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

Not seen the other thread
I don't think it's controversial to talk about.
What's controversial is any sense of blaming white people alive now for our ancestors behaviour.
And also not recognising the "different times" and context is a real factor.
It's one thing to look at more recent events like nazi Germany where lots of the world were horrified but they continued. Compared to colonisation where everyone (in the western world) was doing the same thing. People weren't evil. They just lived in a very different context.

Mostly people that can't acknowledge it are just racist though.

It’s interesting that you want to talk about past “white behaviour” and not the current “(insert race) behaviour” leading to millions living in slavery today. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_21st_century

Yet the nature of colonisation meant that many people were oppressed and dehumanised irrespective of skin colour, for example the Irish

But white people are not uniform. There is a huge variety of ethnicities with complex national histories. Irish people were victimised during the famine. Poor English people also had bad treatment at many points. I'm afraid it's not as simple as all white people always being some kind of colonising aggressor. The history of the European world is complex.

Well I object to your blatant exclusion of my Country in your above statement. As the syllabus in all of the UK is largely similar in Scotland, Wales, N Ireland. You should really of said the British education system.
See what I did there, we can allege discrimination, racism etc into many things where there was never an intention to offend.

The reality with teaching history is there is a shed load of it. More being created every day. There are only so many teaching hours in a year, throw in all the other subjects, and of course history teachers can only teach a tiny fraction of what is out there.

I guess the article shared is a good example of how behaviour is challenging to categorise as belonging to a specific race.

I always understood the whole point of racism is it being around prejudice + power. I guess this is similar in the sense that all races, religions etc can behave oppressively given the right circumstances but the sphere of who they can oppress might be very different. In the period of transatlantic slavery the prejudice of white Europeans allowed them to see black people as less than human and the military and industrial power they had meant they were able to scale up and globalise a horrible practice already happening in Africa. Without the element of prejudice they might instead have looked to encourage reform along the lines of what was slowly starting to happen in Europe at that time to help give average people more rights/freedoms. Without their power then there would still have been a slave trade but it wouldn’t have been moving vast quantities of people across continents. I don’t think though it has anything to do with “white behaviour”

People get defensive. They think you are blaming them personally. Sadly if we don't listen we don't learn. We would not know which things have deeper meaning for other cultures.

Yeah, history was very "white" at school.

Black history month should not be a thing...should be properly integrated.

some people have a vested interest in focusing only on atrocities carried out by people of certain backgrounds. So if you're white or if you're Jewish, it's game on basically.

But it's not just "white behaviour" is it. Many atrocities have been committed over the centuries by many races .
Funny isn't it that some people are not so vocal about what's happening today, like beheading gay people, stoning women to death for being raped or not wearing a headscarf.
It's not white people doing that is it?

OP you are right to say that there is a problem with children in the English education system being able to drop History (and a number of other humanities) at the end of year 9. It means that the level of communally known history in this country is quite limited. Basically a lot of English people are only really aware of the following atrocities
The slave system in the Roman Empire (and a lot of people spend most of their time talking about how amazing the legions were)
Hitler and the Jewish people
The transatlantic slave trade

they just might know about the Russian pogroms if they are familiar with Fiddler on the Roof, Stalinist and Maoist moral cleansing policies, various conquests of the Jewish people if they have studied the Old Testament. They might also have some very basic knowlege of Vlad the Impaler and Ghengis Khan

Pol Pot, Idi Amin, the Quialong Emperor, Timur the Lame, rarely feature.

Yes do please OP 🍿

Amazing. Another curious naive pseudo racial history enquiry. Go and PM the earlier racist if you want this discussion OP

Well thanks goodness you're here to inform us all. Do tell us all about it.

One thing that I think would make an interesting study is the innate defensiveness of victim groups of their "special" victim status.

I encountered it time and again when doing comparative studies. If I was meeting academics or groups related to victims, as soon as they learned I was comparing and evaluating different events, they went to great pains to tell me that the other events weren't the same, weren't as bad, or even that they didn't happen at all.

So there is a huge amount of othering between victim communities.

“White behaviour” what do you want to debate?! Your rascist beliefs? I hope this thread gets reported too

Think the mongols killed something like 10% of the world population. Pretty awful.

If you’re actually trying to say something else, then you need to be specific.

You could launch a conversation about the excesses of the British Empire.

But you need to be specific rather than talking about white behaviour. Irish and welsh heritage people will struggle to see themselves as the beneficiaries of white behaviour. Our lands were plundered by invaders too, and we didn’t get to do any invading ourselves.

What is 'white behaviour ' OP and what makes so called 'white behaviour' any different to colonisers and oppressors of other races?

You’ve implied oppression is white behaviour. Have you not?

This issue is not as (ha) black and white as Black and White....https://www.hellomagazine.com/film/516611/antiques-roadshow-expert-tears-up-refuses-to-value-item/#

It was controversial thread as the OP was blatantly racist and clearly mums net agreed. Stop stirring

I think it’s because this has been discussed endlessly for the past 10 years and there seems no end point to it. There has been Black Lives Matter and lots of other movements teaching white people about the sins of their past.
White people are also allowed to be proud of their past achievements because as with all nations there was good and bad in our past.

Yes, this. If you get antagonism it may be because you’re being very “straw man” in your approach - saying “why can’t we ever discuss x”, “history is taught from white hero perspective here” - it’s so much more nuanced than that. There are enormous discussions all the time, on tv, among groups of people, at work, on the news, in magazines, online, all the time about the very negative impacts of white colonialism etc. Have a look at the school and university history curriculum - they aren’t learning “this important white man was the best and explained to the silly natives how to run their country”. You’re basically saying to a whole group of educated people “why are you all blind idiots who can’t discuss anything” when that’s not true.

If you have a particular example - eg you were talking to a friend and they said “it’s a shame we aren’t still in charge of India” or “slave traders had a point” then yes of course, raise it, bring that up as a discussion here and see what people think, have that discussion. But don’t start out with a generalised massively oversimplified half wrong statement and expect everyone to engage - you have some good things to raise but since you sandwich them in with a whole lot of untrue sweeping statements, people are going to step in to correct your misapprehension.