As I may have mentioned once or twice, many people assume that because Barack Obama is of mixed ancestry, he naturally identifies with all his ancestral races, as does, say, Tiger Woods or Ward Connerly. In reality, Obama has instead felt the constant need to prove he is black enough.
I'm looking for more examples of this phenomenon of feeling the need, due to your unusual background, to prove you are X enough. Perhaps actress Halle Berry? Maybe Zach de la Roccha of Rage Against the Machine is an example. (Daniel Day-Lewis is an amusing example of something slightly different: a complete insider -- his father was Poet Laureate of England and his maternal grandfather ran England's top movie studio -- who has used all his Method acting skills to convince himself that he is a much-discriminated against Irishman). Or Eamon de Valera of Ireland, although I'm not really familiar with his personality. In a different way, Hitler, Napoleon, and Stalin were all from the peripheries of empire.
I think there must be more. Do you know of any?
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
Day-Lewis isn't entirely without an Irish connection. His father, Cecil, who became Poet-Laureate, was born in Ireland and always considered himself "Anglo-Irish", despite adopting British citizenship rather than Irish at the establishment of the Republic. I think the family still has kin in Co Wexford.
ReplyDeleteAlthough I agree that Daniel does somewhat "ham up" the Irishness.
As far as novels are concerned, I guess Coleman Silk in Roth's "The Human Stain" has to be the poster-child of racial cross-over.
ReplyDeleteHow has Obama ever tried to show he's 'black enough'?
ReplyDeleteHis relationship to the US Black community is that of an Expat to their adopted country/culture.
He does adopt a certain amount of surface conformity (joining a church even though he doesn't seem like the religious type) but maintains the stolid private values of the culture that really formed him (get an education, get married, strive for career development and upward social mobility, keep your public emotions in check).
He does trade on the exotica of his adopted culture and uses that to set himself up as its interpreter and advocate to those of his (unloved) birth culture. But in the final analysis he's _in_ the Black American community but not of it and has made sure his kids aren't of it either.
Solomon Bandaranaike- An ethnically Sinhalese but English speaking christian Sri Lankan, who as PM of Sri Lanka instituted a racial preferences system to strong benefit the Sinhalese speaking Buddhist population with whom he strongly identified.
ReplyDeleteOscar Ribeiro de Almeida de Niemeyer Soares called himself "Oscar Niemeyer". Ana de Niemeyer was his paternal grandma.
ReplyDeleteOn stage with the Pogues, Shane McGowan affects an Irish accent and snarls out pro-IRA songs.
ReplyDeleteIn fact he was born in the leafy English home counties in
Tunbridge Wells, Kent, where he attended a prep school
He gained musical scholarship and was accepted into Westminster School, a renowned English private school close to the Houses of Parliament.
Joe Strummer was the embodiment of pink's anti establishment virtues.
In fact his father was a British Diplomat and Joe was born in Turkey. At the age of 9 he began boarding at the City of London Freemen's School in Surrey before going on to Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design,
The BBC's foremost hip hop DJ is Tim Westwood who is the presenter of "Pimp My Ride" in the UK.
He is a white midde class boy who is the son of the Bishop of Peterbrough. He too attended a private school.
He is said to be the inspiration for Sacha Baron Cohen's Ali G character.
I've witnessed this with Native American kids of mixed ancestry. Their full-blooded classmates would put them down for not looking Indian enough...
ReplyDeleteMalcolm X?
alicia keys...
ReplyDeleteLisa Bonet (Cosby Show actress)
ReplyDeleteLenny Kravitz (Musician)
After I thought of them separately, I remembered they married each other.
Arthur Wellesley (Duke of Wellington) was most indignant that anyone suggested he was Irish, despite being born in Dublin.
ReplyDelete"Just because one is born in a stable" he said "does not make one a horse."
My experience is that good looking, lighter skinned people identify more with their white side while ugly, darker people and those who try to be intellectual (and thus discover hate-whitey hyper-HC) identify as "people of color."
ReplyDeleteNatty Bumpo of the Leatherstocking Tales is the first name that comes to mind.
ReplyDeleteThe William Forsythe character JD in E.J. Olmos' brilliant "American Me" is a good example for you, Steve.
ReplyDeleteAlong (somewhat) similar lines, Mexicans I knew in L.A. loved Jackass, both the show and the movie. They thought Johnny Knoxville and the gang were "crazy white boys", with no pretension on their part of being anything other than what they were. On the other hand, they hated Ashton Kutcher and Punk'd - thought he was a total wigger.
