End of disussion.

  • Erika3sis [she/her, xe/xem]@hexbear.net
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    Racism against BIPOC: police brutality and profiling, forced sterilization, syphilis shots, fetal deformities due to exposure to dangerous chemicals, housing discrimination, employment discrimination, slavery, smallpox blankets, etc.

    Racism against whiteys: waaah waaah you reminded me of how I’m complicit in a system of exploitation that I personally benefit from waaah waaah you called me a mean word too waaah staaaahp making fun of meeeeee waaaaaaaah :(((((((

  • a_blanqui_slate [none/use name, any]@hexbear.net
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    It’s actually quite a commonly heard rumor in scientific circles that Soviet scientists developed a method for racism against whites in the late 1950’s, but the team leading the effort along with all their equipment and notes were destroyed in the Nedelin catastrophe when they first attempted to test deployment of it on an ICBM.

  • FanonFan [comrade/them, any]@hexbear.net
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    i’ve never loved this framing, not because i think it’s wrong to call white people krakkker and mayo (never gonna stop doing this took-restraint ) but because it feels like a semantic squabble with limited utility.

    like, white liberals have a common understanding of the word racism which is pretty… shallow: essentially just being mean to someone based on race or racial characteristics. this simplistic definition of the word reveals a lack of understanding of what racism-- institutionally and culturally enforced otherization-- actually entails for those deemed other. but i hate arguing definitions and semantics, like asserting that a word can’t map to multiple concepts simply isn’t how words and language work. i’m more inclined to tell someone that their experience of racism is remarkably shallow and acute than deny that the word racism can map onto such shallow and acute experiences.

    As I type this I suppose “limited utility” isn’t actually accurate, this kind of rhetoric can serve a few purposes: force people who still identify with their whiteness, exude white fragility, to either deconstruct their identity or out themselves and leave the group. maybe it’s just the way people focus on semantics that bothers me.

    it’s more than that, actually. this thread gives me a vibe that I feel fairly frequently within online leftist spaces, not really unique to this topic. it’s the misconception that because we’re right (we are) we don’t need to be tactful or strategic about how we do things, suggesting an underlying assumption that the universe trends towards rightness or justice or whatever. which i don’t think it does. like, just because something’s right or justified doesn’t make it the most effective tactic to achieve our goals. i’m always “justified” in being the most aggressive leftist i want to be, but more often than not (at least irl) it’s more effective to hide my power level and blend in, slowly advancing ideas without raising peoples’ defenses.

    so take this topic as an example (which I could go either way on, this is just an example). the function of this thread seems to be to re-enforce a sort of “party line” about how we define the word, which is fine I suppose. but that seems to preclude any talk of tactics, because any question of whether this rhetoric is effective is conflated with questioning whether this rhetoric is right/justified. another example, the idea that any bullying of soon-to-be/current/former soldiers is justified. It is, they’re imperialist war criminals, but there still may be utility in trying to get through to them on some level.

    it makes me think of mass line, specifically “unite the advanced, win over the intermediate, and isolate the worst of the backward.” Most people are intermediate, and most of the intermediate have backwards traits and beliefs (especially white people in the US), but there has to be a balance between isolating people with one or two “backwards” views, at the expense of the movement, and allowing reactionary views to fester and grow within the movement, also undermining it. looking at it in a more granular way, in some contexts it may be more useful to move people from “backwards intermediate” to “advanced intermediate” or whatever, than some sort of “radicalize or bust”. no historical movement has been made up of ideologically pure, advanced masses, they’ve been mixed bags that are able to unite a critical mass of overlapping/intersecting interests.

    • 420blazeit69 [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      this thread gives me a vibe that I feel fairly frequently within online leftist spaces, not really unique to this topic. it’s the misconception that because we’re right (we are) we don’t need to be tactful or strategic about how we do things, suggesting an underlying assumption that the universe trends towards rightness or justice or whatever. which i don’t think it does.

      Excellent, excellent point.

