The row centres around the exhibition ‘This is Colonialism’ and the museum’s decision to restrict white people from entering a small section of the display
Police officers are gathered in front of the Zeche Zollern museum in Dortmund, the focus of what social networks are describing as a racism scandal.
The row centres around the exhibition ‘This is Colonialism’ and the museum’s decision to restrict white people from entering a small section of the display. For several months now, Saturdays at the museum have been reserved for black people and people of colour to explore a colonialism exhibition
The museum claims the objective is not to be discriminatory, but to reserve a safe space for reflection for non-whites.
Because every time a minority group tries to claim space for themselves, people in the majority group claim it’s the same thing as when the majority excludes the minority.
It’s a mainstay of discussions around race, sex, gender, sexuality, and pretty much every progressive topic.
It’s happening in this very thread for goodness sakes. People claiming racism against white people, completely ignoring what makes racism so damaging in the first place. As if every instance of discrimination is the same because they look kinda similar on their face.
Because at its core, as a matter of principle, making a PoC-only space because the discussion would be ‘disrupted’ by the mere presence of white people is bad, and in the same way that if a museum in Zimbabwe which had a section on Mugabe’s racial policies had an exclusionary area for whites-only to discuss, because PoC might ‘disrupt’ the freedom of the conversation with their presence. It doesn’t mean it’s as bad as legal segregation. It doesn’t mean it’s the same as turning away minorities from a business as a whole. It doesn’t mean it’s as bad as 99% of racism in modern society. But it is still springing from the same fundamentally flawed principle that racial exclusion is acceptable.
It is racism against white people, by definition, unless you’re using ‘power+prejudice’ definition, which would render all sorts of racism suddenly ‘not racism’. Hate crimes by black folk against Muslims in the environment after 9/11 would no longer be racism.
Just because the racism is not as bad (and, distinctly, it is obviously and apparently not as bad as colonialism, or mass segregation by law, or the intermittent exclusion of races in individual businesses, or modern societal-level cultural prejudices) does not mean it is not bad. Just because it is a minor incident of racial exclusion from a public venue with good intent does not mean it is ‘not bad’, it just means you probably don’t need an international embargo against Germany until they fix it. It’s still bad.
If someone, say, in this thread, commits well-meaning microaggressions against people of mixed-race without malice and with only the intent of buoying minorities not of mixed-race, not tearing down mixed-race individuals, that’s still bad, and on the same principle that all racism is bad. That doesn’t mean that they’re as bad as people who call mixed-race people slurs - it doesn’t even mean they’re even close. But it does mean that it’s still bad. It still fundamentally springs from a principle which should be examined with a critical eye in order to root it out for all incidents going forward.
People don’t live in principle, we live in reality, and reality is messy.
Taking into account the full context and effect of actions is important. And in many cases, things which violate our principles can still be, while not ideal, a net positive.
In a world that is still contending with discrimination, not to mention the long-tail effects of historical discrimination, sometimes we are going to see things like minority groups creating spaces by excluding majority group members. And it’s just not the same in practice, even if “in principle” it’s bad because it’s discrimination. Dogmatically sticking to the principle with no regard to the lives of the people living under it only perpetuates the effects of that historical injustice.
But reality is built on principles. Seeking to align reality with our principles is why life is less shitty now than it was in the 60s, or the 1910s, or the 1800s. Accepting the ‘mess’ as it is is nothing but stagnation and conservatism (in the realest sense, not in the ‘reactionary chud’ sense).
I don’t necessarily disagree with the (hoho) principle of this, but that doesn’t mean that those things should be seen as ‘not bad’. They are bad. But they’re a necessary evil, at best, and one should expect backlash to them, and such backlash is not inherently unreasonable, even if it is the least bad solution available at the time.
Even if it’s not the same in practice, that the principle is wrong should result in us seeking alternate paths around such solutions. Allowing bad principle to take root only ensures that it will remain, and torment future generations. I don’t want to live in a society that’s no longer racist against black people, but has then decided that those of Nepalese descent are just fundamentally disruptive to certain parts of ‘our’ society.
And dogmatically sticking to principles in ignorance of reality is why we are still contending with so much crap in our lives to this day.
Sometimes we are going to need to deviate from principle. Because reality demands it, and shying away from it leads to worse outcomes.
I said literally nothing about accepting the mess. You are completely off the mark with this comment.
If that backlash consistently prevents action to improve people’s lives, then it becomes its own evil.
Deviation from principle should be recognised as what it is, unfortunate but sometimes temporarily necessary because we do not live in a perfect world. It shouldn’t be permanent. But yes we do sometimes have to take less-tha-perfect actions.
You are making a whole bunch of assumptions about my position here. That any deviation from a pure principle is going to become permanent, or that I’d support it becoming permanent. And that is just not what I’m arguing for.
As I said elsewhere, it’s not that it’s intended to be permanent. It’s that temporary solutions often entrench themselves as stubbornly as permanent ones. But I’m done with this argument as a whole. I think we started poorly but ended better, but the whole subject exhausts me. Please just keep in mind that these exclusionary behaviors, in addition to the principles mentioned, create no end of trouble simply by their very existence with regards to the identity and belonging of mixed-race individuals.
That is fair, and I’m sorry you have to put up with that. It is often the same in my country for mixed race people, our implementation of affirmative action is far from ideal to say the least.
I think we may have started from different sets of assumptions and argued past each other a bit. I’m sorry for that.
I apologize too. I let my frustration and aggression boil over against someone operating in good-faith. Too used to dealing with people operating in bad faith, lmao.