so we all have to get offended on behalf of people who strongly identify with codified European Phrenology?
But my point is that people who don’t give a fuck about that identity are still subject to it. Whiteness is an ingrained social phenomenon. It’s in the US census!
A person who doesn’t consider themselves white is still considered white by a society, regardless of mass groups like entire nationalities/races to move between classification or determine new classes. Yes, there is (for lack of a better work) mobility of races between classes, but that doesn’t change that typical people will look at another person and decide if they are white or not, and that other person’s opinion or lack of one doesn’t matter. If a light-skinned European-American puts ‘Black’ on their census form, this has approximately 0 effect on anything.
should we all start identifying as capitalists because our lives are defined by capitalist social relations outside our control
No, the analogue would be that even if we decide to identity as socialists, we still live within capitalist social relations imposed on us, until we overcome that system. Until we overcome whiteness, we are subject to our society’s (dynamic) interpretation of it. An individual does not have the transformative power necessary to change their own imposed whiteness class, even if large groups do over time.
That’s all irrelevant, because someone killed those people over bullshit race crap. That is racism, and it was lethal. We need to counter racism in all its forms if we want to unite the proletariat, because even person-to-person racism in private with no structural protection is harmful and sectarian.
ok now were the perpetrators protected by the state?
Just the same as the Buffalo shooting, same as the Christchurch mosque shootings. Life in prison, no parole. Again, not that it’s relevant; it’s still racism even if you’re not protected.
I asked how you define racism, because I can’t understand why you keep suggesting that structural support is required for racial supremacy bullshit to become racism. It’s not a prerequisite. Racism is racism, it’s just more powerful when a state or society institutionalizes it.
Places outside the USA haven’t had as strict of a racial divide and so yeah I can see how it would get muddled.
Yes, although it’s also all these secondary things, I’m guessing there was an implication in your comment that speaking Spanish was a sign someone had Central or South American heritage/etc. and was therefore non-white, whereas in other countries the main people speaking Spanish and Portuguese were from Europe so that isn’t a signal in the culture.
You mentioned Dominican people, and I think this generalizes to many other countries with European colonialism history without much diverse post-WW European immigration (contrast: USA, Australia) and they retained a strict racial divide as a result. An interesting counter-case is a memetic documentary clip filmed during an uprising in Tanganyika (basically now Tanzania) where the filmmakers are dragged out of their car and approaching a wall to be shot, when a soldier sees their passports and says “these aren’t whites, they’re Italians”. My (naïve!) guess is that their understanding of white stems from their British and Belgian oppression, and possibly even shaped by around a hundred thousand Tanganyikans fighting for the Allied forces in WWII.
Bashar al-Assad is an excellent test, because most people in the West envision Middle Eastern people as inherently having darker skin, certainly not light skin and blue eyes which are primary traits racist whites boast about. There’s a strong dissonance there, the same kind that makes dumbass neo-nazis start obsessing about poorly guessing who is Jewish or not. The point being, people assume they can tell, and often get it wrong, as you’ve shown.
But why is structural power or hegemony considered a prerequisite? Racism exists and has dangerous power regardless of structural factors like legality, see mass shootings. It doesn’t need to be institutionalized or dominant to be relevant and dangerous, that just makes it more dangerous.
Just to be clear, I’m of course not trying to equivocate. White supremacy is hegemonic within ‘the West’, but that hegemony doesn’t prevent other racial supremacy movements from local dominance, or even from members performing lone-wolf racially-targeted shootings as an extreme example.
‘Whiteness’ is a label assigned by society, not self-identity. I think race is absolute nonsense and also don’t identify as black nor white, that doesn’t stop people assigning it to me when they see me outside. And if someone says they want to kill people based off of their own interpretation of white or black, our self-identity or lack of one means nothing.
Like you, the comment itself doesn’t insult me because it’s not about a group I identify as, but the normalization of conditional racism here absolutely does concerm me.
Yes, ‘white’ (and of course ‘black’) is absolutely a nonsense concept that expands and contracts arbitrarily, but race and whiteness isn’t (in practice) a self-identity. It is imposed upon people by racists, and has been institutionalized and normalized so much that it’s unavoidable. One can’t just say ‘I’m not white’ or ‘I’m not black’ in a way effectively recognized by society at large. The point being, people are visually identified as being ‘white’ or ‘black’ through things including skin tone. 99+% can look at a license photo and will decide ‘white’ or ‘black’. It is a term with racial implications. A light-skinned Frank who is anti-racist, anti-capitalist and anti-state will be considered ‘white’ by almost everyone, just as someone with darker skin will be labelled ‘black’ even if they are a US Republican, pro-capitalist, pro-police racist. So when someone says ‘kill white people’, why shouldn’t a person considered ‘white’ by society see that as a sign of distrust?
I’ve had English people call me a terrorist and a savage for being Irish, not because I have pale skin.
May I assume “English people” is here referring to people generally considered white? This may factor into why they don’t use whiteness as an insult against native Irish.
The Troubles and British colonization of Ireland are probably going to be far more present in assholes’s minds than race in this situation, since my impression is most British people consider Irish people white these days (as you said, the definition expands), even if there are still specific anti-Irish racist tendencies.
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