[lbo-talk] Anthro/ethnography query

JBrown72073 at cs.com JBrown72073 at cs.com
Wed Oct 1 19:32:51 PDT 2003


Chris Doss wrote:
>I was babbling on here about the Cossacks a while ago, and the thought
>occurs to me: Does anyone know of any other instances in history in which
>a group that was artifically created by a state (in this case, for military
>purposes) over time developed into a group that considers itself to be
>an separate ethnicity? I would think it's a pretty singular development.

Well, they managed to get a lot of ethnic groups in the U.S. thinking of themselves as white by welding them into one reactionary identity, not-Black. It only took a few decades. Was that identity created artificially by the state?

Irish, Italians et. al became 'white' partly through the evisceration of the cities. The WASP ruling class certainly needed to make more people identify with them (against all logic) and racism is a convenient tool for that. Apart from promoting the suburbs, there's also the drug war which was fairly explicitly created as a race war.

Jenny Brown



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