A bizarre racist outburst at a Texas school board isn’t an isolated event — it’s part of a national pattern

  • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Race was invented by the society that colonized this land and setup this nation. The concept of the white race was invented right here in settler colonies before the USA even existed. It’s not just a national pattern, it’s literally the fabric of the nation.

    What?

    You think racism didn’t exist until Europeans settled America?

    Fucking India had a legal caste system based on amount of skin pigment centuries before that, and “you look different so you’re an enemy” has been a part of human history long before we even knew how to write shit down.

    Quick edit:

    Nevermind just saw the lemmygrad.ml, that explains your comment.

    It sucks even tho I block all communities on there I still see comments from that shitshow

        • Kraiden@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          Just gonna drop in here to let any kbin users that might be reading know: this doesn’t apply to you.

          Go to your.instance/d/instance.to.block and you can block the entire instance from the sidebar

          Cough…

      • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        If there was a way without downloading an app I’d be down.

        I don’t see the point in using apps for webpages, but lemmygrad might eventually make me change my mind. I’d probably just join an instance smart enough not to federate with them first tho

        • DaCookeyMonsta@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Oh I didn’t know you couldn’t do it on the web page, I’ve only used an app (connect) since I joined after the fall of rif.

          Still a little fuzzy on how the fediverse works.

    • fear@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Lemmygrad is wrong about a lot of things, but they’re not wrong about this. It’s important to learn from the past so it does not keep repeating.

      The concept of the “white race” was developed in the 17th century with the Atlantic slave trade. It is indeed a product of British colonization. The concept literally didn’t exist before this. Before the 17th century, people who we would now think of as white identified mainly by nationality and religion.

      The concept of whiteness as being a distinct and unifying factor among people from a variety of countries led to the field of scientific racism, which went on for around 2 centuries. This is where terms like “Caucasian” came from. Scientific racism was used as a reason by the Nazis to murder millions of Jews. Now in the 21st century, we know it is pseudoscience even though its terminology lingers.

      This doesn’t mean that people were blind to skin color before 17th century colonialism, as you pointed out with the Indian caste system that dates back as far as 3300BC. You can see in ancient Egyptian art a wide array of colored skin as well. From Egyptian literature, there aren’t signs they really obsessed over it the way society does now.

      I think we can all agree that things didn’t go too well for non-white people after the invention of whiteness. The concept was founded in oppression and helps perpetuate oppression.