Rethinking privilege in the 21st-century

JD Vance & his wife

One of the strange admissions I will make is that I have not read Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. This is J. D. Vance’s book describing the various social and cultural forces which maintain deep pockets of poverty and dysfunction across much of greater Appalachia. Vance, though a Yale-educated lawyer, is from this region, and of the deprived class.

I say strange because I happen to be cited in the book. Vance has told me that some of my writing on the historical origins of the Scots-Irish made him aware that he was not just a white American, that he had a very particular ethnicity in the broader Anglo-American context. The fact is that Vance’s politics are broadly consonant with mine, and I tend to be wary of reading books where I suspect I will agree with the overall message. I don’t find it useful to simply reiterate my own opinions, as I already hold them.

With all that said, I recently saw on Twitter that a literal Communist academic accused Vance of promoting the white genocide meme because he wrote about replacement level fertility among Americans. Just like an inquisitor sees witches behind every corner, American Leftists see a fascist and a racist everywhere they look. But that’s not the interesting point.

Vance responded that he had a mixed-race son.

I am not a specialist on J. D. Vance, so this was news to me. I didn’t know anything about his personal life. A little Google yielded the fact that Vance is married to an Indian American, a law school classmate. And, a little more research quickly yields the fact that she is from a much more privileged class background than J. D. Vance (most Americans would be!). In fact, judging by the community that she grew up in, it is highly unlikely that her family was not upper-middle-class (OK, it was easy to look up her parents and their professions, they are doing very well).

The question I pose here is that as the children of Mr. and Mrs. Vance grow up, will they perceive that they obtain privilege from their white father? Is J. D. Vance more privileged than his wife? A plain reading would probably result in the admission that this is ludicrous. The Vance children will grow up with a paternal lineage defined by hardscrabble lives, with the squandering of opportunities. In contrast, their maternal family will be descended from successful professionals. Immigrants who sunk roots in San Diego.

There is a lot of talk today about “intersectionality.” Usually, I don’t find that that is in good faith. But let’s take the intersecting parameters of the backgrounds of the Vances into account. Who is more privileged? I suppose it depends on how you define “privilege,” but my own personal take is that in fact, J.  D. Vance’s wife is more privileged by background than he is, despite her visible nonwhiteness (which no doubt does result in some discrimination).

In the years before the Civil War, popular racial supremacism arose in the American South to engender solidarity of identity for whites, from the poor masses to the rich planter elite. It was the solidarity of the “aristocracy of the skin.” This explicit racial caste system was such that the poorest white was above the status of the most accomplished black. The way in which we talk about race and class in much of American discourse seems to default back to this idea.

Many of my white academic friends (not all!) from working-class or poor backgrounds believe that because of their class status, they now have the same privilege as other white people. That the past is the past. That is, white people can move up and down the class hierarchy, and yet retain the skin privilege.  History does not shadow them in the way that it does the dusky folk.

White people are magic.

As the 21st-century progresses I think some of us, of all races, need to move beyond this way of thinking. Many South Asian academics I know personally who come from privileged backgrounds speak of themselves as a subaltern and marginal people. But there’s nothing subaltern and marginal about their lives. Empirically I think the “white people are magic” thesis is just wrong. They bleed just like the rest of us.

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Indo-Carib
Indo-Carib
5 years ago
Reply to  Razib Khan

Well, the Derb is an outright white nationalist despite being married to a Chinese woman, so the “I have a mixed race child” isn’t exactly the shut-down a lot of right-wingers would like it to be. Don’t know enough about Vance to really compare, though.

As to what you were saying, WOW Vance is really punching above his weight. Mrs. Vance is a Fox.

