Oh, white genocide. Some people feel so passionately about it that they are compelled to call into TWIB and try and explain it to us. About how it’s valid and true and just. About how white people are oppressed. And we’re happy to listen, but don’t think we’re not going to call out all your flawed arguments.
Team Blackness dove into that bag of fun and discussed the sad case of even more women and children being abducted by the Boko Haram.
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Richard Shindledecker
Some one actually believes that shit?…I’m sorry – it’s so embarrassing to be nominally white.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
I’m trying to remember what we called this back in college — I think it was “oppression envy.” Because, yeah, not liking the black or brown guy your sister brought home is not the same thing as being murdered. It. Is. Not. The. Same. Thing. Dumbasses.
And if white people feel like they don’t have an identity beyond “white,” get into genealogy and find out where your family came from instead of whining about “genocide.”
Richard Shindledecker
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): ‘oppression envy’ That one I’m going to remember and use – Thanks!
Central Planning
When are the death squads going to come by my house? Just curious.
I really don’t get why people are hung up on skin color. If people are hung up on melanin levels, they might as well be hung up on eye color, hair color, height, weight, or anything else. I just can’t comprehend it.
scav
@Mnemosyne (iPhone): Oddly enough, good chunk of my traditional familial white culture was actively stomping, muddy footstep by muddy footstep, over some of that fiddle-dee-dee my daddy’s done impregnated the owned labor and sold my half-siblings further south for pure profit, ain’t we a uniquely precious Xian family-values Suthern White Culture. But, clearly, that stomping white culture of Northern Oppression isn’t a valid white culture, and only the cute hoop skirted intolerant one is valid and being oppressed out of very existence. Any number of other white cultures seem be doing just jim dandy, but they’re obviously cheating by actually being attractive in themselves and as neighbors.
Mumbles
Heard this one last night. The man that called in is so amazingly ignorant that, at one point, even Aaron explodes at him. That’s the first time I’ve heard that happen in a long time.
low-tech cyclist
Sometimes on my morning commute, I see cars with “Don’t Tread On Me” stickers. I sometimes wish I could ask them exactly how they think they’re being trod on. (The rest of the time, I remember that what I’d get in return would be a bunch of regurgitated Fox News nonsense.)
ranchandsyrup
I finally caught up with an former colleague yesterday that claimed he got knockout gamed during the great knockout game panic. He sheepishly admitted that he was running his mouth in a bar and got beat up. I was surprised he didn’t double down.
Stillwater
About how white people are oppressed.
Well, they are. Increasingly. On an objectively relative scale.
Relative to what they (we!) used to experience anyway.
(Or is it “relatively objective?)
Mike E
@ranchandsyrup: Well, that’s…a little
slanderousconvenient, to blame it on that!MomSense
I can’t wait to listen to this broadcast tonight. People called in to complain that white genocide is real? Oh my.
Zinsky
How many Caucasians were killed at Hiroshima or Nagasaki?
Arclite
Conservatives love to think they’re being oppressed even when the opposite is so clearly the case.
See, also: The War On Christmas.
JaneE
I will start believing in “white genocide” when 98-98% of the white race has been killed. If diluting racial purity by having mixed race children is genocide, then the white race committed genocide against blacks in America a long time ago.
Another Holocene Human
@Mumbles: Whoa.
Another Holocene Human
@low-tech cyclist: “I vote Republican to keep feminists, Blacks, gays, and immigrants from RUINING my life.”
“I vote Republican to keep this MORON from finding out that I’m the only one ruining his life!”
gene108
White people in America genocided themselves by race mixing. No where else in the world is a person, who is part Russian, Hungarian, English and whatever else white people have mixed themselves up as being considered part of a distinct “race”.
Whites have taken European cultures and traditions, mashed them together until they are utter unrecognizable to their nation of origin, and tried to claim they are a unique American People.
If Whites wanted to prevent Russian, Hungarian, English, German, etc. racial genocide in this country they would not have interbred, they would have preserved their native language and native customs.
And now that White’s have wiped out their heritage from this country, they want to crib about the fact other cultures are being sucked into the collective Borg-consciousness that is the American melting pot as being White Genocide, because the new mix is a bit different than the old mix; either way it is this assimilation that is causing “genocide” and you white people should know about as you were more than happy to do it to your European ancestors by interbreeding like rabbits in heat.
