stirringwinds:

Although I have seen disturbing things where they try and insist European victims of genocide like Ashkenazim or Bosnians were “POC” (re: Jewish people, many may not see themselves as “white”- even if some do- so I feel like you can’t really say they’re ALL “POC” either because it’s kind of reductionist still)- it’s more like some of these bloggers completely forget about Japanese war crimes. Or the crimes of Ottoman Turkey during the Armenian genocide. Or Pol Pot’s Cambodia. Or the Taliban’s massacre of the Hazara ethnic group in Afghanistan. Some of these blogs rail against colonialism but don’t even talk much about much more recent crimes committed by non-white people.

I mean…saying “White people” globally are the sole and most important cause of oppression just doesn’t compute in my mind. 

• When it is GERMANY who has apologised most extensively for the WW2 crimes, not Japan. where you have Japanese PMs deliberately going to the Yasukuni Shrine where Class A war criminals are enshrined. I hold no ill will to normal Japanese. I think it is extremely senseless how many civilians died in the atomic bombings. BUT, the Japanese government is awful for refusing to acknowledge all their crimes during WW2. It’s like…imagine if huge amounts of “white people” were insisting slavery in the US didn’t even happen. Horrible right, when your family KNOWS it happened because they were slaves?

One should only laugh at “white people” claiming they face racism if it is a white American complaining about how there are so many immigrants or threatened by the fact that Spanish is being adopted as an official language in some parts of the US. Or a European Neo-Nazi calling multiculturalism “white genocide”.

• BUT, when it is “white people” (i.e people racialised as “white” by the American gaze) talking about actual hate crimes and genocide, none of us should be laughing and saying “white tears”. I get angry when people try to insist that “white people” cannot face racism in the world because they are so stuck in their UScentric “White vs POC” view of the world. I have SEEN racism against Polish people in Western Europe. Like…yes, I very obviously have non-European ancestry but I can see in the UK, I tend to get “Othered” less because my English is good, because I am not a migrant worker- compared to the Lithuanian woman who cleaned the hotel room when I stayed with my mother in London. 

• Saying “well but these white people were oppressed by other white people” doesn’t make a lick of sense either. Did the “whiteness” (by US standards) of many Ashkenazi Jewish people give them any privilege in Hitler’s Germany? The Bosnians? You cannot treat “white people” as a homogenous label when they didn’t exist as one in the place where they were murdered. I could otherwise say “Oh a lot of oppression in Asia is just Asians oppressing each other” regarding the Indian caste system, crimes against Afghan ethnic minorities, the Burmans oppressing the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar…or the Japanese war crimes against the Chinese in WW2. I could then say the Rwandan genocide was just “Africans killing each other”.

Wrong right? Because it underplays the virulent racism that existed, that evolved into the mentality that these people were not human anymore even though they shared your skin colour. Racism based on skin-tone is just one reason people will use to oppress or murder others and privileging skin tone as the most important factor, that “but it was other white people”- trivialises other serious forms of racism and discrimination that were based on culture, history, geopolitics or religion.