- cross-posted to:
- worldnewsnonus
- cross-posted to:
- worldnewsnonus
The Danish health minister should āget on a plane and visitā some of the thousands of women thought to be living with the consequences of being forcibly fitted with the contraceptive coil as children, Greenlandās gender equality minister has said.
In an attempt to reduce the population of the former Danish colony, at least 4,500 women and girls are believed to have undergone the medical procedure, usually without their consent or knowledge, at the hands of Danish doctors between 1966 and 1970 alone.
The total number of those affected by the procedures, thought to have continued for decades, is understood to be far higher. Victims and their lawyers say generations of Inuit women were left traumatised and suffering reproductive complications, including infertility, as a result of the Danish stateās policy.
Earlier this month, a group of 143 women sued the Danish state over the alleged violations, but they have yet to receive a response from the government, despite the Danish prime minister visiting Greenland ā now an autonomous territory of Denmark ā soon after.
If you couldnāt read the bitterness in
I canāt help you.
But anything to denigrate minorities who donāt have your views., huh? People like you only listen when it fits your preconceptions.
You literally told me how this issue affects you as a mixed race person, and it clearly doesnāt affect white people.
Either you can put that together or you canāt. If you canāt, itās because you donāt want to. Iām done here.
And you literally didnāt listen, instead opting to reiterate your own preconceptions on what mixed-race people experience and why.
If thereās anything I got wrong about what you were saying about your own experience, I would honestly like to understand.
If thatās sincere, Iāll be happy to explain again.
Again, I must emphasize, I am by no means under the delusion that anti-white racism is anywhere near the scale or severity of anti-POC racism. In terms of resource allocation, there is an obvious and overwhelming preference towards which one needs to be fought. I, as someone who has experienced genuine emotional distress, am speaking as to the personal effects of racist behavior, specifically, slurs and othering, against whiteness, even (though not exclusively) when the person in question does not necessarily or primarily identify as white.
Calling people slurs based on their ancestry or socially constructed racial identification, āactualā or perceived, is bad. Period. The N-bomb is worse than āJapā, and āJapā is worse than ācrackerā. But none of them should be given a pass, and all are capable of creating an environment of othering and hostility.
You feel confident and secure, and so you donāt feel racist slurs are capable of harming you - if so, great for you. Iām sure you grew up in either a great community (which there are many of!), or an overwhelmingly white one. That, however, does not reflect experiences universally, and many white kids (not even getting into biracial individuals) whoāve grown up in majority-nonwhite communities can attest that anti-white racism feels like shit. āIn the greater scope of things, white people rule everything!ā doesnāt mean jack shit inside the context of individual communities, where our psyches reside and rely on for validation and sense of belonging. And those wounds donāt go away when you emerge into a white majority society.
The sin in calling me an anti-white slur is not because Iām mixed-race. Being mixed-race just means I have nowhere to retreat from bigotry in general. If I escape anti-white bigotry, Iām inevitably exposed to anti-Asian bigotry - and if I try to escape from both, I am inevitably exposed to both. There is a great deal of racism inbetween POC communities.
For mixed-race people, often, there is an additional effect in that is that we feel invalidated in total by being denigrated by one of our racial origins. When someone calls me a cracker or like slur, I donāt feel part-shitty, I feel 100% shitty. When you call a white person a cracker, it doesnāt matter if you imply with a wink and a nudge that, OF COURSE you donāt mean me, it still feels like shit just by fucking proxy. Yeah, Iām Asian. But Iām also white. Being called a cracker doesnāt hurt me because Iām part-Asian. It hurts me because I am white. Apart from self-identification, as generally I have little interest in my whiteness except to recognize when it privileges and advantages me, there is the acute knowledge that others see you as such, that you are seen in some way, or in some degree, as deficient, grotesque, or inherently contemptible.
If Iām harassed for being white, do you think I feel only part-deficient? Part-contemptible? Do you think that I feel different about being harassed for being part-white because Iām also part-Asian? That if I was wholly contemptible instead of partially, it would feel better? Would I not feel othered if I was only white and being called a cracker? Considering the escalating racial hostility as children age and feed the mutual racial antipathy, and my own experiences talking with white friends, I doubt it. Just because āOh, this wonāt matter when you look for a job or a promotionā is true doesnāt mean āThis isnāt something that creates a deep and abiding rift between individuals and communities as a matter of rejection of people based on their innate and unchangeable qualities. This isnāt something that creates psychological scars as attempts to refute or combat the accusations escalate against an unshifting bigotry and constant undercurrent of enmity.ā
The essential, degrading, othering, and hostile effect of calling someone else a slur based on their immutable characteristics is universally bad, and itās astounding to me that a left-wing culture that has (very positively!) become increasingly sensitive towards other issues of mental and emotional health, bullying, and self-esteem, seems so keen to overlook this. Much is said, and rightfully so, on the severe and lasting psychological effects of bigotry on individuals. Why is this bigotry excluded?
Itās not a problem that needs a national campaign or a government program to address it. But it sure as shit shouldnāt be dismissed or encouraged simply because itās not as important as the more significant and material effects of racism on POC.
Iām legitimately done now, because now Iām fucking depressed.
