so here is a brief introjection on race:
--following appiah, race is a myth. it is a construct, invented to serve the purposes of various groups
--one of the groups would be that entity which seeks to establish dominion over another group. so, european colonialists called themselves white and their subjects colored, or black.
--this actually occurred in the 19th c, maybe beginning at the very end of the 18th c, and reached its peak in the late 19th c
--it started to be challenged in the early 20th c by anthropologists whose forebears had invented "scientific racism"
--attempts to define race, that failed, were grounded in somatic differences or in ancestors
--those attempts, ridiculous on the face of it, were rapidly undone with contemporary genetic and historical sciences
--yet they persist. abdul can speak for himself when he defines white and black as used below; but to think of arabs as white only makes sense when accepting a definition of race as that which people use to define themselves, for whatever reason
--self-definitions are created only in relation to others, and change over time
--ergo, racial definitions change over time. there is a reason for calling someone colored or non-white.
--in the 19th and early 20th c, in the u.s., non-whites include italians, irish, jews, african-descended peoples, hispanics.
--obviously, after wwII those groupings changed, and are changing as i speak (think about mexicans or chicanos, black hispanics, mixed race caribbeans, etc etc)
--so race isn't a myth, in the sense of something that is unreal, because our intellectual constructions have a reality, a discursive reality, of their own, which matters, which can accommodate or promote genocide. consequences.
most important: these constructs serve a political agenda
--one might be to defend the interests of what one takes to be one's own community, which i assume abdul is doing--but he can speak for himself
--in that case, it becomes us versus them, as opposed to a politics that opposes an us-them binary division
--think the politics of black white in the sahel, with Mali now divided, like mauretania, or like sudan, between populations that use terms like black and white or arab, where neither somatic difference or ancestry or genes, or eye color, or hair type, or anything, works to create distinct differences.
--so we have history, finally, which says, you--you arabs--you enslaved us, us blacks, and thus you are intrinsically different from us, as we can all see. history creates perception, and not vice versa. but when absul says, "white arabs," isn't it the converse?
i leave it to you, abdul, to tell us what you mean by white, and thus by black, or Afrikan.
thanks
ken
On 7/20/12 3:13 AM, Abdul Karim Bangura wrote:
And where is the hypocritical Arab League? Indeed, Libyans are mostly Afrikan, not white Arabs, who are a tiny minority.
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