AIBU to cut off friend who thinks I am racist?

[Screamanger]

Her reasoning being that my grandfather worked in the British Colonial Service in Tanzania. Apparently this means I directly profited from racism.

I don’t believe I have profited, and I am proud of my family.

@Screamanger
My grandpa also fought for GB in ww2 but like most black men his bravery went unrewarded and his DD was treated appalling when she came to this country in the sixties.
You sound insufferable.

You can be proud of your grandfather for being a good man and still recognise that you profited from racism. Lots of good people worked in service of the empire and believed they were doing the right thing. But we now recognise the devastating harm caused by colonialism, and I think we have a moral duty to own that responsibility. It’s not racist to have a grandfather who worked to advance colonialism, and it’s not racist to be proud of the good things he obviously did. But I think it is racist to refuse to acknowledge that you profited from a racist and harmful endeavour. It’s not your fault, you couldn’t have prevented it, you bear no responsibility for the fact that it happened. But you do now have a responsibility to accept that it was a bad thing, and that you owe some of the advantages you now have to the oppression of colonised people (as do most people in the UK, whether directly or indirectly).

I don’t see how we’re ever supposed to learn from the past or make any kind of moral reparations if we don’t acknowledge that the inequality created by colonialism still perpetuates to this day, and part of that is recognising where we ultimately benefited from that inequality.

It’s near-impossible to understand, or have true common ground when two backgrounds are so very different. You both have to decide if your friendship can survive this, but if it is, then you may both have to accept that you will not come to persuade the other to your POV.
Everyone sees the world through their own, personal filter, and racism, sexism, history and culture are part of that filter.
Paternalistic racism continues in various forms, for example, every time I get asked to sponsor unskilled teens to go somewhere foreign and build orphanages and schools or teach English for a few weeks.
Because of course, a group of White, Western youths can do a much better job than the builders already there, and them repeatedly teaching the same trite phrases in English is useful.
It’s a hangover from Colonial times.

Life’s a bit more complicated than simple good/evil.

The plight of Africa today is as much the fault of generations of post colonial leaders as it is anything done by Britain decades or more ago. Look at Singapore, Hong Kong and South Korea - all colonies until more recently than most of Africa, and S Korea suffered a ruinous war in the 1950s yet all far out perform most other countries.

Slavery would not have been possible without the complicity of the African leaders who willingly sold their people into it.

Barbary slave traders captured huge numbers of Europeans including British up to the C19 - longer than the trans Atlantic slave trade (and it was Britain who abolished the latter).

Conquest was the game everyone in the playground was playing. Look at the history of the Ottoman Empire - is modern Turkey now to feel guilt etc? And what does anyone think the Zulus were up to in Southern Africa?

as a fellow BME I think you know you are shouting into the void trying to discuss unconscious racism/bias on MN.

Not BME myself but agree with this. I found out much more about unconscious racism from following various people on Twitter. I agree with MrsTP's posts, and others in the same vein. White British can acknowledge the power structures that have given us an advantage over people we subjugated in the past. We're all a product of our history so yes, generations down we're still benefiting from the leg-up our ancestors sometimes gave us.

I'd try to drop the defensiveness OP and really listen to your friend. Stop seeing "woke" as an insult. Profiting from racism isn't quite the same thing as being racist in the sense we're used to hearing. She doesn't mean you consciously and actively dislike BME people. She just means (I suspect) that your legacy from your grandfather is mixed. You can be proud of his personal bravery in WW2 whilst also finding out more about the colonial service and what it did.

Ahh Provincialbelle there's always one. So according to you colonialism isn't the reason some parts of the world are doing badly because some other former colonies are doing great. You're literally on the borderline of saying that Asians are just smarter than Africans and that's why their countries are more developed. I hope you dearly don't mean to imply that but you're on a knife edge.

provincial so what is your point? We shouldn't care about our own point?

SK is prosperous today largely because of the US. Just another form of colonialism.

"We shouldn't care about our own point?"

We shouldn't care about our own part, I meant.

The plight of Africa today is as much the fault of generations of post colonial leaders as it is anything done by Britain decades or more ago.

You can’t really separate the actions of despotic post-colonial leaders from the colonising countries which created the conditions which enabled them to enforce exploitative rule. Look at the DRC’s Patrice Lumumba, a democratically elected leader who was assassinated by inter-related Belgian and US governmental plots as a direct result of the Congo being used by those countries for a proxy Cold War. Almost as soon as the DRC became independent from Belgium there were civil wars caused by meddling from Western countries, all culminating in the death of 100,000 people and the rule of Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, a man who plundered his country for vast personal wealth and oversaw hideous human rights violations, all with the support of the Belgian government. The consequences of that are still playing out in the DRC today. Should Belgium be allowed to just absolve itself of responsibility? Should there be no acknowledgement of how significant the people of Belgium benefitted and are still benefitting from the exploitation of the DRC’s resources (at the clear expense of its people?).

