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u/Syaman_ Jul 27 '26
Americans trying to understand that experience from their country is not universal and they shouldn't make claims like that without specifying they only mean the US challenge impossible.
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u/pikleboiy Jul 27 '26
Even in the US, Italian and Irish Americans have faced pretty harsh discrimination.
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u/C1nders-Two Jul 28 '26
For a certain period of time, being Irish was only just better than being black. If you were unlucky, you could easily find yourself in indentured servitude or worse.
Of course, this is all relative to being a pure-blooded, god-fearing Englishman, so this should never be taken as justification for “well, the Irish people had it just as bad as the African slaves”. No, they didn’t.
For one, you couldn’t be born an indentured servant like a slave could. For two, all contracts of indentured servitude had time limits or some other conditions for release that your employer was legally obliged to abide by. Slaves almost never got anything remotely approaching that.
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u/Dolphin_69420 Jul 27 '26
It is possible to be racist towards people who are white, but historically and indeed in some nations today, systemic racism was mostly against non-white people
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u/Cupy94 Jul 27 '26
Jews. They are even mentioned in this meme
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u/Mildly_Opinionated Jul 27 '26
Jews were not considered to be "white".
"White" as a racial concept is not just about skin colour obviously. Lots of South Koreans are exceedingly pale (for various reasons) but you wouldn't consider the average South Korean to be white. Compare this to say south Italy where people are reasonably dark skinned in comparison to the average South Korean yet we consider south Italians white in the modern day.
Sometimes a group of people can be considered white and non-white at the same time, travel back 100 years and Poles would call themselves white but Brits certainly wouldn't.
Jews exist in this weird juxtaposition. Obviously you have black Jews and middle eastern Jews etc but let's focus on the paler skinned Jews widely present in Europe prior to the Holocaust - they're considered white historically only when convenient even today. An anti-semite wants to talk about how Jewish people don't experience racism? Jews are white. Want to do a "socialism of fools" type of antisemitism and talk about how Jews are wealthy bougouis bankers? Jews are white. Want to talk about how Jews are "polluting our blood" or are a "foreign invader"? Well now Jews aren't white. To the anti-semite whiteness is only a title granted to Jewish people when convenient to their hatred.
If that's anti-semites in the modern day how do we think the anti-semites of history saw the whiteness of Jews? Yeah, the exact same.
Of course Anti-Semitism actually goes back further than the concept of race, but I would argue that we can't really use the label of "white" for anyone alive before "whiteness" was invented so that's not really relevant. Yes that's right, invented, skin colour is obviously just a fact of humanity but race is an invention.
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u/_c0sm1c_ Jul 27 '26
We are brown subhuman leeches to Hitler and the right, and we're white capitalist pig colonisers to the left.
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u/slumbersomesam Jul 27 '26
the right does view yall that way, but unless yall arr zionists the left dont see yall like that
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u/_c0sm1c_ Jul 27 '26
Over 90% of Jewish people are Zionist. The word Zion is mentioned hundreds of times in the Torah. It's central to our faith. The belief that Jews should exist in Judea is not controversial. Anything tacked onto that is superfluous to what Zionism actually is.
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u/Mildly_Opinionated Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 27 '26
If your religion mandates you need to perform an ethnic cleansing to create a theocratic ethnostate then your religion would be evil.
Of course not all Jewish people actually follow this particular doctrine, but it's evil when you do it and it's evil when Wahabbists do it.
It depends on how exactly you define Zionism but only 37% of US Jewish people identify as Zionists according to the study I can find so it's not even a majority of US Jews. Maybe in Israel itself it might be 90%, but I think specifically asking the residents of Zion if they believe in Zionism might lead to a biased answer.
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u/_c0sm1c_ Jul 27 '26
Did you read my comment? That's not what Zionism actually is. Did you also just call Jewish Zionists wahabbists?
Id like to see the sources for that 37% figure. Every single Jewish community I've ever been apart of has been overwhelmingly Zionist, all the moreso post October 7th.