Another Holocene Human
@Arclite: They are being oppressed. Financially. But they’ve been programmed since birth to be ashamed of economic failure so they find someone else to blame. Someone to feel better than. Someone to attack, burlesque, and set low.
lack of character, lack of self-awareness, ignorance of history, and selfishness
Another Holocene Human
@gene108: You know there were huge migrations of Europeans in the 18th and 19th century within Europe for economic and political reasons, that chauvinism/nationalism was a latter half of the 19th century innovation, that culture, goods, words, whole languages, texts, ideas, religions, clothing, political notions were being spread around Europe at a rapid pace, that the peasantry of Europe was accustomed to rotating casts of monarchs of ethnicity other than their own, while the royal houses of Europe traded “foreign” princesses in marriage.
This is a really bizarre and anachronistic tirade.
Another Holocene Human
gene, the dirty truth about the US is that ALL races mixed
as slavery became race based, and then more concentrated, and endangered, and slave laws were developed
life became intolerable for people of mixed race
family histories were hidden, obscured. people created new identities for themselves
sometimes governments imposed identities
trying to maintain a color line involved a LOT of violence
the history of civil rights in this country is as much a tale of LOSS of status and rights as gaining them
we have an ugly, ugly past
Arclite
This seems related.
Settlers of Catan parody takes on NY hipsters
gene108
@Another Holocene Human:
I thought after the 17th century and the Treaty of Westphalia, Europeans started settling down into nation-states, with language centric concentrations defining national borders.
Anyway, whites came to this country and hooked up with whites from other parts of Europe, wiping out the older European cultures.
It’s similar to what’s happening now, but there’s more melanin involved in the new generation.
In short White Genocide, as the crazies define it, has been happening for a long-time here, probably going back to when the first Swedish immigrant, in a place like NJ hooked up with a German immigrant in NJ, in the late 18th century.
Another Holocene Human
@JaneE: Skin color is purely an adaptation to the amount of UV radiation in a geographic area. There are multiple mutations that break the gene that makes skin black/brown, and they are found in communities that lived in low UV areas prior to the 20th century.
A certain level of Vitamin D is necessary for life and health. It is generated in the body when skin is exposed to sunlight. Too much is harmful as is too little.
Humans originated in a tropic zone and had very dark skin, but as our ancestors traveled and exploited all kinds of environments, various mutations lightening skin arose for low UV environments.
Mutations of hair and eye color may have been a case of sexual selection (there’s plenty of fitness selective pressure against light colored eyes), but the heat maps of 19th century skin color recorded by ethnographers and 20th century satellite UV incidence data match up almost perfectly.
In England there are descendants of recent (11th-16th century) African immigrants who are … white. Rickets. That’s a lot of selective pressure.
gene108
@Another Holocene Human:
I know, maybe I took the wrong tone, but the whole idea of “race mixing” and “loss of culture” is as old as European immigration here.
It’s not a new phenomenon.
Modern white American culture is nothing but mixing different “races” throughout Europe and ending up with something very different from European roots, i.e. white people committed “White Genocide” on themselves -as I state above – the first time a German / English / Swedish, etc. set of immigrants hooked up in the 18th century.
This “new” freak out is ignoring what got white people where they are today and white history in this country, not including the interbreeding with Native Americans or blacks.
Another Holocene Human
@gene108: That’s a nice theory but all those French ministers with German names and German ministers with French names kind of belie that, don’t they?
There were a number of massive political upheavals in the 19th century causing dissidents to have to flee. Some of them came to the US of course, but some fled to friendlier local governments.
The borders of Europe were by no means set in the 1600s unless you are only referring to strong states like Spain, Portugal, France*, and Britain. Central and Southern Europe as well as Scandinavia didn’t see a more modern map until the 19th century. 19th century saw the rise of chauvinism/nationalism and language chauvinism (which cast Roma and Jews as outcasts in Europe). Language chauvinism was a bit of a joke but as centralized governments they took care of that by instituting universal schooling, which also coincided with industrialism in the 19th century. Through the 19th century a sort of fuzzy corner of Europe that Charlemagne hailed from still spoke a low German/Franconian dialect (as my ancestors did when they left there in the 1840s) but today people in those regions speak the national tongue of whatever border they’re on the side of.
France was an innovator of this, shoring up their conquest of Elsatz-Lothringen by imposing the French language and French administration. By the time a German-speaking power moved to seize the region back, the people of Alsace-Lorraine considered themselves to be French. This was a sort of power. The British attempted to do the same all over the world. (But in a more ham-handed way, I think.)
