17 ms·

I see it's common in America to conflate race and nationality. There's hundreds of millions, if not billions of white people who are not native english speaker

by drKarl 4y ago

I see it's common in America to conflate race and nationality. There's hundreds of millions, if not billions of white people who are not native english speakers, and also there's millions of americans who are not white. There are different accents in America, but that doesn't depend so much of the race as it depends on geographical areas or communities. Some of those communities happen to have certain racial origin, like African Vernacular English / Ebonics, or Latino/Hispanic communities, for different reasons. There's for example American people of Indian heritage who were born in USA and are native english speakers, who would according to the article "sound white", which is ridiculous. And it's also common in the US to call someone from South America or Spain non-white, which is hilarious because there's a lot of people from South America who is white, and most people in Spain are white. They even called Antonio Banderas non-white! I suppose that comes from the notion of WASP (White Anglo-saxon Protestant), and so they call non-white anyone who is not WASP? I'm Spanish, white (and with blue eyes) and atheist, so I'm not WASP. I speak english well but i do have an accent. I suppose I would be called non-white in the USA?

t6jvcereio 4y ago
Interesting. But why did you make a point of telling us you eye color? Quite an insight into your thought process actually.
lozenge 4y ago
Race is a social construct, news at 11. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_whiteness_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_whiteness_in_th... - many groups that used to be called non-white, are now called white. You are not putting enough focus on the "American" in the title. The software makes them "sound American", and sound like a specific group of Americans. It doesn't make them "sound white" and sound like a specific group of whites. The concept of whites has no meaning outside of a particular society's definition of it (in this case the US). And yes, if you're born in the US and grew up there your accent will be closer to your school/general society than your parents, in my experience. If the school isn't high percentage Indian, then you will "sound white [American]".
- drKarl 4y ago
  On point. What does "white" mean anyways? In Spain for example there's a mix of iberian-celtic tribes, fenicians, greeks, romans, visigoths (which were germanic tribes), arabic (Al-Andalus califate lasted around 700 years and controlled more than half the iberian peninsula), etc and more recently instead of conquest, there's inmigration from South America, Africa, Asia...
  - Bayart 4y ago
    Much like everywhere in Europe, the Spanish population is stable since the Bronze Age. Subsequent invasions are anecdotal. Considering the European population is generally very young and homogeneous compared to that of other continents, it does make sense to consider it as one ethnic block (whatever you call it, "white" or not, is of little interest).
    - edgyquant 4y ago
      How do we even know that a population hasn’t shifted since the Bronze Age?
      - xeromal 4y ago
        Sampling of DNA from buried bodies from the eras?
- User23 4y ago
  Who you marry and have children with and where you choose to raise them is a social construct too.
- unmole 4y ago
  > many groups that used to be called non-white, are now called white. Like which ones?
  - JTon 4y ago
    Southern Europeans who live by the Mediterranean sea. Italians, Spanish, Greeks
syzar 4y ago
It depends on skin color. Rabiblancos like Raphael Cruz (Ted Cruz) and Marco Rubio come across as white in both appearance and accent. In the U.S. those who speak Spanish who are darker skinned would be referred to as “Mexican” even though millions of them have roots in Central and South America. In the past we pretty much referred to anyone who speaks Spanish as Spanish. This why it’s a bit complicated when a person who speaks Spanish is actually from Spain. Such a person who has a light skin tone should be considered white but might be called Mexican.
- drKarl 4y ago
  That's the first time I come across the term "rabiblancos", it seems it's something they say in Panama to refer to rich white people of European origin, sounds derogatory. I suppose a more common term would be "Criollos" or in french Creole. Well calling "mexican" to everyone with a darker skin who speaks spanish it's plainly as racist as calling any asian person "chinese", etc. AFAIK the term Latino in USA refers to anyone from South America (including Brazil), which would exclude Spain, Italy, France... while Hispanic technically includes people from Spain as much as from any other spanish speaking countries from South America (so it would exclude Brazil).
  - syzar 4y ago
    I grew up in Panama. I’m white in the classical American sense. I don’t have a Spanish accent. English is the only language I speak. Both my parents are white from the United States.
  - helionsantos 4y ago
    How Americans distinguish races is a little bit odd to me. I was born in Brazil, but I am dual citizen of Brazil and Italy (some distant relatives come from there). Besides, my grandmother (my mom's mother) is German, daughter of a Serbian man and a German woman. On my father's side, I have black ancestors, albeit I am caucasian (dark hair, light skin). What am I then, an aberration? I prefer much more how races are distinguished in Brazil. It is purely you skin color, so if you have light skin you are white (asian people included), if you have dark skin you are black and that is pretty much it. Your heritage doesn't matter that much to distinguish your race. I believe this stems from Brazil having laws forbidding segregation in the 1930s, albeit for racists reasons, given that the goal was to mix black people with white people so the country would be whitened.
rutierut 4y ago
I'm a Dutch person living in Spain and my British accent can make it super difficult for some Spaniards to understand me. I tend to have a lot of trouble understanding Greek English. This article lacks so much perspective, Europe is filled with white people having trouble understanding each others English. It's not that weird that once you start jumping continents this effect simply gets stronger.
hotpotamus 4y ago
I was once told by an ethnically Japanese person who was born in Mexico (and when he spoke English he sounded like a Mexican national) that his hardware and software didn't match. What Americans consider "white" is not fixed. Jews are white or not depending on the time and context. Cubans would be considered Latino or something today, and yet the most popular TV show of the 50's (I Love Lucy) featured an American woman married to a Cuban man at a time when interracial marriage would never have been shown on TV.