Skeptical
Skeptical
5 years ago
Reply to  Razib Khan

TBH it’s disingenuous to imply that people can’t be white nationalists or white supremacists or even neo-Nazis while having non-white partners. Lots of online frog Nazis have Asian fetishes and many even have IRL Asian girlfriends, to the extent that it’s a well-known phenomenon.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/06/opinion/sunday/alt-right-asian-fetish.html

I mean forget my opinion, the man has literally written about his views on white supremacism: “Leaving aside the intended malice, I actually think “White Supremacist” is not bad semantically. White supremacy, in the sense of a society in which key decisions are made by white Europeans, is one of the better arrangements History has come up with.”

https://vdare.com/articles/john-derbyshire-who-are-we-the-dissident-right

Armaghan
Armaghan
5 years ago
Reply to  Indo-Carib

Derb is an outright white nationalist”
Not really. Only through the leftist, intersectional goggles painted for the credulous by the SPLC. A DNC Super-PAC masquerading as a human rights organization.

leopard
leopard
5 years ago
Reply to  Armaghan

Surprising that even Derbyshire has supporters here.

Indo-Carib
Indo-Carib
5 years ago
Reply to  Armaghan

I see you got the buzzwords in there. Feel good now?

Armaghan
Armaghan
5 years ago
Reply to  Indo-Carib

Lol, what do you imagine qualifies as a “buzzword” there? Intersectional? PAC? Masquerading? Leftist?

ohwilleke
ohwilleke
5 years ago
Reply to  Razib Khan

Good call on not mentioning her by name. That is fair and appropriate.
I really enjoyed the book, which is an easy and short read, almost a page turner, although, in part, that was because it was personal. I’m just a few years different from Vance in age and he grew up about fifteen miles from my hometown in same county. Half of my high school from was the world he lived in, and half was from the world of academia that I belonged to. It was a through the looking glass experience. Likewise, I knew many peers who’d taken the military route that he did and then went on to study at The Ohio State University.
Still, from anyone’s perspective, he is considerably more perceptive and non-dogmatic than people writing similar material. This is one of the better takes on the often overlooked fact that there is a great cultural divide within the U.S. from an ethnographic perspective.
“Who is more privileged? I suppose it depends on how you define “privilege,” but my own personal take is that in fact, J. D. Vance’s wife is more privileged by background than he is, despite her visible nonwhiteness”
I agree. That was my perception of the many such couples, involving elite individuals from Pakistan and middle to upper middle class white individuals at Oberlin College (not sure where that pattern of college choice came from, it doesn’t seem natural today, but it is there and somewhat ironically many Pakistani students are vigorous advocates for the representation of the marginalized third world generally, at the time I was there, many lived in “Third World House” (as did my future wife who is Korean-American)). I worked a lot with this group of activists in student government to secure better accommodation of Muslim student needs in dining halls in terms of menu options and during Ramadan. Almost all grew up in families with dozens of servants. Those from the Frontier came just about as close to de facto feudal aristocrats as you can get in the modern world. These relationships were tricky, however. Many of these students had a finance/fiancee at home, or studying somewhere else abroad, to whom they were bound out of family power alliances and obligation. So, the already matched students could only sow wild oats in college, with someone they genuinely loved and found themselves as a love match. Then they had to submit or risk making a huge production and being disowned. Maybe only a third of the South Asians in those couples were not bound in this way.

The women at the college were particularly exceptional and elite relative to their homeland peers who were from somewhat less elite albeit very high socio-economic status families. Second tier elite families valued educating boys much more than girls, but perhaps Oberlin’s Pakistani female students were skewed to the more elite and more liberal subpart of the upper crust. My perception is that those families were a bit unusual among people of their class at home than those of students attending less notoriously liberal institutions, but perhaps that was just me.

This said, Pakistani students, especially darker skinned ones, definitely received more overt discrimination off campus than, for example, East Asian or light skinned Latino foreign students in NW Ohio. “Townies”, non-campus cops, airport security, and people in Cleveland perceived them as African-American and treated them accordingly. Like most questions, the question of “privilege” here is complex and context specific.

thewarlock
thewarlock
5 years ago
Reply to  Razib Khan

lol this is the main white privilege. look at okcupid data or tinder experiments. White is right is a big theme. You get a bonus or the opposite based on your race in the dating market. this transcends class. Also getting modeling and acting roles is easier for whites. Main advantages stem from people’s phenotype biases

