Racism amidst the Remnant

[Harry_Allen]

Thanks, @Paul62.

You said:

@Paul62

Could you expound a bit more?

In response:

Yes.

HA

[Arkdrey]

The problem with this reply is that you’re giving it now ; retrospectively. Thus, it sounds self-serving.

Sure. It actually is self-serving, because I can’t expand energy on complex point-by-point responses that end up in circular rehashing.

But, as well, when I said that a person’s culture is what they do , and you gave a response that I then called gobbledygook , I didn’t leave it there. I supplemented that charge with this question: If a person’s culture doesn’t reside in their thought, speech, and/or action, then where does it reside? Where is it?

I believe I responded to this one, at least indirectly. If I didn’t I’ll respond again.

Your point about culture is projecting collective on personal. So you seem to think that there’s something like “global white culture” that produces same results no matter where it is and you then claim that from personal experience.

I’m saying that it’s categorically wrong, and you don’t understand culture from perspective of how it relates to groups and individuals occupying those groups.

What we call culture, is a combination of epigenetic and memetic information. Such information doesn’t merely exist as a contents of someone brain. We no longer live in the oral culture. Most of the information we receive today is communicated through mediums that we select to consume. Like books, articles, Wikipedia, movies, music, etc - are all examples of non-brain source memes. You can read more about memes and memetics here:

Meme

I can read the Bible and Jewish encyclopedia and begin practicing Jewish culture. If no Jews remained, their culture still exists in the wide variety of non-brain mediums that we use for communication where such cultural memes live. As a result, there are traditional elements which may be maintained through some form of “token orthodoxy”, like Royalty in Britain still maintained, but these elements have no power, or have diminishing power in society. The are more like celebrated tokens of identity, more than they actually drive any everyday discourse. Ukrainians don’t walk around in “traditional Ukrainian attire” they walk around in a wide mix of clothing which is selected through wide range of socio-economic and selective processes. Hence, you can’t really consolidate “Ukrainian dress”, for example, into some cultural norm of behavior that’s unique.

That’s the same case with any culture out there. It’s not some monolithic sets of behaviors that everyone adopts.

Hence, it’s an extremely oversimplified position that there some kind of clean continuum between lighter shades of skin and what you choose to focus on and filter as “white culture”.

I hope that clarifies what I meant by culture not merely limited to person’s brain?

My second objection was not merely about cultural function, but the way you categorize and consolidate wide range of cultures into “white people” and claim that all of them “act like white people”, which constitutes some global “whiteness”.

Can you defend your position above?

What are some sets of behaviors that you see as uniquely “white”?

You define racism as [the] projection of generalized prejudice on someone’s skin color. By that definition, per you , what I’m saying about white people fits that definition of racism.*

You haven’t read or understood what I was pointing to, hence you are going on another circle of exactly what I already pointed out.

It’s disingenuous because I’ve made no agreement with you on this word—except, presumably, the implied one that I mean something else by it than you do, and you than me.

If you carefully read what I said. I never said that we should agree on definition. I said that you don’t address MY definition of racism, and you are instead change the subject.

So, if you call me a liar for example, and you define lying as an intentional attempt to deceive people and misrepresent truth. In the analogous context I would say … I’m not lying because I don’t define lying that way. I can’t lie because I’m from Ukraine and oppressed Ukrainian can’t lie. Only rest of the world can lie, because true lying is a about oppression and as a non-Ukrainian I can’t oppress anyone.

By doing so I’ve avoided the issue of dealing with meaning that I very well understand by means of changing the subject to oppression. And that’s what you are doing.

Do I have to say it, again ?

Do I have to say circular again?

I’m not asking you to understand the words the same way I do. I’m asking you to reply to the meaning of my words based on how I enterpret and digest that meaning for you.

Otherwice you end up implying that none of your prejudices matter unless you get rid of some supremacy system that you circularly derive by by means of your pre-filtered prejudice.

I know that it may take longer, but let’s do that for a test. Instead of using words like “white people” and “white supremacy” and “black people” and “racism” … Just use sentences that unpack the meaning of these words.

Do you care to try?

What I’m saying is that the white supremacists are the “apex predator” in relations between people throughout the known universe.

Ok. See the above. Let’s have the same discussion, and see if you can have a consistent narrative with definitions unpacked into sentences. Can you say very same things by plugging the holes of “white supremacy” , “black people” , “white people”, “racism” with a more common language that would explain what these things are.

So, let’s have a conversation, but first define those words, and then use the actual definitions in their place as we converse? Would you like to try? I can’t afford to spend time going in circles.

[2humBaby (C. Evans)]

Nice job Paul!!! You have brought gasoline to the fire with your suggestion. I got to tell you that I got race, Russia, illegals at the border, and AOC green dream or whatever it’s called fatigue. But back to this race thing. As a well educated man, you know that the reason race and race labeling is so much in vogue is because there is piles of money to be made on the subject.

[Paul62]

Nice job Paul!!! You have brought gasoline to the fire with your suggestion.

I just couldn’t resist

[Arkdrey]

When you left the USSR, your father told you that you had to think of yourself as “of lower status than blacks in US.”

No one told my father that. However, your father was white. I know that, because you are.

My father is middle-eastern Turk with Jewish mother. But, I guess that’s all “white” to you

Your father’s statement would have made no sense in the Ukraine without a global race system. Without one, he would have never been able to extract a meaning from the word “Black,” or considered it important enough for a father to give his son as crucial, parting information. Neither would you.

My father have been traveling the the US quite a bit, and he understood the historical context for “white/black” dichotomy. Hence, he explained it to me in “your” language. Keep in mind that I’m coming from the USSR setting, which had Marxist ideals for egalitarian equity that were actively enforced as ideology.

You’re correct. But I do so inside of a race system. You do not. This means that, whatever benefit I derive, I’m not going to get the benefits that I would get, were there no race system, or the benefits that a similarly equipped white person gets because he’s not in a race system, but operating one.

Put another way, it is only within such a race system that white high school drop-outs are as likely to land jobs as Black college students . It’s only in such a race system that that makes any sense; that that fact can be rolled out, without explanation, and, though a few may be a little surprised, nobody says, “I don’t get it. What does this mean, and how is this possible?”

The above is very complex issue in order to merely attribute it to some “racist white culture”. I dug up and glanced at report (it’s not available at the site linked by the article), because I was curious about the methods they used and conclusions that they came up with. The researchers were rather straightforward that race plays a factor, but the only viable conclusion one can draw from the data is that the more education people have, the less disparity in hiring they get. So, at the level of bachelor, the disparity drops to 3% for women and 5% for men. I’m not sure why that would be the case if “racist system” existed and maintained that disparity.

Why do I think the disparity exists? There are a number of factors that play into who gets to the top of that list. Factors like getting children too early as a single mother, and getting roped into child support payments as an absentee father. That feeds into inability to focus on one’s job or education. The state and city one is in, and if they have to compete with other minorities for the same jobs. We are not really comparing the same type of jobs when we are making these claims. The higher-end jobs have a much more competitive edge.

Of course, there is certain level implicit bias that plays against stereotypical “black person”. I think it would be naive to deny it, but that’s not the kind of bias that was there during the Jim Crow era, which was spread through centuries of propaganda. The new kind of bias, IMO, is largely driven by many issues that are associated with cyclical poverty and certain cultural xenophobia developed about these settings as it amplified by various media forms (film/tv/music) that glorify certain danger aspect of it, because in many cases it is the setting for “Italian mob” type of culture that emerges out of that vacuum of stability.

There were some studies about that done with resume names. I’m sure you are aware of these. Someone with a name like Shaniqua or Ladasha, or DeShawn would be discriminated against more common names.

So, in that sense, I think someone coming from Nigeria or West Indies get less bias than someone who gets in with some stereotypes associated with the “inner city culture”. There is some xenophobia that runs along the lines with accents and skin color, but it’s not the same kind as you get in the inner-city context of certain narratives that one gets in the media and doesn’t want to go through the trouble.

• How were non-white “Nigerian” immigrants, arriving here when you did, with similar skill sets and backgrounds to yours, generally and specifically treated?
• How are non-white Nigerians in the Ukraine, with similar skill sets and backgrounds to yours, generally and specifically treated?

I don’t see any major differences in treatment, since both have to overcome certain stereotypes, especially in context of “Russians are enemy, and Ukrainians run inner-city mobs”. So, there’s certain level of distrust that exists, and I can confirm that’s the case.

It needs to be worked out in a just way.

I’m not sure what that means from your perspective. What’s your personal plan for removing this unjust “global white supremacy system”? Is it political? Is it individual? You spend 99.99% of your time fixating on the problem, and it’s rather unclear what you want to do to move forward to a a better world as you imagine it?

[RoyMcD (Roy)]

@Harry_Allen You have done a remarkable job in speaking with the “Christian” white supremacists who have chosen to engage here and attempted to change the subject, discredit the article author, discredit the article, or pretend that white supremacy and white racism somehow disappeared and only is reawakened by non whites speaking of acts of white racism.

I will state for the record that we clearly can see from the posts made by white supremacists and their “white” Latino or “white” native American or “white” asian sympathizers (“white” = identifies as or with whites…) That it would be a mistake to eliminate the Regional Conferences, for the same Spirit that killed Lucy Byard in the 40s, still thrives today within Adventism.

I thank God for revealing in some of the white commentators in this thread that there are still white Adventists who have not bowed at the altar of White Supremacy. To those brothers and sisters who showed by their uncommon love and respect for the testimony of the downtrodden, I Love you and God Bless you. Thank you for accepting Christ and following his way. You are a reminder that there are still White Adventists who are Converted.

To the rest of you Supremacists I counsel you in the name of Jesus to repent and forsake the Idolotry of White Supremacy that has you aligned with Apostate Protestantism and the Vilests Oppressors and Blood Guilty. You need not share in the eternal damnation richly earned by most of your deceased ancestors of the past 300 years.

Repent before Judgements fall upon this land…not for the killing of the unborn but the murder of the living, abuse of the jailed, neglect of the poor, and forsaking of the sick.

Repent before Judgements fall upon this land for the continuance of its past sins upon the children of the enslaved.

Repent before you are spewed out.

[2humBaby (C. Evans)]

Roy let me tell you race supremacist of any color don’t post here. They just don’t because it’s not tolerated by the Web Ed. They do a remarkable job. If I thought there were race baiters here I wouldn’t post and neither would anyone else.

[Timo (reliquum)]

you sometimes come across as the kind of person who is in love with the sound of his own voice.

Quite rich, given who has the most garrulous posts.
Pot kettle much? And despite your verbal gingerbread, rather than approaching the point you resort to a kinder, gentler ad hominem.

Look, you are the one who said “s/he who needs the help most, gets the help”
Women need the help most, being real and present victims of ongoing personal and institutional bias. But rather than accepting that as a historic and present fact, you spread your verbose attestations that you, and by extension all blacks are in fact victims of white supremacy. In other words, you clearly do not mean your words, even in the way you say you mean them. As you say, words matter. And if one cannot say their meaning without this many words, well, i suspect their every word. You can try to tar and feather white people with your every breathless gasp, but in fact you have only accomplished less than nothing.

Be well, Harry, and please try to breathe.
God created you a fish, just like me, and we’re both in the water.
Its risible to suggest all whitefish are denying all black fish water.
If that’s the case, your issue is not with whitefish, its with the creator of all fish.

[Harry_Allen]

Thanks, @Arkdrey.

I said:

@Harry_Allen

The problem with this reply is that you’re giving it now ; retrospectively. Thus, it sounds self-serving.

You said:

@Arkdrey

Sure. It actually is self-serving, because I can’t expand energy on complex point-by-point responses that end up in circular rehashing.

