"AT LEAST I'M WHITE!"

Brenton Tarrant sounds like a name made up by a wannabe Bronte sister for an anti-hero in a tragic novel.  Sometimes life imitates art.  Tarrant's claim is that "races are real things".  I will argue here that "races" are fictions that follow incoherent forces in reality, becoming lethally powerful.

Races are not nationalities, because a citizen is defined as a claimed inhabitant of a circumscribed area.  Some want appearance to be the same as the location, but American "whites" don't look like the people who really come from America. Or what "race" would say you say Idrus Elba is?  He doesn't look like historical Brits, but he's as wealthy, accomplished, tailored, well-spoken and handsome as any contemporary Brit. (Is Elba the same as Alba? White? How funny.)

Races are not physiological since they can easily mix-and-match their characteristics in babies, even those who have never had contact before, and will eventually fuzz out.  But the Austen notion that marriage is crucial attaches to race, because to her the point of marriage is to guarantee the prosperity of one's life.  In her time race was socioeconomic rather than physical, so the consequences of having physical characteristics that are obvious are not directly caused by skin color or kind of hair but that those characteristics have become markers of one's status in the culture.  They're like clothes: not fashionable.  Evilly, low status is permission for others to abuse and oppress without anyone blaming the oppressor.

Low status is matched with wickedness because if that's the only way a person can survive, that's what they must do.  The Bronte sisters write about being poor but countering with education, so that no matter how much they are tempted to compromise or sin, they don't.  There is a long Euro tradition of people who were once important and powerful, who have fallen upon hard times, and who compensate by emphasizing their educations, their fine manners, their knowledge and virtue.  This thread is in my own Scots family who hoped that a new start on the American prairies as homesteaders would make them safe. "At least we have books," they said, and the neighbors were impressed.  

On the rez in the Sixties there were always a few debauched old alcoholics who would croak, "At least I'm white."  Those who believed in race would half-listen.  The drunks never left the rez because no one else cared -- they were mostly white in a white world.  It's only the mixing, the cross-overs, the events through history, the intensity of sex prejudice. that make race mean anything.  There is a history of Germans passing as Scots. (Elizabeth II is German. Uncomfortably.)  

A war kicks up race as hatred, so part of the reason my mostly-Scots grandmother was happier in Canada during WWI was that she was afraid of what the US neighbors would do to her if they knew she was part German.  In the Sixties on the rez a family of German tourists asked us why "Indians" were so hostile to them in the café at lunch. They LOVED Indians! But many of the Indian men around them were veterans of WWII.  Like my white brother-in-law veteran,  they hated everything German.

And yet a strand of German idealist philosophy is the near worship of indigenous people and their ways.  Groups meet to try to duplicate the culture of American indigenous people and make meticulously accurate "artifakes."  Extreme hatred and extreme love often have relationship in their intensity, their emotionalism, their black/white stance.  They grab "race" as a rationale for both extremes.

But this is only for those who can live in their heads because their environment doesn't challenge them to change.  People who work together look at performance, the same way as artists and musicians do.  But performance is an individual measure and, alas, race prejudice is about groups, the community, proving belonging to one team by hating the other one.  Hardships push people into groups in order to resist together.  Then love and curiosity blur the boundaries.

Refusal of change, valuing permanance, was once admired as strength and significance. But no more -- ask the Pope.  Some things have changed very much and even more remain to change.  Wanting to be one race, one belief, only and forever, is an excellent cover for corruption and evil. "Do you want to make us look bad?  That's treasonous!"  Appearance overcomes the reality.

Despite the efforts of PBS, Austen and the Brontes have nothing to say about mass murder in the name of "white" superiority. In their stories such monsters would be struck by lightning and fall over the Dover Cliffs.  Today our community is every living thing on this planet.  The "category boxes" matter very little in a world of horizontal DNA exchange, the interpenetration of all the consequences.
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This blog is partly reacting to the blog post below.

https://weeklysift.com/2019/03/18/fear-of-white-genocide-the-underground-stream-feeding-right-wing-causes/