Armaghan
Armaghan
5 years ago
Reply to  thewarlock

I wonder how many white and brown women swipe left for brown males, versus how many white males swipe left for brown women.
It seems to me that white men don’t have the same issues with pigment when it comes to dating the opposite sex.

thewarlock
thewarlock
5 years ago
Reply to  Armaghan

I’m a 25 year old Indian guy who grew up around NYC. I’m 5’10 with decent facial aesthetics, good physique from powerlifting style training, and on a stereotypical white collar career path. I got about 500 to 600 matches a year on Tinder, when I was using it over a three-year span. I know chubby 5’7 white guys who got 1000 to 2000. I know white guys around my “level” who got 4000-7000. The 5’7 chubby brown guys I know got like 50. It didn’t affect me much because I still had a ton of options to date around. But for the uglier guys, it made a big difference, insofar as only about 20% of women respond in the first place and honestly those who get fewer matches tend to get matches from more rotund or generally less conventionally desirable women.

Also, I notice I can get with black girls way out of my league. I had a tryst with one who looked straight out of Migos video. I was shocked, but biases against that group are so real that men willing to date black women can also “upgrade.” There is most definitely a heavy looks bias in favor of whites and against those that look the least like whites, barring E Asian women.

The majority of Whites I have dated have been Jewish or wealthy WASP types from very educated circles. Mediterranean whites, white hispanics, and E Asians tend to not want to swipe on me. Those of the last group that do tend to be of SE Asian or Pacific Islander origin. Of course, these are just trends. Exceptions always exist.

उद्ररुहैन्वीय
Reply to  thewarlock

Do people actually expect to find a husband or wife on tinder? I am 37 and probably quite old fashioned for this sort of thing but I find the idea of finding one’s life partner on tinder quite abhorrent. Casual relationships where both parties are pretty upfront about their expectations is an entirely separate thing. And suits the tinder USP a lot better.

Offspring (racially mixed or otherwise) is far more likely to be the product of the former type of relationship rather than latter, which is where true racial biases across populations are actually statistically testable. Our kids are proof of who we really are 🙂

Xerxes the Magian
5 years ago
Reply to  thewarlock

Great post on the sexual marketplace..

I notice Liberal White People love having more Coloreds around as “scarcity has a premium.”

MAH
MAH
5 years ago
Reply to  thewarlock

@thewarlock, I noticed this trend of greater discrimination in the dating market against South Asian guys in the west and east coasts. On reddit in the ABDdesis forum you will hear a lot of this bemoaning, but again those posters are all from the west and east coast. Growing up in Texas I didn’t seem to see that much of a disadvantage for desi guys to date interracially, I’m sure there was some discrimination but I and other desis guys would still get interest from all races of girls, white, hispanic, Asian and especially the African American girls (not to mislead we weren’t killing it more than other races, but we weren’t ignored either). And it didn’t matter skin color either darker indian guys would do just as well and you will see quite a few interracial desi guy and non-desi couples, including white. So I don’t know what it is about the east and west coast in worse dating experiences, but if you want a fairer dating market for desi guys, move down to the south, I can vouch for Texas. 😉

Walter Sobchak
Walter Sobchak
5 years ago
Reply to  Razib Khan

A pretty girl is like a malady.

thewarlock
thewarlock
5 years ago
Reply to  Walter Sobchak

@Slapstick

My post was more to illustrate the advantage of White males vs. non White males in the dating, especially casual sex, market place. This is a generally good indicator of phenotypic biases towards whites. Phenotype makes some difference for even professional success. It isn’t the end all be all but phenotypic preference for White Euro looks does confer some advantage, granted not, IMHO, to the level “privilege” touting leftists rant about.

उद्ररुहैन्वीय
Reply to  thewarlock

Sure, I am saying that this bias is not measurable in casual sex terms because it is, by definition, casual. Where it is measurable in the population is when such conjugal union produces new individuals who can be counted 🙂

That is the same principle in job preference. Measurable only in terms of biases in actual income – not how many compliments one gets for dressing one way / another in interviews.

