End of disussion.
this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2023
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race as a concept was invented by white people to describe people who are declared outside whiteness
whiteness isn't a race, it's a morphing caste and who belongs to it can change. We're in a moment where speaking Spanish or being a Muslim automatically excludes a person from full whiteness, regardless of their ancestry or other features. The simple notion of who is or isn't white has white supremacy baked into the concept
Yeah it is different in places outside Anglo countries, I've noticed that. Dominican people I've known will associate whiteness specifically with skin color, regardless of the person's ancestry, language, etc.
Places outside the USA haven't had as strict of a racial divide and so yeah I can see how it would get muddled.
You mentioned showing people pictures. There's a test I do with Americans sometimes. I'll show them a picture of Bashar al-Assad, who they probably don't recognize. I'll ask what he is, and they'll always say he's a white guy. I tell them he's a Muslim and the president of Syria, then they instantly change their answer.
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.
With Dominicans (and a lot of Latin America) my guess has always been that lighter skin signalled more recent colonizer ancestry, so it became a signal of wealth to have lighter skin regardless of one's actual heritage, class, or anything.
That's a really interesting clip and I'm really interested in watching the rest of the documentary, also I should read up on Tanzania in general. Thanks for sharing it.
you can't be racist against white people because white supremacy is hegemonic. there's no structural power behind anti-white sentiment.
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.
because equivocating between structural oppression and mere prejudice sucks. and yes, you're equivocating.
show me someone getting murdered over anti-white prejudice
ok now were the perpetrators protected by the state? did the media spin up defense after defense of them? or did they use it to stoke racial fervor about the need to protect white children?
I was asking specifically to make that point.
But your point was "show me an example of this, because I don't believe there is one." Then you were shown an example of what you were not expecting to find. Shouldn't you reconsider your point?
a rhetorical question is one where you know what answer you're going to get but you ask anyway in order to use it as an example for the point you're actually trying to make.
I know what a rhetorical question is. I'm wondering what point you were trying to make if not "you can't find any examples of someone getting murdered over anti-white prejudice."
that anti-white prejudice doesn't, even on the surface, rise to a level that puts it in the same category as racism. the people arguing that it does are making a categorical error - in order to emphasize the point I'm going to first share a personal example, not because even it itself manages to rise to the same category as the ongoing structural crimes being done to BIPOC people, but rather because it's my experience to share and because even the relative difference between my own experience and the anti-white prejudice being complained about is sufficient to carry the point home.
first, let's start with the generational trauma. the British colonized my ancestral home. they not only stole our wealth - they also destroyed our culture and warped our view of our own history. my culture once had an accepted and tolerated place for trans people like my self, with a tradition stretching back thousands of years - indeed even our very oldest legends, an oral tradition predating writing, note that place. if not for the British, it's likely I'd still have my birth family, and that's a pain so deep I'm crying just sharing this.
second, let's compare my day-to-day experience as someone who isn't white but is trans with the experiences of virtually all of my other trans friends who are virtually all white. I alone have been harassed out of restaurants and bathrooms, had pharmacy and grocery staff shout to the whole store that I'm actually a man, in an attempt to provoke collective outrage (which is, I'll note actual violence), and on one occasion, been chased by proud boys screaming slurs with the obvious intent to beat me if caught. my white trans friends cannot believe the relative degree of violence sent my way - people misgender them or occasionally refuse to use their pronouns but the veneer of polite society never entirely falls away. and to avoid crying more I'm going to stop here before I talk about police.
the point I'm trying to get across is that white supremacy - the legacy of colonial rule - is hegemonic. not even wealth and class entirely free you from the naked violence of the system perpetuating itself. I beg you to read Settlers and read Fanon. comparing a random Black supremacist, someone on the social, political, and economic fringe, with the deeply entrenched and omnipresent system of colonialism is utterly ludicrous.
when we say "prejudice against white people doesn't count because it's not systemic" this is the discussion we're trying to short circuit. it's not feasible to have this discussion over and over again. but speaking abstractly about degrees of harm also doesn't get across how far apart the things we're comparing actually are.
I've read Settlers and Fanon (and The Counter-Revolution of 1776, and I'm working on Black Reconstruction in America right now).
Besides reactionaries and overt racists, no one is claiming there is hegemonic, systemic, or structural racism against white people. I've never even heard this from libs, let alone leftists. Instead, the argument is that insulting or harming someone based on the color of their skin still fits the definition of racism, even if it is not aligned with a larger superstructure of racism.
I'm convinced this whole discourse could be resolved with "there is no structural racism against white people, even though individuals may be racist against them." The disagreement stems from arguing that only structural racism is really racism, which strikes me as an odd semantic battle to pick.
it's a recuperation of the term which is specifically what people are trying to resist. what term could we use to separate the superstructural violence from interpersonal prejudice that won't itself be recuperated? I remind you that the term itself began life as what the white supremacists called themselves. it fell out of favor with them when people caught on that it meant white supremacist.
the notion that it today means "interpersonal prejudice on racial lines" is a weakening of the notion that provides cover to white supremacists, giving them space to complain about the racism being done to them.
there's no such thing as racism against white people because whiteness and racism are intrinsically linked.
I'm looking at how most people use the word "racism" today, because I think we should talk to people using terms they understand. If we think it's worthwhile to redefine a word from its common usage we have to actually teach people, not just spring it on them and berate them for not reading our minds.
It really isn't, as the broader point she was making over prejudice and bigotry was that white supremacist attacks, violence, and oppression are far more dangerous and ubiquitous in American/Euro society than are incidents like the Fresno shootings. The difference and point that silent_water was making, as I interpret it, is that the state and culture both embrace, protect, and enable white supremacist violence through its law enforcement system, judiciary, legislature, through the media, through the broader culture, and through its ability to determine who is worthy of dignity and who is worthy of annihilation.
"We should be more conciliatory to left-liberals "baby socialists" about white fragility and identity" is not something I'd care to cater to either.
Othello's comment was against people who identify as white as a cultural identity, not the pigmentation of their skin.
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.
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.
Prejudice + Power, which it is worth noting is the accepted definition in sociology circles.
you have a child's understanding of racism