You keep claiming that male college students growing mustaches is a White thing. I have no White students. Not one of my 200 students this semester is White. Yet, lots and lots of them have mustaches they are also all in the 18-22 year range. So how is it a White thing? Like most “progressives” you act like Black only refers to those descendants of slaves living in the US and completely ignore the fact that most Black people in fact still live in Africa. Which is a big part of the reason why liberal progressives like Obama even when part African still have horribly racist policies towards the continent.

in the immortal words of Chub Rock, you’ve “uplifted” us, to a higher level of clarity. It’s been a pleasure breaking cyber bread with you

Otto, did you, not, read my post with respect to the African Diaspora and with the type of mustaches described, or are you too busy in “protection/ sic ‘em” mode to bother with the details?

Have you ever been to an African university? Now that I am looking for it I noticed that a very large number of male students here have mustaches or mustache and goatee combinations. Maybe Ghana is unique among African countries, but still how is it a White thing? If you want to prove it is a White thing you need to show that it is not happening on a large scale among Black people in Africa as well as the US and that is simply not true.

“white people distance themselves from that reality by claiming that’s “not what they mean”

Oh yes in-deedy!

the “old-timey Americana” mustache and the Comical Victoriana Mustache both represent eras in America when the “native” population were “erased”
and Black citizens marginalized into spheres of invisibility. Not only was white male masculinity supreme, but “voracious” in terms of not just white women, but all women of color.

I completely agree! And I think those facts are precisely what makes the ahistoricism of this particular fashion so unpleasant.

I think that one of the ways in which this comes forward into the present is white obliviousness/resistance to these histories. I think the “old timey” stuff is appealing precisely because white people both have been brought up not to think of these things and willfully don’t think of them.

I think that learning and maintaining a sanitized/comic/trivia-oriented narrative of the past is how certain kinds of whiteness maintain themselves.

It’s not just the absence of an accurate understanding of the past; it’s not covert-yet-semi-conscious nostalgia for the good times of the overtly imperialist and racist past; it’s the active replacement of history with a flattened/emptied out narrative which lends itself to being “old timey”. I’m not sure it’s always actual, overt denial of the past; it’s more “let’s create a cozy kitschy past precisely so that the question never arises”.