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voidpumpkin · 3 years ago

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YOU FIGHT ON THE COLONISERS SIDE IN SUMERU?!?!

I’m honestly losing track of all the bullshit going on with Sumeru, mihoyo, what the fuck, how are you this bad? For my own sake I'm putting all this nonsense in one place.

Sumeru is a nation in Genshin Impact, like all other nations it’s based off a real world culture. Mondstadt: Germany, Liyue: China, Inazuma: Japan, Snezhaya: Russia, Fontaine: France, Natlan: South America and Africa, Sumeru: SWANA countries (note the non-white/east Asian cultures are just lumped together rather than being separate, distinct cultures.)

First inklings of the problems to come with Sumeru were apparent with the travelling npcs, who are all incredibly pale. They look exactly like the white npcs. Pale SWANA people exist, but they are the minority, the Sumeru npcs we see should not all be so pale. Mihoyo has a long history of colourism, out of the 48 playable characters only 2 are darker than milk, there are no darker skinned npcs, the majority of the non-white playable are paler than most white people. In their other game, Honkai Impact there is only one character with a darker skin tone than milk, that is Carole Pepper, who has slight tan. Despite how pale she already is a major characteristic of her is that she hates how dark her skin is. I repeat one of the main characteristics of Honkai’s only non-white coloured character is that she hates her skin tone. Mihoyo has shown themselves to be consistently colourist before, including how they characterised there only slightly darker skinned characters, Kaeya and Xinyan, both being described as more aggressive than their paler counterparts.

Then designs for Sumeru were released. Not only were they white as fuck, but there designs were quite frankly messy. In the case of Tighnari there was no discernible connection to SWANA culture, and in the case of Doir, she is straight up an orientalist caricature of Indian culture rather than SWANA culture, so they couldn’t even get their caricatures to stick to one region. The conflation of SWANA cultures with each other and non SWANA cultures is a form of racism/orientalism and is unacceptable. The orientalism that is Dori falls in line with the larger misogynistic trend in Genshin Impact, virtually all girls who aren't aren't little children are sexualised/fetishized in some way, with high heels, objectifying outfits, and egregious amount skin shown (something not shared with the vast majority of their male counterparts). This objectification is especially dangerous with the SWANA characters as it is this fetishization and objectification that has been used to justify and condone sexual violence against SWANA women. More details about Dori were released, which showed her riding a genie like it was an animal which people criticised as being disrespectful due to genies being based off the Djinn of Islamic belief.

Then the archon was leaked. And she was a white elf child with a generic Isekai design and absolutely no connection to any SWANA. I repeat, the leader of a supposedly SWANA coded nation has nothing SWANA about her. Her whiteness is even more egregious as a 2D cutscene showed her as a brown skinned adult. Not long after this the trailer for Sumeru dropped. With generic and not very good ‘oriental’ music playing it showed a tropical jungle landscape. Tropical jungles don’t really exist in SWANA countries, don’t get me wrong they do have vast beautiful forests but this didn't resemble them in the slightest. Instead of a) showing how cultures can flourish in desert landscapes as SWANA cultures have done for millennia and the plants that can and do grow there. Or b) showing an accurate depiction of the actual forests that exist in SWANA countries, dispelling some widespread myths about the area. But instead they just went with a jungle. During this trailer we also got to see some of the architecture with only slithers of it referencing actual SWANA architecture.

It was right around this time that Mihoyo themselves put out the terrible defence of ‘it’s just a fantasy world, it’s all cool bro, stop being so mad’ an abysmal defence that doesn’t hold up in their own considering how extensively Mondstadt, Liyue and Inazuma were based on Germany, China and Japan respectively. The level of research and care that went into making these areas and the characters from these areas is what makes Sumeru such a slap in the face. Not helped by the names being accurate. The names of the Sumeru characters are accurate, which shows that Mihoyo is in fact capable of doing research into SWANA cultures and putting it into their game, proving that the orientalist caricature was a choice.

