What I find really interesting about the OJ documentary is how easy it is to manufacture racial solidarity and how impossible it is to make people at least consider gender or class solidarity. Just look at the current election for an example.
Maybe racial solidarities are so strong because no other kind of solidarity is accessible.
Clarissa's Blog 
Racial and ethnic solidarities matter are so strong because they are based on the idea of blood connections and extended family. The idea that you are biologically related to all other people in the group for all of history is what gives these categories their power. Class in contrast is very weak in that it is only based on economic similarity not any imagined actual connection and certainly none as strong as blood ties.
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I have to say, I never heard this explanation and would have never thought of it.
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It’s in Benedict Anderson. And I am not sure about this but I see darkly that it may mess up the intersectionality theories.
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Or perhaps explain them — I know there are those who believe gender is the first difference but peoples’ behavior keeps indicating it is perceived race (understood sometimes as nationality) … so that has to always intersect everything else, hmmm
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Nothing new here. The old German Blut und Boden.
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Interesting perspective. To clarify / extend longer. Would you agree that since class can change, where race / family/ blood really can’t that is one reason invest so much more in the latter and defend nearly unquestionably since its a constant fact of life vs “up for change / debate” in the future?
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Biological sex can’t be changed either yet there is zero solidarity based on it.
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there definitely is some solidarity between genders (biological and expression of gender wise too). But there is some logic to what you say on how its not straight biology. I think the other difference is maybe better looked at as “sunk costs” and “learned closeness”. I don’t have much affinity for my eastern european roots because I wasn’t really raised in that community / events etc. People who were adopted at birth often / rarely have some huge affinity for their birth parents. Basically if you grow up for your formative years for two decades with certain people (from religious, to cultural, to familial) you will have lots of solidarity which is very hard to shake. That might be a worthwhile angle to consider
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I grew up in a monoracial society but the idea of feeling any special affinity or closeness for white people has never occurred to me.
“People who were adopted at birth often / rarely have some huge affinity for their birth parents.”
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Interesting perspective to look at. I only know maybe 3-4 people well who have been adopted and they definitely (all but one) are not close to their birth family and have resentment toward them, definitely not closeness after having met. So 100% wrong surely not. Anecdote is not evidence, but surely casts doubts on 100% notion.
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Resentment is the companion of love, not of indifference.
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Class ironically may be the reason for the people i know. Everyone grew up middle to borderline upper middle income. Great lives by any material standard, loving adoration from the families, and all the opportunities in the world. If they had stayed with birth parents they know / have expressed how much rougher life would have been. So definitely a very complex situation.
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People who were adopted at birth often / rarely have some huge affinity for their birth parents.
There are countless studies of twins and siblings who were adopted away from each other having uncanny similarities to each other, even though they were separated at birth/never knew each other. Also have you read The Girls Who Went Away? There are so many stories about the trauma of not knowing your birth parents/being separated from your children. Anecdotally, the adoptees I’ve known who had loving parents still felt like they had Mom and Dad shaped holes in the universe and were super happy to meet their biological parents, even the ones who were severely mentally ill.
I don’t have much affinity for my eastern european roots because I wasn’t really raised in that community / events etc.
I don’t know. I think communities are different and I think they can go either way.
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“There are so many stories about the trauma of not knowing your birth parents/being separated from your children. Anecdotally, the adoptees I’ve known who had loving parents still felt like they had Mom and Dad shaped holes in the universe and were super happy to meet their biological parents, even the ones who were severely mentally ill.”
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Race, like nation, is not biological the way sex is — it is only imagined to be. It is ideology & created & so there is all this emotional investment in it, it is not just there. The paradoxical strength of it is that it is not natural yet it is purported to be
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Of course, race is biological. There is a mountain of idology tacked onto it – just like there is a mountain of gender ideology tacked onto the simple reality of biological sex. The problem is that the definition of race is heavily influenced by culture. I was shocked to discover that in North America it is normal to put Jews, for instance, in a separate “race.” Of course, such definition of race is meaningless. Back in the USSR, we were taught that there are 3 races: Negroid, Caucasoid, and Mongoloid. They have simple biological differences that don’t need to be invested with any meaning.They arose from the same origin in response to different geographic and climatic conditions. This was the Soviet school of thought and I like it.
