What it says on the tin

Let's unlearn racism together :)

[postsforwhitepeopletoread]

Welcome!

This blog is a curated post collection to help white people learn about racism, imperialism, activism, and their role in systems of oppression. This post contains the tag system so you can look at posts by subject, as well as a list of helpful resources and other blogs to follow. Any non-bold words that are underlined are links to recommended reading!

This blog is intended mainly for browsing, not just following. I will not reblog single posts more than once so please take time to look through the archived posts!

Tag System

Basics: This tag contains a handful of short(ish) posts to get you started (also read the links in the next few bullets!)

White Guilt: Posts about white guilt

White Fragility: Posts about white fragility

Privilege: Posts about privilege

Appropriation: Posts about cultural appropriation

White Culture: Posts about what white culture looks like (yes, white people do have culture!). Subset of the culture tag.

Culture: Very broad tag for posts about different cultures and cultural racism

Allyship: Posts about what being a good ally looks like (or doesn't look like!)

Antiracism: Posts about the action of unlearning racism and/or teaching others to do so (lots of overlap with allyship)

History: Posts with information about historical events or figures connected to systemic racism

Current events: Posts about instances of modern-day racism and imperialism

Antiblackness: Posts about racism against Black people

Indigenous: Broad tag for posts about indigenous cultures worldwide

Orientalism: Posts about racism against people of Asian descent

Imperialism: Posts about imperialism

Antisemitism: Posts about bigotry against Jews

Dogwhistles: Posts about words, phrases, and symbols with plausible deniability used by bigots to signal one another

Conspiracy theories: Posts about conspiracy theories that are rooted in bigotry (spoiler: it's most of them)

Environmentalism: Posts about bigotry in environmentalist movements/ideals

Community: Posts about how racism appears in communities and/or how to combat it

Relationships: Posts about how racism appears (or doesn't!) in interpersonal relationships

Experiences: Personal accounts/stories about experiencing racism

Gender: Posts about the intersection of racism and gender

Incarceration: Posts about the prison system in the US (basically, it's modern slavery)

Media: Posts about racism in media

Humor: Posts about jokes & memes as a vessel for both outright and subtle bigotry (and when they're not)

Activism: Posts about activism

Recommended media: Things to watch or read!

Not every tag has a lot of posts in it (yet), many posts are cross-tagged, and posts may also be tagged with additional relevant terms.

Please be aware: your comfort is not a priority here. Due to the subject matter of this blog, some posts may mention triggering topics. Any posts that describe these actions with any detail will be trigger tagged, but I will not be tagging for keyword mentions (e.g. "women of color are often sexually assaulted"). Nobody is ever obligated to read a detailed account of something horrible, but if you're here to learn about racism you need to be willing to hear that horrible things happen. If you cannot tolerate thinking about these things at all you can use tumblr's content filtering feature for keywords, but please acknowledge that your ability to avoid this kind of information is a form of white privilege.

Resources & Blogs:

The recommended media tag!

Re: media, I highly recommend beginning your antiracism journey by watching this in full.

@creatingblackcharacters: Fantastic blog for learning about antiblack racism. I recommend reading all the lessons in her pinned post.

@insertspanishhere: Blog about Hispanic tropes & stereotypes

@modelsofcolor: Follow to help diversify your tumblr feed and subconsciously unlearn eurocentric beauty standards

@folkfashion: Same as the above

@naturalhairhow101: Posts about Black hairstyles

@isuggestlandback: Posts mainly about indigenous cultures and social issues

@olowan-waphiya: Posts mainly about indigenous cultures and social issues

@blackcharacterpolls: Posts about Black characters in various media

@does-it-like-black-women: Poll blog about media. I recommend looking through the notes on finished polls.

@doberbutts: Posts a lot about queer intersectionality with race and other social issues

@directactionforhope: Posts about current events, social issues, and activism

Melanin Library: Database of books by Black authors

JSTOR Reading Library: Free Black liberation reading materials

Indigenous website & resource list

Masterlist of Black focused resources

In general, try to follow as many POC on social media as you can. Do not comment on posts that are not meant for you, but make a habit of filling your feed with posts by people in other demographics and cultures. Likewise, make a habit of deliberately seeking out media created by POC. Doing these things will allow you to learn new things without having to ask people, and to unlearn the gut reaction to see white people as "default".

It should go without saying but this is tumblr, so: me (the blog owner) reblogging a post or recommending a blog is not the same as me endorsing all opinions and content posted by that blog. The content I recommend here is intended to make you think and (hopefully) grow as a person, and reading and understanding differing opinions is part of that!