Basically bias is worth something interesting / genuine if it produces differences in kids or money.

thewarlock
thewarlock
5 years ago

The bias is measurable. More casual sex partner opportunity, all things held equal, shows greater general desire for a particular phenotype, one primal enough to get people in the mood to, on some level, want to propagate their genes with another person’s.
People often use tinder to figure out how good looking someone is. Good looks have been correlated to higher salary and more children. Tinder success is a surrogate marker for societal phenotypic preference. Societal phenotypic preference and how one conforms to it has been shown to correlate with material success.

Also, many people of the Instagram generation use Tinder as their main dating mechanism. People in this generation have FEWER sexual partners on average relative to the Boomers, despite a more progressive attitude towards promiscuity. So the success obtaining matches on these apps, I would at least venture to guess, would lead to the more children/money.

Also, black men marrying out more and A asian women marrying out more relative to their opposite sex counterparts, have been shown to correlate to these matching trends (eg. Okcupid response rate data).

thewarlock
thewarlock
5 years ago

@MAH
Lol I do well in the market, so for me it’s not a big deal. I also lived in Texas for a year and these differences are less magnified for sure. However, I still noticed them. That is actually where I had the encounters with the really, at least what I presumed, looks wise, out of my league black girl. This was in Houston btw. And desi guys everywhere get some interest from all groups. Groups aren’t monolithic to the degree of no interest. My argument about proportions relates more to how they illustrate phenotypic biases in society and how phenotype perceptions have been shown to translate to other markers. I am also not arguing at all that this effect is large.

One thing I do agree with a 100% is that most Americans judge desis more on dedi facial features than they do on skin color. Light skin color as a boost in the dating market is much more prevalent in the intradesi dating market than the interracial dating market involving desis.

Also, I like tinder numbers because they are good at coming up with a lot of data points for these trends and the app is very superficial so it eliminates a lot of potential confounders. If the three Indian guys you happen to know are frat presidents at UT Austin, then your view is likely skewed. If you drop them off in NYC or Chicago with a dating app and compared them to their white counterparts that’s when you’ll see these trends. Basically, a low N and status bias are not as big of issues in the layman anecdotal analyses using dating apps versus those anecdotes of simply who is in a LTR with who.

Milan Todorovic
Milan Todorovic
5 years ago

/“my writing on the historical origins of the Scots-Irish”/

Interesting! It would be also interesting to show him old Celtic names before they were forbidden by Ed Longshanks (‘Braveheart’) in 13th century, collected by the Xerxie’s neighbour, former Director of Linguistics at Cambridge University. Not many people know this. I can pass it via Anan. Also, you can check their both haplogroups, I would not be surprised if all three of you have the same. That would be material for a really wonder story (of course, we know where is the catch ?).

Milan Todorovic
Milan Todorovic
5 years ago
Reply to  Razib Khan

For every statement at BP, I have a reference (like recent Diodorus’s reference on JR’s elephants). I don’t use them here because of space and because this is not a scientific paper. I use them as ‘eye-opening’ and as a starting point for interested researchers. However, there are a couple with references:

According to the confirmed historical data, the first ethnic cleansing in Europe was carried out by the British: “Edward First Longshanks in 1290 brought a law that expelled all Jews from England for rumours of their “ritual murders”. The law was in effect for 366 years, and it was only in 1656 that it was finally abolished, which again allowed the Jews to appear in England. ” (Holmes, Tara: Readmission of Jews to Britain in 1656. 24. Jun 2011 BBC)

Second Ethnic Cleansing: “The Statute of Kilkenny in 1366 prohibited Irish language, names and sports in Ireland. Many Irish people have been forcefully displaced by the English on the western side of the island, where they have starved of hunger and disease, to allow English immigrants to take as much land as possible. ” (Mann, Michael (2005). The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing, M.E. Sharpe, p. 49.)

Walter Sobchak
Walter Sobchak
5 years ago

@Milan:

Well, try the massacres of Jews in the Rhineland during the First and Second Crusades. Those, we still remember. Mere expulsion is not that bad.