- x86_64Ubuntu 4y ago
  There are both white and black Cubans. No one would have considered that to be any more interracial than if a White Canadian married a White American.
  - hotpotamus 4y ago
    And how do you tell the difference between a black and a white Cuban?
starkd 4y ago
Or maybe it comes from a hypercritical racial focus from people who are intent on dividing us.
- edgyquant 4y ago
  Yep exactly. The average American is most certainly not obsessed with race.
skissane 4y ago
> I suppose that comes from the notion of WASP (White Anglo-saxon Protestant), and so they call non-white anyone who is not WASP? "White" != "WASP": Catholics of Irish descent are definitely not "WASP": not Protestant; many would also say Celtic or Anglo-Celtic not Anglo-Saxon; yet they are considered "white". Some people have this idea that "the Irish didn't use to be white", but that is historically very dubious: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/03/22/sorry-but-the-irish-were-always-white-and-so-were-the-italians-jews-and-so-on/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201... Really what much of this comes from, I think, is some people in the US today are so focused on race, they will reinterpret other forms of cultural/ethnic discrimination as being racial – even though that doesn't make a lot of sense. The "Irish didn't use to be white" claim is retconning religious hatreds – anti-Irish sentiment in the 19th century US was primarily driven by anti-Catholicism – into racial ones. This reinterpretation also reveals a narrowly US-centric view of the world: Australia is another country which received significant Irish immigration (10-30% of Australians have at least partial Irish ancestry, depending on how you measure it), yet "Irish aren't white" or "Irish didn't used to be white" is a thought which would have never occurred in Australia: Australia's historical racially discriminatory immigration policy (the "White Australia Policy") always counted Irish as "white"
- aliqot 4y ago
  When people used to say that Irish weren't white, it has nothing to do with what you just said, it had to do with them being the outsider subjugated class, they're akin to the other minorities at the time who were in the same situation. This is how they became known as non-white. Jews got the same rap during this time.
  - skissane 4y ago
    When did people "used to say that Irish weren't white"? Only really starting in the 1990s (with Noel Ignatiev's book) – by which time anti-Irish sentiment in the US was rather long gone. Nobody called Irish people "non-white" during the heyday of discrimination against them.
dwringer 4y ago
I doubt you'd be called non-white but it's probably contextual. I have a hard time imagining a scenario where it would be likely to come up. You would not be confused with sounding like a "white American", though. The ridiculousness of what it means to "sound white" is the subject of lots of humor. I think Dave Chappelle did a pretty good mockery of it with his news reporter character. There's also a pretty funny scene in Sorry to Bother You where Danny Glover is explaining his call center success to LaKeith Stanfield.
- slfnflctd 4y ago
  I found Sorry to Bother You quite funny, a bit scary, fairly accurate (as someone who worked in several call centers) and unusual in many ways-- it's also extremely relevant to this thread.
LancerSykera 4y ago
I once got in an argument with a Puerto Rican coworker when I told him Spanish people are white. He genuinely could not fathom it, and was very pissed off about it. I guess he thought Latinos are direct descendants of Spaniards?
- edgyquant 4y ago
  Are you saying Spanish people aren’t white?
WastingMyTime89 4y ago
Here is my trick to survive as a Western European in a culturally American environment: just entirely ignore any discussions involving races, racism or progressivism entirely. You might think the world translates to your language and you could participate. You might have trouble understanding or be shocked by the reasoning and think asking will help you get it. You might even think you should have an opinion as you have the mistaken idea that your culture is close to the American one. You would be wrong. The way these subjects are entwined with the American psyche and identity defies entendement and reasoning. In my experience it’s best to treat it like you would a foreign religion.
- PuppyTailWags 4y ago
  I always found it useful to consider the fact that America was at one point an aparthied nation. Its origins relied on the attempted extinction of a race of people who already lived here, then it lived for over a century with an entire race of people as literal property, breeding them like dogs or cats and separating their families with no respect to their humanity. A swathe of america fought a civil war to continue this treatment of this race of humans and the attempt as a nation to reconcile this failed within a generation. There are still members of this enslaved race that, when they were born, were deprived the right to vote because of their race. In this historical context, America's relationship with race does not defy reasoning. It's the only reasonable outcome of a nation that began with humans of one skin color being 3/5 of humans of another skin color.
  - nostromo 4y ago
    None of this is uniquely American. Europe, the Middle East, East Asia, Australia, Africa, etc. all have unique but similar histories of genocide and enslavement. And it was happening in the Americas long before any Europeans arrived too.
    - PuppyTailWags 4y ago
      On the contrary, enslaving a specific skin-color is relatively recent invention. Although the concept of slavery is old, the way slavery was applied is relatively new. America also held onto the enslavement of a specific skin-color most recently, and like I said, there are still people alive who were legally barred from voting purely because of their identified skin color.
cultofmetatron 4y ago
> There's hundreds of millions, if not billions of white people who are not native english speakers, and also there's millions of americans who are not white. reminds me of this time I joined up with a german fellow and we were walking around talking to girls in ukraine. They were enamored with him and asked him to teach him english. He meanwhile was growing more and more disturbed at how they would completely ignore me. At one point he points to me and goes, "I'm german, I have a very obvious german accent. He on the other hand is American!!"
Cyberdog 4y ago
> I see it's common in America to conflate race and nationality. Please don't base your perceptions of America on a Vice article. Clearly non-white people are capable of speaking in an "American" accent too, but Vice is the sort of news outlet that must make things divisive on racial lines as often as possible.

