but that doesn’t stop racists pretending they are and that didn’t stop many thousands of people being murdered over that unreal garbage.
Ok and they also pretend capitalism is the best system in the world and murder millions every year over that unreal garbage, and they do the same over their bullshit conceptions of gender, religion, and nationhood, what’s your point?
I’m disturbed that people here think an appropriate approach is to mirror such obviously unreal racist garbage instead of overcoming it
Except nobody “mirrored” anything, because to successfully mirror something it would need to possess an equivalence of intent, scale, power, and social reach, if Othello whose post you have an issue with was actually going to mirror something, they’d first need to flip their intent in that post and instead of decrying those Nazis, they’d need to agree with them but stipulate that black people need to put whites in camps first simply for being “white”, and that’s just the first step, then they’d need to ally themself with an international network of black supremacists who are backed by powerful state actors and media platforms and who are comfortable putting white refugees in camps or drowning them in the ocean, THEN it would be “mirrored”
instead of overcoming it…it doesn’t matter that we don’t identify with these terms, because society pushes them on us
Except it does actually matter, because people are fighting on the basis of those questions every day, and you don’t overcome it by essentializing whiteness or labeling it an unbridgeable obstacle we can never change, because hey the racists imposed it, so what choice do we have but to identify with that imposition
Those top two, and sometimes even the third, aren’t things people choose to identify with, and in the case of trans people and immigrants, self-identity is often ignored.
Ok, and I’m saying whiteness IS something you can choose to self-identify with because unlike many minority groups, “white” people do have the social capacity and ability to affect change in that arena
Also you’re conflating light-skinnedness with whiteness again, people can’t help light-skinnedness, but they can help identifying their light skinnedness with an over arching political and social ideology like whiteness, and there’s only one way to do that, which is what op in that thread was decrying, so your previous examples don’t apply
A person denying a job based on stereotypes of their race is racism. They don’t need intent, scale nor reach for that. Racism is still divisive garbage that fucks up social movements no matter if it’s instutionalized or not.
Ok, but that’s not happening to “white people”, you know why? Because if the “person denying a job based on “light skin” stereotypes” is discovered, they’re the ones who are gonna get fucked, as they should. Because you actually do need intent, scale and reach to enforce prejudice, otherwise society and most importantly the state is gonna push your shit in
But people who identify with whiteness don’t suffer from that dynamic, instead they prevent others from enjoying that protection, which is why it’s inappropriate to talk about “mirrors” or equivalences of any sort when it comes to this topic and why you shouldn’t conflate skin color with the ideology itself
Now, how are we meant to overcome those obstacles (even just within a local setting like a socialist org) with people like Othello embracing it?
Except they weren’t embracing it, they were literally decrying it, because they recognized that people who identify with whiteness don’t have their best interest at heart, the worst you could call that post was cynical or doomer, but not racist
As far as I’m concerned, their redacted reply made it clear that they think continuing dividing the movement on whiteness is justified because of historical racial injustices in US socialist orgs.
Ok and you’re dividing the movement because you want to preserve some kind of organic conception of whiteness, tied to people’s phenotypical
traits, devoid of its historical and social role in human affairs? Because otherwise we’ll start being racist to light-skinned people? We don’t live in a world of simply light skin supremacy, we live in a world of white supremacy and to combat it we have to deconstruct whiteness and the ideologies and assumptions that underlay it, and yeah average people who ignorantly identify with it are going to get pissed off, but that shouldn’t prevent critique or making fun of people who turn it into their central personality trait
No, I suspect the concept will never be abolished socially until the capitalism that sustains it and simultaneously uses it as a functional tool is destroyed or negated, but as the contradictions of capitalism develop further in conjunction with climate change, so does whiteness as a concept; maybe it expands, maybe it contracts, maybe gen alpha resurrects the Young Patriots Organization and bisects whiteness and transforms it into some pseudo-radical identity, who knows, of course I highly doubt that will never happen, because at the end of the day whiteness has no content beyond exclusionary hatred
But what will definitely happen is whiteness will change over time along with the contradictions of capitalism, and as that happens the artificiality of it becomes more apparent, and as materialists it’s always a sound strategy to point out the artificial, to de-essentialize racial rhetoric and stress when something is not set in nature, despite ideological claims to the contrary
And I take your point about being “ideologically advanced” well, but ironically my usual approach is simple and fully in line with American socio-economic history; desegregation, but instead of arising out of segments of the black community like in the past and mediated reluctantly by a hostile state, it’s an “internal position” advanced by white radicals as a social movement, hardly an ideologically advanced position
Of course, don’t ask me the likelihood of something like that happening, because I can get real doomer about the United States
I’m disturbed that people here think an appropriate approach is to mirror such obviously unreal racist garbage instead of overcoming it
What we’re trying to do – or at least should be trying to do – is to get people to think about why “cracker” lacks the invective of the n-word, and how racism runs much deeper than merely an insult based on skin color. But as you describe, we’re just mirroring racist insults, trying to offend people with them, then saying “how can you possibly be offended by this.”
