In China, ethnic Chinese probably feel the same way compared to immigrants or people of other heritage. Or ethnically Japanese people in Japan. Or Saudis in Saudi Arabia compared to minorities there.
In other words, there is a certain power inherent to being part of the dominant ethnic or cultural group in every human society.
(Although, still need to see research demonstrating membership in these dominant groups leads to same degree of empathy atrophy as the research in the article demonstrates for high status individuals like CEOs.)
I would put this differently: I would say that "white" is a refusal to identify yourself with a group based on ethnicity. Which for many people who are labeled "white" by others makes sense, since they do not have a single "ethnicity" anyway. I am an example: my genetic ancestry includes Anglo-Saxon, Hispanic, Mediterranean, and Native American, and I am adopted, so my cultural ancestry includes a few more things thrown into the mix. No ethnicity comes anywhere close to describing me, so I have no interest in or reason to identify with one.
As far as "fictitious power dynamics", if my choice to not identify with a group based on ethnicity gives me any power, it's a power that anyone can have by making the same choice. So I don't see how it gives me any advantage over anyone else. After all, what I said about not having a single "ethnicity" anyway probably applies to a majority of humans on this planet at this time, and even if it doesn't apply to you in a strict genetic sense, that doesn't mean you can't make the choice to not identify with a group based on ethnicity.
Edit: to those downvoting me, could you please explain why?
The commenter quite explicitly said that they're not referring to all white men. Nor even that being white or a man are among the qualifying conditions.
They are referring to the degree to which people buy in, consciously or subconsciouly, to the notion that their whiteness or masculinity are inherently or naturally good/powerful/dominant.
Since HN is a well-educated community, on the whole, it's not unreasonable to expect a little more work on the part of potential readers than for the same comment posted on a broader platform like Facebook. Unless I know from prior experience where a particular poster stands, when I read a comment I find attitudinally startling on HN I try out a few different interpretations before making assumptions about what was meant.
And in this case, I would agree that there are better ways to express the idea.
I used a stronger tone than necessary about your original reading, I didn't mean to be hostile. But I did think it was clear that the poster was not generalizing as broadly as you took it.
What is more, your line of thinking is a good one.
Edward Said constructed basically this same argument - persuasively, I think - in Orientalism, his book on the history of western writing about the east (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orientalism_(book)). If you can get a copy, I recommend it strongly: as you can no doubt see, the consequences of this idea are extraordinarily complex. For instance: what exactly determines Whiteness, if it's a concept that is defined only as "not-ethnic"?
Along those lines, Noel Ignatiev's (note: a controversial figure) book How the Irish Became White details how Celtic immigrants were NOT considered white in the antebellum South. Anyone in America, I think, with Irish or Scots ancestry knows the long history of American racism against the Celts. Ignatiev argues that the Celts 'gained' White status by setting themselves up as anti-Black by becoming strong proponents of slavery and speaking racist ideologies. I found this interesting and persuasive. The historical evidence of horrible and inhuman Irish anti-Black sentiment is obvious, but where other scholars have proposed things like "oh, the Irish came over and were racist just like everyone else" Ignatiev proposes a more universal truth about the way constructions of race interact.
You presume then that attempting to be a white masculine man leads to brain damage, but what about black masculine man? Do they somehow not suffer the brain damage? Why is it considered damage in the first place? They did get in power, maybe what you see as damage is instead optimization.
I think black men suffer some of the same brain damage as white men.
Women with masculine personality traits probably suffer it in some conditions too. If it's real, it's a fuzzy cluster around men, not a strict aspect of manhood only.
Black people do indeed identify themselves as "black", and not "Igbo" or "Yoruba" or "Zulu". But there's a reason for that: "black", in the sense of "African American", is an ethnicity we created, by kidnapping millions of people and stripping them of their original culture. Most "black" people in the US share a common culture and linguistic tradition, one that happens to have been created here.
So it makes sense that there is "black pride" and "Irish pride" but not "white pride". Of those three groups, "white" is not really an ethnicity.
There is no such thing as "America" - this is a social construct which only persists because, every day, people get out of bed and say "well, there is America, and it is 'that thing over there'" and, well, if enough people get together and say something is, the way it is, then thats the way it is.
All culture is a lie. It doesn't hold up on its own, under its own characteristics, like .. say .. Plutonium the Element does. In order to persist, the lie must continually be told.
So really, your invention is as much a lie as anything else. What you really want is to alter culture - and really, who doesn't want that, these days?
You clearly haven't met people from cultures other than yours, have you?
I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but it doesn't seem like your comment is responding to the article - it's responding to the headline, and you're projecting some things onto it and responding to them. Please don't do that - it's what we see on every other news forum/website, and it degrades the quality of the conversation.
"Masculinity" is an appropriate idea, and masculinity is not a bad thing.
There may be some cultural associations with masculinity which don't need to be there, but I maintain that there is a sense of "masculinity" which ought to be recognized as appropriate in some circumstances (primarily among people who are male)
If any of the above was done by race, it would be an outrage today and obvious racism. So, does that mean, in some aspects, you can just manipulate symbols from the article and claim women have similar forms of brain damage simply from their being a woman?
And I agree with you there are many negatives to manhood and masculinity, many positives to womanhood. I don't see that as contradicting my theory.
It's accepted/understood because it's an intentional outcome of an intentional policy.
There USED to be a white culture, white ethnicity, white everything. (One only needs to experience American history to understand the centuries long history of white identity in America).
But due to heritage of political white supremacy, we decided to destroy ALL white identity, ALL white culture, ALL white "ethnicity", as a "baby with the bath water" approach to ending white supremacy.
I think this is why people have this disconnect between "ethnicity" and "whiteness". In this thread.
OF COURSE there is a white ethnicity, but, we Americans destroyed white identity intentionally to destroy white supremacy.
My Cajun / German great grandparents had a lot more in common with local black families than white Germans from New York. Whiteness to them was just an artificial way to segregate people.
There have been a lot of very distinct cultures held by white people -- German, Irish, Finnish, etc -- but they were all quite different.
http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/cornerst...
"Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner- stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth."
It seems that even a century earlier than your 1950's monoculture, the white people of America were not just calling themselves white, but in fact, were creating political philosophy centered around their white identity.
Not their polish, German, Irish, Finnish identity.
Their WHITE identity.
Oh wait!
Is what it is, you clearly already have your conclusion.
P.S. northern chinese make fun of southern chinese (cantonese), does that preclude their ethnicity and culture? I fail to see how targeting Irish means anything. Chinese target their own sub-ethnicities all day long. As does every other ethnic group.
He's not saying that nobody called themselves "white" before 1950.
He's saying that the demographics of "whiteness" in the mid-1800s are different than the demographics of "whiteness" now, and so the term is arbitrary.
I'm not sure why you'd conflate the two, to be honest—understanding your race is fairly necessary to understand how you're viewed in the US, and how you might be expected to behave. Understanding your ethnicity is an entirely different thing—e.g. legally, nobody cared if a person was french, german, or english if the question was 'black or white'. But you might care.