So write now I am the European Diaspora. I’m writing this in South Africa the place I have lived for several years now and all the white privilege that that comes from. It’s a complicated story based on being a love migrant. that we don’t choose who we fall in love with and at some point within the foreign loveliest you have decide on a place to stay even if it is just for the short term. It’s an age old story that spans the whole of human history everyone needs to leave the village at some point. If only to attend a wedding else where. I think you get my drift.
Anyways beyond that life choice the idea of Diaspora has always fascinated me. Where do you belong? Who do you belong to? Where do you belong to? Does that place belong to you? Having just started an MRes in Human Geography I can assure you the answer to these question are getting more complicated rather than less. Yet at the same time experience has taught me that trauma holds the answer too much for these questions.
What fascinates me most currently is the European Diaspora probably with a more focused interest in the Scottish. However the European and the Scottish Diaspora seem to be bound together in a strange patterning that inform the world right now. That trauma displaces people, land trauma, relational trauma it doesn’t matter specifically which trauma. Trauma is trauma.
What I see now and in ways that astound me, to this moment, is the ways in which systemic trauma continue to inform the European diaspora. That ideas of whiteness can even exist in a reconcilliary culture. I fully accept the existence of whiteness. It’s more the origin of whitenesses being that I am concerned about. Where exaclty does it come from? For me whiteness seems to be caught up in the enclosures act and the highland clearences. How these parables inform and create the tragectory for a white colonialist agenda and why land appropriation became much a significant part of global domination by the British Empire. That imperialism has always been caught up with corporations and capitalism. Even now as we begin to appreciate the ideas neo-colonialism and the continued harm of extractive economies do we fully appreciate the impacts of the The European Diaspora on both indigent cultures, ecologies and the planet.
Even now the new European diaspora has a lot to answer for especially in relation to the Global South. Where western ideologies of progress and science do much to inflict harm on communites globally. Dictating that well-being and wealth are irristricably linked with our understanding the full scope of wellbeing beyond the monetary. Consumption based living does not equal wellness as we must also be very careful to appreciate that in the west our world view is limited and that travel in and of itself is consumptive. We often pose solutions to problems that only exist in our mind. Coming from a place where traditional family systems have been largely broken down and replace with the due care of the welfare state.
Anyways my big question is when did whiteness become trauma transference and why are we still doing it?
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