Phew, thank you for this. Hits home. I feel like I encounter this all the time, and it's so frustrating. I want to have conversations about this, explore where to go and what to do about it as a white European, and also share my own fear and discomfort and pain, but many tend to shoot the conversation down with these escape hatches. The ones I encountered most often are "the world simply isn't fair", and "capitalism is still the least bad of all evils", "humans just are this way" and "you should consider yourself lucky not to live in worse times than these".
Yes I feel you. Part of my frustration also. I actually have a loooooooong list of these pseudo-smart (aka deflective) comments, remarks and answers. They all come from to the same collective frightened psyche. We can do better as a cultures and as humans. Again, like I say in the article… not about individual guilt but all about collective responsibility!
for my own thinking of how to communicate parts of this -- i'm starting to see how modernity and whiteness are more like the furniture in house that shapes experience/desire -- rather than just systems or stories or institutions (like profit, violence, capitalism, or empire). what makes discussing the furniture so hard is that it re-designs itself to accommodate the rooms and critiques of modernity and whiteness -- to seem like responsiveness and yet to change nothing at all. if the call for relationality feels like a threat, then that speaks to how deep the severed identity/culture is -- imo.
Yes i hear you, particularly on the unchanging part. I do feel it. Borrowing from Vanessa Andreotti and so many others there is the ongoing “event” of neurocolonization, which brings all this to the body, neuro chemicals and hormonal responses. So the change might need to modify the house itself. I usually write for/from/with (tentative fabulations) under the floorboards.
Thank you for this article. And indeed: in the same way that responsibility is relational, the "We didn't invent" device is intended to close conversations by fracturing relationships. But because the relationships are real, such a rhetorical device can only ever distract.
Thanks for this insightful piece, Sofia. My mum uses the innocent universalist 'discursive escape hatch' all the time and I never know how to counter it.
Yes it is indeed very common. Although we didn’t invent colonialism we (Europeans) did create chattel slavery (where someone born from enslaved parents would remain enslaved for life, and so on; keeping people locked into brutal lives) and also the sheer magnitude of the whole enslavement enterprise is way beyond anything done before. These two violent “details” change everything if we want to remain “historically accurate” instead of going for excuses all the time.
Phew, thank you for this. Hits home. I feel like I encounter this all the time, and it's so frustrating. I want to have conversations about this, explore where to go and what to do about it as a white European, and also share my own fear and discomfort and pain, but many tend to shoot the conversation down with these escape hatches. The ones I encountered most often are "the world simply isn't fair", and "capitalism is still the least bad of all evils", "humans just are this way" and "you should consider yourself lucky not to live in worse times than these".
Yes I feel you. Part of my frustration also. I actually have a loooooooong list of these pseudo-smart (aka deflective) comments, remarks and answers. They all come from to the same collective frightened psyche. We can do better as a cultures and as humans. Again, like I say in the article… not about individual guilt but all about collective responsibility!
for my own thinking of how to communicate parts of this -- i'm starting to see how modernity and whiteness are more like the furniture in house that shapes experience/desire -- rather than just systems or stories or institutions (like profit, violence, capitalism, or empire). what makes discussing the furniture so hard is that it re-designs itself to accommodate the rooms and critiques of modernity and whiteness -- to seem like responsiveness and yet to change nothing at all. if the call for relationality feels like a threat, then that speaks to how deep the severed identity/culture is -- imo.
Yes i hear you, particularly on the unchanging part. I do feel it. Borrowing from Vanessa Andreotti and so many others there is the ongoing “event” of neurocolonization, which brings all this to the body, neuro chemicals and hormonal responses. So the change might need to modify the house itself. I usually write for/from/with (tentative fabulations) under the floorboards.
Thank you for this article. And indeed: in the same way that responsibility is relational, the "We didn't invent" device is intended to close conversations by fracturing relationships. But because the relationships are real, such a rhetorical device can only ever distract.
You are right! Although here it became an institutional distraction…
Thanks for this insightful piece, Sofia. My mum uses the innocent universalist 'discursive escape hatch' all the time and I never know how to counter it.
Yes it is indeed very common. Although we didn’t invent colonialism we (Europeans) did create chattel slavery (where someone born from enslaved parents would remain enslaved for life, and so on; keeping people locked into brutal lives) and also the sheer magnitude of the whole enslavement enterprise is way beyond anything done before. These two violent “details” change everything if we want to remain “historically accurate” instead of going for excuses all the time.