In response:

Then say that. That way you can begin to prove what you’re charging.

Say, “This response is circular, because you’re using a given claim to prove that claim.” That way I can respond to your charge, and you don’t have to misrepresent yourself, or your intent.

I said:

@Harry_Allen

But, as well, when I said that a person’s culture is what they do , and you gave a response that I then called gobbledygook , I didn’t leave it there. I supplemented that charge with this question: If a person’s culture doesn’t reside in their thought, speech, and/or action, then where does it reside? Where is it?

You said:

@Arkdrey

Your point about culture is projecting collective on personal.

In response:

I’m saying what you call “the collective” is made up of “the personal,” or more precisely, made up of the individual.

As it pertains to people, and culture, what you call “the collective” is merely an aggregate; a generality.

So, what is “American culture”? Well, it’s commonly said, based on an old piece of advertising, “Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and Chevrolet.” Let’s go with that, for now.

Now, there are “Americans” who heartily endorse, and even swear by, all four. Let’s call them “A.” And there are “Americans” who don’t have anything to do with any of them; they don’t even think of them. Let’s call them “B.”

So, are “baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and Chevrolet” American culture?

Yes, if a substantial number of “Americans” feel the way that “A” does. But, at the same time, it’s not “B”'s culture, even though “B” is an “American.”

You said:

@Arkdrey

So you seem to think that there’s something like “global white culture” that produces same results no matter where it is and you then claim that from personal experience.

In response:

Let me clean up your statement, because, while you could represent what I believe by merely copying the text of what I say, you choose to do these summaries that inevitably garble my position.

I think that there’s “global white supremacy” that produces:

a) similar results, in all places, at all times, throughout the known universe, and

b) similar enough results to form a “global aggregate”; i.e., a coherent product, no matter where one is.

I claim this from both i) personal experience, and ii) collective, or aggregate experience, including 3rd party experience.

I claim it from personal experience, because I’ve been to many places and seen it work.

I also claim it from aggregate experience, because I’ve heard other people describe the conditions I, myself, have experienced, in their locales, though these are places I’ve never been.

Put another way:

I’ve never heard of a location, in the known universe, where white power over non-white people, and the thought, speech, and action that make it coherent, doesn’t work.

Some of that aggregate experience even includes dealing with you.

Two examples, A and B:

Example A) When you left the USSR, your father told you that you had to think of yourself as “of lower status than blacks in US.”

What a curious statement. What a curious, curious thing for a loving father to say to his son, as a final piece of wisdom before that child takes to the sky and to faraway lands. It must have been important to him, because it was one of the last things he said to you, and you remembered it.

Your father’s statement would have made no sense in the Ukraine without a global race system. If white supremacy were not a planetary system, not only would a Ukrainian father never derive the wherewithal to offer that glint of insight to his expat kid, but:

— Gaitana’s success in in the 2012 Eurovision song contest would not have been undermined;

— Zhan Beleniuk would go about his day without a problem, and Asi, and her 8-month-old, would be able to take the bus;

— Some 13 foreigners from Nigeria, Jordan, Afghanistan, Syria, Ghana, the Democratic Republic of the Congo would not have become the focus of Human Rights Information Center in 2015;

— African students would be able to take an evening stroll through central Lutsk;

— African students could go to soccer games in peace, and “J” wouldn’t have to eat so many bananas when playing;

— Congolese college graduates would be able to celebrate their success without fear; and, last, but not finally,

— Olaolu Sunkalmi Femi wouldn’t have faced murder charges in 2012.

I’ve never been to the Ukraine. Yet, all of these incidents sound like things that I’ve either witnessed and/or experienced, that non-white people I know have witnessed and/or experienced, or that non-white people I don’t know have spoken about witnessing and/or experiencing.

I’m talking about people, above, who couldn’t find Ukraine on a map. Really, if you change the names of the people and the places, they make credible news stories from almost anywhere. That’s what I mean by a “‘global white culture’ that produces same results no matter where it is,” to use your language.

Example B) After you brought up your Nigerian clients, to make points about the non-existence or relative ineffectiveness of race, I made several challenges. One was that you approach your Nigerian and other non-white colleagues with simple questions or propositions that I’ve designed, and that you report their responses. (These would be people people that I do not know, and, presumably, have never met.)

I do this all the time, because I’m reasonably certain of what the outcome will be.

Now, you have your own set of reasons for why you haven’t done this. But here’s what’s interesting: I have a lot of these dialogues, as you have probably ascertained, and white people never take me up on these challenges. All the stridency and braveheart they display in these online conversations seems to vanish when it comes to testing these ideas in the real world, with real Black people.

Maybe it’s just a coincidence. Or, maybe it just "‘global white culture’ that produces same results no matter where it is."

Any way, back to “culture.”

You said:

@Arkdrey

I’m saying that it’s categorically wrong, and you don’t understand culture from perspective of how it relates to groups and individuals occupying those groups.

What we call culture, is a combination of epigenetic and memetic information. Such information doesn’t merely exist as a contents of someone brain. We no longer live in the oral culture. Most of the information we receive today is communicated through mediums that we select to consume. Like books, articles, Wikipedia, movies, music, etc - are all examples of non-brain source memes. You can read more about memes and memetics here:

en.m.wikipedia.org

### Meme

A meme (/miːm/ MEEM) is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture—often with the aim of conveying a particular phenomenon, theme, or meaning represented by the meme. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices, that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to gen Proponent…

I can read the Bible and Jewish encyclopedia and begin practicing Jewish culture. If no Jews remained, their culture still exists in the wide variety of non-brain mediums that we use for communication where such cultural memes live. As a result, there are traditional elements which may be maintained through some form of “token orthodoxy”, like Royalty in Britain still maintained, but these elements have no power, or have diminishing power in society. The are more like celebrated tokens of identity, more than they actually drive any everyday discourse. Ukrainians don’t walk around in “traditional Ukrainian attire” they walk around in a wide mix of clothing which is selected through wide range of socio-economic and selective processes. Hence, you can’t really consolidate “Ukrainian dress”, for example, into some cultural norm of behavior that’s unique.

In response:

I want to focus on this last paragraph, because it seems to be the place where you break into summarizing examples.

You said:

@Arkdrey

I can read the Bible and Jewish encyclopedia and begin practicing Jewish culture. If no Jews remained, their culture still exists in the wide variety of non-brain mediums that we use for communication where such cultural memes live.

In response:

If Jewish people vanished, and all the things they’d said and thought were stored on a microfiche, and that fiche was stuck in a pressure-proof, heat-proof box, along with all the things Jews had made and used, and that box was buried 6,000 miles beneath the Earth’s surface, at its core, and 10,000 centuries passed, and, by this time, the world was filled with blue Alpha Centaurians, according to your example, the following would be a true statement:

"There is Jewish culture on Earth."

I’m saying that that statement is wholly and obviously false.

What I’m saying is this: When the last Jew dies, Jewish culture goes with her. All that will be left are remnants of Jewish culture. That, in fact, is what they will be called: Remnants.

Otherwise, what we should believe is that, on Earth, there is Neanderthal culture, Incan culture, ancient Polynesian culture, royal Hawaiian culture, a Viking culture, ancient Greek culture, and/or Heian Japanese culture, right now—that these are real, active things. Perhaps thriving, because, maybe, their artifacts are everywhere.

In other words, you’re arguing that cultures are, somehow, permanent, or perhaps quasi-permanent. That, if they didn’t stuff that box at Earth’s core with all that Jewish stuff, but just put in a single piece of paper with the exclamation “oy” on it, Jewish culture would still exist.

I’m saying, if so, it’s a designation without a difference. In other words, if that’s true, suppose there was no box, but, instead, a single blue Alpha Centaurian had heard the word “oy,” once, but had forgotten he heard it, though it was somewhere in his memory, albeit unaccessible. Would Jewish culture exist, then?

You said:

@Arkdrey

As a result, there are traditional elements which may be maintained through some form of “token orthodoxy”, like Royalty in Britain still maintained, but these elements have no power, or have diminishing power in society. The are more like celebrated tokens of identity, more than they actually drive any everyday discourse.

In response:

I’m not sure what you mean by this. Clearly, you’re not saying this:

“‘British royal culture’ doesn’t exist, because it serves an arguably token role in the governmental actions of the UK.”

But, let’s talk about that. I’m saying, if people stopped thinking, speaking, and acting “about” “British royal culture,” it would cease to exist. You could have a billion crowns and thrones stuffed in an attic, or collecting dust in their royal settings, or lying in the street. If no one did anything different—if everyone acted as if that crown wasn’t there—“British royal culture” would have ceased to exist. All you would have are its remnants.

You said:

@Arkdrey

Ukrainians don’t walk around in “traditional Ukrainian attire” they walk around in a wide mix of clothing which is selected through wide range of socio-economic and selective processes. Hence, you can’t really consolidate “Ukrainian dress”, for example, into some cultural norm of behavior that’s unique.

In response:

That’s because Ukrainian culture has changed. Once, it was one thing. Now, it’s something else. That’s because the people thought, said, and did something different. Otherwise, we’d have to take your word, above, and say, “No, it hasn’t changed, because we can find ‘traditional Ukrainian attire’ in museums.”

Further…

You said:

@Arkdrey

you can’t really consolidate “Ukrainian dress”, for example, into some cultural norm of behavior that’s unique.

In response:

From where comes the requirement that cultures be “unique”? Find a book on human anthropology that makes this claim.

Culture is what people think, say, and do. (Indeed, the best claim for unique culture would be made at the personal level.) You couldn’t actually list all the things that are part of Ukrainian culture, because the list would contain every thought, word, and action Ukrainians have, say, or do.

So, what a group of people generally think, say, and do is typically averaged out within some domain: Engineering culture; rave culture; Ukrainian culture; Eastern European culture.

So, for example, part of Ukrainian culture is speaking Ukrainian. But I’ll bet you 1,000,000 hryvnia that, in a day, I could find Ukrainians who don’t speak Ukrainian.

Part of Ukrainian culture is speaking Ukrainian. But not for Ukrainians who don’t.

You said:

@Arkdrey

That’s the same case with any culture out there. It’s not some monolithic sets of behaviors that everyone adopts.

In response:

I think that this is what I’ve been saying.

You said:

@Arkdrey

Hence, it’s an extremely oversimplified position that there some kind of clean continuum between lighter shades of skin and what you choose to focus on and filter as “white culture”.

In response:

What’s also simplified is saying that someone is white. But it works well enough for you to say that your father, you, and your children are that.

In other words, if I go up to someone at random and ask, “Are you white, or non-white?”, most people know how to answer that question. That’s true all over the world. If it was as vague as you say, that would not be the case.

So, I haven’t made any claims about a “clean continuum.” Being white is exact enough for white supremacy to work; to make Aamer Rahman’s joke a joke. If he had told it in “racial reverse,” no one would have laughed, because the racial reverse is the sad history of the world.

You said:

@Arkdrey

I hope that clarifies what I meant by culture not merely limited to person’s brain?

In response:

I think so: I think you’re saying that a person’s culture can also be held, as data, or reside in artifacts and other objects of manufacture.

And what I’m saying is that it’s only that person’s culture if those objects are “in use.”

When a rabbi picks up the torah scrolls, they are part of his culture. If one Sabbath, he said to congregants, or to himself, “I am never reading from the Torah again, ever!” they would cease to be part of his culture.

Now, you might say, “That’s absurd. The Torah is part of Jewish culture, and he’s a Jew!” To which I would say, “Is he? Because he’s also a rabbi, and rabbis read from the Torah. Is a rabbi who refuses to do rabbinical tasks still a rabbi?”