There's something to be said for ethno-cultural authenticity, whatever one wants to make of the rather ill-defined term. It's one of the reasons why, politically, the Boers in South Africa prefered the Zulu Buthelezi and his Inkatha Freedom Party to, what they considered, race-traitor Anglos.
Alicia Keys pops to the top of my head
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alicia_Keys#Controversy
Senator George Allen comes to mind. Jewish mom, dad from Michigan, but Allen felt the need to act as a Rebel born and bred. Probably not exactly what you were looking for, but there.
ReplyDeleteOh yeah - George W Bush is pretty much in that boat, too. Yankee family, privileged background, but Bush acts like a born Texas cowboy. Again, not so much a racial act as a cultural one.
How about Edmund Burke? Irishman, but English-identified.
ReplyDeleteWhat about Ted Kennedy's constant harping about the situation Northern Ireland? Ted lives an upper class lifestyle but needs to connect with the voters in south Boston by demonstrating he cares as much about a country other than America as they do, if not more.
ReplyDeleteOther than the "flourescent skin" angle (an actual line from the movie), "Blood In Blood Out" aka "Bound by Honor" is essentially the same movie as Edward James Olmos' "American Me."
ReplyDeleteBob Marley, Malcolm X
ReplyDeleteReal (allgedly):
ReplyDeleteMalcolm X
Malcolm Gladwell
Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, aka H. Rap Brown
Ward Churchill (sorry, it turns out he's just a white dude in drag)
Cher "Half Breed" etc.
Fictious:
Natty Bumppo: White, but raised by Indians, unlike Ward Churchill
Chato (Charles Bronson), in the 1972 film "Chato's Land"
Billy Jack is, of course, the god of this genre.
How about Malcolm X whose nickname was "Red" because of his reddish hair? Was it his maternal grandfather who was white?
ReplyDeleteCarlos Mencia's father's last name was Holness, apparently a German living in Honduras. His mother is apparently Mexican but he moved to the US before the age of 1. Nevertheless he plays the uber-Mexican in a way that would make Speedy Gonzalez blush.
ReplyDeleteGrowing up in NY I knew about a hundred half-Jewish girls who became super-ashkenazi but they're not famous.
I've known plenty of people from my personal life who'd fit the bill (probably including me) but that's not what you're looking for.
ReplyDeleteDidn't I read somewhere (here?) that Alicia Keys had made some pretty extreme statements which made her sound like a fire-breathing radical? I just looked her up on wiki and saw that she had disavowed those quotes later on, but she seems at first glance to fit your mold.
What about the half Jew neo Nazi?
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Collin
Can you think of any examples in movies or novels? I heard today about a 1993 movie called either "Bound by Honor" or "Blood In, Blood Out" that is a huge favorite among East LA chicanos. The main character is a completely European looking Mexican-American who must constantly act like a total cholo to prove he's Mexican enough.
ReplyDeleteHmmm...given the titles suggested for this movie, it sounds like the character might be loosely based on Joe "Pegleg" Morgan, a white convict (of partial Croatian extraction) who was one of the top honchos in the Mexican Mafia.
Does Jerry Seinfeld's dentist count?
ReplyDeleteJockney
William Gladstone was Prime Minister of the UK several times, English born and bred, and a Church-of-England, Eton-and-Oxford establishment sort. He liked to point out that he had no English blood at all, being entirely a Scots Lowlander on his father's side and a Scots Highlander on his mother's.
ReplyDeleteJeremiah Wright
ReplyDeleteHow about the "Valeras-in-reverse", the O'Higgins family of Chile, Ambrosio and his bastard son Bernardo? Bernardo never met his Irish father, and perhaps was trying to out-creole the creoles.
ReplyDeleteThen there's the weirdest academic in America, Ward Churchill, who strongly identifies with his Indian ancestors, whether they exist or not.
More to the Woods/Connerly orientation might be the Chinese-Scots-Irish-Afro-Cherokee-Canadian Chong sisters, Rae Dawn and Robbi.
Jack London is a gold mine for this kind of thing.
