Month: June 2017

I loved when this one horrible snob accused me of being “anti-English” (in person)–and obviously expected me to immediately start groveling and apologizing. The horrors!

Dude, if your concept of English identity is that wrapped up in the glories of Empire, to the point that you’re automatically interpreting any criticism of colonialism as a personal attack? Yeah, I really am unapologetic about thinking that version of Englishness needed to DIAF a long time ago. For everyone’s sake.

But, of course it did not. And is unlikely to anytime soon.

That particular interaction was darkly funny even at the time. But it’s just the most blatantly ridiculously overblown one so far.

aresnergal:

halalbarbie:

halalbarbie:

halalbarbie:

remember when macron said that what france did to algeria during the colonial period constituted a crime against humanity and he dropped like a brick in the polls? (even amongst liberals and progressives) it’s really not a lie that a good number of europeans either don’t know about their colonial history or they know and they’re proud/think they did colonised people some kinda favour

concept: ex-colonies can’t “leave the past in the past and move on” when our countries still suffer the consequences of colonialism every single day 

it’s always interesting to lose followers for posts like this…..like….what were u doin here in the first place

I’m French and lbr many of the countries we colonised have only won their independance very very recently. People here WILL still argue about Algerian Independance War (and yes, likely say things like “oh but we gave them better civilisation !!1!” or “ok but both sides of the war were terrible”). It’s super fresh and yet, you can’t bring it up without someone saying “oh i’m tired of this guilt-tripping it’s not my fault also it was long ago”

We kinda learned about colonisation in class, but in a very disconnected way ? like, I remember a map and having to learn dates, and some (French) old articles about independances ? Pretty one-sided anyway.

Then again, we’re a country that can barely ever recognize that our surrendering in WWII was less “oh no not war war bad we scare” than “well we really dont gaf about jewish people so whatever”. Or that we were huge in the Slave Trade even after we “abolished” slavery on continental soil.

monsterkissed:

warriorsdebt:

We could have a lot more productive conversations if we could all just accept the truth that a group doesn’t have to hold institutional power to be able to wield it situationally. It is entirely possible to be a member of an oppressed demographic and also sometimes be in a situation where you have the ability to alter the direction and magnitude of the ruling class’s power. The fact that you too are subject to harm does not universally preclude your ability to do harm.

See: the division of resources in MOGAI communities, virtually any issue of respectability politics especially as they relate to intracommunity issues.

a lot of the way we’ve come to talk about privilege, power etc. etc. is very unhelpful and reductive i think. this here is a big part of the problem