The easiest bullet point to see this distinction for is "Christianity is the norm". It's not saying that being Christian makes you white, but that white people in the US made Christianity the norm. For example, people tried to cast Obama as un-American by claiming he was Muslim.
A longer bullet point to explain is the Scientific Method, but I'll take a shot at that one too. Science is a way to seek truth and reduce bias. However, the people who practice science are not fully objective actors free from bias. For example, evolution is absolutely true, but social darwinism is how many people understood evolution. A scientific truth was used to support a political position. People who would complain about inequalities could be said to be anti-scientific because they were arguing against the natural social order. Science itself isn't the issue, it's people using science to reject individual stories or support their priors.
So whatever that infographic is, if the people who wrote it would consider it a racist attack if someone else did it and used "black" instead of "white", it tells you how they really intend it, regardless of how they might edit the definition of "racism".
Black and White are not interchangeable. For your rule of thumb to make sense, you'd have to believe that Black and White people experience the US in the same way.
People will argue over the facts, naturally. That's as it should be. But if you are encouraged to criticize one race without penalty, whether the criticism is factually correct or not, but you aren't allowed to criticize another without being guilty of "racism", whether the criticism is factually correct or not, it's not about the facts. It's about who you can criticize and who you can't, regardless of your specific claims or evidence.
In other words, if you want to judge its nature, swap races. If the only thing that would happen if you swapped races is someone would say, "well then that wouldn't be factually correct", then it IS just about facts. But if instead, those in power would rage about racism and punish the "offender", they are not merely disputing facts. Something else is happening.
Suppose you criticize someone for being slow at reading. It's not the nicest thing to say, but it's run of the mill as criticisms go. But then suppose you criticize someone for being slow at reading who has dyslexia. That would be considered extremely insensitive and rude, even if it's factually correct.
Suppose you say "I screwed up". Pretty unremarkable; self-deprecation is common in our culture, and people won't consider it a sign you're being too hard on yourself, unless the mistake you made was extremely minor or harmless. But then suppose you say "You screwed up". That would be considered far too aggressive and direct for most situations.
Of course it matters who you're criticizing.
Even if it is Americans making these statements in an American context, the Internet and the media broadcasts them to the rest of the planet.
You have to think, not just about whether they make sense in an American context, but also whether they make sense in the non-American contexts in which they are being received.
Your other comment about the Australian experience was interesting and it's useful when comparing the US to the rest of the world. However, it feels like you're trying to say I'm off topic because I'm discussing an American document and an American reaction by using American history.
This American talk about "whiteness" doesn't just get posted in an American museum. It gets posted on Twitter etc and then people on the other side of the planet read it. And the people on the other side of the planet may understand it very differently. But Americans never seem to think about that. (And I'm not saying the concept of "whiteness" might not have some application or usefulness in other countries, including Australia-but it certainly doesn't have an identical application.)
Or, maybe one is a non-US-based employee of a US-based multinational company, and the company leadership starts promoting all this talk to the entire company, without seeming to ever stop to think about how much sense it makes in a non US-context. (But would any non-American employees dare raise the question of how US-centric the biases of its US-based management are?)
So, my relatives want to know, are the baizuo (white leftists) claiming that in China, nothing white people say about or do to Chinese or blacks can be racist? Or are they claiming that they are actually "in charge" of us in China?
Then why call them white at all? Is his a cultural, or a racial definition? Do you believe the two can be separated?
>A longer bullet point to explain is the Scientific Method, but I'll take a shot at that one too. Science is a way to seek truth and reduce bias. However, the people who practice science are not fully objective actors free from bias. For example, evolution is absolutely true, but social darwinism is how many people understood evolution. A scientific truth was used to support a political position. People who would complain about inequalities could be said to be anti-scientific because they were arguing against the natural social order. Science itself isn't the issue, it's people using science to reject individual stories or support their priors.
I'm honestly not sure how to respond to this. It sounds like you mean to say that science was sometimes used in a biased way. This may be true in some sense, but it's not clear that this has anything to do with the scientific method itself being a "white value."
White is a cultural definition in the US which used to be legally defined and still carries cultural implications. It is intrinsically tied to race because race is also culturally defined. The US's "one drop" rule defined people's race as Black even if the vast majority of their ancestry was "White European".