You said:

@Arkdrey

My second objection was not merely about cultural function, but the way you categorize and consolidate wide range of cultures into “white people” and claim that all of them “act like white people”, which constitutes some global “whiteness”.

In response:

I don’t “categorize and consolidate wide range of cultures into ‘white people’” White people did that. (I said the same thing to @2humBaby.) They started this long before I was born. I told you that already.

They seemed to see similarities between “wide range of cultures”; enough to “categorize and consolidate” them; enough to say, “We may be ‘English,’ ‘Scandinavian,’ ‘Spanish,’ ‘Austrian,’ ‘American,’ ‘Portuguese,’ or ‘Ukrainian.’ But, from now on, for certain critical tasks, we will be white.”

Those critical tasks always have to do with people they have deemed non-white. Otherwise, why be white? Why call yourselves white, just to interact with each other? Against what would you be measuring yourselves?

I’m merely repeating what they say.

As for the globality of whiteness, again:

If there were no such thing, as you claim, I couldn’t go to Australia, as I did, then, in a lecture, accurately describe Australian TV’s racial characteristics—how white people and non-white people are mutually depicted on TV there—then be told by white and non-white Australians that I was correct…then admit to them that I’d never seen a minute of Australian TV in my life. This actually happened.

Indeed, if there was no such thing as global “whiteness,” Australians couldn’t understand what I meant by “white people.”

You might say they don’t think about themselves as “white people,” like you did in your first post to me. To which I’d say, of course not: Because they have the so-called Aborigines to do that for them.

You said:

@Arkdrey

Can you defend your position above?

In response:

See above.

You said:

@Arkdrey

What are some sets of behaviors that you see as uniquely “white”?

In response:

I’ve truly had a problem answering this question. The key obstacle was determining what you meant by “unique,” and how I should depict “uniqueness.”

So, one one hand, I could give an answer, like, “Suntanning.” This isn’t precisely a unique white behavior—many non-white people lie in the sun with the expressed goal of getting darker. Arguably, they are a rounding error in Coppertone’s marketing strategy, however.

On the other hand, one can look at the documents and statements that white people have created about themselves, for answers. These artifacts aren’t “behaviors,” but documents describing behaviors in which white people uniquely behave, or seem to do so.

By this, I mean everything from the granting of the Asiento de negros; to Thomas Thistlewood’s diaries; to the Kahn slave trade interactive; to Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia; to the Brookes schematic; to Stephen R. Platt’s history of the Opium Wars; to The Cyclopedia of India, documenting Britain’s 90-year rule of the nation; Spain’s 300-year domination of the Philippines; to the white history of dominating the Inuit; to Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf; to Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race; to Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’s Ghost; to Gerda Lerner’s documentary text, Black Women in White America; to broken Maori, Sioux, Iroquois, Chippewa, and other indigenous treaties; to the annexation of Hawaii; to D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation; to the Australian Constitution; to runaway slave posters; to the Sarr-Savoy report for the restitution of African art; South Africa’s 1949 Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act; to Susan Sontag’s Winter 1967 Partisan Review essay (quoted earlier); to studies on white flight; to Federal findings on corruption in Ferguson MO’s police department; to the findings of the Plain View Project re: police Facebook posts; to the eight photos and videos on which I drilled you; to nuclear superiority; to white fragility.

These white documents describe white behavior, particularly toward non-white people, that, in its quantity and obtrusiveness, distinctly mark and uniquely comment on that enterprise. In their total consequential dimensions—and in their relative simultaneity—they seem extremely unique and without parallel. This is obviously an extremely partial list; merely scratching the surface of the surface.

Also, the issue of relative simultaneity is an important one. Think of it this way: As a weather phenomenon, a storm developing over warm water is not unique. Water, 80°F in temperature, and at least 200 feet deep, is not unique. Water with very little wind shear over it is not unique.

When these generic phenomena are combined, though, they can produce hurricanes, which are unique phenomena.

White apologists will tend to say that lots of people are, and have been, cruel to each other, throughout history. This is true.

As I compiled the above list, though, it occurred to me that no other people—even ones with global hold or world power aspirations—had amounted so much, in so many places, in such a short time. Everything in that list happened over a period of around 500 years.

So, while one might argue that the activities with which white people credit themselves are not unique—I’d disagree—the combination is certainly unparalleled.

Finally, I would add to this list:

— The historical narrative satirized in Aamer Rahman’s joke

— Those links I sent you about Ukraine, above.

— The previous, Black radical economic magazine links I sent you.

and, most of all:

— White Supremacy =

(1) The direct or indirect subjugation of all “non-white” people by white people, for the basic purpose of “pleasing” and/or serving any or all “white” persons, at all times, in all places, in all areas of activity, including Economics, Education, Entertainment, Labor, Law, Politics, Religion, Sex, and War.

(2) The only functional Racism, in existence, among the people of the known universe, that is based on “color” and/or “anti-color” in the physical make-up or physical appearance of persons.

(3) Racism “for the sake of” Racism.

So, to be clear:

In response to your question, “What are some sets of behaviors that you see as uniquely ‘white’?”, my answer is:

a) White supremacy (racism), as defined, first, in the preceding tri-part definition, and, then,

b) Racism (white supremacy), as alluded to and described in the documents preceding.

You said:

@Arkdrey

If you carefully read what I said. I never said that we should agree on definition. I said that you don’t address MY definition of racism, and you are instead change the subject.

So, if you call me a liar for example, and you define lying as an intentional attempt to deceive people and misrepresent truth. In the analogous context I would say … I’m not lying because I don’t define lying that way. I can’t lie because I’m from Ukraine and oppressed Ukrainian can’t lie. Only rest of the world can lie, because true lying is a about oppression and as a non-Ukrainian I can’t oppress anyone.

By doing so I’ve avoided the issue of dealing with meaning that I very well understand by means of changing the subject to oppression. And that’s what you are doing.

You also said:

@Arkdrey

I’m not asking you to understand the words the same way I do. I’m asking you to reply to the meaning of my words based on how I enterpret and digest that meaning for you.

Otherwice you end up implying that none of your prejudices matter unless you get rid of some supremacy system that you circularly derive by by means of your pre-filtered prejudice.

I know that it may take longer, but let’s do that for a test. Instead of using words like “white people” and “white supremacy” and “black people” and “racism” … Just use sentences that unpack the meaning of these words.

Do you care to try?

In response:

I’m happy to do so, at least observationally.

In other words, I have used sentences that unpack the meaning of the words “white people” and “white supremacy” and “black people” and “racism.” I’ve done that when I supplied definitions of those words; e.g., the definition of white supremacy, above.

If you’re suggesting that you have definitions of those words that I should “try on,” or that, instead of saying white supremacy, I should say, “The only functional Racism, in existence, among the people of the known universe, that is based on ‘color’ and/or ‘anti-color’ in the physical make-up or physical appearance of persons,” then tell me how this should work.

HA

[Harry_Allen]

Thanks, @Timo.

I said:

@Harry_Allen

Timo, with all due and appropriate respect, you sometimes come across as the kind of person who is in love with the sound of his own voice.

You said:

@Timo

Quite rich, given who has the most garrulous posts.
Pot kettle much?

In response:

If you’re contending that my posts are lengthier than yours, well, like Jean-Claude Van Damme in a Pablo Francisco joke, you’re the winner, again.

But that’s not what I was saying.

You said:

@Timo

And despite your verbal gingerbread, rather than approaching the point you resort to a kinder, gentler ad hominem.

In response:

I’ll take the ad hominem charge.

I think I felt, as I do, that if I’m going to criticize an aspect of your writing, based on reasons that may have to do with who you are as a person, I should be extremely deferential, because I don’t know who you are.

I felt it was the fastest way to make the point on which I elaborated, subsequently.

However, you haven’t reproduced any of that text.

You said:

@Timo

Look, you are the one who said “s/he who needs the help most, gets the help”
Women need the help most, being real and present victims of ongoing personal and institutional bias.

In response:

Racism is the subject of this forum. Most women are victims of racism, because women are overwhelmingly non-white.

I’ve made this point almost every time you’ve tried to say that I should apply what I’m writing to women, in defense of them, and against sexism. You have never responded to this point.

Again, racism is the subject of this forum. It’s a very common, racist tactic, in a discussion about white supremacy, for white people to try and get non-white people off of the subject. I’ve seen this take place many, many times.

You said:

@Timo

But rather than accepting that as a historic and present fact, you spread your verbose attestations that you, and by extension all blacks are in fact victims of white supremacy.

In response:

My statements are verbose because most of the people here are white, like you, and one has to walk with them, step-by-step, through their protestations, as I am doing now.

If this was a group discussion about racism, with Black people, my responses would be far, far shorter, because they’d be based on common experience; that with which we are all familiar.

That’s probably why @RoyMcD—a non-white person—liked 26 of my posts; possibly a record. Yet we’ve never met, spoken, or had a discussion about race.

You said:

@Timo

In other words, you clearly do not mean your words, even in the way you say you mean them.

In response:

No, I mean them exactly as they are written.

You’ve never met a person who means what he writes as much as I do, Timo.

You said:

@Timo

As you say, words matter. And if one cannot say their meaning without this many words, well, i suspect their every word.

In response:

See above, re: “white people.”

You said:

@Timo

You can try to tar and feather white people with your every breathless gasp, but in fact you have only accomplished less than nothing.

In response:

It’s hilarious that you consider what I’ve written so aggressive, when I consider it just being honest.

You must have missed my link on white fragility.

You said:

@Timo

Be well, Harry, and please try to breathe.

In response:

I’ll do my best.

You said:

@Timo

God created you a fish, just like me, and we’re both in the water.
Its risible to suggest all whitefish are denying all black fish water.
If that’s the case, your issue is not with whitefish, its with the creator of all fish.

In response:

This is poetic. Sadly, it’s also nonsense.

HA

[Harry_Allen]

Thanks, @RoyMcD.

You said:

@RoyMcD

@harryallen You have done a remarkable job in speaking with the “Christian” white supremacists who have chosen to engage here and attempted to change the subject, discredit the article author, discredit the article, or pretend that white supremacy and white racism somehow disappeared and only is reawakened by non whites speaking of acts of white racism.

In response:

@RoyMcD, thank you for your kind remarks and support, including your likes.

I hope everyone else, especially white people, reads the rest of your post.

You said:

@RoyMcD

I will state for the record that we clearly can see from the posts made by white supremacists and their “white” Latino or “white” native American or “white” asian sympathizers (“white” = identifies as or with whites…) That it would be a mistake to eliminate the Regional Conferences, for the same Spirit that killed Lucy Byard in the 40s, still thrives today within Adventism.

I thank God for revealing in some of the white commentators in this thread that there are still white Adventists who have not bowed at the altar of White Supremacy. To those brothers and sisters who showed by their uncommon love and respect for the testimony of the downtrodden, I Love you and God Bless you. Thank you for accepting Christ and following his way. You are a reminder that there are still White Adventists who are Converted.

To the rest of you Supremacists I counsel you in the name of Jesus to repent and forsake the Idolotry of White Supremacy that has you aligned with Apostate Protestantism and the Vilests Oppressors and Blood Guilty. You need not share in the eternal damnation richly earned by most of your deceased ancestors of the past 300 years.

Repent before Judgements fall upon this land…not for the killing of the unborn but the murder of the living, abuse of the jailed, neglect of the poor, and forsaking of the sick.

Repent before Judgements fall upon this land for the continuance of its past sins upon the children of the enslaved.

Repent before you are spewed out.

In response:

Have you ever read David Walker’s Appeal?

This reminds me of that.

