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Originally Posted by knightofalbion
Something obviously lost in translation.
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It will be lost to persons of the dominant culture because the dominant culture invented race. They did so by writing a huge discourse on the physical attributes of 'other' peoples and their intellectual and moral capacity. If you are familiar with Said, he used the term 'orientalism' to describe how Western cultures described races in order to define themselves as superior in opposition to the inferior races of the East. This concocted human taxonomy was used to justify eurocentric colonisation of the world and the subjugation of indigenous populations... A person of this fabricated privilege would deny their own racism, but racism isn't only intentional acts of prejudice, it's a society that systematically and institutionally works to privilege euro-centricity to the disadvantage of ethic minorities. As white people (the privileged) we're immersed in it, and find it difficult to step back and view it objectively, but for any ethnic minority, the oppression is faced in a multitude of ways day in and day out. It's really invisible to whites because it isn't perpetrated externally to them; it operates through their cultural normalcy and is perpetuated by their normal everyday behaviour. The double bind here is, if you deny this to be the case, that only proves your denial, but I'm pretty sure that colonised indigenous people, or African Americans, will know what I'm saying.