For Black folk that didn't grow up speaking Spanish *only*:
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@mekkaokereke @mathowie as a former professor of Latin American Studies whose lane is exactly this, i cannot tell you how happy you make me by mentioning Sarmiento.
when i was doing primary research on the disputed origins of Manifest Destiny, i went down a rabbit-hole of NYC papers on the Internet Archive that made me reckon Sarmiento was in a whirlwind tour of the United States at about the same time.
i’ve always contended USA’s immigration policies been always influenced by him
@blogdiva @mekkaokereke @mathowie oh that is so interesting. Thank you.
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The US government promises "negative net migration," then celebrates when it is achieved, promises to deport 100 million people, even though there are only 40 million immigrants, and does stuff like this:
Most Americans didn't even notice that the US has stopped accepting any non-white refugees.
️"As of June, all but three of the 7,730 refugees admitted into the U.S. in fiscal 2026 were from South Africa".
https://www.notus.org/immigration/trump-deploying-refugee-officers-south-africa
(H/T Simon Marks on BlueSky for the link to the updated numbers)
"It's too late to help the poor abused slave holders from the Confederacy," Trump didn't say, "so I'm doing the next best thing."
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The silliest part of Argentinian Blanqueamiento, is that this wasn't "White people doing this to Black and Indigenous people." This was "Mixed race people doing this to themselves, because White people told them to.
"Most Argentinians are between 2% and 8% African. Just like actress Rebecca Hall.
@mekkaokereke this is my late grandfather, tell me I don't have African blood (see pic).
Every time I went to US or UK and sometimes when applying to remote positions I had to fill in a form asking for race (sorry, "ethnicity"), as if this was the XIXth century. What am I supposed to say? White? Latino? Can I say black (no, of course not)?
And don't get me started about nationality: https://en.osm.town/@mdione/116923688553896688
See also https://bolha.us/@personalescrito/116926070630965836 about the African roots of our national music.
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For Black folk that didn't grow up speaking Spanish *only*:
Question:
* Why don't the other South American fans like Argentina?* Why do so many of the good and kind players and fans from Argentina
️
️make such a big point of being vocally anti-racist?* Why did nazis choose Argentina?
* Why do most countries in South America have people that are Black, white, indigenous, and mixed, but Argentina (and Uruguay) seem super white?
Answer:
Blanqueamiento.
History tends to only talk about the ethnic cleansing campaigns that *almost* worked. It skips over ones that *did* work
@mekkaokereke do you think their whiteness is why FIFA seems to be doing everything they can to help them win? They want all white winners at their white supremacist competition? Or should I take my tinfoil hat off now?
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What "race" is Ronda Rousey?
She didn't even know that she was 12.5% Black until DNA tests told her.
Which side of Blanqueamiento should she be on? Killer or victim?
Is Ronda Rousey Blacker or whiter than Meisha Tate? Could we even answer that without a DNA test?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WdwTOy7ZH1M
The point is:
Race isn't real. Racism is very real.The entire concept of race was just invented one day by a weird guy in Portugal (Gomes Eanes de Zurara) to justify slavery, and the whole world has been running with it ever since.
It's silly.
It would be funny if it weren't so genocidal.
@mekkaokereke Race is, in fact, a valid and useful concept in systematic biology.
“Race”, as applied to humans, is *not* an instance of that concept. It has as much scientific validity as would a categorization that divided humans, *in biological terms*, into “Wears neckties” and “Does not wear neckties”.
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@mekkaokereke @mathowie as a former professor of Latin American Studies whose lane is exactly this, i cannot tell you how happy you make me by mentioning Sarmiento.
when i was doing primary research on the disputed origins of Manifest Destiny, i went down a rabbit-hole of NYC papers on the Internet Archive that made me reckon Sarmiento was in a whirlwind tour of the United States at about the same time.
i’ve always contended USA’s immigration policies been always influenced by him
@blogdiva @mekkaokereke @mathowie
...okay, all that gives some additional context to why #PeterThiel moved to Argentina.
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For Black folk that didn't grow up speaking Spanish *only*:
Question:
* Why don't the other South American fans like Argentina?* Why do so many of the good and kind players and fans from Argentina
️️make such a big point of being vocally anti-racist?* Why did nazis choose Argentina?
* Why do most countries in South America have people that are Black, white, indigenous, and mixed, but Argentina (and Uruguay) seem super white?