The funny thing is that when Jews petitioned Cromwell for admission into England in the 17th Century, he sent the lawyers back to the archives. They could not find anything adopted by Parliament or that said and don’t come back. So Cromwell said come on down. The result was never queried. It is more than likely that Jews had been in England art various times before that among traders from foreign lands who established themselves in London. But, they had not tried to establish a permanent settlement.

Milan Todorovic
Milan Todorovic
5 years ago
Reply to  Razib Khan

For those who research Celtic history, there is a list of Celtic names before they were prohibited. The Director of Linguistics at Harvard-Cambridge (not Xerxie-Cambridge as I said before) published this in his book:

Joshua Whitemouth: The Dialects of Ancient Gaul, Harvard Uni Press, Cambridge, 1970.

Many names, however, survived this prohibition. For example – Brus, i.e. Bruce (Springsteen, Willis). These two Die hard guys probably would be surprised by its meaning in Serbian – ‘whetstone, hone’ – a stone used for sharpening axes or swords. There is also a smaller version used by a mower, held on his belt in an ox’s horn with water used for sharpening the scythe.

The names from the previous list are identical with Serbian names. There are few names with their meaning in Serbian: Beli (white), Budak (pick-ax, grub-ax), Vratar (doorman, gatekeeper, portman), Vrbica (willow, osier), Danko (day), Vrsina (underbrush), Kamen (stone), Bara (plash), Satara (meat chopper), Tatin (father’s), Seleuc (!), etc…

girmit
girmit
5 years ago

I’m know the appalachian social milieu fairly well. And to concur, the highly educated asian families floated to the higher end of the social hierarchy in a way that doesn’t seem apparent in the northeast and elsewhere. The irony was that later when studying and working in more ethnically diverse coastal areas did the the magic status of whites present itself as a common understanding.
When it came to dating the discrimination was apparent but not extreme. At any rate, doesn’t surprise me that the south threw up to indian-american governors.

froginthewell
froginthewell
5 years ago

Don’t know if I have raised this objection here before, but Razib, I don’t remember seeing you seriously denouncing how progressive west or east coast liberals dilute their perceived privilege by spreading it across all whites, at the expense of less privileged whites like JD Vance on whom are forced more than their fair share of the indelible stain of excess privilege.

So really, the desis didn’t begin this. Progressives began this bullshit nuanceless privilege-based social credit system, and in a country some of whose elite universities implement an Asian quota while simultaneously feeling guilty for having instituted a Jewish quota in the past, where privileged east coast women talk privilege and greedily take up opportunities that would more fairly serve poor rustic midwestern men, you expect desis alone to hold themselves to exceptional standards of self-effacement and voluntarily relinquish what they can grab out of a system rigged by someone else?

Charlie
Charlie
5 years ago

You’re entirely correctly the “one-drop” rule is still the dominant american model on “race”; between immigration and intermarriage it is dissolving.

The progressive model on race is one where we are more like Brazil or Mexico where there is a racial continuum. Or rather what Americans think of that system rather than the reality of a system where 75% are brown.

Here is the twist, however. IN those system, you get considerable advantages based on skin-tone and classical european facial structures. If the future of the world is social media influencers, our new elite will be those that have european style faces and light brown skin. Not entirely different than India where those features have been spread through Bollywood as signs of beauty.

So when I see white people make the “magic argument” what they are doing is defining their place on top of the pyramid. We can say conclusively that J.D. Vance’s children will have great privileges in terms of light skin and european faces than say, Mindy Kalings (whoever the father may be).

The analogy goes back to Brazil — if you are a light skinned or blonde Brazilian you’ve got any number of movie, TV, or social media roles open to you.

I guess my own experiences as a half South Indian, half Scots-Irish who has dated a blonde South American come into play here. And I’m not saying the progressive vision is the correct one; again I think the reality is the future of race is brown.

Walter Sobchak
Walter Sobchak
5 years ago
Reply to  Razib Khan

Mrs. Vance is a lot more attractive than Mindy Kaling, and most likely a lot smarter. I sat through “Late Night” because my wife loves Emma Thompson. But, it was terrible, even my wife thought so. Mrs. Vance is probably funnier than Kaling.

thewarlock
thewarlock
5 years ago

Interestingly his wife is of low caste S Indian origin, Kamma caste.
But hes, her features are more caucasoid than Mindy Kaling’s.

