One of the strange things about the whole Justin Trudeau brown/black-face affair is that it makes someone like me, nonwhite, but unconvinced of the extreme racism of most white people, reflect a bit. I spent my formative years in overwhelmingly white environments and didn’t encounter that much racism. I did not know anyone who did black or brown-face. Or so I think. Could it be that behind my back this what a lot of white people were doing?
I’m skeptical, but I’m not sure.
That being said, Justin Trudeau is a certain type of “progressive” white person when it comes to racial matters who puts a lot of stock in symbolics. So this is pretty bizarre for him to have done repeatedly. My own personal issue with this is always that I don’t see these people revealing in their life choices that they believe all the stuff about diversity they say. These people marry white people, and they live among white people, and are friends with mostly white people, all the while talking loudly about how nonwhite people are awesome! (though to be frank my personal experience is once you disagree with a woke white person you are not so awesome anymore even if you are from a “community of color”….)
With the beauty of the internet, there is a simple way to check if some people “walk the walk.” A few days ago an educational consultant of some sort decried “dead white males.” The person was himself a white male. Out of curiosity, I wanted to see if this person who believes in diversity walked the walk of diversity. Within a few minutes, I uncovered the fact that this person lived in a 94% white neighborhood tract according to the census (the city in which he lives is 78% white).
This person, the author of Reaching and Teaching Students in Poverty: Strategies for Erasing the Opportunity Gap and Case Studies on Diversity and Social Justice Education has done quite well for himself. The house in which he lives is valued at $456,000 dollars in a city where the median home value is $280,100.
So how did I find all this out in a few minutes?
- Look up someone in Family Tree Now. I checked the CV of the person above to get a sense of age and where they had lived. Family Tree Now tells you where people have lived as well as their ages, so it allows one to make a positive identification.
- The easiest way to lookup demographics is Justice Map. It draws on census data. Put the address in, and you’ll see the racial demographics visually.
- Zillow has home values.
Why are these tools relevant? Sometimes it is useful to know where someone has “come from.” For example, it is easy to find out if particular people speaking on class issues who seem to be vague about their own background come from the upper-middle-class (lookup where they lived and the value of the home in which they grew up). Usually, when someone doesn’t mention their class background in this context they are privileged or grew up as such.
The racial stuff is more interesting because there is constant talk about it today in the United States. But in the choices well-educated Americans make they exhibit underlying beliefs and preferences often at variance with their averred values (at least once they have children; diversity is something of a ‘life phase’).
Sometimes the results of this snooping can be weird. Recently a black education professor at NYU wrote an op-ed weirdly stating that elite schools were eugenic. I mention his race because this warrior for social justice happens to live on a block that is 89% white near the NYU campus.
Canadian here (who didn’t vote for Trudeau). I know Trudeau himself married a White woman with blond hair (it may be dyed), but I know that one of his former ministers, John McCallum, is married to a woman of Chinese descent. Another minister – of finance – adopted a girl from Uganda. Then on the picture of Trudeau in brownface, where he’s playing Aladdin, he’s with a group of women, one of whom looks East Asian (the one on the far end away from him). This is when he was teaching at a private school in Vancouver, so I presume the woman was one of his colleagues at the time. Then again, are East Asian considered minorities anymore or “honorary Whites?”
1) I don’t know about the stratospheric international Choate-level or Greenwich-Bush-level elites, but I grew up with (came of age late 1970’s early 1980’s) and have subsequently lived with every white-people USA class from top .02 % on down to pure working class mixed-race hoods, and I would say, ah, aside from what I would guess to be boarding-school highlowjinks, it’s maybe frat-guy? type somewhat-monied troglodytic mentalities that might do blackface-type costuming just due to sheer clueless edge-seeking, (like Prince Charles dressing like a Nazi when he was 20 y.o. before his frontal lobes were fully matured). But generally speaking: no. Blackface very rare, very peculiar, very juvenile. I’ve never actually seen or heard about it done in my lifetime. Other than maybe yeah a harmless arab-type Halloween costume pre- 9/11, (when Arabs were still considered to be merely intriguingly romantically exotic, and not necessarily less-than). Even then, no. Can’t recall. So I feel confident assuring that there isn’t wasn’t weird black-or brown- face dress-ups going on surreptitiously all around. No. That did not go on, be assured. Eighth grader cowboys wanting to fight you for dating a white girl yeah. But blackface would generally be considered more than a little off, and, with the makeup part required to make it happen, actually a little…faggy.
