#whiteness

[decolonize-the-left]

The tags on my whiteness post said to me that white people (at least those that are racially aware) and colonized natives perhaps have more in common than most people think. Or at least more than they talk about it in public.

Not that they're the same. Misogyny and transphobia are not the same, but they are both veins of oppression in a patriarchy. Similar.

In the same way, that empty hollowness white ppl feel where your culture should be is not unlike what I feel as a native, from what I've read of your accounts. Learning your ancestors chose whiteness and safety and comfort over culture and identity. That now you have nothing because of the colonization and assimilation your grandparents experienced when they got to the USA. Because of whiteness. Because of the power it has even just as a concept in the US.

We experience these for much different reasons and at least your loss bought you privilege.

... but they aren't total opposites either. A hollowness where you know rich history used to be? Having culture but feeling a disconnect where you know More used to be? Feeling like you only have scraps of the culture your family used to have? Clinging to what you can get your hands on? Feeling like it's so detached that it's not really yours?

I get that and I bet I'm not the only one.

The USA's habit for white supremacy, racism, and colonization hurt all of us.

And it will benefit all of us to discard the systems those things built. They're still there and still hurting every one of us.

We can build a future that benefits us all instead as soon as we all start working on that together.

But we can't do that if some of us refuse to admit the system is what's hurting us. If we refuse to acknowledge that even with perfect politicians our Systems would still prevent progress because they are built on outdated and white supremacist ideals we'll just continue to suffer together under those systems instead.

We can't keep attacking each other just because some of us refuse to look at the ideologies fueling our current reality.

[anarchotahdigism]

funny to see the yt queer girlies talkin bout how staff nuked a yt trans woman's blog from orbit but they stay absolutely dead silent on how many of us queer BIPOC have gotten nuked for talkin about Palestine and indigenous liberation they're even more silent when it comes to the pandemic killing us too but then they were the loudest about the "need" for returning to in person, unmasked life "for mental health" reasons and how it's bad and wrong to require masks and center the most vulnerable cause then the vibes are whack and that's the biggest sin for the yts yt queers are yt first and last and they'll care about other issues so long as it doesn't get in the way of being yt I see y'all's racist, eugenicist, fascist asses. your ableism and fairweather "allyship" always shows y'all's true colors. y'all truly only care about yourselves. ytness and yt communities are death cults.

[headspace-hotel]

I hope I can express this properly and sensitively, but I think oftentimes people need to have Categories and Identities and to be healthily exploratory and playful and elastic about them, else they can get vulnerable to some negative things, sometimes really awful things

I wish I could remember where I read it, but there was something that wrote about whiteness in America as an abyss.

Whiteness is something that sheltered white Americans' ancestors, and at the same time devoured them. They used to have a distinct medley of heritages: Irish, German, Scottish, Italian. "Whiteness" ate it up, the languages, the cultures. There were privileges if you destroyed it, and punishments if you held onto anything that was "Other." In a white supremacist society, white people wanted to be "white" first before any other possible identity or connection they could have.

Yay! You're white. You're on top. You win...what? Turns out the prize for "winning" is just that you get to perpetrate the violence of the game instead of being on the receiving end of it.

And that's the nasty twist—there is no prize. The deeply embedded vice of "Southern pride" is not just what the Confederate flag stands for, but also why they've got to cling so hard to that symbol of traitors and losers: they need to be on top of something so bad that even a pile of shit will do. My ancestors were ultimately dirt poor, loads of them ending up in prison or breaking their bodies down doing hard labor, but they were white. Their reward, and their pride, was being stepped on by the violence of poverty only, instead of also by the violence of white supremacy.

"White pride" is all about hate because white supremacy didn't give these folks anything to be proud of. It stripped away the culture and heritage their ancestors had in favor of "whiteness." All those jokes about how white people have no culture, well, it's true isn't it? This shit is how we ended up a primarily monolingual nation. And what looks like happened is that white Americans wound up just...scavenging most of their culture from those they oppressed. Food, music, all of that stuff. Our white ancestors didn't GIVE us anything that was their own to start with.

And this is something that really strikes me about the white supremacist and fascist movements nowadays: the starvation and hollowness behind them. These folks are empty inside. They were given nothing by white supremacy except a very vague sense that they deserve something, and they see people of all different cultures celebrating and flourishing in their unique heritages and identities, and they feel like...they've been cheated.

