okay
yes, i’m racist
My ancestors enslaved white people for thousands of years and raped their women.
My ancestors also conducted a bunch of scientific experiments on your people, treating them as if they’re lab rats, without their consent.
I help enforce and protect…
“Even though the reality is you’re an entitled brat who’s upset because you don’t want to look at your whiteness and deconstruct it. Because you really need your whiteness that much, so of course you don’t want to look at it.”
I think this is what scares them the most. American Whites have swallowed the whole “rugged individualism” crap so much that they really believe their personal accomplishments are gained in a vacuum. They don’t want to look at Whiteness because it disproves all of that. AND they don’t want to admit that it not only exists, but that they NEED it to so they can have the little they got. That’s why they hang onto it with a death grip and then wanna make believe they don’t.
When Black people talk about Black issues:
- God, it’s always all about you! Share some of that spotlight and stop hogging all the oppresshuns!!!! You want us to talk about you but you never talk about us!
When Black people talk about other PoC issues:
- God, it’s none of your business! You don’t know anything, you’re Black, even if you’re mixed, you still LOOK Black! Stop talking about us!
First off, colorblinding? Fuck yourself, because this is more proof of your anti-Blackness that you claim doesn’t exist.
Second, fuck yourself.
Those two are important for me to get out, so outside of that, I’ll move along.
Firstly, despite you clamoring all over your supposed desire of Asian-Black solidarity, you know shit and zero about being Black. How do you plan on claiming solidarity with a people you not only CLEARLY DO NOT KNOW, and do not EVER plan to get to know?
Yeah, ahuh, I’m sure your “solidarity” is kicking in now.
I am not “100% Black American” <—-what the fuck even IS that? My mother’s family, INCLUDING MY MOTHER, is ALL immigrants. My grandmother on my father’s side is ALSO an immigrant, making me first gen and second gen.
I have always known I was a mix of various things. I was RAISED in Trini culture, which, since you know SO MUCH about the Black diaspora, you’d know is a mix of Asian, Asian-Black mixed, and Black people. Not just South Asian, either, Trinidad in particular has a substantial East Asian community as well.
But we do not call it “Asian” there. We are West Indians, and there are ones who are “Indian-related” (what you’d call South Asian) and “Black-related” (Africans) and of course, mixed. But we do not call ourselves “South Asian”. If you asked a person who looked 100% South Asian (like my aunt does) what she was, she would say “I am Trini”. If you said “you are South Asian”, the most you’d get is “I am Trini and Indian”.
The concept of that being “Asian” is not really pervasive there, likely because the idea in the Islands is that the only “real” Asians are East Asians, which is propagated by the US, as well as East Asians themselves much of the time. It never occurred to me most of my life that my culture was in part originally “Asian”, because despite it being so, it was never referred to AS such. So I consistently speak as though “Asian-ness” is separate from me because it has always been just “Trini; Black and Indian” with no connection between “Indian” and “Asian”.
In addition, I was not born in Trinidad, like my mother. I was born here. I was raised Black, treated Black, and hated by white and non-Black people alike. Amongst island folk, everyone instantly pegs me as mixed and my mom as mixed. In America, much of that is entirely lost as we assimilate into Black.
I knew I was West Indian, I knew I was mixed, but that did not matter in America. In America, I am Black. If I claimed nothing, I would be Black. That is a fact. It became a way of life. Even now I have trouble claiming South Asian-ness, Indian-ness, because of latent fears of “not looking Indian enough”, because despite the fact that Trinis and other West Indians always peg me for exactly what I am, mixed, people who know shit about the Islands (AKA most of America) have shoved decided my fate for me and I wasn’t given a fucking choice, and that stuck.
Just like East Asians are all lumped in together as one giant monolith, so are Black people. There are no countries, there are no cultures, there are no groupings or tribes. There is one thing, the almighty nigger, and that is all there is that waits for any Black person, from anywhere, in America.
But of course you knew that, didn’t you?
Surely, since your knowledge of Blackness and the Black diaspora is so vast and you do so much “real research” on us, and not you know, just digging up shit from anons with no credibility or proof to their names, eh?
So, you decided to be Black. All you had to do was click a button with your pale ass fingers and vavoom! Youz a negro! Now you can derail every argument!
Welcome to the land of being a niggeaux!
Here are some steps to start living your real nigga life.
Step One.
You can never go back to being white. (We lost a lot of you niggeauxs with that one, huh?) Realize that if you aren’t in Africa(and sometime, even there), whenever you hear an adjective, people aren’t automatically talking about you.
Oh, but don’t worry, white people, like your former self will GLADLY point that shit out for you on a daily. Are you gay? No, you’re a black gay/gay black person.(And people will always forget you can be both) Are you selfish? No, you are a selfish black person.(And people will never forget you can be both) Oh, be sure to notice how people say, ‘black’ with disgust when this happens.
