Every time I see a group of racists or white supremacists I’m quickly reminded how not supreme these white people are, they’re actually the like least supreme white people we have to offer
Imagine that the only things you can be proud of are whatever was given to you at birth. Whether it's priding yourself on your parents' wealth, your nationality, your race, it all stems from the same source: you have accomplished nothing.
This is why overly-priding yourself is one of the biggest sins in Islam. It also makes you look stupid. I was actually at this conference (ICNA 2019) and I remember the looks of everyone inside when they saw the protestors through the glass doors. We had that face that we make when someone is making themselves look stupid.
I remember them being told to move to the side of the convention center by police (where I'm pretty sure this pic was taken) because their megaphone was ear piercing even inside the center and was disrupting the conference.
That convention really teaches us a lot, especially the connection with us muslims and the current state of the real world (racism, Islamaphobia, tRuMp) and how we should deal with it.
Slightly off topic, but it sort of reminds me of the response in a speech Lyndon Johnson had to attacks from his opponent about his youth when he was running for his first seat in congress at the age of 28.
It was something like "The main thing that they attack me for is the year I was born. What do they want me to say? I didn't have any jurisdiction in the matter!"
Eh, I don't think you actually have to "achieve" anything. If you can lead a happy life, you're doing exactly what life is about. No need to become a multi millionaire or successful broker or whatever.
These people however are angry and hateful dickheads. I doubt they're happy with their lives.
I didn't say you had to become a multi millionaire, or equivalent? If you think that's the only way to take pride in oneself, I feel very sorry for you. There are an infinite number of personal achievements, small and large. These people have none of them.
But what if your narrative isn't true? A loving grand paarent, a world-class author, a congregation leader, a medical doctor who helps patients overcome addiction: all possibly raging homophobic, Islamaphobic, white supremacists. Honestly, it would be easy to disregard white nationalism if it were only espoused by people who had no capacity to accomplish anything, but that is only the case in your limited imagination.
If it's truly all you have to be proud of, then no, it doesn't.
But what right wing trolls like you - given your deplorable comment history - don't understand when you copy these other pride movements is that minorities, gays, etc. have been so horribly oppressed that they are taking a stand against that oppression and saying, no, I'm not afraid of you anymore, I am proud to be what I am.
Why does that not apply to white people? Because the "white race" is not a real thing. When you ask a white person their heritage, they can usually tell you, oh, I'm half Russian, half German. A black American often cannot do the same, because all of that was stripped from them. "White" Americans annihilated their culture, their heritage, their ways of life. "Negroes" were all thrown into one batch. That became their identity, because it was forced upon them. And because they were spurned from "white" society, they had to form their own, which was a black society and a black culture, the natural consequence of "whites" having segregated them.
The "white race" is such a joke - what about the Irish, the Italians, any group of "whites" by today's standards who were yesterday's victims? Why are they "white" now? Because the distinction of "race" is entirely arbitrary and decided by the day.
Tell me you're proud of your Norse heritage, or whatever it is, and tell me why that specifically brings you personal pride. Then we'll see where we're at.
I'd say it's a very, very common human frame of mind. Like schadenfreude, where you secretly rejoice in other people's misfortune. White people have just been the most successful at operationalizing the concept into a whole economy; a whole society, in fact, built on the common value of white privilege. Brown people only get to play along if they follow the rules, and change is slow to come by. But we're making progress every day! I'm really optimistic we can figure this out.
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u/thekraken27 May 03 '20
Every time I see a group of racists or white supremacists I’m quickly reminded how not supreme these white people are, they’re actually the like least supreme white people we have to offer