Remember, you are still your own person and you should think for yourself! Do not just accept everything others tell you as fact unless they are referring to their own lived experiences– even if they are telling you something is racist, you still need to understand why it's racist. If you disagree with anything on this blog or any of the linked resources, then you should do your own research to find out whether your disagreement comes from a place of ignorance or internalized prejudice. If it doesn't, then it's just something you disagree with that particular person about. People in other demographics are not a monolith and you will not agree with everyone!

[creatingblackcharacters]

man sometimes i think of the “clanker” trend and its like man some people DESPERATELY want to be racist without actually being perceived as racist. im a Star Wars fan so when i first heard it i was like okay chuckle that’s funny I hate ai and its a reference to a thing i like and then it gained traction and people were saying it with SO MUCH like…enthusiasm and venom that it felt like yall just want to say another word. Its not subtle. Truly an insane internet experience.

Like why do y'all wanna say a slur so bad lmao. Why is the urge to be a bigot "without harm" so tempting to you? I have never in my life wanted to call anything a slur, that I would be so geeked to have the opportunity. Grow a spine and say the slurs you really wanna say, and live with the consequences!

[someoneq]

Justin Jordan made a great youtube video about the origins and extent of the trend (people made a lot of robot versions of slurs and of actual Black people). Take care if you're watching because some of the people making the clanker "jokes" he's reacting to didn't do much at all to hide the racism.

[windowz97]

girl who sat next to me at the coffee shop had that Tortured By Computer Work look in her eye so i turned to her and was like Are u doing research? and it turns out she (white) just started working as an indigenous liaison for an ecological wellness surveying company (hired bc she worked with the local nation for a year) so i was like OMG can i share resources with you. and whipped out my 1 million notes and academic papers on ethical Indigenous-settler relations/research and Indigenous perspectives on ecological restoration. she was like omg are u sure this is basically a whole course for free and i wanted to tear my shirt off liek YES!!!! I WANT TO PROMOTE LOW BARRIER EDUCATION TO ADVANCE DECOLONIZATION AND RECONCILIATION!!!!!!!!!!! STEP IN2 MY GOOGLE DOC !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[windowz97]

here's a googoodrive folder containing learnings on Experiential Learning in Ecological Restoration annnddd Research Practice in Indigenous Contexts. each course folder contains a "![Course number] Notes" document as well as PDFs of all the text-based readings that the notes draw from :-)

i plan 2 make accessible the learnings from my other classes too but i think ill only have time to do all that anonymizing & reformatting once i graduate in a few months lol

[bebsi-cola]

[a post about the police where they're called pigs because they're a detestable sort]

the notes: aww noo i thought you meant the animal they're so cute and nice they're just little guys, don't be mean by using them as an insult

[a post about how dogs are valued more than women, disabled, black and brown people, or where you call some bigot a dog bastard]

the notes: yes but dogs!! you have to care about them too. they're so cute and nice they're just little guys, don't be mean by using them as an insult

[bebsi-cola]

you people care more about comparison to an animal being used as an insult than you do about actual slurs

[the-quasar-hero]

Very generally speaking, when you see a black man in a piece of media, be it tv show, movie, video game, etc. there’s something you often see a lot of writers do. To go against the stereotype of black men (and black people in general) being dumb and lazy, you’ll see this black male character being smart and an achiever. 

The Black Nerd. A common character type, the nerd will always be very interested in all things nerdy: science, video games, mathematics, etc. In an continued effort to combat stereotypes, the Black Nerd will be lack athleticism, probably being asthmatic (the nerdiest of conditions). The Black Nerd will dress smartly, suspenders and bow ties. They’ll always talk smart too, using proper English with complex words.

Now, I don’t have a problem with a black character being a nerd, indeed black people are a people; we aren’t all the same and we all have varying personalities. The problem I have is that too often we see a distinct disconnect between Blackness and the Black Nerd. The Black Nerd doesn’t listen to hip hop or rap, only classical music. The Black Nerd only has white friends, the only other black characters are into not nerdy stuff. The Black Nerd never ever uses AAVE at any time in any context.

And again I must say that Black people, not being a monolith, there are no hard fast rules to being Black. I’m more than sure there are Black people like what I’ve described above, I’m not saying it’s impossible; what I’m getting at is that the only Black Nerd we see. There are Black Nerds that play basketball, that bump Kendrick Lamar, and use AAVE since it’s an ever changing dialect. I’m just saying there’s no one way of being a nerd and no one way of being Black.

