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By David Futrelle
So over on 4Chan’s /pol/ board, the anons are talking about ways to save blondes with blue eyes from what anons think will be their eventual genetic demise. Never mind that the notion of the “disappearing blonde gene” is scientific nonsense; these guys love to get worked up about things that aren’t true.
In any case, one anon proposes what he sees as a solution to this imaginary problem, According to him, those with blonde hair and blie eyes
should only breed with alike phenotype. There should be serious incentives from the government if they have 7 children or more. There should also be a blonde hair blue eye ethnostate.
I would say I did Nazi that coming but I sort of did.
But as bad as this is, another anon manages to outdo it with a proposal that combines racism and misogyny, and even a bit of antisemitism, into one giant casserole of terrible:
I don’t even know where to start with this one; in addition to being utterly repugnant, I’m not sure it contains even a single sentence that’s true. Fertility (or the lack thereof) is tied most to birth control and abortions than it is to rape or promiscuity; there are plenty of traditionalist married couples with tons of kids. Black men aren’t out there raping white women en masse, nor are they “savages.” While “forced seduction” is a thing in some romance novels, women in real life don’t generally fall in love with their rapists. Consent — or “concent” — doesn’t make sex bad; it’s what distinguishes sex from rape. Jews are not sending financial aid to people of color. Black people aren’t churning out countless babies in their “gettos,” and, in fact, birthrates of people of color are declining rapidly. And while China is growing in worldwide influence, there’s no reason to think that Jews will soon be sharing the throne with Asians as kings of the world. (I mean, they make up 0.2 percent of the world’s population.)
Is that it? I may have missed an incorrect fact or two; it’s hard to keep track with something so densely wrong as this.
@WWTH
A relict of the eugenics movement, dressed up with a modern term.
@Dalillama:
Yep. Paging the Jukes family.
@Naglfar:
I think there was a brief period just after Kleinfelter’s Syndrome was discovered when it was thought to be linked to criminal behavior, but the original study had been done on prisoners, and Kleinfelter’s turned out to be equally common in the general population.
@ Victorious Parasol
I seem to remember something about rv97 being an ethnic Filipino. Even ate shows some of this. I think it’s a class thing rather than racial – the paler you are, the more likely it is you have a ‘posh ‘ indoor job instead of working in the fields under the hot sun. Most of the Filipino immigrants I know are socially conservative Roman Catholics, so it can be uncomfortable for us palefaces when they let slip something socially conservative, or comment about relative liberalism along ethnic lines.
@Moon Custafer
Yes, that was believed for a while, though now it appears to be mostly or wholly explained by socioeconomic factors.
Even if that were true it would not indicate that Y chromosomes cause criminality, as people with Klinefelter’s syndrome still only have one Y chromosome. Jacobs syndrome (47,XYY) is also discussed in the linked paper, with similar results re: socioeconomics.
I’m pretty sure my karyotype is XY but I am not certain as I’ve never had a test on it, and many people with XXY or XYY go undetected due to lack of symptoms.
Black.
What else did you think it were from his sort? Sense?
I am surprised to see people feel like that there is a need to prove that whiteness is considered to be more attractive than other skin color by the majority. There is a metric shitton of products used to whiten the skin, and I don’t know a single one used to change its skin color to any other, to begin with. Beauty standard are alway based on white people too (and not just skin color : also hair color and appearence, oeil form, just about everything that is even slightly different between caucasian and other ethnicities). It’s so obviously, blindingly common that it feel similar to patriarchy to me : something that is obvious as soon as you look for it.
I don’t mean it’s a good thing or that it’s natural. It’s a problematic racist bias who is deeply drilled in each and every mainstream culture.
As for white-based society being more liberal, that’s an harder call. By far and away, it’s more that rich western country are less autoritharian, and other country can be *extremely* conservative (think Japan or Saudi Arabia). But it seem less pervasive throughout the world than pro-white bias.
I would however remind people that while that may not be true in the USA, in France the most blatantly racist part of the society are minorities. They aren’t racist against white, of course, but the people that I have seen be the most insulting and condescending toward africans were island black people, arabs, and romanis. Part of that is that they are poorer and hide their bias less, but it’s also that being a minority absolutely do not push you toward liberalism.