2) The pain the U.S dumbshit young white SJWs rightly react to and are so eager to decry is at core a genuine heartfelt empathy for the ever-downtrodden black slave-descendents. That they include Razib-types in the racism-“call-out” overreaction is an over-extending to cover all browns, no matter how undeserving such browns may be of misconceived infantilizing empathy. Naively the SJWs stupidly include even international-elite Razib types. But really the urge at bottom is just trying youthfully half-blindly to relieve slavery-diaspora black-Americans and native indigenous “Indian”-types from their inherited disadvantaged state. Not that the SJWs are going to class-discomfit themselves or actually marry indigenes, etc. Cultural-class discombobulation more than strictly phenotypic-racial discomfort is more the cause of non-marriage, of that I am quite sure. White men find brown women perfectly reproductively alluring and would marry and bechild with them if the class-culture divides were not so great.
But to say that USA racism has diminished since the 80’s? Not so confident that that otherwise prevailing diminishing has occured toward vilified-policed-incarcated scapegoated ‘ghetto blacks’.
Two big reasons why the Trudeau dress-up stuff has landed with such a “meh” here are (a) the incidents are pretty far in the past, and (b) as PM, Trudeau largely backed up the “symbolics” with appointment of ethnic minorities, Indigenous people, and women to positions of high authority in the Cabinet. (The Cabinet is a much bigger deal in Canadian politics than it is in the USA.) Across the board, not all of his Cabinet choices were good ones, but most were.
That, and his policy moves while in government have largely been positive for racial minorities and Indigenous people.
The dominant view here is that the brownface and blackface are not demonstrations of racism, but of cluelessness and immaturity driven by life as a privileged rich kid.
I must say that my experiences have largely been the same.
The worst offenders are invariably the wokest.
“I did not know anyone who did black or brown-face. Or so I think.”
As I’m sure I’ve mentioned here we’re both foreigners and were living in the same state at the same time, tho’ our paths didn’t cross. I figure it like this: we’re Gen-X. We weren’t the most politically correct generation but we also weren’t prone to doing obviously lame stunts, like blackface.
If we wanted to shock people we tended more to Goth.
Canadian here, on one hand Trudeau was just playing dress-up, he’s a former drama teacher and as we saw from his India trip, he adores costuming. No harm intended.
On the other hand he and his acolytes would gleefully crucify any opposition politician caught in the same circumstances, so turnaround is fair play.
I have to disagree with Joe Q about the diversity symbolics in cabinet. Most of them have since discovered they were hired to be poster girls and not actually run their departments. Indigenous minister Jody Wilson-Raybould is a good example of this.
As with all progressives of Trudeau’s ilk, diversity is a means but not an end. In some ways the powerless tokenism of Trudeau’s “diversity” cabinet, was more racist than a cabinet full of middle-aged, AngloSaxon men.
No doubt I am out on the weird fringe because I don’t like Halloween and the way it seems to take over the month of October. But modern Americans seem to love getting into costumes. Blackface/brownface is another stupid costume. Big effing deal.
If one were to subscribe to “the secret sin theory of politics,” projection becomes a large factor in outward political and social views. So not exactly a surprise.
I know what you mean from other contexts, like people working with mentally retarded AND physically impaired people and always talking about how much they give back and how great people are, while at the same time, if its about their sexual partners, any bad spelling or slight physical deviation from the good norm will make them unbelievably arrogant and the best such people can hope for is that they being ignored. They really see their clients, at the lowest level, as being perfect beings, themselves caring for them, from a higher level, but they look down on everything in between, not middle-upper class, beautiful, educated, intelligent and politically correct.
I also agree that the background information of a person is highly important in evaluating his/her personal standpoint.
