Boilermaker Rick wrote:
WaitingforRuffcorn wrote:
long time guy wrote:
This discussion was relative to America. When you couldn't refute it you globalized it to include Europeans and presumed that I didn't care about their struggles. That is the epitome of petty and it demonstrates that you have difficulty with conducting this sort of discussion.
I will expound on the point for you.
ON the reasons that slavery was able to continue was due to the "fact" that poor whites supported it almost as much as rich, aristocratic whites
The idea was white privilege, and I related my families person history as it was known to me. Plenty of poor whites took up arms and died to end slavery. So this pushing of guilt on an entire race is "problematic" to borrow a term from your camp, and you really are not understanding my point. You just want to engage in name calling because you are angry about the topic.
The concept of "white guilt" is your problem. Acknowledging that things haven't always been equal and even today some of those inequalities still remain is better than blind defiance, mentioning atrocities in other countries, or minimizing it because your ancestors had other challenges.
You seem to take it personally that inequality has existed and in some ways still does. You don't have to.
Discussing this is "taking it personally"? Why do you always have to take little shots like that?
We all know that only black suffering matters, but here is a point I was making earlier. I know of several local families from Romania and Poland.
Going back to their great grandparents-parents they lived through World War 1, the famine in the years after the war, the Great Depression, the rise of Fascism, the German invasion at the beginning of World War 2, five years of Nazi rule including genocide, the Red Army invasion at the end of the war, the mass rapes carried out by the Soviet army during their occupation, then decades of Soviet rule, which included poverty, famine and killing of land owners and political dissidents.
Telling these families to check their white privilege is absurd. Why does only Jim Crow era oppression "need to be acknowledged" or whatever you want done? Do we need to acknowledge that we bombed or fought wars against most Asian countries in the 20th Century because we did not like their politics?
I am using white guilt as a general term for whatever people want to call this political thought that white people are natural oppressors, and all of the resulting bad ideas that have come as a part of that including choosing to segregate and declaring that speech is violence.
I don't have a clear idea on what you want to remedy past atrocities. Reparations? A change in the laws? I think that's opening quite a Pandora's Box.
My family had plenty of bad things happen to them from the Russians too. It's irrelevant to what happened in this country.
Also you can start to respond to points here rather than things you read on Twitter. I don't think white people are naturally more oppressive. It just happened to be white people here.
As for what should be done it stars with acknowledging the unequal past. Let me know when you are ready to.