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What is your opinion on left unity?
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this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2024
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I just had a white person tell me (a white person) that ask white Americans are colonizers. But she works elaborate on why other races of Americans are not. She also didn’t want to elaborate on what I should do. Just told me that if I cared I’d already know it look it up.
So this is part of the reason. People claim to be leftists without putting any effort or critical thought into it.
I'd like to explain it to you. Not as an attack, but because she failed to explain it to you and you deserve to know.
Whiteness is a fake race. All races are social constructs, but at least some of them point to a long history or a common culture or whatever. Not whiteness. Whiteness was invented by slave traders to separate Europeans from the slaves and the indigenous in the new world. Before then, Europeans did not think of themselves as one race. Look at the Balkans and you can still see that isn't the case anywhere. But in America, the identity of whiteness was invented as a justification for slavery.
If you are white, then you have ancestors and a culture and mythologies and a history, and they are not whiteness. Whiteness is the last 500 years of oppression, not the things that came before. You should learn those things if you can, and value them more highly than the racist "white" identity. If you don't have access to your history, or don't value your history, then it's time to invent a new culture to replace whiteness. Because having the cultural identity of "coloniser" just sucks.
Can you give me an example of what you’re talking about in the last paragraph? I don’t really get it.
My ancestors are from like 7 different countries around Europe and one country from the Middle East(light/white skinned).
Yeah, so you'd be (as an example), french-german-italian-hungarian-swedish-portuhese-irish-syrian. Or whatever. Why do we call the first 7 of those, or the first 7 of your ancestries white? Because a bunch of slave traders said those 7 things are the same thing. If you were haudenosaunee-vietnamese-scottish-maori-jewish-kenyan, we wouldn't be reducing all that complexity to one label. Yes, certain commonalities exist to a greater degree in your ancestry than in my pancontinental example. Yes, it may be fair to call you european. But white? That word is a racist term. It's as fake as the word aryan. Your skin isn't white, it's probably somewhere around a beige-tan-olive. That's not white. If white were a colour, Asians would be white. It's not, it's just racism.
What I don’t understand is what some people would want me to do about it.
I understand what you’re saying now, but I’m not sure what the call to action is.
Change the lens with which you frame your position in the world from "I am a white person" to "I am a person who racists claim to be white".
It's a very subtle and subjective change and I wouldn't be surprised if you've already done it.
Great, so a second person complaining about someone calling themselves white without suggestion as to what souls be changed.
I think you’re just racist against white people.
because that is really dependend on your context and location. whiteness is differently constructed and maintained in different places and what you should / can do also is different.
One starting point for inspiration might be !landback@slrpnk.net, another one might be just talking with someone irl about this
I dont think this is helpful for anyone and I dont get why you would say that to someone, especially someone who from my perspective tried to engage with you in good faith
This can’t be a real suggestion.
Is a little frustrating talking about this as so far, people have either said that in a colonizer or not tell me how this issue can be resolved.
So far it just sounds like complaining about something with offering a solution.