However, in this context, I have to disagree on two issues.
First disagreement:
The people we have sex with and the partners we choose is to such a high grade unplanned in the West, at least on the conscious level, that you can’t blame anyone for the partners he chose in detail.
Also, what do you expect from “non-hypocrites” by those standards? That they leave their same race girlfriend from college, saying goodbye with the words, “now I have to search for a minority girl, because I want to mix and don’t keep up my ‘white heritage’ in the family I want to create for a better, tolerant future”?
That would not just mean being open to other races, but truly sick of the own, which are two different things, even if they come together all too often in postmodern “white people”.
After all, what choices do we have with partners and family?
– Absolute positive or negative limitation: Like saying I will only marry people from this ethnic group, even clan, from this religious denomination, even sect, and no other. Or the negative variant: I will never ever come close to people X.
– Weak or strong, positive or negative preference: I prefer, but “it might happen nevertheless”, if its “the perfect match” f.e.
– Total indifference – I don’t care about the race of a potential spouse, I just look for individual qualities.
The individual qualities however won’t eliminate racial preferences completely, even if clearing for socio-economic standards. Because if you prefer a specific set of traits, some races might have it more often than others. F.e. one of the most leftist and multicultural persons I knew was very upset when a black guy who approached her, after she refused to have sex with him after a two minutes talk, called her “racist”, just because she didn’t want to. It was ridiculous, but she cried afterwards…
What you would have demanded as “honest” would be conscious, deliberate, planned panmixture. But that’s like saying: “You don’t like homosexual sex? You must be homophobic!” When in reality even people which had homosexual sex or desires, can hate, even to a pathological and violent degree, gay people. The one doesn’t preclude the other.
Second disagreement:
Like with homosexual preferences and desires, that people have sex or even children with people of other races doesn’t have to mean they are less racist in general, especially not, if its the male part. Just think about “colonial wives” of many European adminixtrators in places like America and Africa.
One of the reasons for this is sex differential:
Because in individual and group competition, its always about “the fertile ground”, and this “fertile ground” are the women.
Like in a miniature version the Andamans: As long as no foreigners stay on their island or impregnate their women, they are save. They could send people abroad, the males could even move out and make mixed children with the mainland population. It doesn’t matter, as long as their island is closed – they even killed a pregnant local woman and her “too white child” it was said.
Same goes with prehistoric and historic examples. It doesn’t hurt to send out males and make mixed children abroad, even on the contrary, it multiplies your genetic success. Females are much more involed and invest in the issue, because its the female part which will give birth to the child and which has to raise it in most situations. Therefore it always means more, both from the individual and group perspective, if females have foreign race partners. For males, not so much.
If a conquering male group mixed with the local females, did that make them love the males they killed before? Or those still running around, probably trying to fight back? No, because that were the competitors they had to get rid of before taking the ground.
And that is deeply ingrained in the human sexes, because its an old game, probably as old or older than the genus Homo. Females more often identify with the male or his culture, while males rarely do as much. They have to carry on, they have to raise the product, not the male as much.
The modern American situation, with “equal partnership” and stuff is a real deviation from the norm, still you can discuss the pattern observed.
Fact is, a “black guy” can have a mixed offspring with a “white female” and still preach black nationalism and anti-white sentiments.
A white guy can marry an Asian woman, but that doesn’t have to make him a friend of Latinos and Muslims, or open borders, or anything “diversity related” in general.
You can prolong this list ad infinitum, but you won’t prove that mixture with other ethnicities, races or religious groups makes a person by default more tolerant, egalitarian etc. than the Western average.
My third note is not directed to your comment Razib, but the term “Racism” as a whole. It came from a quite specific meaning of human races, or human biological groups, populations with a special set of inherited traits. It was, in any case, a genetically determined difference.
A lot of things which being now discussed under the umbrella term of “Racism” are not biologically determined at all.
The whole issue of “black-facing” being even ridiculed by a lot of very left people in Europe. The sensitivity some “word wars”, the cultural-political struggle for the civilizations future created in the USA always came with a delay to our continent.
