a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment
RicePaddy  ·  3473 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: It's a White Man's Internet

So I wasn't going to get involved, but seeing as you so elegantly dismissed 800 years of Irish oppression as "lol, white people", I will.

    Put the tone argument away. What he's posted is not unrealistic, and you don't get to dismiss it as that because of its tone.

You're just demanding AdonisGksu put away his argument without addressing it, which has a very valid point. There is a very real atmosphere with a lot of groups of "division and hatred". Remember that video that surfaced a few days ago of that guy being kicked out of a public space for being white at a Black Lives Matter protest? What does anybody gain by division and hatred? It baffles me when I hear about "People of Colour only" spaces. Why would you ever want to promote segregation? What does anybody gain? Surely you're just increasing the rift between the two sides? Surely the goal of anti-racism is a world where nobody sees a "black person" or "white person" but just a "person"? It would be infinitely more productive to focus on the actual injustice that minorities face in the western world, rather than focusing on hating and barricading yourselves from people with a different skin colour than yourself.

There is an argument I see thrown around a lot which concludes that a) White people are inherently racist and b) It is impossible for a non-white person to be racist. People who make these conclusions always point back to a system of power form which white people have benefited over hundreds of years.

Irish people are, for the most part, white. We were under pretty tyrannical British rule for roughly 800 years. We did not benefit from any sort of "system of power" for that whole time, and yet, Irish people are still happily pushed under the blanket term of "racist white people." The model doesn't work outside of the United States, and is therefore US-centric.