>kelley wrote:
> >
> > 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".
> >
>
>This is interesting claim...I agree with you up to a point.
we've had this "discussion" here several times. you might want to search the archives with google; angela racialization white trash would be the key words
pointing out that polish people can, in certain contexts, be "read" as latino is simply pointing out the power of superficial readings of skin color. it is why a very dark-skinned puerto rican woman i once had in class was not happy to be thought of as black. nor was the carribean-american student who refused to embrace the identity African-American. etc i explained to her the reasons why folks did this, and we talked about status hierachies here in the states (in my office, not class). i ran into her a few months later and she'd changed her mind.
these sorts of incidences are usually instances of what, in my trade, we call "prejudice". in a context like florida, as i pointed out, it is very easy for the sizzlean or business owners to "read" dark skin as "latino"-- after all, latino down here is a catch all for cubans, mexicans, puerto ricans, guatamalans, costa ricans, brazilians, portuguese etc.
i didn't say that when my polish friends are harassed that they are arrested illegally and beaten with a nightstick. i simply said they were often harassed. they are also often suspected of being shoplifters. that really isn't weird in a coastal, tourist community in florida. (and btw, empirical means experience, so i have been giving you empirical experience. so, stick to your own discipline yoshie.)
this was NOT a claim equating their experience with blacks more generally. it is rather pointing out that race IS socially constituted--meanings are conferred on physical traits. more specifically, race and racism should be understood as "processes" and not static things that are and will be forever and always the same.
as angela pointed out several times, we might better think of it as a *process* of racialization. she made some compelling arguments as to the racialization of gypsies, jews, the infirm and insane, etc in nazi germany. i didn't buy them at the time and still have a problem with calling it racialization. nonetheless, i think this is a far better model than most offered in the social sciences for thinking of race and racism.
this is particularly interesting to me b/c it follows my M.O. which i've focused on for quite sometime. racialization turns the focus on those doing the racializing. the approach fits nicely with an approach i've taken from reading black feminist thought--i minored in african american studies as an undergrad. these women basically said to white feminists to stop asking black women to explain to them what it was "like" being black or to help them understand "oppression". effectively they said, move over; stop speaking for us; and stop asking us to explain ourself to you. instead, you explain how "whiteness" works.
>If polish doesn't necessarily equal white it doesn't rule it
>out, and there's a complicating interaction between self
>definitions and the responses of others, subordinate or dominant.
>Its situational. Here in Connecticut during the 1980's the
>INS regularly harassed Polish ethnics in New Britain and
>routinely raided businesses hiring immigrants whose entry
>into the U.S. was, how shall we say, creative. But the
>Puerto Ricans or Blacks in central CT knew that these new
>arrivals not only made an easy transit to white but
>aspired to it.
>
>Euro-ethnics get a lot room for manuevering, ala symbolic
>ethnicity. They get the real or imagined solidarity but
>can junk the identity if it gets too costly.
>
>Dennis Breslin
well, i don't do this one, it's what Bruce Hare calls the "toilet bowl of comparative oppressions". and, anyway, i'm NOT claiming that poles are an historically oppressed group. they are, rather, in certain contexts--a place like florida with a high immigration rate, plenty of interracial couplings, and new immigrant groups--people who aren't participating in whiteness in any sort of straightforward way.
the problem is structurally embedded racist institutions and practices that need to be rooted out, not finger-wagging at people. which was what was being done in the original post.
kelley