The Ukrainian exchange student is so cool. In the African-American history class, somebody tried to pull the “white guilt” trick on her, asking dramatically, “Do you, people in Ukraine, even know that we had slavery here in America?”
“Do you, people in America, even know we had slavery in Ukraine?” she retorted at once. “Slavery existed worldwide, so it’s not all about you.”
A week later, somebody tried to get at her from another side. “Can you begin to imagine how terrorized black people in America feel when they see reports of police brutality?” the person asked pompously.
“I spent most of last year running to the nearest bomb shelter,” she responded. “Can you begin to imagine how that feels?”
I have a feeling this is the first taste of real diversity people in the class are experiencing.
Clarissa's Blog 
Your Ukrainian student is definitely going to get an A+ in your class, right?
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I’m not teaching this year. And she doesn’t speak Spanish. She’s not my student. But I definitely wish we had more students like this.
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Supporters of Victim Olympics mentality don’t seem to have taken well to your stalwart Ukrainian student: you have four downvotes.
I can already feel their little soft brains going: “How dare a White person presume to claim a place in the Victim Olympics?” Precious.
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People who don’t think these are great, funny responses have mental issues.
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“we had slavery here in America”
It’s interesting that the Atlantic Slave Trade has de facto been re-written to be a US project and utterly unique in human history….
I feel compelled to add that only 7% of those enslaved from Africa were sent to what is now the US where treatment was…. better (awful but less awful) than some places. The Caribbean and Latin America were the real horror shows in terms of the AST….
Not justifying US participation, but putting it in the context of the entire AST makes for better assessment than the overwrought emotional whoring of the 1619 project (structurally an FSB operation…. even if the FSB was not directly involved).
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I got into trouble with a student recently when I talked about slavery in the Caribbean. The student just couldn’t get over the extreme offense of me being unable to confirm that US slaves were treated much worse than the Caribbean slaves. My course wasn’t about the US at all but the student just couldn’t get over the fact that I was suggesting somebody else had slavery, too.
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“unable to confirm that US slaves were treated much worse”
Slaves in the US were regarded as valuable economic resources (which is awful and dehumanizing) while in the Caribbean the policy was essentially to work them to death and bring in new bodies….
Very unfashionable to say that now…
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The emotional investment that people have into the narrative of the “most horrible place ever is the US” is hard for me to understand. I get why this narrative is popular in Russia or Iran. But otherwise, I don’t get why people are so into it.
Hating America is a big unifying factor because both the US left and right love it.
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I thought everybody knew this. Do they not teach about the island slave revolts anymore?
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As long as sixty years ago (when I was in elementary school), the history books used in schools in the U.S. gave the impression that American colonists invented slavery. Had it not been for the fact that I’d read the Bible and therefore knew that slavery had existed in previous times and cultures, I would have believed that there was something unique and novel about slavery in North America.
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For some reason there is now interest in the UK to portray Ukrainian refugees as disgusting racist Islamophobes… https://www.channel4.com/news/how-ukrainian-refugees-are-handling-cultural-integration-in-ethnically-diverse-areas-of-the-uk
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I have a great solution to this problem. With some tanks and F-15s, these vicious islamophobes will win the war and go home. Let’s lobby for the Leopards to go on their way faster and for F-15s to join them. What wouldn’t we do in the name of fighting the terrible scourge of Islamophobia, right?
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