[the-quasar-hero]

Well @dumbey, seems we’re in similar boats

[spaceshipsandpurpledrank]

TLDR: this white queer person tried to hold other white queer people accountable for their racism and they DID NOT LIKE THAT

[fforsythiaaa]

Once when I was in undergrad, someone described something as “problematic” in class and our professor was like, “That’s cool, but ‘problematic’ doesn’t really mean anything. It means that the thing you’re describing has a problem, and in and of itself that’s not bad. Art, especially, should always have problems, or else it’s not interesting and not art, either. It sounds like you’re trying to say that this is bad, but you don’t want to say ‘bad.’ Is that right?”

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.

Anyway. Whenever I see the word problematic, I can’t help but think of this professor being like, “Good starting point, now let’s get specific.” I think when we have to commit to saying “that’s ___” it requires a lot more careful thought about the truth and impact and complexities of whatever we’re claiming. Sometimes there really is some bullshit afoot, and also sometimes it’s art, and it should be full of problems, because that’s what art is.

[progressivemillennial]

“If I have one message to give to the secular American people, it’s that the world is not divided into countries. The world is not divided between East and West. You are American, I am Iranian, we don’t know each other, but we talk together and we understand each other perfectly. The difference between you and your government is much bigger than the difference between you and me. And the difference between me and my government is much bigger than the difference between me and you. And our governments are very much the same.”

― Marjane Satrapi, Iranian graphic novelist

[w0nderland42]

i get that americans love their cultural imperialism, but it really does piss me off that june is “international” pride month just because something happened in the united states.

in aotearoa, june isn’t our pride, it’s theirs. marsha p johnson and sylvia rivera are their historical figures, not ours. the phrase that “you owe your rights to Black trans women” is true there, but here we owe our rights to (mostly) Māori historical figures. i have the freedoms i do because of the legacy of an entirely different set of people operating in an entirely different context at entirely different times.

But because of american cultural imperialism, most queer people in Aotearoa don’t even know our own queer history. Carmen Rupe, Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, the Dorian Society, Gillian Laundon, Georgina Beyer, and the Wolfenden Association are some of our queer history. We should know their names! we should know what they did for us! but because of the power of the american imperial machine, we don’t.

our national pride month should be july, the month that the Homosexual Law Reform Act passed in 1986. our two largest cities hold their pride festivals in february and march, respectively. american queer history has very little (or nothing, depending on who you ask) to do with our queer history. anecdotally, from my own queries, queer youth in aotearoa know more about american queer history than our own.

anyway, happy pride, americans. i’m truly sorry that most of you don’t see the negative impact your nation’s culture has on the rest of the world. and to the rest of the world reading this, try searching for your own country and culture’s queer history, don’t accept the american narratives as your own. we deserve our own histories divorced from the cultural hegemony of the USA.

[captain-price-returns]

[transmechanicus]

Revealing the ignorance of my youth here, but who is this and what is she known for?

[boybeetles]

Anita Sarkeesian, feminist who interpreted media under a feminist lens. She did a series about video games and she was the subject of targeted harassment. That was the start of gamergate

[flurrin]

Minor correction, the start of gamergate was based around a different reporter, Zoe Quinn, but they were both absolutely violently threatened over their involvement in video game criticism and development. A hate campaign was started by Quinn's ex-boyfriend when he wrote a post falsely accusing them of dating video game journalists in order to receive positive reviews on their own game, Depression Quest, which led other bad actors to accuse all women in the industry (Zoe identified as female at the time) of perceived sexual immorality. Anita Sarkeesian's brilliant Youtube series Tropes vs Women in Video Games (which everyone should watch, right now) sparked a particular nerve for criticizing popular games of killing and/or victimizing any important female character (there is a CHILLING bit that borders on ludicrous where she describes the plots of a seemingly endless parades of games as "In [title], [male player character's] wife dies, and you then have to rescue [his] daughter."). That series did actually make a huge change in the industry, especially when touted by progressive legacy developers like Tim Schafer (Monkey Island, Psychonauts), who went on to expand hiring in his company to front women and minority voices, but the shift didn't really show for a long time and echoes of the sexism that plagues the industry at its core are still rampant.

[crazy-pages]

In all seriousness, if you live in the US and you aren't familiar with the misogynistic harassment these people in the game industry faced during Gamergate, you need to watch this series right now.

This was the beggining of the current form of the US fascist movement and it underpins the entire thing about it to this day. If you live in the US and Gamergate isn't familiar to you, you're missing critical history to understanding US fascism. I'm not joking even a little bit here, you will understand modern United States fascism so much better if you are familiar with Gamergate.