ReplyDeleteI'd say there are dozens of examples of part-black Americans radicalizing themselves as a way to seem "more black". Reverend Wright, Malcolm X, etc. How many part-black Americans ever admit to being part-white? Very few, because being part-white means, according to their dogma, that they deserve to suffer at the hands of political correctness and the programs it supports. (It also means, according to Amerind-on-white political correctness, that they "have no right to be in North America because they weren't here first".)
ReplyDeleteI'd say the creation of the concept of La Raza in Mexico is this tendency writ large. Tons of three-quarter Castillian folks somehow think they are Aztecs or Mayans (I suppose Spanish-speakers rarely identify with the Mexican tribes who didn't build pyramids?)
I saw that movie years ago. Here's the IMDB link, Bound by Honor. Not bad, fairly entertaining and engrossing. Interestingly, the white-looking character (who I believe is half white in the story) ends up looking more Chicano toward the end -- his hair gets darker, he slicks it back, etc.
ReplyDelete- Fred
Huge aspect of this is that before the 60s and the subsequent cultural inversion, minorities were enjoined to prove theywere patriotic/white friendly enough. Butwe have gotten away from greatest good for greatest number...
ReplyDeletethe human stain with Anthony Hopkins is a recent example.
ReplyDeleteAK-47-pendant-wearing Alicia Keys
ReplyDeleteHow about AK-47-pendant-wearing Alicia Keys?
ReplyDeleteI would argue against Halle Berry being one of these people. She seems to only act like this when it is expedient to do so, like during Oscar acceptance speeches.
ReplyDeleteHer heritage did not stop her from getting the nose job that allowed her to get the acting roles that would eventually net her the Oscar, nor did it stop her from being impregnated by a white guy.
I am a black woman, and I have no problem with either of these things-- her nose looks great, and her boyfriend is smoking hot-- but these are not the moves of someone who has a overwhelming desire to be black enough.
Hey jlf ... what's your estimate of the chances that Barack will turn out to be a bit immigration restrictionist in order to help blacks?
ReplyDeleteOther than the "flourescent skin" angle (an actual line from the movie), "Blood In Blood Out" aka "Bound by Honor" is essentially the same movie as Edward James Olmos' "American Me."
ReplyDeleteI've frequently wondered if Olmos insists on every gig he gets that his son be allowed to appear, too. His son Bodie appears in just about every movie/TV show that his dad is in. Is that the only way he can get work?
Fictious character
ReplyDeleteVoldemort from Harry Potter. 3/4 muggle
"Blood In, Blood Out!" LOL! After that one, calling a white, blue-eyed Mexican a "Miclo" (the name of the character from that turkey) entered the argot of SoCal kids of the 1990s, from my memory.
ReplyDeleteAaron McGruder, the creator of the Boondocks comic strip, is another good example. He's the middle-class son of Affirmative Action government employee parents who majored in, what else?, African-American Studies at Maryland, and wrote a comic strip about foul-mouthed kids named after Black Panthers exiled from the 'hood to the Beltway suburbs.
Come to think of it, speaking on both empirical experience and observation, just about any university's sundry ethnic studies departments will generally be chock-full of either tragic mulattoes trying to "represent", or else fractionally-ethnic blue-eyes who've been smart enough to game the racial spoils system and go from "Alex" to "Alejandro", or Arthur to "Uhuru", or whatever. A few of them will become tenured radicals and become the Ward Churchills and Armando Navarros we hear about every now and then.
Tom Morello, like de la Rocha also an alum of Rage Against the Machine, is another example (and interestingly, also the progeny of a Kenyan father, a Mau Mau no less, and a white American exotophile professional academic mother). Alicia Keys might be another example. Edward James Olmos is of partial Hungarian-Jewish ancestry (family name was originally Olmosh - he was born in LA but became a Mexican citizen last year).
In politics, George P. Bush, son of Jeb Bush and his Mexican wife Columba, once told a hispanic crowd, in fluent Spanish, that his mother had told him to fight for "our race".
My experience is that good looking, lighter skinned people identify more with their white side while ugly, darker people and those who try to be intellectual (and thus discover hate-whitey hyper-HC) identify as "people of color."
ReplyDeleteThen how do you explain Alicia Keys? Very light, and beautiful, yet she acts completely black and even affects stereotypical black speech patterns.
Advani, leader of the BJP, currently the main opposition party in the Indian parliament, was born in Pakistan. He has made speeches with the most virulent invective against Indian muslims.
ReplyDelete"Just because one is born in a stable" he said "does not make one a horse."
