This article in The Guardian has been doing the rounds on my Facebook (lol) feed again, and it annoyed me even more now than it did 3 years ago.
For those who don't know, I considered myself a pure Left-leaning individual when it comes to politics (rather than my physical stature which is clearly right-leaning). As time went by, the left started to annoy me - as I'm sure it has the majority of the world - and push me more towards the centre.
I'm still a classical lefty by any means, but the growing phenomenon of Social Justice Warriors re-defining 'left' is something I abhor increasingly by the day. Here is such an example why.
Why are white people expats when the rest of us are immigrants?
This seems like a fair question that many might not actually know. When you Google Expatriate you get:
a person who lives outside their native country.
When you google Immigrant you get:
a person who comes to live permanently in a foreign country.
Seems to be more or less the same right?
So the Guardian lays into this.
In the lexicon of human migration there are still hierarchical words, created with the purpose of putting white people above everyone else. One of those remnants is the word “expat”.
This seemed odd to me, since I quite often see dark-skinned expatriates here in Shanghai. Maybe I'm delusional and they don't exist? I'm not entirely sure.
To hammer this point home, The Guardian repeats:
...you should expect that any person going to work outside of his or her country for a period of time would be an expat, regardless of his skin colour or country. But that is not the case in reality; expat is a term reserved exclusively for western white people going to work abroad.
To hammer it again, The Guardian repeats:
Africans are immigrants. Arabs are immigrants. Asians are immigrants. However, Europeans are expats because they can’t be at the same level as other ethnicities. They are superior. Immigrants is a term set aside for ‘inferior races’.
To really hammer it home, The Guardian repeats:
Some arrivals are described as expats; others as immigrants; and some simply as migrants. It depends on social class, country of origin and economic status
Wait a minute. This, taken as a quote from Wall Street Journal, is not The Guardian's argument. It specifically says it depends on social class, country of origin and economic status. You can see it in the quote above. It doesn't mention skin colour/race.
Though the BBC is slowly morphing into The Guardian over the years, their (thankfullly more recent) article gives a definition that is less retarded (Oops, offensive word):
“It’s not about the colour of your skin, and it’s not about the salary that you earn... A business expatriate, she says, is a legally working individual who resides temporarily in a country of which they are not a citizen, in order to accomplish a career-related goal (no matter the pay or skill level) — someone who has relocated abroad either by an organisation, by themselves or been directly employed by their host country.
The BBC then points out that it's not always the way the connotation plays out. We typically refer to people as expats if they are elite, wealthy and well educated, they say.
Well... yeah! This is pretty accurate. We refer to qualified, college educated elites as expats. Fair enough. What about immigrants?
Well, we don't need a journalist to tell us this. An immigrant is often perceived as an individual who moves to a country first, and looks for a job later, or; the less elite, less educated and less wealthy individuals that come to a wealthy, developed nation.
Now you can, of course, find subjective nuance in these terms, but I have to ask... Why did the Guardian attach skin colour to this? Why aren't black people in Shanghai expats? Why is my currently illegal immigrant white friend not an immigrant? What about the white Polish immigrants coming to the UK to find work? Are they not white?
Why, I ask you, is skin colour involved? Is it:
A) Because skin colour actually has something to do with it
B) Because The Guardian among all the other SJWs want to set a narrative of professional victimhood to promote the defamation of white skinned people?
Maybe I'll rant about this stuff more later, but if an Immigrant with dark skin comes to England, they will find a female head of state - the Queen - a female Prime Minister, a Female Scottish First Minister, and a Muslim Mayor of London. The country is run by minorities (Because females are a minority, don't forget).
People with different skin colours are afforded the same opportunities regardless - it would be illegal to do otherwise in England, in the US, Europe, Australia and other white-majority locations.
The fact that white people happen to be the most numerous of the wealthy, educated elites is a story for another day, but it has little bearing on this evil, patriarchal grasp us whities have on the word 'Expat'.
In 2018, you'd think most people would have just kind of moved on from this whole skin colour narrative. At the very least, you'd imagine this discrimination would be dying out as people grow up to give less of a sh*t. For me, literally the only time I think about skin colour is when the far-left demonises white skinned people.
Journalists in papers like The Guardian are doing their damnedest to bring segregation back (no exaggeration), and they'll lie through their teeth in articles such as this one to make it happen.
I'm obviously not saying racism doesn't exist or whatever. Just... stop adding it where there is none. Let it die. Jeeze.
Maybe I'll make a series out of this. Ranting.