the_fantastic_ms_fox | Facebook conversations about White Pirivilege (Reply)

Amy E. G. Fox Oana Capota - it depends on what time period we're talking about. Generally, people will more heavily anglicize their name, the more racism is directed at their culture. The category of "white" used to mean English, Germans, Welsh and Scots and I think the French, who were Catholic. Northern European were considered white later (see Deadwood for examples of what I'm talking about). Later, Irish, Italians, Spaniards, Poles were granted fringe White status in the US and Canada. Jews are often still in a gray area.

During this period, non-white Europeans would often not jut re-spell their name but swap it out entirely for something English or German. After that, they would keep their name but radically change the spelling. Then slightly change it. Then keep it the same as much as possible within the latin alphabet as recognized by the government bureaucracy's character set.

You can see some of this at work with Chinese surnames as some newer immgrants use a standardized pinyin system, which refers to non-English phonemes, rather than anglicized aproximations Eg: Chin -> Qin, Wong -> Wang.
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Amy E. G. Fox Haide Anne Rose - the list is not condemning whiteness, it's focusing on forms of predjudice that still have lasting effects, which advnatge white poeple over others.

I am descended from Scots. And I have huge amounts of White privilege. This despite the fact that the romans thought of us as "wild" and took some of us as slaves. And despite the fact that the English colonized us and our language started to evaporate. I have white privilege because, in the age of sail, my fellow Scots hooked up with other Britons to go beat the crap out of everyone else and take their stuff. And while the worst of it ha passed, nothing has yet overturned the day-to-day advantages that I receive.

Roman stereotypes about blue-skinned cattle-thieves have faded away, and we no longer give our best food to English landlords, but, due to British Colonialism, whether my ancestors themselves dished out the beatings or not, I still have a disproportionate amount of wealth, access to education, resistance to prosecution and so on. Thus, I have privileges that Raven does not enjoy - This is White Privilege. It doesn't make me a bad person, any more than I begrudge Raven for not being on the cisgender end of things. But we both acknowledge that we enjoy privileges that the other lacks, and for no just reason.