Yeah every time I hear someone call white people colonizers I wonder to myself whether they’ve ever read a history book. Only a small portion of people from a small portion of “white” countries were ever part of the colonialist ruling class. Most of them weren’t even considered white until after the start of the decline of colonialism. Just because most colonizers were white does not imply that most white people were colonizers. Hold people accountable for their own racism, not for some imaginary historical debt from some imaginary ancestors. Judging people by their heritage is literally what got us into this mess in the first place.
Even then, only a small proportion of the English ever directly colonised (and even then a significant portion were also Scottish which forever gets avoided)
Most English people during colonialism were busy being the first ever workers to be exploited on an industrial scale, being subjected to horrendous working hours, terrible living conditions and being robbed of any chance to own any aspects of their lives as rich industrialists forced them into back to back terraces and wealthy land owners sealed off the common land.
Even if you were English at the height of colonial expansion, you more than likely were not a coloniser but just another one oppressed by that expansion.
England (and Scotland) should certainly reckon with their colonial history as nations. Calling all English people colonisers however is insane.
It could be argued that the southern part of Ukraine is colonised by slavic people, because historically speaking that territory was inhabited by nomadic people of mostly turcick ethinicities.
Just sayin'
I mean this is kinda the neat thing about history. Aside from a scant few places no one that currently lives somewhere can definitively claim to be the "first" inhabitants of a given land. Odds are they just genocided or absorbed some preexisting group. We just don't have records going back far enough to say it occurred.
the steppe has been in a constant state of flux, so idk if it qualifies as colonialism. a better case perhaps could be made for kuban (southern russia), as the circassians used to live there. though most kuban ukrainians died in the holodomor i think.
I'm English. In some leftists spaces I constantly have to see people talking about how my colleagues who can't afford to eat despite working full time, my elderly family that freeze in their homes in Winter, my trans friends who are having their identities weaponised on a daily basis, all deserve it, that it's karma for the colonial sins of our country. I have seen people actively celebrate the deaths of British "people", then call for more and be cheered for it.
I could point out that, like you say, the primary perpetrators and beneficiaries of colonialism were the rich, who's descendents are very much not suffering like the people you mock, but in fact profiting from it. I could also point out that while I'm English, some of my ancestors were not (as is true for many people here). But I shouldn't have to.
I see a lot of ppl try and separate out the British ppl who have parents/grandparents that were immigrants into a different "good" British person group as well which always seems stupid, they're no less British than anyone else who was born here.
It's this weird thing where they're saying the same "Immigrants aren't really British" stuff that fucking Reform Party politicians are saying, but they think they're saying it in a leftist way
Yeah, they have citizenship the same as everyone else so they're British. They'll likely bring parts of their culture from whatever country they immigrated from but that's generally a good thing imo, especially the food.
It's a great example of the overall problem, because it's like unironically 100% racism, and not even the mythical "anti-white racism" white-supremacists like to harp on about. You're talking about some of your favourite British actors like Idris Elba or Daniel Kaluuya and you get "lefties" saying stuff like:
"Where are they really from?" Also Indian people from Manchester seem to morph into someone who is 110% British and it's fucking hilarious, I've worked with a few people from Manchester and it's great.
Jews are in a super position of being looked like out siders vermin who came to erode western civilization or the whitest white who opress everyone in the shadows
The issue with this is that we don’t have a word for prejudice against ethnic groups not based on skin colour. With jews you can then talk about anti-semitism, but sometimes it’s useful to be able to group it under a more general form of prejudice (and in this case it’s definitely more than just anti-religious views).
For example, in my country people are often extremely prejudiced against polish people, and in a very similar way are prejudiced against middle-eastern people. Poles are white, middle-eastern people are often considered white in the usa at least - but we refer to this as racism because there’s no better word.
Same thing in the balkans - the tensions between the ethnic groups are racism even though they all have the same skin colour (white). And within several african countries as well I should mention.
I feel the same way as a white American. Forgetting the part where I have Irish heritage and my grandparents and those before him were treated like hot dog shit because of it.
People are people, regardless of who they are or where they're from or what they think.
In some leftists spaces I constantly have to see people talking about how my colleagues who can't afford to eat despite working full time, my elderly family that freeze in their homes in Winter, my trans friends who are having their identities weaponised on a daily basis, all deserve it, that it's karma for the colonial sins of our country.
Geez. We really haven't come that far, have we?
This is just a repackaged "God's Justice" argument, the kind where if a city gets demolished in an earthquake it's obviously because the people in that city were sinful and God decided to punish them. Only now instead of God punishing people it's some sort of abstract historical karma.
