#certain countries like polish pple

[butch-bakugo]

I truly and wholely believe that white people will never truly, fully and honestly sympathize with people of color and our history of oppression unless they can look upon their specific heritage and find genocide or immoral and wrongful treatment. Like fully. And I'm gonna use my wp mixed self and my white friends and my white partner as an example. Like the only time they will ever sympathize is when either they are shown the raw truth of genocide faced by others and forced to see it's generational traumatic effects or the more likely option, their specific culture has faced some form of genuine mistreatment.

Like an Irish person who was treated as a second class citizen and understands their past with indentured servitude and same-race colonization understands me, a native American and native Canadian, better than a British scholar who knows the ins and outs of the native American genocide front to back in significantly more detail than even I do. I'm sorry if this is hard to hear or too hot of a take but it's honestly true. A white person who knows some form of genocide heritigicly will sympathize with me in my grief as a native better than a white person whose culture has never faced any kind of mistreatment based on race.

No matter how much education you receive, you just won't be able to fully sympathize. It's been shown scientifically that black student's mental health severely declines once they are taught the horrors of slavery in the us, same for native Americans and colonization, vietnamese students and the Vietnam war, Muslim and middle eastern students and 9/11, the list goes on and on. Learning about your culture's past with the horrors of racism causes literal mourning, I don't think anyone could argue against that, but the white people who've never been racially harmed will never convince me that they understand my pain, empathize or even know an ounce of it. It is simply outside of their experiences and therefore fully unknowable to them.

Some white people can. Some know it or seen it enough to get a rough look. Those aren't who I'm talking about. I'm talking about no history of harm and racial degradation. French, British, etc. You simpley won't. You won't understand it and I'm tired of letting them get away with their false empathy. No you don't understand. You never will. I mourn every time I think of how many natives were needlessly murdered. How many natives could of been alive today hadn't we been nearly eradicated. There were millions of us and I feel so alone in my grief. I feel so alone in my culture. I will never fully know my culture because of it. There are no records. There is no land. I have no country to visit. I'm sure I could find at least something but the reality is there are millions of people who can return to their cultural roots and fully envelope themselves. Who can fly far away and be surrounded by the food and drink and people who share their origin. They can read their history in large libraries and speak their language in full. They can dance their people's dances and sing their people's songs. They can live as their ancestors did. Those people are white. My people were brown. Their land is no longer their own. Their food nor drink has not survived. There aren't many of us left, certainly not enough to fill a country. Their history has been burned and erased and tortured out of them. Their languages are dead and gone. Very few of their thousands of dances survived and many are merely pieces of a shredded picture. Their people's songs have been choked from their throats. They can't live as their ancestors did without white people telling them to stop.

Alot of people like to pretend we can simply rebuild what was lost. That no more damage is being done. That what's broken can be replaced or fixed. When this isn't true. Native societies will never be the same. More damage is being done(see the challenges with icwa and cultural erasure through adoption of native children into white christian families aka residential schools lite). Our cultures are decimated. Our long and proud and expansive history prior to colonization is almost non-existent and none exists after. We are practically ghosts. We are neanderthals. We are almost extinct. Small traces of us exist in many but they simply won't know and if they do, they are encouraged to never explore it. We are dieing not by climate or lack of trying, we are a planned extinction and it's ongoing.

And I'm sorry but.... This upsets me. It upsets every native. It upsets every culture in the same condition as mine and even those with lesser damage. It destroys you. It ruins you. It makes you feel small and unwanted and like vermin. It makes you cry. And I don't think a British/Nordic or french person, the same people who caused this genocide and eratification, can understand my grief. I don't think they can or will. Not unless they are exposed to a huge degree and in the world they built entirely on corpses, it's easy to not look down to consider whose body your stepping on. You simply must walk on.