More designs were released, more orientalism. Then the harbingers dropped, a pretty blatant distraction tactic from the racist mess that is Sumeru, with people noting noting that this sliver of Russian culture has more care an accuracy than most of Sumeru.

A couple more Sumeru designs were released/leaked, hinted at being dark skin before release but in fact had the world's slightest tan. These were Dehya and Cyno, who are Eremites, the indigenous people of Sumeru and now live in the desert (keep that in mind.) There was also the release of the desert bandits, enemy npcs who hilariously are noted as being more accurate than the playable characters. The enemies you fight are more accurate than the playable characters (though they still are incredibly inaccurate, especially the women), this will become darker with the recent release of Sumeru’s backstory.

Now the backstory of Sumeru has apparently been released, with a rough summary of it being: the eremites (the indigenous people of Sumeru who are for some reason named after a type of Christian hermit) lived in harmony in Sumeru before the Scarlet king fought the original Dendro archon, creating the desert. The dendro archon subsequently forced the indingenous people to the desert and built a wall. They built a wall to keep out the indigenous people they kicked out, and the enemies you fight are from the desert, i.e. you’re fighting the indigenous people of sumeru, on the side of the coloniser. Genshin already has a history of anti-indigenous racism with the hilichurls, humanoid beasts, countless of which you slaughter, with native americans used as reference for their behaviour. People have also pointed out the uncomfortable parallels to the Israeli genocide of Palestine, white people forcing out the darker skinned indigenous people whilst also claiming to be the ones who are causing it to bloom.

Whilst we don’t know how this plot will end, considering the track record of genshin and other companies the plot is unfortunately likely going to resolve with, ‘the indigenous people and colonisers should just get along.’

Pretty much every single thing about Sumeru is racist and orientalist in someway and it just gets worse with every new update.

An especially annoying part is the fans so insistent on denying and defending a fucking gacha game of all things, showing how racist they are in both their support and defense of this mess.

Fuck genshin, fuck mihoyo, and fuck the fans defending it.

I am quite frankly terrified for how they will handle natlan, a South American and African coded nation.

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resourcesofcolor · 5 years ago

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Abolishing The Racist European Epistemology

As an Indigenous Austronesian, I genuinely believe that moving away from the Western/European worldview and unlearning Western sociocultural proclivities will lead to a greater, compassionate society... or move forward with an exclusively community-centered, feminist, anti-corporatism worldview that we can all strive to cultivate in current and future generations!

Epistemology is commonly defined as the system of knowing. A civilization’s system of knowing ultimately molds their cultural and socioeconomic system; their entire reality. The European epistemology, and especially the development of European science, has justified the objectification of life, the death of the spirit, and the death of human connection prevalent in ancient and traditional Indigenous worldviews: the spiritual, egalitarian practices of Hinduism and Buddhism, the animism of Shintoism, Native American spiritualism and African polytheism which values all things, animate and inanimate; the reverence-worship of ancestral spirits in the Indigenous Austronesian islands, community-based and matriarchal. Even before the system of knowing, predecessors of modern humanity were altruistic and communal, caring for their sick, elderly and disabled: the natural empathy of a socially and emotionally intelligent prey species.

Accepting beneficial Non-European concepts today and furthering education on the historical and intrinsic value of environmentalism and altruism in Indigenous knowledge is crucial to our survival as an inherently communal species.

Allowing Western society to proceed the narrative of history going forward in 2020 is unquestionably dangerous.

From The Social Epistemology of Morality: Learning from the Forgotten History of the Abolition of Slavery:

“The dominant narratives Western countries tell about themselves is that they took the lead in advancing human rights throughout the world. The West has achieved enough self-awareness to recognize its own capacity for mass human rights violations in slavery, imperialism, the Holocaust, and other crimes against humanity--although it has forgotten many of its crimes. In the dominant Western historical narratives, however, the West has forever been an auto-didact, arriving at the true principles of morality through its own self-sufficient reasoning, figuring out for itself when it has failed to apply them, self-correcting its course, and taking the lead in teaching these principles to the rest of the benighted world. It does not imagine that it had to learn fundamental moral truths from those whom it victimized, particularly not from people of African descent.”

