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Chris Fox's avatar

From arithmetic to a university degree, I've studied mathematics. Math classes are about its principles, not its history. European mathematicians get no more credit than Arabic ones. An entire university class in Fourier analysis, we never even heard his first name.

I've read about math history on my own. And there was no shortage of references to non-European trailblazers.

This is a dumb tangent.

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Peaceful Dave's avatar

With regard to the math context, I feel blessed that my math teachers were not wannabe history teachers. It was never important to me where it came from. The steady white supremacy drone is something else.

I recently read a Medium article that talked about white supremacy in Thailand that caught my eye. My wife watches Thai television over the internet and has mentioned that the "stars" are fair skinned and have Western (white) facial features. Surgery or biracial, probably a bit of both. My brown skinned wife notices. While the changes in facial features are new, the light vs. dark skin thing is old news. Fifty plus years ago she spoke matter-of-factly without disparagement of how the women in Chang Mai were light skinned.

Light and dark unmistakably Asian people have always been a thing and perhaps it's just that I failed to notice it making a difference to them. The vanishing wide pug nose does seem to be an embrace of white beauty standards. She calls it the old Thai face vs. the new Thai face. Could that have something to do with white supremacy? I'm not the right person to answer that. Their history is quite different from ours. The beginning of the abolition of slavery in Thailand began in 1874. Slavery there, as in most of world history had no connection to Trans-Saharan or Trans-Atlantic slavery. They don't have that issue.

When I think of white supremacy, I think of the Ku Klux Klan, and I have no doubt that the use of that label is intended to bring that association. Does the Asian embrace of white beauty standards have anything to do with that? For that matter, does the current trend in black women adopting the long straight hair of their Asian and south of the border sisters have something to do with White supremacism? I didn't try to discuss it with the author of the article because he proceeded to outright racism and I just didn't have the energy for a discussion with someone who labels me a racist because of the color of my skin. An exercise in futility.

I will ask here. Where is the line between actual white supremacy and everything white is white supremacy? Why is that so hard?

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