    • HumanBehaviorByBjork [any, undecided]@hexbear.net
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      i get where you’re coming from, but in this specific instance, a non-white user was reacting to some absolutely vile casual white supremacist posts. tactics, messaging, optics, whatever, not really the issue here. if some dummy white person saw that and got their feelings hurt because they’re not a hitler lover, then i think some mockery is a perfectly reasonable way to help them either get over themselves or leave. they can get their degree in antiracism and basic social awareness on some other web forum.

      • FanonFan [comrade/them, any]@hexbear.net
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        yeah I have a habit of using a specific post/thread to go on a spiel about a tangentially-related thing that’s been on my mind. or directed at the general vibe i get in a thread versus the post itself

        i generally agree with the reported comment and think someone like the reporter is likely not worth any effort or consideration whatsoever

        • FanonFan [comrade/them, any]@hexbear.net
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          that’s a good point, although if we’re talking about tactics internal consistency isn’t 100% necessary. more important that the rhetoric we choose resonates in the way we intend with the audience we’re engaging with

          “whiteness is the absence of race” is an interesting way of framing it that the average person probably hasn’t thought about before. could then segue into the arbitrary nature of white/nonwhite and how it ties into power structures and class relations. ideally sidesteps defenses and encourages novel/critical thought

          also could avoid internal consistency issues simply by wording it like “the way I like to look at it is…” rather than a strong assertion.

            • FanonFan [comrade/them, any]@hexbear.net
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              The part you’re quoting isn’t so much about coalition building as it is agitation to try and break through the cultural wall most people are programmed with.

              To me coalition building entails finding common ground between already-existing organizations and movements.

              As a parallel, the Marxism 101 that we agitate with is reductive to the point of inaccuracy, but it’s meant to be an approachable starting point. Similar pedagogical methods for physics and other things, although less ideologically loaded.

      • 420blazeit69 [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        Most liberals would agree with what we were saying if we specified we were talking about systemic racism

        You hit the correct way to go about this on the head.

  • Moss [they/them]@hexbear.net
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    Also context for any shitlibs who are crying over this (not that it should matter) - that thread was showing how popular outright nazism and white supremacy are on Reddit. Literally whiteys calling for concentration camps.

      • CyborgMarx [any, any]@hexbear.net
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        Bro white people aren’t real, stop getting offended on behalf of an identity only sociopaths and losers identify with

        “every white person who isnt a comrade is my fucking enemy” comes off like “you’re a socialist, you’re one of the good ones”

        jesse-wtf

          • CyborgMarx [any, any]@hexbear.net
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            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

              • CyborgMarx [any, any]@hexbear.net
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                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

              • CyborgMarx [any, any]@hexbear.net
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                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

          • 420blazeit69 [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            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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        Feel free to argue it’s counterproductive (lol this is the dunk tank) but calling crackers white devils continues to not be racism

          • axont [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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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

              • axont [she/her, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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                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.

                • temptest [any]@hexbear.net
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                  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.

            • temptest [any]@hexbear.net
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              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.

        • Damn straight. I don’t know why anyone is seriously engaging with this asshole. It’s not acceptable to invalidate your feelings and talk down to you because you were somehow uncivil or because of the abstract concept of racial abolition. If you’d talked about hating cis people who weren’t comrades and someone came in here talking about how you’re wrong because socialists aim to abolish gender roles and then started quoting Feinberg at you when you refused to engage, absolutely nobody would take that shit seriously and would rightfully tell them to fuck off. I understand race abolition and gender abolition are not 100% analogous in every way, but they sure are in the ways that count here. I’m sorry you’ve been deal with this shit.

