White pride needs a second look.
Here's the antecedents to this:
- My Indian friend went on a huge rant about how India is an idea of convenience used to gain independence from the British. He said that calling a Punjabi a Gujurati would be like calling a Chinese person Filipino.
- I have two white friends, one conservative, the other liberal, who both have this suppressed racial pride. They both claim Native American ancestry mixed with European and yearn to be viewed as such.
- I spent some time plumbing this Alternate History Map of Europe and was just flooded by the sense of how much various Europeans separate themselves from one another. For example, I learned how Spain isn't really a country, but rather a decentralized state of autonomous regions that correspond to former kingdoms. Or that many countries in Europe have native speakers of minority languages. To Americans, most Europeans are just "white."
I think white pride is a misnomer, more of a phantom ethnic identity created out of Americans' unwillingness to see white people as having ethnic differences. Celtic-American pride should be a legitimate thing. Unfortunately, this is nobody's fault. I don't know who's fault it is. Maybe the media? I'm not really interested in pinning blame or anything. Historically, though, during the various waves of European immigration, each ethnic group became this minority other that needed ethnic pride to boost them up. While as the so-called entrenched ethnicities had to tone down their ethnic pride. It's the same thing as how Jews have become so entrenched American culture they're just "white" now.
Frankly, who cares? So our society has a bias toward giving minority ethnicities a little bit of extra spotlight. Getting mad at society for its political correctness becomes such a dumb excuse for bad policy. "The War on Christmas" becomes a rallying cry for all these stupid Christian identity issues, like the real war on gay marriage.
Like Clint Eastwood makes such a big deal about how we can't make racial jokes anymore. Look, the ban on racial jokes only applies to polite society. You can make as many racial jokes to your friends as you want. Just because polite society leans one way or another doesn't make you oppressed. Nobody is infringing on your free speech.
Go to a Celtic antiques shop. Wear Celtic regalia. Just because people may look at you funny and think, "hey, look at this white person trying to be all ethnic," doesn't mean you're being discriminated against! Taxi drivers aren't passing by you. Cops aren't stopping you randomly.
As Jon Stewart mentioned, the culture war is a false war. Winning points in the culture war is totally Pyrrhic and does more harm than good.
You accused conservatives earlier of being party to a slippery slope fallacy. But aren't liberals also party to that too. Just because I'm making a point about white people having ethnic pride, doesn't mean I'm all of a sudden a culture warrior like Bill O'Reilly. I know the War on Christmas is a made-up war and the fear of gay marriage stuff has spun out of control.
Here's what's going on with white pride vs. black pride. I spoke with my friend who is just as meticulous with this stuff as you are.
There's two kinds of ethnic pride in America. There's immigrant ethnic pride, and non-immigrant ethnic pride. Immigrant ethnic pride usually falls on first-generation immigrants and maybe one or two generations of their descendants. Usually immigrant pride starts out with two parents of the same region of the same country coming to America. They feel very proud of their region, whether it's Cebu in Philippines or Karnataka in India. Their children may or may not adopt their parents' particular regional pride, or they will adopt the pride of their parents' modern national identity, for example representing themselves as Indian. Look at, for example, how there's these generic Asian clubs in universities when their parents would be shocked to see Vietnamese lump themselves together with Cambodians or Koreans. And then what happens is Asian men and women mate and don't preserve the regional differences. So a descendant of Chinese-Americans from Western China will marry someone from Taiwan, or a North Indian descendant will marry a South Indian one, and perhaps a Hindu will marry a Muslim.
And as the mixing goes further down, so does the immigrant ethnic pride.
The second kind of ethnic pride is based on some socially invented ethnicity, such as African-American or White. Most African-Americans, when expressing African pride, do so very generically toward all of Africa. Rather, it seems like they're just celebrating being black, and fashioning a sense of rootedness. White pride, as well, is expressed ethnically in terms of being European. But if Europeans came to the US and saw white supremacists celebrating "being European" they would laugh because Europeans have so much regional distinction among themselves.
I see where you made a mistake. You got excited learning about the Celtic League, but Celtic pride doesn't really pass as White Pride. It's too specific. There's very few purebred Celts in the US. Most whites in America are of mixed ethnicity. And so are most blacks.
Perhaps when each of the waves of Europeans came to the US, they had very specific regional pride, as you could see in Gangs of New York. But once Irish-Americans start marrying English-Americans it all just becomes one big melange.
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