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Old 09-20-2007, 07:52 AM   #16 (permalink)
Seaver
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Location: Fort Worth, TX
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I am intending to assemble a big variety of lost traditions and culture and appropriate it. I think its the least I can do as a white person who feels badly for my ancestor's past. In a way I want to celebrate and work with cultural images in hopes to give back in some way. So many of these cultures are amazing and thus deserve a sort of visual apology.
First off don't fall into this White People Ruined Everything mode. Yes, we effectively whiped out the Native Cultures of the West. Yes we colonized half of the world. We changed peoples culture, philosophy, languages, etc.

However, so has every culture, country, and tribe which ever existed. White Christian culture just happened to do it better and more effectively than any others. Do you honestly believe that the 400-ish year war between the Iriquois and the Huron only lasted that long because they believed in each other's rights to coexist? No, it lasted that long because none had any advantage over the other and were locked in stalemate. How about the Persian Empire, do you believe they stopped conquoring people because they felt guilt for their conquests? No, they were militarily defeated.

I don't understand this white guilt. My ancesters never colonized anyone, they never enslaved a single black, yet I'm constantly told by our own culture that because I'm white I owe things to people. That to me is like asking a Mongol today to apologize to Arabs because of the whole Baghdad/Damascus thing. It's absolutely ubsurd that the sins of the great-great-great grandfather should fall on us now.
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