mirandashell
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Is this black face?
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The thing is, Americans and Europeans have a very different definition of "white". There are probably huge numbers of people who are considered white by British people but not considered white by Americans.
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There was indeed slavery in the UK, though it was banned earlier than it was in the US. The scale was different, and the US system resulted in larger numbers of people living here today who are descended from slaves.
Not all racial issues in the US are related to slavery, though. We're a nation of immigrants, and while new immigrant groups always face discrimination and language barriers during the first generation, lingering prejudices against people who aren't white and Christian (in the cultural sense, at least) are greater. Many people do have a sense of what a "real" or "regular" American is supposed to be like, and the media and our social institutions tend to reflect and reinforce this. Awareness of this has grown, though, and more people speak out about the problem in recent years. People who don't like thinking or hearing about it will dismiss the discussions as "political correctness" or whatever.
We also share a border with a country that used to own much of the land in our southwest region, and our government has literally conquered and occupied the land of the people who lived here long before any European. So each group of Americans has their own experience. The term PoC doesn't imply that black Americans have had exactly the same experiences as Asian Americans or Latinos or Native Americans, but the term has evolved as an acknowledgement, I think, of the shared experience of feeling like an outsider in one's own country. And it doesn't reference whiteness as a default norm the way terms like "non white" do.
I am probably mangling the explanation.
I understand there's a lot of immigration in the UK nowadays too, though, and this is changing people's perceptions of the default norm there as well.
That's an interesting observation. As an American, I've never perceived the modern UK as a place that was restrictive in terms of personal freedoms compared to us. I know there are differences in how some things, like freedom of speech and the press, are interpreted in our two countries. But are people not guaranteed freedom of religion, speech, assembly and so on in the UK as well?
Maybe one difference is that the UK has a long history of being dominated by certain cultural groups, and the term "British" itself implies a certain race or ethnicity (not just a nationality). So is there maybe more of a sense that people who aren't white being guests in the country, even if they've been there for generations and are citizens?
One thing I've noticed is there seems to be more identity associated with region of origin in the UK. Of being, for instance, from Cornwall, or Yorkshire, and most especially if one is Welsh or Scottish or from Northern Ireland. We get some of that in the US, with people often being proud of being from the south or Midwest, or New York etc., but we tend to move around a lot more for all the US is a bigger country geographically. The ability of the different parts of the UK to retain its regional accents, culture, and identities has always amazed me, especially since its land area is smaller than many US states.
That's a problem on my end too. I observe, and sometimes participate in, racism as a member of a historically privileged group. I can use my experiences as a woman as a point of empathy sometimes (since women also face prejudice and social institutions that are set up to favor the norms and priorities of a different gender), but sexism and racism aren't identical experiences.
mirandashell
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I see what you are saying. But when I use Freedom, I'm referring to the whole Land of the Free and Home of the Brave meme. The American Dream where anyone get rich and be powerful no matter who they are or where they are from. I think that has been a massively powerful magnet to immigrants from anywhere.
It's not so much that we don't have the same freedoms, we do. It's just not such a .... I don't want to say 'big deal' cos that's not what I mean. America was started with idea of those freedoms being enshrined in the culture of the country. The Founding Fathers and the Declaration of Independence and all that. Whereas here, and in most European countries, they have developed more... organically. Does that make sense?
As for slavery, I do know about the British owners and the wealth it bought to Britain. It's what the Industrial Revolution was built on. I meant it slightly more literally in that there were few slaves kept here. Slavery in the Caribbean is well known here as a lot of the descendants moved here.
I think a lot of people have a ... not a problem but a discomfort about the term 'PoC' because it seems to single people out purely on skin colour. Whereas racism here, as Neander says, is based far more often on where you're from rather than anything else.
The latest fears about immigration here are based on two things, a fear of being swamped and losing 'British culture' (whatever the hell that is) and a fear of terrorism. Both of which are used by people with their own agenda, as per usual.
It's not so much that we don't have the same freedoms, we do. It's just not such a .... I don't want to say 'big deal' cos that's not what I mean. America was started with idea of those freedoms being enshrined in the culture of the country. The Founding Fathers and the Declaration of Independence and all that. Whereas here, and in most European countries, they have developed more... organically. Does that make sense?
As for slavery, I do know about the British owners and the wealth it bought to Britain. It's what the Industrial Revolution was built on. I meant it slightly more literally in that there were few slaves kept here. Slavery in the Caribbean is well known here as a lot of the descendants moved here.
