"there wouldn't have been chattel slavery if people had empathy" is my new favourite terrible take about empathy

look, I wasn't there, but I'm pretty sure that the entirety of the transatlantic slave trade was not staffed and run by people with personality disorders

at some point, y'all are going to have to accept that your empathy does not make you incapable of harming people or immune from dehumanising them

colonisers display(ed) empathy towards people they consider(ed) human

the problem was that they didn't and don't consider Black and Indigenous people human

churchill had plenty of empathy for his fellow englishmen but was happy to allow bengal to starve

he didn't have a personality disorder, and if he did, it was immaterial to his treatment of brown people; he let them die because he didn't consider them people

this is what emer de vattel, a european legal writer, had to say about the justification for colonisation

he clearly cared about the feelings of europeans, just not the "savages" they were displacing

under a law that made Black people three fifths of a human being, white people didn't have to extend empathy to them because they weren't human

they didn't have personality disorders, they were just fucking racist

maybe you shouldn't have bad takes, just a suggestion https://twitter.com/brightcarver/status/1297719573538410496?s=19

screenshots are foreverrrrrrrrrrr

if anyone thinks I misrepresented this person's position, please feel free to tell me so, but I feel pretty comfortable saying that I did not

I didn't even mention them by name in this thread, by the way, so I'm not sure how I was manipulating and abusing them

but then, I'm a sociopath, so I manipulate and abuse everyone by default, right?