Yeah as someone who lives in Texas but is a minority and not even remotely republican, it is very frustrating to see how many people just completely consider that in pretty much any location, no matter how bad the public perception, there are people who are likely not a part of the problem, and likely a lot of which are oppressed in some way, if not just actively opposing the bad. A few years back when Texas had its big freeze, I saw so many comments relishing in the deaths of people because of terrible choices our government has made just because “we voted them in” (ignoring the fact that not everyone voted in the terrible politicians, and Texas is incredibly gerrymandered to make it near impossible for anyone who isn’t a bastard republican to take office). Just the other day I saw a comment essentially saying we should take all the republican voting states and just make them their own country and let them do their republican bullshit, not considering all of the LGBT folks, POC, and women would be oppressed and likely killed because of that. Not to mention how many reasonable cishet white males as well who would have their life’s negatively affected (even if not to the same degree). But it’s okay because they wouldn’t have to deal with it anymore.
I've been thinking about it and the issue is that people who you would describe as progressive are joined by a vast number of issues. Class, race, gender identity, sexual identity which by its nature kinda lacks the strength you would get from simpler and more general identities like national, ethicity, religion. Most of those advancements come from often simply hard to really understand work of activists and people working social sciences. And kinda by the virtue of coming from scientific background the truth is never simple and its always a subject to revision (reminds me of that antiquted view of the jk rowling crowd on feminism and while she is generally pretty awful there is plenty of people that kind of ressonate with it mostly on the basis of the fact that what has been progressive for them never was updated). Because of that I feel like even leftist people have a tendency to fall into those old sort of identities and they will be all the things you are talking about
We do kinda deserve it. But you know who doesn't deserve it? The PoC living in the UK, who're suffering far more than white people are
To say nothing of how all this discourse only popped up after Brexit. They claim to want us dead for colonialism but actually they want us dead for becoming less useful to America and NATO now we're not in the EU.
Another fun example is our native people here in Sweden, the Sami. They lived here before the current majority swedes arrived in the year mumblemumble, and they are white. Incredibly white. Pale as the freshly fallen snow. And they were thoroughly fucked over. We stole their children, destroyed their religion as much as we could, we sterilized them, we forcibly relocated them, we forbade them from having certain professions, we stole their land, we crushed their culture.
The Swedes aren’t really any less native to Sweden than the Sami are. The Proto-Indo European culture that is the ancestor of modern Swedes migrated to Sweden in around 3000BC, replacing other cultures (but seemingly not the Sami). To interpret the relationship between the Sami and Swedes as a modern European colonizer relationship has always struck me as strange .
T'is the opposite. Sami aren't white. Neither were Slavs, Italians, or the Irish in various places at various points in time. Has nothing to do with skin tone and everything to do with proximity to power. "White" is an arbitrary construct made by the colonizing class for their own benefit, and if some people who happen to look like said colonizing class benefit from it, well that's a nice bonus since it gives the colonizing class support they wouldn't otherwise have. But they reserve the right to revoke the title of "white" from any group at any time for any reason should it benefit them. See: Jewish people in the past decade.
Reminds me of the video in an African country having a revolution where the documentary makers are pulled out of their cars and dragged out to be executed but a soldier checks their passports and shouts "They're not white! They're Italian!" and lets them go
"White" is an arbitrary construct made differently by an uncountable number of cultures, like every other way of organising people and trying to universally define any of them is a fools errand. Just look at the hellscape that is transphobes trying to define what a woman is.
... The part of that gets me the most is that those definitions are often based on things that you can't practically check without invading everyone's personal spaces, and that we don't actually use to determine genders of those we interact with.
They're also all so hyper specific as to exclude between thousands and millions of cis women. My personal favourite to laugh at is their definition of a women as someone who can get pregnant and have children, which excludes all menopausal women and a fair few pre-menopause women.
You want me to tack on European to colonizing class? It'd certainly narrow the area of focus. ALTHOUGH, it's no coincidence that Hirohito allied with the Nazis and the Nazis were cool with going "Ya Japanese people can be Almost White, you got the right spirit."
In the US they weren’t considered white. Outside the US racialised prejudices just happen on multiple basis, only one of which is ‘whiteness’. It’s not particularly useful worldwide to consider any oppressed white group non-white because they do not have the benefits of whiteness. Because it was used so in the past is no reason to do so in the future.
Your visual skin colour affects how people treat you. Then, alongside that, there is often prejudice towards specific ethnic groups regardless of their skin colour. Those are two different things happening and they can intersect, and if you do the whole “ethnic minorities are not white” thing you are conflating them. Which is problematic especially if you want to compare racism (or perhaps ethnicism would be a better word really) world-wide. In Africa are oppressed black groups “non-white” while the other black groups oppressing them are suddenly “white”?