In the end its always about pushing boundaries. If everything reasonable is already “mainstream”, you have to come up with a new provocation for your partisans and the mass media to keep the politial machinery and threatening alive and don’t allow a counterattack to happen. At first, even leftist politicians are surprised quite often, don’t know how to react, but since they want to be “the good guys” and don’t get attacked by “minorities” and ideologists from their alliances, they jump on the train regardless of how stupid it may sound to them.
Sometimes those which initiated such campaigns might be surprised themselves of how successful it became and that another push is even possible. But for many years now it became a one-way street, because nobody of “the good guys” want to stay in the way of “progress” and “more justice”.
A lot of things under the racial and sexist label are definitely about social norms and behaviour. I mean virtually nobody attacks a transgender person in a Western European context any more, especially no West Europeans, but they always have to push on. Like a 2 m guy walking around in hotpaints in a conservative neighbourhood, nose up, almost naked and with 30 cm high heels in broad daylight for his own pleasure. But surely, if anyone would say something to him about this being inappropriate, its just homophobic, its just the hate for all homosexuals speaking out of him. As if its not a strange and unpleasant sight for itself, especially for families and children. But no, they have to get used to…
On a similar level I don’t wonder you were not as much under “racist” attack. A lot of “racism” has little to do with race per se and more with a specific selection or behaviour of immigrants. Not just from which people immigration came from, but also which selection of immigrants came. Even machines would learn this, if they would have to make a “risks & gain” prediction, which is why some computer programs reacted “racist” as the media recently claimed.
For example Indian and Chinese immigrants in the US American West and South are above average for their home countries and of a good level for their destination too. They are rather productive and largely unproblematic immigrants for (any?) society. If you have a problem with a limited number of such immigrants, you almost certainly have to be a biological (hard) racist.
Another comparison would be someone with a South Asian phenotype in Europe. This person could appear as a
– typical American or European citizen by behaviour, just of obvious Indian descent
– recent high skilled immigrant with good manners and behaviour
– recent low skilled immigrant, but with sill good manners and behaviour, high working morale
– recent low skilled immigrant showing problematic, destructive and criminal behaviour
– recent immigrant who shows religous extremism – probably even in an obvious way, f.e. by how he’s dressed.
Cut between the first two and imagine a smaller or larger number with more or less of the first or second half. People in the country would, at some point, get a positive or negative “stereotype”. This would be unfair to individuals, but based on experience nevertheless and it might start from a positive or negative initial perception of the immigration. Its the social behaviour and numbers which would change the perception this or that way.
Also, a similar phenotype
– might be a Roma, but behaves normal
– might be a Roma with unusual dress and codes, f.e. like a gangster style with a lot of tattoos, gold jewellery and very colourful, shiny things in general, speaking and acting for the social milieu.
These and more social expressions can be presented by largely the same phenotype, so no or no big racial differences can lead to very different perceptions of the domestic population.
Even in places which have the reputation of being “intolerant”, a lot of people, would react very differently to a person depending on this cues and its attitude and the cues to it. The physical, genetically determined phenotype is just one part of it.
Is this racism? Not in my book. Because a European being dressed like an Islamic extremist might be as, or even more menacing, because the European converts which dress like that are always true extremists, whereas a lot of immigrants might be just “traditional”.
Though some would say so. But what’s this? If the recent Muslim Indian immigrant fights Salafism and the local convert fights for it, what is this? But the politically correct people like to ignore such objections, because their moral hammer is still mostly for the “white people’s” heads.
All of this has little to nothing to do with race, but with whether someone fits in the behavioural norm.
And the behavioural norm is where both the Capitalist and Christian-Marxist majority of pro-diversity people want to bring us all, despite racial and cultural differences which they like to ignore, or even better, eliminate.
Its the global unity they want to create. If they offer someone, especially immigrants, “this gift”, they are obviously pissed off if its being refused instead of “happily embraced”.
Because that was the plan from the start, to make this species and planet bow to “one god”, mammon, power and surveillance say the first, political correctness in an egalitarian-totalitarian world the second, with a lot in between and the possibilit yof “worst compromises” especially in the USA.
