stormborn

Spain, France, Portugal, Germany, the Netherlands, Japan, Canada, Russia, less so. You may not even be familiar with Denmark’s colonies or what the US did to Hawai'i. People in my country were shocked by King Leopold’s Ghost and we had some of the most brutal generational chattel slavery.

It isn’t really about “your ancestors did evil shit”. That’s pretty universal. It’s “you and your country benefits from and/or have failed to acknowledge that evil past”. It’s the Koh-i-noor and residential schools, making reparations for the Holocaust but not Namibia. It’s Eurocentric beauty standards and skin bleaching, the destruction of indigenous languages and cultures, the robbing of generations of wealth, and genocide. This stuff still affects people today. Africa and Central and South America would look wildly different if colonialism had never happened. Central Asia is still dealing with the fallout of the Soviet Union. Millions of people were slaughtered and enslaved around the world up until modern times.

People need to understand it wasn’t just Britain and Spain and the US and it wasn’t some distant past. There are countries that only achieved independence within living memory. Millions of indigenous peoples still have to heed colonial oppressors. Wealth is gone that colonial powers haven’t returned.

You just started a war.

spider-man: homecoming challenge