The myth of white Argentina still shapes the nation

[ben]

A case of the pot calling the kettle black, or seeing the speck on someone else's eye.
All your claims about the Qatar's Foreign Worker situation is true, so you imply, AJ can't throw the first stone, you throw the ball out of the court a case of "whataboutism"

You say whataboutism, I say rank hypocrisy. Tomato, Tomahto.

If a cop stops an African-American for jaywalking and has never stopped whites for doing the same, pointing that out - literally going “hey, what about all THOSE people, why are you ticketing just me?” is not “whataboutism”. It’s pointing out basic fairness.

The other point is that it goes further. Often, the issue is not the hypocrisy itself, bad as that is: rather, the hypocrisy is the tell regarding something more sinister. In my jaywalking example, the issue is not merely that the cop is a hypocrite. The point, rather, is that the cop is a racist who was looking to make black people’s lives difficult; the hypocrisy was just the tell. And in the analogue, I would likewise suggest that when someone is that shamelessly hypocritical, it behooves a good hard look at what exactly they’re selling anyways. And what they’re selling is bunch of critical theory nonsense which could make sense, if even then, only to an American on a college campus who has never set foot in Argentina.

Which is why the piece treats as somehow scandalous the shuttering of, wait lemme find it, oh yes - the Commission for the Historical Recognition of the Afro-Argentine Community, an entity which no one had ever heard of until now, as the top 10 Google results for the name in Spanish make abundantly clear, and in English even more so. No matter: on the author’s view, “[t]his commission was created to promote measures of recognition and repair for a population historically excluded from full citizenship**, and** [sic] its significance extended beyond Argentina. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) and its Special Rapporteurship on Economic, Social, Cultural and Environmental Rights (REDESCA) had identified its creation as an important institutional advance. Its dismantling reflects a political decision to undo some of the limited institutional tools built over decades of Afro-Argentine activism.” Try to read all that and not laugh.

It may well be true that at some point in Argentine history, a decision was made to assimilate any number of populations. Today? The entire piece reads like an attempt to inject American-style race relations into a culture where it makes absolutely no sense. Hard pass.

Anyways, like I was saying, the hypocrisy is just the tell.

 

[JMHarris]

Yes, it is a myth.

Argentina is not and never was white.