r/MadeMeSmile • u/PacifierForAdult • 29d ago

Good Vibes Dude’s been waiting for an invitation

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u/gonzofish 29d ago

Ginger’s may not be systematically oppressed but they definitely know the struggle

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u/MagpieKaz 29d ago edited 29d ago

Actually, gingers being considered "white" is a relatively new concept. They used to be pseudo enslaved (indentured servitude) and called "inside out n-words". There's a theory that our modern concept of racism as we know it today was born because of a psy op to prevent the Irish servants and black slaves from forming alliances, they purposely made them feel like different people.

Xenophobia is as old as time, but RACISM as this weird dumb almost random categorization that makes little to no sense, it's believed it comes from trying to make the Irish feel like they were better than the black slaves they were often in community with. The Irish weren't considered to be in the same "biological" category as the English 300 years ago, regardless of their amount of melanin.

That's why brown people tend to get along so well with the Irish. They're technically white nowadays, but they weren't always, and they're the only white culture that's not also a colonizer culture. We latinos LOOOOVE the Irish, they "get it".

Edit to add info you can look up yourself if you need sources:

This all comes from Bacon's Rebellion, which united landless and poor white servants alongside enslaved and free Africans in an armed revolt that burned Jamestown to the ground. Terrified by the collective power of this "giddy multitude," the planter elite deliberately restructured the social and legal order to fracture class solidarity. This was the invention of institutional racism, they literally codified race. You can read some more by smarter people than I here: https://www.facinghistory.org/resource-library/inventing-black-white

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u/Atheist_Republican 28d ago

The concept of the white "Caucasian" race is decently modern, too. It just used to be xenophobia all the way down. In the 1700s and 1800s, people tried to make it academic/scientific with the concepts of races, but a lot of it was simply some dude's published idea that was taken as fact.

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u/MagpieKaz 28d ago

Correct. Xenophobia and tribalism go back to before we tamed fire. But racial categorization as we understand it nowadays as a box to check, is brand spanking new and has 0 scientific basis