HA

[Arkdrey]

Then say that. That way you can begin to prove what you’re charging.

Say, “This response is circular, because you’re using a given claim to prove that claim.” That way I can respond to your charge, and you don’t have to misrepresent yourself, or your intent.

I’ve been saying it for a while now.

As it pertains to people, and culture, what you call “the collective” is merely an aggregate; a generality.

Culture has specific category boundaries of that behavior. Just because both of us brush our teeth on different parts of the globe doesn’t mean we share the same culture. Hence, you can’t viably aggregate without considering various nuances.

Some of that aggregate experience even includes dealing with you.

Two examples, A and B:

Example A ) When you left the USSR, your father told you that you had to think of yourself as “of lower status than blacks in US.”

What a curious statement. What a curious, curious thing for a loving father to say to his son, as a final piece of wisdom before that child takes to the sky and to faraway lands. It must have been important to him, because it was one of the last things he said to you, and you remembered it.

Your father’s statement would have made no sense in the Ukraine without a global race system. If white supremacy were not a planetary system, not only would a Ukrainian father never derive the wherewithal to offer that glint of insight to his expat kid, but …

I think it’s wiser to avoid one’s confirmation bias bending this statement into what it’s not, but rather ask me what he meant, because he explained.

My father has been to the area of Miami where I was going to live, and he was commenting on the socio-economic variables in that area, and “black people” are more poor in that area … so he was preparing me by saying that your economic way up will begin at the very bottom, below these people.

Keep in mind that he was making about $250/month at the time I left, and were barely scraping by. He himself went through similar path of leaving a relatively poor setting in Turkmenistan, where he had to begin from the bottom.

If I was going to rural Ohio, he would likely make a different observation, and would explain things differently to me, because my economic markers and setting would be different. He would likely use the “Hillbilly” category as a marker.

Overall, his point wasn’t that I would get a “status change”, and I had to prepare myself mentally to be treated on the par with my status in that society, and all of the stereotypes that come with it.

*So, again ... check your confirmation biases when you are quoting other people with these assumptions.*   It wasn't a comment on some "global status of black people".   I grew up with posters of rich and successful black athletes, which I modeled in my life.   So, his words wouldn't make sense in terms that you are describing to me.  

— Gaitana’s success in in the 2012 Eurovision song contest would not have been undermined;

I will say this again and again here. Check your confirmation biases. The fact that Ukraine even chosen a person with a dark skin to represent Ukraine in this contest should point out that you are wrong But, you still think that you are not because there’s some extreme-right winger who is squawking about racial representation and you interpret that as some racism charge, when in fact he would be saying the very same thing if a girl with German father was representing Ukraine. This dude is a politician. Politicians “divide and rule”.

— Zhan Beleniuk would go about his day without a problem, and Asi, and her 8-month-old, would be able to take the bus;

— Some 13 foreigners from Nigeria, Jordan, Afghanistan, Syria, Ghana, the Democratic Republic of the Congo would not have become the focus of Human Rights Information Center in 2015;

— African students would be able to take an evening stroll through central Lutsk;

— African students could go to soccer games in peace, and “J” wouldn’t have to eat so many bananas when playing;

— Congolese college graduates would be able to celebrate their success without fear; and, last, but not finally,

— Olaolu Sunkalmi Femi wouldn’t have faced murder charges in 2012.

I’ve never been to the Ukraine. Yet, all of these incidents sound like things that I’ve either witnessed and/or experienced,

And the above is where your confirmation bias truly shines. You’ve admittedly never been to Ukraine, and I doubt most of the reporters who wrote these articles been there either. They are reporting third-party stories and dressing it up in racism without understanding the setting.

In Ukraine, we infamously have Western Ukraine, which has been “historical buffer zone” for much of the conquest in the past, and it’s been in and out of Ukrainian territory for as long as Ukraine has been a concept. In fact, then word “Ukraine” itself means “At the border” in our language. So, it’s occupied by ancestors of people who were constantly invaded, robbed, and they would re-build and they would again be invaded and robbed. They would rebuild again, and again, and they would get more and more angry. So, eventually, they would be very distrusting towards outsiders that don’t show some “local markers”.

We have a ton of Jokes about Russians being beat up in that area because they try to fake Ukrainian language and they slip up one word that gives them away. Ukrainians in the West cling to “Ukrainian identity” precisely because they were forced into “survivalist tribalism” by extended past… hence whatever you see about them treating outsiders with disdain has to be contextualized in that history.

Ironically, you can take their skin color, and easily turn them in “white Nationalists”, and ignore that they reject any culture that’s not their own, and that wouldn’t be limited to skin color. That would include the way people dress, language, beliefs about history, people who are “good” and “bad”, etc… largely because people in that area, through various historical oppression, are forced into tribalism as a survival mechanism.

But, of course … what you do is open up google search and type in “Racism in Ukraine”, you and you simply run with your confirmation bias guiding you through your ignorance on this subject matter. And your ignorance, through your confirmation bias decides below:

Maybe it’s just a coincidence. Or, maybe it just "‘global white culture’ that produces same results no matter where it is."

Or… maybe… you need to read A LOT MORE about global history to give you broader context, instead of selectively focusing on “white on black atrocity” as though it’s the only kind that matters. Check you biases.

In fact, some would argue that the word “Slave” is derived from “Slav” precisely because that area was a common “Slave mine” for people who were in perpetual servitude in a never-ending historical conquest. That maybe a homonyms coincidence, or “black people” don’t hold monopoly on being a victim of history.

What I’m saying is this: When the last Jew dies, Jewish culture goes with her. All that will be left are remnants of Jewish culture . That, in fact, is what they will be called: Remnants.

Remntants of something is that thing Remnants of cake is … cake. Remnants of carpet … is carpet. Remnants of culture… is culture. Even you subconsciously recognize that culture is a collection of all internal/external setting pertaining to certain distinct behavior.

Otherwise, what we should believe is that, on Earth, there is Neanderthal culture, Incan culture, ancient Polynesian culture, royal Hawaiian culture, a Viking culture, ancient Greek culture, and/or Heian Japanese culture, right now —that these are real, active things. Perhaps thriving, because, maybe, their artifacts are everywhere.

All of the above are still with us in some shape or form. The only time that exists is “now”. What we call “past” is merely a recollection of “now” in memory or “remnant structure” as you would put it. So, these cultures didn’t “die off”. These exist in some transformed continuum, or as a setting of the artifacts that we find, which in fact communicate that culture to us.

If we merely limit culture to “brain boundaries”, then you are devolving into a disjointed and solipsistic reality outlook in which you think brain is insular mechanism that exists separately from the world around it.

But, let’s talk about that. I’m saying, if people stopped thinking, speaking, and acting “about” “British royal culture,” it would cease to exist. You could have a billion crowns and thrones stuffed in an attic, or collecting dust in their royal settings, or lying in the street. If no one did anything different—if everyone acted as if that crown wasn’t there—“British royal culture” would have ceased to exist. All you would have are its remnants .

The very etymological structure of our language carries cultural concepts that are no longer there, and which we don’t think about.

For example, the term “sinister” in Latin means “left”, and it’s derived from false belief that Devil sat at the left side of God, and that left-handed people are of the “devil”. So, there’s a long history of ignorance on this subject that propagates to this very day, to the point that my mother-in-law is ignorantly terrified about my son’s left-handed tendencies and attempts to change it in any way she can saying that “it’s not good”.

I would still use the word “sinister”, and even though it changed meaning, the heritage of that word doesn’t change etymological structure. So, part of that culture is with us, even when it’s long gone. It’s there both in artifacts from which we can connect some narrative, and in some continuum that’s in our brains to this day.

Again, I’d rather agree to disagree on this point and move on. You seem to be set in your belief that culture is only limited to people’s brains.

That’s because Ukrainian culture has changed . Once, it was one thing. Now, it’s something else. That’s because the people thought, said, and did something different . Otherwise, we’d have to take your word, above, and say, “No, it hasn’t changed, because we can find ‘traditional Ukrainian attire’ in museums.”

We don’t merely find it in museums. Museums exist because people identify their heritage and continuum with the progressive change in these artifacts that paint the cultural narrative of that continuum.

Hence, the fact that I’m a part Ukrainian, part Jewish, and part Turk means that there’s a cultural continuum that exists with certain identifiable attributes of these cultures… and not some mundane overlap that we attribute to some “global group”.

Culture is local. It can’t be global. “Global culture” is a nonsense concept, because “global culture” is equivalent to “no culture”. It would be like a concept of race where there wouldn’t be any races. And that’s precisely why I dislike “corporate globalism”, because it serves to erase cultural diversity and replace it with bunch of people in “monkey suits”.

Culture only exists as a category differentiator. Not all “white people” act the same. You are cherry-picking isolated events, and you bundle them up into some “global culture”, while you are ignoring the vast differences in setting and reasons.

From where comes the requirement that cultures be “unique”? Find a book on human anthropology that makes this claim.

Can we have a concept of color when all colors would be purple? Such concept wouldn’t be necessary. Culture is a category concept.

So, for example, part of Ukrainian culture is speaking Ukrainian. But I’ll bet you 1,000,000 hryvnia that, in a day, I could find Ukrainians who don’t speak Ukrainian.

Part of Ukrainian culture is speaking Ukrainian. But not for Ukrainians who don’t.

A Ukrainian is more likely to understand that language than a non-Ukrainian, would you agree? Culture is a spectrum. It’s not a singular concept. For example, I can say that I’m more American today than I am a Ukrainian. And I’m more Jewish in my beliefs than I am a Turk. It’s not a binary concept. All of these exist in my head. I’m merely tracing heritage of these concepts as I attribute these to various categories of people who practiced these in some geographic isolation in the past. But, even in the past it’s not that simple, since the world is never static.

Whatever categories we have today, these are for utility rather than some scientific description of reality.

What’s also simplified is saying that someone is white . But it works well enough for you to say that your father, you, and your children are that .

We are only “that” because that’s what people labels us in spite of the vast cultural differences and variations in the spectrum of “white” that’s much broader than you paint. My father looks more like Arab than white. And my children look more like Asian.

And I’m generally a very strange-looking dude

And what I’m saying is that it’s only that person’s culture if those objects are “in use.”

When a rabbi picks up the torah scrolls, they are part of his culture. If one Sabbath, he said to congregants, or to himself, “I am never reading from the Torah again, ever!” they would cease to be part of his culture.

Now, you might say, “That’s absurd. The Torah is part of Jewish culture, and he’s a Jew!” To which I would say, “Is he? Because he’s also a rabbi, and rabbis read from the Torah. Is a rabbi who refuses to do rabbinical tasks still a rabbi?”

Rabbis wouldn’t have that culture without those scrolls, and those scrolls wouldn’t exist without Rabbis. Hence, I don’t really see how you can separate the two.

I don’t “categorize and consolidate wide range of cultures into ‘white people’” White people did that.

My point was that I don’t do that, and many of the “white people” that you call by that label. Hence, it seems to me that you are perpetuating this culture by maintaining the boundaries that were given to people in the past.

As for the globality of whiteness, again:

If there were no such thing, as you claim, I couldn’t go to Australia, as I did, then, in a lecture, accurately describe Australian TV’s racial characteristics—how white people and non-white people are mutually depicted on TV there—then be told by white and non-white Australians that I was correct…then admit to them that I’d never seen a minute of Australian TV in my life. This actually happened.

Indeed, if there was no such thing as global “whiteness,” Australians couldn’t understand what I meant by “white people.”

You might say they don’t think about themselves as “white people,” like you did in your first post to me. To which I’d say, of course not: Because they have the so-called Aborigines to do that for them.