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No — it isn’t a scientific category. Ask a geneticist.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23684745
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Genetic tests deal in subcategories of race, which are ethnicities.
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That’s a 19th century platitude. Read virtually anyone working on race as social category in the last several decades. Yes you can now trace someone’s genome but it does not mean classifications like “white” are coherent. Here’s a good short piece on this matter http://raceandgenomics.ssrc.org/Goodman/
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“it does not mean classifications like “white” are coherent”
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“in North America it is normal to put Jews, for instance, in a separate “race.””
Really? I’ve read about the idea that Jews aren’t white from both anti-Semites and Jewish intellectuals but I’ve never actually enountered it in real life….
I always thought the Soviet practice of making “Russian” (and Ukrainian and whatever else) and “Jewish” mutually exclusive categories was kind of insane.
The “Racial” category that makes no sense in the US is “Hispanic” since Spanish speakers (like English speakers) come in every possible racial category and combination.
Black is unsual in the US since it refers to both a racial category and a cultural linguistic group that don’t entirely overlap, which is why Rachel Dolezal and Shaun King didn’t bother me, the black community in the US has always had a few members who weren’t technically black (as measured by prevailing genetic standards).
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\ I always thought the Soviet practice of making “Russian” (and Ukrainian and whatever else) and “Jewish” mutually exclusive categories was kind of insane.
But you can not be of two ethnicities of once, unless f.e. one parent was Jewish and another Russian, as in my case.
We have discussed it once, but I still repeat: Jewish people are a people, like German / Russian / etc. people are a people. Jews are among, quoting Clarissa, “subcategories of race, which are ethnicities.” Just recently I read about another scientific proof of that:
“The World’s Largest Jewish Bone Marrow Donor Registry
BONE MARROW AND JEWISH GENETICS
…
Chances for a match increase significantly if the patient and potential donor share the same ethnic background. Because Jews in the past lived in isolated communities, they are today more genetically related to each other than to non-Jews. There are over 10 million potential donors registered in the International Bone Marrow Registry”
https://ezermizion.org/bone-marrow-and-jewish-genetics-2.html
Why do you accept Russians and Ukrainians as ethnicities, but not Jews?
As for white or not white, most Jews are white, but a few after living in Ethiopia for centuries are not. So what? Russians, Ukrainians, Germans, French and 1001 more peoples are all white, yet everybody (including you, I suppose) accepts they are different ethnicities, different peoples. Also, this white or not white discussion is connected to not-Jewish African American history and is quite irrelevant for not-USA Jews.
Found an interesting article from a usually trustworthy on scientific matters major Israeli newspaper:
Here are 12 facts about Jewish genetics.
1. Two clusters: Jewish communities across the globe share a common “genetic thread”, according to a 2010 study led by geneticist Harry Ostrer of Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. Genetic analysis of seven Jewish groups (Iranian, Iraqi, Syrian, Italian, Turkish, Greek and Ashkenazi) identified two distinct clusters that split about 2,500 years ago: European/Syrian Jews and Middle Eastern Iraqi and Iranian Jews.
…
The bottleneck: The extreme population shrinkage of Ashkenazi Jews in the Middle Ages, followed by dramatic expansion, created what is known as a “bottleneck effect.” Mutations that arose and spread among the resultant Ashkenazi population are thought to include genes that predispose to schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/science/.premium-1.664967
As a formerly Ukrainian Jew (born in Ukraine), I found this interesting 🙂 :
“Salut! Some 20 percent of Jews carry a gene that protects against alcoholism, with the variant more common in Sephardim than in Ashkenazim.”
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I was told to include race theory into the very first article I published. The article was on a novel where a Jew comes to a 19th-century Spanish town. I was completely stumped because nobody in the novel saw the Jewish character as being of a different race. It was all too weird.
