show transcript
chirasul posted:
my only advice is to BE CAREFUL posting about holiday traditions around europeans. you’ll post something casual like “anyone else watch the old Grinch movie every year? what a classic” and a european will appear as if summoned and say some shit like “funny how USAmericans always CONVENIENTLY forget that Not Everyone On Earth is from The USA……… no of COURSE we dont watch ‘the grunch’ or whatever the fuck that is…. our tradition is to attend a community showing of Glummdorf the Racial Stereotype”
themainspoon replies with screenshots of several tumblr tags and comments:
riseupriseupandcomealong:
my mom’s (american) class tried doing a language exchange thing w a sister school in spain and they decided to send each other boxes of gifts for christmas. the spanish class made remarks about oh christmas in the usa is so commercialized we have ~real traditions~ here and then my mom opened a box full of blackface dolls and blackface doll ornaments and blackface clothespins in front of her students
raygender:
Did once have a Dutch woman
vehemently defend the Festive Christmas Blackface by repeating "it’s different in Europe” with increasing desperation until she was crying. Literally all anybody else present did was just like, calmly say they were uncomfortable with the practice and not change her mind when she wailed about it.
monkey-mulch:
you bring up rudolph the red nosed reindeer and they bring out Skimbo the filthy redskin and im barely even joking about that they actually had this thing called indian plays in both soviet countries and germany
themainspoon:
European children waiting patiently on Hatemas Eve for Racism Claus to slur down the chimney and segregate all of their presents by colour.
Which European country was it that added a loophole to their constitution to allow slavery as punishment then manipulated their legal system to lock a third of black men up again? I forget.
“my culture can’t have racist elements because your culture is racister!”
truly a smackdown, i am humbled.
Imagine being from the UK and thinking it is some superior country. You’re literally a top contender for the worst group of human beings to have ever existed.
I personally don’t think the sins of the father pass to the son, because that’s what stupid assholes who haven’t developed second order thought think, so maybe consider refering to the nation as a concept instead of every living or dead Brit.
Ah, Europeans always love to hoist racism over Americans.
Forget stones, y’all have whole-ass machine guns in those glass houses.
I’m an American.
What the fuck is this thread? Americans can insult European racism, but a European can’t point out American racism?
I’m really glad we’re doing all that and this is your takeaway because that gives Europeans like yourself every excuse to do nothing. It’s okay for me to trip on this rake because somewhere an American is tripping on their rake harder.
You’re on a thread that’s effectively saying America doesn’t have racist traditions like Europe does. The comment above just calmly points out that we do, and some of it is part of our existing legal system. You don’t get to insult Europeans (in a way that seems to at least in part be made up) and then get angry when someone points out very legitimate real racism that actually effects a large number of people’s lives.
You’re on a thread that’s effectively saying America doesn’t have racist traditions like Europe does.
[citation needed]
this post is about holiday traditions specifically, like that’d the first sentence.
at no point did anyone say america isn’t racist.
believe it or not, every western culture is racist in some way to some group.
I paired down a much cruder response initially to just what you read because I thought about it and realized this was the case. I still find it disgusting to use whataboutism to ignore Europe’s racism. If your answer to is to shrug off your own country’s white supremacism because America is worse that’s bullshit. It isn’t as enlightened as you think it is.
Can we not try to avoid introspection into our own racism by talking about someone else’s racism please?
Yes, this is a fucked up thing. Why do you specifically bring it up under a post about European racism tho?
On the one hand, it’s bait.
On the other hand I don’t think the country that has formalised slavery and a culture of policing which views it’s own citizens as prey really has the right to dictate conversation on race relations.
In no other field would such failure be seen as authority. You wouldn’t pick a garage to fix your car because them accidentally destroying the most engines shows they’re experts.
I disagree strongly with this sentiment. If there was one garage that was destroying engines and another garage removing all the seatbelts, sure, maybe engine-estroying-garage has their own shit going on, but that doesn’t mean that their critisism of seatbelt-removing-garage is invalid.
You literally can’t talk about anything related to the US without Europeans whining. It really is hilarious and quite stupid in general.
Since Americans basically stole every tradition they have from someone else, I’m not gonna worry about their opinion on them :D
The US is a toddler when it comes to history and traditions. I drive by a church that was built in the year 900. That one’s actually called the ‘new church’ since it replaced one from the year 400. That’s history. And we’ve got traditions that go back centuries further.
Just because Americans prefer watered down, tame versions of our European traditions, doesn’t mean the rest of us are going to follow. Krampus, Sunneklaas, Sinterklaas and other traditions are here to stay.
No, even our traditions change.
Take Sinterklaas, the “blackface” wasn’t something negative. Those black Pete were respected by everyone. It wasn’t like the 1950 US television where blackface was used to represent dumb stereotypes of black people.
But even then, we Europeans see how it can be seen as something negative by certain groups, so to accommodate them they are being changed to soot Petes since they travel through chimneys.
I disagree strongly on the first point. Blackface was not percieved as negative by a lot of people because they had no awareness of it’s significance, but black pete has always been a racist stereotype. It’s not “oh, this is a character who happens to be black”, it’s “this thick-lipped gold-earring wearing pitch-black person with old-timey clothes is the servant of an old bisshop”.
This shit has always been fucked up. And we didn’t just make an easy decision to change them because some people were uncomfortable, people fought for that. And half of the people are still “bUt iTs jUsT a ChIlDrEnS hOlIdAy iS evErYthInG rAciSt tHEse DaYs?”
Bigotry is as old as time.
Bragging about how vintage your racism is isn’t impressive.
they actually had this thing called indian plays in both soviet countries and germany
Americans are so racist they have to fabricate nonexistent racist stuff elsewhere to feel better about their own racism. Impressive.
Germany literally has a children’s game called “Who’s Afraid of the Black Man”
I don’t wanna hear about Racism being a “uniquely American problem”
Cause it very clearly is not.
School shootings and medical debt however ARE “uniquely American problems”
That’s based on the black death, aka. the plague, hence the rules of the game.
We have enough rascist shit in our culture but this one isn’t :)
