Neo-Nazis Chased Out of Town

This is so inaccurate that it's difficult to know where to begin! I wasn't going to bother to unpack it, but then I started to think that TC-IMC really shouldn't let this silliness stand. 

For one thing, we could get into "thank white people for modern-style slavery, for environmental disasters, for Monsanto, for the holocaust, for nuclear weapons"....but that just turns into an empty back-and-forth.

Or we could talk about Asian tech research, Soviet medical inventions (which tended to come from  folks who would not be considered "white" ), Arabic and Asian optics work without which _we would have no eyeglasses, friend!__,Hong Kong and Singapore contributions to capitalism, Middle Eastern medical research from after the Roman Empire onward, Native social forms that pre-dated and inspired much in Enlightenment political philosophy and much in the US constitution, all kinds of scholarship in the great African kingdoms before they were shattered by slavery, new social movements in Africa today--and about a million other things.  And you don't even mention artists, writers, politicians, philosophers--as if somehow you think Simon Bolivar or someone is just completely trivial. 

But if we talked like that,  it would just turn into "oh, Rousseau was more important than the Native people whose government practices inspired him" or "the Soviets were white!" or some other way to deny that anyone besides Great European Men could possibly make anything--as if Great White people just sit down in an empty room and magically have Great White Ideas all by themselves.

And I guess my gut response is "if some white people invented things, why does this mean that neo-nazis get to run around scaring and insulting people going to an anti-racist workshop?" That's always what "white pride" people seem to mean, but I've never seen, for example, an Asian-American cultural event that consisted of hassling other folks.

But all these arguments rely on a deeply contradictory set of definitions of race. First off, the sharp definitions of who is white, who is brown, etc were created as Europeans started trying to conquer other nations--just look at the very first interactions with African kingdoms, for one thing--"race" isn't what's on Europeans' minds; it's power and military might.  And then of course whiteness shifts over time--for the modern racist, it's convenient to consider just about anyone not from Africa or Asia "white", but that isn't how racists thought in, say, the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries.  Just how "white" would  Italian or Jewish or Eastern European inventors have been in 1870?  Just how "white" were a lot of those people under Hitler, frex?

And of course, all these wonderful inventions--rocketry, anyone?--are built up on top of imperialism.  Europeans come in, kill people, take their stuff, take their ideas, enslave or exile them and then sit on top of their piles of treasure fooling around until they invent something, patent it to make money off of it, use it to bribe or threaten other people, amass more treasure, invent more stuff--I'm not especially proud of white folks inventing a bunch of plastics and new electronic processes so that they can fight wars more effectively.  And that's where a lot of these inventions come from.  War is the forcing house of technology. 

And look at how disgracefully white people have used even the most benign of inventions--withholding lifesaving drugs from poor countries so that rich corporations can make even more money! Doing medical research in Africa so that they won't have to adhere to human subjects protocols!  If that's white invention, you can keep it.

Of course, you can believe that this is somehow magically encoded in the genes, that white people must be selfish, violent, greedy "inventors" who hurt each other and the planet (which to you means that white people are superior, although why I will never understand).  You can believe that white people do things because they're white, not because of any kind of historical circumstances. 

The rest of us will try to figure out how we white folks came to be where we are so that we can behave better in the future.  We don't believe that the future is already written, that we're trapped in your world of invention and greed and violence because white people can never be anything else.  We believe that we can work together people of color and with care and humility and thoughtfulness  fix the world your "white" inventions have created.