Equality is so threatening when you're in this situation because it feels like you've got less than everyone else at the end of the day. Not just because of comparison to previous privileges, but because your whole identity was "person that gets to step on everybody else" and your whole inheritance was "shit stolen from everybody else" and in a world where all is set right, you have no identity and nothing. You are nothing.

Anyway I was looking just now at a blog that seemed really white-supremacist-leaning and it was 99% about like, Norse and Proto-Indo-European paganism and "traditionalism" and that's what got me thinking about this again.

This person had apparently done DNA tests on themselves or something, and were really fixated on figuring out their Norse and Germanic ancestors and separating out their genetic and racial identity at a level of precision that seems really pointless that far back in time. And honestly all the paganism stuff seemed like totally arbitrary speculation as well.

And how to become satisfied as a person like this? I am just as much Germanic or Norse as they are, but I don't believe that distant ancestors determine who you are to such an extent that I have some sort of innate cultural tie to Vikings or Visigoths or what have you. I know what percentage Celtic or Anglo Saxon or Norse I am—zero. I learned about those things in books the exact same way I learned about all the cultures and past kingdoms of the world that I presumably don't have ancestors from.

I feel like the experience of being a baby ally and obsessing about apologizing for being white is the same kind of thing in another direction, or another outcome of the same process. Some people seem to get really twisted up for a time over how to stop being guilty about being white.

It's part of the same thing as this guy who is trying to genetically identify his ancestors from like 3,000 years ago. It's the emptiness and meaninglessness of "white" identity apart from white supremacy.

I talk about deradicalization sometimes and I've had the notion a few times that fascism appeals to people who are hollow and starving in terms of identity, and if it wasn't for the sense of emptiness and hunger, they would be less easily radicalized. But it's also a little bit awkward to talk about the deeply unsatisfying nature of white supremacy, because...well, that is pretty low on the list of things bad about white supremacy.

I think this concept is worth talking about in general, though: People want to feel like they come from or are part of something meaningful. They are drawn toward Identities and Categories and Belonging to groups. This is something I think is commonly true about humans, I think it is normal and not a bad thing, and I think we could stand to be a little more upfront about its reality.

I think this means that wanting, and seeking, a sense of cultural identity as a white person (particularly an American) needs to have some kind of non-horrible outlet for it. Because right now, it's nothing but a way to get radicalized, and the dominant other option people take (becoming the Guilty White Person) is liked by no one and helps nothing.

And maybe it doesn't need to have anything to do with race or culture or your ancestors or any of these things that can lead a person down such terrible paths. Maybe more of us should be furries!

As just another thing to consider, I'm reading the book Ecology of a Cracker Childhood and the author of the book uses the word "cracker" not like, with the gravity of reclaiming a "slur" or something like that, but seemingly because that is just the word she most strongly identifies with, the word that best articulates who "her people" are. This feels very solid and levelheaded to me, something that comes from someone with a good sense of themselves.

Personally I've thought a long time that more people should reclaim "redneck." Not in the sense of reclaiming a slur exactly, but in the sense of putting it in neutral usage among the folks it always referred to, instead of letting it increasingly be associated with any Southerner (regardless of working class background) that is the sort to wave a Confederate flag around. The very idea of gatekeeping "redneck" away from racists is just absolutely hilarious to me, I won't lie.

[gothhabiba]

“whiteness is contextual” is true, but “systems of ethnic or phenotypic discrimination, land theft and Indigeneity, &c., are not always ‘whiteness’” is also true

[the-incorrigible-chaia]

So, I've been reading the arguments that several Jumblr folks, including @starlightomatic and @tikkunolamorgtfo, have been having with ex-Christian atheists over the term "culturally Christian", and said ex-Christian atheists' staunch refusal to engage with the term, and it got me thinking that I see a very similar dynamic to that with white liberals, especially white queer people who came from conservative areas.

A lot of the time, white liberals from conservative areas, especially queer white liberals, have been hurt, sometimes badly, by their conservative communities. They've been marginalized and oppressed by white conservatives, and so they run as far in the opposite direction as they can to disassociate themselves with them. Which, I will add, is perfectly valid, and I can understand why they do so.

What's not valid, however, and is also extremely common, is when a person of colour then starts talking about white supremacist culture, and the white liberal insists that they cannot be racist, because they were marginalized by white conservatives, and they react with extreme hostility.