I genuinely appreciate your openness and I agree that what youāve experienced is bigotry, it is othering abuse. Thanks, I understand it takes a lot to lay all that out and I donāt take it lightly.
I cannot tell you that the trauma that youāve experienced is lessened by who or what you are, and this is an issue that leftists should take seriously. I understand you face a unique intersection of discrimination, and that your whiteness has contributed to that.
I still have something to say about where we differ here, but I wonāt unless you tell me you want to hear it. I promise to be respectful regardless of what you decide.
I appreciate your response, butā¦ Iām not really in any condition to continue this conversation, sorry. You can state it if you wish, but I donāt have it in me to respond at this point.
Okay, thanks for being open to hearing it. If you donāt reply or you take a while I wonāt take that to mean anything in particular.
I accept that all of the things youāve talked about are real forms of oppression. The difference here is that I donāt agree that it should be called racism. That may seem like a tiny, semantic difference but I think itās important. When you say that it is on another level than the racism that POC face, I agree. It is a quantitative difference that amounts to a qualitative difference. I think it deserves to be addressed as its own unique phenomenon. Iām afraid I donāt know what the name for that phenomenon is. I would be surprised if someone hadnāt written about it. Iāll keep an eye out for that.
I also understand that youāre saying that hearing a phrase like āa very white way of thinkingā feels othering to you. That makes sense, but I donāt agree that the solution is to stop talking about the problems with whiteness. Whiteness as a concept hurts everyone. Of course it hurts POC more than it hurts white people, but it isnāt a zero-sum game. White people in general arenāt helped in any way by it. Thatās not what privilege means in this context. It means that the boot that stomps on us is less forceful and has smaller cleats. The point of calling some people white and others not is to divide people. That doesnāt mean that attacking whiteness as a concept is divisive - it is attacking a mechanism of division. The point here is that there is absolutely nothing to be gained by protecting the concept of whiteness.
Weāre not attacking individual people and saying they suck because they are white. It really isnāt personal at all. The concept of whiteness is based on privilege, which means being able to ignore the suffering of people who were affected by genocide and who are still living. I think thatās what they mean when they call it a very white way of thinking.
I donāt know how to help you with your feelings on this issue. Iām sorry, I wish I had an answer for you on that but I just donāt. If youāre feeling hurt, thatās always valid. However, dealing with and healing from that hurt requires correctly identifying its source, and itās easy to land on wrong answers to that question, and thatās a large part of why I think this is important.
Guess Iām back for more.
Iād dispute that it isnāt racism, as application of sociological definition for the purpose of narrow and highly academic discussions with general usage, but thatās not the primary problem here. I find what itās called less important than acknowledging in it. In this thread, thereās a lot of āWhite people canāt be hurt by being denigratedā, not just denying that itās called racism. Thatās what hurts here. I look around here and all I see is hostility in what is a fairly left-space. I can quote people in this very thread quite clearly saying, āYouāre white. White is bad. Get over it.ā
Iām not trying to protect the concept of whiteness or say that we should stop talking about white privilege. But when you denigrate āwhite peopleā, you are denigrating a group of people for their ancestry - full stop. It doesnāt matter that you mean it in a different way than common usage. When you start describing things as āwhiteā you are necessarily adding an either positive or negative connotation to being āwhiteā, which is something that is largely decided by society and observers, not your intentions.
At no point have I defended white privilege, man. White privilege can and should be overthrown. Thatās completely separate from the point here.
So was the point of calling people āBlackā - and if you dispute that, I have a whole laundry list of historical examples to go down that predate the creation of a cohesive and empowering sense of unified Black culture. Yet if you started associating negative qualities with āBlacknessā and objected āIām not saying BLACK PEOPLE are bad, Iām just saying BLACKNESS is bad, which is a state of mindā, I mean, fuck, thatās outright āracist uncleā shite.
Regardless of whether or not you like it, when you say āwhiteā, a large number of people hear you addressing them, because thatās how theyāre addressed by society, conservative and liberal; light-skinned and dark-skinned. When you say āwhiteā, that refers to, by linguistic consensus, a very large group of people based on their racial origin, not their opinions or their recognition or lack thereof of their own privilege. And when you start assigning qualities to āwhitenessā itself, this context necessarily translates into a denigration of the individual by a denigration of an arbitrary group that has no inherent moral quality to it.
Again. At no point have I defended the concept of whiteness. The entire concept of racial categories is absurd except as a social construct.
But white is pretty widely considered to be a category based on phenotype and cultural recognition of phenotype - it doesnāt matter that you donāt mean that individual people suck because theyāre white. It doesnāt matter when some old coot calls something ācotton-pickināā as a means of degrading it that he doesnāt MEAN it in a racist way, or that heās not using it towards an individual, much less a Black individual. It is still generally heard by Black folk as a whole as denigrating. And no amount of āYou just have to understandā¦ā or āThis isnāt directed at youā¦ā can change that.
I think itās important too, which is why I take such issue with racializing positive and negative qualities, like points of view. Avoiding the idea that using racialized descriptors is bad simply because the core of modern racial categories is centered around the privilege of whiteness does not mean that racialized descriptors are innocent of implicit or explicit bigotry.