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Now, welcome to the award-winning Best of the Left podcast with Cups Today from Tim Wise,

on the media, the Young Turks, NPR, Vico DC, the Tom Hartman program, and Dixon White.

I think it's important to know this history.

You know, it seems stale to some folks to talk about the origins of whiteness, but it's

critical if we're going to understand race and racism, we have to understand that.

If we're going to understand the class system in America, the economic system, we have

to understand it because those two things are connected.

So let's be clear, for those of us who are now called whiteness room, that's a pretty

new thing in history.

We weren't white when our people got here, right?

Our people didn't come here as white folks.

They didn't use that terminology back in our countries of origin.

That term was never used to describe Europeans, but large, all European people have been

killing each other for generations.

We didn't think of ourselves as members of one big happy family or team.

The Irish and the English didn't consider themselves the same, how northern Italians and

southern Italians didn't consider themselves the same.

So there was no white race until the colonies of what became the United States of America.

And then in the mid-1600s, the series of court decisions and then the reaction to several

rebellions most principally among them, bakings rebellion in Virginia and the Virginia

...