What's Your Melting Pot?
 

Okay. So I was bored and I got to thinking (which is usually dangerous), can't remember if this has been done or not. If not, then:

Maternal side, my great-grandfather was half-Cherokee and Irish. Great-granny was Irish and Scottish. Grand-pop was French Canadian and either Cree or Crow, and there was a lot of Welsh in there someplace on Mom's side. Paternal side, my grandfather was half-Scots and half-Polish; my grandmother was half Swedish and Czech. There's also some Danish in there someplace. So, that makes me kind of a walking "melting pot."

So, what's your "melting pot?"

Oh, and forgot the German. There's German on both sides of the family.

I have always hated this fetish of trying to figure out the tiniest racial fraction one has.
Let me know when it's not a white dude who's flaunting their 'roots'.

Fuck it, I'm white.

It makes them less white. It makes them exotic and interesting. It makes them NOT what white has become. It's one of the reasons I have a huge eye roll during St. Patrick's Day in the states. A bunch of white people celebrating how awesome it is to be Irish.

My father was 1/2 Cherokee, 1/4 Blackfoot and 1/4 Welsh. My mother is 1/2 Irish, 1/4 Cherokee and 1/4 English. That makes me have 1/2 Native American and 1/2 British Isle, though being around my Cherokee family more than anyone, that's who I mostly identify with.

Yep because the bagpipe is a bigger part of spanish culture anyways...... I'm not kidding, more celts settled in spain than in ireland from what I've read.

On that note my mother's parents are have 100% colombian blood, which consists of 100% spanish blood. On my fathers side is mostly german with a little bit of irish and austrian. So yeah, I'm a first generation mutt when it comes to my mother's side.

Nothing wrong with being white

Mmmmm The Melting Pot has awesome fondu...oh that's not what we were talking about? Oops, got distracted thinking about chocolate fondu.

I'm not sure if its trying not to be totally white or whatever, my dad does the ancestry.com thing and just researched his father's side, which is Irish and Dutch. I asked him if he was going to research his mother's side, which is Metis and French, but he has no interest to do so. My nan passes for white and you can't get her to talk about being aboriginal.

Americans seem to not mind aboriginal ancestry so much, though, but funny I never hear a white American flaunt how one of his ancestors was black.

Really? It seems pretty common 'round here but that could also be a very regional thing.

Well keep in mind I'm not American XD but I figured it had to do with the One Drop Rule.

I think really a white person with a little bit of black blood has become a bit of a joke here, even Family Guy did an episode about it. So it's not surprising people with that sort of gene pool would be a bit reluctant to flaunt it, and genealogy isn't exactly a common point of conversation.. believe me I enjoy talking about genealogy but it's not easy to get such a conversation started. Hell racism and the Nazis didn't exactly help that.

Its also hard to do geneology if you're not white, even if my grandmother would tell me shit I could only go so far back, in Canadian records for a long time they only put aboriginal women in official records as "Indian Woman."

And if your ancestors were black and slaves, good luck because the slavers weren't nice enough to record where they were from.

Well you can at least figure out the region they were from based on the slavers themselves, since they at least kept records of where they bought them from. The slavers most people think about today, were no more than merchants transporting(highly unethical) products from the supplier to where they were in demand, middle men.

The African slave trade like the numerous slave trades throughout the ages, was built on capturing enemies during wars, and exporting them to provide further funding for the war effort. Wars are built on the loot acquired during them. Modern wars If anything, are a lot less profitable than they used to be, and that's saying something since our modern wars are worth billions.

That combined with the poor record keeping of the African peoples(I think they kept an oral history), meant that, I doubt families in Africa today have any idea if any of their ancestors were exported as slaves.

Btw with that in mind, if anyone passes through Milwaukee and wants to hear more about that, look up the black Holocaust museum here, founded by a man who survived his own lynching(his friends didn't unfortunately), back when lynchings were a thing.

Yeah, it was just a pleasant sea journey, yeah?

And no, its not that easy. Most names weren't recorded and when they got to North America they were given new names anyway, its extremely difficult to trace from what ship your ancestor came from, and from then you probably wouldn't know what their African name was.

Africa isn't a monolith, its a huge continent with tons of different ethnicities and cultures. Slavery to many Africans wasn't slavery as it was in the states, you weren't expected to be a slave for the rest of your life and it had no basis on the colour of your skin. Slavery in America was based on race, to the point where as soon as slavery was banned, vagrancy laws meant that many black people quickly became imprisoned and their labour controlled by prison work. I doubt the Africans who sold Africans into slavery knew what would become of them and their descendants, plus Africa was then largely colonized by European powers who took what they wanted anyway, gosh darn the customs.

