AITA My wonderful wife (white as, British immigrant) just said to me (mixed, British/mongrel) that she she saw some stats about the amount of houses being built vs amount of immigrants "allowed in".
2mon 22d ago by aussie.zone/u/Mantzy81 in aitah
I just looked at her. She started raising her voice and insisting she meant that the government should think about the amount of houses that can be built to accommodate all the newcomers.
I just looked at her - she got angry as I was looking at her, and she could see I was visibly intrigued I (which she saw as threatening). She raised her voice further and wondered why I'm looking at her like that. I mentioned "so you're blaming the government for letting too many people in". She got angry with me and said it "wasn't about blame". I didn't mention the whole "got mine" attitude.
Eventually she took her pillow, called me an arsehole who cares too much about racism and went to sleep with our mixed-race children.
Funnily enough, we'd just been watching "The Knick" and I had mentioned how many don't realise their privilege. This was how she responded. I'm concerned. I'm not saying she's racist, not at all. Just naive or blind and ignorant. Yet she got angry with me for "not accepting" racism.
I should mention she got angry at me recently for not liking the direction the UK was heading and really not wanting to visit because of it (both our families live there - mine are "brown" lol.
I think it proved my point about privilege but I didn't want it to end that way but she stormed off. So AITA?
Edit: Australia btw
NTA. Racism isn't the thoughts and feelings of an individual. Being raised in white society inherently socialized your neurology into patterns that are racist. It's a structural, systems thing, not an individual moral thing. Calling yourself a mongrel is an example of how insidious the process is.
Based on the little you shared, you didn't do anything wrong. She's going through a deconstruction process and it requires her to rewrite her own personal narrative about her life, her family, her country of origin, etc. It's emotional, and it's grief inducing. Anger is one of the stages of accepting loss.
Good on you two for creating these conditions for growth and change. It's one of the critical parts of the process of disrupting the social construction of racism.