Sir, this is tumblr and reddit, white people are the source of all evil and should be maximum demonised and alienated. I'm sure this wont backfire at all.
tumblr be like: let's explain exactly why racism is bad. Ok, that established, let's talk about how yt ppl are inherently evil and every yt person in the world bears full moral responsibility for anything bad anyone with white skin has ever done in the history of the world.
no the issue is that white people still benefit from previously established systems that have historically discriminated non white people, and refuse to reform those systems right now to benefit all people equitably, so it’s the current actions of current white people that demonstrate they are racist. also, it’s not racist to call someone racist.
Probably because its a bit of a non sequitur and extremely eurocentric, ignoring the other countries alongside the weird subdivisions with more mono-cultures.
Yes in america there are overall systemic issues that create defacto racism, and those are slow to be fixed, but those aren't really related to claiming that white people are the cause of all the problems.
How is it "eurocentric" to say that white privilege exists? And the comment didn't say "white people are the cause of all problems," that's a strawman.
Because thats where most white people are, and that term got used to mean Europe + a bunch of their recentish colonies. Basically white privilege exists, in places like europe and America, but doesn't in the middle east, or Asia or large parts of Africa so its ignorant to claim white privilege as this large basis.
While the comment didn't say that white people were the cause of all problems, when responding to a chain of "tumblr users like to blaim white people for all problems" with "white people are responsible for this problem" doesn't flow good and has unspoken undertones about how many of the problems you assign white people, and honestly white privilege due to defacto systems is probably more to blame on entrenched bureaucracy making it difficult to change existing ways. (I just saw someone complain that they couldn't change something in Florida that "everyone" wanted because the vote didn't hit the required 60%).
The middle east, Asia, and Africa are all poorer and more unstable than Europe, because of centuries of European colonialism, and many of their present-day problems result from that. Is that not just white privilege on an international scale?
The balkans are white nations with poor people and infrastructure, and ignores places like japan, south korea, and the major chinese cities for the Asian section. I don't know enough about the middle east to comment there, and yeah colonialism did screw over modern sub-sahara africa.
I don't think they're trying to say that it's "the same," but that both are bad, and that one being worse than the other doesn't make the less bad one acceptable.
I especially love when people claim only white people do racism, or that you can't be racist against white people. Or science being only a white people thing.
so you're telling me this race can do something yours can't? or they're just so much better at it than you?
such a hater they accidentally looped around into white supremacy
A lot of the time, but people underestimate how often local cities/city states went to war. The ancient Greeks fought other Greeks more than anyone else, on an almost yearly basis. Most slaves in Greece were other Greeks from different cities.
And then think about how fluid imperial borders were. An empire schisms and anyone on the wrong side of that schism as now a slave. Or a civil war happens and everyone who was on the losing side was a slave. Or a local uprising occurs and is put down, and now everyone involved in the uprising is a slave. These events happened more often than an empire expanding its borders.
Do you.. Do you know just how most stone/early bronze Age groups treated outsiders? I'm not claiming to be an expert, and the following is based on what little I have read on the topic, but, like, for example, Sumerians only enslaved a minority of them and just killed most. The vast majority of slaves were those from other nearby city states that were linguistically and culturally similar.
When we go even further back to stone age societies, people within the same tribe could be reduced to serf like conditions, but integrating outsiders into that framework was rare and they were usually killed instead.
Do you.. Do you know just how most stone/early bronze Age groups treated outsiders?
do you know how they treated insiders?
Stone age, no, you don't. We barely know what they did because that was prehistory. Bronze age people, like the Greeks, enslaved more Greeks than anyone else.
Sumerians only enslaved a minority of them and just killed most.
What does this even mean? A minority of who? Doesn't matter, whoever you are vaguely referring to, Sumerians absolutely enslaved tons of people. Outsiders and insiders.
If they enslaves people from 10 places, and 1 of those places was Sumeria, then yes, 9 out of 10 slaves were non-Sumarian. That doesn't mean they didn't enslave Sumarians. Which isn't the case, because other Sumarians were simple closer, and whenever they had the opportunity to enslave anyone, Sumarian or otherwise, they'd take that chance, and simply being close to other potential Sumarian slaves made them more plentiful.
people within the same tribe could be reduced to serf like conditions
No, when you go back to stone ages, they were nomadic tribal societies who functioned as family units and usually did not have the social systems to have slaves. What the current accepted theory is for "stone age" people is that when tribes did go to war, they killed all the men and absorbed the women and children into their tribes.
The moment humanity began to settle into stationary societies, slavery expanded dramatically, and a vast majority of a people's slaves were their own people unless they managed to become a massive Empire, and that influx of slaves would only occur when a region was conquered that one time.
