If you look at statistics around the world, white people have built-in advantages wherever they make up a significant portion of the population, in terms of life expectancy, infant mortality, income, class mobility, etc. Even in countries where they constitute a tiny minority (like in South Africa), whites overwhelmingly enjoy better standards of living than the indigenous, colonized people they share their land with. This isn't by accident.
No, it's not by accident - it's the result of European colonialism. The fact that European colonialism 'got there first' (ahead of, say, a global Ottomon hegemony) is itself an accident, though.
European imperialism is unique in history, in my opinion, in that it used scientific reasoning to justify oppression.
The science may have existed, and European societies were themselves racist, but this wasn't the motivation for colonialism itself. Funnily enough,
Pocahontas has quite a pithy explanation:
"The gold of Cortez
The Jewels of Pizorro
Will all seem mere trinkets
By this time tomorrow"
European colonialists wanted land, wealth and prestige - just like any early modern, medieval or classical society. 'The white man's burden' was a perverse attempt to justify the British Empire's presence in India on racial grounds, long after the British set foot there for commercial reasons. European colonialists were racist, yes, and the outposts and structures they enforced were systematically racist, but racism was not their motivation in the first instance.
We could just as easily been talking about a world that systemically advantaged Japanese, Chinese, etc. descended people
There's a multitude of reasons for this, and views on race don't really feature (the suggestion that the
Japanese didn't have the mentality for empire seems way off
) . Europeans happened to be internationalist, intensely competitive with each other, had political structures that rewarded the profit margin, and developed the appropriate technologies for overseas operations - again, by accident of history and geogrpahy. Some decent books are:
-
Empire and
Civilisation (both Ferguson)
- The English and their History (Tombs)
- Why Nations Fail (Acemoglu and Robinson)
An Irish or Italian person, who may have been oppressed and other-ized as non-white two centuries ago perfectly fits under whiteness today.
This is the weird thing about how the American race debate has developed - Irish and Italian people are clearly white and have never been anything else. The legacy of black slavery is so pernicious and pervasive in the States that the language has undergone a kind of back formation wherein white skin is such a strong precondition for systemic racism that oppressed white people stop being white! It's bizarre to many of us Old-Worlders; these days, I'm in the habit of mentally replacing the term 'whiteness' with 'middle class' and suddenly the entire discussion makes much more sense.
A good example is here how Irish stereotypes were the exact same thing they used for black people
I'm not sure there's anything novel going in here, animal analogies are a pretty common trope in any kind of racism going back centuries - apes, pigs, rats, cockroaches, termites etc.
"i'm not racist, but...racism isn't based on race. And reverse racism exists, so everybody is awful"
I have no idea how on Earth you found these words in my previous post.