Posted on 04/22/2013 3:09:11 PM PDT by drewh
Salon.com: Look, White Caucasian Boston Bombing Squirrels! Posted by William A. Jacobson Monday, April 22, 2013 No one cares about the skin color of the Boston Marathon Bombers except to push back against people like David Sirota of Salon.com who infamously hoped that a “white American” was responsible, and others in the media and left-blogosphere who were hoping that another Timothy McVeigh-looking person was the perp.
I’m sure the victims don’t care about skin color.
The push to make the Whiteness or Non-Whiteness of the bombers an issue continues with just as much gusto at Salon.com and elsewhere after it turned out that the bombers were Chechen Jihadists.
Joan Walsh of Salon.com, responding to criticism of Sirota’s Great White Hope, writes: Are the Tsarnaev brothers white?
But are we sure the Tsarnaevs aren’t white? They are quite literally Caucasian, as in from the Caucuses: Rebecca Eisenberg helps with this handy map. And ethnically in this country, we count Americans of Russian descent, as well as Chechens, as white. Dzhokhar was a naturalized American citizen; Tamarlan had applied for citizenship but reportedly didn’t get it because of FBI concerns about his possible ties to Islamic radicals.
So why are the Tsarnaev brothers not white, at least to right-wingers? Is it only because they’re Muslim? Muslim immigrants? Or is it because they’re “bad,” and whiteness must be surrendered when white people are bad? …
These days, though, Americans of Russian or Chechen descent are unambiguously categorized as “white” by the U.S. Census Bureau, which says it counts as white all “people having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa. It includes people who reported ‘White’ or wrote in entries such as Irish, German, Italian, Lebanese, Near Easterner, Arab, or Polish.” As I wrote Friday, the anguished outburst of Ruslan Tsarni, the brothers’ uncle in Maryland, was the quintessentially American cry of a newcomer wanting to be identified as a good, patriotic American – not necessarily as white, but certainly not as suspicious “other.”
So conservatives’ insistence the Tsarnaevs are absolutely not white is curious, to say the least.
This analysis of Whiteness is shallow, to put it mildly. Chechnya (to be distinguished from The Czech Republic!) is in the Caucuses, and there’s no one as “White” as someone who comes from the region from which the term Caucasian was derived. Right?
This is complete nonsense and a distraction for two reasons. First, when it comes to skin color, we need to Stop using the word “Caucasian” to mean white:
About four years ago blogger emeritus RPM of evolgen brought into sharp relief an issue which has nagged me:
Caucasian, literally, refers to people native to the Caucasus, but it has become interchangeable with any number of ‘White’ populations, most of wh1om trace their ancestry to Europe. One gets the feeling that the term ‘White’ fell out of favor and was replaced by ‘Caucasian’ much like ‘Black’ was replaced by ‘African-American’. But the roots of such terminology are a bit disturbing; it was postulated that the natives of the Caucasus exhibited the idealized physical appearance so the Caucasus were believed to be the birthplace of mankind. The logic behind this idea — the assumption that Whites exhibit the best physical appearance — is implicitly racist. Additionally, we now know our species first appeared in Africa, so the biology isn’t any good either. The connotations of the term Caucasian along with the geographical absurdity of using that term to describe all Europeans or Whites are the two main reasons we should abandon the term.
… The Caucasus mountains bound the Middle East on the north, and the real Caucasians are to some extent a liminal Middle Eastern population. This gets really dumbfounding for the stupid people who ask and answer questions of the form “are Armenians white?” on the internet. After all, the Armenians are indubitably Caucasian, and Caucasian is white, right? Compare the subtly of a regular dictionary definition of Caucasian, to the straightforward acknowledgement of the idiocy of the common usage of the term in urban dictionary.
Derek Thompson at Slate.com asks Why do we say that white people came from the area of Chechnya and Kyrgyzstan and Dagestan?
Wait, do white people really come from the Caucasus?
It’s highly unlikely. There are scholarly disagreements about how and when some of our dark-skinned ancestors developed lighter skin, but research suggests humans moved across the Asian and European continents about 50,000 years ago.
Second, “White” is an incredibly broad term as defined for U.S. Census purposes:
White. A person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa. It includes people who indicate their race as “White” or report entries such as Irish, German, Italian, Lebanese, Arab, Moroccan, or Caucasian.
