#to obfuscate one of the worst genocides in history

[existennialmemes]

In light of [gestures broadly to Reality] Thanksgiving is cancelled. No more thankfulness until we've dealt with The Horrors

[tsunderrorism]

Reposting my response to a friend's question re: "white passing" and race science.

Sure! The first thing to realize is that 'white passing', as it's used right now (it originally meant a colonized person who deliberately hid their heritage to disguise themselves as a white), is a phrase that's meaningless at best and a propagandist tactic aiding assimilation and genocide at worst. YOU aren't 'white passing' and neither am I.

The people who use this term have a wrong idea about how race is constructed. They see it as mostly a matter of perception. That's why their privilege checklists are mostly full of cultural relations (representation in entertainment, perception of whiteness) rather than material relations (a 400 year history of colonial/imperial genocide). Communists are materialists. We always look for the class relations that culture arises from and to use language that illuminates these relationships instead of obfuscates them.

In that spirit, "White passing" is a term that obfuscates. It paints NATIONAL oppression, which is a relationship between GROUPS as being a relationship between individuals (IE by claiming a person's whiteness is a matter of whether they're percieved as white). But membership in an oppressed nation isn't about perception. It's about the experience of colonialism: having your resources stolen, your governments overthrown, your country bombed, your culture suppressed, your people slaughtered in massive scale war crimes. What can privilege discourse say about that? You're Lebanese. Would your skin color have stopped the IOF from rolling into the south to seize territory? "Passing" discourse would have us imagine that because of your skin color you could stand in front of a Merkava tank and stop it! I'm Boricua. Could my skin give us our political independence back? Could it have made it legal to fly our flag during the years of La Ley De La Mordeza?

In its drive to conquer the world, colonial capitalism had to invent categories for who was human and not and give them a psueodoscientific gloss. It was an attempt to paint something created by social relations as having an unchanging essence (what Lenin and Mao called 'metaphysics'). They used various arbitrary means to try to classify people, from precisely measuring the shapes of their skulls to the crude "paper bag test", where skin tone was compared to a paper bag. Imperialism has always portrayed whiteness as being tied to phenotype, but that's always been a lie. That is the "race science" I refer to.

"Passing" discourse is also bad because it erases and assimilates. It puts lighter skinned colonized people in the same category as their oppressors, which is incredibly dangerous. It encourages people to identify with white settlers rather than their own nation[s]. This is especially true in regards to indigenous people of the americas. One of the most useful propaganda tactics against indigenous people is to portray us as people(s) who no longer exist, either by pretending that assimilation has absorbed/destroyed our culture completely (this is similar to the anti-Black "Sambo" myth that slaves were completely de-Africanized and dependant on whites) or that we're all dead and thus of no consequence (so our land and resources can be further seized). This isn't just an issue of hurt feelings. Whites have used the "you don't look like Indians" tactic to justify land seizures and pipeline building for decades. "Radical" liberals often use it to try to shut down disagreement too.

It also recalls a particularly painful era for many indigenous people: the Residential Schools, which operated under the motto "kill the Indian to save the man". I'm sure you've heard of some of the history there. Calling someone "white passing", if they're NA Indigenous says to them: yes, the Residential Schools did a good job, your indigenousness has been destroyed and you're a white man now. This is insulting in the extreme. And it's a *continuing* aspect of Indigenous genocide today.

Finally one has to wonder: who benefits from colonized people being at each other's throats over which of us has the most unprivilegedestest skin tone? It's not us! We're the only friends we've got, so we need as many of us involved in the struggle as we can. We can't do that if we're constantly calling each other ersatz whites.

I've experienced this tactic IRL, when I called out the friends of a (white) known serial rapist. Rather than engage with the criticism, I was told I "navigate the world as a white man" and had no right to criticize anyone who was neither white nor male for being friends with this monster. Psuedo-radical "passing" discourse was used in defense of a white rapist!