End of disussion.

  • Erika3sis [she/her, xe/xem]@hexbear.netEnglish
    75·
    1 year ago

    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 :(((((((

  • ImOnADiet@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
    72·
    1 year ago

    How is this thread turning into a struggle session? Im seeing arguments out of hexbear users that I hear from my apolitical gamer friends when I tell them they shouldnt care about someone calling them cracker…

  • FanonFan [comrade/them, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
    65·
    1 year ago

    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.netEnglish
      57·
      1 year ago

      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.netEnglish
      48·
      1 year ago

      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.netEnglish
        27·
        1 year ago

        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.netEnglish
          16·
          1 year ago

          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.netEnglish
              13·
              1 year ago

              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.netEnglish
        11·
        1 year ago

        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.

  • a_blanqui_slate [none/use name, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
    64·
    1 year ago

    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.

  • Moss [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    62·
    1 year ago

    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.netEnglish
        54·
        1 year ago

        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.netEnglish
            27·
            1 year ago

            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.netEnglish
                22·
                1 year ago

                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.netEnglish
                17·
                1 year ago

                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.netEnglish
            27·
            1 year ago

            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.

      • nohaybanda [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        45·
        1 year ago

        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.netEnglish
            49·
            1 year ago

            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.netEnglish
                35·
                1 year ago

                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.netEnglish
                  5·
                  1 year ago

                  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.netEnglish
              5·
              1 year ago

              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.

        • ScrewdriverFactoryFactoryProvider [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
          34·
          1 year ago

          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.

          • Othello [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
            29·
            1 year ago

            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.