That’s a really broad range, rendering the Census term “White” meaningless when it comes to skin color. Bedouins and Scandinavians are all “White.”
The more important question is not whether the bombers were “White” or “Caucasian” but why Salon.com is obsessed with the Whiteness or non-Whiteness of the bombers.
It has nothing to do with skin color.
It’s all about distracting from the abysmal attempt to pin the bombing on the right-wing and Tea Party by reference to the indisputably “White” Timothy McVeigh, and to evade the questions the left does not want to face as to Jihadism, whether “homegrown” or international.
Look, White Caucasian Boston Bombing Squirrels!
I will grant Salon.com one thing. They do know a lot about ”Whiteness” and squirrels.
I don.t think they’re even full brothers.
Big dance party and celebration at the Sirota residence! All lefties invited!!
David said to be ecstatic at the wonderful news!!
Be careful. Anytime you read a column by a known liberal, it will cost you I.Q. points. Reading Sirota’s idiotic column cost me at least 20.
Who said they weren’t white? I don’t recall any “conservatives” saying they weren’t white. What a maroon this author is.
Right: We don’t care what color he is.
Left: You deny that he is white?
Right: His race is irrelevant
Left: You’re racist
The thing is Salon..CNN...Axelrod....Slate...many on the left drooled for was white..TEA party. That way they cold paint us not as political opponents but as enemies of the state.
The problem for everyone is that there are several breeds of white folks ~ they split up at the end of an interglacial about 35,000 years back and went different places where the survivors sat out the ice age for a while.
Bingo.
Are all southern baptists black? What a foolish question. Color, ethnicity, race have little to do with their religious beliefs. The causcasus and parts of eastern Europe were invaded by muslims in the 7th-8th centuries and as is usual today, the local population was given the choice to convert or die. They held Spain for several centuries and made it into France until Charles the Hammer turned them back at Tours. The racist left got the white caucasians they were hoping for; they just weren’t the white conservative Christians they wished for.
I wouldn’t be surprised if a Leftist posing as a Tea Partier commit a crime in the future in order to tarnish the name. It be another long history of Left attempt to manufacture “Fake but Accurate”
In historic times the Jomon became the Emishi, and they in turn the Samurai class.
The Ainu are not native to Japan, as the civil wars progressed in the Southern Islands and the climate deteriorated the Jomon, et al, left Hokaido and other islands in the North and Ainu from the continent moved in.
Actually, the white people in Southern and Central latitudes of Europe are part of a branch that split off from the original white people ~ who now live primarily in the Arctic and Subarctic. Again, that happened about 15,000 years ago although an earlier branch appears in America 20,000 years ago.
East Asians and Europeans carry genes that suppress formation of melanin ~ both methods are different! The European Neanderthals had a third set of genes that suppressed formation of melanin. It is important in the Northern reaches of the Northern hemisphere to have light skin.
They then became the people harrassing the other tribes there to become Moslems.
I don't think very many Arabs or Turks ever actually penetrated too far into the interior Caucasian states! The place is dangerous now; it was more dangerous in the past!
For some reason people from the sub continent are classified with orientals and not as indoaryans
We had ‘em here on FR ~ there, I’ve let the KITTENS out of the bag ~ far leftwingtards read Free Republic FIRST!
Half of my family was not considered white by racist nativists when they got here. Now, we are considered children of privilege by racist leftists. The Caucasoid peoples are of varying shades. Liberals hoping for another Timothy McVeigh are the worst kind of racists. The real problem with these terrorists is that they were radical, jihadi, Muslims not which strain of Caucasoid they sprang from.
Ethnicity, not race, relates to differences between groups of people. Except for aesthetics and skin cancer, race doesn’t mean squat.
Okie dokie. So they are southern, white guys. As it turns out, Chechens also tend to drink tea instead of coffee. So there you have it, a perfect NPR storm: southern, white, male, tea partiers.
Where did they get the impression that Conservatives didn’t think the brothers are white? The same place that came up with the “90% of Americans want more gun control?”
It matters not at all that this group was white, brown, black, or green. They are a cancer that kills indiscriminately.
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