economic stats (as if people mattered)

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Sat Nov 11 13:42:59 PST 2000



>>unlike Wojtek who is white
>
>heh. tell that to wojtek and tell that to polish friends of mine
>here in florida: they get treated like latinos and are stopped
>regularly and harassed. i'm sure you know this, but i just wanted
>to point out that "polish" doesn't mean "white".
>
>kelley

You mean as often as blacks, Latinos, and even Arabs get stopped & harassed? I'd like to see stats to prove parity, if your argument is that Polish-Americans are just as frequently subjected to racial profiling & police brutality as African-Americans.

As you recall, the Irish used to be black in Ireland, but they became white in America (see Noel Ignatiev, _How the Irish Became White_, NY: Routledge, 1996, for instance), coming to dominate some police forces even: "The author [Ignatiev] points out that in Philadelphia the Irish gained their own fire companies and became members of the police force. Both of these facts demonstrate major gains in power in the then ultra-corrupt government. With the fact that they had places in the fire companies and the police force showed that they were under no control of another group. The Irish freed themselves of bias by becoming police themselves" (at <http://lilt.ilstu.edu/gmklass/pos334/archive/ignatiev.htm>).

I have no doubt that Wojtek's support for the wars on crimes & drugs has helped him become white & American, his reflexive Europhilia & kind words for formerly existing socialism notwithstanding. The same might go for the Black, Feminist, & GLBT Talented Tenth. Whiteness is about social relations of class power, not about skin color or anything else. Money whitens, as they say in Brazil. Becoming a cop or cop lover whitens as well, even if you are black, to say nothing of Irish & Polish.

Yoshie



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