Ken Burch
1 min readJun 20, 2020

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Well, you aren't being discriminated against for your gender or your skin color, so your false equivalence doesn't apply. It's somewhere between absurd, obtuse, and obscene for any white male to insist that he faces just as much oppression as a woman, a person of color, an LGBTQ person, or Muslim, or simply a non-European immigrant.

I too have-among other strains-Irish and Scottish ancestry-family lore has it that one of my ancestors was a Scottish Jacobite-the Scottish resistance fighters fighting to overturn the unjustly imposed absorption of Scotland into Great Britain-the first colonies of the British(English) Empire were Scotland, Wales, Ireland and Cornwall (Kernow). Knowledge of this guided me to my natural allegiance in life: opposition to all forms of imperialism and conquest, a solidarity with all whose lands, labor or lives had been stolen by whichever European invader had convinced itself that it had a natural right to dominate others and that it's "culture" was inherently superior to those it had subjugated, dispossessed or enslaved by force. Even though you and I seem to have had similar ancestries, I never bought into the idea that what had happened to my ancestors gave me a greater claim to suffering or injustice than BIPOC people, LGBTQ people, or any of the others I listed above. What I was taught by it was that you need to stand with the wronged, or with the wrong.

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Ken Burch
Ken Burch

Written by Ken Burch

Retired Alaska ferryboat steward, grandparent, sometime poet. Radical yet independent of dogma. Likes nice days, playing banjo and not as yet dying of Covid.

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