While the Western powers were achieving naval dominance and conquering foreign shores, central, northern, southern, and eastern Europe lagged, only to have nation-states form at the height of the racist language chauvinist movement.
So a French person might have a sense of French identity centuries before anybody in Germany would say the same. By the same token, 19th century France accepted thousands of immigrants and assimilated them.
*Western half, as they would gobble yet more kingdoms before they were finished
Another Holocene Human
To be fair, there were longstanding Hungarian and Serbian kingdoms, although not by 1900.
Another Holocene Human
@gene108: Shit, I’ve known plenty of Anglo-Americans who brag about their Native American ancestry.
In the early days, everybody was banging everybody. Racial apartheid came later. Trying to undo what cannot be undone. It’s a self-defeating stance.
And it ends in rivers of blood.
Another Holocene Human
European borders are and were the product of elites, NOT popular demand.
The only exception I can think of is the frontier between Roman Gaul and the “barbarians”, who lived outside the Roman world and liked it (because they were stupid ignorant numbnuts whose descendants would burn what was left of Europe after the Plague of Justinian to ash, but, you know, whatever). I guess at the time the Romans weren’t interested in their patch of property so they just let them be.
National borders came first, national language came second.
TooManyJens
@MomSense:
Well, one person. And his 221-word mantra, from which he repeated his talking points over and over, louder and louder. It was bananas. Aaron got so mad I was legit worried about him. He doesn’t freak out much, so when he does, it’s unsettling.
Quaker in a Basement
You actually sit and listen while people talk that crap? They should have to pay you for that.
heckblazer
@Zinsky: Around 20, including about a dozen American POWs.
Uncle Ebeneezer
That phone call was painful to listen to. Funny how we are an All-white Country even though black people have been part of our citizenry from the very get go. Hell, the first casualty of our Revolutionary War was a black man, Crispus Attucks.
Medicine Man
Listened to this tonight. Whew, I second the comments from people who were worried about Aaron’s blood pressure.
I do have some questions about how Elon handled Mr. Rural-Joisey though. Not that I think there was much room for anything constructive to come from that debate, I do wish Elon had challenged the one of the fallacies his caller was stacking his BS arguments on: the idea that “white” people are disappearing at all. The number of white people in the US is not diminishing; they’re just not growing as fast as other ethnic groups. So, if white people are not being forced to intermarry by any observable policy, are not having their children taken and transferred to parents of other cultures/races, are not having their property/land stolen and handed off to “invading” peoples, and are in fact still a growing demographic, isn’t it painfully fucking obvious that the caller is just conflating the loss of total political and demographic hegemony with genocide? Merely allowing the presence of other ethnic groups is genocide on the white majority? That is pretty weak thinking.
I’m more than willing to accept that Elon is more experienced with these kinds of arguments than I am and thus was cutting ahead to the only likely value to be had from the exchange (ie. coaxing the caller into saying as many appalling things as possible to highlight his absurdity) and moreover I can understand why a podcast made by black folks would focus on challenging the logic/justice behind labeling the US as an exclusively “white” nation, but I am still curious about Elon’s strategy for dealing with that guy. I really think the caller would have audibly pretzel-ed himself if his assertion that immigration/integration = genocide was debunked in detail, or am I just falling prey to high-minded liberal thinking?
I would love to ask Elon though, if only to get some knowledge dropped on my head.
OneMadClown
Thank White Jesus that we can finally start having a conversation about this. Last night I walked into Little Caesar’s at 3 minutes before closing and asked for a Bacon-Wrapped Deep Dish, and they told me that there were none left and it was too late to make me one fresh. #whiteoppression
Enhanced Voting Techniques
To think, it wasn’t until the 70’s I was considered a full white, in good standing, because my mother’s family is Slavic and I have an odd last name. And now the Iron Dream(tm) is over….
Uncle Ebeneezer
@Medicine Man: “I do wish Elon had challenged the one of the fallacies his caller was stacking his BS arguments on: the idea that “white” people are disappearing at all.”
It sounded like Elon started to go down that road when he asked the guy “are White people being prevented from having children with other White people?” but then the chaos of the call and the joking about White people finding Blacks irresistable got him away from it. That guy was so off-the-rails and so tied to his one Rush Limbarf talking point that I doubt it would have made much difference.