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            thanks this comment made me feel better, some of these assholes are really getting to me. and thats a great point about the gender thing, like am i just supposed to pretend that i live in a fantasy land where most white people aren’t racist and dont see and treat me like subhuman garbage, where i haven’t been abused, belittled, and harassed my whole life. there are even horrible people implying im not black for saying something that ALL OF MY FRIENDS SAY, thats normal. not to mention the context plus I literally say that im crying while typing in the comment. like i organized with white people all the time, I feed my community, i do the fucking work i put up with bullshit that would break your average person, i get sexually harassed by white leftist, i can ignore so much to get the work done but the second i express any real human emotion suddenly im some bad evil backwards person for being NORMAL. i feel so disposable, like no one will take me as I am, i have to be a perfect little good pet for white leftist all the time. like this is the exact shit conservatives do when they quote mlk to tell black people to get over racism. and that fact that this shit gets upbeared so much is annoying. i know most people are being supportive but im struggling not to let the few jerks get to me. im gonna force myself to take a break. after the next fanon post i think i need a long break from hexbear. like this is getting to me so much i may be done with this place permanently after sunday idk.

  • Abraxiel@hexbear.net
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    It honestly does suck a little to read people talking about how I’m inherently bad and how I deserve to die and I don’t have culture etc. I don’t really complain about it because I get it. It’s not like I face discrimination in real life. But like some of it does feel pretty shitty when I see it on a daily basis here.

    • Moss [they/them]@hexbear.net
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      Whiteness is more of a cultural indicator than being dependant on your skin colour. Others have mentioned that the definition of “white” can expand and contract as fascists demand. So like, when people are railing against white people, we’re talking about people who actively identify as white and conform to white culture, like generally supporting capitalism, being unconcerned with or happy with racism, acting like any slight against white people is discrimination equal to real racism, etc.

      People with pale skin can and have been discriminated against, but never because they’re white. I’ve had English people call me a terrorist and a savage for being Irish, not because I have pale skin.

      • temptest [any]@hexbear.net
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        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.

        • CyborgMarx [any, any]@hexbear.net
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          One can’t just say ‘I’m not white’ or ‘I’m not black’ in a way effectively recognized by society at large

          Ironically, this argument only works for black communities because many black people are disempowered in terms of self-identity and the means to socially and economically enforce that self-determined identification

          But for the rest of us the US census bureau had to create entire new categories (Hispanic white) and rework definitions (adding the entire MENA region to white) because people can and do effectively self-identify in terms of race

          Racists have alot of power to impose whiteness and its various exclusions on others, but they are not omnipotent, that’s why issues such as passing or non-passing, colorism in non-white communities, and the historical situations with Slavs, Jews, Irish and Italians exist, large swathes of the world challenge you’re supposition that they can’t practice a type of self-sorting when it comes to European racial codification

          That’s why it makes no sense to do what you’re doing and try to reinforce the “imposition upon people by racists” as you called it, hey the racists imposed it, so we all have to get offended on behalf of people who strongly identify with codified European Phrenology? No fuck that, they also imposed capitalism, should we all start identifying as capitalists because our lives are defined by capitalist social relations outside our control, I mean plenty do and they’d take your argument and apply it to all sorts of things they’d want to essentialize, gender, religion, caste, national identities

          • temptest [any]@hexbear.net
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            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.

            • CyborgMarx [any, any]@hexbear.net
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              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!

              I’m not disputing that reality, I’m disputing your response to that fact

              A person who doesn’t consider themselves white is still considered white by a society

              Not me, I don’t identify as white and society at large doesn’t see me as white unless I happen to pass on any given day, but the US census considers me white and a certain delusional minority of my ehtnic in-group consider me and themselves white, and I’m not an anomaly, this is the reality for so many ethnic groups who don’t fall cleanly into this thing you present as being so cleanly divided

              That’s why I said it’s ironic, cause your argument only really applies to dark skinned black people who don’t have the economic and social power to overcome this kind of codification

          • 420blazeit69 [he/him]@hexbear.net
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            But for the rest of us the US census bureau had to create entire new categories (Hispanic white) and rework definitions (adding the entire MENA region to white) because people can and do effectively self-identify in terms of race

            Most of the time white people say “I’m not white, I’m ________,” they are justifiably clowned on. If a white guy from middle Illinois checks “Hispanic white” on the census and then goes to a Hispanic community saying he’s Hispanic, what’s the reception going to be like?