What's missed here is that the axis of oppression is a different one. Yes, white queers are marginalized by white conservatives, but it's on the basis of their queerness, and they still benefit from white supremacy on account of their whiteness. In the same vein, yes, ex-Christian atheists are marginalized by Christians, but it's on the basis of their atheism, and they still benefit from Christian hegemony on account of their being...

And here is where the term "culturally Christian" comes into play: All the things adjacent to Christianity that are still informed by and contribute to Christian hegemony. Analogously, whiteness is adjacent to, informed by, and contributes to white supremacy. And just as a lot of white liberals really, really don't want to think of themselves as white, because it feels like being lumped in with the white conservatives who hurt them, culturally Christian atheists don't want to think of themselves as being culturally Christian, because it feels like being lumped in with the Christians that hurt them.

And just as whiteness portrays itself as the absence of race, making it extremely hard to map out its defining characteristics as a discrete phenomenon, Christianity's portrayal of itself as a religion separate from culture—and the ensuing portrayal of ex-Christian atheists by themselves of being a cultureless secularity—makes it extremely hard to map out the defining characteristics of cultural Christianity.

But, just as we have to mark out the bounds of whiteness to dismantle white supremacy, we have to mark out the bounds of cultural Christianity to dismantle Christian hegemony.

And those bounds aren't policed from the inside.

EDIT: Accidentally @'d the wrong person.

[houseofpurplestars]

Not sure who needs the reminder but,

You don't have to agree with someone 100% of the time to be in community with them. I dont actually expect perfection from people. Everyone makes mistakes and disagreements are normal and healthy actually.

If anyone is out here demanding conformity and forbidding critique, um... that's a big fucking red flag!

[chuplayswithfire]

this is probably something white people don't think about, though i'm pretty confident other people of color will agree with me here, but like:

*everyone* who lives in a majority white country understands the white mind, except maybe some of those who have white minds. this is because we attend your schools, we watch your TV, and films, we read your books, we see the news filtered through your view. the vast majority of western media is about exploring the white mind, mostly unconsciously, because that's what happens the majority of NYT Best Sellers are written by white people (you know the books that get the most press) and the majority of shows are written by white people and produced by white people and reviewed by white people and - I could go on.

My purpose in saying this is because, if you're white you may think that in the same way you have to actively learn about other races and ethnicities and the works and arts produced by people of color, people of color have to go out of our way to learn about you.

we don't.

many of us learn as much about the culture of whiteness as we learn about our own cultures. someone of us more about whiteness than our own culture, depending on how much a family may have had to try and assimilate.

I welcome and incite genuine discussion and conversation - but genuinely and truly, the last thing anyone who identifies as a person of color generally needs is to be explained the white point of view. Trust me, we've understood it.

[tikkunolamresistance]

Hey, sorry if this is an inappropriate thing to ask, it's just a point a lot of people bring up that confuses me; are ALL Jewish people non-white by default? Even white-passing European Jews? Is it okay to say they can experience white privilege if they're white-passing, like I've seen people say about some light skinned black/mixed race people? I guess that's a whole other discussion though. Sorry if I sound ignorant, it's just there are Jews of many different ethnicities right? so it always confuses me when this comes up. Don't feel like you have to answer if this question is inappropriate or anything though, absolutely feel free to ignore ❤️

Here’s the thing: whiteness is a social construct. To be deemed “white” in the modern sociopolitical context is to be deemed a fitting componentof the facist, supremacist race theory that enforces sepratism and division not only within geopolitical boundaries, but community dynamics. Whiteness is centralised by Capitalist politics; the suppression of individualism, cultural practices, identity and community.

Whiteness has erased the diversity of European cultures, to create a singular “white” identity. That there is just white peoples, and then everybody else. When we look at Europe, we see that Italy is not the same as Latvia, who is not Bulgaria and who is not Ireland. This forced assimilation of European identities— something Hitler and the Nazi party strived for, modelling this ethos from the assimilated culture of the European settler American state— has given room for othering, alienation and discrimination based on ethnic and cultural differences; to drive fearmongering of other cultures among the “untouchable” white population.

Jewish people are of every ethnic background, skin colour, nationality. We are a people, not a singularity. We are not to be fit into a box for others consumption, for others tolerance. There are white Jews, but Jews are not white in the centralised socially constructed concept.

