Reddit reviews Modern Inquisitions: Peru and the Colonial Origins of the Civilized World (Latin America Otherwise)

> How is whiteness associated with private property?

I'm referring to the emergence of private property as upheld by Liberal political theory through the likes of John Locke and its associated legal systems, which have their origin in Modern Europe and was co-produced through the massive waves of European colonialism. Thus I'm referring to 'property' as a legally-sanctioned and policed set of relations that are inherent to the Modern state, a model of societal organization that is more or less globalized these days. I can provide some good readings on the relations between private property, liberalism, and the construction of race if you're interested.

Do you have sources for your claim that private property as I have defined it existed in the Chinese Empire? Can you also define the Chinese Empire and its boundaries through time and space? Genuinely interested to learn more.

I think I actually agree with you in general, but my point is that contemporary forms of power are concealed in whiteness and its relation to the private property relations of European liberal state-making and their institutional structures that still dominate most of the world today. So in other words, its not that these problems are exclusive to whites, as you have pointed out nicely, but that the current legal-political infrastructures of the world are dominantly copies and a perpetuation of white liberalist ideas. I completely agree that discrimination and patriarchy have been central to human relations. I just think that there current dominant iteration is within the political and legal structures of white Europe (which still exist in non-white spaces like India or Indonesia or Latin America as a consequence of European colonization). You are right that slavery is rather common in terms of human history, but chattel slavery, the form of slavery inherent to Europeans and upheld through legal sanctioning (even in democracies - in fact democracy is built on slavery, ironically) is a uniqe form in relation to private property and the creation of the 'race' category.

> Get your head out of your ass man. Yes you needed to hear that again. Read a little world history. Do you even know who the "whites" really are? They don't teach that in your school, I'll tell you that.

I have read some world history. Apologies I've made you angry, and probably because my quick and dirty reddit post that I wrote on my phone wasn't particularly rigorous. I do know where the notion of whiteness comes from, and it has its roots in the emergence of the idea of race as first instigated by the Spanish inquisition in the late 1400s as part of the development of state bureaucracies (you can read about this through Irene Silverblatt). In a dialectical sense, Whiteness then came to construct itself in opposition to the 'Other' throughout the various colonial projects of the Spanish, Dutch, British, French and then later the Italians and Germans as they saught to control and discipline their colonial periphery through knowledge - hence the rise of census making, statistics, and other forms of state control (folks like Foucault and Said are key thinkers here).

> Language controls you and you don't even know it.

Yes, true. This is a basic tenant of the social sciences and humanities, and also a good reason for the rise of critical theory and other post-Marxist theories for they wanted to find ways to always be interrogating our language structures and how they colour our viewpoint without us knowing it, i.e. the concept of 'ideology'. In fact I'm actually more interested in how white and black are used by different cultural groups but sometimes I prefer to participate in the discourse itself because I agree with direction of the politics.

> Black and white are also really horrible terms, and ignores the fact that that are many different races within the broad groups of "white" or "black" - I think people of african/european descent is much more objective. But I digress.

For that reason I completely agree with you that black and white are difficult categories, but so are basically any terms we could use to describe people and their groups. I think however that these words have important cultural salience and can point us to certain historically produced structures, and so it is more of a pragmatic issue of whether or not to use them. These words also have important cultural and situated importance for the groups thesmelves, for instance things like the Black power movement or Black lives matter where blackness is integral to fighting against the whiteness that has long oppressed them in America (I understand these terms are less useful outside of America). Also what makes you think that European descent and African descent are 'more objective'? Objective of/to what?

Finally on your point about minority - no I don't really use those terms. Yes the literal skin colour of people on Earth is much less white than otherwise, but my point again was that Whiteness is a kind of systems and political organization that is specific to Western liberalism and can thus be practiced by those who are not 'white' in the colloquial sense.

Happy to chat more.