Australian aboriginal features, the largest deviation from caucasoid features, will be considered just as ugly broadly in the future and as now

Santosh
Santosh
5 years ago
Reply to  thewarlock

I just want to point out that Kammas were considered a low caste ritually but were also one of the peasant-caste groups of Andhra with their natural range extending over the Krishna basin. Peasant groups generally tended (and still do) to be quite dominant in the non-religious, general social and political order of Andhra. There are two major classes within this caste – a rich landed class whose development probably dates to the British rule and a poor peasant class who still owned land (in however low amounts) in the Krishna and Guntur districts, but the gap between the two is decreasing and many erstwhile poor people of this caste now belong to the lower-middle to middle to upper-middle class families by virtue of a compound of factors ranging from their head-start because of their ownership of land in the Krishna basin, their belonging to coastal Andhra that was subject to the British-influenced Hindu renaissance of 19th and 20th centuries and their consequently early Sanskritisation, Westernisation, early diversification from agriculture into industry of various types, etc. They have a significant presence in the US also. They are known to be one of the most casteist groups of AP and TS though many of them also tend to be very Westernised and moderately liberal and also less casteist. They are somewhat similar to Brahmins in that they are highly heterogeneous in thoughts and temperaments just like Brahmins (like how there exist both far-left and far-right kind of people among Brahmins).

froginthewell
froginthewell
5 years ago
Reply to  Santosh

Santosh Garu, Don’t know about Kammas, but someone like Prolaya Vema Reddy was probably Sanskritized, right (is he also the same Vema Bhupala who commented on the Amarushataka)?

More generally, there used to be many Sanskritized non-Brahmin meat-eating south Indian jAti-s in the medieval times; one would expect most kings to belong to this category (there are some medieval nonveg recipes etc. including involving animals not eaten much today, but I don’t want to share since I believe in vegetarianism).

Where have they all gone, is it that they got de-Sanskritized and then re-Sanskritized later, though to a far lesser extent than the times when they made impactful contributions to Sanskrit literature?

Off-topic aside, regarding the US: In IMO 2019, USA shared the first rank with China.

The team: Vincent Huang, Luke Robitaille, Colin Tang, Edward Wan, Brandon Wang, Daniel Zhu – 5 of 6 are east Asian (probably Chinese), zero Indians, while Indians brag about their success in such consequential stuff as spelling bee.

Milan Todorovic
Milan Todorovic
5 years ago
Reply to  froginthewell

Serbia – the 9th out of 112 countries – all 6 medals (3 golds, 1 silver, 2 bronze)

Santosh
Santosh
5 years ago
Reply to  froginthewell

froginthewell, I am so weak in history that I only know the name of Prolaya Vema Reddy and nothing more. It is all very unclear who the medieval-era feudal elites (who we can assume reasonably that those types were somewhat Sanskritised also) of Andhra and Telangana used to be. Some say majorly only the people who were ancestors of modern-day Reddys, some say only those who were the ancestors of modern-day Reddys and Velamas. While these above two groups also got majorly descended from the farmers of Andhra and Telangana, Reddys also have some discernible Karnataka connection in their name which seems connected to the word rASTrika (speculated in the Dravidian Etymological Dictionary as rASTrin/rASTrika –> inscriptional Telugu raTTaDi (probably via some old southeastern Prakrit now lost) –> reDDi) associated with some sort of head/warlord for the Rashtrakutas. Several of the rest of them like Kammas who are recently upwardly mobile claim all sorts of privileges associating themselves with the Kakatiyas (which seems personally somewhat laughable to me because Kammas till the early modern period were so snugly fit to the Krishna delta), whatever, whatever, but I don’t know if their claims are true.

Maybe we can figure this out if we can see if there were any groups of people who owned large tracts of land (as in landed aristocracy as opposed to small farmers) in the Krishna delta before the British period and what castes they belonged to. At some point in the British period though, some higher sub-caste people or something among the Kammas definitely got themselves into the limited Zamindari system of the place and became moneyed farmers. Most of the rest stayed poor but they had ownership of land (which was/isn’t probably the case still today for many rural OBC/SC groups).