ReplyDeleteThe late, great Richard Jeni phrased this as 'I'm Catholic in the same way that a cow born in a tree is a bird.'
How about Malcolm X whose nickname was "Red" because of his reddish hair? Was it his maternal grandfather who was white?
Malcolm may indeed have had white ancestry, but red hair is not in itself an indicator of such. The gene is estimated to be anywhere from 20-100 thousand years old, perhaps preceeding the exodus from Africa.
Then there's the weirdest academic in America, Ward Churchill, who strongly identifies with his Indian ancestors, whether they exist or not.
Weirdest ex-academic.
Bob Marley, Malcolm X
ReplyDeleteUnless you've read something I have not, I wouldn't consider Bob Marley a good example. He had minimal contact with his white father growing up and he seemed to expend little effort proving he was black enough to his fellow rastas. His racial background just doesn't seem to have been a real big deal in Jamaica.
It would have been interesting if Marley's father had been more involved. I wonder if that would have only made Marley more militantly black. As it worked out, Marley seemed to have a more relaxed attitude toward race than many of his fellow reggae artists--like Peter Tosh.
Advani, leader of the BJP, currently the main opposition party in the Indian parliament, was born in Pakistan. He has made speeches with the most virulent invective against Indian muslims.
ReplyDeleteIf he is a Karachi-born Hindu, then I would guess his hatred of Muslims might stem from reasons that aren't related to identity problems.
Steve Martin in The Jerk.
ReplyDelete"William Gladstone was Prime Minister of the UK several times, English born and bred, and a Church-of-England, Eton-and-Oxford establishment sort. He liked to point out that he had no English blood at all, being entirely a Scots Lowlander on his father's side and a Scots Highlander on his mother's."
ReplyDeleteThe current PM of the UK is Scottish as well. The PM governs the United Kingdom after all, not just England.
- Fred
Steve should check out the We-Sorts of Southern Maryland. They are considered tri-racial isolates.
ReplyDeleteThey consider themselves unique.
Because they are.
They belong to about six extended tribes; the same surnames occur over and over again.
Walls, Jackson, Proctor, Taliaferro and a few others.
They are black, white and American Indian. Many have deformities such as cleft palates due to inbreeding. They will also have blue eyes or green eyes, pale white skin but wiry hair.
I knew a number of them.
Spock.
ReplyDeleteTom said: Edward James Olmos is of partial Hungarian-Jewish ancestry (family name was originally Olmosh - he was born in LA but became a Mexican citizen last year).
ReplyDeleteNot to derail the thread much but I detest Edward James Olmos. I saw a snippet of him on Lary King once when Larry's guests were discussing immigration. Olmos is a pro-amnesty, reconquista all the way.
-Vanilla Thunder
Saying that Daniel Day Lewis's "grandfather ran England's top movie studio " rather points to the problem.
ReplyDeleteFilm Studio.
Day-Lewis is half-Irish, half-Jewish. He isn't English at all.
The now predictable chip on his shoulder could fairly be assumed to be of mixed-ethnicity too.
"Then how do you explain Alicia Keys? Very light, and beautiful, yet she acts completely black and even affects stereotypical black speech patterns."
ReplyDeleteYou missed where I said that people who try to be intellectual also identify with the "colored" part.
"In an interview with Blender magazine, Keys' allegedly said "'Gangsta rap' was a ploy to convince black people to kill each other, 'gangsta rap' didn't exist" and went on to say that it was created by "The Government". The magazine also claimed she said "Tupac and Biggie were essentially assassinated, their beefs stoked by the government and the media, to stop another great black leader from existing."
Same thing with Obama. Very intelligent and competent but bought into the hate whitey world view. He's got a high IQ so this worldview will take him to the White House while a low IQ person like Alicia Keys who tries to develop a "social conscious" ends up ranting about Tupac and Biggie being prophets.
Roger Chaillet: Steve should check out the We-Sorts of Southern Maryland... Walls, Jackson, Proctor, Taliaferro and a few others.
ReplyDeleteWhoa - we were just talking about a DC race hustler, named "Taliefero", on this thread, just four days ago:
Ethnic data on subprime loans
http://isteve.blogspot.com/2008/09/ethnic-data-on-subprime-loans.html
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
Feliks Dzerzhinsky, born to an aristocratic Polish family, made quite the revolutionary and finished up as chief of terror* for Soviet Communism.
