Emily Pothast
1 min readMar 18, 2019

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Oblique death threats aside, this is precisely the kind of ignorance of history I’m talking about.

Colonialism was never the exclusive purvey of the Spanish and Portuguese; even Sweden had overseas colonies. Here in Seattle, there is a massive “Swedish” community because some 150,000 Scandinavians settled in the Pacific Northwest between 1890 and 1910, making Swedes the “largest foreign-born ethnic group in the state.”

I’m of Norwegian and German descent myself, and I can assure you that a huge part of the reason America is as white as it is has to do with northern Europeans coming to America in the late 19th century in search of Lebensraum.

And now that Europe has spread its white seed all over the world, you’re whining that there aren’t enough of you left in Europe? Come to the US, it’s full of white people who don’t know dick about world history. You’ll fit in perfectly!

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Emily Pothast
Emily Pothast

Written by Emily Pothast

Artist and historian. PhD student researching religion, material culture, media, and politics. emilypothast.com

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