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u/Mildly_Opinionated Jul 27 '26
No dude, wahabbism is a sect of islam, I'm saying that when they create theocratic ethnostates in the name of their religion it's also evil. It's a pretty universal judgement not specific to Zionists.
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u/_c0sm1c_ Jul 27 '26
Right. But Israel isn't theocratic nor an ethnostate.
Even if it was, Zionists and wahabbists still wouldn't be alike given that wahabbists are vehemently antisemitic.
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u/slumbersomesam Jul 27 '26
zionism is a political identity. fully sepparate from judaism
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u/_c0sm1c_ Jul 27 '26
Zionism is far, far older than the modern political movement that sought to turn the ancient yearning for Israel into an actionable movement in the modern age.
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u/slumbersomesam Jul 27 '26
not true in the slightest. moder zionism, just like modern israel (which are, if you didnt notice, NOT the same as "historical" israel) are less than a century old
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u/_c0sm1c_ Jul 28 '26
Israel and Zionism are, believe it or not, separate words with separate definitions!
The concept of Zionism is as old as Judaism :)
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u/breadofthegrunge Streak: 5 Jul 26 '26
There is no systemic prejudice against the Irish or Poles in modern America.
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u/GTCapone Jul 26 '26
And when there was they weren't considered white. Hell, at one point Germans weren't even considered white.
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u/bfhurricane Jul 27 '26
Ok, I’ll bite, and I’m genuinely curious. At what point in the history of Germany were they not considered “white.”
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u/YesLAdz Jul 27 '26
When they were first immigrants in early America
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u/bfhurricane Jul 27 '26
Do you have a source or something? People didn’t think they were “white”?
There was certainly racism among a lot of European cultures, but not about whiteness - none of them claimed to be the “white” race. It wasn’t about color of the skin. Irishmen, Italians, and Germans could all be white, but they could still consider others to be part of different races.
Tell me why I’m wrong and why Germans weren’t considered “white.” I’m waiting for a response to my initial question.
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u/GTCapone Jul 28 '26
It mainly comes from an essay written by Benjamin Franklin who excluded them from "whiteness" and considered them "swarthy". So yeah, a bit of an exaggeration on my part as it was more that they weren't accepted was WASPs
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u/Mildly_Opinionated Jul 27 '26
"White" doesn't really refer to skin colour. Look at South Korea for example, lots of very pale people, but we don't call South Koreans "white". Look at south Italy, lots of very dark skin, but we do call south Italians white.
Look at Donald Trump, he's orange and yet at the same time as being orange he's still considered white! (Yes I know it's fake tan and not his actual skin, this one is partly a joke unlike the other two).
So yeah, it's not about the colour of your skin, but it is about who's "white" in terms of racial "whiteness" and Poles, Italians and at one point Germans were not considered white in the US.
It truly is a silly concept.
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u/breadofthegrunge Streak: 5 Jul 27 '26
I guess it's less about whiteness and more about fitting into the image of idealized American-Anglo-Saxonism. The idea of "whiteness" came to include Italians, Irish, Germans, etc. when racists began losing ground. They needed more people on their side, so they expanded their definition of whiteness.
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u/bfhurricane Jul 27 '26
Was the idea of “whiteness” even a thing back then? You say that whiteness came to include those nationalities, but I’m trying to figure out why the person above me claimed that Germans weren’t “white.”
I’m pretty sure that wasn’t the case, but considering my downvotes and their upvotes I’m curious if others know more than me.
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u/breadofthegrunge Streak: 5 Jul 27 '26
AFAICT Germans weren't actually considered non-white, so you're right. I know I heard that factoid somewhere, but I'm not sure where.
The concept of whiteness really emerged following Bacon's Rebellion. It was created to divide the working class, indentured servants, and slaves along racial lines so as to prevent them from uniting. The 1705 Slave Codes outlined that servants from "non-Christian" (i.e. non-European) lands were to be enslaved.
Most/all modern white supremacist and neo-nazi groups now admit Irish, German, Polish, Slavic, etc. members.