I also don’t get the Dolezal drama. If the actress from L Word can call herself black, why can’t Dolezal? It’s not like anybody can say she’s not before seeing a genetic test.
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And yes, using “Hispanic” or “Latino” as a racial category is insane.
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\ Biological sex can’t be changed either yet there is zero solidarity based on it.
Why should I feel solidarity with Palestinian women when we are enemies and women support terror just as much as men?
Or with Arab women in Israel when we belong to different societies and they also prefer to keep away from me?
Or even with Jewish Haredi/religious women who are just as glad as men to force their religion on me via state laws and embrace (to some extent) gender segregation?
Or …
If we have the same genitals, it does not mean we are similar culturally or have similar values. Not even a little. How can and why should I feel solidarity, if we speak in different tongues (figuratively)? I care about my own society, men and women.
\ I have to say, I never heard this explanation and would have never thought of it.
Weird.
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And why should poor and abused people feel solidarity with a rich spoiled murderer who wouldn’t be caught dead in their company just because he is the same color?
We are not talking about rational things here.
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“The idea that you are biologically related to all other people in the group for all of history is what gives these categories their power.”
Oh yeah! Speaking of blood ties, here’s something I learned during my visit to India. I always knew some Hindus do not marry within their own sub-caste, but didn’t know why. The idea is that all sub-castes in various Hindu communities have descended from their own versions of Adam and Eves (well, mostly Adams, the names of Eves are not that prominent). So, marrying within one’s sub-caste would be like committing incest because you are biologically related.
What you just said is quite literally followed in many parts of India; it’s not an abstract idea.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotra
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“Oh yeah! Speaking of blood ties, here’s something I learned during my visit to India. I always knew some Hindus do not marry within their own sub-caste, but didn’t know why. The idea is that all sub-castes in various Hindu communities have descended from their own versions of Adam and Eves (well, mostly Adams, the names of Eves are not that prominent). So, marrying within one’s sub-caste would be like committing incest because you are biologically related.”
-Please excuse my ignorance, but what is a sub-caste? I understand that it must be some internal division of a caste, but that’s about it.
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“I understand that it must be some internal division of a caste, but that’s about it.”
That’s about it.
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” I always thought the Soviet practice of making “Russian” (and Ukrainian and whatever else) and “Jewish” mutually exclusive categories was kind of insane.”
Growing up in the US you’re conditioned to pay less attention to some kinds of genetic categories and more to others. Growing up in the 60s and 70s, especially in a place with not many Jewish people around I always thought of Judaism is the only marker of Jewishness, that is Jews were people with a particular religion.
And nothing in the mainstream media really encouraged people to think in any other way. Also, one of the more famous public Jews was black, Sammy Davis Jr. so it was hard to think of Jews as a genetic group.
I get the whole ethnic group aspect of Jews now but among non-Jewish Americans it’s still kind of a non-starter (and AFAIK there’s still nothing in American media that would help Americans understand the genetic underpinnings of Jewishness).
For me personally, cultural and linguistic affiliation trumps narrow ethnic concerns, but I’m weird that way.
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\ Growing up in the US you’re conditioned
I understand better now where you’re coming from. I was conditioned in the opposite fashion: raised as an atheist in FSU, but with my mother being 100% Jewish and with our (F)SU atheist environment never truly letting her to forget that.
\ For me personally, cultural and linguistic affiliation trumps narrow ethnic concerns, but I’m weird that way.
It’s not black and white. Linguistically, my family’s mother tongue is Russian. Even my grandmother only knew a few words in Yiddish. Culturally, my grandmother was a communist and we were (F)SU family through and through. There was zero religion or any special Jewish cultural practices. Yet, as I mentioned, everybody saw my relatives (I was young when we left to Israel and half-Russian too) as Jews and there was antisemitism both on private and government levels.
How do you define “narrow ethnic concerns” vs “cultural and linguistic affiliation”? India speaks English, yet they did not want to be under British rule. Ireland also became an independent state. Ukraine and Russia are also close culturally (based on my living in Ukraine and my aunt’s family – in Russia). I do not talk about the current war here.