Regarding Sanskritisation itself, maybe they got Sanskritised (again) in the new Sanskritisation kind of way? The Telugu secular Brahmin taste for social reform, Renaissance Bengali literature, etc. etc. perhaps – just like trying to imitate the Brahmins of the period. But this particular group above also has this anti-Brahminical streak about them which is slowly fading. Many of them were also highly active in the 1940s and 50s in the Communist party (and also to some extent Maoism because of the closeness of Krishna district to Chattisgarh and Jharkhand), though many say they were mainly in it for internal and also casteist reasons (internal as in to get the landed aristocracy to distribute land to the poor farmers within the same caste, casteist because Reddys apparently controlled INC along with Brahmins, etc. etc. But of course, unfortunately for them, the communist party never had any future in India lol)

Violet
Violet
5 years ago
Reply to  Santosh

Santosh,
I don’t think Kamma prosperity is that recent. Most of my sources are oral (e.g grandma and her grand father history through her). But Garapati Narasimha Rao mentioned one time in his speeches that “neni” is a contraction of “nayakuni “ and people with those family names are likely chieftains of some sort.
Think of Akkineni and last names of some AP politicians…

froginthewell
froginthewell
5 years ago
Reply to  Santosh

Dear Santosh, Thank you for the excellent response. Knew almost nothing of the material you have just taught me.

Santosh
Santosh
5 years ago
Reply to  Santosh

Haha I don’t know why you are generally so nice to me but I like it very much. Thank you! But I must point out that I am not at all sure about some bits of the above post like the early dynamics of the political parties in Andhra, etc. The only thing I can be sure about is that I personally am quite unsure if the A Dravidian Etymological Dictionary is right in etymologising reDDi as deriving from raTTaDi. (The Etymological Dictionary though it is such a magnificent work of wonder is not 100% correct and there are some corrections suggested for some entries within it by scholars like Bh. Krishnamurti, etc. after publication.)

(I typically also avoid writing follow-ups pointing out or explaining my mistakes pertaining to things unless when I deem quite necessary, because it feels very painful to prolong discussion on a dying comment needlessly and not letting it die (I’m very shallow in my morals lol – I have this very easy tendency to support assisted suicides, euthanasia, and things like that). So I sometimes take the opportunity to highlight my mistakes and avenues where the probability that I would have gone wrong is very high whenever there is the first reply.)

(It also feels a bit strange if someone is grateful to me in response to something I say because I used to have this perhaps quite strange but radically implemented philosophical policy in my early and later adolescence and young adulthood (I’m still a YA though) that I should try my level best not to have any influence of any kind whatsoever on any person but I have gradually realised the futility of sustaining such principles when they are physically impossible to achieve and thus becoming more and more okay with the phenomenon of bidirectional influence flow lol.)

Santosh
Santosh
5 years ago
Reply to  Santosh

Yes Violet, I realise that I have missed several things in my earlier comments. One of it is that the Kammas of Krishna and Guntur at some point in the medieval period ended up migrating to Tamil Nadu and some southern Andhra districts like Chittoor and this I guess is as soldiers (I think it’s reasonable to think that a significant percentage soldiers of Andhra and Telangana in the medieval period were of farming background.). Narasimha Rao’s very reasonable suggestion of deriving the ending part of many Kamma caste surnames -nEni from nayakuDu*-like words origins comes into play here. So I think that the above evidence also supports the idea that a significant percentage of these people may have been soldiers or familiar with that profession. To some extent, they might have been village chiefs in the districts with their majority like Krishna, Guntur, etc. too.

It is indeed the case that I was quite familiar with the details that you wrote above but for some reason, I always forget all the details when writing a comment lol. I cringed like anything after remembering the Tamil Nadu soldierly origin sub-batch (especially cringeworthy after that nice falsity about these people hugging the Krishna river near its delta all their history lol) but then simply thought to myself mUsIlO munaganivvu haha.