by drKarl 4y ago

t6jvcereio 4y ago

Interesting. But why did you make a point of telling us you eye color? Quite an insight into your thought process actually.

lozenge 4y ago

Race is a social construct, news at 11. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_whiteness_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitions_of_whiteness_in_th... - many groups that used to be called non-white, are now called white. You are not putting enough focus on the "American" in the title. The software makes them "sound American", and sound like a specific group of Americans. It doesn't make them "sound white" and sound like a specific group of whites. The concept of whites has no meaning outside of a particular society's definition of it (in this case the US). And yes, if you're born in the US and grew up there your accent will be closer to your school/general society than your parents, in my experience. If the school isn't high percentage Indian, then you will "sound white [American]".

drKarl 4y ago
On point. What does "white" mean anyways? In Spain for example there's a mix of iberian-celtic tribes, fenicians, greeks, romans, visigoths (which were germanic tribes), arabic (Al-Andalus califate lasted around 700 years and controlled more than half the iberian peninsula), etc and more recently instead of conquest, there's inmigration from South America, Africa, Asia...
- Bayart 4y ago
  Much like everywhere in Europe, the Spanish population is stable since the Bronze Age. Subsequent invasions are anecdotal. Considering the European population is generally very young and homogeneous compared to that of other continents, it does make sense to consider it as one ethnic block (whatever you call it, "white" or not, is of little interest).
  - edgyquant 4y ago
    How do we even know that a population hasn’t shifted since the Bronze Age?
    - xeromal 4y ago
      Sampling of DNA from buried bodies from the eras?
User23 4y ago
Who you marry and have children with and where you choose to raise them is a social construct too.
unmole 4y ago
> many groups that used to be called non-white, are now called white. Like which ones?
- JTon 4y ago
  Southern Europeans who live by the Mediterranean sea. Italians, Spanish, Greeks