Jewish people will be viewed white or non-White by those who see it as a necessary political tool, but you must know that the end goal in deconstruction Capitalism is to strip away these divisionary racial politics. Zionism need you to believe Jews are a singularity to enforce the “Israeli” settler identity, building itself groundworks inspired by the brutal and colonial founding of the United States, that forced cultural assimilation of varied European identities and has since constructed a faux American culture.

[alpaca-clouds]

Mizrak is not white

Okay, I need to get this out of my system right now, because I saw that repeated a couple of time: No, Mizrak is not white. He is light-skinned, but he is not white. We technically see it in the way he is drawn already. While his skin is fairly light, it is also darker than that of a lot of white people. He also uses a scimitar instead of a European style, sword. His voice actor is also not white, which with the casting in Castlevania does usually mean something.

There is of course also the dialogue hinting he originates from Jerusalem, though of course given the time and the amount of pilgrimages going there, it does not say much. But there is a good chance he might have Palestinian background.

Also please remember in general that at the time Nocturne takes place "white" was a much smaller category than it is today. (You know, gentle reminder: Whiteness is not real. It is a constructed category.) Italians and Greeks were usually not considered white, neither were the Irish, with some people arguing Scottish people were not white either. Same with Slavic people, who by many were not considered white at the time either.

I just want to put this out there, because I see a lot of people overestimate the amount of privilege Mizrak holds. For sure, he is afforded some through his associations with the Knight Order, but he still... well, he ain't white.

[intersectionalpraxis]

it's wild to me how many Americans are quick to smear Hamas as r*pists, when it's been reported multiple times that there's no verifiable evidence it ever happened, while simultaneously ignoring all the sexual violence the IOF inflicts on Palestinian prisoners AND saying stupid MAGA shit as if Trump himself isn't a self-admitted r*pist! hypocrisy much?

I think, among many things, it's the superiority imperialist/colonial complex the United States government has. I've spoken about this on my page before about how the US has a rampant issue of sexual violence in their own military -American women serving in their respective units are told essentially that 'rape' is a hazard of the job -I always recommend watching The Invisible War. It's just over a decade old, but everything in that documentary is relevant.

The US doesn't care about victims and survivors of sexual violence -looking at the rape statistics of their own country alone, on top of the ways in which rape culture permeates on a societal and legal level, it always baffles me how any one of those American politicians can say they care so much when they don't.

The 'Hamas has rapists' and they have 'raped' hostages is part of a history, and ongoing perpetuation of white supremacist colonial discourses -which demonizes Black and Brown bodies. In this case, it deems the 'other' as dangerous, violent, and aggressive -as a threat to white women and white womanhood specifically. It's so alarmingly obvious it's being used as a tactic to deflect ACTUAL crimes of sexual violence against Palestinian children and women, and it's beyond frustrating. All this continues to do is stigmatize rape victims and survivors all around the world who are vastly unable to come forward because of the shame and stigma attached, among many other reasons.

[newsfromstolenland]

White People Are Liars Sometimes (Usually)

It is virtually impossible to get white "Canadians"  to shut up about how welcoming and diverse Canada is.

Over the years, the Canadian state and the white majority population have cultivated a reputation for progressive politics and an inclusive culture. But what exactly is it like to live on this stolen land as a person of colour?

I'll let you in on a little secret: white people are liars.

When white people from other parts of the world think of Canada, they so often think of maple syrup and politeness, of silly looking RCMP officers in their stupid hats. This is because of lies and propaganda.

Propaganda that serves white Canadians operates uniquely in that it attempts to almost infantalize the image of the Canadian government and colonial occupation, while also claiming to be at the forefront of societal progress. It seeks to convince the world, and indeed the population of this land, that Canada is harmless, overly polite, a utopia of diversity, and something of an international pushover.

This could not be further from the truth.

Read the rest now on my patreon!

Support me via paypal!

[decolonize-the-left]

Everyone asks what I read and truth be told I learned a lot of politics through experience and listening to Black revolutionaries.

There is nothing- nothing- that I say on my blog that Malcom X or James Baldwin or Frantz Fanon or Thomas Sankara or Frederick Douglass didn't say first (and much more eloquently)

Further, their words have given me the tools to think critically about not just my place, but everyone else's and what we owe each other.