Many African cultures did indeed have a writing system, and for a very long time. The more you know!

From what I hear in the news, lynching is still a thing.

Hmm interesting. I would say I think the usage of slaves in America contributed to the duration of the slavery, and created the racism, rather than the racism existing beforehand. It used to be much of the time that slaves were a luxury item that helped out around the house, or business, or provided entertainment somehow. You interacted with them on a regular basis, and were generally associated with better things, contributing to their better treatment and likely hood of being freed.

Then you have the American usage of slaves, thanks to the industrial revolution and colonization you found them used as simple laborers, and interacted with them very little and as a result you disassociated from them , and would be more likely to look down upon them.

Two examples supporting this are how house slaves actually got freed a lot more often compared to the field slaves, and the Egyptian slaves who were used in an even more extreme fashion as a far more expendable workforce you barely interacted with, and slavery there lasted far longer than it did here.

This leaves me with the question of, was slavery and racism in the south a result of the people themselves, or the necessity that the slaves served towards profit making.
But how many of those cultures were the ones that participated in the slave trade is something I'd like to know, especially since as cultures with writing they would be better educated.


Well they're not the sort of thing you have whole towns having picnics for anymore. Hell picnic has often incorrectly been thought of as a shortened version of pick-a-******, though it was used in that context often at the time.

Two questions I've never thought about before in one post, I like where this is going.

Well I'm just another white person. I'm cajun, that's pretty much as there is to me. As much as I'd like to learn about my ancestry, I find it difficult to go on and on about how French or whatever I am. I'm white, it's not that important.

What? Dude, there was racism before slavery. Canada didn't have much of a slave trade and still found a way to be institutionally racist. And don't forget to conquer America you had to kill a whole lot of natives who refused to be assimilated into whiteness.

[quote]
Then you have the American usage of slaves, thanks to the industrial revolution and colonization you found them used as simple laborers, and interacted with them very little and as a result you disassociated from them , and would be more likely to look down upon them.
[quote]

There were both house slaves and field slaves, it didn't make a large difference.

White America isn't as old as Egypt, and anyway the prison labour system intentionally made it so that freed black slaves remained slaves. We don't think at all about the work of prisoners, they're totally removed from us and it perpetuates.

Education didn't stop Europeans or white Americans from committing genocide and slavery, did it?

But the judicial system is extremely reluctant to persecute those who do kill innocent black people, a cop in Tennesee just got paid vacation for shooting an unarmed black teenager, it took over a month to arrest Zimmerman and he quickly made up to 200,000 dollars through online donations, and an online retailer is apparently making lots of money selling Trayvon Martin shooting targets. Meanwhile black people who defend themselves are persecuted to the full extent of the law, like CeCe McDonald who should have been protected by Florida's Stand Your Ground Law.

Hi. I have a thing for cajuns.

Hi. I have a thing for monogamy.

I do too! I just really love their accents!

Where in Louisiana are you? My family is in a slow transition to Lafayette, I spent all of December there.

I think my family history is fascinating, not so much knowing what nationalities I'm made up of but knowing what my ancestors did, what town they were from, what their lives were like. The generalities are boring but I think the specifics are fascinating.

When did Canada's racism start exactly? Did it by chance coincide with the slaves escaping into Canada?

I think the initial racism against the natives was a matter of psychologically making it easier to wage a war against them, for the sake of taking their land. Dehumanization of the enemy is quite normal in the course of a war.


I did mention this, and the house slaves were treated significantly better than the field slaves.



The question wasn't if educated Africian civilizations, it was how many.



But those don't count as Lynchings, those are just plain murders, all lynchings are murders but not all murders are lynchings. Lynchings are very public demonstrations, there is no hidden motive behind them, no attempts at denying their purpose. They rip you out of your home, and drag you to some public place, and kill you. They are used to intimidate, to say "if you step out of line, we will kill you". It's not done by individuals, it's done by a mob of people, to completely dominate.

As for the Trayvon Martin shooting, I've been looking to The Young Turks for info on this and they did show that apparently zimmerman very much might have been hurt. With that last piece of info I've decided to leave the decision of guilt to the jury to decide, since I don't know everything that's going on and it's no longer as one sided as it originally seemed.