Race, culture and concepts of ethnicity

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After discussing the topic a lot, I realized something about myself: the very concept of race, while well-known, is largely absent in my culture. Slavs traditionally define one's ethnicity by their language, not ancestry - so a Russian is not a Pole despite indistinguishable genetics but if a child of any ancestry grows up in Poland and speaks Polish as their first language, they is Polish.
That may, by the way, explain another phenomenon - a difference on how people react to correcting their language between Polish and English fora. But that's another topic.

This tendency makes Slavic nations ready to assimilate any minority willing to assimilate - including e.g. Bulgars being Turkish by ancestry but Slavic by language and culture. In central Europe, people tend to be descendants of those who lived here for millenia mixed with all the waves of immigration that happened since ancient times.

It was a bit strange to me that, according to Wikipedia, only 3% of North America identify as multiracial - compared to, e.g. over 40% of Brazil citizens, another big country with a history of black slavery, where some regions have over 80% of mixed-race inhabitants.
For some reason, Africans and Europeans did mix in Brazil but not in the US.

One possible explanation I could think of: As Slavs tend to pay the most attention to one's language, the Spanish and Portuguese tend to pay more attention to one's religion than ancestry. That helped the infamous Spanish Inquisition emerge but it also resulted in ex-slaves and indigenous Americans becoming marriageable after accepting Catholicism.

That were my thougths on the topic... how do you see it?

Possibly, in Brazil, there was not a great wealth disparity between blacks and whites.

From what I know, race is actually a social construct, it hardly has inherent elements that could not change broadly from culture to culture. It is kind of what makes a lot of preconceived notions of people from different "races" as a bit silly, except for some fairly superficial elements. The culture, which is how someone was raised, is usually the bigger factor.

So it is interesting to hear that Slavs mostly go by language. Does that mostly relate to their first language, how well they speak a language, and what about if someone is seemingly very fluent with a lot of languages?

If I was to be open about my country, Australia, I think that we have a bit of a racist element to who is considered an Australian. Especially from older folk (like my mother) if they see a visible Muslim acting unruly her immediate response is they should go back to where they came from, regardless of actually knowing if they were born in Australia and would be more at home here than an English (from England) person who moved here several years ago and still has an accent.

Polish grammar is more unique than most grammars.

Race has been conceptualized differently in Anglo America from how it is Latin America, and the Caribean(Anglo meaning the US and Canada).

Long complicated story short: there was more actual mixing of Europeans with other races in Spanish, French, and Portugese America than in Anglo America. And "mixed race" also has more of history of being recognized as a thing in Latin America than in Anglo America.

When Spain colonized the Caribbean, and when Cortez conquered Mexico, and Pizarro conquered the Incas, they sent the Conquistadors: all male army divisions. The conquistadors intermarried into the native populations. This resulted in the modern descendants being "mestizo" (part White and part Indian descent).

In contrast: when England colonized the eastern seaboard of what was to become the United States they sent whole families: like the storied Pilgrims to Massechusettes, and the Jamestown colonists to Virginia. So the White tended to stay all White as they spread across the English speaking north America.

Africans were later imported as slaves to Brazil and the Caribbean, and finnally to England's North American colonies. Just like Mestizo (mixed Indian and White) became a thing in Mexico and Peru, Mulatto (mixed Black and White) became a category in the Caribbean and in Brazil.

In Contrast the US evolved the "one drop rule" in law and in attitude. In the Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Brazil, or even in French Louisiana, if you were half Black you were "Mulatto". And there were even categories like Quadroon and Octoroon for one fourth and one eighth Black respectively. But in the US if you were one part in 16 Black, or even one part in 32 (in some locations), you were legally defined as being entirely "Black"(ie having one drop of blood). There was never a concept of in-between, or mixed race cetegory. You were one category or the other Black or White.

indeed in the former French colony of New Orleans Mulattoes has always been a cetegory of their own - above Blacks and below Whites in the social strata. And it was brutal shock to them, as the area became assimilated to the Anglo AMerican south in the 19th Century, and Mulattos were forced into the same box as "n****rs" with Blacks by American Jim Crow era laws and attitudes.

There was still a racial hierarchy in the Caribbean/Latin America. There were racial tensions between Mulattos and Blacks in the Caribbean.

Also in Brazil there is a saying that "money bleaches"- if you get richer and move up in society -somehow-magically- your race can also change- in the eyes of others- from Black to Mulatto to even White. in contrast in pre WWII America even Black celebs were still denied service in restaurants in the segregated south.

The more I've watched the world to see what matters and why I've come to the conclusion that slight majority of people are animals with no intention of moving higher than that, here to rape and kill anyone they can rape and kill - by legal means (essentially destroy them and take there stuff if they have any vulnerability that can be exploited, otherwise if they break the law then the state has the power to come in, haul them off to jail, and other people get to divide the spoils), it's wrapped in this Glade / Lysol cloud of plausible deniability where people are never serious, always joking, or when they are serious they're being much more straight to the point on what they want to do to each other. It's a landscape of perpetual gas-lighting and back-stabbing where if you don't know who the sucker in the room is its you.

Race matters unfortunately to the degree that people at least don't try to rape and kill anyone who isn't in their own family, plenty won't try that on anyone whose in their close nit community or at least on anyone who has any power or leverage to fight back with, but when it comes to people who can't fight back and especially people who are in any sort of out or different group - most bets are off. To that degree anyone who looks markedly different to these people will be amplified targets - much as people on the autistic spectrum, looking different, have an instant failed 'victim interview'.

This is part of why it horrifies me that reason is losing its grip in favor of some form of religiosity, even if it looks like its making short-term gains. This is also why, while people made fun of Jordan Peterson for making the Gulag Archipelago connection between compelled speech on pronouns and Leninist/Stalinist outcomes, when we lose grip on reason the very stuff I was talking about - ie. violence, narcissism, perpetual deceit, ie. Darwinian evolution sorting out who lives and dies on the landscape of fitness, all that matters is whose willing to do what to the next person, who has the most power to take out or dominate other people, whose the most perfect moral mercenary and would sell out their own parents, ie. I don't know if there's a proper name for this but if you think of people using the term 'kleptocracy' as a country that constantly steals from the people the term I'd be looking for is a country run almost exclusively by people who have cluster B personality disorders - ie. psychopathy, sociopathy, narcissism, borderline, etc.. When you look at a book like Gulag Archipelago what jumps out is that this is indeed what climbs to the top of witch-hunting cultures, and in the case of the USSR it was 'wreckers' and all of the people sabotaging the system - which was their explanation for why their centrally planned farming, after killing off all of the talent, wasn't working or why all of their engineers or anyone who had a job that made contact with physical reality and couldn't lie was being discovered to be a 'wrecker'.

This is where I think it's really of dire importance that our culture gets serious about Darwinian game theory, understanding what it is, what's driving the behaviors (much of the time it's subconscious, clashes with people's stated values, and they have a million rationalizations for it). Without putting that hydra under a microscope and destroying its freedom to fire off arms races and multipolar traps, getting beyond issues of race, it's part of how we don't make it to the 22nd century. Also if we could just - finally - say that zero sum games and destructive competition is an almost unabated bad, perhaps setting aside some incredibly niche cases, we might be able to both clean out gas-lighting as a social currency and also make some progress on race just because the mechanisms for people trying to kill each other and take each other's stuff will be too restrained to be very successful.