Without context, it already paints a familiar picture of the Western world, and America in particular. With contexts, it explains how Haiti, and Haiti alone, was the first country in history to abolish slavery: “...the site of the only successful slave revolt in world history.”

Today, Haiti’s valiant, winning revolt in the history of slavery in the Western world is not widely known, or known at all.

From the very first chapter of Yurugu--- An African Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behavior:

Indigenous and/or Non-European epistemological systems have always deeply respected the universe and environmentalism: their societal, cultural and architectural structures working with nature, instead of against it. Valuing life, instead of objectifying it.

The Western/European epistemology devalues and neutralizes Indigenous knowledge even as it simultaneously adopts them. From How Indigenous Knowledge Advances Modern Medicine & Technology:

“For centuries, Indigenous people’s lives depended on their knowledge about the environment. Many plant species — including three-fifths of the crops now in cultivation and enjoyed across the globe — were domesticated by Indigenous peoples in North, Central and South America. Corn, squash, beans, potatoes and peppers are just a few examples of foods that now contribute vastly to global cuisine!”

“Indigenous knowledge about the medicinal properties of plants has been instrumental in pharmacological development. For example, as settlers arrived in North America, Indigenous people helped newcomers cure life-threatening scurvy through conifer-needle tonics that were rich in vitamin C.”

Indigenous science and modern science must work together in harmony the the progress towards safe medical treatments and cures.

The death of the spirit, the ushering in of European philosophy: naturalism, individualism, and, ultimately, racism...

The entire concept of racism (and how it became systematic + created the imaginary concept of Race, based exclusively on phenotypical appearances with no scientific basis or evidence of its validity) is part of European and American history. “Black” was initially defined by white people, originated from their European-sourced racism and the White’s obsession with their own concept of whiteness.

From White Supremacy In Eurocentric Epistemologies: On The West’s Responsibility For Its Philosophical Heritage by Björn Freter:

“By reading some of the important so-called enlightened and enlightening [European] philosophers, such as the exemplars Voltaire, David Hume and Immanuel Kant, one can find blatant white supremacist racism. Consequently, it is very likely that their racism affected the construction of their philosophical edifices. However, it seems Western scholarship has demonstrated little interest to address this problem. It is not that the texts I engage here are hidden; at least then I could claim a conspiracy. Rather they appear to be widely intentionally disregarded. If philosophy is to retain its integrity, then a work of amelioration must be done, and these destructive, fracturing epistemologies must be addressed.”

Freter goes on to address the racism inherent in Immanuel Kant’s philosophical work, an influential German philosopher in the Age of Enlightenment; xenophobia is blatantly present in Kan’s work:

“Humanity is in its greatest perfection in the race of whites. The yellow Indians are already of lower talent. The Negroes are much lower and at the lowest there are parts of the American people.”

“Mr. David Hume (an influential Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, also racist) challenges anyone to cite a single example in which a Negro has shown talents, and asserts that among the hundreds of thousands of blacks who are transported elsewhere from their countries, although many of them have even been set free, still not a single one was ever found who presented anything great in art or science or any other praiseworthy quality, even though among the whites some continually rise aloft from the lowest rabble, and through superior gifts earn respect in the world. So fundamental is the difference between these two races of man, and it appears to be as great regarding mental capacities as in colour. The religion of fetishes so widespread among them is perhaps a sort of idolatry that sinks as deeply into the trifling as appears to be possible to human nature. A bird’s feather, a cow’s horn, a conch shell, or any other common object, as soon as it becomes consecrated by a few words, is an object of veneration and invocation in swearing oaths. The blacks are very vain but in the Negro’s way, and so talkative that they must be driven apart from each other with thrashings.”

The compulsory and “pragmatic” dehumanizing of African (and Asian) spirituality/epistemology while ignoring the systematic disadvantages of non-white people is, in itself, racist. It is where such prejudices all began. To consider that racist European philosophies influenced the modern world’s systematic racism... unthinkable? No. Unsurprising. The Western/European epistemology gave birth to racism as it is understood today----- which was “reformed” or replaced through capitalism.

