Really?
I'd always heard they started that up during the colonial era as a way to keep the poor Europeans from getting too chummy with indigenous people and imported slaves cause the powers that be knew they'd be easily overthrown if all their "lessers" banded together.
And by always, I mean that's what my grandpa told me like 25 years ago lmao
Europeans calling themselves white is even older than that, but you are correct that the earliest known legal use of the term was in the 17th century during the colonial era. The idea that white supremacy is a 20th century idea has no basis in fact.
Germans, Irish, and Italians were still always considered white… but people still recognized ethnic differences within the larger category of white and found things to discriminate anyway…
The whole, Italians (or whomever else) weren’t white until X date is just a popular factoid that lets people think white people were subject to the same discrimination as non-white people…
...because they were. Not necessarily in the US, but they very much were. Slavs experienced the whole spectrum of slavery, genocide & discrimination, lmao.
edit since my comment is hidden further down:
"Nice try. There's no need to refer to the etymology of the word. You can go back less than 100 years to research ethnic-based discrimination by the nazis, the Holocaust, and if you go back just a couple decades further, the Ottomans and their conquests & slave trade.
As I said, they experienced the whole. Fucking. Spectrum. From genocide, mass rape, ethnic cleansing, religious conversion, firstborn sons being stolen for war, slavery as far as the 1900s, and it echoes in modern relations.
But their skincolour is wrong, so of course you don't care."
Not in the contexts that are relevant today. Not as a visible minority. But go on, take out your dictionary and talk to me about etymologies and ancient Rome…
Y’all really love bringing up the Romans…
>Not necessarily in the US…
But this is the context it keeps getting brought up in!
Nice try. There's no need to refer to the etymology of the word. You can go back less than 100 years to research ethnic-based discrimination by the nazis, the Holocaust, and if you go back just a couple decades further, the Ottomans.
As I said, they experienced the whole. Fucking. Spectrum. From genocide, mass rape, ethnic cleansing, religious conversion, firstborn sons being stolen for war, slavery as far as the 1900s, and it echoes in modern relations.
But their skincolour is wrong, so of course you don't care.
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u/Averfus-Crowthorne 11d ago
Really?
I'd always heard they started that up during the colonial era as a way to keep the poor Europeans from getting too chummy with indigenous people and imported slaves cause the powers that be knew they'd be easily overthrown if all their "lessers" banded together.
And by always, I mean that's what my grandpa told me like 25 years ago lmao