I myself, wouldn't have a Lot of the politics I do had I not been exposed to the ideas they talked about with such knowledge and experience. Whether it was by following activists or looking up things up or learning about them myself, they're influential and I would even say foundational to decolonization and dismantling white supremacy.

My usual recs are Wretched of the Earth and Braiding Sweetgrass, but those are just starters since people just usually ask where to begin.

So I wanted to make this post and for them to be Very Much credited for the following I have and my politics since I don't often mention them.

For example, I talk a lot about how the comfort of the privileged is an obstacle that stems directly from their privilege. How libs who only conditionally support peaceful protests don't understand what's necessary; that challenging the status quo can't be done comfortably and it's never been "peaceful" for the oppressing classes. How it's detrimental to progress to compromise on how we fight for our rights and to have been liberals telling us we demand too much.

Frederick Douglass:

Frantz Fanon:

Privileges multiply and corruption triumphs…Today the vultures are too numerous and too voracious in proportion to the lean spoils of the national wealth. The party, a true instrument of power in the hands of the bourgeoisie, reinforces the machine, and ensures that the people are hemmed in and immobilised.

Thomas Sankara:

Malcom X:

James Baldwin:

In a way, I owe the invitation to the incredible, abysmal, and really cowardly obtuseness of white liberals. Whether in private debate or in public, any attempt I made to explain how the Black Muslim movement came about, and how it has achieved such force, was met with a blankness that revealed the little connection that the liberals' attitudes have with their perceptions or their lives, or even their knowledge—revealed, in fact, that they could deal with the Negro as a symbol or a victim but had no sense of him as a man.

Bonus MLK Jr quote:

Over the last few years many Negroes have felt that their most troublesome adversary was not the obvious bigot of the Ku Klux Klan or the John Birch Society, but the white liberal who is more devoted to “order” than to justice, who prefers tranquillity to equality. In a sense the white liberal has been victimized with some of the same ambivalence that has been a constant part of our national heritage. Even in areas where liberals have great influence— labor unions, schools, churches and politics—the situation of the Negro is not much better than in areas where they are not dominant. This is why many liberals have fallen into the trap of seeing integration in merely aesthetic terms, where a token number of Negroes adds color to a white-dominated power structure."

Whether your medium is a PDF, a book, movie, clips, quotes, podcast, whatever. However you digest info easiest: learn about them and their words. Think about them. Talk about it and process it with friends.

That's how you shape your politics to be similar to the ones you find on my blog.

[diasporangael]

[anarchotahdigism]

one thing I've noticed about all the yt women posting photos in support of pred is that they're nearly all revealing themselves to be antimaskers They're taking selfies in crowded, often indoor, public places without masks, happy to spread the suffering and death of COVID for the sake of their personal pleasures. And one yt woman who said she was friends of pred, when her support post trended, had also posted a recipe of a Palestinian dish but absolutely nowhere did it mention it was a Palestinian dish nor did she have any hint of Palestinian solidarity during a casual scroll of curiosity. As soon as pred got zapped, all the yt queer fans of hers dropped all pretense of caring about people actually fucking dying and focused on rallying around a single ableist. Fuck y'all anti-masking plague rats, y'all's solidarity couldn't stop a fucking mall cop at the end of a double shift. Something else I've noticed is how many people said they'd no clue who pred was--- posts for her just exploded across their feeds and they initially felt it (justifiably) wise to support a woman being persecuted for her identity. But the reason pred has all this support is because she's one of the popular white women, and it's not exactly hard to be a popular white woman if you're willing to be at least a little bigoted. So her supporters are painting her as this completely angelic, sainted, wonderful supporter of queers or whatever when that's hardly the truth. But that kind of white washing is also very typical of white people when they get in trouble. Meanwhile all the people of color in my notes have said things like "yeah sounds right," and "whew I'm glad I wasn't the one to say this" and "remember the BLM purges" and such cause this isn't just a familiar song, it's a whole holy ritual that yt ppl trot out whenever one of them feels the slightest amount of heat that we're born into. This site is so fucking racist, ableist, anti-Black, anti-solidarity because it's dominated by craven, feckless yt fucks who only care about the suffering of others as a thought experiment, as a philosophical abstract, and as soon as something happens to affect a yt person, they close ranks quick and fast, leaving behind and out everyone else who had been suffering longer, worse and first. Thus ever whiteness.

[positive-lifestyle-news]

[chansondereste]