syzar 4y ago

It depends on skin color. Rabiblancos like Raphael Cruz (Ted Cruz) and Marco Rubio come across as white in both appearance and accent. In the U.S. those who speak Spanish who are darker skinned would be referred to as “Mexican” even though millions of them have roots in Central and South America. In the past we pretty much referred to anyone who speaks Spanish as Spanish. This why it’s a bit complicated when a person who speaks Spanish is actually from Spain. Such a person who has a light skin tone should be considered white but might be called Mexican.

drKarl 4y ago
That's the first time I come across the term "rabiblancos", it seems it's something they say in Panama to refer to rich white people of European origin, sounds derogatory. I suppose a more common term would be "Criollos" or in french Creole. Well calling "mexican" to everyone with a darker skin who speaks spanish it's plainly as racist as calling any asian person "chinese", etc. AFAIK the term Latino in USA refers to anyone from South America (including Brazil), which would exclude Spain, Italy, France... while Hispanic technically includes people from Spain as much as from any other spanish speaking countries from South America (so it would exclude Brazil).
- syzar 4y ago
  I grew up in Panama. I’m white in the classical American sense. I don’t have a Spanish accent. English is the only language I speak. Both my parents are white from the United States.
- helionsantos 4y ago
  How Americans distinguish races is a little bit odd to me. I was born in Brazil, but I am dual citizen of Brazil and Italy (some distant relatives come from there). Besides, my grandmother (my mom's mother) is German, daughter of a Serbian man and a German woman. On my father's side, I have black ancestors, albeit I am caucasian (dark hair, light skin). What am I then, an aberration? I prefer much more how races are distinguished in Brazil. It is purely you skin color, so if you have light skin you are white (asian people included), if you have dark skin you are black and that is pretty much it. Your heritage doesn't matter that much to distinguish your race. I believe this stems from Brazil having laws forbidding segregation in the 1930s, albeit for racists reasons, given that the goal was to mix black people with white people so the country would be whitened.

rutierut 4y ago

I'm a Dutch person living in Spain and my British accent can make it super difficult for some Spaniards to understand me. I tend to have a lot of trouble understanding Greek English. This article lacks so much perspective, Europe is filled with white people having trouble understanding each others English. It's not that weird that once you start jumping continents this effect simply gets stronger.

hotpotamus 4y ago

I was once told by an ethnically Japanese person who was born in Mexico (and when he spoke English he sounded like a Mexican national) that his hardware and software didn't match. What Americans consider "white" is not fixed. Jews are white or not depending on the time and context. Cubans would be considered Latino or something today, and yet the most popular TV show of the 50's (I Love Lucy) featured an American woman married to a Cuban man at a time when interracial marriage would never have been shown on TV.

x86_64Ubuntu 4y ago
There are both white and black Cubans. No one would have considered that to be any more interracial than if a White Canadian married a White American.
- hotpotamus 4y ago
  And how do you tell the difference between a black and a white Cuban?

starkd 4y ago

Or maybe it comes from a hypercritical racial focus from people who are intent on dividing us.

edgyquant 4y ago
Yep exactly. The average American is most certainly not obsessed with race.

skissane 4y ago

> I suppose that comes from the notion of WASP (White Anglo-saxon Protestant), and so they call non-white anyone who is not WASP? "White" != "WASP": Catholics of Irish descent are definitely not "WASP": not Protestant; many would also say Celtic or Anglo-Celtic not Anglo-Saxon; yet they are considered "white". Some people have this idea that "the Irish didn't use to be white", but that is historically very dubious: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2017/03/22/sorry-but-the-irish-were-always-white-and-so-were-the-italians-jews-and-so-on/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201... Really what much of this comes from, I think, is some people in the US today are so focused on race, they will reinterpret other forms of cultural/ethnic discrimination as being racial – even though that doesn't make a lot of sense. The "Irish didn't use to be white" claim is retconning religious hatreds – anti-Irish sentiment in the 19th century US was primarily driven by anti-Catholicism – into racial ones. This reinterpretation also reveals a narrowly US-centric view of the world: Australia is another country which received significant Irish immigration (10-30% of Australians have at least partial Irish ancestry, depending on how you measure it), yet "Irish aren't white" or "Irish didn't used to be white" is a thought which would have never occurred in Australia: Australia's historical racially discriminatory immigration policy (the "White Australia Policy") always counted Irish as "white"

