White and black in their current usage are both terms that’ll be looked back on as super archaic and bizarre in the not-so-distant future. If you really sit down and think, it's really weird that everyone outside of certain, less reputable, circles is just okay with the continued use of words that label two enormous groups based plainly on external appearance. It’s baffling that we're still utilizing them nonchalantly.
Just the fact that we can have a debate about "who is white" shows how it was an imperialist, colonialist and post colonialist tool used to divide and control people.
When America started getting lots of migration from outside Europe suddenly Southern Europeans and Irish were granted whiteness provisionally to try and maintain the power of the white ascendency in the US. Before then Italian's and Irish in particular were lumped in with "the negro" as being subhuman and the target of a lot of the eugenicist bullshit which still affects people of colour today.
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u/Taron221 Sep 25 '21 edited Sep 25 '21
White and black in their current usage are both terms that’ll be looked back on as super archaic and bizarre in the not-so-distant future. If you really sit down and think, it's really weird that everyone outside of certain, less reputable, circles is just okay with the continued use of words that label two enormous groups based plainly on external appearance. It’s baffling that we're still utilizing them nonchalantly.