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All true. Nobody in my family has practiced Judaism for over 100 years. Moreover, my Jewish father was a sort of a crypto Christian even back in the 1960s USSR. But there was no doubt in anybody’s mind that they were all Jewish. They stood out in every way, even after adopting Russian names.
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” India speaks English”
Not especially. It’s not very common as a home language or movie language. India as a country (like Hinduism) I’ve read is probably an invention of the British. It’s a 9 to 5 language more than a native language.
Ireland is a better example but the Irish consider themselves culturally and linguistically distinct from the UK.
Among native speakers of English (and Spanish as far as I can tell) there’s no real desire for a universal standard in anything* and national differences are carefully maintained.
“narrow ethnic concerns” vs “cultural and linguistic affiliations”
For me cultural differences are kind of like linguistic differences, I mostly take people’s word for it. If Palestinians want to pretend they speak the same language as Iraqis and Libyans then go for it! If Czechs and Slovaks want to pretend they speak completely separate languages – cool.
In Poland I’ve known people with Czech, Ukrainian, German, Yiddish, Greek, Romanian, Vietnamese, Yugoslav, African and English last names who self-identify as Polish – as in it’s their first language and they act like most other people in the country do in most situations. The language and culture are more important than their individual genetic history.
*which makes international usage both easier in some ways and harder in others
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“I was conditioned in the opposite fashion: raised as an atheist in FSU, but with my mother being 100% Jewish and with our (F)SU atheist environment never truly letting her to forget that.”
I now think that english totally needs a way to distinguish Jewish ethnicity and Jewish religion. Maybe Jew and Jewish for ethnicity and Judaic, Judaist and Judaism for the religion?
Sammy Davis Jr wasn’t a Jew but he was a Judaist. Would that work for people?
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“Maybe Jew and Jewish for ethnicity and Judaic, Judaist and Judaism for the religion?”
That’s how we do it in Russian. We simply use different words.
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\ “Maybe Jew and Jewish for ethnicity and Judaic, Judaist and Judaism for the religion?”
A complex question. Even in a Hebrew textbook for immigrants (from language courses for adults my mother attended) one text was titled “Who is a Jew?” and discussed religious vs other approaches. Israel receives atheist ethnic Jews, but also views anybody adopting Judaism as deciding to join the (ethnic) Jewish people and allows Orthodox converts immigrate, treating them as first class citizens in the process. At the same time, any ethnic Jew, who adopts other religion, is viewed as deciding to exit from the Jewish people and is not allowed to immigrate.
Unlike for other peoples, because of being an ethnic minority, for Jews in exile religion usually went with belonging to the ethnic group. A few non-Jews could convert, marry a Jew and assimilate into the Jewish people. If a Jew left religion (usually out of desire to escape discrimination), s/he married a gentile and in a few generations even the rumors of “the dirty secret” of a Jewish ancestor died out. It is still the situation everywhere but in Israel and the number of not religious American Jews is declining because of intermarriage.
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\ I was told to include race theory into the very first article I published.
Have you included it?
Such demand in itself seems racist to me since I consider myself white.
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“Have you included it?”
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“Such demand in itself seems racist to me since I consider myself white.”
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“How do you define “narrow ethnic concerns” vs “cultural and linguistic affiliation”? India speaks English, yet they did not want to be under British rule. ”
That is a whole lot of wrong. India ‘speaks’ English now. When British ruled India, I would guess fewer than 0.1% of Indians spoke English.
“India as a country (like Hinduism) I’ve read is probably an invention of the British.”
Hinduism an invention of the British? Where did you read that, BNP newsletters?
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India speaks English”
Not especially. It’s not very common as a home language or movie language. India as a country (like Hinduism) I’ve read is probably an invention of the British. It’s a 9 to 5 language more than a native language.
LMAO. Have you seen any Indian language movies in the past…twenty years? People switch languages in the movies ALL THE TIME. It’s very rare to watch an entire Bollywood movie or regional commercial film that’s 100% one language. English has been the language of the courts since independence although it’s not a scheduled language
Hinduism is not “an invention of the British” so I’m not sure where you came to that utterly absurd conclusion.
