goatsarah
Once again, seeing the whole, "Fediverse is full of Europeans who keep refusing to frame social justice issues strictly from the point of view of USians and this is definitely very problematic everyone!" thing.
And I can't help thinking, "Have you tried taking your cultural imperialism and shoving it up your arse? Maybe that will help?"
goatsarah
"But why can't you see racial issues through the precise lens of the US civil war and its aftermath and the North American social justice struggles of the 20th century while completely ignoring the impact of your own countries' 19th and 20th century colonial legacies, the status of European ethnic minorities, and the effects of reintegration after the Cold War? The fact that you have your own issues and perspectives is VERY PROBLEMATIC FOR ME, and I DO NOT LIKE IT!"
Diddums?
goatsarah
Guess fucking what? The societal norms of the US and refusal to consider that other perspectives may exist are pretty much utterly dominant in the moderation culture of every other English language social networking system.
Maybe it's OK to have, you know, just one where we don't all have to pretend to be you?
FeralRobots
@goatsarah One of the things I really enjoyed about it the first few months* was how many Europeans there were. I learned a lot just from having to adjust my frame to understand y'all's references.
_
*I limit it like that because I think there are just a lot more North Americans on here now.
goatsarah
goatsarah
Ailbhe
@goatsarah on the one hand, I agree, and on the other, there's always something funny when Brits complain about American cultural imperialism. Like a more harmless version of Irish people complaining about migration.
Nils H
@goatsarah Exactly this. I remember when iTunes would automatically name your albums when you ripped them all those years ago. I had an album by Talking Heads that was called [IMPORT], which illustrated perfectly how the United States is just the whole world to some people. The second example that sticks with me is seeing Brianna Ghey accused of white privilege in 2023. I love the US but some need to take a step back sometimes.
Sin Vega
@goatsarah I keep "fuck off back to idaho" on my clipboard. I don't even know what it means but it annoys them a lot so it must be doing some good
goatsarah
toolbear#🪧 votes Harris-Walz
@goatsarah
This is a subtoot about Kissane's subtoot about a white guy mansplaining racism to a Black women pointing out (correctly) how white and off putting the Fediverse currently is?
The criticism about my country's cultural hegemony is valid. But it feels like you're saying the EU's hands are clean on the racism and white supremacy front, which I'm sure isn't what you mean.
goatsarah
@MzAprilDaniels I would say more exasperated than upset.
After all, this is pretty much the one form of social networking where, if someone desperately needs to fuck the fuck off, you’re not necessarily risking a ban for saying so.
Mz. April Daniels
@goatsarah What in particular are you upset about, because I can't tell what kinds of behaviors you wish to cease.
goatsarah
Mz. April Daniels
@goatsarah But what exactly is it that exasperates you? Because you haven't been specific--I can't tell what you're talking about.
goatsarah
@MzAprilDaniels See the sign that says “free seppo tutoring”?
No?
Me neither.
Mz. April Daniels
@goatsarah I don't know why you're being so rude to me. I'm trying to understand the root of your complaint so I can be a better neighbor, and now you're being petty and snide. Did your mother not love you or something?
goatsarah
@toolbear See, that’s an example right there, “homogeneously white”, where the word “white” means a very specific thing to Americans in this context which you just go and assume has to have exactly the same cultural connotations to the rest of the world.
And then start using that assumption, or even assertion, to eg tell Roma people that they can’t possibly be victims of racism (and they very much are) because the experience of people ten thousand kilometres away is somehow more pertinent to their situation than their own.
It’s kinda like going to another country and remarking that it’s full of foreigners.
toolbear#🪧 votes Harris-Walz
@goatsarah
Because I wrote "But ____" when I usually try to avoid that because of how it can negate the prior statement…
Re-emphasizing that "fediverse feels homogenously white" and "USA cultural imperialism go fuck yourself" are both valid.
I said my thing. I'll move along.
mmu_man
@goatsarah I guess the funniest thing is when mericans first experienced another country applying their law to them with the GDPR… hey, you've been doing that for 80 years, let us have a try!
goatsarah
toolbear#🪧 votes Harris-Walz
@goatsarah
Hard disagree. White supremacy isn't an exclusive export from my country.
You keep decentering a complaint from a Black woman. That's what I most disliked and why I spoke up originally.
goatsarah
@toolbear I mean, that was your assumption. I’m complaining about a generalised phenomenon however; specifically, how on earth does someone come onto a forum, note very publicly that it’s predominantly populated by non Americans, and in the same breath decide that the best way to navigate this specific dynamic is through the precise prism of USA race relations?
You’re literally doing it now, and it’s apparently so ingrained that you aren’t even aware that you’re doing it now. You’re seeing a room full of mostly Europeans talking to other Europeans and deciding that the most important thing we need to bear in mind is your specific cultural sensitivities.
You don’t appear to give a shit about ours though.
pkboi
goatsarah
@pkboi I mean, the whole thing about race is that it’s a social construct and the boundaries of what constitutes it are set according to the underlying social structure of each society.
But Americans literally can’t comprehend, despite their last 150 years of history shaping it utterly profoundly, that other places draw lines in different places.
As far as they seem to be concerned, there are “white people” and “PoC”, and that’s it.
The mental gymnastics they then perform to contextualise things like the Northern Ireland situation, racial discrimination against travellers and Roma, the literal Holocaust, and shoehorn them into their specific narrative are something to behold.
goatsarah
@jay You’re very good at reading what you want and ignoring the rest to in order to be another tedious wanker half way round the world telling us that we don’t understand our own social dynamics and modern history, aren’t you?
*plonk* for you. Toodles.
