List of white nationalist fallacies
May 30, 2018 8:31:29 GMT -4
Hypso The Musky Rat-Kangaroo likes this
Post by Gotlander on May 30, 2018 8:31:29 GMT -4
I completely agree and I see this argument mainly from nationalist Central and Eastern Europeans. It's funny how they think they get this pass on being racists. There's then the other extreme coming from the other spectrum (I agree with many post-colonial theories but not the more extreme ones) where they claim every "white" person, be it a Moldovan or British person, is responsible for paying for past colonial sins. Basically in their eyes a poor Moldovan person is 100% more privileged than a middle class person that happens to come from a non-European country. Arguments like these are quite North America-centric where "white" is more commonly used but has spread to Europe too thanks to social media and American academic text dealing with critical race theory.
The point is, much of Europe is simply off their radar or they don't know it even exists. So of course they won't think about how "white privilege" applies to Belarus or Moldova or Slovenia. It's not just "Eastern Europe" either, when I was there talking to people I was surprised how many people had never heard of Denmark. Namedropping Oslo, Copenhagen or Helsinki just resulted in an endless amount of blank faces. My Portuguese-Canadian friend living in Ontario told me he often has to correct people that Portugal is in fact, in Europe, and not in Latin America.
I am not calling people from North America ignorant unfairly btw. Many people from Europe are equally ignorant about not only countries and regions of the world outside of Europe, but even countries inside of Europe. For example, I met one German couple in Berlin who had never heard of Latvia. My mom told me a story about when she returned to Sweden from a trip to Finland in the 1970's, a coworker asked her how the trip was and if they also drank milk and celebrated Christmas in Finland.