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“Hinduism is not “an invention of the British” so I’m not sure where you came to that utterly absurd conclusion.”
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I think Cliff means that the British tried to reduce a very exuberant, complex and abundant religious universe to the lowest common denominator that would be easy to understand for Westerners who wanted to see everything in familiar terms. Like the Spanish monks who came to the New World and tried to find equivalencies to the Holy Trinity, Virgin Mary and the saints in the indigenous religious systems.
That’s quite a different statement than “Hinduism is an invention of the British”.
The British werenot motivatedby understanding.
A translation does not an invention make unless you want to claim that King James invented the Bible.
They didn’t invent any texts or beliefs but codified what was actually a lot of different belief systems into a single system.
There is no single system, again: utter nonsense.
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“There is no single system, again: utter nonsense.”
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“LMAO. Have you seen any Indian language movies in the past…twenty years? People switch languages in the movies ALL THE TIME”
Except that when they do the English doesn’t seem to make much sense or be very related to anything else.
A few years ago I had the idea (long time daydream) of learning a Dravidian language (since I find southern indian things more interesting than northern things) but kind of gave up because of the code switching (not the only reason, but it was up there).
It would be as if the only version of Spanish was Spanglish. As a person who code switches some times i have nothing against code switching as an occasional thing but that seems to be all that Indian languages have now…
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From the makers of..
‘Thai food tastes like Indian food’
Comes a new epic HOT TAKE this summer..
‘HINDUISM WAS INVENTED BY THE BRITISH’
‘Let the laughs begin..” – Frank Bruni, New York Times
‘Tour de Force..” – RogerEbert.com
‘Laugh out loud funny’ – Rolling Stone
‘A Revelation!’ – el from Clarissasblog.com
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Read it and jeer
http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/0195166558.001.0001/acprof-9780195166552
Of, if you’re too lazy to click (white space added for ease of reading)
Is “Hinduism” a legitimate term for the widely varying religious practices of India that are commonly called by that name?
The appearance of “religion” as a category comprising a set of practices and beliefs allegedly found in every culture dates from the modern period, emerging as Europe expanded trade abroad and established its first colonial relations in the 17th and 18th centuries.
Hinduism emerged in the encounter between modernity’s greatest colonial power, Great Britain, and the jewel of her imperial crown, India.
Around the turn of the 19th century, officials of the British colonial state and Christian missionaries helped cement the idea that regional and sectarian traditions in India possessed a sufficient coherence to be construed as a single, systematic religion.
This encounter was deeply shaded by the articulation and development of the concept of “religion”, and it produced the now common idea that Hinduism is a unified religion.
The Bengal Presidency, home of Calcutta — capital of colonial India and center of economic gravity in the eastern hemisphere — emerged as the locus of ongoing and direct contact between Indians and colonial officials, journalists, and missionaries.
Drawing on a large body of previously untapped literature, including documents from the Church Missionary Society and Bengali newspapers, this book presents a portrait of the process by which “Hinduism” came into being.
It argues against the common idea that the modern construction of religion in colonial India was simply a fabrication of Western Orientalism and missionaries.
Rather, it involved the active agency and engagement of Indian authors who interacted, argued, and responded to British authors over key religious issues such as image-worship, satī, tolerance, and conversion. This book retells the story of Christians’ and Hindus’ reception of each other in the early 19th century in a way that takes seriously the power of their religious worldviews to shape the encounter itself and help produce the very religions that colonialism thought it “discovered”.
While post-colonial theory can illuminate issues of power and domination, the history of religions reminds us of the continuing importance of the sacred and spiritual dimensions of the peoples under colonial rule.
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I’ll read that right after I finish reading ‘Can Jet Fuel Melt Steel Beams?,’ an equally legitimate academic topic that I discovered while doing the google.
I doubt, though, that I’ll read anything in your link that remotely suggests that British invented Hinduism. Admit it, that was you just trying to be provocative. You do have this habit of dropping crypto-racist shit in your posts, when the funny thing is that you didn’t even need to say that shit to make your point. But you can’t help yourself.
