In his speech after yesterday's Kabul airport bombings, President Joe Biden claimed that Afghanistan is "a country that has never once in its entire history been a united country, and is made up — and I don’t mean this in a derogatory — made up of different tribes who have never, ever, ever gotten along with one another." I'll leave Afghanistan's history to the country's historians, but when a European-American (especially a President) speaks of "tribes", that terminology draws on the history of the colonization, displacement, and genocide of Native Americans, as well as the erasure of their history and even the enslavement of Africans – and Biden's "not derogatory" disclaimer doesn't help. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 27 August 2021)
Note: Credit to this tweet by İyad el-Baghdadi for drawing my attention to that part of Biden's speech.
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| "The Durrani Empire at its maximum extent under Ahmad Shah Durrani, late 1750s" (Wikipedia) |
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