*- I think the most probable possibility here is that -nEni is the Old-Telugu-like-conservative genitive case ending of the word nEDu (example: Old Telugu genitive rAmuni from rAmuDu as opposed to the Modern Telugu genitive form rAmuDi) which seems like a shortened form of nAyuDu, ‘leader’ which itself is an intimate Telugu-ised form based on the original Sanskrit form nAyaka (as opposed to the tatsamaM nAyakuDu). There is another shortened form of nAyuDu that can be seen in still some names: nIDu; example: names like bApinIDu.

froginthewell
froginthewell
5 years ago
Reply to  Santosh

Santosh ji, you were already very careful about expressing skepticism on reDDi vs raTTaDi, but even such conjectures are helpful to get going. So many interesting unexplored questions.

Violet
Violet
5 years ago
Reply to  thewarlock

You don’t know the caste hierarchy of Andhra Pradesh it seems.
Andhra Pradesh chief minister office switched only between Kamma and Reddy castes over the last three decades.

VijayVan
5 years ago
Reply to  thewarlock

Late Sridevi was kamma

Xerxes the Magian
5 years ago
Reply to  VijayVan

whoa I thought she was Brahmin..

says more about my own biases!

thewarlock
thewarlock
5 years ago

Yeah lol. guessing caste is only generally easy with extreme looks spectrum. Middle is a big heterogeneous thing. It is homogenizing, albeit slowly, with more inter-caste marriages

You would be shocked at how non caucasoid even some N Indian Brahmins can look. People post stuff on the internet that tends to fulfill confirmation biases rather than challenge commonly held misconceptions, so as to more easily yet fallacious gain credibility.

chrisare
chrisare
5 years ago

I’m surprised to see Razib taking “privilege” seriously. It’s a malleable pejorative used to describe presumably unearned advantages held by advantaged whites. I don’t see it’s value analytically or for that matter in any other use other than twitter and media point scoring.

उद्ररुहैन्वीय

Iran has a rank below India and UK and even the Zionist entity in IMO2019. Can’t explain given far superior Iranian IQ as we all know. I wonder if the fact that this competition happened in England had anything to do with these results – I put nothing past these crafty brexiting bastards…

Bangladesh went down a bit, but between Finland and Belgium is not a bad result.

Pakistan’s maths geniuses maintaining their excellent position between Costa Rica and Trinidad mashallah!

Xerxes the Magian
5 years ago

You are more obsessed with Iran than I am mate..

उद्ररुहैन्वीय

I think Iranians are the Aryan master race. They should run S Asia again, and not via Mongol/Turk proxies this time.

Scorpion Eater
Scorpion Eater
5 years ago

Iran has shown spine by detaining the British tanker.

I think their obsession with Israel entangles them in needless confrontations with the West. They are capable of doing better things.

sbarrkum
5 years ago
Reply to  Scorpion Eater

I think their obsession with Israel entangles them in needless confrontations with the West. They are capable of doing better things.

Scorpion Eater,

Iran is NOT engaging in needless confrontations.

Sanctions, are strangling Iran. It is war by other means, to destroy or make Iran subservient.

Like Iran says, if they cant export oil, no one will be allowed to export oil thru the Straits of Hormuz.

sbarrkum
5 years ago
Reply to  Scorpion Eater

A couple of FB post in one place predicting if there is a war with Iran

a) Gold will sky rocket USD 1,700/oz and above is a high probability (USD 1,400 on June 20)
b) Will Trigger a Financial Crash bigger than the 2008 because

Possibility of Oil pushing USD 100- USD 150
That will trigger trillions in derivatives and the dominoes fall

c) Saudi Arabia will fall apart, like Libya. Recall what happened to Kuwait. Luckily Bush senior saved absorption of Kuwait into Iraq.

http://sbarrkum.blogspot.com/2019/06/trump-iran-gold-and-finacial-crash.html

Milan Todorovic
Milan Todorovic
5 years ago

I haven’t realized before that Slapsy is an undercover OIT guy. It seems that he finally came out.

Brown Pundits