Report from Kenya #663 -- Who is White?
David Zarembka
Who is White?
Report from Kenya #633 – December 4, 2020
If you want the URL for this report, contact me at davidz...@gmail.com
These two men are really white. I took this picture at Rupa Mall in Eldoret, Kenya.
The English make the principal body of white people on the face of the earth.
Benjamin Franklin, 1751.
As you begin reading this Report from Kenya on “Who is white?”, please take a moment to think who you consider to be “white.” When you answer this, consider the question, “How many races are there?” Can you name them?
Here are the questions I will answer in this essay.
1. Are Poles (and other Slavic people) white?
2. Are Portuguese white?
3. Are Irish white?
4. Are southern Europeans white?
5. Are Middle Easterners, Iranians, and North Africans white?
6. Are Jewish people white?
7. Are Latinos white?
8. Are Japanese white?
9. Are people from India and Pakistan white?
10. Are the Amharic, the traditional rules of Ethiopia, white?
11. Are the Tutsi ethnic group in Rwanda white?
12. Are half Kenyans/half Europeans white?
13. Are some Africans white?
14. Are the descendants of Thomas Jefferson and his slave, Sally Hemmings, white?
Recommendation: Read The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould (1981 and 1996) to have an understanding of the falsities of the theory of race which we have not yet completely accepted as the total pseudo-science that it is. The late Stephen Jay Gould was a classmate of mine in college, but I did not know him.
1. Are Poles (and other Slavic people) white?
Not really. When I was a kid, Polish jokes were still common. I’ll save you from the humiliating catch lines of these ethnic jokes. As my father was born in Poland, I noticed as a kid that, when someone told him a Polish joke, he did not laugh. During the heyday of race theory from the Nineteenth Century until World War II, there were many, many races. Different so-called “scientists” would propose all kinds of divisions into “races.” Slavs -- from which the word slave is derived -- were considered a separate inferior race from the “white” English, Germans, and Scandinavians. Adolph Hitler in his vision of the Thousand Year Reich included the plan that the master Germanic race would subdue and work the inferior Slavic people until they were exterminated as the English settlers in American had “exterminated” the Native Americans and appropriated their land.
2. Are Portuguese white?
No. When I went to college in Cambridge, MA, in the early 1960s, there was a Portuguese community in Boston. I was surprised to hear that these people were not considered “white” because the Portuguese had Moorish blood from North Africa in them.
3. Are Irish white?
No. The Irish were the first ethnic group that the English conquered and considered inferior. As they later conquered various parts of the world, they took what they had developed in treating the Irish to the peoples of North America, Africa, India, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere. After the 1845 Irish famine where many people died because the English refused to supply relief and even exported food from Ireland during the famine, to survive many Irish came to the United States where they were severely discriminated against. You can read all the details in Noel Ignatiev’s 1995 book How the Irish Became White. I can remember when John F. Kennedy ran for president in 1960, there was disquiet due to the fact that he was Irish.
4. Are southern Europeans white?
No. Southern Europeans – Italians, Greeks, and others – were also given their own racial classification which was below that of the master “white” race, but a little above the Slav “race”. I can still remember this anti-Greek sentiment when I went to high school because two of my classmates were of Greek origin.
5. Are Middle Easterners, Iranians, and North Africans white?
Yes. As you can see from the first category on the US census form, Lebanese and Egyptians are given as examples of people who should check “white.” Doesn’t the fact that “white” is at the top indicated that it is the superior race? In previous censuses more than 80 per cent of people in the US originally from Afghanistan to Mauritania in the west of North Africa classified themselves as “white.” Since this selection is self-identification, people can choose any classification they want.
6. Are Jewish people white?
No. Certainly the Nazis did not consider Jews as “white”. This classification making them inferior “others” allowed them to rationalize the Holocaust. In the current hostile environment in the US, this anti-Jewish hostility is still common. When I lived in Pittsburgh from 1971 to 1985, I lived only a few blocks from the Tree of Life Synagogue where on October 27, 2018, a racist terrorist killed eleven people and wounded six others.
7. Are Latinos white?
Sure, that font of all racial classification, the United States census, indicates that Latinos may be of any race, allowing the individual person to determine his or her own racial classification. As Latinos become more acculturated to mainstream society in the United States, more of them will self-identify as “white”, thereby, as has been continually happening in the past, increasing the number of people who are part of the “white” race.
8. Are people from India and Pakistan white?
Yes. In the 1970 US census, the small number of people at that time who had immigrated to the US from India and Pakistan were classified as “white.” This was justified by the fact that many of the major languages in India/Pakistan are Indo-European languages, indicating that these people had originally come from Europe. When affirmative action became legal in the US, some of these “white” Indians and Pakistani wanted to become classified as “Asian” like people from China, the Philippines, and Japan so that they could receive the benefits from affirmative action. They succeeded in this even though these people from the Indian sub-continent are more closely related to Europeans than Asians further east. This illustrates that one of the main proponents of racial classification are especially those who benefit from those classifications. This therefore makes it much harder to end the pseudo-science of race. During the Obama administration there was an attempt to make people from the Indian sub-continent a separate race, but this was not implemented. In the 2020 census these people were still classified as Asian. From your answer at the beginning of this essay, does this change your answer on how many “races” you thought there were in the world?
9. Are Japanese white?
Yes, during the apartheid regime in South Africa from 1948 to 1994, the Japanese were considered “white.” This meant that they were given all the substantial privileges that “whites” received in that society based on racial classifications. Ironically the Chinese were not classified as “white.”
10. Are the Amharic, the traditional rules of Ethiopia, white?
Haile Selassie I, Regent Plenipotentiary of Ethiopia from 1916 and the Emperor of Ethiopia from 1930 to 1974.