Jay Blanc
@goatsarah I struggled to understand what you meant by all this. And then I read your further replies on your site where you bring up Roma, and I have this to say.
Please do not use Roma as a way to say "White people suffer racism too!"
Traditionally, Roma were not treated or classified as White People. Some of us can pass as 'White', and many had to in order to flee Fascism. But Roma as a people were not considered 'White People'. See for example how Australia treated Roma immigrants.
Jay Blanc
@goatsarah Not to distract from "'Black Lives Matter' focus is American Imperialism being imposed on Europeans" is a nuclear bad take. You might, for instance, remember that we have just as many Problematic Statues, because the slave trade and the systemic generational racism it created did not start and end in the Southern United States.
LN :anarchoheart3:
@jay @goatsarah While I agree with her take somewhat, I also think this is extremely easy to miss for us Europeans. Yes, the boundaries of whiteness are not identical in Europe (e.g. the ironic "discrimination" against Italians is funny to Americans but less funny in places like Germany where they are seen as non-white) but that doesn't mean the mode of discrimination doesn't exist here. Our understanding of whiteness is more balkanized but it's still there and at the core of this oppression and anti-Blackness is widespread even if there may be fewer Black people around.
Heck, despite the racism against Eastern Europeans it's trivial to see the difference in how e.g. Germany treats white Ukrainian refugees compared to how it treats brown refugees. There was literally a public discourse around how the existing shelters were undignified and inadequate for Ukrainians when they were apparently perfectly sufficient for Syrians and North Africans.
Yes, whiteness is a social construct but it's also defined by exclusion. It's not literally about skin color, it just often aligns with it. But as the recent cases of Latino/Hispanic white supremacist violence in the US have shown, this complexity is not unique to the US.
As for Europe's history of colonialism: just because we were so racist we didn't want to bring most of the slaves to Europe that doesn't mean we heavily promoted slavery and benefitted from it. Just look at Belgian rubber plantations to see how much pain this caused.
You can't export social justice discourse 1 to 1 from the US to Europe but that doesn't mean it doesn't apply. It's not an exact match but it doesn't require many adjustments. We're just leagues behind when it comes to reflecting on our history of these issues. That's not something to be proud of and it's not the fault of the US.
goatsarah
@alan @jay Ah, but if you don’t export it 1:1 then you’re just saying “you can be racist against white people too”, apparently, because nuance is the enemy when someone has a nice simple binary categorisation system.
Like, growing up a lot of my extended family members were racist as fuck. A lot of it absolutely was about skin colour, but an awful lot wasn’t too, and when someone is desperate to tell you that, “no, your experiences were wrong, because that doesn’t fit how I see the world”, then they can just go away.
hypolite
goatsarah
: j@fabrica:~/src; :t_blink:
@goatsarah @pkboi This is the same for USian native/tribal issues, Hispanic issues too. Eg, the 1619 Project minimizes much older systemic racism that still affects tribal treaties. We ignore the significant differences between Cubans, Mexicans, Guatemalans.
I’m pretty sure most folks here still think Sunni-Shia violence is just because middle easterners Hate Freedom, ignoring centuries of history, Iranian and Pakistan funded militant groups.
(((o))) Acoustic Mirror
@goatsarah Do you think there's some way we can get the gringos to move over to Blsky or something? They'd be so much happier there. A proper, USian company. No Europeans. No weird memes. No other languages. Nobody talking about places in the world you've never heard about. It would be perfect.
Henrik Millinge Sørensen 🇩🇰
@goatsarah Being danish I couldn't agree more.
sll - Macron destitution.
@MzAprilDaniels Oui, il y a ça aussi. Le refus obtus des dominants de comprendre un langage simple, clair et structuré. @goatsarah
pmroman 🇪🇺
@goatsarah I lived over 3 decades in the US. Racial dynamics, relations and history are very different in the US and Europe, even terminology differs considerably. It's very hard for most US and European folks to understand each other on most social (not just racial) issues.
goatsarah
@pmroman The first time I went to the US, I experienced massive culture shock. Sharing a language, I expected far more cultural compatibility but what I found just felt so very foreign, far more so than any European country I’ve visited even when I don’t speak a word of the local language.
It was quite the wake-up call.
goatsarah
dada
@goatsarah Try to stay focus on toots in French. It's the best way to avoid US-way-of-life :troll:
Goth'n'Bass
@goatsarah Thankyou for saying this out loud. I've been thinking it for a while, though long before coming here.
Flore
@goatsarah it's also "how dare you using software / Network that was not invented by us (i.e. in the silicon valley)?"
localzuk
@goatsarah this is exactly the issue I've had for a long time. The arguments for changing how Mastodon works, how it is moderated, etc, are seemingly mostly from Americans that are trying to frame everything from a US perspective. It's infuriating.
There's more Europeans than Americans, surely we can have one place which suits us more than them?
Niclas Hedhman
From Snatch; "You people spawned this language. How come none of you can speak it?" (from memory, so could be off a bit)
Aral Balkan
@goatsarah It’s the colonial mindset. I truly believe it is almost impossible for an American to conceive of the world as separate from America. There’s America, there are the friendly Disneyland states you visit to be entertained by the curious displays of the Almost-Americans, and then there are the Brown people ghettos you bomb (with a suitably diverse military, of course)…
As I watched an American tell a Brit once: “Accent? I don’t have an accent… you have an accent!”
Steve Lord
@goatsarah @MzAprilDaniels after an exasperating session of <<looks at entire thread>> I am stealing this specific toot to save time when dealing with sceptic septics. Thankyou for your service, as they say in the land of the free from nuance.
goatsarah
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