You are misplacing characteristics of categories where such categories are not warranted. When someone says “white person”, we can instinctively understand a “label”, and I’m not really against the nominal labeling of skin color. If we put a mix of races in the room, some of them will be clearly darker, and some of them will be clearly lighter in skin color. I don’t see anything problematic with saying that someone varies by these characteristics in skin color.

The problem is that in a political spectrum of the ideology, when someone says “white people”, they don’t merely say “skin color” white, they attempt to smuggle in the ideology that they attach to “whiteness”… no matter of what cultural differences there may be between “white people”. And when that someone says “black people”, there’s a similar ideological smuggling going on relevant to mistreatment and oppression.

That’s the narrative I reject. I don’t reject that we are different in skin color characteristics. I reject that we have some unitary function that matches the skin color. What you tend to do is to apply a rather extreme confirmation bias to selectively approach history and string up a narrative of “white supremacy” that’s rather binary in the way you describe it.

And when people begin describing things in binary manner… watch out!

See above.

But you haven’t defended your position. You keep saying things like “people understand what I mean by ‘white people’ or ‘people laugh at comedy about white invaders’”, but you can’t demonstrably show me that attitudes of all white people are uniform when it comes to the subject of race.

So, if you eat at a restaurant a 10 times, and then one day you walk into a restaurant full of white people, and the waiter ignores you. Then 10 times when they didn’t, isn’t a statistic that’s a viable objection to your POV… the one time that they did becomes the poster child of racism, and then re-projection on “white supremacy”.

Again… check your biases. Read a bit more literature that disagrees with your POV. Merely feeding your confirmation bias will take you to rather extreme and nonsensical setting.

These white documents describe white behavior, particularly toward non-white people, that, in its quantity and obtrusiveness, distinctly mark and uniquely comment on that enterprise. In their total consequential dimensions—and in their relative simultaneity —they seem extremely unique and without parallel. This is obviously an extremely partial list; merely scratching the surface of the surface.

While I can appreciate effort in finding and linking to various articles …you’ve circumvented my question in order to attempt to prop up your circular view of race-culture relationship.

There’s nothing historically unique in prohibition of mixed-raced marriages. It was a common practice in various racial setting in our collective past. Of course, in South Africa it was unique in a setting of apartheid law, but as an idea it’s not that unique or ubiquitous to “white people”. A large number of “white people” have cross-cultural and cross-racial marriages, and I’m one of them.

There’s nothing unique about past settings in which tribalism narratives excluded certain “outsiders” from integrating into that society.

Hence, I’ve asked you about UNIQUE characteristics of “whiteness” as a culture that you’ve yet to demonstrate as such.

Also, the issue of relative simultaneity is an important one. Think of it this way: As a weather phenomenon, a storm developing over warm water is not unique. Water, 80°F in temperature, and at least 200 feet deep, is not unique. Water with very little wind shear over it is not unique.

When these generic phenomena are combined, though, they can produce hurricanes, which are unique phenomena.

The analogy that you paint doesn’t support your premise.

As I compiled the above list, though, it occurred to me that no other people—even ones with global hold or world power aspirations—had amounted so much, in so many places, in such a short time. Everything in that list happened over a period of around 500 years.

The largest land empire in human history that was derived through a rather bloody conquest was “non-white”. And that culture was more or less uniform in its conquest and spread of its ideology.

In response to your question, “What are some sets of behaviors that you see as uniquely ‘white’?”, my answer is:

a) White supremacy (racism) , as defined, first, in the preceding tri-part definition, and, then,

b) Racism (white supremacy) , as alluded to and described in the documents preceding.

You are defining these concepts in circular manner. You are saying that “white supremacy/ racism” is what unique about “white supremacist / racists”. It’s a circular tautology.

I’m happy to do so, at least observationally.

In other words, I have used sentences that unpack the meaning of the words “white people” and “white supremacy” and “black people” and “racism.” I’ve done that when I supplied definitions of those words; e.g., the definition of white supremacy , above.

If you’re suggesting that you have definitions of those words that I should “try on,” or that, instead of saying white supremacy , I should say, “The only functional Racism, in existence, among the people of the known universe, that is based on ‘color’ and/or ‘anti-color’ in the physical make-up or physical appearance of persons,” then tell me how this should work.

I’m no longer sure that would be helpful, since you seem to be deeply entrenched in the narrative that you follow, hence your confirmation bias seems to ignore the fact that you are cherrypicking this narrative from a rather diverse historical setting… and you implying that it’s uniform.

I’m more interested in my previous question that you’ve ignored… in which way do you see this “white supremacy” stopping you from achieving your personal goals?

[Arkdrey]

I thank God for revealing in some of the white commentators in this thread that there are still white Adventists who have not bowed at the altar of White Supremacy. To those brothers and sisters who showed by their uncommon love and respect for the testimony of the downtrodden, I Love you and God Bless you. Thank you for accepting Christ and following his way. You are a reminder that there are still White Adventists who are Converted.

To the rest of you Supremacists I counsel you in the name of Jesus to repent and forsake the Idolotry of White Supremacy that has you aligned with Apostate Protestantism and the Vilests Oppressors and Blood Guilty. You need not share in the eternal damnation richly earned by most of your deceased ancestors of the past 300 years.

To summarize:

People who agree with your binary view of the world = Converted and Saved

People who disagree with you = White Supremacists condemned by God himself

I think John McWhorter is spot on in characterizing this ideology as a religious narrative.

[DrDLWaters (Dr. Dennis L. Waters, Sr)]

I would encourage a deeper study of any literature of the Bible to anyone who would speak about racial issues. When some one says that Jesus did not address or advocate regarding racial issues, you may want to re-read the Gospels and so many other writings.

If you are looking at colors, then you need to do a geographical search to understand the location and ethnicity of the people of the regions you are references. You need to understand the historicity of people in a region, like the woman of Samaria, and therefore the people of Samaria, and the woman at the Well.

Jesus’ actions, so many of his actions were absolutely addressing societal issues of privilege and class. Things like “suffer the little children…” And “the first shall become last and the last shall become first.” and finally, the entire statement of Mary prior to the birth of Jesus, when she goes to see Elizabeth is about this matter, not of racial issues, but of justice.

Race is a cover for a principle, an idea of that says there are superior people and inferior people, that some way there are some people made in one image of God, or made by one God and another group of people made in another image of God, or made by another God, either way it is a duality.

The entire American experience of the 3/5 doctrine is involved here. It gives justification for people to treat people differently. When used by Christians especially those who used swords, spears and guns, cannons, and planes, and rockets to carry the Gospel where missionaries could not win the people, which is pretty much everywhere where the Gospel has gone, the ability to impose or use what is called hegemony, the conqueror’s belief system on the other people.

[Arkdrey]

Dennis,

Welcome to the discussion.

I think much of our understanding of “Jesus and race” is a retroactive projection of our modern understanding of these issues, since our concept of race would be very different than what we would find in the era of Jesus… in fact, you will not find much of that concept (if any). It’s not that people wouldn’t notice racial differences, but in antiquity they would invest more in familial and tribal identity than that of race. Of course, my research into the subject of race in antiquity is limited. I would like to be proven wrong, but such haven’t been the case so far.

Modern racism seems to be a post-Classical concept. It wouldn’t be something that culture of the day of Jesus would find relevant or appealing. You have to at the very least recognize that such conceptual understanding of “post-Classical racism” is a bit anachronistic, since we don’t really find that in any literature of the past, hence Jesus would have no need to address it in the manner in which you imply he did… hence he didn’t. The modern conceptualization of race developed out of certain scientific classification by early anthropologists. It’s not something people in Jesus day would think of as a viable “line” of tribal identity.

“Tribal identities” were of much more problem than racial ones, that’s why Paul doesn’t say “There’s no White, Black or Asian”. He says “There’s no Jew, no Greek, no Gentile”… which are non-racial concepts, and rather ethno-cultural divisions.

Race was not a problem in the Biblical narrative. Neither was the modern conceptualization of sexism. It’s certainly not the problem the Biblical writers focus on. They focus on much deeper problems that results in modern racial and sexual division.

[DrDLWaters (Dr. Dennis L. Waters, Sr)]

Arkdrey,
First, Great to speak with you. Second to the degree to that we will end a discussion about something in the Bible on the idea of something that is believed, which is a purely subjective level, then I have no real interest in such a discussion. Third, my discussion begins and ends with the principle, the idea, that “God is One God, who created One Humanity, in God’s One Image, and we are all that One Humanity.”

Now if you have some statement that is contrary to this statement let me know further. If you are saying that in some part of history, that God left God without a witness of this statement, including the time of Christ, let me know. If you are saying that in the time of Christ that all men recognized that all men and women were equally the One Humanity in the Image of God, let me know.

Race is symptom of the problem, but the problem itself has to do with the denial of the imago dei, in the human, the “Adam” the man/woman of the earth, made of clay, if you will. It is a matter of justice, really.

This is a principle statement, one of my professors at Howard University School of Divinity in his book, takes a different approach to the topic as well. It is not directly about race, as a presence in the Bible, whether Old Testament or New Testament. It could be classed as a thematic approach. It is not an anthropological approach either, it is a study of the words, such as a theme or word, like that of “justice” as he studied the cognate languages of the original biblical words. The Greek word of course for justice is transliterated as “diakrisune”

Here are a few verses from the Old Testament about Justice:

16 λάκκον ὤρυξεν καὶ ἀνέσκαψεν αὐτὸν καὶ ἐμπεσεῖται εἰς βόθρον, ὃν εἰργάσατο, 17 ἐπιστρέψει ὁ πόνος αὐτοῦ εἰς κεφαλὴν αὐτοῦ, καὶ ἐπὶ κορυφὴν αὐτοῦ ἡ ἀδικία αὐτοῦ καταβήσεται. 18 ἐξομολογήσομαι κυρίῳ κατὰ τὴν δικαιοσύνην αὐτοῦ καὶ ψαλῶ τῷ ὀνόματι κυρίου τοῦ ὑψίστου.

The Hebrew of the same:
I am trying to copy the Hebrew but this will not work

Here is my best effort at this, it is incorrect as it should be right to left.
16 בּ֣וֹר כָּ֭רָֽה וַֽיַּחְפְּרֵ֑הוּ וַ֝יִּפֹּ֗ל בְּשַׁ֣חַת יִפְעָֽל׃

17 יָשׁ֣וּב עֲמָל֣וֹ בְרֹאשׁ֑וֹ וְעַ֥ל קָ֝דְקֳד֗וֹ חֲמָס֥וֹ יֵרֵֽד׃

18 אוֹדֶ֣ה יְהוָ֣ה כְּצִדְק֑וֹ וַ֝אֲזַמְּרָ֗ה שֵֽׁם־יְהוָ֥ה עֶלְיֽוֹן

At any rate the idea is the appeal as I said before is about justice. It is the same appeal as in the New Testament. In the book, Troubling Biblical Waters, Dr. Cain Hope Felder, does an outstanding work of scholarship regarding looking at the ancient cognates to discover the racist wording used to translate the Bible and to uncover the history of people hidden in plain sight in the historical record to the degree that the Bible can be used and referred to as a historical record. It takes a wider breadth of scholarship to look beyond previous narrow constraints to see these things, however, with an intention to uncover the imago dei of every person and a commitment to do so, it is a worthy endeavor.

Blessings,

Dennis L. Waters, Sr.

[Arkdrey]

First, Great to speak with you. Second to the degree to that we will end a discussion about something in the Bible on the idea of something that is believed, which is a purely subjective level, then I have no real interest in such a discussion. Third, my discussion begins and ends with the principle, the idea, that “God is One God, who created One Humanity, in God’s One Image, and we are all that One Humanity.”