All right, I’m entirely sick of AVN. He’s got nothing to offer except racism and creepy fetishistic undertones, and having to hunt back through old comments to find his rambling white supremacist garbage is like going on an Easter egg hunt to find a dog turd.
I’m more than happy to contact David and ask him to ban or leave AVN’s comments to stay forever in moderation. Anyone else want to bat the troll around a little more?
@Catalpa
I’m getting tired of him as well. By abusing our goodwill, he was gross in a way most other trolls aren’t. At least Scummyboy had the decency to make it clear he was an asshat from the beginning.
Blue-eyed* and blond here. But I’m a more of a Becky, see, so I have to wait for fair-haired Chad to finish cavorting with the Stacies before he deigns to impregnate me with his blond babies. In the interim, I’ve had to settle for a beta soyboy who doesn’t want kids of his own (neither do I, but does that matter compared to the Future of the White Race(TM)?)
…ugh, that hurt to type. Maybe not the best crossover episode.
*Mostly blue but hazel-green in the middle. As commenters are saying, a lot of people with light-coloured eyes have a different colour around their pupils (the fancy name is central heterochromia).
@Karalora – I heard he fudged some results to make things look simpler, but I’m not a scientist nor a historian.
Colorism and racism are different, although related. Colorism usually (not 100% of the time) favors light-colored skin over darker skin, for the reason Kevin stated: if you work manual labor in the hot sun, your skin gets darker, and if you’re rich and have light indoor labor or no labor whatsoever, then your skin will not get darker. It’s easy to mark this up to the remnants of white supremacist colonialism, but it’s seen in many non-colonial and pre-colonial cultures as well. Colonialism doesn’t help any, but as a full explanation it’s inadequate.
In, let’s say, the United States, colorism and racism are inextricably intertwined, but that’s not true everywhere.
@PoM : the thing is, as far as I can tell, in Asia or Africa it’s racism and not colorism.
For example, in the middle age, Japan was about colorism, and women whitened their skin. Now, they still do that, but they also remove slanted eyes and dye blond. So now it’s about racism.
Sure, white skin was a sign of poshness in a lot of culture. Now it’s more than that. One of the many aspect of white privilege is that, effectively, white is the default for beauty pretty much everywhere. (okay, every place TVs exists)
@Ohlmann – What evidence do you have for this? I mean, the last part can be true in some cases, but I don’t think it’s that simple.
E.g. it reminds me of French Quebecers being blamed for Islamophobia in Canada with the same idea: that being a minority in the country makes them more insular and regressive. I think, okay, maybe the idea of your culture being threatened might lead you to clamp down on things that are perceived as threats to it, but blaming Quebec francophones for all the anti-Muslim sentiment in Canada isn’t fair and is far too simplistic. For one, they aren’t acting in a vacuum, since similar things are happening elsewhere in the country, not to mention the States and Europe.
In short, racism within minority groups is definitely open to criticism, but I think it’s better if people in majority groups acknowledge their shortcomings first, or else the criticism can come across as paternalistic.
Sure, it’s not always easy. For me, a white English Montrealer, when I heard that James McGill (founder of McGill University) was a slave-owner, I “conveniently” forgot about that. It was easier for me to speak out against Bill 21 in Quebec – the Parti Quebecois law that bars people who wear “religious symbols” (cough, cough, hijabs) from certain jobs. And now people are saying to take down the James McGill statue and acknowledge his less-than-savory history on the website, since it affects Black students going to McGill today, and I realize I ignored this before.
…anyway, sorry if local politics stuff is boring; your post just brought these things to mind.
Well, fuck. I had typed a long-assed post RE: hair and eye colors and how those of my immediate family put the lie to the /pol/tard’s bullshit (plus other stuff), but it looks like it was eaten whole.
@Lenona – LOL, of course I meant Feder, if my criticism had been addressed to you I would at least have had the courtesy to use “you” instead of “that”.
