Colonists aren’t immigrants.
Then where’d they come from?
Colonists are people who come to steal land from others, destroy their culture, and force them to assimilate to their own.
If you don’t understand the difference between that and an immigrant that is concerning.
I… kind of feel like you’re both arguing on the same side here and just getting hung up on semantics, and degree of anger?
Semantics are fairly important – we understand the world through words.
I understand OP’s point and I applaud the general gist of the message i.e. NO DAPL, NO DRILLING ON STOLEN LAND
Yet the current tendency to talk about “we’re a nation of immigrants and refugees” is fairly disingenuous – artificially rosy – since not everyone received the “immigrant treatment” so to speak – prejudice against jobs, social exclusion, etc.
And then there is that group of people who were kidnapped and continually kept enslaved for centuries. >.>
If we’re engaging in wordplay to make a political point, it’s only just to consider all the words we’re using.
As Anne of Green Gables says, “I read in
a book once that a rose by any other name would smell as
sweet, but I’ve never been able to believe it. I don’t believe a
rose WOULD be as nice if it was called a thistle or a skunk
cabbage.”Citing Anne Shirley in support of your POV is an automatic win. 🙂
And yes, it is important to use and employ semantics, and to refine OP’s original point. I just felt the first three posts were unnecessarily adversarial and aggressive for people who are, essentially, in support of the same ideas. Especially since OP was a tweet (ie, sound-bite, max impact, not necessarily going to be perfectly phrased). And especially now that there’s some pretty globally hefty enemies that are doing their best to divide opposition by setting different groups against each other, and to give us so many battles to fight that we can’t unite.
Semantics are important, I agree. Hell, I’m a linguist and I have eons of frustration available for humans in general using language imprecisely. But at this point in history I think it’s important to not let them become a point of division. 🙂
Hahaha, thanks – rereading Montgomery right now is a joy ^_^
I would also like to add that if semantics are important, they are important regardless of tone.
We can’t begin to unite and to heal divisions without examining them first.
Tweets are just as ripe for analysis as any other source – otherwise we wouldn’t have so many news articles about Tr*mp’s tweets.
Tone policing that derails a legitimate point opposing language of oppression doesn’t quite have the same impact as protest and analysis.
Published
myblog 