If we don’t educate the oppressor, who will? That’s the problem. If they don’t see a problem, they won’t ever help. If they feel like they are openly being antagonised, they aren’t going to help either. We have to be practical if we want to see real change
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The thing that I will always maintain is that it is never an individual minority’s job to educate white people out there. However, some of us do take it upon ourselves to not make equality more palatable, but package our messages in a way that’s clear, fair and understandable for people who have never had to experience what we do. It is then up for them to either take on board the messages or not. However, in the meantime, it’s really bad optics to appear as though we are gatekeeping the aspects of our cultures that are the most interesting to white people and could act as a gateway into true appreciation of other cultures
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It’s not just white people though, yes the majority are white but there are minority cultures out there that are white too.
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If we allow it, being interested in dreads or saris could be a way for white people to understand and appreciate other cultures. They’re going keep doing what they’re doing whether we scream about appropriation or not, so why not use it as an opportunity instead?
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Yeah “white people” is a sticky term. I mean, what does it even mean? For a while in places like America, Irish people weren’t considered to be white, or “white enough”. It’s more of a catch-all for people who are culturally dominant.
Especially because a lot of “white” ethnic groups haven’t experienced the same level of othering and, often, slavery and racial abuse. Sure, Irish people did experience a lot, but they and their culture has long since been embraced in its entirety and not picked apart and sold off in little watered-down packages.
Slavs were treated badly in Nazi territories, but it’s not really a significant problem at the moment. I can’t think of a single “white” culture today whose oppression is built into the fabric of society in the same way as African Americans, for example
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Yeah I know that it’s not on such a high level as African Americans, but there are a lot of white raced cultures that don’t get embraced once you start looking into it…
What exactly is white culture?
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Like the average non-Irish American might choose to wear a claddagh ring, but Irish people aren’t really treated badly for wearing them. And when was the last time a police officer thought an Irish person “looked rough” and shot them for doing nothing wrong other than being Irish? When was the last time an Irish person was told any aspect of their culture made them look “unprofessional”?
Do you know of any examples of white cultures that aren’t embraced
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There isn’t really such thing as white culture, to be honest. It’s much more of a collection of cultures
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Yeah, because I just googled it and nothing.
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Yeah you’re not going to find much, other than super racist white supremacist stuff, tbh. British culture is different to American culture, which is different to French or Australian or Czech culture, and so on.
And then there’s the fact that even in England, the culture in London is very different from the culture in Durham
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I don’t think that turning cultures into commodities is an issue that comes with white people. It’s an issue with capitalism in general. Capitalism forces any outliers to assimilate and turns commodities out of anything. I mean, look at the way even socialist ideas have been commodified!
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The struggles of our cultures are extremely real, but let’s face it. Most of us go back to eating our Taco Bells too. None of us take this as seriously as we should. The only difference is that we aren’t allowed to forget in the same way.
Also, I think it’s unfair to expect white people as a whole to be as invested in dismantling racism, because they just can’t see it. The same way a lot of men don’t necessarily see the struggles of women. We’re hyper-aware of it because it’s our lived experience, but when a lot of the biases are so ingrained and inherent, it can be blinding.
Which is why we need to show understanding and patience rather than gatekeeping. Use the feelings that white people have to foster community rather than exclusion
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And this isn’t an excuse. Nope. White people should be invested in dismantling racism. It’s a call for us to change tactics
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As I’ve said before, white people are going to do what they want to do whether we complain about it or not. That’s the ignorant bliss of being in a dominant culture. Ultimately, you can ignore minorities in a way they cannot ignore you.
We are forced to spend our lives seeing ourselves through the eyes of the respective dominant cultures we live in. But white people aren’t active oppressors. Most don’t know that they are taking part in an oppressive system and a lot would be horrified if they truly understood.
But they don’t get it in the same way we do. They’ve never had to. From the outside, it’s hard to see. People assume we all have equal lives unless they can physically see how you are in a disadvantaged position. If the disadvantage is institutional, it’s invisible to them.
So gatekeeping our cultures is going to do nothing but fuel hostility. In the same way everyone from the left at the moment is being demonised by the “see? cAnCeL cUlTuRe” craze in the media. Or the same way that men who didn’t get the problem hijacked the MeToo movement. Most of them don’t do it to actively harm us. It’s the fragility.
It’s the fact that they can’t see the problem, so it feels to them as though they’re being punished for no reason. And considering white people have so much more influence than us, we need them to understand if we want progress. So we do that by education rather than demonisation
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Not saying we shouldn’t. I’m saying the oppressor shouldn’t feel entitled to be educated by oppressed individuals when there are many other oppressed individuals who are willing to educate them whether it be face to face, twitter threads, books, websites etc.
If someone asks me about braids then I wouldn’t mind, but it shouldn’t be compulsory for me just because I’m a black individual who wears her hair natural.
I agree with this but there are times when the oppressor will feel antagonised regardless of how calmly they’re educated. There are many microaggressions that come with discussing race and discrimination because people think that criticising discrimination is a personal attack on them instead of a system. At the end of the day, an oppressed individual could be as calm and respectful as possible and still be ignored. If the oppressor doesn’t care, then they won’t listen regardless.
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Look at all of the work that Martin Luther King did. Whether he realised it or not, one of the tactics he used was to turn white empathy against the oppressive system. When white people can see and understand, they can help us to dismantle the system in a way that they may not have otherwise been able to. And when white people disagree with a white-dominant institution, you see how quickly things change
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As I said a little while ago (not sure if you saw it or not):
I agree massively with a lot of this. However, I think we can be cunning about it. It’s a lot easier to point out oppression when you can say “you didn’t have a problem with her dreads. What’s the difference”, if you know what I mean. It’s about tact for me
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It hasn’t ever worked before, the dominant culture takes what it wants and leaves you behind, if you don’t gaurd the gate they will take the keys and lock you out. This is literally the genesis of America, the pale faces came and we shared our turkey and they smiled and returned the favor with smallpox blankets and head shots then they stole all of our shit and systemically eliminated our culture. Now people think we either don’t exist anymore or we sit around in teepees talking to ghosts and painting with all of the colors of the wind. My people used to cut out human hearts and eat them, we weren’t standing around talking to trees. We can’t let them reduce us to the parts of our culture they care about either.
I’m not in favor of screaming cancelled into the void, I agree with meeting people where they are when you speak to them and have no problem with someone taking it upon themselves to have a conversation, I do it all the time. What I’m not gonna do is tell minority groups to not be offended, not speak up because it will make people uncomfortable, to let people take what they want and hope for the best.
The civil rights movement needed Martin but it also needed Malcom.
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I disagree. As much as it may seem this way, we’ve seen that communication has improved things significantly. The same time we had the Civil Rights Movement, we had people like Uhura in TV making strides with black representation. The more we educate and distribute information about our culture, the better things are getting. The problem is that we’ve only had the capability to distribute this for a fraction of the time we’ve had colonialist destruction. We’ve seen so much progress being made in the past few decades, which coincides with our ability to communicate in ways we’ve never been able to before. The problem is that it doesn’t happen overnight
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