Are you trying to stir up a shit storm?

I know, I know. I'd like to think this is no different than someone posting a "Famous African Americans" post but it just isn't the same. Reality is that through our history these types of promotions of white people have often been used in racist way.

I'm not saying we shouldn't be proud of others of our race. Considering that for most of the existence of the colonies and the US thereafter just about ALL famous Americans were white it's superfluous to celebrate whites in a way.

Whites were the majority of famous people mainly because most of those famous white americans were happily enslaving millions of African Americans and discriminating against the Irish, the Latinos, and women.

It just grates on a lot of peoples nerves because it gets too closely associated with "White Power"

I see no point to this thread.

I really just thought it was (a) an interesting perscpective and (2) intriguing about exactly whom was chosen to be representative of white Americans.

The fact that the mention of race automatically triggers associations of racist extremism. Does this mean we can't ever recognize this group as a group (rather than, say, contributors to the general culture) unless it's done in the context of terrorism? Do we reflexively always concede the default perspective to the hateful minority of whites? I find the implications of that almost as disturbing.

There's been an uptick in the past couple of decades in the study of "whiteness" in some college courses. I would like to see it as a positive challenge that we can all get past these negative typologies and learn to see the subject as a thing in itself and as a useful contribution to the melting pot.

along the lines of "Stuff White People Like".

we love us some Eddie Vedder.

Irish, &.......just saying

It is my understanding that in the South back during slave days and immediately thereafter the race of a child was determined by the race of the child's mother. So since Obama's mother was white he would officially be white.

On the other hand the article makes it clear that about 3% of people who are white (which is entirely a political and self-determined categorization) have black American genes too.

Made of wood, plastic, or metal.

I am CORNHOLIO!

You said "bung"

that I'm not the only person that immediately went there.

(and I think you spelled it wrong)

Butter and freshly grated Parmesan cheese only!

I spelled it correctly. See the de facto DU list of forbidden words at http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~biglou/resources/bad-words.txt

lol... this shit is funny

See this thread in Meta: http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1240&pid=155284

I genuinely curious.

They were regarded as Germans, foreigners. Their Mennonite faith put them in another outsider group.

but there were certainly plenty of Germans already living in the United States in 1870. My own paternal German ancestors came to the US in 1739 and the Shueys a little bit earlier. But the Shueys were sort of French-Germans. As Huguenots they were run out of France in 1685 with the revocation of the edict of Nantes and spent about 40 years in Germany before coming to the US.

By 1870 though, they perhaps did not think of themselves as German any more. My paternal ancestor, after all, married a Scot in 1874.

To make a long story short, he didn't start learning English until age 13.

But he sure could swear up a storm in German or Hopi.

My German Grandmother's family changed the spelling of their last name to make it sound English.

Many whites have varying amounts of Native American and African ancestry. In a recent study, Gonçalves et al. 2007 reported Sub-Saharan and Amerindian mtDna lineages at a frequency of 3.1% (respectively 0.90% and 2.2%) in White Americans of European descent.[45] In another study, about 30% of all White Americans, approximately 66 million people, have a median of 2.3% of Black African admixture.[46]

or are you just doing your usual .n/t because the OP said FAMOUS White Americans and gave statistics.

I didn't realize I had to answer to you or otherwise qualify. If you don't like my posts, ignore them or me.

Ha, topped you.

And he's already included in the picture.

We will vote overwhelmingly for President Obama just as we did in 2008 when the only two places where he had a larger margin were Hawaii and D.C.

It just looked at first glance to be Bach. I thought it was kinda funny.

The nuances of the title alone leave so much for a negative interpretation and flamefest. I understand it was sarcastic and meant to generate conversation but feel another route could have been taken.

the moment to appreciate the positive in what we are acculturated into seeing only in negative terms. We routinely use "White" as a term of approbation on DU. And yet, if it weren't for white people, we'd have no Great Gatsby, no Tom Sawyer, no William Penn, no Meryl Streep. My god, no Battlestar Gallactica!

Just like most breeds of dogs we come in a variety of colors, shapes and sizes. White, black brown or yellow matter naught. It's time to get beyond the fiction that pigment has anything to do with anything.

That said, tracking race does give us useful measures of social progress. The fact that only random fiction separates doesn't mean that there's no point in appreciating how some of us are setters and some of us are weimers. Me, I'm a Chihuahua.

Ethnics is a fiction perpetrated by those who wish to hold people down who might be different than themselves.

And obviously there's such a thing as ethnically American. I checked it on my 2010 Census form. Or don't you think those things are real either?

in the 1980 census 28% of the population listed English ancestry; I would guess that English and/or British is still the single largest ancestral origin for Americans of European ancestry.

Since race, is generally a fallacious concept as applied by the general public, you pretty much have to go with just whatever the survey respondent says. If someone says ethnically they are a Serbo-Martian Ziggarutite, that's what the survey taker puts down on the form. Personally, I report my ancestry as "American/United States." Calling my ethnicity "European" is far from an accurate descirption. None of my ancestors that I know of were ever in Europe.

part of it is that people increasingly report themselves as "American"; another part of it is that someone who's of relatively recent (say 19th century) German ancestry and colonial British ancestry will report their ancestry as "German" because Anglo-British is still to some extent a kind of "default" ancestry for the white population, and non-British ancestry is more worthy of notice.

I'd personally describe myself as being of predominantly English ancestry (since that's where most of my ancestors came from, most of them before the Revolution).

And yet I'm more comfortable saying "American". On the other hand, distant cousins who retained the Dutch last name by patrilineage might be calling themselves "Dutch American" despite having less Hollandaise in their bloodstream. People will (though it's random) self identify to their patrilinear roots--either claiming Italian ancestry, though they are only 25% Italian, or dismiss these roots for a lack of an Italian surname, though they might be 37% Genoan in origin and more Italian than any other nation-stock.

This is one reason why I dodge the whole trolley car and just say...

I'm an American,
as mutt as can be,
I know no Europeans
related to me

Ever since the convention, Democrats should love math. (Just as ever since the first debate, we should love statistical clustering).

Seriously? Not in MY neck of the woods. The Orangemen once ruled my part of Canada.