As an analogy, consider the names we give various colors. We can tell that light blue and dark blue are different colors, but in English we will default to calling them both 'Blue'. In Russian, you cannot call those two the same color. There is a continuous gradient of colors, and we divide those colors into different named categories due to culture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_term#Basic_color_terms
Culture determines racial boundaries as well, since there are no clear genetic/cultural dividing lines between the "races". Slavs used to be excluded from Whiteness in the US because they were considered "Asiatic", but now we consider Slavs "White".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_whiteness_in_th...
So to answer your questions, "White" is a cultural concept which is used to define racial boundaries in the US.
> it's not clear that this has anything to do with the scientific method itself being a "white value."
The scientific method is not a "white value", but whiteness values scientific data over interpersonal opinions. One example would be: "IQ tests show that Black people are dumber than White people, and that explains why there is an income gap". You would be elevating scientific data over personal narratives of schooling and job discrimination.
I'm not saying that science is bad, what I'm saying is that science is a combination of technical and cultural aspects. The bullet point is referencing the cultural motivations and impacts of science more than the technical aspects.
Right, but this was a bad time. We should be moving on from this. The infographic apparently does the opposite: reinvigorates, and then accidentally claims that white traits are mostly superior. I know you're going to claim that there are not value judgements in the info graphic, but the opposite of hard work, individualism, and the scientific method are in fact bad things. (And, even if you're non-white, the Greco-Roman heritage is in fact a large part of how the American system of government came to be.
I'm trying to be constructive because we're on hn, but I have to say I'm absolutely disgusted by the modern tendency to reduce everything to race. The color of someone's skin is not important, and people of the same skin color don't all share the same values. More importantly, racial groups cannot "own" values such as hard work, and formal logic.
"White" is not a cultural concept. People on the new left are trying to make it a cultural concept, and it's backwards and racist.
You can't discuss racism without discussing race and skin color. I'm trying to think of why you wouldn't think talking about race would be helpful, and this is what I came up with: race isn't a problem in modern America; discussing race causes racism; or examining race & racism creates racial differences.
> but the opposite of hard work, individualism, and the scientific method are in fact bad things.
These are good traits, but their "opposites" aren't inherently bad.
- Hard work is the key to success; "work smarter not harder"
- The individual is the primary unit; cooperation and mutual assistance.
- Scientific Method: "Quantitative Emphasis"; qualitative readings of personal narratives such as interviews.
> accidentally claims that white traits are mostly superior
This is addressed in the webpage, and is the entire point of the graphic. "Racism is perpetuated by deeming whiteness as superior and other racial and ethnic groups as inferior. … [The superior traits] describes the experience and attitudes of those who are members of the dominant, privileged, or powerful identity groups."
The infographic is asking you to examine why you think these traits are superior. That doesn't mean they're inferior, but they aren't the best in every situation either.
Hard work
“Delayed gratification”
Planning for the future
The “nuclear family”
Rational thinking
Promptness
Politeness
“Decision-making”
Personal responsibility
Speaking standard English
I guess where some non-Americans feel concerned about this, is the tendency to export US discourses about race to the rest of the English-speaking world (and even the world more broadly), despite the fact that other countries have different histories and cultures and understanding of what the words mean.
The Australian Human Rights Commission recommends analysing racial and cultural diversity in Australia in terms of four broad categories [1] – Indigenous, Anglo-Celtic, European, and non-European. ("European" is defined to exclude Anglo-Celtic people.) Slightly reminiscent of the American "one drop rule", people of mixed backgrounds are assigned to the more diverse background. By contrast, the US has an official classification of people into five different races [2].
Australia does have a rather horrible history of racial discrimination – for example, the "White Australia Policy" which for decades banned non-European immigration. However, I think the way Australian officialdom (governments, academics, etc) have tried to deal with that, is to avoid using racial categories like "white", and focus primarily on culture and multiculturalism. They are happy to talk about different ancestries/nationalities/cultures (Italian, Chinese, Indian, Lebanese, etc), but grouping them into racial categories is avoided in official contexts, although it still sometimes happens in less formal contexts. (Journalists sometimes talk about "Asian Australians" or "African Australians", but the government prefers to talk about Chinese and Filipinos and Sudanese and Eritreans.) When it is necessary, they'll split them into not explicitly racial groupings like Indigenous/Anglo-Celtic/European/non-European. That splits two groups of people both considered "white" in the US (Anglo-Celtic and European), while lumping together as non-European both some people officially considered "white" in the US (e.g. Lebanese people), and also multiple non-"white" races (Asian, African, Pacific Islander).
