I’ve read this opinion on here and other leftist places several times, and it’s gotten to the point where I’m absolutely confounded about whether people even understand geopolitics and know history. Truly weird take that would suggest hidden prejudices and having complete blinders on what is happening in the world.
Several people on this website believed Greenland was “rich and white” until recently, too, so there’s more than one sign that the people here may have hidden prejudices and some amount of ignorance about the world.
This is a yankee website, they’re kinda known for ignorance of most places outside their borders
Most places inside their borders, too, let’s be honest.
someone here once said that the Sámi were not Indigenous because they “looked white”
jeez i wonder why they “look white”
…Because the native-settler dynamic is the result of a material, economic base, irrespective of skin color?
Also, one person said that supporting Indigenous rights was the same as supporting primitivism.
Famously, Tumblr also described Finland as a colonialist country, so maybe we shouldn’t get all up in arms about the historical analysis done by the most propagandized people in the history of the world.
Sorry, I don’t see what’s wrong with calling Finland a colonialist country…? Suvi Keskinen of the University of Helsinki has spilled a lot of ink on this topic, I think. Am I just misunderstanding what’s meant by this?
From what I remember Finland has/had some paternalistic and colonialist attitudes towards Sami and Karelian populations - like enforcing their “proper” dialect over local languages. They also tried to colonize East Karelia during ww2 and put russian citizens into camps.
Everything outside of
is just a gradient from “relatively rich” to “you will die of an antediluvean disease” going from north to south
“I before E… Always.”
I before E except before Ark
Looks pretty white to me, checkmate
That specific comment might be more of an artifact of the fact that Greenland is often not mentioned as anything other than a part of Denmark. Denmark is famously both rich and white, so I kind of want to give our comrade (who was rather apologetic IIRC when you corrected them) a little bit of the benefit of the doubt.
If you were a regular american, you’d mostly only hear about Denmark in the context of being a “progressive” nation in Scandinavia, who isn’t as crazy as Sweden (Denmark used to be the most far-right of the Nordics when it came to the treatment of refugees and MENA-immigrants).
Greenland was also under direct US occupation in living memory, still has the northernmost US military base in the world, and is notably located on the same continent as 49 of the 50 US states — with its Kalaallit natives being closely related to several Indigenous groups of the USA’s biggest state, the USA’s biggest neighbor-slash-puppet, and even the easternmost region of Russia. Even if you had only ever looked at the very first picture at the top of the Wikipedia article for “Indigenous peoples of the Americas”, you would’ve seen that Greenland is overwhelmingly Indigenous.
…Now I really shouldn’t get so ticked off about it, since obviously everyone’s going to be ignorant about some things, but I really can’t help but feel like when even such superficial prodding into Arctic or Indigenous history and issues as even just looking at a map of pre-contact language families, would’ve revealed that Greenland is an Inuit country — that you probably haven’t been doing your due work to learn your own continent’s history. So if it was just one person with that misconception, I don’t think I would be so bothered by it, but it was several people, which might point to this being a broader issue.
The closest thing most americans learn about Greenland is from history simplified or whomstever who say shit like “oh vikings named iceland and greenland but did wait - they did a switcheroo- the ice land is called green pog!”