Slavery & Capitalism Are Irrevocably Connected

From The Old World Background to European Colonial Slaver:

Slavery was integral to America’s socioeconomic development, and the socioeconomic development of Europe preceding it. It is an unquestionable aspect of America’s culture and history. The moral monstrosity of slavery permeates every proverbial fiber of capitalism, as they are incestuously connected.

Tipping practices in America can trace its origins to slavery. Wet nursing was primarily done by black female slaves, abused by white upper-class female masters. As slaves became free, those who could not afford to leave the continent were forced to remain in America’s earliest service industries.

From Black Perspectives, reflecting on Eric William’s Capitalism & Slavery:

“At its most basic, (and setting the question of semantics aside for a moment) the Williams thesis held that capitalism as an economic modality quickly replaced slavery once European elites accumulated the vast surplus capital from slavery that they needed in order to bankroll their industrial revolution. After providing the material foundation and the trade infrastructure that fueled Europe’s dramatic transformation towards modernity, slavery, according to Williams, began a rapid decline in the early nineteenth century. As the new global standard of industrial capitalism took hold, Williams found that antislavery sentiment conveniently accelerated in support of an apparently more efficient and less capital intensive method of commodity production. Slavery, in short, was no longer needed. Ideological superstructure followed the economic base. Labor coercion continued post emancipation in the form of sharecropping and wage peonage as former slaves quickly experienced proletarianization. In the end, technological change, modern agricultural methods, and industrial factories supplanted traditional agrarianism and ended the older feudalistic relationships of slavery.Nearly every aspect of this thesis has been scrutinized, amended, embellished, and/or overturned by subsequent scholarship.

Attempts to [describe] the precise features of capitalism and slavery while tracing their relationships to one another over time also proliferated well beyond William’s original set of questions. Perhaps the most sweeping account to recently push outward from the Williams thesis is The Making of New World Slavery (1997) by Robin Blackburn. For Blackburn, slavery not only enabled European capitalism but also the entire cornucopia of European modernity itself. In exploring the interdependence of slavery and capitalism it turns out that, for Blackburn, Williams actually did not go far enough. Blackburn details how a vast cosmos of forces from modern nation-states, tax systems, financial industries, consumer economies, and a host of other political, ideological, economic, and cultural transformations were all built upon the backs of enslaved Africans. Rather than finding a stark shift in the age of emancipation from slavery to capitalism, however, Blackburn describes an ever thickening dialectic between slavery and modernity at large, with capitalism serving as only one of many transformative processes that grew directly out of slavery between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries. While Blackburn would argue against the idea that slavery was unprofitable or on a path towards natural extinction at the dawn of the nineteenth century, he does find that Williams was generally correct in describing the role of slavery’s surplus capital in fueling industrialization in the European metropole.”

[...] “By way of a tentative conclusion, slavery and capitalism might best be described as inseparable yet also irreducible to one another. They must be understood as both distinctive yet permanently connected. Certain aspects of each system overlap with one another while other parts of each system seem to stand apart."

Through understanding European’s epistemology and the historical and interconnected contexts of racism, slavery, capitalism, and white privilege in Western development, and the Western world as we know it today, we can learn to deconstruct and abolish it: in our personal lives, and hopefully externally!

#writing.#history.#resources.#indigenous.#africa.#americas.#racism #blm #black lives matter #indigenous lives matter #bipoc

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renardtrickster · 5 years ago

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Like a modern-day Echo I am tragically unable to express myself except in this case it’s in regard to how much I hate Two Broke Girls but good god I will try.

Max is the most unlikable TV character for me because she alternates between being an edgy font of offensiveness and the creator’s Coolsona. By the first part, I mean how her only personality traits are “I hate people and will let you know this” and “i had a troubled childhood full of nasty sex”. There’s a point in the show where Han, who I can only describe as her favourite victim, delivers a speech about how she torments him and how it’s affected him, and singlehandedly saved her from both lawsuit AND having her business stolen. Max immediately goes back to sniping at him in the single most frustrating instance of Status Quo Is God I’ve ever seen in my life and I’ve watched Adventure Time.

