The American media loves saying that, but does it really have a right to exist? Does an apartheid colonizing regime have the right to exist in someone else’s land?
The American media loves saying that, but does it really have a right to exist? Does an apartheid colonizing regime have the right to exist in someone else’s land?
Who is included in the colonized and colonist categories in this sense? All “white” people? All white passing people no matter background? Recent (last 50 years) migrants of all races?
What would the differentiation be, and what is the line in the sand? This doesn’t seem to be nearly as cut and dry as “Isreali vs Palestinian”.
The differentiation is “can we trace your geneaology up to a slave owner, or further up to the pilgrim ships”. There’d need to be a party apparatus for this sort of records-checking; but I imagine in this day and age, there’s likely a technological solution for this that I’m not immediately landing on. Beyond that, I’m not above the idea of re-educating anyone who’s ever flagged themselves “Caucasian” on a federal census; but the priorities are ‘do you have slave-owner in your blood’.
That does seem like a good criteria, but that is an extremely small and limited amount of people. Slave owners were by far concentrated in the South, and only the ultra-wealthy could afford to own slaves to begin with. It was only a 1-2 percent of people owning 95%+ of all slaves. As most free people in the South, white or black, were themselves near destitute and extremely poor.
Plus records of that would be difficult to work with, yes a direct relative would be an easy find, but we would go after someone for their great great great great great uncle twice removed owning slaves?
Also the Caucasian label is itself extremely tenuous, as you would catch the decent majority of slavs, turks, some arabs, Romani, and a whole hell of a lot of bizarre and “non-white” groups by going after the Caucasian label.
Plus then you run into the problem of a decent chunk of people being mixed, meaning no single label would work well for them, or you could have a family where one partner could have had a slave owning ancestor, while their partner had a ancestor who was a slave, and one of their children is extremely dark, while one of their siblings could be much lighter, and then another that’s white as snow. There would be an absurd amount of unique scenarios you would have to grapple with, this is just one.
people rented slaves, and for the purposes of this discussion, that should be at least partial credit for “owning”
Sure, but how in the world would you ever prove that? I doubt less then 1 percent of the receipts from those transactions survived.
land ownership would be easier to find records for and is probably a decent proxy.
if the other person’s “reeducate anyone who checked the caucasian box” idea is too extreme, maybe a compromise could be reeducation for anyone defending the use of confederate symbols.
Yeah that last bits fine. But land ownership seems a bit extreme, again, just owning land doesn’t signify anything.
owning land in a settler-colonial slave society sure fucking signifies something. holy shit dude
No it fucking doesn’t? A random ass ancestor owning land isn’t something you can pin on a random person in the modern day.
What does that signify? Plus like I mentioned before, the vast majority are dirt poor subsistence farmers playing with second rate dirt while mega plantations owned by the bourgeoisie hog hundreds of square miles of prime land that’s operated by literal slaves. Those subsistence farmers aren’t really the vanguard of the settler colonial force.
But imagine someone came up to you today and said, “Well it seems like one of your ancestors 250 years ago simply existed in a settler colonial area, even though they were dirt fucking poor, and we don’t have any evidence or documentation. Prepare for reeducation!” I’m sure you’d love that?
Is it such a sin to want to see those who self-identify a certain way educated on the baggage they’ve associated themselves with? You raise fair points on the concept of mixed families; but beyond that, while self-identification is fine and all, I see a use case for the education.
But its not really “self-identification”, its not really a personal choice is it? You can’t just self-identify as another ethnicity, race, or background, and most people don’t give theirs a second thought.
Education should just be done overall. I just don’t see the point in otherizing and targeting certain groups on factors such as race, sexuality, ethnicity, or background, barring other overt reasons. I’m definitely not defending racist white chuds and they’re the first ones that could use reeducation, but it just feels like belief and views should be a primary concern. I’ve met plenty of gusanos, extremely out of touch extremely wealthy minorities, and people with racist families who grew beyond that. It just feels the main separator is class and education more then anything.
Again, going back to it, dividing a clean cut colonizer and colonized just seems to be near impossible in the United States. It feels like other factors should be taken into account first.
I fully agree, and I feel the logic follows that the only actual path to peace for Israel/Palestine is a sort of de-Balkanization, a one-state solution where the one state in question can’t be Israel or Palestine.
Naive. It is naive to think that the Zionists won’t take and take and take until they’re all that is left– exactly in the example of the crackers. Colonialism is a cancer, and your treatment plan is to just let it ravage the region-- and if this is really the only path of peace, then maybe the conflict deserves to flare up from the Palestinian side, with just as little mercy as the Zionists show them.
I feel like this admittedly old but still very relevant piece by Edward Said makes some good points. Notably:
and
Do you think it possible for the brutalized to live in peace with the people that brutalized them? That cheered brutalizing them? Especially in the same generation that the brutalized were being entirely destroyed? You too, cosign letting cancer ravage the region.