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by mushbino 2051 days ago
Historically, predominantly white empires colonize territories that aren't white. If you're black, brown, indigenous, you're most likely from a former or current colony. It's been used as a justification for blatant exploitation.

This type of marginalization has happened and is still currently happening in Eastern Europe, but it's done around ethnic and/or religious lines. The most obvious examples of this are the the treatment of Jews and more recently the Bosniaks in the Balkans. It also happened in Russia to the Cossacks and Crimean Tatars, among others. It operates on the same principal.

1 comments

Sorry, but I still don't understand your point. How am I priviliged if people from a foreign country colonized another part of the world? I and my ancestors didn't have anything to do with this. Our country was, in fact, "colonized" for more than a hundred years too.

All the minority groups you just mentioned are also Caucasian, so they are priviliged, but at the same time they... are not? In your original post you made a racial claim that just didn't make much sense to me at all, same as all race-related stereotypes that try to somehow classify groups of billions.

It's purely tribalism at its heart. It's much easier to exploit a group if they are perceived as different. Skin color and looks are the easiest things to distinguish one group from another. It's more challenging to marginalize a group if they can be seen as just like you and me.

In the Americas, the dominant group, both financially and politically has been people with lighter skin. This is how we've been trained to think for a very long time and it persists to this day. Had history played out differently and people with dark skin did the colonizing to people with white skin, things would be different, but that's not the case.

This same thing has been done to Jews in Europe and elsewhere for a couple thousand years. These groups of people who are "different" have been used as convenient scapegoats, which we know has played a central role in civilization since the very beginning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scapegoating

To bring it back to the US, the black population and eventually the Hispanic population have been used as scapegoats for white societies to look at as the source of their problems. It's a way of maintaining social cohesion (in the dominant group).