theory, education and academia engenders anything other than the kind of idiotic self righteous keeping it simple herd mentality that creates and contributes to these problems in the first place? it sounds like you are almost trying to pretend that minorities have more to worry about from people with education, or academic leftists, as opposed to a group of assholes on the street deciding to pick a fight with someone they decided looks queer, or some boss who wont hire someone because theyd rather have paler skin and a set of mannerisms closer to their own behind the counter. its unsurprising that if this crap was going to come from the mouths of anyone it would be a white straight male who has never had to actually face the problems that such conservatism has on peoples lives, and who is trying to act like scorn for thought and theory will engender anything but more of the conservative herd mentality that creates the problems in the first place.

i would imagine it can be condescending to hear people tip toe around you, afraid that they may use an offensive word to describe your skin colour and so ending up sounding patronising, as if there is something inside you that's gonna flip if you hear the wrong word. i'm sure being treated like this can be infuriating. it can feel patronising when people apologise for using the word faggot in front of you aswell, but shit at least they care enough to worry about how they sound. i'd much rather have to deal with someone like this as opposed to some unapologetic homophobe who has an actual hatred and intolerance to queerness. one of them is more likely to be open and not act out there prejudice in their behaviour, rather than just their choice of words, and so one of them is more likely to beat someone up or gossip and make their life hell in school or work or exclude them or generally treat them inferiorily, can you guess which one? i dont advise you to feel such superior scorn to academics, the people that contribute to the humanities by theorising identity and finding ways out of its traps, they have done and will continue to do a lot more good in the world than your dumbass anti intellectualism. noone is being oppressed by theory, except those that refuse to think their way out of it.

altho i can see some merit to what you are saying, if i cut out all the stuff about who and what you blame it on. when i meet someone who when finding out i am queer gets uneasy and makes some sort of a deal out of it it can annoy me because i would have happily continued in my interaction with them without having to deal with their issues, as if i am on call to be the spokesperson for the correct way to behave in front of gay people so as not to offend their delicate sensibilities. these people can often be homophobes who are trying to cover for themselves, as im sure some racists do who use the term african american. but this is more of a minor annoyance than anything else, and it is usually these people in these situations who can be open to hearing what you have to say and having their preconceptions changed.

[floatingslowly]

perhaps it's because I'm made of genetic-soup, perhaps I'm just a cunt, but I don't really think like that.

that said, I'm 1/64th Cherokee, so, obviously, I'm Native American.

[floatingslowly]

a point of recent conversation: it would be best for all parties involved if we would just fuck ourselves into the same uniform brown.

I support this and am willing to do anything in my power to help "darken" the genestock, because, of course, we start with white, right?

[Savage Clone]

I have long been of the opinion that if you were born in America, you are "American."
In other words, stop attributing your personality traits to the motherland of your great-great grandparents.

"I have a hot temper. I'm Italian after all!"
No you're not. Your family has lived in the midwestern USA for three generations.

[floatingslowly]

I had sex with a brown-person (granted, she's a very pale brown) and the baby came out blond!

no, Germans, I will not sell you my uber-seed.

[gualbert]

In France, saying that a black person is "noir" (means black) is borderline.
One should say that he or she is "black" (means black).
(edit: and politicians say "coloured people")

America's ideology is overwhelming.

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by evollove

What a stupid term, by the way, "African-American."

yes, what a blunder. we should keep calling them "niggers". our apologies to you.

Originally Posted by ni'k

no. noone else does this. because it is fucking stupid.

tarado, not everywhere is belfast. this is a very different country from what you know. just saying. you can't theorize with any validity, from your own very provincial reality, what goes on elsewhere.

i'm saying this cuz as an immigrant to gringolandia i still don't get this country 100% and i seriously doubt you have a clue from just reading the interwebs

Originally Posted by floatingslowly

I'm 1/64th Cherokee, so, obviously, I'm Native American.

no you're not. you're just angling for those casino checks.

Originally Posted by Savage Clone

I have long been of the opinion that if you were born in America, you are "American."
In other words, stop attributing your personality traits to the motherland of your great-great grandparents.