Step Two.
Since you started off White, you are going to be a dark skinned Black person to truly lose any color privilege. So, don’t bother watching TV because you’ll hardly ever find yourself there. Your hair, consider it nonexistent. You’re an alien to White people now, they don’t know how to really deal with ‘your type.’ You’ll be rejected from salons and told to get rid of the way your hair grew out of your head permanently.
Step Three.
Stop talking to family and friends. Chances are, if you only pretend to be a niggeaux online. Mufuckas must hate us around your parts.
Step Four:
Now that you have no family or friend, at least you have your identity right? Woah! You were planning on being an individual? Stop right there. From now on, whatever you wear, read, watch, and eat is no longer your own business, but is subject to the scrutiny of every person you know. Listen to rap? You’re a stereotype. Don’t listen to rap? You’re a race traitor. Wear Jordans? You’re too black. Wear Vans? You’re not black enough. Eat chicken? You suck. Don’t eat chicken? You suck. And don’t bother looking for any kind of perfect medium for this, cause it don’t exist.
This is a starting list for all anons who want to hide behind a face of an identity that isn’t yours. Collect yourselves.
I’m often asked why I’ve focused so much more on anti-black racism than on Asians over the years. Some suggest I suffer from internalized racism.
That might well be true since who doesn’t suffer from internalized racism? I mean, even white people internalize racism. The difference is that white people’s internalized racism is against people of color, and it’s backed up by those who control societal institutions and capital.
But some folk have more on their minds. They say that focusing on black and white reinforces a false racial binary that marginalizes the experiences of non-black people of color. No argument here. But I also think that trying to mix things up by putting non-black people of color in the middle is a problem because there’s no “middle.”
So there’s most of my answer. I’m sure I do suffer from internalized racism, but I don’t think that racism is defined only in terms of black and white. I also don’t think white supremacy is a simple vertical hierarchy with whites on top, black people on the bottom, and the rest of us in the middle.
So why do I expend so much effort on lifting up the oppression of black people? Because anti-black racism is the fulcrum of white supremacy.
A fulcrum is defined by Merriam-Webster as “the support about which a lever turns” or, alternatively, “one that supplies capability for action.” In other words, if you want to move something, you need a pry bar and some leverage, and what gives you leverage is the fulcrum – that thing you use so the pry bar works like a see-saw.
The racial arrangement in the U.S. is ever changing. There is no “bottom.” Different groups have more ability to affect others at different times because our roles are not fixed. But, while there’s no bottom, there is something like a binary in that white people exist on one side of these dynamics – the side with force and intention. The way they mostly assert that force and intention is through the fulcrum of anti-black racism.
Hang in there with me for a minute and consider this. Race slavery is the historical basis of our economy. Yes, there was/is a campaign of “Indian removal” in order to capture natural resources and that certainly is part of the story. But the structure of the economy is rooted in slavery.
Our Constitution was written by slave owners. They managed to muster some pretty nice language about equality, justice, and freedom for “men” because they considered Africans less than human. Our federal system is based on a compromise intended to accommodate slavery. Our concept of ownership rights, the structure of our federal elections system, the segregated state of our society, the glut of money in politics, our conservative political culture, our criminal codes and federal penitentiaries all evolved around or were/are facilitated by anti-black racism.
And this is not just about history. Fear of black people drives our national politics, from the fight over Jim Crow in the 50s and 60s, to Willie Horton and the Chicago Welfare Queen in the 80s, and the War on Drugs, starting in 1982 right up to the present. Since 2001, the U.S. has spent about 1.3 trillion dollars on war. Since 1982 we’ve spent over 1 trillion dollars on the drug war.
About 82% of drug busts are for possession, while about 18% are for trafficking. Sound like an irrational way to wage a war on drugs? Not if it’s a war on black people.
According to Human Rights Watch, black males are incarcerated at a rate more than six times that of white males resulting in one in 10 black males aged 25-29 being held in prison or jail in 2009. The same report states:
blacks constitute 33.6 percent of drug arrests, 44 percent of persons convicted of drug felonies in state court, and 37 percent of people sent to state prison on drug charges, even though they constitute only 13 percent of the US population and blacks and whites engage in drug offenses at equivalent rates.
And why a war on people? The war on drugs is the cornerstone of the “tough on crime” messaging campaign that is key to the Republican Southern Strategy. It suggests that extending civil rights to African Americans resulted in the crime wave of the 1970s (and not the baby boom as is suggested by sociologists) in order to drive white Southerners into the Republican Party.
And that “tough on crime” thing, that’s not just against black people. It’s a propaganda war that is weakening civil rights and civil liberties for all of us.
There’s no hierarchy of oppressions where race is concerned, but anti-black racism is the fulcrum of white supremacy.
i guess this HAD to be posted again because of fuckery.
