The Danish health minister should “get on a plane and visit” some of the thousands of women thought to be living with the consequences of being forcibly fitted with the contraceptive coil as children, Greenland’s gender equality minister has said.
In an attempt to reduce the population of the former Danish colony, at least 4,500 women and girls are believed to have undergone the medical procedure, usually without their consent or knowledge, at the hands of Danish doctors between 1966 and 1970 alone.
The total number of those affected by the procedures, thought to have continued for decades, is understood to be far higher. Victims and their lawyers say generations of Inuit women were left traumatised and suffering reproductive complications, including infertility, as a result of the Danish state’s policy.
Earlier this month, a group of 143 women sued the Danish state over the alleged violations, but they have yet to receive a response from the government, despite the Danish prime minister visiting Greenland – now an autonomous territory of Denmark – soon after.
I genuinely appreciate your openness and I agree that what you’ve experienced is bigotry, it is othering abuse. Thanks, I understand it takes a lot to lay all that out and I don’t take it lightly.
I cannot tell you that the trauma that you’ve experienced is lessened by who or what you are, and this is an issue that leftists should take seriously. I understand you face a unique intersection of discrimination, and that your whiteness has contributed to that.
I still have something to say about where we differ here, but I won’t unless you tell me you want to hear it. I promise to be respectful regardless of what you decide.
I appreciate your response, but… I’m not really in any condition to continue this conversation, sorry. You can state it if you wish, but I don’t have it in me to respond at this point.
Okay, thanks for being open to hearing it. If you don’t reply or you take a while I won’t take that to mean anything in particular.
I accept that all of the things you’ve talked about are real forms of oppression. The difference here is that I don’t agree that it should be called racism. That may seem like a tiny, semantic difference but I think it’s important. When you say that it is on another level than the racism that POC face, I agree. It is a quantitative difference that amounts to a qualitative difference. I think it deserves to be addressed as its own unique phenomenon. I’m afraid I don’t know what the name for that phenomenon is. I would be surprised if someone hadn’t written about it. I’ll keep an eye out for that.
I also understand that you’re saying that hearing a phrase like “a very white way of thinking” feels othering to you. That makes sense, but I don’t agree that the solution is to stop talking about the problems with whiteness. Whiteness as a concept hurts everyone. Of course it hurts POC more than it hurts white people, but it isn’t a zero-sum game. White people in general aren’t helped in any way by it. That’s not what privilege means in this context. It means that the boot that stomps on us is less forceful and has smaller cleats. The point of calling some people white and others not is to divide people. That doesn’t mean that attacking whiteness as a concept is divisive - it is attacking a mechanism of division. The point here is that there is absolutely nothing to be gained by protecting the concept of whiteness.
We’re not attacking individual people and saying they suck because they are white. It really isn’t personal at all. The concept of whiteness is based on privilege, which means being able to ignore the suffering of people who were affected by genocide and who are still living. I think that’s what they mean when they call it a very white way of thinking.
I don’t know how to help you with your feelings on this issue. I’m sorry, I wish I had an answer for you on that but I just don’t. If you’re feeling hurt, that’s always valid. However, dealing with and healing from that hurt requires correctly identifying its source, and it’s easy to land on wrong answers to that question, and that’s a large part of why I think this is important.
Guess I’m back for more.
I’d dispute that it isn’t racism, as application of sociological definition for the purpose of narrow and highly academic discussions with general usage, but that’s not the primary problem here. I find what it’s called less important than acknowledging in it. In this thread, there’s a lot of “White people can’t be hurt by being denigrated”, not just denying that it’s called racism. That’s what hurts here. I look around here and all I see is hostility in what is a fairly left-space. I can quote people in this very thread quite clearly saying, “You’re white. White is bad. Get over it.”
I’m not trying to protect the concept of whiteness or say that we should stop talking about white privilege. But when you denigrate ‘white people’, you are denigrating a group of people for their ancestry - full stop. It doesn’t matter that you mean it in a different way than common usage. When you start describing things as ‘white’ you are necessarily adding an either positive or negative connotation to being ‘white’, which is something that is largely decided by society and observers, not your intentions.
At no point have I defended white privilege, man. White privilege can and should be overthrown. That’s completely separate from the point here.
So was the point of calling people ‘Black’ - and if you dispute that, I have a whole laundry list of historical examples to go down that predate the creation of a cohesive and empowering sense of unified Black culture. Yet if you started associating negative qualities with ‘Blackness’ and objected “I’m not saying BLACK PEOPLE are bad, I’m just saying BLACKNESS is bad, which is a state of mind”, I mean, fuck, that’s outright ‘racist uncle’ shite.
Regardless of whether or not you like it, when you say ‘white’, a large number of people hear you addressing them, because that’s how they’re addressed by society, conservative and liberal; light-skinned and dark-skinned. When you say ‘white’, that refers to, by linguistic consensus, a very large group of people based on their racial origin, not their opinions or their recognition or lack thereof of their own privilege. And when you start assigning qualities to ‘whiteness’ itself, this context necessarily translates into a denigration of the individual by a denigration of an arbitrary group that has no inherent moral quality to it.
Again. At no point have I defended the concept of whiteness. The entire concept of racial categories is absurd except as a social construct.
But white is pretty widely considered to be a category based on phenotype and cultural recognition of phenotype - it doesn’t matter that you don’t mean that individual people suck because they’re white. It doesn’t matter when some old coot calls something “cotton-pickin’” as a means of degrading it that he doesn’t MEAN it in a racist way, or that he’s not using it towards an individual, much less a Black individual. It is still generally heard by Black folk as a whole as denigrating. And no amount of “You just have to understand…” or “This isn’t directed at you…” can change that.
I think it’s important too, which is why I take such issue with racializing positive and negative qualities, like points of view. Avoiding the idea that using racialized descriptors is bad simply because the core of modern racial categories is centered around the privilege of whiteness does not mean that racialized descriptors are innocent of implicit or explicit bigotry.