ReplyDelete*The mission he claimed for himself, not a mockery.
O-Ren Ishii, the Lucy Liu character in "Kill Bill"? She was a quarter Chinese, a quarter Japanese, half American, wore a kimono, and ended up running the Japanese Yakuza, telling her docile underlings, "The price you pay for bringing up either my Chinese or American heritage as a negative is... I collect your f---ing head."
ReplyDeleteWhen you hear Eminem speak you wonder if he thinks he's actually black. What white person talks like that?
Geraldo Rivera, nee Gerald Michael Rivera, who is half Jewish and had a Bar Mitzvah.
Obama has instead felt the constant need to prove he is black enough..
ReplyDeleteThe way Obama leans depends on who he wants votes from. If he were a politician from Montana his approach would be different than a "community organizer" from Chicago. Proving onself X enough is old news in politics. A number of urban Irish politicians for example did the X thing in railing against their Protestant opponents or other white ethnic competitors like the Italians. Its par for the course with some ethnic politicians.
farris sez:
His relationship to the US Black community is that of an Expat to their adopted country/culture.
He does adopt a certain amount of surface conformity (joining a church even though he doesn't seem like the religious type) but maintains the stolid private values of the culture that really formed him (get an education, get married, strive for career development and upward social mobility, keep your public emotions in check).
Who says "get an education, get married, strive for career development and upward social mobility, keep your public emotions in check" is a monopoly of people that are non-black, or are alien to black culture? To the contrary, they have been par for the course with Black West Indian immigrants to the US. See Ivan Light's 'Ethnic Enterprise" (1972) and Sowell's "Economics and Politics of race" (1983) among other books.
As for US blacks, such values were the norm prior to the late 1960s, when black wedlock and labor force participation rates were very much higher, and opinion polls show such values to be embraced by the majority of blacks. In fact at one time in US history black divorce rates were lower than those of white people. (Sowell, 'AA Around The World,' 2004).
In addition, other white ethnic groups have hardly paragons of virtue on these measures over the course of US history. The white "fighting" Irish for example, in some decades had out of wedlock rates around 50%, and have been a historical byword for violence and substance abuse, primarily alcohol, a pattern foreshadowed in Ireland and England before mass immigration to the US, where that pattern was again repeated. Sowell (Ethnic America), et al.. See the book also 'How the Irish became White.' The Irish have been among the slowest rising of all the European ethnic groups, and have been surpassed economically by the more disciplined and conservative Italians, who we all know, have had their own problems with certain negatives.
He does trade on the exotica of his adopted culture and uses that to set himself up as its interpreter and advocate to those of his (unloved) birth culture. But in the final analysis he's _in_ the Black American community but not of it and has made sure his kids aren't of it either.
Exactly what "qualifies" one to be in "the black american Community" by your reckoning? Is their a "rating scale" some place? Based on your theory then conservative Walter Williams, who subs for Limbaugh on occasion, must not be "truly" black, nor are millions of others.
maintains the stolid private values of the culture that really formed him (get an education, get married, strive for career development and upward social mobility, keep your public emotions in check).
ReplyDeleteAnd as noted in my example with the white Irish, negatives mark all ethnic groups at various times and eras. The negatives noted with the Irish do not encompass what it means to be "Irish". The other side of the negatives are the positives, like the good work done by the many in the Catholic Church historically in helping to curb some of the social pathology and excesses. But even these two end points do not take in the definition of "Irish" by any means. Sweeping pronouncements as to "the black community" need to take into account that said community is diverse, and that mix of patterns varies in various times and eras, and will do so in the future, just like other European groups over the span of history.
Francisco Franco was Galician not Castilian, his mother was a descendant of Portuguese royalty yet he banned the use of regional languages (Catalan, Basque, & Galician).
ReplyDeleteHistorical evidence seems to indicate that Wallace Fard Muhammad was a cynical yet imaginative conman from New Zealand, without a drop of sub-Saharan ancestry.
ReplyDeleteMalcolm X definitely did have white blood - one quarter through his mother, whose father was white. He dwells upon it at length in his biography.
Our perceptions of ethnicity are determined by social convention - to the eyes of anyone from the United States, Malcolm X looks black and nothing else, because the one drop rule dictates that all individuals with any amount of African ancestry are to be considered black.
