Is race a social construct cooked up to justify the transatlantic slave trade?
Review of court cases + censuses + naturalization laws concerning the Whiteness of various groups finds:
-Italians, Irish, non-Anglo Euros always considered white; their naturalization was campaigned against on grounds of non-WASP status rather than non-White status.
-various middle eastern groups mostly ruled to be non-white
not-equal.org/content/pdf/mi…
Some other pieces from our guys on the subject:
- aporiamagazine.com/p/race-and-the…
- thuletide.wordpress.com/2020/12/07/rac…
Fuerst's book on the existence of race contains some good discussion on historical usage of the concept:
philpapers.org/archive/FUETNO…
Some inconvenient quotes:
-1778: King Louis XVI of France forbids all his white subjects to “contract marriage with blacks, mulattoes or other people of colour”:
x.com/kunley_drukpa/…
-Roman Emperor, Julian the Apostate discusses human biodiversity - that is innate differences between the races in mind and body:
tertullian.org/fathers/julian…
i.imgur.com/r6sFxlr.png
-Napoleon: "Had I been at Martinique, I should also have been on the side of the English [...] I am for the whites, because I am white; I have no other reason, yet that is reason good enough."
x.com/thltd_/status/…
^ see p.120:
not-equal.org/References/Ref…
-It's been proposed that Europeans became aware of themselves as such as early as the year 732:
x.com/DBlossius/stat…
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