[cumaeansibyl]

Not an exaggeration. Gamergate led directly to the redpill/incel movement, which white supremacists exploited and colonized. Not to say that most of the white men in those movements weren't already racist to some extent, but that wasn't an active part of their politics until white supremacist recruiters came along and convinced them that the women ruining their videogames were part of the conspiracy to destroy the white race.

That's a very brief summary but you can go back step by step over the past decade and see how they did it.

[rabbitkinglune777]

cool. another black child died in a hate crime

[rabbitkinglune777]

South Carolina jury finds store owner not guilty of murder in killing of Black teen | CNN

A South Carolina jury on Monday found a store owner not guilty of murder in the 2023 shooting of a Black 14-year-old.

apparently the murder happened in 2023 after doing some research but the murderer has been found not guilty.

black children get murdered and become victims of hate crimes every fucking day. this is ridiculous

[rabbitkinglune777]

im posting this here despite the website being extremely white centered, I want people to understand how in this country it's basically ok to murder and victimize black people, especially women and children in the name of "self defense" and white America will reward you for your antiblackness.

[queerautism]

Fellow white people did you know there's this cool youtube hack where you go out of your way to watch videos made by Black people. And suddenly your video recommendations will have loads of cool new channels. And then you realise youtube was literally hiding videos made by Black people from you because they assumed you wouldn't be interested

[canadianwheatpirates]

For everyone being like "we should talk about racial segregation by algorithms", you'll love Discriminating Data by Wendy Chun! She literally digs up the original study that "proved" people prefer to socialise with folks similar to them and showed that it discarded Black participants.

[the-trans-advice-blog]

Please please please think of trans people of color when you’re going to make a generalized statement. When you’re making posts about passing tips, medical treatments for transitioning, even light hearted stereotypes include people of color in your sentiments.

As a black trans person it is so fucking isolating to see stuff I’m supposed to relate to only to find that they weren’t talking about me or people like me.

[starg2zerlion]

Good rule of thumb is the more people of different backgrounds you know, the harder it becomes to dehumanize them, so its a really good thing to meet people from different backgrounds, and anyone telling you that people from x culture or y country you really shouldnt interact with probably dont have your best interest in mind

[llambdoll]

[bideogaymes]

that Natasha doll shit that’s big in Asia rn (China, Indonesia, Korea, etc.) is emblematic of why we say antiblackness is global. abusing a Black baby doll to relieve stress, in violent and pedophilic ways, & then going out of their way to take pictures of irl Black, African, and half-Black Asian children to brag that they found the “IRL Natasha doll”? and comments under posts on Xiaohongshu saying they want to “punch” it (an irl Black child) up?

and in Spanish speaking circles online they sharing gore pictures of dead African babies in online chats so much it has a label named “BND”? Another Black teen was murdered recently by an Asian American store owner convinced he was stealing despite putting items back. He shot him in the back.

yall dont deserve nothing from Black people in any part of the diaspora, irdc. this shit makes me so angry but the demands for an expectation of actionable organizing and dismantling of the white supremacist project that is the US is laid at our collective feet and no one else’s is so crazy to me. how are Black ppl supposed to generate trust for nonblack ppl that hasn’t been demonstrated in a sustained, recent, manner, without us having to force the rest of the world to see us?

Idpol is divisive until it’s time to self adopt the moniker of the Global South and that often doesn’t include & backseats Black African exploitation/extraction. it’s hella transparent how nonblack leftists only mention Sudan, Congo, Somalia, etc. as afterthoughts to their awareness and solidarity posts focusing on Palestine but feel entitled to call Black leftists “zog slaves” for not making dedicated media to the issue they feel the most important, regardless if to these Black leftists making Black issues their focus and niche.

fucking crazy so many of yall got the nerve to posture moral superiority.

[bideogaymes]

i didn’t say every East Asian did or does support this, nor did i specify East Asia at all.

[bideogaymes]

the video is even worse. these Chinese and Asian social media users are actually going to remote African villages to film themselves abusing, terrorizing, and humiliating Black children.

One clip shows a Chinese man holding a young Black girl on his lap and having her repeat sentences in Chinese. she doesn’t know what she’s saying but the captions show him having her say, “ I have no value. I’m just a retard.”

im sick to my stomach.

editing to add youtube video link:

[rabbitkinglune777]

bluesky is having a normal one Abt black ppl

(black mutual made a joke about white people that I laughed at)

[rabbitkinglune777]

this is why I feel unsafe with libs especially non black ones because they take simple jokes the oppressed make at their oppressors and use it as a chance to dehumanize us further/see black people and other racialized minorities in a aggressive light. these ppl just want us to sit here and take their performativity and abuse, not actually stand up for ourselves