frislander: large-angry-ground-squirrel: lananiscorner: capaldicious: johnskylar: jenniferrpovey: op

frislander: large-angry-ground-squirrel: lananiscorner: capaldicious: johnskylar: jenniferrpovey: ophiliae: cookiemonstahz: adventuresinlearning: and we are still fighting over minimum wage And america tries to act so high and mighty. America needs to sit down and learn a thing or two from these other countries. YOUTH PARLIAMENT?! HECK YA! I like the youth parliament idea, implemented at the local level. A youth county board, as it were. Give kids a say in their own community and they might actually be able to improve it. I also think it might be an interesting idea for every school board to have a student representative, high school age. Oh, I think I know the reason! Nearly everyone is white and everyone benefits from a history of colonialist exploitation Nearly everyone is white and everyone benefits from a history of colonialist exploitation Return to #1. Plus they have a lot of refineries for Russian and Norse oil. Literally these countries are SO white that they don’t even track the percentage of ethnic and racial minorities because the numbers are too small. When you’re a monoculture it’s a hell of a lot easier to pretend your politics are about helping others, because everyone is like you. I’m so tired of tumblr holding up Scandinavian countries as utopias. Ex-fucking-cuse me. “Nearly everyone is white and everyone benefits from a history of colonialist exploitation.” Research wouldn’t hurt. You might want to know that up until 1917, Finland was not a country of its own but fully under Russian rule. Before that, under Swedish rule. Before 1860, the year we were made mostly autonomous, we were basically a colony ourselves with no right to govern our own regions, collect our own taxes or have a say in Sweden’s or Russia’s politics. Our language and culture was looked down upon. The ethnically Finnish population was poor, oppressed and pretty much entirely without say in anything regarding our own country. Up until 1902 Finnish wasn’t even an official language in Finland, and even after that Russian was the official language of our parliament until we finally became independent. And if you want some slavery and strife, of course there have been things like Isoviha: Russians invaded Finland (which belonged to Sweden at the time), slaughtered tons of Finns and shipped about 20 000 of us off to become slaves. For contrast, our population was only 350 000 at the time. The Swedes just sorta shrugged and went “Not our problem”, since, you know, we weren’t Swedes. Then Pikkuviha, another period of Russian invasion. How about the first and second Sortokausi? Even the name means “era of oppression”. The Russians decided that Finland had it too well and started to forcefully suppress Finnish nationalist movements, shipping people off to Siberia, replacing Finnish officials with Russian ones, making Russian the only official language in Finland - basically trying to destroy the Finnish culture and fully integrate Finland into Russia. So I’d hardly say that we benefited from colonialist exploitation. So yeah, sure, we’re white. But it doesn’t fucking matter because we never have lived in a country where whiteness was never of any benefit. In Finland (and most of Europe anyways) being oppressed has always had everything to do with your ethnicity instead of the colour of your skin. We never had a single colony, we never invaded a single country, slavery has always been illegal here - even when we were a part of Russia where slavery was common. Sure, we have less than 1% of PoC - but please tell me why the fuck does that matter? It didn’t save us from being a god damn colony. And of course I left out shit like the eradication of our native religion but hey, we’re white so it doesn’t matter anyway right? It must be lovely to sit on your high horse there in the USA and think you know a single thing about the racial and/or cultural dynamics in Europe. Just because the crackers of your precious country fucked up doesn’t mean that you get the right to shit on minorities (population of Finland: 5 000 000. Contrast that with the USA) and ignore the rapid developement of Finland from pretty much nothing, a country 100% dependent on agriculture and wood, to one of the world’s most educated, most liberal, most egalitarian and most technologically advanced countries in less than 100 years. And all of this without benefiting from “third-world” countries or colonies, without by wars or conquest, without by aggressive foreign policies. Unlike the fucking USA. Fuck you & do your research. All good points on Finland, but I want to point out this sentence in particular: In Finland (and most of Europe anyways) being oppressed has always had everything to do with your ethnicity instead of the colour of your skin.  This is so goddamn true. I think US Americans sometimes forget that Europe is not one country made of federal states, but a continent made of individual countries, most of which have very long and complicated histories full of individual cultural traditions. If you look at the European map, it’s not drawn with a ruler and a pencil. Our borders are full of curves and twists, many of which follow natural borders (rivers, mountain ranges, etc.) and were hard fought for by the individual cultural groups that lived there. Also, “percentage of POC” is not really a good metric for tracking racism, at least not in Europe. I come from a part of Europe that had next to 0% of black people until about thirty years ago, because we lived on the East/communist side of the iron curtain. You know what we did have lots of? Polish, Russian, Yugoslavian, Hungarian, and Vietnamese people. Four out of those five groups are white, but damn if I wasn’t raised with a ton of thinly veiled racism towards those groups that took me years to shake. Incidentally, I also think this is why Europeans and Americans often butt heads when it comes to the topic of racism. From what I’ve experienced when talking to Americans, in the US, racism tends to be defined as a systemic oppression of people of color. In Europe, pretty much everyone I’ve ever met considers racism any kind of belief that one race is better than another and the consequent prejudice and discrimination against people of certain color and/or ethnicity, no matter whether you’re part of the majority/minority in your country. are we just going to ignore the fact that that person called Finland a “monoculture” and said that ethnic minorities are too small to track, as though the Sámi and Swedish minorities don’t exist Also it wasn’t so long ago that America also saw ethnicity-based racism against “other white people” like the Irish and the Italians. Bigotry sees no colour, and indeed in some places it can even work the opposite way to how Americans might expect - in the part of England where I’m from, social attitudes to white Traveller communities are if anything worse than to people of different skin colours. Another thing that characterises the situation in Europe is that it is significantly more characterised by xenophobia than by racism per se - that’s how you get things like how POC are told to “go back to Africa/India/wherever” even if they’e spent their entire lives in Britain/France/Germany etc., because the bigoted European constructs anyone who does not fit into their conception of how some  who inhabits their nation should look/behave/etc., and therefore even if you’re white you still are stigmatised if, say, you’re Pole living in the UK. This even happens if you’re a minority that’s indigenous to the region, e.g. the Sami. Now you do still get stuff that could come under racism in the American understanding, however even this comes in a different form. In Europe, racism against POC is a lot more like how it was a century or so ago, i.e. we still have things like bananas being thrown at black football players to monkey noise chants, which afaict you don’t get in America. On average I don’t think Europe is any less bigoted than America, however the distribution of that bigotry across groups is substantially different and has somewhat different motivations. -- source link

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