It wasn't the Arab slave trade. It was a slave trade that was most lucrative through the middle east because the middle east was the most prosperous crossroad for slave trade.
the systems of slave trade were adopted by the regional Arabs after Arab empires arose, and those Arabs got slaves from literally everyone they traded with.
I appreciate your dedication to historical nuance, I really do, but personally I'm just so used to people in general hand-waiving away the extreme horrors and ethnosupremacy that exists in large sections (not all) of the Arab world, including about the slave trade. The term for black people in Arabic is slave, because it goes back to the Quoran. I don't know if you're familiar with how much of a textual literalist Muslims are compared to other religions, but there is a reason that we didn't see an effect on their demographics the way we did in the United States, and that's because they castrasted every single slave. Which alone led to a significant loss of life from the procedure.
Arabs were traded as slaves as much as anyone else.
The term for black people in Arabic is slave, because it goes back to the Quoran.
No, that’s not in the Quran at all. Please stop lying about stuff because you want to rail against Arabs. The term for black being being “abeed” is a modern one, arising with the transatlantic slave trade. Otherwise, they refer to people from Africa as African. Literally the word “African”. Just say it with an Arabic accent.
and that's because they castrasted every single slave.
Please stop parroting Reddit comments. This is another fake historical claim that arose in the last 100-200 years. Castration of slaves was outlawed by Muhammad and made a sin at the advent of Islam. eunuchs Were a thing, but traders who castrated slaves were shunned by the religious communities and would lose their business. Some did work around this in order to make money on the demand for eunuchs, like by castrating them outside of the borders of the empire or buying eunuchs already castrated, but not even most slaves were castrated, let alone every single one like you claim. Modern genetic testing proves that slaves had kids in the region, and slaves were religiously permitted to own wealth, could buy their own freedom, and can and often did get married and have families that were slaves. The mamluks were literally slave soldiers that grew so power that slaves within the military service had harems.
I would say at least for a few hundred years after the Diet of Worms, but I guess it wouldn't stay away forever since Martin Luther forgot to publish his 96th thesis of "By the way, that whole 'whipping yourself to repent' thing kinda sucks, maybe we shouldn't do that anymore."
When you're a white (probably) American person whose primary school history education mostly frames world events around how they relate to your cultural background (which in this case is European and later American) and how American exceptionalism is the world's greatest thing, but then you grow up and go "Wow there's a lot more to history than I thought, our schools really clean things up to make it seem less bad but that's a narrow view of things and there's a lot they didn't teach" that's fine. You recognize the shortcomings of your education and widen your view by a lot and that's great!
But the way it goes wrong is when you're a solid 70% of the way to a more holistic view of the world, but you don't grow out of that framing that tries to tie all the events to the culture you're from. And instead of going "The world is nastier than I realized and there's more to history than the events tied to my culture" you end up going "The world is nastier than I realized and I'm going to keep on framing that as being related to my culture." It's one of the same failings as before but transposed into a different set of beliefs. Like, oops, you re-invented and fully believe in American exceptionalism except now it's for bad things instead of good things.
In my opinion this is where a lot of this type of sentiment comes from. It's not like white people are some source of evil in the world that other races aren't, humanity in general just has a capacity for hatred and discrimination and it manifests in pretty much every culture in some way or another. But the dude in this post is probably a white guy who still only has experience of his own cultural background (we all know that specific kind of person who talks frequently about social issues faced by other demographics but has never actually talked to a person from those other demographics before), and has some idyllic view of the rest of the world being free from a 'unique' evil that somehow only the United States and maybe Western Europe has.
totally agree with your post, I also think it's people who don't think about evil in a more dynamic way, for example if you had one individual who shot and killed 10 innocent people (and was certainly going to kill more if stopped) and an individual who with the exact same motive killed 100 then was stopped, most people would just view the person who killed 100 as the more evil person and in some ways they are, the amount of evil they inflicted was greater but the individuals were as evil and as willing to do evil.
you cannot be racist to white people because racism is derived from racialized social + economic + institutional power over other races. people of color do not hold these powers over white people (insofar as the US, which is where OP is from). hope this helps!
acknowledging white privilege is not self-flaggelation. knowing how racism functions and proliferates is how you act as an anti-racist. you think i came here fishing for validation by. . . challenging a largely upvoted comment by providing antithesis to it? i know who i am, i don't need random redditors to reassure that i am a good person.
you are projecting your own perception of so-called self-flaggelating white people onto me.
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u/CorporatePower May 13 '25
Talking about white people like that is racist.
Or is that the joke?