#whiteness

(in reference to this post) Modern Greek people are not always "granted" whiteness. There is an enduring western narrative that Modern Greek traditional culture doesn't represent a continuation of Ancient Greek culture, but a "Middle Eastern corruption" from Ottoman influence, and this is sometimes extended to race as well, with a claim that the Ancient Greeks were Germanic-type whites with blond hair and blues eyes, and that the Modern Greeks with their Eastern-Mediterranean phenotype are actually Turks or at best strongly mixed-race, and thus do not count as "white".

You are not told you have no culture because you are English. You have no culture because you and your ancestors have bought into the lie of whiteness. England has a culture more than whiteness, even though there is much overlap. Insofar as a culture is a connection to land and family and community.

I'd kill for a life where my biggest battle to fight was my personal sexual and gender identities, instead of always having to shelve that to fight for other areas of my life that will smother me, kill me, leave me and my people colonized and dead long before I've had a moment to think about my sexuality.

a term I don't really like: kantasuomalainen. Suomalainen = a Finn, kanta = foundation, base. What does kantasuomalainen mean when it's used in the news = a white Finn who speaks either Finnish or Swedish. When asked, editors have tried to explain that it means a person whose family has lived in Finland for generations - but in practice, most of the time the whiteness is the relevant part when this term is used. Would they call a person whose grandma is from Norway or Russia kantasuomalainen? Yes. What about someone whose grandma is from Somalia? No. It's my understanding that this term gained popularity bc the media avoids talking about whiteness (and white supremacy) directly.

I'm thinking about this today bc there is someone going around and stabbing non-white people in Oulu. They have cycled past them and stabbed their pedestrian victims from behind. Every victim has luckily survived but the suspect(s) is still free and unknown (there are pictures circling which show a middle aged(?) white man fleeing the latest scene). The news writes that all the victims have a foreign background. However there was apparently some other cyclist in Oulu a year ago stabbing women who were all "kantasuomalainen". This previous attacker was deemed to suffer from some kind of mental illness (says the police, though I think it's notable that all the victims were women) and is not a suspect in these new cases.

But does it seem plausible that the previous attacker stopped to find out if the women's families had lived in Finland for generations? I think the articles are saying that the women looked like white Finns, so why not be direct about it! I think this is also connected to the apparent reluctance of the police to consider the ongoing stabbings as racist hate crimes.

The Finnish-speaking media is very capable of speaking about Finnish-speakers and Swedish-speakers when it doesn't want to imply that Finnishes is tied to being a native Finnish-speaker. (It's also less clumsy in Finnish: suomenkielinen, ruotsinkielinen).

There is also another term which I just hate: vihervasemmisto. You could translate it just as the Green Left but it emerged as an insulting term from the far right, which has no real definition. Punavihreä (Red Green) was and is a term that actual politicians used of their own policies, and is neutral (and which can usefully mean several things, like the subset of voters who vote either for the Greens or the Left Alliance in elections).

Like I had multiple bullies who each decided I was a different race and then harassed me because of that. I was picked on for being Mexican, Greek, Middle Eastern, Armenian, Indian. I am none of those things, but in the eyes of my white, Christian peers I was Other from them and they were dumbass high schoolers trying to figure out WHY.

Which is why it is extra funny to me when antisemites tell me that I am white, and only white, and not only that I am SUPER white because like. I've spent my entire life being bullied specifically because the white Christian kids I was brought up around felt that I was somehow Not Like Them and they went out of their way to try and figure out in what way I was Not White and then bully me for it. And these were just the kids who didn't know me or hadn't really heard much about my family, because all the OTHER people who bullied me went straight for me being a Jew.

Like not only does this personally nail down the point that no, Jews are not white and people will always find a way to make us not white (and IMO the whole "Jews are super white" is just the Progressive Way to do that, especially when it's white progressive who are trying to make Jews Even Worse Than Them by making us whiter than they are, thereby having someone else to point to when someone starts hating on white people and they don't want to have to face up to it).