By “the creator’s Coolsona”, that brings up another topic. Two Broke Girls has what I call “I Don’t Like This” Moments. Typically at the very beginning of the episode, but sometimes it happens in the middle of them too. Where someone does Thing That Creator Doesn’t Like and then Max jumps in to say The Funny Mean Things at them for an entire scene. And maybe because I’ve been growing up in an environment where “odd” things don’t register as weird to me, and I know not to make fun of people even if I do think it’s weird, but it always seems so petty, unnecessary, and unsympathetic. The Thing I Don’t Like can be anywhere from “likes steampunk, has marionette dolls” to “has a beard”. I just saw an episode where she insulted a dude’s mental state, mental maturity, and ability to have sex because he was using a colouring book! For stress relief!

And nobody ever talks back is what really pisses me off. I’ve slowly (and with great difficulty) stopped hoping expecting someone to clock her for mouthing off to them. But nobody ever really contests her. Some of them weakly try to blow it off, but most of them are just content to sit there, slack-jawed, while she unloads the creator’s frustrations into them. Seth MacFarlane at least had the decency to make everybody hate his fursona, Max faces no consequences of any sort for chewing out the people who provide her tips (in a show where getting and keeping money is repeatedly stressed) or her boss, who is also her designated victim! That’s why I said “the creator’s Coolsona”. Max is like the anthropomorphic personification of “yowza what a sick burn, i could make people cry if i didn’t stutter so much”, and she’s the main character! Caroline is (ostensibly) on equal terms of importance to Max, but she’s more like a second fiddle because Max has such an overbearing, inescapable personality. And instead of the (ostensibly) more likable Caroline, we have Michael Patrick King and Whitney Cummings’ walking, talking ball of unreleased daily stress.

And Max is just one aspect of the show (if a pretty integral part)! There’s so much more I could talk about but Impoverished Vriska (which is unfair to Vriska) took up so much of the post I have to shove the rest of it into bullet points.

The rest of the main cast are just ethnic stereotypes.

Han is the owner of the diner (Max’s boss, as I said before) but all of that pales before the fact that he’s a short guy from South Korea. Half if not the majourity of the jokes on the show consist of “Han is short”. Other features is that he’s somewhat incompetent, nobody likes him, he’s definitely not as cool as Max, and he’s possibly very gay.

Speaking of which, Michael Patrick King was confronted with the fact that Han is basically just an Asian point-and-laugh character and said that allegations of his racism were unfounded and he knows what it’s like to be discriminated against because he’s gay. Make of that what you will.

Oleg is the cook. He’s Ukrainian but you could just say “East European Weirdo” and that’s all that matters. His name may as well be Buck because he likes to fuck and that’s all there is to say about him.

Sophie is also an East European Weirdo (Polish edition) who also may as well be named Buck. Literally the only thing that makes her separate from Oleg is that she’s a girl, isn’t on a list of some sort, and she’s sometimes capable of having thoughts outside of flesh on flesh. She’s also shilled a lot which is very weird. Apparently her actor is more famous than any of the others but I wouldn’t know.

Earl... He’s old black and likes weed. He gets very slight characterization outside of that I think. His relation to the diner is so vague that it took me ages to realize what he does (cashier, apparently).

Outside of that, we have more stereotypes as well. There’s a lot of gay characters but I swear every single one of them talks with the Gay Voice. Lisp, effeminate manner, you know how it is.

The episode specifically about LGBT people protesting the cupcake shop was bad too.

One out of context comment to a pretentious nonbinary person leads to a massive riot outside.

After a few scenes of the circus outside, Max and Caroline get picked up by a wild gang of homophobes (complete with them talking about overly offended youths, they’re the bad guys but it doesn’t quite pass the smell test).

