• afronaut@slrpnk.net
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    20
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    2 days ago

    Best way I can explain American’s “fixation” on race is that our country’s history is based on the attempt to create a racist white utopia through law (slavery, ethnic cleansing, manifest destiny, segregation, Jim Crow, private prisons etc.).

    Many of the historical debates, protests, rebellions, riots, and wars we’ve had were largely surrounding the issue of racial equality. And… it never went away because racist white people have evolved their political tactics. They still want “the South to rise again”, they still want “to Make American Great Again”, they still want segregation, slavery, and woman subordination.

    You might be thinking, “it’s not that serious”, but the mere fact that America is becoming the de facto Nazi Regime of the West now says it all. Hitler was deeply inspired by America’s Jim Crow laws and used it as a platform to address “the Jewish Question”. But, White American’s racism didn’t just materialize out of nothing. It’s descendant of Western Imperialism and Colonialism that was being exported across the globe by Europeans who had finally come to a geopolitical status quo on their continent after checks notes thousands of years of fighting over whose nation and religion is better.

    TL;DR: American’s being fixated on race is just the next phase of geopolitical infighting that came after thousands of years of Europeans fixating on nationality and religion, both of which are becoming less relevant each day than one’s ethnic and cultural identity.

    • Mustakrakish@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      1 day ago

      The real reason is less about creating an actual “whites only country” and more about creating a political outgroup to scapegoat so they can stoke hatred on that line and cause the working class to be distracted fighting each other, so they don’t band together to fight their mutual enemy of those playing the puppetmaster. It’s been the goto strategy since the aftermath of Bacon’s Rebellion. Races don’t exist from a biological perspective, there’s more variation within a “race” than between them.

    • RowRowRowYourBot@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      3
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      1 day ago

      You need to learn about the history of Western scientific racism as it would fill a few holes in your thinking here. Essentially Europeans needed a way to justify enslaving fellow Christians which normally is extremely illegal under canonical law. Scientific racism was the way these Europeans justified breaking this law.

      • afronaut@slrpnk.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        1 day ago

        Please don’t assume what I do and don’t know about history lmao. I’m very aware of the history of scientific racism. I studied sociology and anthropology in university which is the academic antithesis of scientific racism as a pseudoscience. The modern concept of we understand today was developed by a Swedish botanist, Carl Linnaeus, and a German professor of medicine, Johann Frederich Blumenbach, in the late 17th century.

        What you’ve mentioned isn’t really that far off from my initial comment. You’re just going to into more historical detail about my claim that racism derives from Western European imperialism/colonialism.

    • GiveOver@feddit.uk
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      5
      arrow-down
      6
      ·
      2 days ago

      Oh, I know why they’re obsessed with race. What I don’t understand is why this meme can get upvoted and not discarded as racist. And I’m not crying about “wah racism against whites” I mean real racism.

      • afronaut@slrpnk.net
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        13
        arrow-down
        5
        ·
        2 days ago

        Because it’s not really racist, is it? I don’t see how this meme contributes to the suffering or oppression of any white person. I suppose the meme can be taken in different ways. Some people are perceiving it as racist. Others are perceiving it as one of the admirable characteristics of white people.

        Something I’ve noticed about a lot of white people who do take offense to memes like this is that they simply do not like being made aware of their race at all, which is just not a reality most non-white people get to experience.

        • GiveOver@feddit.uk
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          3
          arrow-down
          7
          ·
          2 days ago

          I said I’m not talking about racism against white people. I think it’s racist because the joke appears to be that white people have disposable income and like to travel and do adventurous things. So, to me, it’s saying non-white people don’t have money and don’t travel or do fun things. And I think that’s bad. I don’t feel like I’m doing backflips to get to this conclusion, I genuinely don’t understand how it’s not seen this way by everybody else.

          • Couldbealeotard@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            5
            ·
            1 day ago

            I interpreted it as a stereotype of certain privileged classes of white people that are so out of touch with the struggles of the world that they don’t realise how dangerous it is to try this. In fact, I think there has been cases of upper/middle-upper class people who have gone on these kinds of tourism-pilgrimage and have ended up dead.

          • afronaut@slrpnk.net
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            4
            arrow-down
            2
            ·
            1 day ago

            That’s a stretch, and ironically, such a black and white perspective. At the end of the day, it’s just a meme. A meme joking about one group of people’s extreme form of recreation is not making the absolute claim that non-whites don’t do any of these things.

            But, there is truth to the statement that white Westerners are able to travel more with disposable income. Facts are not racist. Pointing those facts out in a lighthearted meme is not racist, to white people nor non-white people.

            Would it be racist to make the claim that white British people were able to colonize several countries while Thailand was not? No, because that’s a historical fact; one that also explains why white Westerners today have more disposable income on average than non-whites.

            In a roundabout way, you want to point at this meme and say it’s racist against non-whites but this was most likely made by a non-white person pointing out what they have noticed in our country, pertaining the subject of race and socioeconomic background. That being said, there are plenty of extremely impoverished white people in America. That doesn’t negate the truth of this meme though.

            • GiveOver@feddit.uk
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              1 day ago

              I don’t think “it’s just a meme” or “it’s just stating the facts” will ever be a good defense against racist stereotyping, so I’m going to ignore that line of argument. Fair enough if it was made by a non-white person trying to poke fun at white people, that makes it better, but that context isn’t obvious to me at all. I guess it’s easier for Americans to infer, which brings us full circle