http://ianlafo.com/early-american-white/
Early American White
How come if we call black people black it’s racist, but if they call us white it’s fine?
In my history class we’re discussing the early American-indian war, and the book calls the Americans whites and the Indians Native Americans. Doesn’t that seem a little racist?
Sounds like you have some personal problems if you associate black with scum or dirt, boody.
‘Black’ and ‘white’ are colour labels that were chiefly invented in the last milenia by ‘whitish’ people mainly under a doctrine of ‘Social Darwinism’ and ‘Unilineal evolution’ in an attempt to legitimate ‘white’ colonisation of the globe. This mythology argues that hunter gatherers were the earliest form of people, then pastoralists and then industrialists and was and is * still used to legitimate the colonisation of the world by industrial nations. The version of it which purported to grade people in terms of skin colour placed Eastern Europeans at the ‘top’ followed by Southern Europeans, Middle Eastern peoples, East Asians, South Asians, Native Americans (Northern and Southern), Polynesians, Africans, Melanesians, ‘Australian’ Aborigines, and Tasmanian Aborigines at the very bottom of some gradient of human evolution that was meant to legitimate people higher up the hierarchy exterminating people further down. White people are the ones who started labelling everyone by colour including ‘ourselves’. I totally agree that identifying people by colour is problematic – but then this is the inheritance that comes with the stolen continents we now kid ourselves we possess.
* To quote the comments of an Indonesian soldier currently involved in the invasion of West Papua on August 12th, 2008 at 3:27 pm:
“New Guinea offers unparalleled opportunity to witness peoples only recently emerging from the Stone Age with traditions of cannibalism, which some suspect may even still be practised in the remotest areas today. Besides the obvious attraction of being eaten alive, Irian Jaya has plenty of interesting things to do and see for those that manage to survive the headhunters’ cooking pots.” (see indonesiamatters link).
