There’s a certain kind of racism activist who thinks all white people are the cause of all the racial problems of the world, and that it’s impossible for them to understand.
I had written something about Europe, and I don’t remember the details. It was something to do with the way people in the Balkans had slaughtered each other over minute differences, or how the 1940s Germans saw “slavs” or basically all Russians, as subhuman.
There was a comment or a reblog or something about it, and the comment was basically “LOL white people.”
To a certain kind of Person-of-Colour American racism activist, all white people are white. But while they might all be “white” to them, in Europe the differences are old.
So a comment like that is either very smart or very dumb, though I’m inclined to the latter.
It’s smart because if anything, it’s an illustration about how all racial and ethnic differences are silly and artificial. Why should Russians and Germans kill each other? Why should Bosniaks and Serbs kill each other? Why should anyone hate Jews? It’s all, technically, artificial. In black/white/Asian/Latino terms, they’re all “white.” What, really, is the difference between all of them?
But it’s dumb because it marginalizes serious and real conflicts. It lumps all “white people” into one. It applies an American framework on the rest of the world, which does not fit. Most importantly, it doesn’t help at all.
After all, if “white people” looked at Congo, or Rwanda, and said “LOL black people” it wouldn’t be so easily dismissed.