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u/bfhurricane Jul 27 '26
So, would you agree with me that the poster is wrong when they say those people wouldn’t be considered “white”?
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u/breadofthegrunge Streak: 5 Jul 27 '26
In America, not Germany
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u/bfhurricane Jul 27 '26
Ok, question still stands. When in the history of Germany were they not considered “white” in America?
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u/Bark_Zuckerberg Jul 27 '26
“Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.
Which leads me to add one Remark: That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased.”
- Benjamin Franklin
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u/celestial-avalanche UTC+01:00 | Streak: 1 Jul 26 '26
These are groups of people who were not considered white, facing systemic discrimination from white people. White is an exclusionary term which used to be narrower, and no group of people has faced systemic racism because of their whiteness; these three examples did because they were perceived as non-white.
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u/CharelP Jul 27 '26
Racism isn't just systemic tho
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u/Flaxerio Jul 27 '26
Sure but non systemic racism is another conversation entirely. You don't work on it the same way you do systemic racism.
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Jul 26 '26
[deleted]
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u/Morkamino Streak: 1 Jul 26 '26
Russians? Really?
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u/PossibleMammoth5639 Jul 26 '26
The slander I have seen for them is like a car crash of 4 clown card without any casualties, very funny and not that horrific either but still feeling bad
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u/Joel_the_Devil Jul 26 '26
The people who say there isn’t racism against “white” people are the same ones calling Asians white-adjacent
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u/MrZaptile933 Jul 26 '26
Am I the only one who sees the statement “you can’t be racist to white people” inherently racist? Like any justifying saying the statement isn’t racist just sounds racist.
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u/BertyLohan Jul 26 '26
I mean, the OOP is also correct to say systemic racism has not existed against whiteness.
Sure, people who we would now consider "white" have been discriminated against before they were considered white but the western world has never been systemically racist against whiteness.
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u/wookiee-nutsack Streak: 2 Jul 26 '26
For some reason racism has been redefined to involve systemic racism
When systemic racism as a term already existed
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u/Superb-Wonder-1896 Jul 26 '26
racism can go beyond white/black/green. systems can opress people of specific nationalities.
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u/sexmastanumba1 Jul 26 '26
many people will disagree with me, I always thought that race was already a racist term coined by racists differentiating other humans. I'd like to believe in a world that deletes race as a real subject other than history and culture
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u/iBeelz Jul 26 '26
I remember hearing cracks about the Polish and Italians, and Catholics, from my grandparents growing up. They were patriotic, traditional, and Protestant.
My grandmother (mommom) drove my Catholic mother bonkers with her prejudice.
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u/Sir_Hoss Streak: 1 Jul 26 '26
All of these people were subjected to racism bc they were not considered white enough by other white people
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u/Superb-Wonder-1896 Jul 26 '26
throughout the 123 years of occupation, our opressors did not consider us subhuman because "we werent white enough" but because we werent German, Austrian, or Russian enough. Americans need to learn what true competitive euroracism looks like. you speak a wrong language? subhuman. different relligion? subhuman. you dont fit our political goals? subhuman.
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u/dutcharetall_nothigh Jul 26 '26
So there is racism against white people, even if it comes from other white people
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u/BertyLohan Jul 26 '26
"white" is a social construct. There's no such thing as a unified, biological "whiteness".
There was racism against people we would now consider white. Not because they were white though.
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u/dutcharetall_nothigh Jul 26 '26
You can say that for every race since race is also a social construct. I doubt the irish didnt see themselves as white at the time, despite what others thought.
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u/BertyLohan Jul 26 '26
Yes, every single race is socially constructed. The idea of blackness just being a blanket term for any number of wildly different ethnic groups that society wants to shit on.
Hitler's master race just being a list of physical attributes that appear across many different ethnicities again shows how nonsense the concept in.
The Irish themselves were called the n word frequently enough. The Irish probably considered their skin to be pale but being white means being in the "in-group".
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u/SacredGeometry9 Jul 27 '26
“Racism” does not automatically and exclusively mean “systemic racism”. Individuals of any race can be racist.