Now if you have some statement that is contrary to this statement let me know further. If you are saying that in some part of history, that God left God without a witness of this statement, including the time of Christ, let me know. If you are saying that in the time of Christ that all men recognized that all men and women were equally the One Humanity in the Image of God, let me know.

I think it’s a vastly different conversation about our teleological reality as opposed to the conversation about our present-day ethnic diversity. I’m not really sure as to how the idea of “One humanity in God’s image” helps us to untangle the complex web of tribal identity? I don’t disagree that such is the overarching narrative of the Biblical discourse. I’m just not sure that it would read “God addresses the issue of race and racism” in the modern context of human tribalism.

For example, what should I think about it in context of the modern setting in which the people we find inside the walls of our house are typically more important to us than the people who are outside of it? And we can progressively trace it through our religious and church affiliations, all the way to political and national identity. Our circles of close friends, etc.

How does the concept of “One humanity” overcome the “cronyism of familiarity”, and should it? Should we worry about the poor kid across the town just as much as our own child?

While I don’t disagree with the broader ideal, I’m just trying to paint the real complexity that can’t be easily set aside via “We are all a part of imago dei”… and I really don’t see Christian religion resolving this issue in the broader sense. I’ve experienced certain contexts in which people care about poor in the church just as much as they care about their relatives. It’s a great church dynamic to be a part of. But such is extremely rare… and it rather clear that merely preaching Jesus isn’t doing the trick.

Race is symptom of the problem, but the problem itself has to do with the denial of the imago dei

I think the problem is a bit deeper, and it has to do with entrenched individualism in a setting of competitive system that forces us to prioritize human worth. Hence, we don’t necessarily deny that all people are made in the image of God, but we end up denying the “chain of priority” in which we get to resolve problems for people who are outside of our circle of “relatives and friends”.

At any rate the idea is the appeal as I said before is about justice.

How would you describe the concept of justice as specifically as you can? I think there’s a lot of contention about this subject, but my guess is that’s because people don’t agree on what that concept translates to in some specific reality of human relationship.

[Harry_Allen]

Thanks, @Arkdrey.

You said:

@Arkdrey

Culture has specific category boundaries of that behavior. Just because both of us brush our teeth on different parts of the globe doesn’t mean we share the same culture. Hence, you can’t viably aggregate without considering various nuances.

In response:

If we both brush our teeth on different parts of the globe, then we share the same culture in the area of “primary tooth care.”

You could say that, in this area, the culture you have, and the culture I have, overlap.

This term—overlap—is a common term used to describe such cultural occurrences.

I said:

@Harry_Allen

Some of that aggregate experience even includes dealing with you.

Two examples, A and B:

Example A ) When you left the USSR, your father told you that you had to think of yourself as “of lower status than blacks in US.”

What a curious statement. What a curious, curious thing for a loving father to say to his son, as a final piece of wisdom before that child takes to the sky and to faraway lands. It must have been important to him, because it was one of the last things he said to you, and you remembered it.

Your father’s statement would have made no sense in the Ukraine without a global race system. If white supremacy were not a planetary system, not only would a Ukrainian father never derive the wherewithal to offer that glint of insight to his expat kid, but:

You said:

@Arkdrey

I think it’s wiser to avoid one’s confirmation bias bending this statement into what it’s not, but rather ask me what he meant, because he explained.

In response:

So:

1. I would only ask your father that question. Make him available to me, without preparation by you, and I will do so.

2. I know enough about what he meant, from the working familiarity with the English language that I possess, to know that, by “blacks,” he was talking about “people of African descent”; in other words, he was using it in the common, “Western,” sense of the term.

Again: Your father’s statement would have made no sense in the Ukraine without a global race system.

After he told you that you had to think of yourself as “of lower status than blacks in US," did you ask him, “What are ‘blacks’”? Or, “Why are they low status?” Or, “What about the whites that are below them. Should I be lower status than them, or the same?” Or, “How about after I do that? What people are next, in my rise up the ladder?” Or “What stereotypes, and what do these have to do with ‘blacks’?”

Of course not. But why not?

Because the race is a very compact piece of code. It’s so small that all he had to say was “blacks,” in order for you do get your directions. Indeed, had he said “hillbillies,” you wouldn’t have asked if they were “blacks,” even though both are generally regarded as poor, uneducated, and dirty.

You say, “I grew up with posters of rich and successful black athletes, which I modeled in my life.” I say, without a global race system, you wouldn’t know what a “black” athlete was.

The knowledge of the word “black,” itself, and its meaning, is a primary part of race. Without racism, the word would have no meaning. Without global racism, it would have no meaning in Ukraine.

I said:

@Harry_Allen

Your father’s statement would have made no sense in the Ukraine without a global race system. If white supremacy were not a planetary system, not only would a Ukrainian father never derive the wherewithal to offer that glint of insight to his expat kid, but:

— Gaitana’s success in in the 2012 Eurovision song contest would not have been undermined ;

You said:

@Arkdrey

I will say this again and again here. Check your confirmation biases. The fact that Ukraine even chosen a person with a dark skin to represent Ukraine in this contest should point out that you are wrong

In response:

You sound like MitchMcConnell: We don’t need to study reparations because we had a Black president.

How, exactly, does Gaitana’s success in in the 2012 Eurovision song contest prove that race is not a global system?

You said:

@Arkdrey

But, you still think that you are not because there’s some extreme-right winger who is squawking about racial representation and you interpret that as some racism charge, when in fact he would be saying the very same thing if a girl with German father was representing Ukraine. This dude is a politician. Politicians “divide and rule”.

In response:

“This dude is a politician” fails to prove that race is not a global system. It’s not responsive.

Indeed, if he’s “dividing,” as you charge, then that means there’s someone to whom he’s speaking, in Ukraine, who holds these ideas to be sensible and true, correct? If so, this further supports my argument. If not, then what does he “divide”?

You said:

@Arkdrey

in fact he would be saying the very same thing if a girl with German father was representing Ukraine.

In response:

So, you’re saying that, if a woman with a Ukraine mother and a German father had “a good chance of making the final of the Eurovision Song Contest,” Yuri Syrotyuk would have said, “Millions of people who will be watching will see that Ukraine is represented by a person who does not belong to our race. The vision of Ukraine as a country located somewhere in remote Germany will take root”?

If so, prove it. Find me an example of him, or someone like him, saying this.

Indeed, I’ll make this easy: Don’t limit your search to the borders of your fatherland, or to Ukrainian nationals. Find me an example, anywhere in the known universe, of someone making such a statement under similar circumstances.

I said:

@Harry_Allen

Your father’s statement would have made no sense in the Ukraine without a global race system. If white supremacy were not a planetary system, not only would a Ukrainian father never derive the wherewithal to offer that glint of insight to his expat kid, but:

— Gaitana’s success in in the 2012 Eurovision song contest would not have been undermined ;

— Zhan Beleniuk would go about his day without a problem, and Asi, and her 8-month-old, would be able to take the bus ;

— Some 13 foreigners from Nigeria, Jordan, Afghanistan, Syria, Ghana, the Democratic Republic of the Congo would not have become the focus of Human Rights Information Center in 2015;

— African students would be able to take an evening stroll through central Lutsk;

— African students could go to soccer games in peace, and “J” wouldn’t have to eat so many bananas when playing;

— Congolese college graduates would be able to celebrate their success without fear; and, last, but not finally,

— Olaolu Sunkalmi Femi wouldn’t have faced murder charges in 2012.

I’ve never been to the Ukraine. Yet, all of these incidents sound like things that I’ve either witnessed and/or experienced, that non-white people I know have witnessed and/or experienced, or that non-white people I don’t know have spoken about witnessing and/or experiencing.

I’m talking about people, above, who couldn’t find Ukraine on a map. Really, if you change the names of the people and the places, they make credible news stories from almost anywhere . That’s what I mean by a “‘global white culture’ that produces same results no matter where it is,” to use your language.

You said:

@Arkdrey

And the above is where your confirmation bias truly shines. You’ve admittedly never been to Ukraine, and I doubt most of the reporters who wrote these articles been there either. They are reporting third-party stories and dressing it up in racism without understanding the setting.

In response:

Perhaps you’re right. I mean, perhaps writers Mikhail Klikushin and Maria Danilova haven’t been to Ukraine.

Here’s what’s really interesting, though: When you say that, you sound like Strom Thurmond, and other southerners, who claimed that there was no racism in the South, and that all of the conflict was due to “outside agitators…who were stirring up trouble.”

You may think I’m being flippant, here. I’m not. What you also share with white southerners is a commitment, not only to dismissing charges of racism from non-white people in your own borders, but to no small amount of arrogance; the willingness to show up, as a white person, in the U.S., from some other place, here for a mere twenty years, and write off the experience of racism lived by people who’ve been here all of our lives.

In other words, this is very white behavior; typically so.

I asked you: How do Black people in the South, whose experiences with white people go back to rum, sodomy, and the lash, respond to your spectacular ideas?

You did not answer this question. But, that’s probably because, if those Black people did respond, you would charge them with “confirmation bias.”

You said:

@Arkdrey

In Ukraine, we infamously have Western Ukraine, which has been “historical buffer zone” for much of the conquest in the past, and it’s been in and out of Ukrainian territory for as long as Ukraine has been a concept. In fact, then word “Ukraine” itself means “At the border” in our language. So, it’s occupied by ancestors of people who were constantly invaded, robbed, and they would re-build and they would again be invaded and robbed. They would rebuild again, and again, and they would get more and more angry. So, eventually, they would be very distrusting towards outsiders that don’t show some “local markers”.

We have a ton of Jokes about Russians being beat up in that area because they try to fake Ukrainian language and they slip up one word that gives them away. Ukrainians in the West cling to “Ukrainian identity” precisely because they were forced into “survivalist tribalism” by extended past… hence whatever you see about them treating outsiders with disdain has to be contextualized in that history.

Ironically, you can take their skin color, and easily turn them in “white Nationalists”, and ignore that they reject any culture that’s not their own, and that wouldn’t be limited to skin color. That would include the way people dress, language, beliefs about history, people who are “good” and “bad”, etc… largely because people in that area, through various historical oppression, are forced into tribalism as a survival mechanism.

In response:

In other words, “Ukrainians aren’t racist. They hate everybody!”

What in the world are you talking about?

The singer, Gaitana, has lived in Ukraine since she was five. Zhan Beleniuk, the wrestler, was born there, and hasn’t lived anywhere else. These are Ukrainian people. What language do you think they were trying to fake?

As for Asi and her 8-month-old, “The violent attack was filmed by the angry crowd that was shouting ‘Tie her to the fence together with the kid!’” I just need you to point out the part where they performed a language test on her before doing so.

“‘We let in the residents of Uzhgorod [only], we let in [only] the white people” – these was the explanations given to the reporter by the on duty entrance guard – white blond-haired lady in her forties (on the video here).’”

If she’s only against people who aren’t Ukrainian, then why did she say, "We let in [only] the white people”? Is Ukraine “white people”? Is Uzhgorod?

If these are not expressions of racism, what would be? Give me three or four examples.

In this article—written by Rajeev Syal, from Ukraine, by the way—it says:

The student, known as J, plays amateur football in Lviv…. He said spectators sometimes come armed with bananas even when the game is for fun and played in front of a crowd of a few dozen. “It has happened to me – the monkey chants, racist comments and the fruit. I try to ignore it or turn it into a joke by eating the fruit.”

The article adds:

The city’s ruling party, Svoboda, whose slogan is “one race, one nation, one fatherland”, has been variously described as fascist, neo-Nazi and extreme.

