To wonder why it's so controversial to talk about white behaviour throughout history?

Films, works of fiction can hardly be considered history lessons....

Have to say I've never once heard colonialism talked about in a positive light and rightly so.

Old western cowboy films were around when my 75 year old mum was little. They were old and dated 40 years ago.

When I took my O levels I was 16 and when I took my A levels I was 18 - the usual ages people are when they take those exams in the UK.
My son took his A levels 2 years ago.
Some of those old westerns you mention were made when my parents were children AND were made in the US so really you'd have to take it up with Hollywood.

Yeah but the "white" argument doesn't really stand up when it was colonial English people who took over Scotland, Ireland and Wales too.... the inhabitants of whom are all "white". Being English or white just has absolutely nothing to do with it.

👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

Why don’t we replace the phrase ‘white behaviour’ with ‘colonialism’ - would that help?

It unfortunately goes hand in hand with white supremacy, you can ‘what about’ all you like and it says without going that white people aren’t the only aggressors throughout history, but we’re talking sustained, deliberate invasion, repeated genocides in some places and complete displacements of a WHOLE people to steal their resources - and yes this was based on white supremacy. I’m talking modern history not the bloody Roman Empire because these more recent atrocities more clearly provide the fabric to today’s society.

Examples:
-USA/Canada (was Native American, almost wiped out and now predominantly white European… not to mention the slavery)
-Brazil/Argentina/Uruguay etc (now vastly European)
-South Africa (now at least 20% European cos, you know, apartheid)
-Almost all of the Caribbean (now populated by black Africans brought over for slavery, lots of Indian indentured servants for the British Empire too)
-Australia (now predominantly white, natives almost wiped out and forcibly displaced)
-Israel (argue with your mother.)
—The Congo (10 million killed by King Leopold in the 1800s for the rubber trade, including systematic removal of limbs from men, women and children as punishment)

I’m sure there’s more I’ve missed. FYI no one is asking white people to apologise, that’s just being intentionally dense.

I wonder how many people know that every single British tax payer was contributing to paying off the debt of the UK for making up the slave owners losses until 2015?

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/06/17/government-finished-paying-uks-slavery-debt-2015/

Well, the Chinese invented gun powder but they used those for pleasure - fireworks. They also invented compass.

Yes you can go back that far to other white privileged men. Even the title you have given their land “the new world” is problematic ….people already lived there! It was new to the Europeans who wished to colonise it because the indigenous people were wasteful and uncivilised. Read any primary source of how the indigenous people were described.

You either didn't pay enough attention in school or just enjoy speaking nonsense to get a response

🤔

OP, as I said in the other thread, schools/colleges have taught students about the good and bad of history for decades. I certainly learnt about some of the terrible things the UK did in the name of colonialism, the concentration camps we set up in S. Africa etc etc when I did O Level and A level history.
My son recently did A level history and was similarly taught both the good and bad. No one was was painted as a hero.

You either didn't pay enough attention in school or just enjoy speaking nonsense to get a response.

There's no such thing as white history or black history. These terms are patently ridiculous. We don't say "brown history", do we? The terms are too broad, catching a huge range of cultures and nations. There is however the history of race and racialism, which is important to study.

It’s ironic that you want a discussion about history when you are using the word England when you seem to mean Britain.

Which predominantly white countries did we invade, pilfer and then colonise?

Yep just have a look at the East India Company or the lesser known Hudson Bay Company.

Their history is closely linked to the British Empire... it's about raw materials, trade, arrable land and the money to be made.

…to carry on, we boycotted certain products because the companies supported the regime in South Africa, we were listening to “ Free Nelson Mandela” , Del Boy and Rodney in only fools and horses lived in “Nelson Mandela house”….unless you lived under a stone why do you think people knew nothing about the world ?

I’m perplexed why you think “History is whitewashed in this country, we usually learn it from a "hero" viewpoint.” I went to school,in the 1980’s ,we studied the transatlantic slave trade, we visited the fantastic International Slave museum in Liverpool. I read “ Roots” by Alex Haley, which was an incredibly well selling book that was made into a well known TV series. We learnt a lot about the American civil rights movement. We were equally aware of the problems with racism in society ,it was a time of race riots in a number of cities, we saw the problems that black football players had with the racism from the crowd.

It's a human nature, or dare I say it, mainly male thing. The colour of skin is more circumstantial due to historical country and climate conditions more than anything else, I would guess.

If we are going to lay the blame for colonisation how far back do we go? Do we blame Christopher Columbus (Italian) for discovering the new world? How about Vasco de Gama (Portuguese) for opening up European trade routes.

Why did they think they could just go and “take resources” when people already lived there?

Because we could, through force. It's the same reason we did it to all the other countries, including the white ones we took from.