Doesn’t it depend on how we think/talk about people? There are people in my recent family history who have been very dodgy indeed racially. I find it troubling and would be very careful how I talked about them.

There is nothing wrong with being proud of your grandfather for being the kind and gentle man in your family. Nothing at all.

But perhaps your friend thought you were proud of colonialism, which may have harmed her family whilst the British did in fact benefit.

VivienneHolt has explained it well.

It may simply be a case of at least trying to understand why the other person might have a different perspective.

You 'don't know' if colonialism was racist?

YABU. And your friend has called you out on your ignorance.

Did you actually profityhough? I think that argument only comes into play when you get a large inheritance compromising of dirty money.

Did you actually profityhough? I think that argument only comes into play when you get a large inheritance compromising of dirty money.

Why that arbitrary distinction? ‘Profit’ doesn’t just mean ‘made a large wad of cash from’. In this context it means ‘benefit’ - so the economic, social and professional advantages obtained by the OP’s grandfather which enabled him to give his descendants a life that many people subjected to colonial oppression would have been prevented from achieving for their own family by the actions of empire.

This is also why most people in the UK can be said to have profited from racism - how much of our infrastructure was funded by wealth pillaged from other countries? How much of wealth still generated today through tourism is the result of artefacts taken from their countries of origin, either without payment or for far less than their worth? How many of our public buildings, how much of our national wealth, comes from money made on the backs of slaves? We still benefit to this day from the vast wealth this county accumulated thought empire and slavery, and it’s not good enough to simply say ‘I didn’t personally enslave anyone so it’s nothing to do with me’. That is just a comfortable lie for people who don’t want to face a reality that makes them feel bad.

It's not just about profiting
It's about being ignorant and then being defensive when you're not even willing to acknowledge your family's actions may not all have been benevolent

We get it, it's your family. But this is wilful ignorance

It's kind of like saying that all German's are anti Semitic. Perhaps ask her if she believes that.

It's kind of like saying that all German's are anti Semitic.

It really isn’t.

corblimey

That is the absolute most inane comparison I've ever seen.

Edge of heaven I said - and meant - no such thing. Koreans are not the same ethnicity as Han Chinese so it would be absurd and offensive to lump them together under “Asians”. And being Asian hasn’t helped North Korea, which gives you the clearest example (as did East/West Germany) that it is the culture and system of government that leads to success, not ethnicity. The countries I mentioned are rich through the rule of law, something almost entirely missing across Africa (with Ghana being a notable exception and one of the most prosperous countries in Africa accordingly).

Woke = tedious pain in the backside. Avoid at all cost, it is nothing to do with anyone else, it is just historical fact, can I claim money back from the Romans because they enslaved my ancestors (possibly).

People like this achieve nothing and just cause problems for others

“Woke = tedious pain in the backside.”
But not necessarily wrong.

There are certain people in this world who believe all white people are guilty of some thought crime whether they are aware of it or not and there are certain white people who pander to this and insist on apologising for things totally out of their control and for which they are not responsible. It’s pathetic. People are people and are responsible for their own actions alone - your friend judged you by your grandfather who in all probability was a good man but who worked in a branch of government that nowadays is a bit unPC. And people like to make blanket judgments about others without examining the context.

Roald Dahl worked in Africa too and is a national hero

“And people like to make blanket judgments about others without examining the context.”

Well this is definitely true!

Seeing comments above about British people being ‘enriched’ by ‘colonalism’. If you feel so bad sell your house and give the money to charity. According to the tedious people everything is down the U.K., not the other countries who had empires, Germany, France, Holland, Japan, China, Greece, Italy, etc. No it’s all the UK’s fault!

If being ‘woke’ is recognising biases and structural inequality I’d take that any day over being ignorant.

OP, you do sound ignorant. You ‘don’t know’ if colonialism was racist? You don’t recognise that all white people benefit from systemic racism? You have profited from racism even if you yourself are kit racist (although your answers suggest you are at the very least incredibly unaware of all the ways racism manifests, it isn’t just a case of calling brown people nasty names). We should all think critically about our own privilege and work to undo the biases and prejudices we have as a result of society/conditioning. I don’t know the entire conversation you had with your friend but you do should rather wilfully oblivious and uninformed about Britain’s role in dividing and destroying other nations.

For the record, I’m white