Is WHITENESS a fluid thing in the United States?

Is WHITENESS a fluid thing in the United States?

Americans aren't white

Let us not discuss the Americans. Nothing good ever comes of it.

It literally isn't, and American whiteness being a "fluid social construct" (e.g. Irish or Poles not being considered white at one point and then "earning" their whiteness) is a myth, and an easily disproven myth at that: legally only white people could become naturalized citizens in America, since the first Naturalization Act of 1790 until 1924 when naturalization got extended to non-whites. But Irish people and all European immigrants were being naturalized during that period, hence they were considered white. It really is as simple as that.
This doesn't stop various progressives in the academia like Noel Ignatiev from peddling the myth though in order to "deconstruct whiteness" and doing disingenuous shit such as pretending that someone being discriminated against (like the Irish were) means he wasn't considered white, which is honestly nonsense.

How do you know it comes from a humor magazine

Then by that logic, South Americans are also wh*Te. (((Something which Americans vehemently try and refute time and time again)))

Even Nordicist supremacists like Lothrop Stoddard considered Italians and Irish to be white in the 1920s.

The idea that the definition of "white" has changed is bullshit. White has always meant "someone of fully European descent".

Then explain OP's pic. Why did whites on th east coast think of those orphans as shitskins but believe they were sacred and should not be raised by non-whites in Arizona?

Reminder that the image in the OP only recommends that case as a starting point. It does not in anyway represent the attitudes of white people everywhere in a culturally and socially dynamic 19th/20th century US.

1. Anecdotal tale. Anybody knows you can't extrapolate conclusions from some random folk tale, it's unscientific.

2. Doesn't contradict what I wrote. A Nordicist like Lorthrop Stoddard considered Irish as part of the White race, just inferior to Anglos or Germans (but better than, say, a Chinaman).

>Then explain OP's pic.
I haven't read that book and I'm not going to treat a screenshot from Reddit like it's a fact. But it's a worldwide phenomenon that wherever white people encounter non-whites, their white identity becomes pronounced.

This. Stoddard or even Madison Grant never said that non-Nordic Europeans aren't white, they just thought they're of lesser quality than Nordics (and still of higher quality than anybody else).

It's le funny cartoon from Harper's Weekly.

Duh but it's not what people think. No Europeans other than Finnish were ever really questioned, all had legal white status

The question of whiteness and it's parameters should really be focused on Admixture and in the South contrary to popular belief one drop rule never, ever took root to the fullest extent.

>Southern Brazil

lel
looks like old stoddy knew better than most folks do nowadays i tells ya

>1920s, post-WWI fatalism
>the same as the 18th and 19th centuries
makes me think...

Wow! I wasn't aware that American history only started in 1920!
2: A racial hierarchy, never seen one of those before! Next you'll be telling us that because most racists likeAsians better than Blacks that there the same race.

What the different "races" are and who belongs to them is different based on time and place. Our current racial categories for instance only date to about the 1600's/1700's. If you told a Roman he and a Gaul belonged to the same "White Race" he would laugh at your face because the Gauls were obviously a different race than the Romans in his eyes. Similarly whether Jewish people were counted as white has always been more of a political question than a genetic one. Or take for Instance how Native Americans have always been considered their own race when they are genetically very closely related to certain East Asian populations that are categorized as "Asian".
Sub-Saharan Africans from other sides of the continent are much more genetically different from each other than they are to other "races", yet they all get lumped together as "black" for socio-political reasons. Similarly the populations of Anatolia and Greece are near identical genetically but because one is Christian and the other Muslim the Greeks get to be "white" while the Turks are "middle-eastern". One can also look at Jews. They are genetically similar to whatever population they have historically lived with, Such as the Ashkenazi being Central/Eastern European vs the Mizrahi being Middle-Eastern, yet whether a Jew is "white" or not depends more upon the political beliefs of the one judging them.

Drop the reddit posting.

In 18th and 19th century it really was no different, see naturalization laws (whiteness was a requirement).

>Writing a detailed response is now "reddit posting".

It's not a detailed response, it's just some reddit tier sarcasm.

There literally isn't a single piece of sarcasm in that entire post.

Did you write it?

He didn't write it but you didn't read it

>Wow! I wasn't aware that American history only started in 1920!
You're saying this isn't sarcasm?

I can't find a source pegging it as a humorous cartoon. From the sources I've found it looks like it's meant to be taken earnestly

That's a bunch of bullshit. The OP's post was talking about social perception, not law. By law, Arabs and most mestizos were and still are white. But no one back then really thought of them as such. Nor do most people today.

The same applies to other European ethnicities. The Irish discrimination has been exaggerated, but Jews, southern Italians, and occasionally Slavs? Genuinely and non-ironically thought of as non-white in the USA for most of the 19th century and the earliest parts of the 20th. The U.S. Bureau of Immigration had a separate racial classification for southern Italians (northerners were different), for fuck's sake.

White creoles families were desperate to hide their blood connection to Creoles of Colour

In the 1930s, Governor Huey Long satirized such Creole claims, saying that you could feed all the "pure white" people in New Orleans with a cup of beans and a half a cup of rice, and still have food left over!

Anything cultural is axiomatically "fluid".

Obviously the Vikings or the Goths didn't have the 18th century American concept of being white.

>implying one fringe chimpout on the edge of civilization in a tiny backwater mining town 100 years ago proves anything
This is why sociology is not respected by any serious academics.

Arabs only attained whiteness in the Immigration Act of 1917.
>social perception, not law
Laws generally reflect social perception and vice versa. The Ignatievs of the world thus have to disregard all laws and scientific consensus altogether and instead clutch for straws by finding things like a random letter where someone jokingly calls an Irishman a nigger as a definitive proof of anything. Truly no better than using shitposts from Veeky Forums.
All in all it boils down to the fact these people want to get rid of "whiteness" as a concept, they have an agenda to push and we shouldn't confuse their comical bias and lies for reality.
>discrimination
Discriminated against =/= not being perceived as white. Those are two completely separate things. That's mentioned in the very post you're replying to. Poor whites have been discriminated against since before the US was even independent, doesn't mean they were not considered white.

>Arabs only attained whiteness in the Immigration Act of 1917.
No, they were legally allowed to immigrate and become citizens before that, and it was confirmed in a 1909 legal battle involving George Shishim that Arabs are white. Same with most mestizos, who were also allowed to become citizens and listed as white on the census (primarily because early censuses only listed white and black as categories). Both of those groups are still considered white legally. It has not prevented the general population from viewing them as non-white. Same thing with Italians and such in the 19th century.
>Discriminated against =/= not being perceived as white.
Many people of the time flat-out stating they're not white + southern Italians getting their own racial classification = not being perceived as fully white. Sicilians and Neapolitans being perceived as non-white by large swaths of the populous, if not legally, was a real thing. Arabs, Turks, other MENA people, and mestizos (even those of majority European descent) not being perceived as white was and IS a real thing.
>they have an agenda to push and we shouldn't confuse their comical bias and lies for reality.
Instead we should take your lies and bias for reality, right?

I'd say yeah. I mean just looked at what happened with Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman, I doubt Zimmerman is what most people think of as white but the media was calling him as such because he shot a nigger.