nemu98 asked on reddit: Why is the anglosphere so focused on race?
2025-09-16
The British Empire implemented racism in colonizing Ireland, and then applied it everywhere, to create a hierarchy of ethnic groups or races, with their white people at the top. If caste was available, they used caste. (Gershon, Britain’s Blueprint for Colonialism: Made in Ireland)
When they settled a country like in the Americas, they regarded the indigenous people as “savages”, and not quite human.
The US implemented race based slavery, and that required a lot of laws, court decisions, and other ways to measure race, and classify people. They made rules about whether the child of a white person and black person was white, or Black. Black people were, by default, slaves. White people were, by default, free, and eventually couldn’t be even indentured servants. (Black Codes)
Then the US went into defining whether different other ethnic groups were white, or not. People who were not white had fewer rights and privileges. Nonwhites might not be able to attain citizenship (Naturalization Act), for example. There were laws prohibiting marriages between people of different races.
Again, this was done through laws, court decisions, and other ways. The affected groups were Lebanese (who got classified as white in the Dow case), Chinese (not white, Chinese Exclusion Act), Indians (not white, Thind), Mexicans (usually white, sometimes not, Martinez, The Legal Construction of Race: Mexican-Americans and Whiteness), Indigenous people (not citizens, Constitution), Japanese and other East Asians (not white, Ozawa). That’s just off the top of my head – there are probably more.
In 1964, the racist interpretation of the Constitution was finally overthrown, after decades of making small gains in the courts. This was called the Civil Rights Era, which is the period we’re in today – though it’s being eroded by the Trump administration. (Civil Rights Act of 1964, also Loving v. Virginia, Brown v. Board, Fair Housing Act 1968, Shelley v. Kraemer)
I don’t know what happened in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa, India, Hong Kong, Palestine, Guyana, Nigeria, Iran, etc.
March 14, 2018
Dustin Seibert wrote about his personal experiences with the Nat Geo: Why the colonizers at National Geographic want you to accept their apology for being racist AF – theGrio
Let me see if I can find the photos I have of a 1930s issue of the Nat that I had, before I threw it out.
Oh yeah, it’s was racist, and not only about dark skinned people in other countries. They were virtually apologists for slavery and were perpetuating stereotypes.
This is from a 1939 issue of the National Geographic. My father was already a teenager in Virginia when these photos were taken.
Racism Crossword Puzzle
I’m trying to make puzzles for this site. This one is about the theme of racism.
Housing Racism and Skid Row
Jan 31, 2018
Down on the corner of 6th and San Pedro, there’s a building named for Ben Weingart, and maybe his story could explain Skid Row a little better.
I don’t mean Ben Weingart’s “Horatio Alger” story of rising from orphanage and poverty to become one of LA’s richest people, and a major philanthropist.
I mean the other story, about how he was involved in first, making residential hotels in Downtown’s down and out areas, during the Depression.
Then, about how, after the war, he became a big suburban developer. One of his developments is the well known suburb of Lakewood, which may be coming to terms with its history of racism. They were a unique suburb, because, at the time, Jews were not allowed to live in white communities. They either lived in communities of color, or in “yellowlined” white communities that were mainly ethnic white.
Lakewood helped make suburbs available to Jewish people, but they used the then-common contract which forbade the buyer to re-sell the property to a nonwhite person.
Suburban bedroom communities used their cops like a taxi service, to send “undesirable” people to Skid Row.
For example, there was a scandal many years ago, when a mentally ill woman who was released from the hospital was driven to Skid Row, and “dumped“. You see a story like this every couple years.
I think it’s great that the Weingart center is doing things to address the needs of homeless people, because the money was made, partly, by a developer who helped to create Skid Row, as well.
Other Stuff
Long Beach Fair Housing Foundation
Racism in Ad Targeting
Facebook is being sued by a prominent civil rights group for alleged discrimination in advertising. The plaintiffs say Facebook allowed landlords to exclude women and people with children from seeing housing ads.
Source: No women or families: Facebook sued over ‘insidious’ housing ads — RT US News
History
This is interesting to me because I recently found an ad from the late 1950s or early 1960s, advertising homes in a development, and they were targeting Japanese-Americans. This was legal at the time, but was made illegal by the 1968 Fair Housing Act.
The practice was called “steering”, and to see evidence of it was interesting. They advertiser, Don Nakajima, had advertised in The Rafu Shimpo, an ethnic paper in Los Angeles. The ad also mentioned “Japanese-American neighbors.”
The typical example of steering is when a Black family isn’t shown homes in a white community. There’s some evidence that there was also steering of people of color toward specific developments.
When these ads were placed, many, if not most, of the new suburban developments were not open to Asian, Black, or Brown buyers. So this was not really racist steering, but a way to sell to a marginalized population. It wasn’t a “good” thing, but a response to an oppressive situation.
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