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USA was created in the wake of perhaps the largest ethnic cleansing in human history (virtual entirety of the North American continent) and has been at war for
by pphysch 5y ago
USA was created in the wake of perhaps the largest ethnic cleansing in human history (virtual entirety of the North American continent) and has been at war for >90% of its history. It has always been deeply racist (whether overt like KKK lynchings or subtle like census reporting and tokenism).
Whatever these rightoids are allegedly plotting, you can't say they are "remaking" America into something radically new.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- the_doctah 5y agoHow does mid-millenium colonization of America prove current-year racism? This is pure CRT-adjacent nonsense. The use of words like "rightoid" does not help your argument.
- kragen 5y agoThe Trail of Tears, the US Civil War and the appalling form of slavery that led up to it, the Chinese Exclusion Act, racially-biased "eugenic" involuntary sterilization, Jim Crow, the Japanese internment camps, the Indian Schools, Wounded Knee, cowboys & Indians movies, the Tulsa race massacre, per-country immigration quotas, mass deportation, child internment camps, etc., are not mid-millennium colonization. There's an unbroken chain of racism running through US history since before its foundation, one so deeply embedded in US culture that I couldn't see most of it until I had been gone for several years. Idealizations of US history are common to all US factions, though their content differs.
- the_doctah 5y ago>one so deeply embedded in US culture that I couldn't see most of it until I had been gone for several years. Wherever you went, odds are it has an equally shitty history, and present.
- kragen 5y agoYup, but different enough to give me an outside perspective on the culture I'd grown up in. Argentina's present is actually shittier, but not in the same way.
- pphysch 5y agoRight. Sorry. I'll be more politically correct next time.
- wolverine876 5y ago> perhaps the largest ethnic cleansing in human history (virtual entirety of the North American continent) We're measuring by geographical area? If we are, very few people lived (or has ever lived) in most of the continent. To suggest that the worst of someone is all there is, is just an old means to tear down the best, and to demoralize. I'm sure you can find much more.
- pphysch 5y agoEthnic cleansing apologism on HN? Really? > By the end of the 20th century most scholars gravitated toward an estimate of around 50 million [prior to colonization]—with some historians arguing for an estimate of 100 million or more. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_Indigenous_peoples_of_the_Americas https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_history_of_Indige...
- kragen 5y agoTo be clear, those 50 million and 100 million numbers are for America as a whole, not North America.
- pphysch 5y agoSure, peoples in South America also suffered some ethnic cleansing but not as bad as North America. At any rate it's millions of people and entire cultures exterminated. Less than 1% of US population is classified as (pure) Native American, whereas it used to be 100%. A staggering example of ethnic cleansing/replacement.
- kragen 5y agoYes, although most of South America suffered in different ways that are arguably worse. The Mohawk and the Navajo retained their language and their culture; the Caribs and the Quilmes are so thoroughly effaced that we know nothing of their religion and their folklore. Nothing as culturally catastrophic as the burning of the Maya codices befell the Haudenosaunee. Although the situation for Native Americans in the US is extremely bad and has been much worse, I think your 1%/100% contrast overstates the case a little bit. The current (not pure) Native American population in the US is 2.9%, or 9.7 million people. This may be higher than the pre-Columbian population of Native Americans, and if it's lower, it's probably not by more than a factor of three, and I really don't want to endorse ideologies proclaiming the virtues of racial purity, since I am a liberal. The great problem is, in my outsider view, not population loss, and even less is it "race mixing", but the parlous circumstances to which modern Native Americans have been reduced --- circumstances largely established by openly white supremacist government policies.