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awaysantiana · 2 years

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(disclaimer: if you're someone who likes to whine about how the real edward teach was white so we can do raceblind readings of our flag means death and pretend ed OFMD isn't Māori bc people not being white makes you uncomfortable you suuuuck and everyone hates you, DNI with this post lmao)

screaming and wailing over the dynamic between izzy and ed in our flag means death and the way that it's racialised because like. okay.

so plenty of people have pointed out the way that izzy abuses ed in the latter half of the season is specifically racialised, like... the way that he berates ed for being weak and sensitive, the way that he tells ed that it's like, his true nature to be a savage, violent beast, shit like that? so rooted in this idea of the violent savage, it's dehumanising, it's callous, it's cruel!

and like, yeah, sure, izzy is doing it because he's scared and because he wants Ed to maintain this violent persona because he thinks that if Ed doesn't do it they'll all die, sure, yeah, but that's not the point, he's still effectively proving that Ed shouldn't have trusted Izzy in the first place because of course he'd say that, he has no idea that Ed's life is like

but the thing is, right

Ed would have known that from the beginning. it's not as if Ed could have mistaken Izzy for a brown man who knows his position - so why did he trust Izzy with something so intimate as his vulnerability and his care in the first place?

like a 30-40% of pirates in the Golden Age of Piracy were Black ex-slaves or otherwise escapees of indentured service, and that's not thinking of other pirates of colour (esp if we think also of like, North African pirates, indigenous ones, etc) and while white pirates would no doubt still have been racist, like... pirate ships were broadly democracies, because the men crewing them had to be willing, and had to be motivated. from a purely pragmatic standpoint, pirate ships needed able-bodied sailors, and trying to reliably enforce giving Black and brown pirates a lesser share for their skin colour outside of the the imperial structure just wouldn't have been possible to still get those people to sail with them

and apart from Izzy like, Ed's crew that we see? Fang and Ivan! another Māori man and a Punjabi man

and so it's like. why the fuck would Ed trust Izzy in the first place?

because the thing is, right, from what we see of Izzy and Ed's relationship in the first four or something episodes of OFMD, like, let's examine their relationship

the Blackbeard persona is a constructed artifice - a fuckery

Edward performs the role, but it's Izzy that maintains it when Ed is in one of his depressions or in a mood - it's Izzy that's out on deck or representing Blackbeard when Ed himself isn't available

Izzy knows Ed doesn't kill. not only does he know that Ed doesn't kill, but he doesn't seem to have a problem with it - and he never even asks why or implies he knows why. he just offers to kill people for Ed to make things easier on him

Izzy mentions Ed's increasingly "erratic moods" when he resigns, but initially he's really gentle and cordial with Ed in private, nudging him toward what he thinks Ed should do (and lying to try to avoid Stede), but never like, giving orders or trying to argue with him

it's undeniable that Izzy sees Ed as the commander between them, and while Izzy has a toxic caretaker thing going on where he thinks he knows best, he also considers himself the facilitator of Ed's will and does as he says even when he hates it

Ed does lie and say he's going to get rid of Stede to keep Izzy with him, but he also says shit like "need you here." when he taps Izzy's hip and shows other like, variations of vulnerability and trust and expresses his reliance on Izzy

which all raises the question like.

why? why Izzy?

part of how painful it is when Izzy goes for Ed and waves that page around and says how Ed needs to embrace his savagery and whatever like... it is that Izzy's not brown. Izzy has no idea what it's like to be Ed, he has no idea what it is to be Māori, what it is to be brown amongst racist white people

so why do they have such an intimacy in the first place? of all the people on Ed's ship (of all the people in the world), why is it Izzy to whom he extends this trust of his false identity, and also the vulnerability behind it? because it's not just that he's trusting Izzy with the vulnerability behind his mask, like

he's trusting Izzy to serve him, which Izzy does. he's trusting Izzy to be loyal to him, and to care for him, which in his pathetic mildly rabid way, he very much does - yes, he's possessive and he's jealous and he's violent and he's cruel, but before we see more of that, like, they're very intimate friends

the stupid (and fucking racist) reading of this is the assumption that like... ed's chosen izzy because his ~whiteness~ makes him special and magic and more respectable or whatever, or that because izzy's white, that means he's more likely to read and write or whatever, but like... obviously that's bullshit. izzy's not magically more likely to be able to read and write because he's white - literacy rates were all over the place, but were chaotic among the lower classes, and it's just racist af to be like "Ohhh izzy and lucius can read bc they're white!" when like

lucius can read bc he's not a fucking sailor, he can read because stede looked for a guy who can read. as for why izzy can read (but finds the actual space given to the books perverse), it's probably bc he does the books as first mate - most sailors wouldn't need to be able to read bc they've kind of got other shit to be getting on with

