Re: Ethnic urban legends

[Beth Benoit]

Title: Re:  Ethnic urban legends

This rather interesting exchange took place on another list I came across while searching for some Mead background: (Note:  I issue my standard caveat about web sources - an undocumented source on the web is only worth the paper on which it's written. )  ;-) >Also, in America, groups like Poles and Italians were not always considered >"white." Benjamin Franklin stated that Germans, Swedes, French, and Russians >were members of the "swarthy races" and that the Anglo-Saxons were the only >truly white people in the world. White is a rather moveable feast. As we now >understand it, the term white was created in the 1970s and may or may not >include Arabs. Although one can define caucasian (hence the inclusion of Asian >Indians and Ethiopians), there is no historically or culturally valid >definition of "white." > >In fact, Poles, Italians and the like were considered "non-white" by U.S. immigration authorities until about the 1920s. Also, in one of the postings there was talk about Native Americans' attitudes toward the Earth and its natural resources. But these attitudes varied from tribe to tribe and were influenced by how people fed themselves. The hunting and fishing tribes tended to have one way of dealing with nature, the farming tribes another.<