4 ms·

> For instance, "Woke" has been a huge topic here in Norway the past ~3 months which is funny as it's close to completely irrelevant for the day to day life of

> For instance, "Woke" has been a huge topic here in Norway the past ~3 months which is funny as it's close to completely irrelevant for the day to day life of 99.9% of Norwegians. It gets worse when American-Left wokeism completely disregards the native culture and tries to invent racism when there was none, creating unnecessary racial conflict through their shitstorms. E.g. the American Left is now trying to cancel "blackface" in German Christmas traditions, where the whole point was to highlight that yes, Africans were important in early Christianity and equal to other races (but there weren't enough people with the right skin colour around, so make-up had to make do). But no, black representation is, apparently, more racist than pretending everyone in the bible is white.

throwing-away 3y ago
White people painting themselves black is not black representation regardless of the historical justification or US culture. Calling this out and asking for traditions to stop or adjust is not "woke".
- creshal 3y ago
  > White people painting themselves black is not black representation You have a lot of small countryside villages where no black people live. One of the three magi you need in your school play about Christmas is, by tradition, considered to be black. What other solution do you suggest to represent that?
  - throwing-away 3y ago
    Don't paint the kid black and leave the nativity play as-is? If the goal is to teach them that the people in the biblical stories weren't all white I'm sure there's plenty of other better ways than putting one of them in blackface. Traditions are not sacred, and can and do change over time.
    - creshal 3y ago
      > Don't paint the kid black Why, other than because Americans have negative connotations with the practice? > I'm sure there's plenty of other better ways We're open for suggestions.
      - throwing-away 3y ago
        > Why, other than because Americans have negative connotations with the practice? But it's not just people from the US. There are protests every year in Europe against various traditions which involve blackface (eg. Black Peter). There are plenty of people who protest and given the colonial legacies of some European countries it's pretty clear to me that this is not just invented racism/conflict from "the American left". As a European myself I understand the complaints of US defaultism and agree with plenty of them but this simply not one of them.
        creshal 3y ago
        From Wikipedia: > The George Floyd protests and subsequent Black Lives Matter demonstrations in the Netherlands in 2020 appear to have had a significant effect on the acceptance of Zwarte Piet's traditional appearance among the Dutch public. A June 2020 survey saw a drop in support for leaving the character's appearance unaltered. 47 percent of those surveyed supported the traditional appearance, compared to 71 percent in a similar survey held in November 2019. Perfectly organic local protests and totally not fuelled by US activism, indeed.
niemandhier 3y ago
Never saw it that way, but you have a point!
justin66 3y ago
Which prominent figures on the American left have commented on German Christmas traditions?
- bilbo0s 3y ago
  Meh. Part of the problem with American righties and lefties is that they tend to make stuff up. The comment you're responding to is very likely an example of that, but in its own way it illustrates how they insert their talking points into even HN threads created to discuss how to get away from their talking points. Viewed from that perspective, it's insidious even if it is completely fabricated.
  - dotandgtfo 3y ago
    I don't think it's necessarily "making things up". I believe that these people legitimately believe their stances but they are based on wrong, incomplete or outright fabricated evidence. Usually of a potent emotional nature. Which makes them care too much about trying to convince other people to their viewpoint. If you read about "woke leftists cancelling [my tradition/Christmas]" day in and day out you start believing this stuff, even if it just started out as hanging out on certain subreddits for fun. I don't believe everyone is as susceptible to this "convincing emotional content built on fear and rage" but it absolutely seems like a decent amount of people are. Especially considering these are usually the loudest voices in any debate. That's the worst part about the American internet being so prolific in Europe. I don't think Americans understand how much their internet impacts Europe. I can only really speak for Northern Europe. But the impact is massive there, most content we consume after we learn english in our teens is American/English content.
alisonatwork 3y ago
This is a poor example of Americans deliberately influencing culture overseas. On the topic of the historical wise men who are said to have visited Jesus - they came from the east (Asia), not the west (Africa). While it is true that in some parts of Europe one of the wise men has come to be portrayed as black, it's absurd to say that blackface must be applied in order to preserve the authenticity of the portrayal. If historical authenticity was the goal, the entire nativity should be portrayed by people with Middle Eastern features. And if the goal is merely symbolic - a way of showing that Christianity can appeal to people from all over the world - that can easily be communicated through dialog. Zwarte Piet has a different history and has nothing to do with early Christianity. If anything it has to do with pagan traditions around winter demons that relatively recently morphed into a black sidekick for Sinterklaas, coincidentally exactly around the time that blackface minstrel shows and human zoos were popular. But I suspect you know this, and are trying to loop in American "culture wars" as a way of not dealing with something that Afro-Europeans find at least racially insensitive if not outright offensive. This, in fact, is exactly how Americans end up getting shoehorned into every topic everywhere in the world, because even when people claim to want to discuss topics in the local context, they tend to spend more time derailing the conversation into some whining about American cultural hegemony instead.
- creshal 3y ago
  > And if the goal is merely symbolic - a way of showing that Christianity can appeal to people from all over the world It's not just that it could appeal to the whole world, but that early Christianity was not just an European affair. > that can easily be communicated through dialog. All the counter suggestions so far have been vague and ineffectual. If racism could be solved through dialog, we wouldn't even be here. > But I suspect you know this, and are trying to loop in American "culture wars" as a way of not dealing with something that Afro-Europeans find at least racially insensitive if not outright offensive. I would suspect that Afro-Germans rather find it offensive that Germany keeps dodging its responsibility for its colonial war crimes and tries to silence critics of its incredibly dubious 2021 "settlement", after 70+ years of attempts to solve this situation. But Americanisms are dominating the public discourse so hard that these topics aren't even on the radar. (Similarly, we can get massive Floyd protests country-wide on a moment's notice, but none against Germany's police giving guns to and covering for Nazi terrorists shooting Turkish migrants.) So, sorry, I'm not some insidious white supremacist trying to silence critics, I'm just extremely disappointed in our local problems being ignored in favour of doing whatever the Americans are doing.