and while there's an argument to be made for like... izzy can "legitimise" ed while acting as his agent, and associate with racist white people on ed's behalf or whatever bc he's white, like. not to bully izzy again but i feel like literally any other white guy in existence might be better for that given his whole, you know. personality

and if ed needs a pet white guy to offer legitimacy to other people or whatever (which frankly i think is lowkey bullshit in the first place, bc Ed's got a reputation and a skillset and infamy, Izzy is just a no-name weirdo, white or not), he doesn't actually have to trust him with the mental illness he's struggling with behind closed doors, his suicidal ideation, his whimsy, any of it, but he does

he's a Māori man in an unbelievably racist world, struggling not just with the way other people attack and undercut him because of his class and because of his race, but also with the huge vulnerability of his own mental illness and suicidal ideation, and yet the man with whom he is closest, the man with whom he is most vulnerable before stede, is izzy hands.

our idea of whiteness in the modern era has been constructed to uphold the racial supremacy of our whiteness, just used as a violent cudgel to uphold anti-Blackness and anti-indigneous sentiments, as well as other forms of violent racism, within the imperial structure, and the line of whiteness and what it extends to has changed many times

if you look at writings from the 1700s on Jews, on Irish and Scots, on various other ethinic groups, you'll see lots of hugely abusive racial shit that nowadays is brushed aside or is less significant because like... Italians, Jews, Greeks, Irish, those are all mostly accepted as white now, right?

at the time, not so much

so yes, like... i think for a lot of people who read Izzy as Irish or as Jewish like, that definitely adds to his potential for racial awareness and the interplay of racial dynamics? but it's not just about the racialism as it is also about class, and the way that like

whiteness as a construct today is a weapon used to defend white imperviousness to criticism and white powers over those of anybody else, to create subclasses within classes - upholding whiteness is generally more important to white people as a whole than any kind of genuine allyship with BIPOC simply bc like. we often claim ignorance of our whiteness or the impact of it bc it makes us feel sad :( aw poor baby us so sad about like, the structures that are literally built to keep us in power, often while maintaining the illusion of our ignorance

like, one of the things that makes intimate friendship with us so difficult is that we have to unlearn a lot of the behaviours that we're taught from childhood to rank our whiteness over anything else, including the pretence that we don't know we're white, and that includes taking like, other people's race personally, forcing anyone with an examined racial identity (which includes the experience of racism) to be silent in case it makes us ~uncomfortable~ etc

and even across intersections of other identity, like, we as white people are notorious for pretending we understand but being violent and super reactive as soon as anyone else points out racist shit - queer and trans people know that cishets are Uncomfortable and Weird in unspoken ways, but we'll still pretend we don't see the same thing with racism, for example

and like. have you seen izzy. i love him he's my chewtoy and he's literally kind of the worst guy in the world, but ed trusts him??? which is so loaded?

and i'm so so curious and so interested about the things that could prompt Ed to trust Izzy, and what this implies about their history together and their relationship bc like

in order for Ed to trust Izzy so much, surely they must have talked about it? or surely like, for whatever reason, Ed must have some reason to think that Izzy is more aware of the (racist) facts of life than someone else? or less caring of them, less invested in them? or like... Izzy is his only option, in which case, why was he the only option?

because it's like. it's not just that Izzy and Ed are friends, it's that Izzy is in Ed's service, unassailably (even after getting defeated in a duel and kicked out and he betrays them to the navy, he does so out of his misplaced, obsessive, weird loyalty to Ed and desire to protect him). izzy's devoted to ed, and more specifically, he's like... fixated on ed's survival, even over his own

so if Izzy is Irish or Jewish or otherwise outside of like, the accepted position of White Man in the period, for whatever reason lacks the relative invulnerability of whiteness or lacks the ability to wield it in polite society or whatever, that adds to it

i think that either way there's obviously some level of class informing it just in that like... when izzy says they have to be violent and terrible and blah blah, he believes that because he does think it's their only option, and he's disgusted with stede because like

i think that just as ed has been taunted with ideas of luxury and the idea that they're not for him, he's been told they're not for him again and again and again in a thousand different ways, because he's Māori, because he's mixed race, because he grew up poor, because because because, like

izzy?? for whatever reason also has this kind of idea in his head? but for him it's that luxury and softness will make him weak (and therefore destroy his survival), and i think that there's a lot you can play with there, whether it's growing up poor and in poverty, in the navy where that class interplay was pushed so much between commissioned and noncom officers etc, whether it's because he's Jewish or Irish or whatever

LIKE THERE'S

a lot of potential there, and i'm just fascinated by it, bc Ed is such a vulnerable man and he struggles so much, he's in so much pain - all this trauma and all this agony and all this grief, but it's Izzy that he picks to soothe him? what about Izzy is soothing except for his ferocious loyalty, and like... why is he that loyal in the first place?

i just! i lose my mind

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