liberation

dumbthingswhitepplsay:

Now mind you, as a child of slaves and colonizers that raped my family, I should not have ever had to learn English.

But as my ancestors were taken so far away from their cultures, English was what I got stuck with.

Cool. I’ve spoken it since, you know, forever.

Unfortunately, it seems a lot of people sort of forget how English works. I know English-speaking white people have their own little magic English code that no one else is allowed to understand (and if they even vaguely appear to understand it, they will find a reason to fix that), but let’s get back to basics.

“white” = this can be a noun or an adjective, referring to the social construct in this case

“People” = this is a noun, meaning more than one person

“Some” = this is a modifier denoting quantity

“All” = this is also a modifier denoting quantity

”____” = there is no word here, it has no meaning

Let’s look at three sentences.

“White people like going to the store.”
“Some white people like going to the store.”
“All white people like going to the store.”

Since everyone is so choked up on modifiers, let’s start with the bottom two sentences.

“Some white people like going to the store.” This says that there is some quantity of white people like going to the store. This is all it does. It does not, in and of itself, imply that all white people cannot like going to the store, merely that at least some of them do.

“All white people like going to the store.” This is a highly specific statement clearly stating that all people who can be described as white like going to the store. It includes all white people as is written in the statement.

Before moving to the last sentence, let’s learn a new word:

Projection: A noun used to refer to the phenomenon in which a person, insecure with themselves, forwards flawed meanings and implications where they do not exist.

Now, onto the sentence. “White people like going to the store.” This says that there is some unknown quantity of white people that like going to the store. There is no modifier. That means that it could be referring to as little as two white people, up to all white people. Using basic common sense, most people would assume that without more specific information, this includes some median number of white people; neither the minimum of 2, or the maximum of all.

Projection? Is the part where YOU know that when you say “people of [non-white race] do X”, you mean all, so you assume that everyone else does, too.

(via poemsofthedead-deactivated20120)