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The use of “White” or “Black” to designate a human however is the ultimate racism: The Black and White or Racism.

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Jenny commented on the term “white” referring to the absence of racial connotations – which is an interesting observation and totally in-line with commentary out of the Jalisco area of Mexico, where a young girl getting ready for a formal event would be told, in translation, that she is/looks white. (State of being, not state of identity)

Further, we in the US often append the “politically correct” terminology of the 90′s to references to Americans of non-dominant racial (and even ethnic, when there’s a large enough population) identity. As an adjunct I’ve found this problematic.

A conversation I had in England with several friends of mine from Britain, Greece, Jamaica, and Barbados really brought that home. To most, having their nationality in some way altered or denied by prefixing their ethnic/racial identity implied that they were “less” than a full American/Brit/etc.

This is a question I bring up to my classes, then. Why do we say “African/Asian/Hispanic – American” but not “Euro – American” as well. We’re being no less imprecise with that identification. Many “African-Americans” don’t have RECENT ancestors from Africa, and some Nigerian-descended 1st generation Americans really take issue with this shared identification. The absence of the term “Euro” then may well indicate the state of “freedom from ascribed racial identity” but those identities we do ascribe (hypodescent, anyone?) are often exceptionally imprecise in themselves. So, generally, the conclusion is that the terminology is part of the meta-racism that exists in the USA today, cast in the light of “supportive correct terminology” as if being other than pale and of often distant European ancestry was something to be ashamed of.

While I realize that “Euro-American” is more often used to refer to a socio-political hegemony of thought and capital, even in this usage we are being exceptionally general as many parts of both Europe and the Americas are not included in this disingenuous title.

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BTW, while this comment was personal, it was specifically triggered by this interaction. As I said previously, I don’t follow SM as religiously as I probably should so I only have a very vague idea of what has been going on.
In fact, when I start a commenting spree in here or elsewhere, it’s just based on some trains of thought and it isn’t meant as a way to shut down any of the voices. When I stop commenting, it’s oftentimes because I notice my voice has no positive impact.

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There’s an obvious sense in which being racially unmarked is a ‘privilege’ of those who get to claim whiteness, but a more subtle sense in which this creates an odd bind. “Blackness” or “negritude” or “color” have arisen historically as assertive reactions to the phenotype-based ascriptions of hegemonic racism. As such, these identities have been important points of leverage in challenging and overthrowing that racism.

The problem is that this valorization of physical color and its various mythologized cultural associations binds those so identifying into a model of victimhood, exclusion and righteous conflict as an essential element of self-definition. And it binds them to color. Because to recover from racism they would have to recover from race, that is, they would have to (as the binary has been defined) become white – the enemy. As suburban African-Americans who shop at Pottery Barn, throw dinner parties and like the Indigo Girls are accused of being by “the black community.” The label sticks even harder when it’s self-attached.

As a consequence, it’s now an open question who is more committed to ‘doing’ race in North America, blacks or their erstwhile oppressors. The Obama campaign is quite revealing on this point; only for blacks as such is it about race; most whites really just don’t want to get into that and would prefer just to judge him “by the content of his character.”

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Jenny, I agree completely about the non-ethnic content of ‘whiteness’. In my field of history I believe this is the conventional understanding, including a growing literature on the historical process of ‘whitening’ of various immigrant ethnicities.

Consequent to this process, one would capture much more about me and my tribe, locally and world-historically, by referring to us as ‘suburban’. This includes many friends ‘of color’ whose versions of suburbanity were inflected in many ways by the prevailing conventions of ‘race’ (however muted in that context), but with whom this white guy shares huge chunks of basic worldview, education and life trajectory.

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When I first glanced at Rex’s entry, a felt a small tinge because I probably used “Euro-American” in a comment on SM, at some point. So I felt like the comment was directed at people like me. And I felt as if I had to defend myself.

