Actually I feel like you just brought up a topic I would like to hear more than just me/you opinion on. I'll make another thread, as I think most are ignoring this one at this point.
I did identify them. It's you who can't identify them - you don't like my fact and history based identification, but you have none of your own. You can't even identify the continent, the century, or the motivation, of your imaginary individuals. The people who were and are labeled against their will and contrary to their interests are making it an issue, and have been for some time. They aren't going to stop doing that because you don't like it.
No you did not identify them, you geberalized, there is a huge difference. They were individuals who made the labels, not white men. And labels are inherently not a bad thing. Ive shown why already. Man up, admit you are wrong.
The people who described themselves as "white men", between 1650 and 1850, in the US, classified the population of the US by "race" and assigned the labels - by law, by custom, by mutual agreement, all of them together, none of them particularly important. Nobody else had any say. That's as close as you will ever get to identifying the "individuals" you require - as you have already discovered, if you made the attempt - because that's as narrow as the category can be made and still agree with recorded history. These particular labels have been a bad thing, in fact. They were assigned for bad reasons to fictional classifications to abet slavery, and have had miserably bad consequences. We would have been much better off without them, or the racial classification system they formalized.
It was individuals who made the labels, not white men, you are still objectively wrong. And you did say why they are bad, you were simply just wrong, and I pointed out why. Admit it. You can do it.
Correct me, then. Identify these non-white, non-male individuals. Or the subset of white men you think was involved, significantly different from my description - showing, of course, how your identification aligns with recorded history (as I did, with my links). You have never addressed the matter of why I claim these labels have been bad. In fact you have ignored completely the reasons they were invented, and the consequences of their employment over the centuries since their invention. You even denied that the classification system that employed them was invented at all, when and where and by whom it was. Why is that?
Ive alteady addressed why these individuals cannot be identified, and why they cannot reasonably be lumped into a broad category and portrayed as white men. You choose to ignore yet are still objectively wrong. You identified nothing. You simply generalized. Big difference. And i directly spoke against your arguments, as they werent really properly thought out, just wild interpretation. Look throughout the thread.
reality check: Slavery was legal and practiced in each of the Thirteen Colonies at various times. Not all Africans who came to America were slaves; a few came even in the 17th century as free men, sailors working on ships. In the early colonial years, some Africans came as indentured servants, as did many of the immigrants from the British Isles. Such servants became free when they completed their term of indenture; they were also eligible for headrights for land in the new colony in theChesapeake Bay region, where indentured servants were more common. As early as 1619, a class of free black people existed in North America. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_negro Free blacks during the colonial period never accounted for a large proportion of the black population in Virginia, let alone the total population. But until the latter part of the seventeenth century, they enjoyed many of the same rights as free whites. Whites and blacks often worked and socialized together, and some free blacks, such as Anthony Johnson of Northampton County, apparently even owned slaves themselves. At the same time, freedom was considered to be a legitimate goal for enslaved blacks, who were able to earn money to purchase their freedom. Some, like Johnson, even had the legal acumen to argue for their rights in court. Once free, Africans and African Americans (blacks imported to Virginia from the West Indies or second- or third-generation Africans born in Virginia) were expected to live as members of the community, to become in some respects "black Englishmen." This meant owning land, voting, and paying taxes; http://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Free_Blacks_in_Colonial_Virginia It ain't never as simple as black and white.
No, you haven't. You have simply repeated your original false claim that I am wrong, over and over, without evidence or argument or even much attention to exactly how I am "wrong". Except insofar as it supports my point that the racial classification scheme the US ended up with was broadly sourced and culturally infused from the beginning, rather than a couple of guys getting a wild idea and selling the entire country on their new scheme, that background information is worth minding but not directly meaningful here. We weren't talking about slavery in particular. Which is among the reasons classifying people as members of a "black" or "white" race does immediate damage of various kinds, as well as setting the stage for the mess we have inherited now. That classification system was established by a particular, self-described and self-identified, demographically and sociologically dominant group of human beings in the US during the critical time, 1650 to 1850 (although, as linked, they were still filling in the details as of 1908 and even later). They called themselves "white men", and they acted in mutual agreement and cooperation in that matter. Nobody else had any say.
You have just repeated your false claims, and refuse to accept the objective fact that individuals made the labels, and that they serve a good purpose.