We’ll talk all day about how you can’t make a book or movie with subtext because no one will get it, then we’ll do this convoluted stuff instead of just explaining our views on how racism works.
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Ok and they also pretend capitalism is the best system in the world and murder millions every year over that unreal garbage, and they do the same over their bullshit conceptions of gender, religion, and nationhood, what’s your point?
Except nobody “mirrored” anything, because to successfully mirror something it would need to possess an equivalence of intent, scale, power, and social reach, if Othello whose post you have an issue with was actually going to mirror something, they’d first need to flip their intent in that post and instead of decrying those Nazis, they’d need to agree with them but stipulate that black people need to put whites in camps first simply for being “white”, and that’s just the first step, then they’d need to ally themself with an international network of black supremacists who are backed by powerful state actors and media platforms and who are comfortable putting white refugees in camps or drowning them in the ocean, THEN it would be “mirrored”
Except it does actually matter, because people are fighting on the basis of those questions every day, and you don’t overcome it by essentializing whiteness or labeling it an unbridgeable obstacle we can never change, because hey the racists imposed it, so what choice do we have but to identify with that imposition
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Shut up.
Ok, and I’m saying whiteness IS something you can choose to self-identify with because unlike many minority groups, “white” people do have the social capacity and ability to affect change in that arena
Also you’re conflating light-skinnedness with whiteness again, people can’t help light-skinnedness, but they can help identifying their light skinnedness with an over arching political and social ideology like whiteness, and there’s only one way to do that, which is what op in that thread was decrying, so your previous examples don’t apply
Ok, but that’s not happening to “white people”, you know why? Because if the “person denying a job based on “light skin” stereotypes” is discovered, they’re the ones who are gonna get fucked, as they should. Because you actually do need intent, scale and reach to enforce prejudice, otherwise society and most importantly the state is gonna push your shit in
But people who identify with whiteness don’t suffer from that dynamic, instead they prevent others from enjoying that protection, which is why it’s inappropriate to talk about “mirrors” or equivalences of any sort when it comes to this topic and why you shouldn’t conflate skin color with the ideology itself
Except they weren’t embracing it, they were literally decrying it, because they recognized that people who identify with whiteness don’t have their best interest at heart, the worst you could call that post was cynical or doomer, but not racist
Ok and you’re dividing the movement because you want to preserve some kind of organic conception of whiteness, tied to people’s phenotypical traits, devoid of its historical and social role in human affairs? Because otherwise we’ll start being racist to light-skinned people? We don’t live in a world of simply light skin supremacy, we live in a world of white supremacy and to combat it we have to deconstruct whiteness and the ideologies and assumptions that underlay it, and yeah average people who ignorantly identify with it are going to get pissed off, but that shouldn’t prevent critique or making fun of people who turn it into their central personality trait
Removed by mod
No, I suspect the concept will never be abolished socially until the capitalism that sustains it and simultaneously uses it as a functional tool is destroyed or negated, but as the contradictions of capitalism develop further in conjunction with climate change, so does whiteness as a concept; maybe it expands, maybe it contracts, maybe gen alpha resurrects the Young Patriots Organization and bisects whiteness and transforms it into some pseudo-radical identity, who knows, of course I highly doubt that will never happen, because at the end of the day whiteness has no content beyond exclusionary hatred
But what will definitely happen is whiteness will change over time along with the contradictions of capitalism, and as that happens the artificiality of it becomes more apparent, and as materialists it’s always a sound strategy to point out the artificial, to de-essentialize racial rhetoric and stress when something is not set in nature, despite ideological claims to the contrary
And I take your point about being “ideologically advanced” well, but ironically my usual approach is simple and fully in line with American socio-economic history; desegregation, but instead of arising out of segments of the black community like in the past and mediated reluctantly by a hostile state, it’s an “internal position” advanced by white radicals as a social movement, hardly an ideologically advanced position
Of course, don’t ask me the likelihood of something like that happening, because I can get real doomer about the United States
What we’re trying to do – or at least should be trying to do – is to get people to think about why “cracker” lacks the invective of the n-word, and how racism runs much deeper than merely an insult based on skin color. But as you describe, we’re just mirroring racist insults, trying to offend people with them, then saying “how can you possibly be offended by this.”
We’ll talk all day about how you can’t make a book or movie with subtext because no one will get it, then we’ll do this convoluted stuff instead of just explaining our views on how racism works.