Yet when Malcolm X visited Africa, people were suspicious and hostile towards him because of his Caucasian ancestry, which to their eyes was obvious.
I would say Alicia Keys is an excellent example of a mixed-race individual who identifies overwhelmingly with her black side, and feels compelled to overcompensate due to its limited phenotypical expression.
Oscar Ribeiro de Almeida de Niemeyer Soares called himself "Oscar Niemeyer". Ana de Niemeyer was his paternal grandma. --anonymous
ReplyDeleteAnd don't forget his boss, Pres. Juscelino Kubitchek. He went by his mother's family name. Whether that was because they were prominent local merchants, or he just wanted to stick out-- dad was a plain old Oliveira-- I couldn't tell you.
The current PM of the UK is Scottish as well. --Fred
So was the last one. Though Tony's father was a Blair by adoption, his original name was Pearson, which is also Scottish, or at least Borders.
True blue, red blooded, All-American boys from the Great White North:
ReplyDeleteBrooks
Frum
Krauthammer (though born in NY, he was raised in Montreal)
There may be more, but they're tough to spot. You have to pay particular attention to how they pronounce the word "house." Ever notice how, in discussions of the current real estate meltdown, they studiously avoid using that word in favor of the more easily American-accented "home?"
Clever bastards.
Oh by the way, since I know this will probably come up anyway, yes, they're also all Jews.
If we're in Star Trek territory there's also Whorf who was all Klingon-genetically but raised by humans (on earth IIRC).
ReplyDeleteHe became an uber-Klingon to an extent that even surprised other Klingons (but was routinely attracted to women who were only partially Klingon or not Klingon at all).
Maybe Bruce Lee, who was 1/4 German.
ReplyDeleteSomewhere on the internet:
>When his fellow students learned of his part-German heritage (His mother was half-German) they refused to train with him. His master, the legendary Yip Man, saw the fire and talent in him and decided to train him privately.
I don't have any direct evidence that Bruce tried to act "Chinese enough," but he never made any reference to his German heritage as far as I know.
Wouldn't Lawrence Dennis be a good example? Or maybe he was just "passing."
ReplyDeleteMalcolm X of course didn't really have any alternative other than to identify as black given the one drop of blood rule prevalent in the US at that time.
Co Xing Hua (the son of a Chinese scholar official and a Japanese mother in 17th century Yokohama) might be another. He was the general who threw the Dutch out of Taiwan. Apparently he identified exclusively as Chinese, although given the patrilineal system of Confucianism that was not surprising.
How has Obama played up his 'black" side? I guess it is great that now America has graciously allowed people of mixed ancestry who previously would have been considered solely black to identify as bi-racial (though never white interestingly enough-that category is only for "pure" peoples). But why wouldn't most mixed black/white people identify as black? Historically that is what they are considered, and the black community has never had much trouble accepting mixed race individuals as black. To be bi-racial, and try to live it means having no community to claim as your own, and the white community certainly won't accept you as one of theirs. So from a practical standpoint it makes sense.
ReplyDeleteDiCaprio's "lace curtain Irish pussy" in The Departed.
ReplyDeletebut these are not the moves of someone who has a overwhelming desire to be black enough.
ReplyDeleteWhich segues nicely into my answer to the above poster asking what Obama's done to seem black enough...
Though I totally agree that Obama's a white guy delighted to have been born black enough to game the system.
Yet when Malcolm X visited Africa, people were suspicious and hostile towards him because of his Caucasian ancestry, which to their eyes was obvious.
ReplyDeleteCare to elaborate?
Supposedly there was a Japanese-American unit that won more medals of honor than any other US unit during WWII - might be attributable to a similar phenomenon of wanting to prove they were American and not Japanese. I believe a similar thing is true of "Hitler's Jewish Soldiers" during WWII as well.
ReplyDeleteWhat? Not one mention of Othello!
ReplyDeleteFaulkner's Joe Christmas.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure of John Lennon's mother's family, but his case could be an excellent example. He obviously felt left out of the 1960s identity movements so he suddenly decided that he was Irish. McCartney did as well. Lennon recorded a few pro-IRA songs, and even gave his son the Gaelic version of his own.
Jackie Arklöv is a Swedish neo-nazi who was convicted of war crimes in Bosnia while serving as a Croatian mercenary. After being released in a prisoner swap, he hooked up with a gang of other neo-nazis who were impressed by his war credentials. In the course of a botched bank job, he killed two hapless cops execution-style. After a few dramatic days of flight, he was captured and jailed.