Answer:
Blanqueamiento.
History tends to only talk about the ethnic cleansing campaigns that *almost* worked. It skips over ones that *did* work
@mekkaokereke
Paraguay => Nueva Germania
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What "race" is Ronda Rousey?
She didn't even know that she was 12.5% Black until DNA tests told her.
Which side of Blanqueamiento should she be on? Killer or victim?
Is Ronda Rousey Blacker or whiter than Meisha Tate? Could we even answer that without a DNA test?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WdwTOy7ZH1M
The point is:
Race isn't real. Racism is very real.The entire concept of race was just invented one day by a weird guy in Portugal (Gomes Eanes de Zurara) to justify slavery, and the whole world has been running with it ever since.
It's silly.
It would be funny if it weren't so genocidal.
@mekkaokereke this is the whole thing in a nutshell: race isn't real, racism is real.
Thanks for your posts! -
@mekkaokereke Race is, in fact, a valid and useful concept in systematic biology.
“Race”, as applied to humans, is *not* an instance of that concept. It has as much scientific validity as would a categorization that divided humans, *in biological terms*, into “Wears neckties” and “Does not wear neckties”.
No. Race is not a useful concept in systematic biology.
That's something that white people that don't know enough about medical racism and haven't done enough of the reading on it believe.
Again, there is more generic diversity within Africa, then between Africans and Europeans, or between Europeans or Asians. As a West African, I am genetically more distant from an East African, than I am from a white person.
White people say, "Well, their skin is all Black?' and then make decisions on data compiled on a tiny subset of Black people (mostly West Africans from Ivory Coast, Ghana, Nigeria, and Angola) to 1.5 billion people that share none of the traits.
And that's before we even get to the fact that a lot of this data from the non-representative sample, was compiled and analyzed by racists that don't care about Black people.
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@mekkaokereke Race is, in fact, a valid and useful concept in systematic biology.
“Race”, as applied to humans, is *not* an instance of that concept. It has as much scientific validity as would a categorization that divided humans, *in biological terms*, into “Wears neckties” and “Does not wear neckties”.
@marcas @mekkaokereke I am a bit surprized by your first claim (but that might be a language issue, "race" does not have the exact same frontier in French). In biology species are already more fuzzy than one would expect, and then groups inside species are even more difficult to handle; races of animals make sense for (some) *domestic* animals, and they are human-made through bread selection over thousand of years. This is very restrictive compared to the general idea of classifying the living being.
(It is by the way quite telling that some people will use the "obvious" existence of races of dogs to justify that there should be human races as well.) -
You don't have to wonder what it was like living under Argentinian Blanqueamiento.
If you are in the US, you are living through a Blanqueamiento period right now.
A white nationalist wrote the US Blanqueamiento policies, and called his organization "The Alt-Right."
Most white Americans voted for it
️@mekkaokereke the timestamp in your quoted post’s screenshot really warrants emphasis: Spot-on prediction from 2017!
Shout out to the “who could have known?
” crowd! -
No. Race is not a useful concept in systematic biology.
That's something that white people that don't know enough about medical racism and haven't done enough of the reading on it believe.
Again, there is more generic diversity within Africa, then between Africans and Europeans, or between Europeans or Asians. As a West African, I am genetically more distant from an East African, than I am from a white person.
White people say, "Well, their skin is all Black?' and then make decisions on data compiled on a tiny subset of Black people (mostly West Africans from Ivory Coast, Ghana, Nigeria, and Angola) to 1.5 billion people that share none of the traits.
And that's before we even get to the fact that a lot of this data from the non-representative sample, was compiled and analyzed by racists that don't care about Black people.
@mekkaokereke Everything you say is true (and I'm aware of it). But that is simply not how systematists use the term "race".
1/n
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What "race" is Ronda Rousey?
She didn't even know that she was 12.5% Black until DNA tests told her.
Which side of Blanqueamiento should she be on? Killer or victim?
Is Ronda Rousey Blacker or whiter than Meisha Tate? Could we even answer that without a DNA test?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WdwTOy7ZH1M
The point is:
Race isn't real. Racism is very real.The entire concept of race was just invented one day by a weird guy in Portugal (Gomes Eanes de Zurara) to justify slavery, and the whole world has been running with it ever since.
It's silly.
It would be funny if it weren't so genocidal.
@mekkaokereke Many thanks for this thread and the sharing of such valuable knowledge.
