Reddit reviews The Invention of the White Race, Volume 1: Racial Oppression and Social Control

Theodore Allen's The Invention of the White Race explores this, framing 1676's Bacon's Rebellion, where slaves of various ethnicities and origins banded together against rich elites in Virginia, as the inciting incident that led to the first promulgation of slavery laws based entirely on race.

no, see, that's not 'being fair'
whiteness is a construct and a dominant one usually used to divide. people are added to whiteness as new enemies are created. there is no real white history, because there is no real 'white race'. Jews, Irish, Italians, so on and so forth - commonly referred to as white now, but not previously. Only now because those seeking to divide us through violence find it useful to include them in an 'us or them' mentality. That's an extremely basic way of putting it, but historically 'white', 'aryan', etc, only start to exist and show up when they are being used to motivate acts that I would consider violent - colonization, slavery, genocide, etc.

of course there has always been war, and of course there have always been border conflicts, ethnic cleansing, genocide, but 'whiteness', like 'blackness' is an invention of this. it's not the same as violence based on nationality, belief systems, or even real lineage - white power is based entirely on buying into the idea of whiteness.

if anyone is actually curious about this, The Invention of the White Race is important to read. Here's a presentation on it that I haven't watched the whole thing of but seems to be on point:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Gq77rOuZck

https://www.amazon.com/Invention-White-Race-Oppression-Control/dp/1844677699

European history is a bit different, and as a jew who had family in camps, I feel it's also really important to the current conversation. but I'm not sure I have as good a single source as this one for the US.

But I don't expect most redditors to reach past surface level, this is complex stuff.

"their own kind" lol that is not quite what I am talking about

There's a good (very thick, two volume) book out there called "The Invention of the White Race" that goes into detail about these things. But the short answers to your questions would be:

1. "African" isn't a coherent racial category, nor was it in the 15/16/1700s. Racial categories are socially constructed, not scientifically derived, and there were certainly many different groups in Africa, so you can hardly speak in generalities. But often times, yes, it was racism from one group towards another.
   
   
2. Again, racial categories are not static or consistent across time and place. Nor are all systems of slavery/forced labor/etc the same. Some of these could be considered racist, to be sure, but have since either been coopted into the dominant whiteness narrative (see the history of the Irish and Italians in America, for example) or other outcomes. Most pre-capitalist (or at least early formation of capitalism) forced labor was not racially based as such, at least.

> Stop drinking the liberal for-profit sociology department Kool-Aid.

Not an argument. My understanding of race is rooted in Marxism, in a materialist understanding of race as a social and economic relationship. You, on the other hand, ascribe by the liberal, idealist definition.

>Any definition of racism that argues it is anything more or less than "treating people differently because they look different" is nonsensical dogma designed to perpetuate the very thing it purports to describe.

Is sexism racism? What about discriminating against people with visible disabilities?

Read a fucking book. No investigation, no right to speak.

>You can see this in how people talk about black culture when ancestral "black people" came from wildly different cultures with about as much relation as Maori culture has to Inuit culture.

"Black culture" refers to American black culture, which actually is coherent precisely because African slaves were stripped of their various cultures. The experience of slavery, Jim Crow, etc. have resulted in a formation of a coherent black culture.

Of course, every black person from Cali to NY could tell you this- but clearly you don't actually have any black friends.

>But whatever, reify your imaginary divisions between people some more, I'm sure that'll promote equality...

Lenin:

>Down with this contemptible fraud! There cannot be, nor is there nor will there ever be “equality” between the oppressed and the oppressors, between the exploited and the exploiters. There cannot be, nor is there nor will there ever be real “freedom” as long as there is no freedom for women from the privileges which the law grants to men, as long as there is no freedom for the workers from the yoke of capital, and no freedom for the toiling peasants from the yoke of the capitalists, landlords and merchants.

We did not create racial divisions. Whites did. We're not reifying shit by pointing out what actually exists.

Sorry, you can't answer the question if you don't know what any of the words mean. I recommend you read this book

https://www.amazon.com/Invention-White-Race-Oppression-Control/dp/1844677699

To learn what race is (not in the dictionary).

I don't even know where to start with how absurd and divisive this line of thinking is.


You basically have allowed the DNC/GOP dynamic to convince you that half of the people that you see every single day of your life are so racist that they will forever vote solely on racist lines.


You swallowed the "divide and conquer" propaganda that the political machines have been pushing since the founding of this country (and well before then). You should read a book called The Invention of the White Race and think about how powerful of a concept they cooked up 400 years ago was as it influences your world view as of 18 minutes ago.

Don't take it personal. It's a system you didn't invent. Whiteness is a manufactured concept. In colonial days there was European, African, & Indigenous servitude. The creation of whiteness was a method of divide & conquer as elites were afraid the European indentured servants would join with African/Indigenous slaves in an uprising. Slight privileges were allowed to lower-class Europeans, which relieved them from thinking they were at the bottom of the barrel. They made it!

The more potent the concept of whiteness became and the better former European peasants felt about their lot, the easier it became to get lower classes to support ruling class institutions of black/indigenous slavery, to support widespread native land expropriation, and all the trappings of the immensely profitable new system called white supremacy. Whiteness is ambiguous and has taken on many previously excluded groups. Our nation's meteoric economic rise wouldn't have been possible if all the workers were paid fair wages.

Just a little taste of the huge amount of literature about this subject.

"As time went on, the labor needs of the land holders continued to grow, and desperate to cultivate the land, they were loathe to let go of their bond servants and the bondsmen and bondswomen’s children (whom they kept in bondage for a legally defined time as well). In the mean time, a growing American peasantry was proving as difficult to govern as the European peasantry back home, periodically rising up in riot and rebellion, light skinned and dark skinned together. The political leaders of the Virginia colony struck upon an answer to all these problems, an answer which plagues us to this day.
The Virginians legislated a new class of people into existence: the whites. They gave the whites certain rights, and took other rights from blacks. White, as a language of race, appears in Virginia around the 1680s, and seems to first appear in Virginia law in 1691. And thus whiteness, and to a degree as well blackness, was born in the mind of America.

As of the 18th century whites could not be permanently enslaved as they sometimes had been before, and black slaves could never work their way to freedom.

This has resulted in a system where centuries later race is still how class is lived in America."

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2015/5/6/1382872/-Matters-of-Race-and-Class-How-Whiteness-is-One-of-the-Greatest-Scams-in-Modern-History

https://www.amazon.com/Invention-White-Race-Oppression-Control/dp/1844677699

https://www.amazon.com/Working-Toward-Whiteness-Americas-Immigrants/dp/0465070744