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“Admit it, that was you just trying to be provocative. You do have this habit of dropping crypto-racist shit in your posts,”
I actually have a habit of using a kind of shorthand in the (vain, I know) hope that people aren’t looking to virtue signal by jumping on the slightest hint of heresy.
To be clear: The British “inventing” hinduism is about British helping to codify a vast polytheistic mozaic into a single LCD kind of religion modeled on the European versions of Middle Eastern Religions. They didn’t invent any particular practices or texts but had a key role in selecting certain practices and texts and labelling them “a religion”.
I just thought that “invent” (as used by numerous authors who’ve written on the topic) was acceptable shorthand – I was wrong.
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\‘Let the laughs begin..” – Frank Bruni, New York Times
‘Tour de Force..” – RogerEbert.com
‘Laugh out loud funny’ – Rolling Stone
‘A Revelation!’ – el from Clarissasblog.com
I am sure it’s funny, but unfortunately don’t get any references. 😦
SB, I know I am extremely ignorant about India. If you wanted, you probably could write a few (guest?) posts about your country. I am sure many readers of this blog are just as ignorant as I am.
The extent of my knowledge are Kipling’s “rikki tikki tavi” and “Maugli” (read in childhood) and Foster’s “A Passage to India” (reading now).
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“SB, I know I am extremely ignorant about India. If you wanted, you probably could write a few (guest?) posts about your country.”
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“SB, I know I am extremely ignorant about India.”
So why would you choose to opine on a subject you know nothing about?
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“Hinduism an invention of the British? Where did you read that, BNP newsletters?”
No. It’s a legitimate academic topic. Not accepted by all (and some crazies embrace the idea as well).
Put “British invented Hinduism” into google and you’ll see what it’s about.
In short, the monotheistic, holy-text and classical language oriented British were trying to make sense of the polythetistic mozaic of local beliefs and rites and created a sort of unified religion based on Sanskrit texts – an idea that had not really existed before British rule.
They didn’t invent any texts or beliefs but codified what was actually a lot of different belief systems into a single system.
Something similar happened with Shinto in Japan (though it was the Japanese themselves who sort of unified the various local practices into a new “religion”.
“When British ruled India, I would guess fewer than 0.1% of Indians spoke English.”
When they arrived in Ireland, a similar percentage spoke English….
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“When they arrived in Ireland, a similar percentage spoke English….”
Did a similar percentage speak english when they left Ireland? That’s about the percentage of Indians who spoke english in 1947. To suggest that there was any linguistic solidarity with the british would therefore would be utterly wrong. Even now, when a lot of Indians speak english (and do it well), there is little to no idea of any sort of cohesion with the english. And that was before the right-wing party took power.
I know it wasn’t you who made the point. It was el being el.
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\ It was el being el.
🙂
It was el remembering you telling me off for being surprised English was your mother tongue despite living in India rather than America, Canada or England.
Is “India speaks English, yet feels no connection to the English speaking countries” OK?
\ condensing it into posts – any number of them – will, I believe, be a futile effort.
At least, 1% of knowledge is better than none. Aren’t there a few major groups? It’s not like every village and town is something truly different, right?
I asked about modern India “who is who” and “who against whom” in the most general way. SB mentioned once “Hindus against Muslims.”
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Cracking India by Bapsi Sidhwa is a really good Bildungsroman about the Partition.
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“Except that when they do the English doesn’t seem to make much sense or be very related to anything else.”
To you. It doesn’t make sense toyou.
The language used in Bollywood films doesn’t make sense to CliffFromOnline, what a tragic flaw.
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And I don’t much like Bollywood, when I was kind of interested in Indian stuff I was looking more at Kannada, Malayali and Telugu movies/series (Tamil was just toooo diglossic).
A (western) Hindi teacher and another Indian-language specialist also told me the English used in Indian movies/series doesn’t make much sense to them and is often not directly related to anything else in the movie. Maybe I should pass on their email addresses to you so you can enlighten them.
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