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95% of mass massacres of innocent civilians carried out by white "role models"
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[QUOTE]Originally posted by zarahan- aka Enrique Cardova: [QB] [b]CONSTRUCTING WHITENESS[/b] Part 1 of 15 [IMG]http://img37.imageshack.us/img37/2716/icemaninheritance.jpg[/IMG] Http://racism.org CONSTRUCTING WHITENESS BY Judy Helfand If I say "I am white," most people in the U.S. would think, "That's obvious, of course you are." But the obviousness of my being white has been shaped by a history of cultural beliefs and practices and social, legal, and economic policies. My Jewish immigrant ancestors of 100 years ago were seen as white by the immigration and naturalization service in the U.S., enabling them to come here and become citizens. But my Pennsylvania Dutch and English ancestors, who were already here, probably saw my Russian Jewish ancestors as Jews, not white. As did my Jewish grandparents themselves, who lived and struggled in Jewish ghettos, not in "white" neighborhoods. I am using this simple example to show that how and when we place someone in the category "white" and the consequences of being in that category --or being excluded from it--is a complex historical story, one I refer to as the history of the social construction of whiteness. In this paper, I hope to show that whiteness consists of a body of knowledge, ideologies, norms, and particular practices that have been constructed over the history of the American colonies and the U.S. with roots in European history as well. The knowledge, ideologies, norms, and practices of whiteness affect how we think about race, what we see when we look at certain physical features, how we build our own racial identities, how we operate in the world, and what we "know" about our place in it. Whiteness is shaped and maintained by the full array of social institutions--legal, economic, political, educational, religious, and cultural. As individuals and in groups, affected by whiteness, we in turn influence and shape these institutions. Thus, whiteness is constantly evolving in response to social forces and the constellation of people who are seen as white may change over time. According to Theodore Allen, the knowledge, ideologies, norms, and practices of whiteness and the accompanying "white race" were invented in the U.S. as part of a system of racial oppression designed to solve a particular problem in colonial Virginia. Prior to that time, although Europeans recognized differences in the color of human skin, they did not categorize themselves as white. I will provide more detail later. For now, the important element of his theory is that whiteness serves to preserve the position of a ruling white elite who benefit economically from the labor of other white people and people of color. Whiteness, as knowledge, ideology, norms, and practices, determines who qualifies as "white" and maintains a race and class hierarchy in which the group of people who qualify as white disproportionately control power and resources, and within that group of white people, a small minority of elite control most of the group's power and resources. Not all studies of whiteness describe it as a system designed to economically benefit a small elite, but most agree that racial oppression is a key element in whiteness and that, as a group, white people do benefit disproportionally from the race and class hierarchy maintained by whiteness. As individuals in the U.S., we are generally assigned a racial identity at birth based on our appearance or on the race assigned to our parents. Growing up, regardless of our assigned race, we are shaped by the knowledge, ideologies, norms, and practices of whiteness, which affect our self identity. In most cases, a casual observation is sufficient for an observer to see us as members of our assigned racial group. Those of us with light colored skin and certain European features, are seen as white. But some of us who are seen as white, through reflection on the nature of whiteness, may have decided that, given the current meaning ascribed to the racial category "white" and the unfair benefits we receive as members of the white group, we don't want to identify as white. This may take many forms, including both the desire to structure a new positive identity as white and the desire to eliminate racial categories altogether. In any case, there is a tension between (1) our self identity and our way of operating in the world and the ways in which we are seen by others and (2) the ways in which they expect us to operate. Much recent writing on this topic attests to and explores this tension, and throughout the history of the U.S. there have been white people who have engaged in similar resistence to accepting their racial category, although perhaps within different conceptual frameworks. Well documented is the resistence of many of those categorized as people of color to accepting the meaning ascribed to their assigned racial categories. These tensions, this cumulative resistence to whiteness, has an impact on the ideological, institutional, and social interactional construct of whiteness at any moment in history. However, within the confines of this paper, the focus will be on dominant forces working to construct whiteness, with scant attention to oppositional or divergent forces. This is, certainly, a failing in the approach which, without fully examining the complex interaction of ideas and practices in play at any moment in history, provides only an outcome-oriented picture of the social construction of whiteness. [/QB][/QUOTE]
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