Date: Sat, 10 Apr 1999 07:57:20 -0700
From: "Marlene R. Atleo" <maratleo-AT-island.net>
Subject: Re: West is White????


If we consider that America was at one time pretty close to having German
as the official language and understand history in the context of the mass
Germanic in migrations it is remarkable that there Germanic internships at
all...and of course they were not to the level of Japanese internships

....why Americans and Canadians don't remember them..
....how much was declassified after the war
...recently I read a piece about the US evacuation of Aleut from Unalaska
that was classified until recently....whole groups of Aleut were removed,
their villages burned....these small lineages of hunters  were split up
never to find eachother again....it was genocide for those groups...

and as Terry said...the "whiteness" has conceptually much to do with taking
on the trappings of euroheritage and I would add especially in the form of
bourgeoise modes of culture and production...

First Nations and other minorities of color were systematically excluded
from professional status by law and policy....thus becoming a professional
was like becoming "white"...graduating from school even was "like becoming
white", heck even going to school was being "white"...and no "Indian" would
want to be  an "apple" (red on the outside/white on the inside)
./..certainly provides a huge barrier to school achievement...when
achievement means becoming "white"
......turning into something else 
...that is part of the legacy of social Darwinism that pervades the western
perspective
....its about "whiteness" as a standard for development and democracy as
underlying assumption....color is merely a sign for all of that colonial
baggage which needs to be unpacked bit by bit

....you cannot unpack a stereotype with another stereotype...

yesterday morning I watched a CBC program where three refugee women of
color were talking about their experience of "naturalized" Canadian life.
One was an Ethiopian journalist who was imprisoned for her non-elitist
activities and served 10 years in jail...she escaped to Canada with her
family and found out that she was "black"...which in her ethos meant "good"
because God is black, pure water is black...black is good...she felt great
to be black....until the racist experiences of her children changed the
meaning of "black"...

thats why I really like Strauss and Quinn's "A cognitive theory of cultural
meaning." as a way of thinking about how we manage to retain only the most
salient conceptual aspects of our meanings within a culture and how it
changes.....it can get very disorienting with rapid change....

the political elite and the moral "right"  can and do come apart under such
circumstances...the disruption of "whiteness"....

yes, "things do fall apart" as a man observed.....about the disruption of
blackness in his village...



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