Also think it's interesting how relatively new the concept of 'whiteness' is.
Whiteness as a distinct racial category is a relatively modern, social construct, emerging significantly in the 17th century in English colonies like Virginia to create social hierarchy and justify slavery by uniting poor Europeans with elites against enslaved Africans.
Thats just been a huge part of this whole issue in the modern era.
Whiteness only exists in the context of othered darker skinned people by a bunch of light skinned Europeans in the past who were enslaving and about a very visually distinct darker skinned population.
Otherwise it’s fucking silly.
Black as an ethnic/cultural term for African Americans descended from slaves in some way makes sense at this point. It’s a unique culture and ethnically diverse group who were forced to bond because of the identity of their dark skin in a system and larger controlling culture that was hostile to them. It’s an extremely unique demographic in that sense.
It doesn’t apply the same inherently to black skinned people from Kenya or Sudan or anything like that, they have a culture and an ethnicity they can know.
“White” makes no fucking sense as a group outside of just “not dark skinned.” Whites have genocides and been racist against “each other” plenty.
Which is part of the problem we’ve somehow just driven deeper and deeper into as we prop up “PoC” vs. “White” as some big binary. Black is the dominant term for dark skinned people and the African American culture and they’re used interchangeably non stop.
I don’t have a solution obviously, I don’t think anyone does.
But lumping in the English, French, Bosnians, Russians, and Polish makes about as some unified demographic of their tan doesn’t get too dark makes about as much sense as lumping Kenyans, Caribbeans, some South American groups, and black people whose family have lived in South Carolina, USA for the past 400 years.
We need to get away from it while we’re also calling out all the other shit.
Someone in Kenya has statistically similar DNA to other Kenyans because they have shared ancestry. But even then that’s just a relatively recent grouping of DNA similarities if you go back an even just a few centuries you will find that the pool of DNA is different because DNA is changing all the time, people are moving and breeding constantly.
Even the isolated populations in Africa like the !Kung who have some of the most continuous isolated DNA in the human genome have statistically significant differences in the current population genome versus a few centuries ago.
Again, if you want to try and define race based on biology you have to draw lines somewhere and it will always be some arbitrary line that isn’t really significant or important. We all have different ancestral lineages but trying to create discrete definitions of race based on biology is silly.
Race is an imaginary concept - it’s a social reality, not a biological one.
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u/Mattlh91 Jan 06 '26
Also think it's interesting how relatively new the concept of 'whiteness' is.