The American media loves saying that, but does it really have a right to exist? Does an apartheid colonizing regime have the right to exist in someone else’s land?

  • Black AOC@lemmygrad.ml
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    1 year ago

    The differentiation is “can we trace your geneaology up to a slave owner, or further up to the pilgrim ships”. There’d need to be a party apparatus for this sort of records-checking; but I imagine in this day and age, there’s likely a technological solution for this that I’m not immediately landing on. Beyond that, I’m not above the idea of re-educating anyone who’s ever flagged themselves “Caucasian” on a federal census; but the priorities are ‘do you have slave-owner in your blood’.

    • ComradeSalad@lemmygrad.ml
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      1 year ago

      That does seem like a good criteria, but that is an extremely small and limited amount of people. Slave owners were by far concentrated in the South, and only the ultra-wealthy could afford to own slaves to begin with. It was only a 1-2 percent of people owning 95%+ of all slaves. As most free people in the South, white or black, were themselves near destitute and extremely poor.

      Plus records of that would be difficult to work with, yes a direct relative would be an easy find, but we would go after someone for their great great great great great uncle twice removed owning slaves?

      Also the Caucasian label is itself extremely tenuous, as you would catch the decent majority of slavs, turks, some arabs, Romani, and a whole hell of a lot of bizarre and “non-white” groups by going after the Caucasian label.

      Plus then you run into the problem of a decent chunk of people being mixed, meaning no single label would work well for them, or you could have a family where one partner could have had a slave owning ancestor, while their partner had a ancestor who was a slave, and one of their children is extremely dark, while one of their siblings could be much lighter, and then another that’s white as snow. There would be an absurd amount of unique scenarios you would have to grapple with, this is just one.

      • robot_dog_with_gun [they/them]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        That does seem like a good criteria, but that is an extremely small and limited amount of people. Slave owners were by far concentrated in the South, and only the ultra-wealthy could afford to own slaves to begin with. It was only a 1-2 percent of people owning 95%+ of all slaves. As most free people in the South, white or black, were themselves near destitute and extremely poor.

        people rented slaves, and for the purposes of this discussion, that should be at least partial credit for “owning”

        • ComradeSalad@lemmygrad.ml
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          1 year ago

          Sure, but how in the world would you ever prove that? I doubt less then 1 percent of the receipts from those transactions survived.

          • robot_dog_with_gun [they/them]@hexbear.net
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            1 year ago

            land ownership would be easier to find records for and is probably a decent proxy.

            if the other person’s “reeducate anyone who checked the caucasian box” idea is too extreme, maybe a compromise could be reeducation for anyone defending the use of confederate symbols.

            • ComradeSalad@lemmygrad.ml
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              1 year ago

              Yeah that last bits fine. But land ownership seems a bit extreme, again, just owning land doesn’t signify anything.

                • ComradeSalad@lemmygrad.ml
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                  1 year ago

                  No it fucking doesn’t? A random ass ancestor owning land isn’t something you can pin on a random person in the modern day.

                  What does that signify? Plus like I mentioned before, the vast majority are dirt poor subsistence farmers playing with second rate dirt while mega plantations owned by the bourgeoisie hog hundreds of square miles of prime land that’s operated by literal slaves. Those subsistence farmers aren’t really the vanguard of the settler colonial force.

                  But imagine someone came up to you today and said, “Well it seems like one of your ancestors 250 years ago simply existed in a settler colonial area, even though they were dirt fucking poor, and we don’t have any evidence or documentation. Prepare for reeducation!” I’m sure you’d love that?

      • Black AOC@lemmygrad.ml
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        1 year ago

        Is it such a sin to want to see those who self-identify a certain way educated on the baggage they’ve associated themselves with? You raise fair points on the concept of mixed families; but beyond that, while self-identification is fine and all, I see a use case for the education.

        • ComradeSalad@lemmygrad.ml
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          1 year ago

          But its not really “self-identification”, its not really a personal choice is it? You can’t just self-identify as another ethnicity, race, or background, and most people don’t give theirs a second thought.

          Education should just be done overall. I just don’t see the point in otherizing and targeting certain groups on factors such as race, sexuality, ethnicity, or background, barring other overt reasons. I’m definitely not defending racist white chuds and they’re the first ones that could use reeducation, but it just feels like belief and views should be a primary concern. I’ve met plenty of gusanos, extremely out of touch extremely wealthy minorities, and people with racist families who grew beyond that. It just feels the main separator is class and education more then anything.

          Again, going back to it, dividing a clean cut colonizer and colonized just seems to be near impossible in the United States. It feels like other factors should be taken into account first.

          • renownedballoonthief@lemmygrad.ml
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            1 year ago

            I fully agree, and I feel the logic follows that the only actual path to peace for Israel/Palestine is a sort of de-Balkanization, a one-state solution where the one state in question can’t be Israel or Palestine.

            • Black AOC@lemmygrad.ml
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              1 year ago

              Naive. It is naive to think that the Zionists won’t take and take and take until they’re all that is left– exactly in the example of the crackers. Colonialism is a cancer, and your treatment plan is to just let it ravage the region-- and if this is really the only path of peace, then maybe the conflict deserves to flare up from the Palestinian side, with just as little mercy as the Zionists show them.

              • renownedballoonthief@lemmygrad.ml
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                1 year ago

                I feel like this admittedly old but still very relevant piece by Edward Said makes some good points. Notably:

                What exists now is a disheartening, not to say, bloody, impasse. Zionists in and outside Israel will not give up on their wish for a separate Jewish state; Palestinians want the same thing for themselves, despite having accepted much less from Oslo. Yet in both instances, the idea of a state for ‘‘ourselves’’ simply flies in the face of the facts: short of ethnic cleansing or ‘‘mass transfer,’’ as in 1948, there is no way for Israel to get rid of the Palestinians or for Palestinians to wish Israelis away. Neither side has a viable military option against the other, which, I am sorry to say, is why both opted for a peace that so patently tries to accomplish what war couldn’t.

                and

                The beginning is to develop something entirely missing from both Israeli and Palestinian realities today: the idea and practice of citizenship, not of ethnic or racial community, as the main vehicle for coexistence. In a modern state, all its members are citizens by virtue of their presence and the sharing of rights and responsibilities. Citizenship therefore entitles an Israeli Jew and a Palestinian Arab to the same privileges and resources. A constitution and a bill of rights thus become necessary for getting beyond Square 1 of the conflict because each group would have the same right to self-determination; that is, the right to practice communal life in its own (Jewish or Palestinian) way, perhaps in federated cantons, with a joint capital in Jerusalem, equal access to land and inalienable secular and juridical rights. Neither side should be held hostage to religious extremists.

                • Black AOC@lemmygrad.ml
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                  1 year ago

                  Do you think it possible for the brutalized to live in peace with the people that brutalized them? That cheered brutalizing them? Especially in the same generation that the brutalized were being entirely destroyed? You too, cosign letting cancer ravage the region.