Thoughts on White Hegemony - Forceful Assimilation through Children

[ubiquirk]

I recently got Rabbit-Proof Fence from the library to watch.  For those of you not familiar with it, it tells the true story of three "half-caste" (ie, half white, half aboriginal) girls who attempt to escape from an internment camp after being forcibly removed from their aboriginal mothers.

It turns out that Australia had a policy that any "half-

Comments

[zagzagael]

Heh. Yeah, English language used as a whip of shame is no longer an issue, eh? But, my relatives clearly remember their own fathers being told - No Irish, No Dogs. Irish Need Not Apply. They learned English pretty damned quickly and Irish has now become a dead language...

The Tutsi situation must surely be our most horrific current climate of forced ideology.

[ubiquirk]

Really, the actions of white cultural hegemony are so prevalent, that I had to pick a focus for this post.

Yep, whites (Belgians) went into the Rwanda area and created the whole Hutu/Tutsi thing by choosing some of the people there are being "more white" than others and creating an artificial distinction. Then look at what we got.

[septentrion1970]

There was a time when the children in French colonies learnt about "the Gallic, their ancestors".

[ubiquirk]

Sigh. And the use of Brit Lit in India, etc - "proper" literature.

[maddyriddle]

If you talk about ideology instead of ethnicity, then the same problem happened here during the last coup d'etat (1976-1982). The government stole the children from the political prisoners they took (and killed) and they gave them to families with the same ideology as the people in charge so they could get a "proper upbringing away from the poisonous influence of their family".
My generation has a lot of issues about identity because of that.

[ubiquirk]

Ideology can be used to suppress anyone who's "othered," so it can be based on class, gender, religion, governmental party, etc. I'm sorry to hear about that - I don't think I know much of the specifics about that in Argentinia, but then, if it's suppressed, I might not.