ReplyDeleteHere's the rub: check out his picture.
Born in Liberia, mixed parentage, admired the Führer, came to a bad end.
"Mariah Carey was born in Huntington, Long Island, New York. She is the third and youngest child of Patricia (née Hickey), a former opera singer and vocal coach of Irish descent, and Alfred Roy Carey, an aeronautical engineer of Afro-Venezuelan descent."
ReplyDelete...it seems most accentuated when the father is missing from the picture.
"Lani Guinier was born on April 19, 1950 in New York City. Guinier is the daughter of a Jewish mother, Eugenia Paprin, and the Jamaican-born scholar Ewart Guinier, who also served as Harvard professor (and chair) of the Afro-American Studies Department in 1969."
ReplyDeleteTruth, I was beginning to think you were avoiding the thread!
ReplyDelete"Obama never SAID he hated whitey, he PROVED it when he referred to a six-on-one black-on-white beating as a "fight", and went on to mouth sociobabble about how (white-on-black) racism was to blame."
ReplyDeleteWhat was his quote exactly?
"He proved it when he denied his grandmother's right to express fear of young black males"
Again, I beg to differ, what was his quote exactly in which he denied his grandmother this right?
"He proved it by seeking out and continuing to attend a church led by the Rev. Wright."
When did rev. Wright say that he "hated whitey"?
"He proved it by his proud admission that he fantasized about beating up a college classmate who mentioned that Obama was one of two black men on a basketball team."
This is proof that he 'hates whitey'? I fantasize about beating someone up practically every day of my life, yet I have not done it since 1983.
"These attitudes, directed at blacks, Latinos, or Jews, would be way WAY more than enough to prove hatred of the groups, in the minds of the touchy leftists of the world."
Great, I don't consider myself a 'touchy leftist', do you? If not why do you take these people to be role models?
"? Does ANYTHING qualify as hatred of whites for you?"
Yes, I would consider the transgressions of the Wichita Murderers to be 'hatred of whites'. As far as I know, however, neither Obama or Wright as murdered anyone. You admitted earlier that Obama has never said that he hated whites and has never done anything that out-and-out proves he hated whites either, could this mean that you are merely a parrot, or that you are projecting your own feelings about blacks upon someone else in order to legitimize them? I'm not trying to insult you, I'm just wondering.
"Truth, I was beginning to think you were avoiding the thread!"
Buddy, you know it's a great honor for me to discuss the issues of the day here!
The English royal family have been outsiders for more than a millennium, starting with William the Conqueror. Even Queen Victoria was more German than English and her husband Albert certainly so. It was only in the First World War that the Battenbergs changed their name to Mountbatten.
ReplyDeleteThe theme of an outsider arriving to lead a band of heroes to victory has been a staple of Hollywood's. Both Braveheart and Robin Hood, the Prince of Thieves, feature an outsider, not of ancestry but of experience, returning home to thwart the plans of some dastardly Englishmen.
This is reallly too much for one thread. The Irish identity issue alone has enough for 3 separate threads.One would be in US politics; I'm surprised Steve didn't mention John Kerry - the "Irish" son of an Austrian Jewish convert to Catholicism. Life imitates art - in one of Richard Condon's novels, I think it was "Winter Kills", the character corresponding to Joseph P. Kennedy Snr is an orphan who believes himself to be of Irish descent but in fact has none - his records were destroyed in some catastrophe.
ReplyDeleteEnglishpersons calling themselves Irish can be divided into those who act and those for whom saying it is enough. The latter don't have to prove they're Irish enough - the beauty of it is that by just saying they're Irish they can transform themselves into victims. My favourite is a woman called Clare Short, who wrote "I am Irish, not British, and as you know we were victims of colonialism, not perpetrators". This deserves a prize because Short was actually a minister in the British government writing in her ministerial capacity at the time.
An example of a doer is Erskine Childers, an English novelist who became such an intransigent Irish Republican that the Irish Free State government had him shot.
I don't know if it's on-topic that many Boers had unknown Black ancestry, which made the birth of their children particularly interesting. Shortly after the end of Apartheid there was a violent rebellion by a group of White supremacist ultras, whose leader had distinctly African features, altho probably no-one ever pointed it out to him.
Anonymous said...