            • CyborgMarx [any, any]@hexbear.net
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              Usually it’s “I’m not just American, I’m ________” and then they get justifiably clowned on, but that’s because Americans think genes make culture

              If a white guy from middle Illinois checks “Hispanic white” on the census and then goes to a Hispanic community saying he’s Hispanic, what’s the reception going to be like?

              “According to the 2010 US Census, 52.8% of Mexican Americans (approximately 16,794,111 people) self-identified as being White.” They’d probably assume he was someone’s relative?

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                And when he tells them he’s not related to any Hispanic people, he doesn’t speak Spanish, he’s never been south of Missouri – that he’s just some white guy from Illinois – will the reply be “well you checked the box, so sure”? Or will it be some mix of laughter and maybe something along the lines of “shut up, cracker”?

                It’s wild to me we’re going back and forth over something as easily observable as “people will assign you a race and not everyone can change that perception.”

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                  “people will assign you a race and not everyone can change that perception.”

                  jesse-wtf What back and forth? I never said “EVERYONE” can change that perception, I’ve literally stated three times in this thread dark skinned black people cannot do that, also that hypothetical Illinois patty of yours could have maintained the perception if he hadn’t hypnotically opened his mouth and told all those hypothetical Hispanics (none of whom are hypothetically white) that he wasn’t Hispanic, again showing that in real life this stuff is more about perception than folks looking like this or looking like that

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        Nonetheless, I can’t just “opt out” of being white unless I fucking lie like Lying Liz Wrecker Warren, and even then I will still be white just like she was still white and society will privilege us as being white all the same. I despise whiteness, but I am still objectively part of the white population and probably will be until I die because I am deep within the shifting boundary of who is designated as white.

    • Mokey [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      I grew up around mostly hispanic and black people and i understood whiteness to not really mean your skin color but the culture/class dynamics. Theres people who mean your skin but theyre ignorable.

      I feel like my friends and I were always some other third thing that has its foot in a lot of other things. Because we werent rednecks, we werent first gen polish immigrants nor were we middle class suburbia nor were we rich white devils. Were still white but the attachment to the label is very loose.

      Getting upset about people mocking your whiteness is kind of a litmus test to see how you view the world and what youve experienced.

      But also the people here who are the loudest about whiteness just found out about it, you dont have to take everyone seriously. I also find the self-flagellation kind of pathetic and for liberals.

    • GarbageShoot [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      I kind of get what you are saying but, as a white person, I think it sucks a lot more being cultureless than seeing people remark on my being cultureless. They recognize the indignity of it, whereas white norms seem to prefer its members be empty husks fit only for consuming and spite.

    • CyborgMarx [any, any]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      Why do you identify as white tho? The US census bureau classifies me as “white” but I’ve never felt even the barest twinge of identification with that fiction and I can pass

      • robot_dog_with_gun [they/them]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        i’m not sure what identifying as white means but cops think i’m white and it seems like i have white privilege so for eeoc purposes or whatever i’m a honkey and i’m not sure checking “other” or “prefer not to say” is meaningful

        • CyborgMarx [any, any]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          Basically when you observe terms like White American or American (I’m assuming you’re American sorry) which label do you connect with more, which one looms largest in your awareness? When you see a group of white nationalists march in the streets on TV, even if you have a negative reaction, do words like “we”, “us”, “me” pepper your internal monologue when observing those groups of people?

          That’s what I mean by identifying, not simply as some detached intellectual understanding of the perception other people have of you, but as a personnel, emotional, and social awareness of yourself

          • robot_dog_with_gun [they/them]@hexbear.net
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            1 year ago

            i’m pretty down on my nationality too. there’s christian dominionist freaks who loudly identify as their religious affiliation their gender and their citizenship in some order and i’m over here primarily identifying as “person”. america is trash and needs to be thrown away, to put it mildly.

            when i see things like the nazi march in ohio it’s “wish i was there on a roof with a rifle”