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@plantasia
There is going to be a lot of defensiveness in the years to come and we all gonna make mistakes but this is long overdue. For me personally as a teacher of German-Turkish background, it has really been a matter of understanding that one can do racist things without really being a racist, of understanding that words, gestures, jokes or symbols that look innocent to oneself can be hurtful depending on who says them and who hears them.
That something as arbitrary and superficial (literally) as skin colour has been used to prop up such an enduring system of global inequality is absolutely astonishing from a historical perspective. I am always reminded of how the Belgians introduced the very concept of ethnicity into Rwandan politics by way of the Hamitic hypothesis, which later exploded into the violence between Hutu and tutsi.
Young people today make me hopeful though. But the history of empire has to feature much more prominently on school curricula.