So, you’re saying this also happens to soccer players with Ukraine mothers and German fathers? They get fruit thrown at them, and are mocked as animals?

Great. If you’re not making this up, send me the links to stories documenting the same.

I said:

@Harry_Allen

If Jewish people vanished, and all the things they’d said and thought were stored on a microfiche, and that fiche was stuck in a pressure-proof, heat-proof box, along with all the things Jews had made and used, and that box was buried 6,000 miles beneath the Earth’s surface, at its core, and 10,000 centuries passed, and, by this time, the world was filled with blue Alpha Centaurians, according to your example, the following would be a true statement:

"There is Jewish culture on Earth."

I’m saying that that statement is wholly and obviously false .

What I’m saying is this: When the last Jew dies, Jewish culture goes with her. All that will be left are remnants of Jewish culture . That, in fact, is what they will be called: Remnants.

You said:

@Arkdrey

Remntants of something is that thing Remnants of cake is … cake. Remnants of carpet … is carpet. Remnants of culture… is culture. Even you subconsciously recognize that culture is a collection of all internal/external setting pertaining to certain distinct behavior.

In response:

Remnants of a cake are made of cake. But they are not a cake. If you served remnants of a cake at a birthday party, they would assume the cake was gone. Someone would say to you, “Where’s the cake?”

Remnants of a carpet are made of carpet. But they are not a carpet. That’s why, when people buy carpet, they often avoid remnants. If you told your wife, “I’m going to go buy a living room carpet,” and brought home remnants, she might divorce you.

Remnants of a culture are made of, or by a, culture. That is, they are so designated, due to cultural impetus and intent. But they are not the culture. They are not, because culture is thought, speech, and action. Thought, speech, and action is what ties cultural remnants together into culture, much as “more cake” is what ties “cake crumbs” together into “a cake.”

This is why, for example, when people try to mystify racism by speaking about “institutional racism,” I always say, “‘Institutions’ are a) White people plus b) their stuff. Their stuff can’t be racist.”

I said:

@Harry_Allen

Otherwise, what we should believe is that, on Earth, there is Neanderthal culture, Incan culture, ancient Polynesian culture, royal Hawaiian culture, a Viking culture, ancient Greek culture, and/or Heian Japanese culture, right now —that these are real, active things. Perhaps thriving, because, maybe, their artifacts are everywhere.

In other words, you’re arguing that cultures are, somehow, permanent , or perhaps quasi-permanent . That, if they didn’t stuff that box at Earth’s core with all that Jewish stuff, but just put in a single piece of paper with the exclamation “ oy ” on it, Jewish culture would still exist.

I’m saying, if so, it’s a designation without a difference. In other words, if that’s true, suppose there was no box, but, instead, a single blue Alpha Centaurian had heard the word “ oy ,” once, but had forgotten he heard it, though it was somewhere in his memory, albeit unaccessible. Would Jewish culture exist, then?

You said:

@Arkdrey

All of the above are still with us in some shape or form. The only time that exists is “now”. What we call “past” is merely a recollection of “now” in memory or “remnant structure” as you would put it. So, these cultures didn’t “die off”. These exist in some transformed continuum, or as a setting of the artifacts that we find, which in fact communicate that culture to us.

In response:

Sorry, but I don’t use drugs.

You said:

@Arkdrey

If we merely limit culture to “brain boundaries”, then you are devolving into a disjointed and solipsistic reality outlook in which you think brain is insular mechanism that exists separately from the world around it.

In response:

I don’t know what you mean by “brain boundaries.”

Culture originates in the brain. It is then expressed by thought, speech, and action. When that thought, speech, and action ceases, the culture does, too.

You’re saying it resides in objects? So, if you pick up a katana, you should be able to do the things that Miyamoto Musashi did when he unsheathed his?

I promise you: You won’t. Why?

Because, presumably, you don’t possess Japanese samurai culture.

Even more, though, you don’t possess Miyamoto Musashi culture; the way that Miyamoto Musashi thought, spoke, and acted. When he died in 1645, his culture died with him and no longer exists.

His text, The Book of Five Rings, exists. But it is a remnant of his culture.

I said:

@Harry_Allen

But, let’s talk about that. I’m saying, if people stopped thinking, speaking, and acting “about” “British royal culture,” it would cease to exist. You could have a billion crowns and thrones stuffed in an attic, or collecting dust in their royal settings, or lying in the street. If no one did anything different—if everyone acted as if that crown wasn’t there—“British royal culture” would have ceased to exist. All you would have are its remnants .

You said:

@Arkdrey

The very etymological structure of our language carries cultural concepts that are no longer there, and which we don’t think about.

For example, the term “sinister” in Latin means “left”, and it’s derived from false belief that Devil sat at the left side of God, and that left-handed people are of the “devil”. So, there’s a long history of ignorance on this subject that propagates to this very day, to the point that my mother-in-law is ignorantly terrified about my son’s left-handed tendencies and attempts to change it in any way she can saying that “it’s not good”.

I would still use the word “sinister”, and even though it changed meaning, the heritage of that word doesn’t change etymological structure. So, part of that culture is with us, even when it’s long gone. It’s there both in artifacts from which we can connect some narrative, and in some continuum that’s in our brains to this day.

In response:

No one—in other words, 99% of people—who calls anyone sinister, today, has any notion of left-handedness in mind. No one, if they read this sentence in a modern newspaper…

He acted in a sinister fashion.

… would say, “Ah! A left-hander! I knew it.”

The part of human culture that does that is only inhabited by a) Latin lexicologists, and b) people who are interested in what is commonly called “a dead language.”

That’s because the culture that does what I described, above, is dead.

What is left is a remnant of the idea, built into the language. When you, Latin lexicologists, anybody else who cares about this nuance, and the data about it have all ceased to exist, so will the remnants.

This, much the way that if all that British royal stuff was put in a pile and burned to ash…so would the remnants.

Now: People looking askance at left-handers, or trying to get them to write with their right hands, as far as I know, that stuff still happens.

But the impetus that made people connect it to the devil, that you described above, that culture is dead, and/or almost dead.

You said:

@Arkdrey

Again, I’d rather agree to disagree on this point and move on. You seem to be set in your belief that culture is only limited to people’s brains.

In response:

If you’re not lying, find the place where I said, “Culture is only limited to people’s brains.”

You said:

@Arkdrey

Culture is local. It can’t be global. “Global culture” is a nonsense concept, because “global culture” is equivalent to “no culture”. It would be like a concept of race where there wouldn’t be any races.

In response:

Besides the fact that you haven’t defined “local,” this doesn’t even make sense.

Part of human culture is smiling.

Part of human culture is to furrow one’s brow when confused, or thinking.

Part of human culture is laughing.

In other words, these are all actions in which people engage, everywhere.

It doesn’t mean every single person in the world smiles, laughs, or furrows their brow. It means that these are actions, engaged in by a substantially large number of persons, over a wide enough part of the planet for us to safely say they are global.

This is also what I mean when I say that race is a global system. When I say…

White supremacy is a global system, and is dominant, over non-white people, throughout the known universe

…I don’t even mean that all white people are racists. I don’t, because I don’t know if they are or they aren’t.

I mean everything I said about Ukraine. I even mean everything that you said about Ukraine. I say this, because a very dominant part of white supremacy involves white people telling victims of race that what they see—as racist—is not racist, just like you did.

You said:

@Arkdrey

Culture only exists as a category differentiator. Not all “white people” act the same.

In response:

O.K. Find the place where I said, “All white people act the same.”

All white people are white people. They’re all alike in that sense; in other words, there’s some reason they have all been designated white people; a demonym without a country.

Everything else remains to be seen.

You said:

@Arkdrey

You are cherry-picking isolated events, and you bundle them up into some “global culture”, while you are ignoring the vast differences in setting and reasons.

In response:

I believe that the non-white people, so cherry-picked, would not agree with you.

But, perhaps what Asi and her 8-month-old were experiencing was not a lynching, but “confirmation bias.”

I said:

@Harry_Allen

From where comes the requirement that cultures be “unique”? Find a book on human anthropology that makes this claim.

You said:

@Arkdrey

Can we have a concept of color when all colors would be purple? Such concept wouldn’t be necessary. Culture is a category concept.

In response:

This is not responsive. You haven’t defined “category concept,” nor have you explained why cultures need to be unique.

I said:

@Harry_Allen

So, for example, part of Ukrainian culture is speaking Ukrainian. But I’ll bet you 1,000,000 hryvnia that, in a day, I could find Ukrainians who don’t speak Ukrainian.

Part of Ukrainian culture is speaking Ukrainian. But not for Ukrainians who don’t.

You said:

@Arkdrey

A Ukrainian is more likely to understand that language than a non-Ukrainian, would you agree?

In response:

I expect.

But what does that have to do with the point I made?

You said:

@Arkdrey

Culture is a spectrum. It’s not a singular concept. For example, I can say that I’m more American today than I am a Ukrainian. And I’m more Jewish in my beliefs than I am a Turk. It’s not a binary concept. All of these exist in my head. I’m merely tracing heritage of these concepts as I attribute these to various categories of people who practiced these in some geographic isolation in the past. But, even in the past it’s not that simple, since the world is never static.

Whatever categories we have today, these are for utility rather than some scientific description of reality.

In response:

This all seems non-responsive.

You said:

@Arkdrey

Hence, it’s an extremely oversimplified position that there some kind of clean continuum between lighter shades of skin and what you choose to focus on and filter as “white culture”.

I said:

@Harry_Allen

What’s also simplified is saying that someone is white . But it works well enough for you to say that your father, you, and your children are that .

You said:

@Arkdrey

We are only “that” because that’s what people labels us in spite of the vast cultural differences and variations in the spectrum of “white” that’s much broader than you paint.

In response:

You said that. You said that you were white, and had white children. This means that your father is white. These were your words. You are, in fact, one of the people you blame.

You said:

@Arkdrey

I hope that clarifies what I meant by culture not merely limited to person’s brain?

I said:

@Harry_Allen

I think so: I think you’re saying that a person’s culture can also be held, as data, or reside in artifacts and other objects of manufacture.

And what I’m saying is that it’s only that person’s culture if those objects are “in use.”

When a rabbi picks up the torah scrolls, they are part of his culture. If one Sabbath, he said to congregants, or to himself, “I am never reading from the Torah again, ever!” they would cease to be part of his culture.

Now, you might say, “That’s absurd. The Torah is part of Jewish culture, and he’s a Jew!” To which I would say, “Is he? Because he’s also a rabbi, and rabbis read from the Torah. Is a rabbi who refuses to do rabbinical tasks still a rabbi?”

You said:

@Arkdrey

Rabbis wouldn’t have that culture without those scrolls, and those scrolls wouldn’t exist without Rabbis. Hence, I don’t really see how you can separate the two.

In response:

This is precisely my point.

You can’t separate the two. You can’t, without doing damage to the culture.

A rabbi who won’t read from the Torah is not practicing rabbinical culture, because rabbinical culture includes reading from the Torah. If all the rabbis in the world did this, then, effectively, rabbinical culture would have ceased to exist.

The fact that pristine, unread copies of the Torah were in every Jewish synagogue—or that one was printed in Hebrew, in Bologna, in 1482—would be irrelevant.

If rabbis, by definition, read from the Torah, and rabbis were to cease to think, speak, or act in that manner, rabbi culture would be over…because rabbis would be over.

It doesn’t matter if they all piled into Congregation Shearith Israel one Saturday morning, at once. With no one to read the Torah, those rolls would become rabbinical cultural remnants.

