According to a fairly arbitrary decision of which sub-groups to split up further and which to see as one.
And quite likely, you will also need another fairly arbitrary decision of which groups to include as "white" (if you included Turkic people as white, and saw them as a single group, I'm pretty sure there are more of them than Slavs).
I have a theory based on absolutely nothing that cultures rarely ever fundamentally change. When Americans decided that racism is bad, they didn't reject the racial theory as a whole, they just concluded that some details of its application were wrong. Otherwise it's difficult to explain why a seemingly race-blind society keeps discussing race all the time, and dedicates so much effort into preserving information about who is what race. Similarly, despite democratic revolutions, both Russian and Chinese societies keep going back to some form of monarchy - this form of governance is just deeply ingrained in their culture, and you won't change it overnight.
> Otherwise it's difficult to explain why a seemingly race-blind society keeps discussing race all the time, and dedicates so much effort into preserving information about who is what race.
I think a core problem there is that people fail to realize that emphasizing and celebrating the own ethnicity/gender/sexuality/religion opens the door for discrimination along those lines.
Demonstrating "pride" to belong to some group is never consequence-free, and often a really bad trade-off overall.
I basically agree. There should be no pride or shame in things you can't take neither credit or blame for. I also don't buy the common argument that taking pride in something is necessary to counterweight the shame associated with it in the past.
But I also think there are positive ways of celebrating your culture.
> But I also think there are positive ways of celebrating your culture.
I think you're right, I was being too prohibitive.
When people start to reduce their own identity (and their judgement of others) to just one dimension is where the actually dangerous territory starts, but it is a very easy position to end up in sadly (even right after being on the receiving end).
Interesting fact - "white ethnicity" is used mostly in context of a "racial theories" by Germanic and Anglo-saxon societies according to which Slavs are not white, yet Slavs somehow believe they belong to the "white group". Hint - it's not about skin shade or color. The Germanic complex of Slavs is a real thing, e.g. some Slavs believe they are superior because they "descend from Vikings".
You might be referring to the works of Madison Grant where he split whites into three groups: Nordics, Alpines and Mediterranean. The Nordics are seen as the most white, Alpines as less white and Mediterraneans even less white. In this case Slavic people are in the Alpine class.
If you look at Viking migration by DNA, you can find 1:1 match with Grant's Nordic peoples areas in Europe.
"White" in USA means "Anglo-Saxon Protestants + some groups we accept as close enough".
Makes no sense, but the whole idea of races is dumb from the start (same skin color is a very bad proxy for DNA similarity), so it's pointless to correct them.
Calling anyone in the US "Anglo-Saxon" is already buying in to a mythology about ethnic origins. Even in England I doubt you'll find many people whose ancestry is derived mainly from the Angle and Saxon tribes as opposed to being a mix of pre-Celtic British, Celtic, Norman, other Germanic, etc.
And Protestantism didn't exist until centuries after the Anglo-Saxons stopped being identifiable groups, if they ever were
Africa's higher human diversity is mainly in low-population groups like the Khoisan. The big groups are not nearly as diverse (although they do carry some Khoisan genes, for example).
Indeed really not true. For example: I am quite mixed, declared my own race on an unclaimed spot of non-scientific identity-formation, and despite what some would say and discounting any possible future irradiation, my genitic diversity is absolutely zero ;-)
In the 1940 US census, "white" included anyone of Mexican descent.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt promoted a Good Neighbor policy that sought better relations with Mexico. In 1935, a federal judge ruled that three Mexican immigrants were ineligible for citizenship because they were not white, as required by federal law.
Mexico protested, and Roosevelt decided to circumvent the decision and make sure the federal government treated Hispanics as white. The State Department, the Census Bureau, the Labor Department, and other government agencies therefore made sure to uniformly classify people of Mexican descent as white.
This policy encouraged the League of United Latin American Citizens in its quest to minimize discrimination by asserting their whiteness.
The race category of "Mexican" was eliminated in 1940, and the population of Mexican descent was counted with the white population.
Wasn’t being “white” legally required to vote in federal elections for most of US history? Were any of these groups ever prohibited from voting on the basis of not being “white”? I have never heard of that happening, have you? I think that would answer the question, since the government was actually in the business of determining “white”-ness at that time, and unless I’m mistaken, all of those groups were determined by the federal government to be “white”.
> Slavic peoples were considered to be people of an "inferior race" who were unable to assimilate into American society.[4] They were originally not considered to be "fully white" (and thus fully American), and Slavic peoples' "whiteness" continues to be a debate to this day, but most people consider them to be of Caucasian culture
"white" is a racist label that does not take into account the complexity of world history. It may be reasonable to use it in contexts of historical racism, e.g. in America (where many Slavic people were almost absent) or Sub-Saharan Africa (zero Slavic presence during colonial times), but it just does not make much sense elsewhere, e.g. it's absolutely irrelevant when describing ethnic tensions between Slavs and Caucasians or Central Asians.
Not if you consider all the modern negative connotations of being called "white". Eastern Europe was under colonial rule (of Russian empire) up until 1980-90s.
Russians are Slavs too. They are the last remaining colonial empire and historically one of the worst bullies ever.
Poles are Slavs, and they colonized EE before Russians took over.
It's just a pointless subdivision within a pointless hierarchy.
Races as defined by Americans don't match skin color nor DNA proximity.
Skin color doesn't match DNA proximity.
And none of these map cleanly into "bully vs victim" subdivisions. Mostly because groups of people move from bullies to victims and back over time. People who systematically have the chance to bully others will eventually do that.
Doesn’t the word “white” obviously refer to the skin color? If you think it has to bring something about colonialism it’s probably because you have somewhat of a twisted perception of reality.
No, just someone who is not a jingoist for an Eastern European country.
Though I'm sure Russian jingoists over 60 today too prefer to see Soviet-allied states as "their empire". It's no more true than saying Argentina was a US colony - which means yes, you could say it, but we'd all be dumber for thinking of it like that.
