But you are right, HWR. There isn't an easy answer, even if WASP bashing seems like it should be so true. Most abolitionists were WASPS. And even if Henry Ford was a fascist and desperately afriad of all of the "colored" people of the world, be they black or Italian or irish or german, his son and grandson established some of the most progressive and powerful charities in the western world.
So, I say again, what is your alternative? And more generally, how should we deal with these entries that are so clearly not about fact in the sense that we normally imagine in an encyclopedia. 100 years ago, they would have pretended or not been aware that a controversy even existed. I can't count the number of antique encyclopedias I have read which talk of the "five races of man" --the black, the white, the yellow, the red and the brown-- with a complete sense of authority and "factuality". I mean, how do we construct useful, factual entries about important concepts which are, by their very existence, controversial and opinionated? I personally reject the quasi-journalistic minimalist approach of saying only what is absolute fact as being both too dictionary like and generally useless. Rather than dealing with a problem, I feel that such an approach just avoids it. And avoiding these issues, letting them fester, is its own kind of action and therefore judgement. By saying noth we are expressing an opinion and affecting the debate.
But what should we do? --trimalchio
That's more fact than a lot of this debate. White was a real touchy word 100-200 years ago and CANNOT be judged on what we today might imagine is a clear and stable definition. Irish people were EXPLICITLY non-white. As were Swedes. As were all sorts of European immigrants. Even today you hear the epithet of "black comb irish" which singles them out as not belonging to the racial group defined as "white". Whatever that racial group might actually contain is unclear. It has always been more defined by what it DID NOT contain. And yes, that is a messy and unclear situation. But it is a factual one. A shorthand of the time was to say that, despite a person's physical appearance, it was easier to identify their whiteness by way of their pocketbook. But that wasn't always true either. Certainly there were grades of non-whites and grades of whites. French aristocrats in Lousiana, for example, were sort of white, but if they came to New York city their catholicism and Frenchness would have created distinctly racial problems. We still see this today in places like Northern Ireland, were the debate is not only political, but distinctly racial, ethnic and cultural, even though from an American point of view at least we would classify both groups as "white".
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