4 ms·

My prediction is in 20 years Asian will be considered part of white. Maybe it's just being in the Silicon Valley bubble, but it already feels much of the way th

My prediction is in 20 years Asian will be considered part of white. Maybe it's just being in the Silicon Valley bubble, but it already feels much of the way there. (Not trying to offend anyone, but feel safer with throwaway account.)

tptacek 9y ago
This isn't a crazy prediction. "White" means a lot less than people pretend it does. Before the 20th Century, it excluded many European ethnicities. At various points, the Irish, Italians, Greeks, and Jewish people have been "non-white". Solidarity among the relatively fair-skinned only became a thing during the fight to perpetuate Jim Crow, and as a response to the Great Migration. It's hard to pin this down because there's a powerful cultural normalization effect around "whiteness"; we accept the notion that there are "white", "black", "latino", and "Asian" people, in part due to history and in part because breaking "white" down further would be cumbersome. But it's worth remembering that while there really is a sui generis "black" culture (the US African American culture, a product of displacing millions of Africans and stripping them of their original culture), there isn't "white culture". Irish and German people don't have that much in common culturally: they don't share a language, they don't eat the same food, they don't listen to the same music, they don't have the same folklore. Since one important sense of the concept of "whiteness" is "membership in favored ethnicity", it's not unreasonable to predict that it will eventually expand to include non-European ethnicities, too.
- mynameishere 9y ago
  Quit spreading lies. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/03/22/sorry-but-the-irish-were-always-white-and-so-were-the-italians-jews-and-so-on/?tid=ss_tw&utm_term=.5f2fa1480a59 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...
  - tptacek 9y ago
    First, don't address me or anyone else on HN that way. Second: this post is playing a sneaky lawyer trick. It acknowledges --- ferociously --- that there's historically been a hierarchy among European ethnicities in the US, then frames "whiteness" exclusively in terms of the early 20th century, when --- as I said --- Jim Crow and the Great Migration forced a measure of solidarity among European ethnicities against encroachment from blacks. Whites surveyed in 1958 don't appear concerned about intermarriage between Anglo- and Irish- Americans? You don't say!
    - dctoedt 9y ago
      > Whites surveyed in 1958 don't appear concerned about intermarriage between Anglo- and Irish- Americans? You don't say! Family lore has it that my great-grandparents (German descent, first generation born here) were concerned when their only son, my grandfather, married an Irish girl, my grandmother (also first generation born here).
throwawaymac 9y ago
Asians will never be white until dick size jokes are not a thing, which will never happen.

tptacek 9y ago

This isn't a crazy prediction. "White" means a lot less than people pretend it does. Before the 20th Century, it excluded many European ethnicities. At various points, the Irish, Italians, Greeks, and Jewish people have been "non-white". Solidarity among the relatively fair-skinned only became a thing during the fight to perpetuate Jim Crow, and as a response to the Great Migration. It's hard to pin this down because there's a powerful cultural normalization effect around "whiteness"; we accept the notion that there are "white", "black", "latino", and "Asian" people, in part due to history and in part because breaking "white" down further would be cumbersome. But it's worth remembering that while there really is a sui generis "black" culture (the US African American culture, a product of displacing millions of Africans and stripping them of their original culture), there isn't "white culture". Irish and German people don't have that much in common culturally: they don't share a language, they don't eat the same food, they don't listen to the same music, they don't have the same folklore. Since one important sense of the concept of "whiteness" is "membership in favored ethnicity", it's not unreasonable to predict that it will eventually expand to include non-European ethnicities, too.

mynameishere 9y ago
Quit spreading lies. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/03/22/sorry-but-the-irish-were-always-white-and-so-were-the-italians-jews-and-so-on/?tid=ss_tw&utm_term=.5f2fa1480a59 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...
- tptacek 9y ago
  First, don't address me or anyone else on HN that way. Second: this post is playing a sneaky lawyer trick. It acknowledges --- ferociously --- that there's historically been a hierarchy among European ethnicities in the US, then frames "whiteness" exclusively in terms of the early 20th century, when --- as I said --- Jim Crow and the Great Migration forced a measure of solidarity among European ethnicities against encroachment from blacks. Whites surveyed in 1958 don't appear concerned about intermarriage between Anglo- and Irish- Americans? You don't say!
  - dctoedt 9y ago
    > Whites surveyed in 1958 don't appear concerned about intermarriage between Anglo- and Irish- Americans? You don't say! Family lore has it that my great-grandparents (German descent, first generation born here) were concerned when their only son, my grandfather, married an Irish girl, my grandmother (also first generation born here).

throwawaymac 9y ago

Asians will never be white until dick size jokes are not a thing, which will never happen.