aliqot 4y ago
When people used to say that Irish weren't white, it has nothing to do with what you just said, it had to do with them being the outsider subjugated class, they're akin to the other minorities at the time who were in the same situation. This is how they became known as non-white. Jews got the same rap during this time.
- skissane 4y ago
  When did people "used to say that Irish weren't white"? Only really starting in the 1990s (with Noel Ignatiev's book) – by which time anti-Irish sentiment in the US was rather long gone. Nobody called Irish people "non-white" during the heyday of discrimination against them.

dwringer 4y ago

I doubt you'd be called non-white but it's probably contextual. I have a hard time imagining a scenario where it would be likely to come up. You would not be confused with sounding like a "white American", though. The ridiculousness of what it means to "sound white" is the subject of lots of humor. I think Dave Chappelle did a pretty good mockery of it with his news reporter character. There's also a pretty funny scene in Sorry to Bother You where Danny Glover is explaining his call center success to LaKeith Stanfield.

slfnflctd 4y ago
I found Sorry to Bother You quite funny, a bit scary, fairly accurate (as someone who worked in several call centers) and unusual in many ways-- it's also extremely relevant to this thread.

LancerSykera 4y ago

I once got in an argument with a Puerto Rican coworker when I told him Spanish people are white. He genuinely could not fathom it, and was very pissed off about it. I guess he thought Latinos are direct descendants of Spaniards?

edgyquant 4y ago
Are you saying Spanish people aren’t white?

WastingMyTime89 4y ago

Here is my trick to survive as a Western European in a culturally American environment: just entirely ignore any discussions involving races, racism or progressivism entirely. You might think the world translates to your language and you could participate. You might have trouble understanding or be shocked by the reasoning and think asking will help you get it. You might even think you should have an opinion as you have the mistaken idea that your culture is close to the American one. You would be wrong. The way these subjects are entwined with the American psyche and identity defies entendement and reasoning. In my experience it’s best to treat it like you would a foreign religion.

PuppyTailWags 4y ago
I always found it useful to consider the fact that America was at one point an aparthied nation. Its origins relied on the attempted extinction of a race of people who already lived here, then it lived for over a century with an entire race of people as literal property, breeding them like dogs or cats and separating their families with no respect to their humanity. A swathe of america fought a civil war to continue this treatment of this race of humans and the attempt as a nation to reconcile this failed within a generation. There are still members of this enslaved race that, when they were born, were deprived the right to vote because of their race. In this historical context, America's relationship with race does not defy reasoning. It's the only reasonable outcome of a nation that began with humans of one skin color being 3/5 of humans of another skin color.
- nostromo 4y ago
  None of this is uniquely American. Europe, the Middle East, East Asia, Australia, Africa, etc. all have unique but similar histories of genocide and enslavement. And it was happening in the Americas long before any Europeans arrived too.
  - PuppyTailWags 4y ago
    On the contrary, enslaving a specific skin-color is relatively recent invention. Although the concept of slavery is old, the way slavery was applied is relatively new. America also held onto the enslavement of a specific skin-color most recently, and like I said, there are still people alive who were legally barred from voting purely because of their identified skin color.

cultofmetatron 4y ago

> There's hundreds of millions, if not billions of white people who are not native english speakers, and also there's millions of americans who are not white. reminds me of this time I joined up with a german fellow and we were walking around talking to girls in ukraine. They were enamored with him and asked him to teach him english. He meanwhile was growing more and more disturbed at how they would completely ignore me. At one point he points to me and goes, "I'm german, I have a very obvious german accent. He on the other hand is American!!"

Cyberdog 4y ago

> I see it's common in America to conflate race and nationality. Please don't base your perceptions of America on a Vice article. Clearly non-white people are capable of speaking in an "American" accent too, but Vice is the sort of news outlet that must make things divisive on racial lines as often as possible.