As I observed the Paraguay national team behaviour when playing against France, I wonder what is the history of Paraguay regarding racism and fate of black people.
Do you have some knowledge to share about Paraguay? -
@mekkaokereke Everything you say is true (and I'm aware of it). But that is simply not how systematists use the term "race".
1/n
@mekkaokereke The term refers to identifiable subgroups within a given species that are to some degree isolated from each other but are nonetheless conspecifics. (We humans don't even come close to the degree of genetic diversity that could support a valid classification of our species by race in this sense of the word; our genetic poverty is the legacy of the bottleneck event that very nearly drove us to extinction hundreds of thousands of years ago).
2/n
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@mekkaokereke The term refers to identifiable subgroups within a given species that are to some degree isolated from each other but are nonetheless conspecifics. (We humans don't even come close to the degree of genetic diversity that could support a valid classification of our species by race in this sense of the word; our genetic poverty is the legacy of the bottleneck event that very nearly drove us to extinction hundreds of thousands of years ago).
2/n
@mekkaokereke Systematists have also adopted other terms for cases that need a category but don't fit that definition. For example: gens, for cuckoos, whose females fit into an identifiable category -- the other bird species whose nests they invariably parasitize -- but whose males do not. The term, as systematists use it, has as little to do with ancient Roman family structures as the term "race" does with the pseudoscientific (and often malevolent) classification of humans by skin color.
3/3
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@marcas @mekkaokereke I am a bit surprized by your first claim (but that might be a language issue, "race" does not have the exact same frontier in French). In biology species are already more fuzzy than one would expect, and then groups inside species are even more difficult to handle; races of animals make sense for (some) *domestic* animals, and they are human-made through bread selection over thousand of years. This is very restrictive compared to the general idea of classifying the living being.
(It is by the way quite telling that some people will use the "obvious" existence of races of dogs to justify that there should be human races as well.)@BrKloeckner @mekkaokereke Your point about language is a good one, and another (if non-biological) reason to be careful here. English and French do have a great deal in common. (After all, we stole more than half our vocabulary from you!). But it's precisely at the margins where meanings can be elusive and false friends abound.
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@mekkaokereke Race is, in fact, a valid and useful concept in systematic biology.
“Race”, as applied to humans, is *not* an instance of that concept. It has as much scientific validity as would a categorization that divided humans, *in biological terms*, into “Wears neckties” and “Does not wear neckties”.
@marcas @mekkaokereke
I always figured humans invented race so they could be racist. -
For Black folk that didn't grow up speaking Spanish *only*:
Question:
* Why don't the other South American fans like Argentina?* Why do so many of the good and kind players and fans from Argentina
️️make such a big point of being vocally anti-racist?* Why did nazis choose Argentina?
* Why do most countries in South America have people that are Black, white, indigenous, and mixed, but Argentina (and Uruguay) seem super white?
Answer:
Blanqueamiento.
History tends to only talk about the ethnic cleansing campaigns that *almost* worked. It skips over ones that *did* work
@mekkaokereke Thank you for this thread. It explains several things I have been wondering about and had not yet found the answer for. Appreciate it!
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@marcas @mekkaokereke
I always figured humans invented race so they could be racist.@Burn_this_ @mekkaokereke The kind of "race" Mekka is talking about? Humans absolutely did just that. That's not what's behind the word as a technical term in biology. But that term has nothing to do with the, umm, racist sense of "race".
Similarly, r-selection and K-selection are valid concepts in evolutionary theory. But as incorrectly applied to humans by pseudoscientific racists, they have no validity (and no use, other than to confirm the racist's ignorance of basic biology).
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@mekkaokereke I saw an Instagram reel the other day that said the answer to why aren’t there more black people on ARG’s team was because their war for independence against Spain in the early 1800s promised freedom for slaves if they enlisted, so many black people died on the front lines, then Argentina won but waited 40yrs to grant emancipation so most fled to Brazil instead of waiting.
@mathowie
It's a bit more complex than that. In the early 1800s, there wasn't an Argentina yet. It was a collection of provinces that did whatever they wanted, with some semblances of union sometimes. And the Year 13 (1813) Assembly (Asamblea del año 13) did grant freedom of wombs to slaves. But Argentina's constitution was only finally written and signed in the 1850s.
Many Black people died in the war of Paraguay, an utter carnage where, as Mekka says, they were sent as fodder.
@mekkaokereke