I think a lot of people have a ... not a problem but a discomfort about the term 'PoC' because it seems to single people out purely on skin colour. Whereas racism here, as Neander says, is based far more often on where you're from rather than anything else.
The latest fears about immigration here are based on two things, a fear of being swamped and losing 'British culture' (whatever the hell that is) and a fear of terrorism. Both of which are used by people with their own agenda, as per usual.
Welsh, Irish, English and Scottish are completely different nations. The Welsh language isn't even closely related to English. Irish and Scottish people have their own languages too (more closely related to Welsh than English). There's thousands of years of cultural and linguistic history separating us. It's completely missing the point to consider them just regions of Britain.
The Cornish ought to be considered a nation too, seeing as they have their own language and are Celtic, unlike the rest of England, who are mainly Anglo-Saxon with various other tribes mixed in.
Regarding the different regions in the UK, there's still hundreds or even a thousand or so years separating the regions with their own dialect and culture. I can barely understand broad Yorkshire or Geordie (Newcastle dialect) and I'm from London - and that's before you even get to Scottish dialects like Glaswegian. Before TV was invented, the dialects were even more different. They were half way to evolving into separate languages.
These differences reflect thousands of years of cultural separation and this is what I'm talking about when I say that white people in Europe are not a single ethnic group. If you want an analogy with America, look at the native American nations - their diversity in language and culture which developed over millenia. White Americans by contrast have only been there for a few centuries.
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Your mention of feeling like a guest in your own country made me think about whether that applies to Irish people living in England (for example)... but in my experience, Irish people living in England will still strongly identify as Irish and not as English, even if their family's lived in England for generations. People frequently come to live in England and keep their own identity - though people can consider themselves English if they're born and raised here and speak with an English accent, or if they're mixed and have one English parent - no matter where in the world the other parent's from. You don't have to be ancestrally English to consider yourself English - but on the other hand plenty of people aren't going to want to do that when they're proud of their Irish/Welsh/Basque/Kenyan/whatever roots. Many people consider themselves to be English and something else, though, especially if they have mixed parentage.
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Yeah I don't think that PoC is the right term for identifying people who are likely to have experienced racism in the UK. The woman who sits at the desk next to mine at work has blonde hair, blue eyes and white skin yet is at a high risk for experiencing racism because she has a Polish accent and a Polish name.
That said, I fully recognise that in the USA, Americans, particularly PoC Americans, know what's best for dealing with the kinds of racist issues you get in USA. 'Cause it's a different part of the world with its own issues. As a Brit, I can try to understand the issues but I'm not in a position to tell Americans how to fix them. (Although I would suggest having better trained police and fewer guns - but that only deals with the problem at a surface level IMO.)
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PoC doesn't work in Australia, either - for the same sort of reasons.
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Some great observations there Nm.
I am a little curious though. What particular physical features allows one, say, you, to distinguish an Irish person from a English or Welsh or Scottish person?
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Just an FYI: you cannot be racist against someone you share the same race as. You can, however, be prejudiced against that person because of where their family is from. Racism implies the person is from a different race than the person doing the hating, and that is when we don't get into the sociological definition of racism which is based on who belongs to a dominant racial group and who doesn't. I think the word you're looking for is ethnocentrism.
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Seems like your assuming British definitions of white and the general European definition of white is the same thing or that everyone in Europe feels the same about whether Romany are white or not. Which is strange since Jews weren't considered white until relatively recently in modern history regardless of how they saw themselves at the time.
That's a very modern view of what 'racism' is and who shares 'race', especially in the British context. Which comes back to the original point, I think, that these issues look and feel different on opposite sides of the Atlantic. After all, racism is all about the 'other': historically, the 'other' present in America was barely visible to those living in the UK.
A century or more ago, an English racist would have been grossly offended if told they were the same race as an Irish person or a Pole because they had the same skin colour - to them, Anglo-Saxons were a different race to Celts and to Slavs. I've read lots of contemporary British 19th century texts on race. They had *league tables* of races that shaded down through from the less 'esteemed' white Celts and Slavs and Jews to Polynesians and other ethnicities; the bright line that we might draw now between 'white races' and POC wasn't always present.
And those historical attitudes play forward into the modern UK context. These views crystallised in the 19th century, well after Britain and America had separated culturally, so it shouldn't be surprising that the discourse differs (even if the WASP concept survives in the US).