Some white person replies with:
“You’re being racist right now for saying it’s white people. It’s uneducated people. Blame them, you racist.”
It’s the same song and dance.
Over and over and over and over and over again.
The power to not have to care or desire to correct oneself, to force others out without fear, without pain, without struggle. To be able to strangle their livelihoods in your hands and then turn around and say “It’s not me. It’s some other people. Stop blaming me. It’s some other people. I have the power to crush you, and I’ll do it if you keep saying it’s me.”
How sick.
How depraved.
You want to be treated like individuals, but you can’t even separate a small group of 20 completely different people into such. You want your intent, your lives cared for by complete strangers and will harass them to get the approval you desire when they’ve made it clear they want nothing to do with you.
And when your persistent badgering finally causes them to blow, you point the finger and say “Look. They stepped out of line. My harassment was nothing compared to that single comment after I’ve been bothering them for hours.”
And people believe that.
And take the time to go out of their way to spread lies and hatred and whatever they can do to demonize the person who dares step out of line. They’ll ruin that person’s life for wanting to live the same way everyone else lives. They’ll kill that person.
And no one cares.
It’s stomach-churning to watch.
What should you do?
- Try to understand why they do it that way?
- Sit around on your whiteness-induced high horse not realizing that your reaction, while more socially acceptable, is based on a scale of what white people can expect, and has a long history of medicalizing and demonizing black people for such? (Anti-social disorder makes no real fucking sense if you have to worry about every fucking person you meet tryina kill you. Black children are left behind/considered mentally ill because they do not hug strangers out of being taught not to trust them, rightfully.)
Many of you non-black PoC and white people do the latter; especially the closer to white and pale East Asian y’all are. (See also: the benefits of being not-black in US society.)
Let’s use a huge exaggeration to begin to illustrate my point. Follow closely now.
Let’s pluck a kid out of a war zone. That kid has been used to hearing bombs go off in nearby territories and never knows when a person she meets on the street is going to pull out a gun and kill them all.
Is it reasonable to expect that kid to jump and run upon hearing a loud sound similar to a gunshot or a bomb?
Of course it is. That’s fucking common sense. Not even a koolaid-drinking PoC or a white person could argue that’s completely logical.
Now, do you think that if the person was removed from the war zone and was merely told “it’s safe now”, they would be able to trust that? Do you not think that the kid would STILL jump and run upon hearing loud sounds?
Of course they would. It’s called PTSD and it’s considered a highly sympathetic mental illness to have.
Now let’s take a kid in a really shitty neighborhood. Heard gunshots outside of his window every week, every other person is a drug dealer, there’s no money coming into the community, just going out. No hope.
How many people do you think that kid is going to trust offhand?
Not many, right? That’s called common sense.
Even if that kid leaves that place, they’re not going to magically start trusting anyone, right?
Why would they? That don’t make no sense. That’s called PTSD—except it’s not, when it’s a black kid. It’s called “anti-social personality disorder”. If it’s a black girl, it’s called “borderline personality disorder”.
Now what if you went through your entire life being microaggressed on by white people all damn day, every day?
You wouldn’t trust em right? What if no matter how many chances you gave, the outcome was still the same; you got fucked over.
That’s called common sense. Except it’s not in this society. That makes you sick, and not with anything that’s considered sympathetic. You got a “personality” problem.
That’s white privilege.
For the long, long, long history in America, rape has been used against black women to dehumanize them. Not just rape, but declaring them unrapeable; especially when it came from white people.
That means that you could have every ounce of evidence needed in a court in today’s age to convict your white rapist of rape and the police would just laugh you out of the police station.
That of course, came with other forms of dehumanization:
- It’s just a nigger, they deserve to be raped
- It’s just a nigger, they like sex anyway
- They’re barely human, they can’t be raped like a white woman can
As well as:
- I didn’t like the way that nigger looked at me, so I raped em
- They weren’t even all that upset after I raped them, they just continued to go about their day, so clearly it was okay
This is not some new thing that white 20 year old US idiots made up. This is something passed down to them from their grandparents, great grandparents, great, great grandparents and longer. This is a system that is so pervasive it shows up regularly in popular media, that black women are too strong to be REALLY raped and rape doesn’t really affect them that much.
This is not just making rape jokes on the internet, and even if it were just that it would be vile.
This is repetition of long-standing racism against black women and women-presenting people that will go on for a long time.
But she’d say she wasn’t racist, though.
(from http://raaw.wordpress.com/2007/10/15/caucasian/. The header is a clickable link to the original post.)
October 15, 2007
I read it on forms. I hear it conversation. And most annoying of all, people refer to me as such. I’m talking about the word Caucasian.
