Exclusive: Territory’s government calls for visit to listen to those thought to be living with consequences of forced fitting of IUDs

The Danish health minister should “get on a plane and visit” some of the thousands of women thought to be living with the consequences of being forcibly fitted with the contraceptive coil as children, Greenland’s gender equality minister has said.

In an attempt to reduce the population of the former Danish colony, at least 4,500 women and girls are believed to have undergone the medical procedure, usually without their consent or knowledge, at the hands of Danish doctors between 1966 and 1970 alone.

The total number of those affected by the procedures, thought to have continued for decades, is understood to be far higher. Victims and their lawyers say generations of Inuit women were left traumatised and suffering reproductive complications, including infertility, as a result of the Danish state’s policy.

Earlier this month, a group of 143 women sued the Danish state over the alleged violations, but they have yet to receive a response from the government, despite the Danish prime minister visiting Greenland – now an autonomous territory of Denmark – soon after.

  • PugJesus
    -1•7 months ago

    If a black person called me a cracker it wouldn’t scare me very much because I know that I have the privilege of being white, and I know that, whether I like it or not, the entire white-supremacist apparatus of the state is likely to prevent me from having to deal with any serious oppression. Those individual people could still hurt me, but so could anyone. They are still far less likely to attack me because they know how dangerous that would be for them, but a white person attacking a black person is more likely to be protected.

    … do you think racists often engage in in-depth calculus of their odds, or are they impulsive shitheads? Because in my experience, racists are the latter.

    When you get called “cracker”, you know that you don’t have that apparatus behind you. You know that cops, the legal system, and myriad other racist things that you probably know better than me, are still going to treat you as non-white.

    Or they might treat me as white.

    So the “cracker” attack hurts because you’re being excluded from the community that would otherwise protect you when the apparatus of the state won’t.

    No, that’s definitely not it. The “cracker” attack hurts because it’s an invalidation of who I am, or who I’m perceived to be. I don’t expect my community to protect me where the state wouldn’t. That’s… not even close to my experience of expectations of community.

    If I get called a cracker by someone who doesn’t share either of my racial backgrounds, do you think that hurts… less?

    I’m not trying to whitesplain this to you, that’s very much what you described when you called it “rage and absolute isolation”.

    What you are describing is rage and absolute isolation, but not the rage and absolute isolation I was talking about.

    That’s why the attack hurts you as a mixed-race person, but not me as a white person. I do not experience that isolation. That’s the difference.

    You don’t experience the isolation. That doesn’t mean that denigrating you for your ancestry suddenly becomes acceptable. It is racist, and, furthermore, the prevalence of anti-white racism, even when not directed at mixed-race people, is still harmful to mixed-race people.

    Another way of putting it - a man’s daughter hears him calling her mother a bitch. It doesn’t matter that it’s not directed at her.

    • @Excrubulent@slrpnk.netEnglish
      0•7 months ago

      You don’t experience the isolation. That doesn’t mean that denigrating you for your ancestry suddenly becomes acceptable. It is racist, and, furthermore, the prevalence of anti-white racism, even when not directed at mixed-race people, is still harmful to mixed-race people.

      But it’s not especially harmful to white people. That’s the point. You laid it out so perfectly that I don’t feel like I have much more to add to be honest.

      • PugJesus
        2•7 months ago

        But it’s not especially harmful to white people.

        It’s not especially harmful to white people to be denigrated for who they are…?

        If society as a whole wasn’t horrifically anti-Black in its racism, would it then be okay to use anti-Black slurs? Because it wouldn’t be ‘especially harmful’?

        • @Excrubulent@slrpnk.netEnglish
          1•7 months ago

          Were these supposed to be trick questions?

          It’s not especially harmful to white people to be denigrated for who they are…?

