CuAnnan
My country men are fond of the phrase "800 years of oppression", but I would contend that until Elizabeth the First (or arguably Henry the Eighth) Ireland was not really occupied, but some Normans had come in, integrated and lived quite happily among the Irish.
Starting with Queen Elizabeth the First, moving through (in leaps and bounds and in no particular order) The Plantations, Cromwell, the Great Famine, The Great Hunger (which despite common parlance was closer to a genocide than a famine, in that Irish people and farms were producing
more than enough food to feed the nation several times over but everything except the potato and
maybe a knackered cow worth less than a pound was forcibly removed to feed the English occupying landlords), the Penal Laws, The Troubles up the North. Or, in short, I think that racism against whites looks an awful lot like Irish history.
Oh god this is back.
Ok. How about you don't take something in obviously
American only context and then try to place it in another country and go, "SEE!"
Yes I KNOW people have been treating Irish folks like s**t for centuries. Especially in England, not so
any more in America, but it used to be so here too.
I'm not at ALL sure why you think re-contextualizing something you damn well KNEW was specific to America makes it so you "win".
Irish people weren't "white" in America when they were getting shat on, and they are now. Isn't that interesting?
The racial system in America is pretty damn unique. While in a lot of other places it's far more on religion, or culture, or ethnicity, that's not true of America, and hasn't been since the beginning. We are an experiment in a very different type of systematic prejudice, and I would appreciate if people who either know jack s**t about it, or think talking about something in
another ******** country with a different context proves their point would just not.
CuAnnan
Actually, that's what you look like. Where schools are representatives of nations.
You think that because bullying has a specific profile in your school that's what it looks like everywhere.
See? This is what happens when people think they can move something to another country and "win". Let me ask you something?
Does England have the construction of "whiteness" that America does, or is it based on something else? On ethnicity, on religion, on cultural values, ect.?
Because if it doesn't have the same history as America, this is a false goddamn comparison.
I didn't ignore Ireland because I'm "pretending" people considered white in OUR context never suffered. I'm ignoring them because it has absolutely nothing to do with my point about American history,and the culture of white supremacy here.
Your bullying has a different profile, and you know I wasn't speaking about it, and yet here you are trying to make it about YOU.
CuAnnan
If "cracker", "snow bunny" and so on are not offensive then neither is "******". I am white. I am not part of the ancestrial history connected to those who used the term "******" as a tool of oppression. As it happens, I use neither outside of discussions about pejoratives. I don't like impersonal invective.
And here's where I ask if you even LIVE in America, because I'm not joking when I say it makes a difference. While I no longer like bothering arguing with ignorant white people, or any people for that matter, about the facts of white supremacy as if it's up for debate, I sometimes make exceptions.
There are slurs for Irishmen in this country, that at the time they were used, were just as nasty and harmful as "******" is previously and currently. That time *passed*. Those terms? They never had the connotation or denotation that specific Irish slurs did. Why not? Because they haven't been backed up with violence.
Make no mistake, violence done to a group, through a system, is still violence. It's violence when we funnel poor people, especially poor minority kids, into the prison system. It's violence that was the war on drugs. It's violence that snatched land from NDN people's and burned down black towns. And it's violence that denies black people equal access to loans, and cars, and education.
All of this is violence, but not all of it is physical violence. Calling a black person a "******", saying "no niggers allowed", that is an act of violence backed up by the ages of white supremacy. And no matter how not racist you personally are, the context of any white person calling a black person a ****** will always be a different one than the reverse so long as
white supremacy is a thing in this country.
She has no head, no it isn't equal.
This is what gets me here. The absolute insistence that terms with very different histories, usages, connotations, and violence behind them *have* be to equally offensive and harmful
just because . Just because they both sorta refer to skin tone, just because they both have to do with "race", just because if it didn't we'd have to finally admit she has no head.
This is the same exact nonsense that permeates the feminist movement that conflates reproductive issues with abortion without ever stopping to ask poor and minority women if they've ever had a problem with abortion, or if they need protection to GET abortions.
It's a blatant refusal to interrogate from a different non-affluent white perspective. Those words are all the same to you. I don't suppose you think "M**k" is all the same as "cracker". I certainly don't, but ******** it
maybe you do at least you'd be consistent in your wrongness even if continuing to be wrong.
CuAnnan
Maybe you should put the scalpel down.
Because hacking away at the rest of the world and claiming it's triage is
??? I'm sure you were going somewhere with this, but you cut off the rest of the thought?
In any case, no. Insisting that things
in America aren't equally doesn't say anything about Ireland.
That's funny. In a "haha wow even when white people are from other countries they think 'just pull yourself together' is an actual piece of unique helpful advice." sort of way.
Let me let you in on a little secret:
If Black America never stopped to heal itself or protect itself we would have been dead a long time ago. Great now that we've gotten that out of the way, any OTHER useless platitudes you have for me?