Sure we’re all trying to be PC when we invoke the formal racial title for a group of people we absolutely must designate. African American for blacks, Asian American for Asians, etc. But a history of struggle and racism called for such designators and more importantly, such designators as chosen by the people in question. It only follows that when making racial proclamations where you wish to include white folks, your brain will pause a moment to search for the nice formal self-designated word for whitey. Unfortunately, the word that comes up is Caucasian.
But where did that word come from and how did it rise to the lofty position of designated the white race as a whole? Some might be surprised to know, that like most racial designators, the history of the word Caucasian is racist, inaccurate and flawed. I’m writing this in order to bring light to this dirty word and hopefully work to remove it from our politically correct vocabulary.
Where is Caucasia?
I asked that same question when I was a wee lad first trying to divide my world into discrete boxes. Turns out, there really is a Caucasia. According to the mighty wikipedia this region is interesting for the following reasons:
- It’s considered the “border” between Europe and Asia
- Not surprisingly, the peoples and languages are extremely diverse
- Noah’s Arc mythically landed in the Caucasus Mountains
- Some human skulls were found there.
It’s that last point where we start. Popularized by a Joseph Friedrich Blumenbach, these Caucasian skulls were considered so modern (in the anthropological sense) and so well-formed that they must be the ancestors of the white race. Blumenbach goes on to compare them to the skulls of the pure and beautiful German race and even gives us an insight to his Georgian fetish:
[These skulls] produces the most beautiful race of men, I mean the Georgian; and because all physiological reasons converge to this, that in that region, if anywhere, it seems we ought with the greatest probability to place the autochthones (birth place) of mankind.
By “mankind” Blumenbach of course meant white people who were tainted along the way to produce the other, inferior races. Please see the summary on wikipedia for Caucasian race for more hilarity.
White Chicks are Hot
There are several things working together to contribute to the racial designator Caucasian. First you obviously have the erroneous and egocentric claim that not only is the white race superior in beauty, intelligence and culture, but also that it’s the oldest. News flash: it’s not and I’ve seen plenty of ugly “pure” white people.
Second, since the cranial features defined as Caucasian happen to also be found in many dark-skinned and decidedly non-European peoples (North Africans, West Asians and Indians), the science of morphology had to be tempered with some good ol’ racist explanations of impurity and the added “fact” that Caucasians’ natural skin color is white. A fact that cannot possibly be construed from a naked skull, but who’s really paying attention, right?
Third, as it may already be clear, the racial designator of Caucasian has less to do with science as it does with European requirements to justify imperialism through racial superiority and stewardship. Recognizing this, the use of Caucasian to mean white people in Europe is no longer preferred. It does, however, live on in the United States through legal precedent.
The Story of Bhagat Singh Thind
Bhagat Singh Thind was a Punjabi immigrant working his way through school in an Oregon lumber yard in the early 20th century. He fought in WWI and after his discharge, Thind applied for U.S. citizenship in 1920. Turned out several Indians had been granted citizenship before, but in Thind’s case a disgruntled naturalization examiner appealed the decision.
After a long legal battle, it was decided that Indians are not considered white persons using the famous “they just look different” argument.
This decision was important in cementing the American notion that white and Caucasian are one and the same. Justice Sutherland rejected the historical and anthropological reasoning (as flawed as they be) that included South Asians into the Caucasian fold and Thind was not white because he didn’t look white. Ipso facto, Caucasian began to mean exclusively white in further legal and demographic instances.
Caucasian is a Dirty Word
No matter how you slice it, the word Caucasian to denote white people is racist and inaccurate. From a physical anthropology perspective, Caucasians are currently defined by a diverse range of people, most of whom are not European; and before that it was used to denote a perfect race of white people. From a sociological standpoint, Americans are really the only people who use the word to denote whites due to a particularly faulty legal precedent. Perhaps most important is that we do not need a formal word to denote white people.
African American, Asian American, Latino American and everything in between, came out of ethnic movements and struggle. The people in question — long given names by the controlling white population —decided it was time to give themselves a name. That history of struggle is not apparent with whites and in fact a history of assimilation and quite literally “white washing” makes up the culture of white America. Whether we can make claims to European ancestry is often rendered moot when considering the race politics of this country. Each European ethnic group had its period of struggle in America, this is true, but the ultimate goal was to be considered white. The Irish, Italians and Jews have all gained access by assimilation.
Why create another name in light of this peculiar history of whites in America ? The reason for this underlying need to be associated with a white race is the larger theme of this blog and it only starts here. But the fact of the matter is Caucasian is an improper and offensive word that shouldn’t be used to denote white people. White people, white folks and whites, are all accepted names for the people I identify with and while I find it charming and polite that some folks use the word Caucasian in formal speech on race topics, the dirtiness of the word irks me each and every time I hear it. Please strike it from your vocabulary.
Thank you!
