#borderers

To state the obvious, Jeong is hardly alone in colorfully expressing anti-white sentiment, and it is this broader phenomenon I find most interesting. Honestly, I’ve been around this sort of talk, most of it at least half-joking, for most of my life. (Years ago, I even affectionately parodied it.) The people I’ve heard archly denounce whites have for the most part been upwardly-mobile people who’ve proven pretty adept at navigating elite, predominantly white spaces. A lot of them have been whites who pride themselves on their diverse social circles and their enlightened views, and who indulge in their own half-ironic white-bashing to underscore that it is their achieved identity as intelligent, worldly people that counts most, not their ascribed identity as being of recognizably European descent.

One reason I’ve been disinclined to take this sort of talk seriously in the past is that it has so often smacked of intra-white status jockeying. It is almost as though we’re living through a strange sort of ethnogenesis, in which those who see themselves as (for lack of a better term) upper-whites are doing everything they can to disaffiliate themselves from those they’ve deemed lower-whites. Note that to be “upper” or “lower” isn’t just about class status, though of course that’s always hovering in the background. Rather, it is about the supposed nobility that flows from racial self-flagellation.

But many of the white-bashers of my acquaintance have been highly-educated and affluent Asian American professionals. So why do they do it? What work is this usually (though not always) gentle and irony-steeped white-bashing actually performing?

…

But that doesn’t exhaust the universe of possibilities. In some instances, white-bashing can actually serve as a means of ascent, especially for Asian Americans. Embracing the culture of upper-white self-flagellation can spur avowedly enlightened whites to eagerly cheer on their Asian American comrades who show (abstract, faceless, numberless) lower-white people what for. And, simultaneously, it allows Asian Americans who use the discourse to position themselves as ethnic outsiders, including those who are comfortably enmeshed in elite circles.

Think about what it takes to claw your way into America’s elite strata. Unless you were born into the upper-middle class, your surest route is to pursue an elite education. To do that, it pays to be exquisitely sensitive to the beliefs and prejudices of the people who hold the power to grant you access to the social and cultural capital you badly want. By setting the standards for what counts as praiseworthy, elite universities have a powerful effect on youthful go-getters. Their admissions decisions represent powerful “nudges” towards certain attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors, and I’ve known many first- and second-generation kids—I was one of them—who intuit this early on.

…

So what if you’re an Asian American who has already made the cut? In that case, you might celebrate Harvard’s wisdom in judiciously balancing its student body, or warn that Harvard’s critics have a darker, more ominous agenda that can’t be trusted. This establishes you as an insider, who gets that Harvard is doing the right thing, while allowing you to distance yourself from less-enlightened, and less-elite, people of Asian origin: You’re all being duped by evil lower-whites who don’t grok racial justice.

It was in a (small) class for East Asian history of the past 2-3 centuries, one of the first week introductory sessions, and the professor, as part of a bit on how different both the past was and East Asia is, asked how many of us students had ever lived someplace without electricity or running water. So, a couple of the foreign students raise their hands, and so do I. And everyone turns to look at me. Finally, one of the ladies in the class blurts out “where are you from?”

“Alaska.”

Cue “ah”s of enlightenment.

So if you're a Milburn, Tailor, Armstrong, Scott, Little, any variation of Johnstone, Moffat, Elliot, Trotter, Nixon, Bell.. perhaps your family was, in some far flung not so distant past (1525), living in the anglo-scot border regions and cursed by the Archbishop Dunbar for the family's habit of theft, murder, drive by crossbow shootings, cattle rustling, sheep rustling, illegal production of spirits, stealing people, burning stuff down.....

THE BORDER OR RIDING CLANS CLAN CARRUTHERS CCIS

  THE BORDER OR RIDING CLANS     By the word “clans” is generally if not almost universally understood those of the Scottish Highlands, few being aware how important a part our clans played during the Middle Ages, and I trust, therefore, this little treatise concerning the Border, Riding or Foraying clans, Dalesmen, Marchmen or Borderers, as they were variously styled, may not prove…

Book Review: Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Strange Tales

Book Review: Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Other Strange Tales by Robert Louis Stevenson Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) wrote several “weird” stories as well as adventure tales like Treasure Island. This volume collects five of them. “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” starts us off with the adventures of Mr. Utterson, attorney at law. A respectable lawyer, he’s concerned about the…

CLAN CARRUTHERS-BORDER REIVERS-A CLAY BIGGINS

CLAN CARRUTHERS INT SOCIETY CCIS                 PROMPTUS ET FIDELIS

A CLAY BIGGINS

To the left is a little map of the Border Marches on each side of the English Scottish Border from the Solway Firth in the west to the North Sea in the east. This is the area that dominated the national history of England and Scotland from the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries. These Marches were the haunt…