The best this “elite” can do is to exploit cheap labour from immigrants and use their vote and demographic power against the old domestic structures of self-defense and labour organisation, while they underline how great and humane they are allowing this to happen. As if it would hurt them. It was never so easy to a be a do-gooder in the West, if you have enough money and no conscience.
Also fun how discrimination by wealth and money is no issue any more – so good we can all concentrate on whether a politician did paint his face black in a carnival decades ago. Yes, that’s what really matters, climate change, gender issues and black-facing. The world is perfect otherwise.
Could it be that behind my back this what a lot of white people were doing this?
I’m white, and I’ve never seen it.
“That would not just mean being open to other races, but truly sick of the(ir) own.” You just described me – but in my case it was that I became truly sick of my fellow Australians and Australian culture. Truth is I never did like them very much or fit in very comfortably, despite my family having been in the country for several generations, and one line probably for at least >47,000 years, and genetically isolated for about 37,000 years. The complication is that I still love the country and crave the smells of the bush, just not the people who inhabit it, except for Aboriginal people for whom I have complicated love/hate feelings, but love is confined to Noongar and people of the Western Desert and northern Western Australia. I feel nothing for Yolngu and Aboriginal people of eastern Australia; their culture and languages are foreign to me.
Conversely I have known European men who married Chinese women as an act of racial or cultural domination (I suspect physical attraction for East Asian females – known colloquially as “yellow fever”- while being contemptuous of Chinese culture). It’s not rare. A lot of them claim that being in a mixed marriage proves that they are not racist, while they behave in a very racist manner and subjugate their wives in a very oppressive way. Mixed marriage in itself is no demonstration of anything. “It doesn’t hurt to send out males and make mixed children abroad.” So, yeah, that’s right. But it can indeed be a demonstration that the people concerned are not racist and are attracted by individual qualities regardless of race and culture, it’s just not a guarantee of it. You need to observe behaviour in individual cases.
Never known blackfacing or brownfacing among Australian whites I have known, but it does happen still in Australia for ‘comedic’ satirical effect at ‘private’ gatherings that get found out about. It happens a lot in China in a very public way, satirising Africans and Filipinas (i.e. females, not Philippine males) in TV advertisements and comedy shows, but there is increasingly strong objection to it by educated Chinese, just as there is to animal cruelty, eating dog meat, etc.
Not wanting to be pedantic, but when did f.e. replace e.g.?
I don’t think that how males treat their Asian wives is necessarily racist, but they just want to be the dominant part not having to deal with the Feminist ideology in their family. It can have a racist undertone, but it doesnt have to.
Also, its largely the same with some Eastern European brides. Oftentimes it works out for both sides for some years, until the wive get used and exposed to the Western conditions too much, with some families breaking up or changing roles.
The most authoritarian teacher from my whole educational lifetime had a wife from SEA. It was no coincidence.
“Blackfacing” in Catholic Europe is mainly associated with festivities for the biblical mages. Its the main event where you can see it, to present the dark saint. Has no negative undertone whatsoever.
All people I know talking about America and Australia after a longer time there talked about faked friendliness, hypocrisy and people being more dishonest. I have no experience whatsoever in this respect first hand, but I know American style business culture and how people behaved before.
Central Europeans make the impression of being negative and less friendly for Anglos, so you can’t have both I guess.
But its worth to note that a specific kind of Individualism and superficiality was born in England and spread from there.
I might quote Nietzsche:
Man does not strive for happiness; only the Englishman does that.
There is a deeper truth to that, becauseif being “happy” individually all the time is the main goal of a human, his life can only be a lie and superficial. In fact his life will both be meaningless and unhappy in the end, because short term hedonistic funktioniert doesnt give you a deeper sense and meaning.
But it makes individuals easier to control, better consumers and customers.
The West became rotten from that side of the channel long time ago. Even the demographic catastrophy and familial instability can be ascribed to that.
Some Europeans even want foreign partners because of this. They are sick of how the average compatriot approaches life, relationships and family planning.
