And only if it’s been sufficiently whitewashed.
“People of no color” and “people of colonial complexion” really make me think.
I kinda like colonial complexion in a goofy ironic way.
“Colonial complexion” also harkens to “passing complexion”. Racism is the curdled buttercream holding the layers together.
Putting this here, because Christianity in the US tends to be defined by white, protestant strains as the norm.
A thread:
Yep. Nobody cares where my grandparents came from or what socioeconomic class I’m from. I’m polar-bear-in-a-snowstorm white, which means I’m white, end of story.
Our Father
Pure unadulterated racist?
“I sometimes listen to Bob Marley and when he sings about black liberation I pretend he is singing about white liberation instead.”
Normally I’m very good an understanding other human beings even when I think they are complete fuckheads. This is genuinely breaking my brain.
Well, in the U.S. at least, white culture also = seeing race relations as a zero sum game. Any gain in equality for other races simply MUST mean (somehow or other) an unfair gouging of white people.
Not just the US. You should ask my father sometime about how all these “special programs” are making things so hard on the poor white men… so hard to accomplish anything in this world with all the favouritism towards everyone else.
Compared to you, I am kind of more centrist leaning. Compared / according to my family, I am a far-left, bleeding heart commie who doesn’t understand how the world works. My sister literally texted me a picture of low gas prices after the RCMP arrested the Wet’suwet’an protesters to force the pipeline through. Both she and my dad think I am stupid and brainwashed to want my next car to be electric. She bragged about how she (as no. 3 in her company and the HR person) loves being in a “right to work” province because she can just fire people. She can’t understand how someone like her own sister with my mental illness issues and refusal to do unsafe work wouldn’t have a job. How a boss who wants to threaten and harrass someone can use that for evil. They don’t consider themselves racist because they aren’t on a one-on-one basis, but they truly believe that the system is biased against white people.
Difference is that while all three of us got Arts education, mine was in Media and Communications where I learned to recognize bias… including the bias of default. It was taking a post-secondary history course where I learned that I had been lied to my whole life vis-a-vis my province’s treatment of First Nations. I found online communities like here, where we don’t hide from or ignore the obvious injustice.
And maybe some of it comes from not thinking of myself as anything special. I am not more deserving than you or Melz or Mindysan or anyone else who doesn’t commit what Granny Weatherwax succinctly identified as the only true sin.¹ I may get treated that way on account of being white, but it doesn’t mean I am, it means that the system is fucked up.
Which is a long winded way of me saying that I see it in every goddamn conversation I have with my family, I hear it from coworkers (who should bloody well know better) and on the radio in the morning from talking heads who either believe it (while not seeing it) or are too afraid to risk corporate coming after them for being “too controversial”. And that’s in one of the leftiest provinces in Commie-Canuckistan (my sister is in one of the least left, but she grew up here).
White culture is wherever you find white people.
ETA: forgot footnote.
¹Essentially, the only sin is treating people like things. Really, all the other evils fall along from that.
My sympathies!
And yeah, I certainly didn’t mean to exclude other predominantly white countries. I was just trying to acknowledge that white culture isn’t a monolith when it comes to specific examples, which can take shape or operate differently in different places.