throwing-away 3y ago

White people painting themselves black is not black representation regardless of the historical justification or US culture. Calling this out and asking for traditions to stop or adjust is not "woke".

creshal 3y ago
> White people painting themselves black is not black representation You have a lot of small countryside villages where no black people live. One of the three magi you need in your school play about Christmas is, by tradition, considered to be black. What other solution do you suggest to represent that?
- throwing-away 3y ago
  Don't paint the kid black and leave the nativity play as-is? If the goal is to teach them that the people in the biblical stories weren't all white I'm sure there's plenty of other better ways than putting one of them in blackface. Traditions are not sacred, and can and do change over time.
  - creshal 3y ago
    > Don't paint the kid black Why, other than because Americans have negative connotations with the practice? > I'm sure there's plenty of other better ways We're open for suggestions.
    - throwing-away 3y ago
      > Why, other than because Americans have negative connotations with the practice? But it's not just people from the US. There are protests every year in Europe against various traditions which involve blackface (eg. Black Peter). There are plenty of people who protest and given the colonial legacies of some European countries it's pretty clear to me that this is not just invented racism/conflict from "the American left". As a European myself I understand the complaints of US defaultism and agree with plenty of them but this simply not one of them.
      - creshal 3y ago
        From Wikipedia: > The George Floyd protests and subsequent Black Lives Matter demonstrations in the Netherlands in 2020 appear to have had a significant effect on the acceptance of Zwarte Piet's traditional appearance among the Dutch public. A June 2020 survey saw a drop in support for leaving the character's appearance unaltered. 47 percent of those surveyed supported the traditional appearance, compared to 71 percent in a similar survey held in November 2019. Perfectly organic local protests and totally not fuelled by US activism, indeed.

niemandhier 3y ago

Never saw it that way, but you have a point!

justin66 3y ago

Which prominent figures on the American left have commented on German Christmas traditions?

bilbo0s 3y ago
Meh. Part of the problem with American righties and lefties is that they tend to make stuff up. The comment you're responding to is very likely an example of that, but in its own way it illustrates how they insert their talking points into even HN threads created to discuss how to get away from their talking points. Viewed from that perspective, it's insidious even if it is completely fabricated.
- dotandgtfo 3y ago
  I don't think it's necessarily "making things up". I believe that these people legitimately believe their stances but they are based on wrong, incomplete or outright fabricated evidence. Usually of a potent emotional nature. Which makes them care too much about trying to convince other people to their viewpoint. If you read about "woke leftists cancelling [my tradition/Christmas]" day in and day out you start believing this stuff, even if it just started out as hanging out on certain subreddits for fun. I don't believe everyone is as susceptible to this "convincing emotional content built on fear and rage" but it absolutely seems like a decent amount of people are. Especially considering these are usually the loudest voices in any debate. That's the worst part about the American internet being so prolific in Europe. I don't think Americans understand how much their internet impacts Europe. I can only really speak for Northern Europe. But the impact is massive there, most content we consume after we learn english in our teens is American/English content.

alisonatwork 3y ago

This is a poor example of Americans deliberately influencing culture overseas. On the topic of the historical wise men who are said to have visited Jesus - they came from the east (Asia), not the west (Africa). While it is true that in some parts of Europe one of the wise men has come to be portrayed as black, it's absurd to say that blackface must be applied in order to preserve the authenticity of the portrayal. If historical authenticity was the goal, the entire nativity should be portrayed by people with Middle Eastern features. And if the goal is merely symbolic - a way of showing that Christianity can appeal to people from all over the world - that can easily be communicated through dialog. Zwarte Piet has a different history and has nothing to do with early Christianity. If anything it has to do with pagan traditions around winter demons that relatively recently morphed into a black sidekick for Sinterklaas, coincidentally exactly around the time that blackface minstrel shows and human zoos were popular. But I suspect you know this, and are trying to loop in American "culture wars" as a way of not dealing with something that Afro-Europeans find at least racially insensitive if not outright offensive. This, in fact, is exactly how Americans end up getting shoehorned into every topic everywhere in the world, because even when people claim to want to discuss topics in the local context, they tend to spend more time derailing the conversation into some whining about American cultural hegemony instead.

creshal 3y ago
> And if the goal is merely symbolic - a way of showing that Christianity can appeal to people from all over the world It's not just that it could appeal to the whole world, but that early Christianity was not just an European affair. > that can easily be communicated through dialog. All the counter suggestions so far have been vague and ineffectual. If racism could be solved through dialog, we wouldn't even be here. > But I suspect you know this, and are trying to loop in American "culture wars" as a way of not dealing with something that Afro-Europeans find at least racially insensitive if not outright offensive. I would suspect that Afro-Germans rather find it offensive that Germany keeps dodging its responsibility for its colonial war crimes and tries to silence critics of its incredibly dubious 2021 "settlement", after 70+ years of attempts to solve this situation. But Americanisms are dominating the public discourse so hard that these topics aren't even on the radar. (Similarly, we can get massive Floyd protests country-wide on a moment's notice, but none against Germany's police giving guns to and covering for Nazi terrorists shooting Turkish migrants.) So, sorry, I'm not some insidious white supremacist trying to silence critics, I'm just extremely disappointed in our local problems being ignored in favour of doing whatever the Americans are doing.