With links and arguments and evidence from me, don't forget. None from you, as yet. They served one of the least good purposes imaginable, and have no good role at present except aid in rehabilitation from the manifold consequences of that original evil if possible; they were the creation of most or all of an entire self-defined demographic group ("white" men) acting collectively and by mutual agreement (in several different State legislatures, in markets and towns up and down the entire eastern and gulf seaboard, in courtrooms and international trade organizations and foreign countries and offshore islands, for seven or eight generations), and all this is recorded history. You have a couple of books and several links to catch up on - as it is easy to see you have not researched this matter at all. Try answering this question: when, why, and how, did the Irish, Italians, and Finns all become "white" rather than remain in their initial classification (Irish and Italians "black", Finns "Mongol" or yellow as we know it now). Do some research, present your findings.
Yes links that you are parrotting, yet it is a self attesting truth that individuals created the labels, and not the white race. It is objective truth you cant square with. No matter how much you wish it so, it was not white men who did thay, it was individuals. And the labels serve a practical purpose. These are simple self attesting truth seeable by any with an objective mindset. Ive already presented the reasoning, just look above. Own up
It is a historical fact that self-described "white" men in the US created the US sociological races and the labels for them, acting collectively and by mutual agreement over a large region and many decades, in the early years of the formation of the country and the establishment of plantation slavery in the Americas. I linked you to several sources, hundreds of others are easily found on any standard browser using key words such as "history race origin America white black Irish Italian law" and the like. These races did not exist prior to their creation - a variety of other racial classification schemes did exist in some places and at some times, but not these US races (never before had the Irish and Italians and Finns and Slavs and Saxons and Turks all belonged to the same "race", for example, much less the Japanese and Han, and of course the Congolese and Micronesian peoples had never before been associated in any sense). The US "white" race did not definitely include Finnish immigrants until some time after 1908, for example, and in the early years of their immigration Finnish people frequently suffered from racial discrimination and bigotry due to their non-white status - I linked you to the final court case involved, above. Here again is a general and partial overview of the creation and establishment of the "white" race in the US, very incomplete but a decent start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_whiteness_in_the_United_States Once again: Yes, as before and above, you are again correct in making that statement yet another time - we agree that these US races and labels were and are useful for various practical purposes, in US society past and present (and in a couple of other places, such as certain Caribbean islands, although with some small differences. A similar but not identical system was also found useful in South Africa and nearby countries, yet another in a region on the east coast of South America, and another with its own small variations in the South Pacific). You are simply unwilling to acknowledge whose purposes those were and are, and what purposes they were and are. And that lack of awareness, that benighted ignorance and inability to acknowledge the basic facts of American society, is the biggest threat American democracy faces.
And it is a self attesting fact that portraying the actions of individuals as the actions of an entire race is inaccurate. You have yet to come to terms with that. That is a bigger threat to democracy.
That depends on who the individuals were, and why they acted. If millions of individuals who describe themselves and each other as members of a race act collectively and by mutual agreement over hundreds of years in direct and self-aware alignment with their self-adopted racial identity, it would be inaccurate to deny that their actions are those of a race. They themselves would disagree with you. In this case, of course, the situation is a little different. What we have is millions of self-identified "white" men who were acting collectively and by mutual agreement, but I was not describing the actions as those of a race, but instead as the actions of white men. We agree that all these white men were individuals, and since I regard their self-identification as a race to be an evil delusion I assign no responsibility to that race, but instead affix it to the individuals involved - merely identifying them as they identified themselves, "white men". This is a sound principle of identification, after all - one identifies individuals as they identify themselves, all else being equal. It's simple courtesy, and when there are millions of them - as there are in this situation - it's also practical. It's one of the practical uses of this ugly business of US racial identification - you favored that, remember?
What's your estimate? It has to cover the two hundred plus years and a third of a continent over which it happened (the Catholic Irish were moved from the "black" to the "white" race between 1800 and 1860 in New York and nearby regions, the Finns were added to the "white" race from the "yellow" race in Minnesota in 1908), and recognize that the people assigning the labels and deciding who should receive which one and agreeing on their employment and estaqblishing their common use hroughout their entire society were all men who described themselves as "white", and all men who described themselves as white.
It simply doesn't matter how many, or exactly whom they were, it is still a simple fact that the actions of individuals who sat down and created the labels, does not represent an entire race.
And we're full circle: "represent" is not involved, and has nothing to do with it, as pointed out to you pages ago. Neither does "entire race", as pointed out above. But if it truly doesn't matter how many or exactly whom, then you have no problem with the historical record: about five million of them, every single one self-described as a "white man", in the US, between 1650 and 1850. Nobody else had any say. And whether democracy in the US can survive the legacy of that original and founding evil, remains to be seen.