"I have a hot temper. I'm Italian after all!"
No you're not. Your family has lived in the midwestern USA for three generations.

yes and no. it really depends how assimilated you are and how many generations (if any at all) you're removed from your immigrant ancestors AND how discriminated against they were & had to stick together by or choice force. this country has very strong tendency to segregate & the labels stick.

though it cracks me up people when people desperately cling to some label.

on that note, i went to talk to my neighbor the other day about some nuisance coming from her property and she called my landlord to report "a mexican" that had knocked on her door. my landlord also has the habit of enumerating people according to her ethnicity. people here in new mexico (provincial as fuck) are always asking me where am i from-- complete strangers approach me to ask this in the most rude way. i've opted from answering "al-qaeda". it shuts them the fuck up.

i'm not precisely "mexican" though i'm from some indefinite "south of the border", yet if it's whitie who applies the label, one of the options one can do is appropriate & subvert.

e.g.: "i'm a spicko-american"

but i personally don't like clinging to group labels. groups annoy me. and i don't dance salsa.

Originally Posted by floatingslowly

I had sex with a brown-person (granted, she's a very pale brown) and the baby came out blond!

no, Germans, I will not sell you my uber-seed.

maury povich, however, just wants 45 minutes of your life and a DNA test

Originally Posted by gualbert

In France, saying that a black person is "noir" (means black) is borderline.
One should say that he or she is "black" (means black).

America's ideology is overwhelming.

yes. 'merica is *very different* from france, in a hell of a lot of ways. on the aspect of ethnicities alone, france has been a very homogeneous country until very recent times, even religious differences have been more or less "buried" since the edict of nantes (the jews didn't so much, and they paid), and the government deals with ethnic differences in a very different way, by burying them instead of trying to social engineer them like here (quotas, etc.)

it's annoying that every fucking entry form here asks me for my "race". what the fuck is "race". i always fuck it up-- yet, i understand the fools are trying to equalize the playing field, however coarse their tools.

btw, i recently watched "la noire de..." and fuck, france was no racial paradise 40 years ago and probably isn't today-- i remember in french class we'd read all these newspaper clips of the cops shooting algerians kids.

anyway, tom8to, tomahto...

[chicka]

the first generation of children born to parents who came over on a boat, a plane, a raft or through a tunnel keep their handle (ie: Irish - American) and the next generation are Americans.

I generally call black people by their name you know George or Sally same
with all my friends. If I don't know their first name then it's Sir or Madam
Mr. Miss you get the drift......

[verme (prevaricator)]

huh?

you mean...
franco-german, irish-pakistani, hispano-jewish, afro-british ?

i'm sure every language has lots of prefixes relating to nationality, ethnicity, race, etc... you can mix them with other words as long as they make logical sense.

lulz

the most widely used are the ones relating to nationality - to describe double nationality or institutional relations.
no they are not as commonly used to describe ethnicity, etc.

[gualbert]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

btw, i recently watched "la noire de..." and fuck, france was no racial paradise 40 years ago and probably isn't today-- i remember in french class we'd read all these newspaper clips of the cops shooting algerians kids.

Hey, France is no racial paradise, clearly no paradise at all.
Do you know any racial paradise somewhere?

[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by chicka

the first generation of children born to parents who came over on a boat, a plane, a raft or through a tunnel keep their handle (ie: Irish - American) and the next generation are Americans.

technically, yes, practically, it's trickier-- look for example at all the birthers who question obama's origins-- it's covert racism-- and it's everywhere.

it's easier to quickly be accepted as "american" if your parents are white christian english speakers than if they are brown, curly-headed and muslim. yes, you may be "american" but somehow you're not quite there yet in the eyes of a lot of people. and you feel unwelcome.

i was doing some movie research the other day & came across this interesting factoid-- annette funnicello, some disney teenybopper star from the 60s, asked her handlers to get a more "american sounding name" (i.e. WASP) for TV. as luck would have it the producers (or whatever) thought that her name was so "strange" that it would be unforgettable so they asked her to keep it.

a lot of stuff has changed and now you can have "ethnic" names & be successful, but the notion that the authentic "american" is some mayflower cunt is still around (i ran into one of those the other day, funny enough).

the thing is that it's hard to put a finger on what it is to be "american" -- is it the constitution? is it your ancestors?-- the pledge of allegiance was invented to handle the large influx of immigrants in the early XXth century-- "the flag"-- easy to identify.

me, i love the frikkin constitution and the bill of rights, and make fun of me all you want, but it's a great reason to come live here. baseball and hotdogs, on the other hand, i don't give 2 shits about.