They wiggle out of it in the most contrived manner possible by kissing each other, and suddenly the LGBT crowd outside becomes their best friends despite being convinced that they were bigots (and Han & Max offering piss-poor refutations to that claim).

And the episode ends off with the same nonbinary person, after making up with Max & Caroline, taking an unwarranted shot at bisexual people and then walking off into the sunset.

By the way this same character is the only explicitly NB character on television to my (limited) knowledge. So I’d like to take a moment and weep for enbies in that they already have crumbs and one of the bigger crumbs came from this fucking show.

If 50% of the show’s jokes is “Han is short”, the other 50% is “SEX”. Honestly at some points the show plays out like an Amy Schumer stand-up.

Rant ended impromptu because thinking about this show enough to write this much gave me brain damage.

#oh no renardie is posting

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charlizealcaraz-blog · 8 years ago

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Between Black and White: What Life Was Like for Other Races During the Racial Segregation

The racial segregation that took place in America from 1896 to the 1950s is an example of one of the many horrendous things that should never be repeated. It reeks of the repugnant discrimination that African-Americans experienced on a daily basis and how inferiorly-treated they were by Caucasian people (slavery, lynching, etc).

Public facilities were made and separated only for white people and black people, and it is no doubt that white people were at the top of the social hierarchy and black people were at the bottom–but what were the other races doing at the same time era, the era of racial discrimination and the peak of racism?

Most people would say that there were barely any other races during the racial segregation in America as most history textbooks never talk about them; nevertheless, they did exist in huge numbers and were fully functioning and living American citizens.

According to the racial census done in the 1940s, there was a total amount of 18 million non-whites living in America. Although 12 million of them were black, the other 6 million were other races among the 132 million people in America during that time.

Mixed (Black and White):

Mixed peoples who lived at the time of the segregation struggled with identity issues as their black and white beings were not accommodated in a black only and white only America. They also dealt with the same discrimination that all-black people did and received the same racial slurs and distasteful experience in school, and at work.

Although it was illegal, interracial marriages did exist during the segregation which resulted into mixed children. The children were naturally neither 100% white nor 100% black as they are a mix of both; hence,

“...there was no place for them

in the Black and White America.”

They were treated just the same as pure blacks even though it was evident that they were not just black. Any person who has even just the littlest fraction of black ancestry was considered black and required by law to only use black facilities. There was even a whole rule about it–the “one-drop rule” where it states that any person who has even a drop of black blood would be considered black according to law.

Homer Plessy was ⅛ black and ⅞ white and had an appearance of a white man. He boarded a vacant “white-only” car in a passenger railway and he was immediately detained for occupying a car that was apparently not designated for him, as he was “just not white enough” to legally occupy a “white-only” car.

Asians:

Records show that Asians were treated variously throughout the states when the Jim Crow laws were in effect. Some states considered them to be “white” and brought them into the white society of privilege and a higher spot in the hierarchy, while some were labeled as “coloured” or “black” and were segregated and pushed back to the bottom of the social status ladder.

Being an Asian immigrant–or even an Asian-American–in the segregated South was not different from being African-American in the Southern states.

A hefty amount of Chinese people immigrated to America right after the American Civil War–most of them headed towards the South. The Mississippi Chinese were a group of Chinese people who had migrated to Mississippi during 1865 to 1877, and that time period and region was considered to be societally dominated by Mississippians of British and African descent.

The Mississippi Chinese immigrated to America for financial purposes, hoping to help fund their families back in China with the money they earn overseas. They were seen as “peasants” and from poor artisan families by Native White Americans; hence, also being labeled as “coloured” and received discrimination from them, although less than what African-Americans get.

They were also just as segregated as black people. Although not centralized in Mississippi, the Chinese communities in San Francisco and some other states had separate schools, theatres, etc–this also meant that they were involved in the ‘separate but equal’ idealism, having less quality facilities and less accommodations than white people.

Although not coming from white people, Filipinos endured discrimination and hatred in the 1930a for supposedly ‘taking jobs away’ from other minorities. There was a huge need for agricultural workers at that time after the exclusion of Chinese and Japanese people, and Filipinos were called in to fill the empty spots.