So just because we differentiate at a finer grain now between race and ethnicity and nation and profiling, doesn't mean that discrimination against, say, the Irish doesn't feel like racism to those on the end of it, given its historical context. And I'm really reluctant to tell someone who has suffered that kind of discrimination that they shouldn't claim it was racist. (Big exclusion: anyone who claims to be racially discriminated against because someone challenged their white privilege can bugger right off.)
My nan (grandmother) was from a Jewish family and my parents grew up in a very Jewish part of North London. North London Jews were considered white then and I've never met anyone who considers British Jews to not be white. I'm part Jewish and have never in my life considered that to make me not white, because they're London Jews. If I was descended from Ethiopian Jews then I wouldn't be entirely white.
Jews were discriminated against throughout Europe and still are sometimes, but it's not down to whether or not they were considered white. You seem to be equating whiteness with being a member of the dominant/most privileged ethnic group (at least that's how it comes across). Jews were discriminated against because people didn't like Jews and they weren't part of the dominant/privileged ethnic group, just as the Irish and Gypsies weren't (aren't, because it's not like we've become this racism free Eutopia or anything). The dominant groups don't define themselves by whiteness the way white Americans do so persecuted groups aren't defined by a lack of whiteness - how white you are comes into only really comes into it when it comes to discrimination against non-Europeans. What I'm getting at is that if someone's persecuting someone because they're a different European ethnic group, they're not thinking "I'm white and that person isn't white" they're not thinking about skin colour at all. They're thinking "I don't like (add group here)"
You're right that across Europe there probably are differences in opinion over who's considered white. I was trying to emphasise the big differences in how it is on each side of the pond. It is the case though that no-one in Europe will think of "white" as being a single ethnic group that you either belong to or don't the way Americans do, because it has never been a single ethnic group for the whole of European history.
Susannah is spot on regarding the fact that historically, English and Irish wouldn't have considered themselves the same race at all*. The English considered the Irish to be extremely racially inferior and various groups within Europe were classified by the dominant ethnic groups as a way to "prove" themselves superior, naturally putting their own group right at the very top.
*and many still would consider them different races on account of being Celtic rather than Germanic/Teutonic (the English are more related to the Germans than to the Irish, Welsh and Scottish).
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The actual legal definition of racism in British law says that you can. How it's defined in America may be different. Here in the UK, it's defined as discrimination/prejudice/ill treatment of someone based on where they're from. So if a Scottish person refuses to employ someone because they're English, that's racial discrimination and they'd be breaking the same law as if they were refusing to employ someone because they're black. In America you can define racism how you like but in the UK it's already legally defined.
Also, scientifically speaking, race isn't a legitimate thing anyway. If you were to divide our species into sub-groups based on when the different ethnic groups diverged from each other (i.e. how genetically different they are from each other), you'd have three groups: the San people of the Kalahari (which is an African ethnic group), the native people of the Congo Rainforest (another African ethnic group) and Everyone Else. In other words, Nelson Mandela is more closely related to me than he is to the San people, even though the San people live on the same continent. This is because all non-Africans are the result of an evolutionary bottleneck, i.e. descended from Africans who left Africa. Non-Africans can look quite different to Africans - that's because of evolving a handful of differences that enable us to adapt to the local climate. They're the result of a handful of genes and Africans remain the most genetically diverse on the planet, due to having been in Africa much longer than anyone's been anywhere else.
Additionally, our entire species is too young and the different ethnic groups within it haven't evolved to be distinct enough to be categorised at subspecies level. Everyone on the planet is Homo sapiens sapiens. Ethnic means cultural. It doesn't mean genetic. There are very big cultural differences between various peoples, due to the fact that culture evolves and adapts way faster than genetic differences do. So if scientists won't classify people into different subspecies, any racial classification system is the work of non-scientists who don't know what they're talking about.
So what we're left with are differences (both physical and cultural) that people can observe in others. That is completely arbitary and different people in different places will focus on different things when they mentally divide people up. That can be based on broad categories such as what continent you're from or what skin colour you have, or it can be based on much finer categories such as whether you're Irish or English.
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Also, ethnocentric is not synonymous with racism. Ethnocentricism is assuming that everyone else in the world sees things the same way you see them in your culture and/or interpreting other cultures through the lens of your own culture. This is how it was defined when I was at university, i.e. it's the scientific definition. It possibly has a wider, general/non-scientific usage. Expecting British people to have the same view of ethnicity and racism as Americans is being ethnocentric, i.e. it's interpreting British people, culture and history through an American lens.
BTW: it's extremely difficult to not be ethnocentric. It's something that everyone does and it's just a matter of trying not to. And I'm not saying I'm better in this respect than anyone else.
