White Privilege's Good Old Days Narrative Perpetuates Racism. Because, Of Course It Does. [View all]

[Soph0571]

That is the POINT. They love power. They love control. They desperately want to retain domination of his- story.


(as seen on the interwebs - do not know who wrote it)

All of this.

It is the same way the male pale and stale love to talk about how GB led the fight to end slavery - choosing to ignore the fact that the trans-Atlantic slave trade was seeded and perpetuated by us before America was America and the Empire was built on slavery before Wilberforce got indignant about it and forced the hand of the establishment - that had already been made rich on the back of Empire and slavery.

The winner gets to write the narrative right? And white patriarchy has written the story for the last millennia. In some ways it is hardly surprising that the self entitled racist wanker righties have a sad on about CRT etc. The rest of society is demanding that they hand over the pen of history, so that wider voices are as valued in both a historical and present day context as the gammons are. It is asking them to expose themselves to the truth of who and what white male privilege looks like - and that is some ugly shit - actual history tells us so.

As Moira Donegan put it in an article for the Guardian entitled What the moral panic about ‘critical race theory’ is about

For Republicans, the preferred narrative of race and American history is one that minimizes the harm done to Black people, overstates white virtue and insists that racism is a personal prejudice in the minds of misguided or amoral people, rather than a system that structures cultures and institutions. Racism was a problem, this story tells us (with an emphasis on the past tense) because some white people made an error; it’s not a problem any more, because those white people have been edified.
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Maybe this is part of what Republicans don’t like about these versions of anti-racist thought: they remove white people, and white people’s feelings, from the center of the story.

After all, when racism is merely a personal idiosyncrasy, and not a systemic condition, nothing is required of white people, or of the institutions they control, except to deny that they feel hate in their hearts. But if racism is a foundational reality, and not just a personal prejudice, then much bigger changes have to be made – and more is required of white people than personal innocence.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jun/17/critical-race-theory-republicans-moira-donegan]
Emphasis mine

White folks have work to do and one thing we know about right wing male white privilege - working for the betterment of other has never been a strong point. Heh.