Originally Posted by chicka

I generally call black people by their name you know George or Sally same
with all my friends. If I don't know their first name then it's Sir or Madam
Mr. Miss you get the drift......

ha ha ha-- good--

Originally Posted by verme (prevaricator)

huh?

you mean...
franco-german, irish-pakistani, hispano-jewish, afro-british ?

i'm sure every language has lots of prefixes relating to nationality, ethnicity, race, etc... you can mix them with other words as long as they make logical sense.

lulz

the most widely used are the ones relating to nationality - to describe double nationality or institutional relations.
no they are not as commonly used to describe ethnicity, etc.

right, but the criticism here is not aimed at those holding dual nationality but at N-th generation descendents of immigrants who still make a claim so some ethnic roots.

in part, these claims are an answer to the old notion i alluded to above that being "american" is, you know, blonde, blue eyed, apple pie, mayflower cunt.

on the other hand these claims often border in the ridiculous when people use them to have some kind of identity in the mass. but still, there are cultural traits carried by generations of non-WASPs, such as going to a school run by nuns, eating kliebasa, or celebrating strange holidays that mean little in its country of origin such as "cinco de mayo"

Originally Posted by gualbert

Hey, France is no racial paradise, clearly no paradise at all.
Do you know any racial paradise somewhere?

my bedroom-- but that's private.

 

hm, yes i know, i was hinting at the fact that those labels are the often-clumsy attempt of american society and government at dealing with a long history of racial discrimination, genocide, etc. i mean, being called 'native american" is an improvement over "fucking redskin", in my book. still, tons of shit to be sorted out beyond language and labels...

[dale_gribble]

i'm american, i suppose north american or perhaps the most proper would be u.s. citizen. i consider myself american however that is not my ethnicity, most of my ancestors were not from this country. does that help clarify things for you people who live in other, clearly inferior, countries?

[floatingslowly]

If you an' yo' folks likes me an' my folks,
Like me an' my folks likes you an' yo' folks;
You's never seed folks since folks 'as been folks,
Like you an' yo' folks like me an' my folks.

Thomas W. Talley's Negro Folk Rhymes (Wise or Otherwise) (1922)



I propose that this is and always has been, a White-American problem.

[static-harmony]

Eh, I just considered myself American. I wasn't born in Mexico, so I don't called myself Mexican-American.

[ni'k]

evollove, in a display of sheer class just sent me a pm that reads:

Originally Posted by evollove

Do you prefer moron-faggot or faggot-moron?

an attempt to offend that fails utterly, although i'm sure someone who operates on such a low level probably thinks it does. i wish all the best to him since as someone with an inferiority complex brought on by those mean smart people and their books and a phobic aversion to thought he's bound to already live in an utter hell of inarticulate stupidity. what he obviously doesn't get is that to some of us acting like that only illustrates the fact that you are such a fucking moron. have fun taking pride in it, i'm sure it will serve you well.

[davenotdead]

i'm lebanese-american. with blood from croatia/serbia.

i look all white but my dad was tan. i have the devil's curly hair.

my great-grandparents were insanely wealthy and had plantations in Cuba, which were burned / confiscated by Fidel , so they fled back to Lebanon.

basically, if it weren't for Fidel, I'd be rich enough to commission Lee Ranaldo to write me a song for each hour of my day

[EVOLghost]

Originally Posted by Savage Clone

I have long been of the opinion that if you were born in America, you are "American."
In other words, stop attributing your personality traits to the motherland of your great-great grandparents.

"I have a hot temper. I'm Italian after all!"
No you're not. Your family has lived in the midwestern USA for three generations.

what if we're first generation?

[EVOLghost]

Originally Posted by chicka

the first generation of children born to parents who came over on a boat, a plane, a raft or through a tunnel keep their handle (ie: Irish - American) and the next generation are Americans.

oh I get it.

[dale_gribble]

Originally Posted by davenotdead

i'm lebanese-american. with blood from croatia/serbia.

i look all white but my dad was tan. i have the devil's curly hair.

my great-grandparents were insanely wealthy and had plantations in Cuba, which were burned / confiscated by Fidel , so they fled back to Lebanon.

basically, if it weren't for Fidel, I'd be rich enough to commission Lee Ranaldo to write me a song for each hour of my day

that sucks.