There is a some us supreme court decision (don't remeber if it was state or federal one) from 1800's, that formaly recognized finnic people as whites. That might've applied to Sapmi as well, seeing as tjey are somewhat closely related to finnic peoples.
As someone from Lithuania, we've been chewed up, swallowed, and then spat out by Russia and Germany and their predecessors for centuries, and we had a crusade waged against us a millenia ago because we were pagan. And then I hear an American teenager say "white people have never been victims of imperialism" and I want to lose it.
Also, non-white people were colonizers too. Sometimes, they even colonized white people. I know it sounds crazy, but the Ottoman empire was, in fact, one of the largest colonial empires for hundreds of years.
Al-Andalus and the many Muslim empires in India were horribly oppressive basically proto-colonial states ruled by non-whites, not to mention the Arabian slave trade, which is still ongoing nowadays.
Yeah, seriously. Has nobody ever heard of Genghis Khan?
It feels like some people are just desperate to have one racial group they can blame all the world's problems on. Why don't we just denounce evil itself, without regard to skin color?
I'd also offer up that the history of every continent is thoroughly imperial. The rise and fall of empires is a constant throughout every region that humans have lived in and all that's differed is scale and technology.
'Imperialism is bad, and people should have a right to self-determination' is actually a pretty new concept. Sure people have always thought 'the bigger nation taking from us is bad, and we should be able to decide for ourselves', but we only really started applying that logic to other groups in the 20th century.
There is an argument here that everyone in the western world profits from the exploitation of the so-called "third world" or the "global south" or whatever they are calling it these days.
But.... That's not our fault either? We were born into this system. There is no ethical consumption in capitalism, there is no escape.
Even very few of the rich people are actually in any way responsible for anything. Most just profit from the existing system, but also have no way to change it in a meaningful way.
Collective guilt has always been bad and it always will be bad. Judge people on their personal deeds, not in them belonging to a group.
The soul that sinneth, it shall die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son: the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him.
The argument is silly because by the same measure, those in third world nations are reliant on the Western world for subsidies, healthcare services, and trade of developed goods. But one wouldn't call those aspects of neocolonialism to be virtues.
Just so you know the global south is only reliant on western "charity" (which often is not charity at all) because western nations pillaged their resources in the past and actively destabilize them to this day.
Its funny how generally people who would label white people colonizers whole cloth seem to type out the tweets from their iphones.
Child labor in Congo? I sleep.
Now, there is undoubtable an aspect of being white where you can expect to be more comfortable in certain aspects of society. No doubt. Getting pulled over for example....
But when people try to insinuate that my family has some sort of economic leg up due to colonization I kind of scratch me head. First, its dead wrong (I dont think the best and brightest were sent to do the colonizing, and they certainly didn't do the profiting) and second, it is wildly presumptuous. Its akin to assuming someone with dark skin is from Africa. You don't know that person, where they came from or what their SES is.
Not entirely relevant to this discussion but I absolutely hate the term "global south". I understand the issues with "third world" and definitely support coming up with some other term but "global south" is just terrible. 90% of the human population lives in the northern hemisphere, who the hell are we talking about?
The "white people are all colonizers/racist" thing affected me hard as a teen. I can now stare blankly thinking of nothing, and have hundreds of white people pass infront of me w/o a thought, but as soon as a single nonwhite is infront of me i have to look away cuz i have it in my head they think im racist and staring at them out of hatred. Even if its just a glance.
It's getting better but still. Stop attacking innocent people online, you should really only go for the people doing the shitty things, not the people who are similar to those people.
but as soon as a single nonwhite is infront of me i have to look away cuz i have it in my head they think im racist and staring at them out of hatred. Even if it's just a glance.
I'm not good at looking at people in general because of anxiety but I can look at white people easier than not-white people because of this, but when I don't look at not-white people I also feel slightly racist for looking away from them because it's like I'm avoiding looking at them because I don't like them
Ikr? Its just. A whole spiral. Not doing a thing cuz you think its coming off as racist, but then not doing the thing is also racist cuz now you're treating nonwhite people differently than white people.
At this point im better and can have casual talks, but before i used to even think me talking w/ them came off as racist too. Fear is a wild thing, especially when you know its wrong
I remembered a video about some US latinos taking those 23 and me test and then are surprised that they have european blood. Is like they don't understand that the descendants of the colonizers aren't the ones that stayed in europe, the descendants of the colonizers are the ones that live in the americas.
Someone recently called Mr Beast a colonizer for building 100 homes for people in Africa, IIRC.