I think Australia's ways of dealing with its history are at times quite different from those of Americans, precisely because their histories are in many ways quite different. But I think many Americans unconsciously assume that understandings of race and culture that make sense in a US context must make sense for the rest of the world as well.
[1] https://humanrights.gov.au/sites/default/files/document/publ...
[2] https://www.census.gov/topics/population/race/about.html
(Throwaway because I'm scared of talking about race and culture using my real name.)
Were the Obama religion conspiracy theories being driven by "Christianity is the norm", or by Islamophobia? Suppose, counterfactually, that instead of a nominally Muslim father and stepfather, his father and stepfather had been Jews or Hindus or Buddhists? And, likewise, suppose, that instead of spending some of his childhood in majority Muslim Indonesia, he'd spent it in Israel or Nepal or Thailand? And, suppose instead of an Arabic-derived middle name, he had a middle name derived from Hebrew or Sanskrit or Pali?
An "Obama is a secret Hindu" or "Obama is a secret Buddhist" conspiracy theory would have had far less steam, because whatever misconceptions the average American likely has about those religions, far less Americans fear them than fear Islam.
And "Obama is a secret Jew" would have struggled because it sounds antisemitic, and antisemitism is far more taboo in American culture than Islamophobia is.
Anti-Muslim sentiment in American culture is largely specific to Islam, most of it is not driven by some generic "hate everyone who isn't Christian" sentiment.
The same propaganda machine that labelled Obama "a socialist Muslim Kenyan agent and anti-Christ" also assassinated the character of Bill and Hillary for 30 years (including attributing something like 40 murders to them) and later credited them with the "under age sex trade ring" (queue PizzaGate and the QAnon canon). Then they attacked Obama's birth certificate. The same thing happened with Obama's advisers (eg. Valerie Jarrett).
It's a power play by politically-biased news sources which convince people of conspiracies. The details are irrelevant because the conspiracies that don't gain traction are left behind and the propaganda evolves. The only details that matter are the ones that best apply to Confirmation Bias.
The NYTimes has a podcast called RabbitHole[1] which describes how this works so well on the internet and reverse engineers how a YouTube visitor was radicalized and later rejected his previous radicalization views.
The fact that there are a plethora of conspiracy theories in the ideology and that it's largely people who identify as Christian or are pro-Christian seem tangential to me.
The "natural social order" for humans isn't scientific because there is none that we can identify, unlike in animals with much simpler social structures. Social Darwinism isn't based on evidence, being promoted by quacks that are anti-science.
You're trying to draw a distinction where there is none.
Science is the way to seek truth. And yes, we should use scientific evidence to reject anecdotes, if that evidence is strong enough. Not sure what you mean in your last sentence but it sounds wrong to me.
I hope I’m totally wrong about my interpretation about the infographics and I hope my frustration is unsubstantiated.
1. "Whiteness and white racialized identity refer to the way that white people, their customs, culture, and beliefs operate as the standard..."
2. "Whiteness (and its accepted normality)... communicate hostile, derogatory, or harmful messages." [ed. because whiteness causes microagressions.]
3. "Racism is perpetuated by deeming whiteness as superior and other racial and ethnic groups as inferior."
4. "White supremacy is an ideology where white people are believed to be superior to nonwhite people."
5. "[I]nternalized racism, [] happens when an oppressed group believes the racial views that society communicates are true, and they act as if they were true."
So, if the graphic isn't clearly critical, the page is. If you hold the "white" ideas in the graphic as "superior," that is to hold "whiteness" superior. Holding whiteness superior is the definition of "white supremacy." If you hold these "whiteness" views as a minority, it is because you have internalized racism -- the "whiteness" has colonized your mind.
Families. Science. Christianity. Hard Work. Democracy. If you think any of these are superior, it's "white supremacy." If it's not properly nuanced, this is how it's being churned out for the masses.
Also, this comes from 1990. A lot has changed since then. Maybe it's not quite as controversial to be non-Judeo-Christian, for example.
I think the infographic connotes a negative view of whiteness, and that translates to racist, IMO. -
However, absolutely nothing about it suggests that "internalizing aspects of white culture" makes you a racist. It's fine if you don't respect or understand the idea that the web page is trying to communicate here because frankly they did a shamefully bad job. They are preaching to the choir. But absolutely nothing about it suggests the thing that angers you. You are bringing that idea to the infographic with you.
[1] https://nmaahc.si.edu/learn/talking-about-race/topics/whiten...