User talk:Eequor/Archives/Natives

There are numerous articles and talk pages in wikipedia where people are extremely sensitive to word usage, especially terms related to sexual identities and political sensitivities and we normally bend over backward to avoid offense. Should I infer from your label and your text removal that you think I belong to a group not privileged to object when an exclusionary and inaccurate label is used?

Would you mind sharing with us how many generations of ancestors one needs to have to be a native American? You need a history lesson. The term Native American was used from the early 19th century to the early 20th by xenophobic and racist political parties in the US. In the early 19th century they were concerned about dilution of "Native American" stock by recent Dutch and German immigrants, by midcentury it was the Irish, and by the early 20th it was the Italians and eastern Europeans who constituted the "racial threat." All evidence suggests there have been repeated migrations into the Americas from both directions over the last 15-30 000 years or so, wave after wave. Each wave accommodates the next with anxiety and distrust, but labels that distinguish "native" racial groups from immigrants have a very ugly history and display a combination of ignorance and bigotry. The recentness with which a group sees itself as the "natives" rather than the "immigrants" varies from group to group, often with little regard to what evidence of history we have. The term seems even nastier if you think about how terms like "native ____" have been used in Europe to isolate "non-native" groups for ethnic cleansing or wholesale slaughter no matter how many generations families lived in a country. "Native American" remains an inaccurate, divisive, and disrespectful claim to racial privilege.

Do you normally see yourself as sensitive to exclusionary labels by groups? You have just decided that my objection and explanation needed to be expunged from the community. This was a hostile and disparaging thing to do. Please remember doing it the next time you engage in an argument over respectful terminology for some group of people. Alteripse 05:41, 13 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I'm confused as to why you would think I was reacting to you specifically, considering that there were other participants in the discussion.

• Tell me you really weren't and I'll even apologize for my temporary annoyance. Alteripse 16:33, 13 Sep 2004 (UTC)

In my opinion, referring to Caucasians of any nationality as native Americans is simply incorrect. Modern European nationalities have experienced considerable mixing in only hundreds of years, whereas the Americas have been mostly isolated for thousands of years. It is nonsensical to place an arbitrary division between Dutch, Germans, Irish, and Italians on the basis of whether they had emigrated to the United States. To consider native American to meaningfully distinguish between the groups marginalizes the much greater differences between truly native Americans and native Europeans. --[[User:Eequor|ηυωρ]] 10:53, 13 Sep 2004 (UTC) Of course it is nonsensical to distinguish children of Dutch and Irish immigrants from the grandchildren of English or Scotch immigrants as non-native--- that was exactly my point, and it is no more or less justifiable today. Finally, if you haven't noticed, in the last 4 centuries the distinction between "native Americans" and "native Europeans" as you use the terms has been steadily blurred. Tell me what term those of us who might have some European, African, or more recent Asian ancestry should use? Do we not deserve to be native anywhere? Should we do a rewind on 4 centuries of human migration, 40 centuries of human migration, 400 centuries of human migration, or 4000 centuries of human migration so you can tell people that's the geographical identity they are stuck with? Do you get to pick the time we think of as the "start"? Honest, read some history of human migrations and you will realise how arbitrary it is to try to pin people to an "ethnic homeland" which is nothing more than where this group of people happened to be when some western writer perceived them as a distinctive group. This really seems to be what your terms imply.Alteripse 16:33, 13 Sep 2004 (UTC)

I wrote this before you put the exchanges on the talk page. I am somewhat mollified and willing to downgrade my complaint to a mild objection to your disparaging remarks and labels rather than a censorship. You decide how much it fits. Alteripse 05:50, 13 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Actually, I moved the argument to the talk page about a minute after I removed it from the reference desk. The reference desk is not a place for arguments over usage. --[[User:Eequor|ηυωρ]] 10:53, 13 Sep 2004 (UTC) Once I realized what you did I have no problem with it. People make lots of semantic corrections on the reference page but if it turns into a political debate taking it to the talk page is fine; you just didn't need to do it with disdain. Alteripse 16:33, 13 Sep 2004 (UTC)