Comment by jauzj

2 years ago

[flagged]

>Racism? I didn't know Romanians and Danes were of different races.

Now you do. In the ideology of racism (from the 19th century to the Nazis and beyond) not only Romanians and Danes are of different races, but also Nordic/Germanic/Anglosaxon are of different race to Italians, Bulgarians, Greeks, and so on, including of course the Irish. With a long history of those (and more) not considerd "white" in the US, and being persecuted by the KKK and others.

>Conflating racial prejudice with cultural prejudice is a cheap trick.

Yes, god forbid we condemn prejudice as racial when in fact it's just prejudice because of their "inferior" culture.

Of course, though, those two go hand-in-hand historically. For example, according to Nazi racism, Jews had a "damaging influence" on German culture, they promoted various forms of decadence and so on. And of course every modern racist would say they don't hate blacks as a race, just black culture and crime and so on.

>Conflating racial prejudice with cultural prejudice is a cheap trick.

Race is culture. There is no scientific or biological basis for the racial classifications we use. That whole framework was invented by European slave traders and imperialists to justify white supremacist ideology. At one point, Irish and Italian immigrants to the US weren't considered white. Whether Jews are white or not depends on one's opinion of them (they tend to become less white the more paranoid people become of them.) Greeks wouldn't be considered white by many people yet many white people also hold up ancient Greece as the bedrock of "white culture," which as a concept doesn't even really make sense. "Asian" defines half the human population, so broad as to be nearly useless. "Black" is a whole can of worms. None of it is scientific or objective, all of it is a social construct.

If you happen to get a bit into the whole Nazi classification of races (don't, you almost certainly have something better to learn), you'll find that they made a distinction between Germanic "Aryan" types and Slavs.