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Dear readers from a foreign country,
Do you know what a snowball is? I don’t think so, so let me tell you. A snowball is a dome-shaped object molded together with a plate with a perfect fit. Everything is made of material that easily breaks into pieces. The balloon is about two-thirds full of water and scenarios of one kind or another have been created and attached to the bottom plate of the balloon. White flakes that should look like snow are on the bottom plate and when the globe is shaken, which often happens when a playful hand is near, the flakes rotate around the fixed landscape at the bottom of the globe. All figures and objects disappear in a feigned snow haze, are consumed by it, are lost in it, and for a moment it seems that this will be the case forever: they will never be clearly visible again. Then the flakes (the fake snow) slowly fall to the bottom of the globe and everything becomes as before. The landscape does not change, it is fixed, fixed and fixed! One usually finds the snow globe where gloomy family vacations take place: Disneyland, the Bronx Zoo, the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, the last three in New York; near the streets in the departure lounges of airports, in places that you may very well never visit again because you don’t want to visit these places again. This is the life of the snowball.
Their racism has been directed, above all and in particular, at Afro-descendant blacks
For the past four yearsStarting sometime in early November 2016, I have been living in a snowball called the United States of America. I have been a figure in this snow globe, the water in it has sometimes been orange, sometimes rosy red, the color of the snow has never been white. It has been an experience full of shame. I’ve been a prisoner of that. For me, the United States of America is the most wonderful country in the world and it really is, but only if you live there do you become attached to the best people and the best people are the blacks, the African Americans. If in the United States you join the group of people who call themselves “white”, you will find yourself involved in misery and in the small and great abuses of your fellow men, as well as in greed and daily murder. And more. Here’s a list: One’s kids should go to the best schools and one will completely forget that the best schools have never helped anyone be a good person (take Boris Johnson, take George W Bush, just like an example from the crowd). With the exception of presumably John Adams (the second president of the United States, served only one term) and certainly Barack Hussein Obama, all American presidents have been racist on a large scale and their racism has been primarily and especially directed to black people with African diseases. origin. The great Abraham Lincoln, a president to whom I am so deeply attached to growing roses in his garden in his honor, was a racist but he hated slavery and that is enough for me, because I am a descendant in the most blessed way. enslaved. (I write blessed, but I mean random because the blessings are so arbitrary that they are actually coincidences.) The United States of America is, even before becoming something like the United States of America, a disturbing and cloudy snowball of abuses and these abuses. from the beginning it has originated from people who emigrated from Europe.
Photo: Stina Wirsén
The largest snow globe I live in is dated August 3, 1492, but let me now take a look at the globe from early November 2016. In one fell swoop, the open skies I lived under state of Vermont were closed, which was very strange because I remembered that the open sky under which Vermont lived when the year 2001 opened even more than and it was in a time of darkness, that’s what they told me, and yet , the sky above me could not have been more open, blue, more welcoming and welcoming; but now, or then, as I now want to see it, the 2016 sky, in that month of November, darkened: words really change the color of things and people who were not allowed to enter the United States of America They could recognize that idea of the slave states of America then they were defeated, but they found a way to will resurrect And the specific snowball is the one that I / most of us are in. Making groups of people feel smaller than they think they are, making groups of people feel larger than they could be, making groups of people tied between the smallest and the largest is an American idea , an American ambition, but nothing is permanent, not even in a snowball, because sometimes an arm brings it down from the shelf (the shelf is the permanent home of the snowball). There was a travel ban for people from “Muslim” countries. But what was it? A few centuries ago, you were not allowed to be a Catholic in some European countries, you were not allowed to be a Protestant in others.
Read more. Jamaica Kincaid writes about how the corona pandemic has created a huge gap in our lives
Catholics became more or less racist after the Spanish defeat during the Elizabethan era; When I was little, when I was a child, on a Caribbean island ruled by the British, I learned that Catholics, that is, the people of Italy, Spain and similar places, are not really white and that notion lived so strongly in me that When I arrived in America, the United States, and I met so many people who were said to be white: Italians, Spanish and almost all Catholics, I got rid of the fear of whites that could have entertained: I knew racism in abundance but I often knew I that the people who exposed me had had their own difficult encounters with people who, by exercising their power to decide who is what, only contributed to the perpetual impermanence of the snowball. And then people were from countries where the dominant faith was Islam as Catholics and they were also like blacks in America: America has a tradition of segregation. Only African Americans / African Americans understand it instinctively and that is why they / we are the real Americans. This is also why so many immigrants in America try to distance themselves as much as possible from African Americans (the Irish, light-skinned immigrants from India, light-skinned immigrants from China, Korea, Japan), because the African American is the long-term American. : there is no America, the United States, but African Americans / Blacks. America’s obsession with freedom is simply due to the fact that we live in such intimate closeness with people that we “don’t liberate.” We are very aware of the situation of the “not free”. African American is the definition of “not free.” America is a strange place: it has fifty states, half of which are named after the indigenous people who lived on American land, from Alabama to Wyoming. America’s national motto could very well be: Kill the people, keep their names.
One morning this past weekend, in early November 2020, someone walked past the table where the snowball he had lived on for the past four years was and intentionally pushed it to the ground. It was churned into countless pieces, the water ran out and was sucked into the wooden floor, the feigned snow didn’t melt, sure, but all the figurines broke. I collected all the good ones, including myself (yes, it’s my snowball and I decide) because then I would repair them and do my best to get them back whole – then I took a hammer, the one I used to hit. down annoying in the garden, and crushed the rest into dust and dust.
Finished. from English: Per Svensson
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Yascha Mounk: Uncle Joe wasn’t sleepy when it really mattered
Björn Wiman: Donald Trump is the president our world deserves