You said:

@Arkdrey

My second objection was not merely about cultural function, but the way you categorize and consolidate wide range of cultures into “white people” and claim that all of them “act like white people”, which constitutes some global “whiteness”.

I said:

@Harry_Allen

I don’t “categorize and consolidate wide range of cultures into ‘white people’” White people did that. (I said the same thing to @2humBaby.) They started this long before I was born. I told you that already.

You said:

@Arkdrey

My point was that I don’t do that,

In response:

That’s not true.

On June 23rd, you wrote, "The vast majority of “white people” don’t think of ourselves as “white people.”

You didn’t say, “themselves.” You said “ourselves.”

You also said, in the same post:

“But, if you are talking about [reminding] me about my “white guilt”, when my ancestors likely suffered far worse fate than yours did… then sorry.”

“Me.” “My.”

White.

You said:

@Arkdrey

and many of the “white people” that you call by that label. Hence, it seems to me that you are perpetuating this culture by maintaining the boundaries that were given to people in the past.

In response:

Nooooooooo…. Blame The Racists. They do that far better than I ever could in my best dream.

I said:

@Harry_Allen

As for the globality of whiteness, again:

If there were no such thing, as you claim, I couldn’t go to Australia, as I did, then, in a lecture, accurately describe Australian TV’s racial characteristics—how white people and non-white people are mutually depicted on TV there—then be told by white and non-white Australians that I was correct…then admit to them that I’d never seen a minute of Australian TV in my life. This actually happened.

Indeed, if there was no such thing as global “whiteness,” Australians couldn’t understand what I meant by “white people.”

You might say they don’t think about themselves as “white people,” like you did in your first post to me. To which I’d say, of course not: Because they have the so-called Aborigines to do that for them.

You said:

@Arkdrey

You are misplacing characteristics of categories where such categories are not warranted. When someone says “white person”, we can instinctively understand a “label”, and I’m not really against the nominal labeling of skin color. If we put a mix of races in the room, some of them will be clearly darker, and some of them will be clearly lighter in skin color. I don’t see anything problematic with saying that someone varies by these characteristics in skin color.

The problem is that in a political spectrum of the ideology, when someone says “white people”, they don’t merely say “skin color” white, they attempt to smuggle in the ideology that they attach to “whiteness”… no matter of what cultural differences there may be between “white people”. And when that someone says “black people”, there’s a similar ideological smuggling going on relevant to mistreatment and oppression.

That’s the narrative I reject. I don’t reject that we are different in skin color characteristics. I reject that we have some unitary function that matches the skin color. What you tend to do is to apply a rather extreme confirmation bias to selectively approach history and string up a narrative of “white supremacy” that’s rather binary in the way you describe it.

And when people begin describing things in binary manner… watch out!

In response:

You. Are. Bugging.

You’re speaking as if these terms were invented last week; like someone trying to redefine “Santorum.”

You’re talking about these words in a way that only existed in the mind of Jacques Derrida.

I’m saying that the people who deemed themselves white were trying to “smuggle in the ideology that they attach to ‘whiteness.’” They did it, and it worked like gangbusters, cousin: Business is a-boomin’.

It’s fine if, after you have the mansion, the Porsches, the Gulfstream, and the matching hippos, you want to disavow any relationship to Pablo Escobar. Just don’t expect anyone to take you seriously.

You’ve gotta come at this another way, Arkdrey.

You said:

@Arkdrey

You keep saying things like “people understand what I mean by ‘white people’ or ‘people laugh at comedy about white invaders’”, but you can’t demonstrably show me that attitudes of all white people are uniform when it comes to the subject of race.

In response:

This is absurd.

I can’t show you that all active U.S. soldiers are uniform in attitudes when it comes to being an active U.S. soldier, either. However, they’re all uniform when it comes to being in the military. The proof of that is the fact that they are in the military. I include, here, even the ones who are planning on going AWOL tomorrow night.

White people are uniform enough on the subject of race to be white people. This itself is a remarkable achievement, because it requires the sublimation of what is geographic, or national, for something that is predominantly conceptual.

It’s like when someone says, “I’m hungry. Let’s go to McDonald’s.” McDonald’s is not found in nature. It’s a completely artificial construct that took billions of dollars and millions of man-hours in programming to create; i.e., to get someone to utter those six words.

So is white. So is white supremacy.

You said:

@Arkdrey

So, if you eat at a restaurant a 10 times, and then one day you walk into a restaurant full of white people, and the waiter ignores you. Then 10 times when they didn’t, isn’t a statistic that’s a viable objection to your POV… the one time that they did becomes the poster child of racism, and then re-projection on “white supremacy”.

In response:

I’m not clear what you mean by this example. Please re-write it more carefully, more simply, or merely choose a different illustration

You said:

@Arkdrey

Again… check your biases.

In response:

Again, I requested that you to do so by asking your “Nigerian clients” certain questions. I’m still waiting for those answers, like I am from every white person I’ve challenged to ask their Black “friends” what those of darker hue honestly think about racism.

I’ll check my biases when you check yours.

You said:

@Arkdrey

Read a bit more literature that disagrees with your POV.

In response:

Why do you think I’m here, talking to you?

You said:

@Arkdrey

Merely feeding your confirmation bias will take you to rather extreme and nonsensical setting.

In response:

Great.

I’m at @Harry_Allen, on Twitter. After this topic closes, reach out to me, there, with your Nigerian clients’ responses to my questions.

You said:

@Arkdrey

There’s nothing historically unique in prohibition of mixed-raced marriages. It was a common practice in various racial setting in our collective past. Of course, in South Africa it was unique in a setting of apartheid law, but as an idea it’s not that unique or ubiquitous to “white people”.

In response:

Do you mean that there’s nothing historically unique in prohibition of mixed-raced marriages…for racist reasons?

Or, are you merely speaking about the Montagues and Capulets?

You said:

@Arkdrey

A large number of “white people” have cross-cultural and cross-racial marriages, and I’m one of them.

In response:

Yes…your “wife from the Philippines.”

I remember asking if she was non-white. You did not respond.

You said:

@Arkdrey

There’s nothing unique about past settings in which tribalism narratives excluded certain “outsiders” from integrating into that society.

In response:

Montagues and Capulets…thought so.

You said:

@Arkdrey

Hence, I’ve asked you about UNIQUE characteristics of “whiteness” as a culture that you’ve yet to demonstrate as such.

In response:

My answer is “White supremacy.”

You said:

@Arkdrey

The analogy that you paint doesn’t support your premise.

In response:

In fact, it does. It says that never before has one racial group amassed so many different kinds of tools for mistreatment, all pointed unrelentingly at their subjects, in such a short time.

Any one of the phenomena I listed are uniquely white, as far as I can tell. But their contemporaneity is absolutely, singularly white. That’s why white woman Susan Sontag said:

That’s what I meant when I said:

@Harry_Allen

As I compiled the above list, though, it occurred to me that no other people—even ones with global hold or world power aspirations—had amounted so much, in so many places, in such a short time. Everything in that list happened over a period of around 500 years.

So, while one might argue that the activities with which white people credit themselves are not unique—I’d disagree—the combination is certainly unparalleled.

You said:

@Arkdrey

The largest land empire in human history that was derived through a rather bloody conquest was “non-white”. And that culture was more or less uniform in its conquest and spread of its ideology.

In response:

Right…the Mongols, in the 13th century.

One Ohio-class sub filled with white, American seamen could have fired a single Trident II D5 and ended all that noise on their lunch break. Literally.

I said:

@Harry_Allen

In response to your question, “What are some sets of behaviors that you see as uniquely ‘white’?”, my answer is:

a) White supremacy (racism) , as defined, first, in the preceding tri-part definition, and, then,

b) Racism (white supremacy) , as alluded to and described in the documents preceding.

You said:

@Arkdrey

You are defining these concepts in circular manner. You are saying that “white supremacy/ racism” is what unique about “white supremacist / racists”. It’s a circular tautology.

In response:

No, you’re not reading what I’ve written correctly.

To the question, What are some sets of behaviors that you see as uniquely ‘white’?, I said white supremacy.

In other words, I see white supremacy as uniquely white.

You said:

@Arkdrey

you seem to be deeply entrenched in the narrative that you follow, hence your confirmation bias seems to ignore the fact that you are cherrypicking this narrative from a rather diverse historical setting… and you implying that it’s uniform.

In response:

The narrative I am following, here, in this forum, is white power over non-white people.

To me, this means that, as long as such an entity exists, no non-white person gets the Last Word on anything, in any area of activity by people, including Economics, Education, Entertainment, Labor, Law, Politics, Religion, Sex, and War.

By the “Last Word,” I mean that no non-white person, throughout the known universe, can make a decision about anything, in any area of activity by people, including Economics, Education, Entertainment, Labor, Law, Politics, Religion, Sex, and War, and not be overruled by one or more white people.

Now, perhaps you’ve got a chapter in this narrative that is:

• “Non-white power over white people,” or

• “White / non-white power parity”

If so, I would love to see it. If I’ve missed something you said, I would love to see it.

In this exchange, however, what you’ve mostly done was attempt to tell me that what I see is not what I see. I’m trying to figure out why that should work on me.

You said:

@Arkdrey

I’m more interested in my previous question that you’ve ignored… in which way do you see this “white supremacy” stopping you from achieving your personal goals?

In response:

I would refer that question, and similar ones, to the White Supremacists, since:

1. They are deceitful, secretive, and violent, and

2. They are in charge.

Truly,
HA

[Arkdrey]

You say, “I grew up with posters of rich and successful black athletes, which I modeled in my life.” I say, without a global race system , you wouldn’t know what a “black” athlete was.

You say that because all of your premises inevitably lead to “global white supremacy”. Keep in mind that I’m speaking about skin color, while you are taking about something entirely different.

The knowledge of the word “black,” itself, and its meaning, is a primary part of race. Without racism, the word would have no meaning. Without global racism , it would have no meaning in Ukraine

You mean it wouldn’t simply refer to skin color? It must imply dominant relationships?

How, exactly, does Gaitana’s success in in the 2012 Eurovision song contest prove that race is not a global system?

Consider what would have happened if a pale-skinned Ukrainian girl would represent Angola at miss Universe pageant? You would likewise see that as a marker of “white supremacy”, hence there is no point to debate something that you already see as same outcome no matter what the variables are.

No, you’re not reading what I’ve written correctly.

To the question, What are some sets of behaviors that you see as uniquely ‘white’? , I said white supremacy .

In other words, I see white supremacy as uniquely white.

Again, I see no further point in discussing this precisely because you reiterating your circularity of thought. White supremacy is uniquely white is circular due to how you define white supremacy. You don’t seem to notice or see that.

You will continually twist every point I make by filtering it along the binary lines through inherent circularity of your arguments.

I appreciate the effort you put into the discussion, but I don’t see us finding agreement on this subject.

[Sirje]

Jesus’ actions, so many of his actions were absolutely addressing societal issues of privilege and class.

That goes without saying. God’s perspective of humanity is one of equality - rich/poor; black/white/yellow/red; old/young; smart/dull; etc. He addressed them by actually ignoring them.

A deeper study yet, would reveal Jesus did not come to rectify the present social inequalities. His mission was to proclaim the “coming of the kingdom”, how ever we define that. It appears that at present, the shift is toward perfecting the world order - which defines God’s kingdom in terms of this present world. That will never happen. Jesus did not come to establish a better world. He came to proclaim a “new world” - not by human effort. That does not negate water for the Samaritan woman; or, the Samaritan, in turn, helping the Levite. Jesus’ mission was personal - not social. Caesar was to be given what Caesar demanded (as frustrating as that is) as long as Caesar reigned. God would take care of the justice when God comes to reign.