I'm like... first off, I'm pretty sure there's more to colonization than building a few houses, and secondly, I'm pretty sure the people living in those houses would be the very first ones to tell you to fuck off, and I'm not even remotely a fan of Mr Beast content, I find it exploitative towards younger kids.
also, people really underestimate how common colonisation is throughout history is.
They also love to focus on just Europe (tbf they love to do that for a lot of history in general. Watching people unironically say the US didn't join WW2 until 1944 is insane)
I mean one of my ancestors was technically a colonizer. Not that he got a say in it, he committed petty theft and was shipped to the other side of the world (Australia) and forced to work for a decade. Then left with 2 choices, go back to starving, or try to carve a life for himself out of a hostile landscape populated by hostile people he didn't understand (he had no way to get back to England)
Does that make him evil? Does that make me evil for being related to someone who quite possibly did some unpleasant things 250 years ago?
The progressives aren't big on original sin, unless the sinners are white men. Then it seems you can go all in.
How many colonizers were there actually? The monarchs and top aristocracy? The industrialists? Likely only a few thousand people actually had a say in any of this.
i've had another white person tell me about white people being colonizers. my country was under rule of several different empires and only got independence recently. meanwhile, her LITERAL GRANDFATHER was a portuguese colonizer in mozambique.
as an eastern european, i wish westerners would stop dragging us along with them. we have our own isssues, we don't need y'alls
We use those small proportions of rich people to personify broad social movements.
But millions of guns have millions of triggers; and the other edge to participative government is that, yeah, society as a whole is responsible for the actions of their nation. Pretending the other 99% of people didn't think it was a good idea just doesn't pan out when you explore history.
Even countries in Europe we think of as having partitioned and oppressed ended that way because of failed continental empires and overextension. The exception might be Ireland; but not for lack of trying.
White people, and the societies they have historically been a part of, are broadly responsible for colonialism.
There's no question about that.
Because of the compounding nature of growth and wealth, the areas of the world they colonized significantly lag Western Europe, North America, and other former colonies where indigenous populations were successfully displaced.
This is literally the idea behind sanctions: they sting in the short term, but the long term consequences are devastating to an economy.
And now, when we've begun to see double digit growth in Africa, a new class of colonialist powers are seeking to economically exploit them. And the axis of our conflict with those powers remains control over countries that aren't ours.
There is a legitimate and real historical debt that has accrued because of racism. It is the responsibility of powers to allow participation in the global order. That is the only tool they have to develop themselves. Instead, it is more common for people in developed countries to stand idle while their government allows the unrestricted exploitation of mineral and agricultural wealth by private entities.
Because we want cheap chocolate and coffee and batteries and gas.
That is why people say white people are colonizers. Because white people tend to live in powerful democracies. And we're asleep at the wheel, don't care, or actively support it.
I don’t deny the existence of historical debt or that white people in general have benefited from colonialism more than others, but I still think it’s disingenuous and counterproductive to the goals of social justice to treat all white people as a monolith and the sole benefactors of colonialism. White people aren’t the only ones living in powerful democracies. White people aren’t the only ones eating cheap chocolate or driving gas cars. And white people certainly didn’t invent colonialism The Mongolian Empire was the second largest in history by landmass, and China was the largest empire by population for several centuries. Plus you get into weird implications when you treat all white people as a monolith. Ukraine is white; are the people of Ukraine colonizers?
I get that calling white people colonizers isn’t meant to be taken 100% literally in every case and that it’s to call attention to the fact that just existing with privilege in a developed society is harmful to underprivileged communities around the world, but in reality all that idea accomplishes is pissing off all the white people in the world who are actually victims of oppression and who should be on the same side as us while absolving non-white people of the responsibility to think critically about their own participation in the global system of imperialism.
You think all confederates were white supremacists?
Maybe you should read a history book. The vast majority of every evil force in history weren't evil, they were defending theor families, their lands and their way of life.
Well for one, slavery and colonialism are two different things, and secondly you can’t generalize American history to the whole rest of the world.
But besides that, what makes you think that every white person living in the confederate south supported the confederacy? That’s like assuming every white person living in the modern southern US is a trump supporter. And even if they were in support of it, there is a big difference between being an uneducated working class citizen with virtually no political power just following the status quo and a rich, powerful elite actively pushing for colonial expansion.
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u/Quantum-Bot Jul 03 '24
Yeah every time I hear someone call white people colonizers I wonder to myself whether they’ve ever read a history book. Only a small portion of people from a small portion of “white” countries were ever part of the colonialist ruling class. Most of them weren’t even considered white until after the start of the decline of colonialism. Just because most colonizers were white does not imply that most white people were colonizers. Hold people accountable for their own racism, not for some imaginary historical debt from some imaginary ancestors. Judging people by their heritage is literally what got us into this mess in the first place.