show transcript
chirasul posted:
my only advice is to BE CAREFUL posting about holiday traditions around europeans. you’ll post something casual like “anyone else watch the old Grinch movie every year? what a classic” and a european will appear as if summoned and say some shit like “funny how USAmericans always CONVENIENTLY forget that Not Everyone On Earth is from The USA……… no of COURSE we dont watch ‘the grunch’ or whatever the fuck that is…. our tradition is to attend a community showing of Glummdorf the Racial Stereotype”
themainspoon replies with screenshots of several tumblr tags and comments:
riseupriseupandcomealong:
my mom’s (american) class tried doing a language exchange thing w a sister school in spain and they decided to send each other boxes of gifts for christmas. the spanish class made remarks about oh christmas in the usa is so commercialized we have ~real traditions~ here and then my mom opened a box full of blackface dolls and blackface doll ornaments and blackface clothespins in front of her students
raygender:
Did once have a Dutch woman
vehemently defend the Festive Christmas Blackface by repeating "it’s different in Europe” with increasing desperation until she was crying. Literally all anybody else present did was just like, calmly say they were uncomfortable with the practice and not change her mind when she wailed about it.
monkey-mulch:
you bring up rudolph the red nosed reindeer and they bring out Skimbo the filthy redskin and im barely even joking about that they actually had this thing called indian plays in both soviet countries and germany
themainspoon:
European children waiting patiently on Hatemas Eve for Racism Claus to slur down the chimney and segregate all of their presents by colour.
“our racism is fine because it’s Tradition™”
No, even our traditions change.
Take Sinterklaas, the “blackface” wasn’t something negative. Those black Pete were respected by everyone. It wasn’t like the 1950 US television where blackface was used to represent dumb stereotypes of black people.
But even then, we Europeans see how it can be seen as something negative by certain groups, so to accommodate them they are being changed to soot Petes since they travel through chimneys.
I disagree strongly on the first point. Blackface was not percieved as negative by a lot of people because they had no awareness of it’s significance, but black pete has always been a racist stereotype. It’s not “oh, this is a character who happens to be black”, it’s “this thick-lipped gold-earring wearing pitch-black person with old-timey clothes is the servant of an old bisshop”.
This shit has always been fucked up. And we didn’t just make an easy decision to change them because some people were uncomfortable, people fought for that. And half of the people are still “bUt iTs jUsT a ChIlDrEnS hOlIdAy iS evErYthInG rAciSt tHEse DaYs?”