My own usage tends to depend on context. Not that “Euro-American” is that flexible a term, but my disambiguation strategies rely on context a whole lot (might be stronger among French-speakers).
So…
In a discussion where “Western” is expected, I often throw “Euro-American” in as a way to make things clearer (or to make people think about how obviously unclear “Western” really is). I guess this term use is a bit like Strathern has apparently been doing (though I wasn’t aware of her term use). Some critics would probably talk about political correctness but I hear it more as thought-provocation. The term tickles the ear. To me, “Anglo-American” is even more effective because of US/UK continuities which often go unnoticed. Kind of like “WASP” without the ‘W.’
In other contexts, I use it the same way as Dylan does, referring to a worldview with post-colonial implications. In this sense, there can be a fairly clear implication that we’re really talking about specific parts of Western Europe and North America. Something close to the “Western” (and western) portion of Wallerstein’s “Core.” There’s a country/nation-state version of geo-political thinking embedded in this usage (IMHO) and the implicit map resembles that of NATO members.
In yet other contexts, my personal use of “Euro-American” contrasts with my use of “post-industrial societies,” pointing out that there’s a difference between the historical/geographical realities of “European Imperialism” and the Industrial Revolution. People often use “Western” for either of these and it might be useful to distingush the two.
In all of these usage patterns (term use plus context), there is some degree of vagueness as to which societies/regions/”countries” are included/excluded. In post-colonial discussions, for instance, some people would perceive “Euro-American” to tacitly include (or not expressly exclude) some parts of Australasia. In Globalization discussions, “Euro-American” may be limited to “the most powerful nations” such as the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy (G6 minus Japan). This degree of vagueness could be seen as more realistic since it captures real vagueness in most discussions on such topics. Sure, it’s often useful to be more specific as to how much ground a term like this is meant to cover. But given journalistic habits seeping into our conversational styles on geo/socio/political issues, we might as well use broad terms and hope for the best.

As for racial undertones, I think they were indirect (if present at all) in most conversations in which I’ve participated with “Euro-American” being used. Sure, there’s an implicit link between The West and The Whites, to some people. But the religious conceptual association (“Judeo-Christian Westerners”) seems even stronger to me (and much more implicit). In most contexts, not all Euro-Americans are labeled “White” and not all labeled “Whites” are Euro-American.
In other words, I really don’t think “Euro-American is code for White.” At least, not in most academic conversations.
Sure, it might have been used on occasion as a differentiating ethnonym for “people who mainly recognize themselves as descendants of European settlers” in the United States of America (excluding the rest of North America). But “European-American” seems much more common in those contexts, these days. “Afro-American” is quaint in most contexts. It might be political correctness which makes “-o-American” sound weird as a part of ethnic/racial terms.

(Sorry to be coming so late to the discussion. Not been doing a good job with my feeds.)

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The only thing I feel compelled to chime in with is a structuralist point. It seems to me not quite right to say “white” means this or that particular ethnicity in x, y, or z context. As I understand it, “white” designates those who are unmarked by race, not people of any particular ethnicity or ethnicities.

Thus, while I like the eloquent phrase about the “stark and polar metaphysics” of terms like “black” and “white,” I don’t think they should be jettisoned. It seems that if you are indeed referring to the stark polarities of racial inequity–the way some people are involuntarily *marked* by race, while others have the *option* of identifying their ethnicity or not–then it would be obscuring that phenomena to use a more descriptive term, rather than revealing the categorical nature of the concept.

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I am indeed too young to remember the Vietnam War, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know what happened. French Indochina was initially invaded, catastrophically, by Japan, and US involvement mostly folllowed that point in history. The US didn’t become involved until after France attempted to create a nominally independent state under Bao Dai. The US hardly usurped the French-it was involved in Cold War manouvering, through ‘euro-american,’ meaning non-communist channels, against Ho, a process which gradually developed into a more and more obviously horrible war.

As Sean M. reminded me, the US did go to war over Spanish posessions long before WWII. And as I pointed out, the US also fought this war with Japan, in which it attempted to reassert control over the former Japanese empire. This is sort of important because we were discussing the relationship between empire and race-I am not an expert on the subject, but I will bet you dollars to donuts that if you look at Hearst paper representations of the Spanish-American war, the representations of the Spaniards are racialized.

My point is that Euro-American as a category has the ability to euphemize the identification of 1) whiteness 2) the west 3) “our side” in imperial competition. Claiming the the US kicked French butt in the same way it kicked Spanish and Japanese butt obfuscates this.

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bq. An explanation of the gloss of the more usual Western as Euro-American can be found in Edwards et al. 1999: 15-17. ‘American’ here derives from North America, ‘European’ from Northern Europe, but Euro-American influence is neither confined to these parts nor uniform within them (it has global spread, is locally patchy). I refer to a discourse not a people, although I personify the discourse in referring to its ‘speakers’ as Euro-Americans. The awkward term is meant to summon those whose cosmologies were formed by the religious and rationalist upheavals of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries across Northern Europe, creating present-day America in their wake’ (163, n. 1).

The Edwards et al. citation is:
Edwards, Jeanette, Sarah Franklin, Eric Hirsch, Frances Price, and Marilyn Strathern. 1999. _Technologies of Procreation: Kinship in the age of assisted conception_. London: Routledge.

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