As for Feder’s reaction (or rather non-reaction) to the intentional bit of cringe, it’s either self-selective memory at work, or (given that he’s a fundie, and that the true roots of the modern fundamentalist religious right was Southern white reaction to the civil rights movement – they later decided to camp abortion because by the time the late 70s rolled around keeping up an overt segregationist attitude was a losing proposition) he considered it to be the proper way to speak to a black woman and so he didn’t consider it worthy of comment.
@epitome
I agree, this is important. Too often people arguing in bad faith will concern troll about some issue (women’s rights or LGBT rights are common choices) as a way of arguing against a minority (such as Muslims or PoC). That was part of what AVN was doing on the other thread. While people in minorities definitely can hold problematic views, members of the majority holding these views is always more problematic, as the majority has more power. Bigotry should be called out wherever it presents, but it is most important to call it out and acknowledge it in powerful majority groups.
@Paireon
Can we not use terms derived from ableist slurs?
Dunno. Worked in Africa a fair bit, and lived in four different countries
(Egypt, Kenya, Botswana – it were much safer to stash the family there and commute to South Africa at the time, and Nigeria) for over a year in each. Not places that have a high number of people wanting to “be white,” for obvious reasons.
Yet skin lighteners – chemical, herbal, and magical – were sold bloody everywhere, and bought by pretty much every woman. There were towers of the damned things in the markets, never mind the shops.
That does seem to me to be a lot more colourism than racism.
@Threp
This matches the experience of my Rwandan cousins.
Re: paler being better –
This is probably a silly little nit to pick but there must be other US olds who remember the 60s and 70s when having lily white skin in the Summer was a thing to be avoided at all costs. It was the given reason why jet-setters spent Winters in warm climates!
Of course, this was another rather classist thing that was dependent on having the time to lay in the sun to perfect one’s tan before the days of tanning salons. As well as knowledge about UV light and its links to skin cancer.
All I ever got out of it* was maaaaybee looking a tiny bit less pale, but definitely more freckles and sunburns. I was actually relieved to put all that in my past once the skin cancer news came out in the early mid 80s.
*as a school kid with more disposable time than my working class parents who could justify laying on a towel in the back yard by doing homework while ‘tanning’
@Hambeast
I remember those days. My younger sister could take a tan very well. I burned and peeled, so I decided this was no fun.
@Moon_Custafer
Now there’s a name I haven’t heard in a fair while.
I think we’ve had enough AVN, I’m re-banning him.
So, the argument is that “toxic masculinity” is a direct result of “criminal DNA” and that therefore we shouldn’t allow people like him to breed?
Rather an own goal, I think.
David, thanks for banning AVN. He was icky.
Vicky P – Totally agree. So. Not. Fun. It was hot and boring.
My mom could get beautifully golden brown in an afternoon but her sister could burn to sun poisoning levels faster than I could! My dad had a world-class farmer tan from actually being a farmer in his childhood and youth.
So what color eyes & hair do all these rapey turdbuckets have? Do they all have blue eyes & blond hair?
Or maybe they think women pass their hair & eye color onto their daughters and fathers’s pass their hair & eye color onto their sons? And, of course, this bizarre genetic purity only matters in the women they want to fuck, not in them or their sons.
Because, if you think that’s how genetic inheritance works, you are too stupid to be commenting on it in public. STFU & educate yourself first.
(They remind me of the people – mostly men, in my experience – who think that all cute fluffy cats are female and all tough police dogs are male.)
This is a variation of “policing women’s sexuality”. For centuries, men have moved around the world, fornicating & raping in war & peace, completely indifferent to “race mixing”. The other cultures had to cope with the mixed race babies they left behind. Now that women are free to choose their mates, suddenly cats are marrying dogs and civilization is threatened.
I’m somewhat a bit envious of people able to get a little more bronzed. I just don’t know what I’d do with my hair if that was the case. I’m a trans* woman nerd with sandy blonde hair and cool skin.
Honestly, I kind of look like a wet gold-toe sock.
Kleinfelter’s I don’t think was considered the criminal karyotype; that was 47XYY.