          I already said it wasn’t harmful to them, yes. But also, “White” is not an identity, as I have already said. It is a fucked up political category that serves to say, “these people are not any of the racialised categories”. That’s what I said at the start - it is only an exclusionary category. It does not identify any particular set of cultural or ethnic groups. There is no such thing as “white culture”. There is Norwegian culture, British culture, Texan culture, etc, but no white culture. Black culture, on the other hand, very much does exist, because black people as a group have been forced to construct a culture in response to their racist oppression.

          If society as a whole wasn’t horrifically anti-Black in its racism, would it then be okay to use anti-Black slurs? Because it wouldn’t be ‘especially harmful’?

          Blackness as a concept was invented by racists for racist purposes. Anti-black slurs wouldn’t exist without that, so you couldn’t use them.

          • PugJesus
            2•7 months ago

            I already said it wasn’t harmful to them, yes.

            That’s a fucked up thought.

            . But also, “White” is not an identity, as I have already said. It is a fucked up political category that serves to say, “these people are not any of the racialised categories”. That’s what I said at the start - it is only an exclusionary category. It does not identify any particular set of cultural or ethnic groups. There is no such thing as “white culture”. There is Norwegian culture, British culture, Texan culture, etc, but no white culture. Black culture, on the other hand, very much does exist, because black people as a group have been forced to construct a culture in response to their racist oppression.

            So as long as the category is artificial, you can denigrate ancestry all you want?

            Blackness as a concept was invented by racists for racist purposes. Anti-black slurs wouldn’t exist without that, so you couldn’t use them.

            You’re dodging the question.

            I’m done here. It’s incredibly shitty, and left-spaces should really fucking know better. But hey. Mixed-race folk always get the short-end of the stick. Why should left-spaces be any different, right? Cracker signing off, I guess.

            • @Excrubulent@slrpnk.netEnglish
              1•7 months ago

              It was an honest answer to the question, but I’ll answer in a different way: yes, in the world you imagined, anti-black slurs would be fine because they wouldn’t exist. It’s telling that you had to basically turn the entire world of racial politics entirely upside-down to get to that conclusion.

              In contrast - and this is a very simple concept - the term “cracker” doesn’t hurt me in the slightest, and I’m the pastiest white person you ever did see. The fact it hurts you so badly shows you that the anti-white sentiment that exists in the discrimination you face specifically hurts you because you are not actually white.

              You’re here banging on about anti-white racism and you want to pretend you’re on the left? Read a book.

              EDIT: Start with an article at least: https://www.vu.edu.au/about-vu/news-events/news/what-is-reverse-racism-and-whats-wrong-with-the-term

              • PugJesus
                1•7 months ago

                In contrast - and this is a very simple concept - the term “cracker” doesn’t hurt me in the slightest, and I’m the pastiest white person you ever did see.

                “It doesn’t hurt me, therefore, it doesn’t hurt anyone like me.”

                The fact it hurts you so badly shows you that the anti-white sentiment that exists in the discrimination you face specifically hurts you because you are not actually white.

                Thank you for explaining my own experiences to me.

                Fucking ridiculous. How did you put it before? “Whitesplaining”?

                • @Excrubulent@slrpnk.netEnglish
                  2•7 months ago

                  Oh okay, so let’s listen to what other white people have to say on the matter.

                  According to that article that I already linked you and which you apparently didn’t read:

                  A representative US survey, conducted by PEW in 2019, found that around 12% of respondents believed “being white hurts people’s ability to get ahead in the country nowadays”. Among white Republicans, the proportion was 22%. It was only 3% among white Democrats.

                  Reverse racism is such a fringe conservative belief that only a tiny minority of conservative white people even believe it, and amongst democrats it’s barely more than a rounding error.

                  So only a tiny group of fringe reactionaries believe this bullshit, but here you are claiming it’s supposed to be a leftist position.

                  That is fucking ridiculous.

                  • PugJesus
                    0•7 months ago

                    A representative US survey, conducted by PEW in 2019, found that around 12% of respondents believed “being white hurts people’s ability to get ahead in the country nowadays”.

                    Literally not even close to the issue I was addressing, but I’ve dealt with enough racists like you to know it’s hopeless.