ReplyDelete"As far as novels are concerned, I guess Coleman Silk in Roth's "The Human Stain" has to be the poster-child of racial cross-over."
10/04/2008
That's totally incorrect. The Silk character is actually white, despite his taint of "Negro blood." A better example is Gregory Howard Williams, a pasty-faced white guy who pretends to be black.
Zach de la Rocha has a younger cousin named Mike de la Rocha (google him) who is a completely European-looking Mexican who was student body president at UCLA for awhile while I was there. He is the epitome of a guy who needed to act radical chicano enough to fit in, given his lack of Spanish knowledge and middle-class Ventura roots. He graduated with a degree in chicano studies and is now working as an Obama-esque racial agitator. My friend's brother lived with him in the dorm suites during his sophomore year and always chided him about his lack of genuine chicanismo.
ReplyDelete"...Lennon decided he was Irish during the 1960s...McCartney did as well."
ReplyDeleteLennon's Irish roots were never proven. His mother's family was Scottish and Welsh, I think, as well as English. His father was of uncertain parentage and was raised in an orphanage.
Paul McCartney, however, is entirely of bonafide Irish descent. His maternal grandparents were of Irish Catholic background, maternal grandfather directly from Ireland. His paternal grandparents were of Irish Protestant background, though some had been Catholic at one point. Northern Irish I think.
Being mostly Irish myself, I always wished my favorite Beatle, John, was Irish, but alas, I can't honestly claim him until more information on ancestry is in.
"No one forces a white person with black ancestry to be "black."
ReplyDeleteSo you wouldn't mind Kristoff St. John porking your sister?
From the 60s, the prime example of this was Kathleen Cleaver, high yaller and blue eyed.
ReplyDeleteAngela Davis was pretty yaller too.
Come to think of it, all the Panther women were pretty light-skinned.
So was Huey Newton.
Lastly, Edward Said. American born, Protestant, wealthy - carrying on about the dispossessed Palestinians.
How about Adam Clayton Powell, 26-year congressional representative from Harlem and "civili rights" leader? He looks like Walt Disney in dim light. According to Wikipedia, his paternal grandfather was white, as were several of his mother's ancestors.
ReplyDeleteTruth said...
ReplyDelete"No one forces a white person with black ancestry to be "black."
So you wouldn't mind Kristoff St. John porking your sister?
10/06/2008
Kristoff St. John is a dark mulatto, not a white person with partial black ancestry. You comment is a non sequitur.
michael farris said...
ReplyDeleteIf we're in Star Trek territory there's also Whorf who was all Klingon-genetically but raised by humans (on earth IIRC).
He became an uber-Klingon to an extent that even surprised other Klingons (but was routinely attracted to women who were only partially Klingon or not Klingon at all).
Or how about Spock for that matter? Half-Vulcan, half-Human but culturally uber-Vulcan. Especially in the early episodes, Spock was stiffly formal, humourless, and preachy about logic and Vulcan superiority. Pure-blooded Vulcans were more relaxed, confident, and matter-of-fact than poor old Spock.
"Kristoff St. John is a dark mulatto, not a white person with partial black ancestry. You comment is a non sequitur."
ReplyDeleteOK, Jeremiah Wright then.
I didn't know you were holding a gage. What are you using, a paper bag?
"Kristoff St. John is a dark mulatto, not a white person with partial black ancestry. You comment is a non sequitur."
ReplyDeleteOK, Jeremiah Wright then.
I didn't know you were holding a gage. What are you using, a paper bag?
You obviously don't know the difference between a mulatto phenotype and a white one. Whites of mixed ancestry would be Gregory Howard Williams and Anatole Broyard, for example.
Williams was raised as a white boy in Virginia and now claims to be "black" (and has been rewarded for it with the presidency of City College of New York). Broyard (of Louisiana Creole ancestry)identified as white and has been denounced for it by liberals and blacks.
http://www.interracialvoice.com/editor13.html
If you hate the blacks so much, why in the world would you want to increase their numbers by encouraging backward assimilation of white to black instead of black to white?
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteI am 'black'.
ReplyDeleteIf you hate the blacks so much, why in the world would you want to increase their numbers by encouraging backward assimilation of white to black instead of black to white?
ReplyDelete10/08/2008
Blogger Truth said...
I am 'black'.
10/08/2008
Oh, that explains it! You want European DNA to improve the racial stock!