Yes, in that hierarchy of many races, the Amharic Ethiopians, who were some of the earliest Christians, were considered the lowest rung of the white race.
11. Are the Tutsi ethnic group in Rwanda white?
Yes, according to John Speke, the British explorer who was the first European to see that Lake Victoria was the source of the Nile River. Since he thought that the people in the area around Lake Victoria where a “superior race” because of their “fine oval faces, large eyes, and high noses, denoting the best blood”, he decided that these people had come from Ethiopia. This meant that the Tutsi from Rwanda and Burundi were also “white”. The Belgians accepted this classification and in the 1920’s divided the people of present day Rwanda and Burundi into two categories, Hutu who were inferior and the “white” Tutsi as the natural ruling class since “whites” were a superior race. This bonus classification has serious repercussions as this led to the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 and numerous conflicts in Burundi. The deadly consequences of racism did not die at the end of World War II, but are still alive and thriving.
12. Are half Kenyans/half Europeans white?
Yes, according to my daughter, Joy. Here is her explanation from pages xiii and xiv of her book, The Pigment of Your Imagination.
When we (Joy and her American friend, Ruanda) explained that we were not related, Mbithi (Joy’s cousin) quickly chimed in, “Well, we just think all white people look alike.” It took a moment for Ruanda and me to realize that he was referring to us as white…I quickly retrieved a copy of Essence, an African-American women’s magazine, from my suitcase. I wanted to understand my cousin’s definition of “black” and “white” so I flipped through the magazine pointing to the models, and asking him to identify their racial category. He overwhelmingly answered “white” as many of the models featured in the magazine were light-skinned African-Americans. In the United States, I am often seen as black, yet in rural Kenya I was seen as White. Like beauty, race lies in the eyes of the beholder.
13. Are some Africans white?
Sure, there are three categories of “whites.”
A. People with Albinism:
These two American models of African descent, Papis Loveday and Shaun Ross, are considered to be the darkest and lightest men in the world. There are many people with albinism (PWA) in Africa with about one out of every 2000 people being a PWA. In some parts of Tanzania, Burundi, Zambia, and Malawi, PWA are attacked and killed for their body parts to be used in witchcraft rituals. I have helped to set up some Healing and Rebuilding Our Communities workshop in western Tanzania for people with albinism.
B. Northern African and Arabs:
Najib Balala, current Cabinet Secretary for Tourism in Kenya. He comes from an Arab background on the Kenyan coast which was settled by Arab traders about 700 AD.
Shakespeare’s play, Othello, considers Othello to be a Moor. At that time North Africans were not considered “white.” But as indicated above, North Africans are now considered “white” so this means that there is a large “white” population in northern Africa. Moreover Arabs from the Middle East have been trading and living on the coast and islands of East Africa since at least 700 AD. Since Arabs are now considered “white”, their offspring on the coast of East Africa can be considered “white” also.
C. Immigrants from Europe:
I once gave a talk in Scotland and I made the mistake of calling the people “English.” I was chastised and told of my faux pas. Then in 2004 when I was in South Africa, I made the mistake of calling a South African of English descent “British.” I was quickly chastised again and told in no uncertain terms that he was an African and not “British.” Europeans immigrated to Africa beginning in the 17th Century about the same time as to North America. Since generations have passed, these people who were classified as “white” in South Africa call themselves African. So there are some Africans who are “white.”
To end my discussion on Africa, one time some years ago I was sitting on the corner on a main street of Bukavu, South Kivu, Democratic Republic of the Congo, waiting to meet someone. As I watched people walk down the street, I was astounded by the diversity of the people I saw. Skin colors were tan, light brown, reddish brown, to almost black. But the body build was also extremely diverse. Some people were very short, probably less than 5 feet tall, while other were tall and thin, and others were tall with broad shoulder, looking like they could play on American football teams. Others were, of course, just average size. These body shares and colors were combined in many versions. This illustrates the essential genetic fact that Africans are more genetically diverse than all the rest of the people in the world. Europeans and Americans often call Africans “black”, but, if this is so, then everyone else outside of Africa is “white.”
14. Are the descendants of Thomas Jefferson and his slave, Sally Hemmings, white?
Yes. Sally Hemmings was of one-quarter African descent and three-quarters English descent. Thomas Jefferson lived before the one drop rule was developed after the Civil War and he considered anyone who was one-eighth African or less to be considered “white.” Therefore he would have considered his six children with Sally as “white.” When he died, he freed Sally and their surviving four children. In the 1830 census Sally and all the children were recorded as “white”. Three of the children passed into “white” society and the descendants are considered “white”. One, Madison, married an African-American and his descendants are still considered African-American. How does this jive with your understanding of the “white race”?
Conclusion:
From the time of Benjamin Franklin when only the English were considered “white”, the “white” race has continually had additions as those who had not been considered “white” became “white”. The result is that the term now has almost no meaning. Since race as Joy wrote, “lies in the eyes of the beholder”, does it really have any meaning at all? When I grew up I learned what a chair was and today a chair is still the same thing. But even in my lifetime, as I have grown older and lived in various places, the concept of the “white race” has expanded. The meaning it had when I was a kid is no longer the meaning it has now. In other words the definition of “white” changes and therefore really doesn’t describe anything. I just wonder why we just keep this concept around. But like those who still believe that the earth is flat, this race generalization seems to continue to live and even thrive.
So now reconsider your answers to my questions at the beginning of this essay. Who is “white” and how many races are there and can you name them? Did this essay change your perspective?
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David Zarembka
Email: davidz...@gmail.com
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