As for my spelling: English is my second language and the faster I write, the more mistakes I make. Will keep that in mind.
Sorry, I didn’t mean to pick at you about language. Just convention – it means the same thing.
A lot of what you have said resonates strongly with me. “Some Europeans even want foreign partners because of this. They are sick of how the average compatriot approaches life, relationships and family planning.” Yes, exactly. Still need to find the right person though, and that means finding a good match on all of life’s big issues, or being willing to compromise on some of them. The really big one is money – that causes a lot of marital problems, especially in Anglo/E or SE Asian couples, because E and SE Asian people traditionally feel a financial responsibility towards their own families, and that does not sit well with a lot of Anglos. I don’t know anything about S Asian people in that regard. Anecdotally I read about a lot of problems concerning money for Indian women in Australia, but that is from overly financially demanding Indian husbands, not Anglo husbands.
Amen!
Always seems a bit odd to me when people ascribe to Britain a sort of Anglo individualism or anti-traditional hedonism…
At a coarse level, if you look at the typical World Values Survey shifts and position over time, GB’s not very extreme, and Anglo countries generally tend to skew more self-expressive but less secular rational and more traditionalist than most of the continent.
Britain still observes a number of class distinctions and social distinctions that are not particularly very individualistic, and are often thought of as a relatively hierarchical and class bound society. Europeans often describe British people as rather inhibited and parochial (“Little Englanders”, etc.) and rather reserved and indirect in language, not exactly self disclosing.
On the level of philosophy, of course British thinkers have tended to push towards hedonic arguments (Mill’s utilitarianism / liberalism), but also towards “common sense” skepticism of Continental rationalism and scientism (which has perhaps more to with France and Germany).
The work on relational mobility (how much people tend to and tend to feel free to drop and form new relationships vs obliged to stick with established ones) also tends to suggest that Britain is fairly average among Europeans (https://www.pnas.org/content/115/29/7521).
You could even argue relatively high TFR also suggests that family life is more of a priority in Britain, compared to living an individualistic lifestyle, relative to much of the continent or even low TFR places in East Asia.
Certainly I don’t think you can back project a priority of the individual ego back to Britain deeply in history – in the 19th century, would we have said the English Victorians were individualistic and expressive relative to the Romantic movement prioritizing the realization of the ego unbound from social obligations that was prospering on the Continent? And on happiness, Nietzsche may have thought the English were focused on happiness (though really, he means Mill), but Kant in 1764 thought “The feeling of the noble sublime predominates with the English, whose actions are guided by principles rather than impulses” (in contrast to what he thought of other European nationalities).
Generally, in the history of thought the transformation of societies to new values is thought to be better ascribed to philosophical movements that take in and involve the whole of the continent (though mainly France, Britain and Germany), and the transitions of values that take in the whole of humanity as individual wealth swells, and of the adoption of the values of the bourgeois, not a single emanation from Britain.
Americans do probably have particular tendencies around emotional expression that could perhaps be called superficial (if taking an uncharitable description!), but this is probably more to do with the history of migration and self selection than their connections to Britain (https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/05/what-your-smile-says-about-where-you-re).
@Matt: “Britain still observes a number of class distinctions and social distinctions that are not particularly very individualistic, and are often thought of as a relatively hierarchical and class bound society.”
Yes, that’s so true and its of great importance. What England lacks more than most Continental European nations is a national identity across classes which allows to feel completely interconnected. I’m not sure I say it the right way, but part of what I mean is that the English are in the European context a more caste-like and less ethnic people.
Self-expression and eccentricity are huge issues. It really shows off in a lot of activities and preferences which first appeared in Britain before anywhere else in the world. Some stayed there, a lot spread to the world for better or worse.
But its hard to talk about Britain as a whole, because its such a divided country, divided by regions and social class. From very traditional down to Earth countryfolk to eccentric middle class people which just lost their mind in a strange version of their little, individual, hobby-like reality. Without the British patriotism there is not much which keeps this people together. Differences appear to be smaller in this respect, or of a different, more ethnicity and traditional culture based nature elsewhere in Europe.