white people are racist by default (in the united states as well as other countries). are you white? congrats, you’re racist, and here’s the explanation:
you grew up in a racist society -> you were socialized to be racist thanks to racism being a dominant ideology -> you benefit from racism -> you’re racist no matter how much u think you’re not.
unlearning it is going to be a constant battle and u will never unlearn it fully. accept this. it is ingrained in you as a result of your upbringing and the media you’ve consumed. the sooner you come to terms with your own racism, the sooner u can better yourself. recognize the problem in yourself instead of setting yourself apart from those “other” white people.
I fux heavy with the White people who keep putting this post on my dash
This applies to all social structures by the way.
You’re a man? You grew up benefitting from sexism. You’re straight? You grew up with homophobic ideals. You’re cis? You grew up with transphobic ideals. You’re able bodied? You grew up with ableist tendencies.
The process of unlearning all of the ideology you were surrounded by is what activism is about. Do it.
Among the smartest and longest lived animals we can ever hope to interact with and it was willing to learn this stupid trick to amuse its human friend.
“If you give children a vocabulary that’s large enough and complex enough to express their emotions and their ideas, you give them access to complex feelings and emotions in themselves. So that if you talk to a teenager and all they can say about how they feel is BAD, and they haven’t got, you know, a larger vocabulary for lonely, abused, insecure, frightened…I mean there’s this huge panoply which…I remember when my daughter was just telling me that she just felt bad, I bought her a thesaurus. I said, “Look up, is it sort of over lonely, or is it insecure…and look up under lonely, you’ll find two hundred words for lonely. Which one?” But what that does is that it makes you feel that there’s this huge complexity of emotions and there are words for all of them. If you want children to feel less frustrated and less disenfranchised and less unable to even feel comfortable with their own emotions, you’ll have to give them a vocabulary that’s as complicated as their inner lives. And one of the things we see in children is this incredibly reduced capacity for reporting their inner lives to the exterior world. One of the things is just teaching them poems, just teaching them to memorize poems in school, they don’t have to interpret them, if they just internalize the language of the poem, the complexity of the emotion in the poems…” –Jorie Graham, in a conversation
“Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought.” — George Orwell, 1984
For those who don’t know and don’t want to click thru to find out: Jonas Salk is the reason we in North America no longer live in terror of polio. He also refused to patent or profit from his vaccine. He also spent the last years of his life researching a vaccine for AIDS, long before that was cool and back when a lot of people were secretly hoping it really would just kill all the gays. So you’re damn right people applauded and gave free upgrades.
Reblogging again because this time I did click through, and because of the times in which we live: Jonas Salk was Jewish, and the child of immigrants.
What’s really wild is that the native people literally told the Europeans “they walked” when asked how the statues were moved. The Europeans were like “lol these backwards heathens and their fairy tales guess it’s gonna always be a mystery!”
Maori told Europeans that kiore were native rats and no one believed them until DNA tests proved it
Roopkund Lake AKA “Skeleton Lake” in the Himalayas in India is eerie because it was discovered with hundreds of skeletal remains and for the life of them researchers couldn’t figure out what it was that killed them. For decades the “mystery” went unsolved.
Until they finally payed closer attention to local songs and legend that all essentially said “Yah the Goddess Nanda Devi got mad and sent huge heave stones down to kill them”. That was consistent with huge contusions found all on their neck and shoulders and the weather patterns of the area, which are prone to huge & inevitably deadly goddamn hailstones. https://www.facebook.com/atlasobscura/videos/10154065247212728/
Literally these legends were past down for over a thousand years and it still took researched 50 to “figure out” the “mystery”. 🙄
Adding to this, the Inuit communities in Nunavut KNEW where both the wrecks of the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror were literally the entire time but Europeans/white people didn’t even bother consulting them about either ship until like…last year.
“Inuit traditional knowledge was critical to the discovery of both ships, she pointed out, offering the Canadian government a powerful demonstration of what can be achieved when Inuit voices are included in the process.
In contrast, the tragic fate of the 129 men on the Franklin expedition hints at the high cost of marginalising those who best know the area and its history.
“If Inuit had been consulted 200 years ago and asked for their traditional knowledge – this is our backyard – those two wrecks would have been found, lives would have been saved. I’m confident of that,” she said. “But they believed their civilization was superior and that was their undoing.”
“Oh yeah, I heard a lot of stories about Terror, the ships, but I guess Parks Canada don’t listen to people,” Kogvik said. “They just ignore Inuit stories about the Terror ship.”
Schimnowski said the crew had also heard stories about people on the land seeing the silhouette of a masted ship at sunset.
“The community knew about this for many, many years. It’s hard for people to stop and actually listen … especially people from the South.”
Indigenous Australians have had stories about giant kangaroos and wombats for thousands of years, and European settlers just kinda assumed they were myths. Cut to more recently when evidence of megafauna was discovered, giant versions of Australian animals that died out 41 000 years ago.
Similarly, scientists have been stumped about how native Palm trees got to a valley in the middle of Australia, and it wasn’t until a few years ago that someone did DNA testing and concluded that seeds had been carried there from the north around 30 000 years ago… aaand someone pointed out that Indigenous people have had stories about gods from the north carrying the seeds to a valley in the central desert.
it’s literally the oldest accurate oral history of the world.
Now consider this: most people consider the start of recorded history to be with the Sumerians and the Early Dynastic period of the Egyptians. So around 3500 BCE, or five and a half thousand years ago
These highly accurate Aboriginal oral histories originate from twenty thousand years ago at least
Ain’t it amazing what white people consider history and what they don’t?
I always said disservice is done to oral traditions and myth when you take them literally. Ancient people were not stupid.
QueerGalaxies 