They were brought in as ‘strikebreakers,’ or people who work in place of others who are on strike, and these Filipino workers encountered heated tensions with Mexicans and other minorities who were protesting against their employers as they felt that they were taking away the work. Preserved documents show that Filipinos received hateful letters coming from the people they subbed in for, and even had their camps destroyed.

Filipinos were also seen as a threat to white people as they felt that Filipino men were taking their local European women; hence, they were strongly against Filipinos marrying white women giving Filipino men no dispensation regarding the Anti-Interracial Marriages Law.

Much similar to Filipinos, it was mostly men from India who immigrated to America for agricultural labour. Although records show they lived a decently peaceful life, the Congress barred immigration from India in 1917. It is unknown when the immigration ban was lifted, but it was evident that because of it, there was a great gender imbalance. Consequently, Indian men married local Mexican women–a bizarre dispensation from the Anti-Interracial Marriage Law.

Interestingly enough, black men would try to pass off as anything but black to avoid being lynched. They witnessed how untouched the Indians were, especially Sikhs, and decided to sport one as well to get around racial discrimination. Turbans helped black people go incognito during the Jim Crow Era, and it worked out well for them as they were often not questioned once seen wearing the traditional accouterment.

A turban isn’t limited to just Indians–it is also commonly worn by Middle Easterners, East Asians, and North Africans in different variations–but it was classified as the “racial marker” for Indians and thus, anyone who wore a turban during the racial segregation was Indian.

Mexicans, Latinos, and Hispanics:

The 1940 American census above doesn’t show a category for Mexicans, Latinos, and Hispanics and that only indicates how inferiorly treated they were. Although not as much as African-Americans, these groups experienced extreme discrimination and lynchings, and were also subjected to more inferior segregated facilities.

Mexicans immigrated to America after Mexico and the United States had formed the bracero–a labour program in which Mexicans were encouraged to move to the U.S. to as contract workers. The braceros were desperate for jobs and kept them despite being paid very low wages, and often worked under inhumane conditions that other ethnicities, especially whites, would be unwilling to accept. Mexicans were treated so poorly in the United States that at one point, the Mexican government refused to send any more workers to the country.

Much like other non-white and non-black ethnicities, Mexican communities were also given separate schools for their children. These schools were much more inferior and alienated than other races’ schools (example: Chinese Schools); so much so that they filed many cases to the Supreme Court, claiming that their rights were being challenged.

Discrimination amongst Hispanics and Latinos, revoltingly enough, were based on how light or dark their complexions were. Lighter skin Latinos and Hispanics, since they could pass of as white, experienced no discrimination at all unless they tell them what their last names were. Even if they did, they would change their last names to “white” last names. For example, one woman would change her last name “Purcell” to “Purcella” or from “Juan” to “John.”

American Baseball teams set a conspicuous example of this malpractice. Sports teams during the Jim Crow Era were, unsurprisingly, also segregated to White Leagues and Negro Leagues. There were no separate leagues for Latinos and other ethnicities, therefore, they were ‘smuggled’ into the two existing leagues depending on their complexion. Light-skinned Cuban baseball player Adolfo Luque played for the Cincinnati Reds for example, while dark-skinned Cuban baseball player Martin Dihigo played for the Negro Leagues.

The Jim Crow Era in America was, undoubtedly, the worst times for blacks as they were treated inhumanely and were killed simply because they were of darker complexion. It is appreciated that history textbooks were formatted to highlight both their sufferings and excellence in that time era of peak racism, but most often they forget to talk about other ethnicities and how they were treated–whether they were just as alienated as black people or not.

Their stories are unsung and they need to be told in order for this generation, and generations to follow, to understand the conditions of International Relations between America and other countries.

It seems as if their stories are forgotten and are completely omitted from America’s history by the way they were documented. Lest we forget the way other minorities were treated in history to learn why we shouldn’t do it in the present and avoid it in the future.

#history #race #culture #oppression

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