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It's hard to define, however Celtic people (Welsh, Irish and Scottish) usually have paler skin and are more likely to have ginger hair and freckles. Even dark-haired Irish people will have very pale skin that burns and doesn't tan. Plus there are facial features, like someone will just look Irish or look Scottish. That's hard to define really. There are also differences in accent and clothing. It's hard to describe these without falling into stereotypes.
Also, people from the North of England look different from southerners. There's such a thing as "looking Geordie" - although being from London, if it's north of the Watford Gap I'm pretty ignorant. Northerners make distinctions between Geordies (from Newcastle) and Mackams (from Sunderland) - look how close Newcastle and Sunderland are on a map.
It's interesting how in America it's all about being white, but in the UK, Celtic people are whiter than Anglo-Saxons and Normans, and the Normans (upper class English people are Norman, rather than Anglo-Saxon, descended from the Norman French who invaded in 1066) are the ones that have been the most racist and also the ones responsible for our class system (which came from how the Normans kept themselves in positions of power and wealth while Anglo-Saxons and Celts were robbed, oppressed and marginalised). You could argue that Anglo-Saxons have never been the dominant ethnic group in the UK - the Normans have (and still are, seeing as they're the upper classes, aristocracy and royal family). However, the Anglo-Saxons have been in a much better position these last 1000 years than the Celts have.
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Yeah it would be completely wrong to say the Irish aren't victims of racism because they have suffered hundreds of years of being persecuted and dispossessed, to the point of genocide. The potato famine was no accident. The Irish had been marginalised by the British (upper classes, i.e. Normans with Anglo-Saxons as their footsoldiers - working class people recruited to fight for them) to the point that they were forced into the worst, least fertile bits of land, where only potatoes would grow. When the potato famine hit, the wealthy classes in Britain refused to help because they considered the Irish to be fundamentally racially inferior and it would be better for the world if they just all died - so they let them starve. I don't see how this is any different from the British ruling classes going to Australia and deciding that the native Australians were racially inferior and it would be better if they just all died. It's the exact same mentality.
Anti-Irish racism isn't just historical. I grew up hearing lots of racist slurs against the Irish (not from my family, just outside the home) and there was ongoing persecution of Irish Catholics in Northern Ireland. The protestants are descended from the British while the Catholic are the native Irish population - it's ethnic violence, not religious violence - and the protestants were the privileged/ruling class while the Irish Catholics were heavily persecuted and marginalised. This is well within living memory and there's a tentative peace since the introduction of various initiatives to bring Protestants and Catholics together and also to enable Catholics to be part of the police force and have an equal share in the power. Ask someone from Northern Ireland (preferably Catholics) whether it's working out or not... I'm English, I'm not in a position to tell Irish Catholics that they're not persecuted any more.
I agree also that people who claim they're victims on racism when they get called out on their privilege are idiots and need a slap upside the head. It's just that in Britain, privilege doesn't automatically come with white skin.
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mirandashell
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I thought this subforum was for discussion of North American issues only, since "persons of color" is an American concept not found elsewhere, as pointed out on the previous page. If it's for discussing international race* related issues, it should be renamed.
* taking into account that American idea of "race" does not necessarily correspond to those found elsewhere
* taking into account that American idea of "race" does not necessarily correspond to those found elsewhere
It is for discussion of PoC-related issues, which refers to people of non-European descent from all around the world.
Even a cursory glance at our topics would reveal participation and discussion of Latin America, Africa, Asia, India, etc.
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It is about more than race. People of color around the world are united by our traumatic experiences with European colonialism and imperialism, and being viewed as second-class, "primitive", or "exotic" civilizations and cultures by the Western world.
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mirandashell
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So other forms of racism shouldn't be discussed here?
I'm not stirring, I'm genuinely asking. Cos if that is so, maybe we need another subforum for writers who are writing about racism that isn't purely about skin colour?
I'm not stirring, I'm genuinely asking. Cos if that is so, maybe we need another subforum for writers who are writing about racism that isn't purely about skin colour?
Do you go to the QUILTBAG forum to discuss cis-het people?
I'm not the mod here...
But PoC spaces should center PoC people and issues, not white people.
The racism experienced by PoC isn't purely about skin color either. See post #48.
I did, and I stand by my statement.
You characterized the racism PoC people experience as being only about skin color, when it isn't.
No, but a PoC space should center PoC, not white people, who have plenty of their own spaces.
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