Red Light Politics

[redlightpolitics]

Mainstream media is currently riding high on the trend of equating anti fascism to neo nazism. There is a plethora of “Both side” arguments, claims of violence and authoritarian silencing, whataboutism and free speech pearl clutching. The good progressive, the docile liberal is in a tizzy. Their centrism threatened by the loud presence of the antifa, a looming figure that is portrayed as even more dangerous than the advocacy of genocide and racial cleansing emanating from the side of the nazis. Antifascism, now that is the real danger.

The magnanimous middle ground and maintaining colonial order

I wrote about the current defense of neo nazis at the expense of their targets and how this is part of a long historical order.

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Perhaps it is not a coincidence that sentimentality, or “the reliance on feelings as a guide to truth” became a mainstream staple during the 18th century, at the height of European colonial expansion. While the European Empires were defining the racial and gender hierarchies that still rule us to this day, sentimentality became the dominant way of “knowing”.

Sentimentality and the building blocks of bigotry – This Political Woman – Medium

My latest on how sentimentality shapes politics in the age of sentimental bigots such as Trump, Wilders, Farage or Le Pen.

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To the outside world, the Netherlands is a rich and diverse country, embracing values of equality and acceptance of differences, even if some cracks are visible every year during the heated discussions about blackface and Zwarte Piet. However, the inside reality is quite different.

In the ‘tolerant’ Netherlands, solidarity is for white women - The Washington Post

I wrote about media in The Netherlands

[redlightpolitics]

I wrote about “Alt Feminism”

Ahem it comes with a certain endorsement

Here’s the link: Alt-Feminism and the white nationalist women who love it

[redlightpolitics]

Privacy is currently thought as the exclusive realm of the individual and not as a communal right deserving of protection, particularly in instances where this communal data can harm the group from which it was gathered.

Big Data and the ethics of community surveillance – This Political Woman – Medium

In my ongoing series about Big Data, I wrote about the lack of safeguards for data collection from communities and how this data is often used to further stigmatize marginalized groups.

[redlightpolitics]

I have already written about the way the “fashion profiles” of Richard Spencer and other known neo-nazis in mainstream media are normalizing these discourses and making these people appealing to the public, sexy and desirable even. As recent as November 2016, Spencer was filmed giving a speech where his followers broke into Sieg Heil Nazi salutes and Spencer himself used words such as “lugenpresse” (lying press) that have a long history within Nazism. However, since these interviews and profiles rarely (if ever) point to this man’s history of neo-nazi advocacy (including eugenics and mass extermination), here’s a rundown of the past seven years of Richard Spencer, in his own words, calling for ethnic cleansing, mass sterilization and a whites only ethnostate.

Facts to counteract the normalization of neo-nazis – This Political Woman – Medium

Richard Spencer, who got punched this past weekend, denies he is a neo-nazi. I created an archive of the past seven years of “Spencer in his own words” where he advocates for mass sterilizations of Black people, racial genocide, ethnic cleaning and the creation of a whites-only ethnostate.

[redlightpolitics]

Necropolitics being a global expression of sovereignty in which the world is divided into those who are disposable and those who are not, those whose lives can be wasted and those who cannot. In this political order a new form of control is exercised over those whose lives are considered disposable or what Judith Butler would call “those whose lives are ungrievable”. Mbembe’s necropolitics are matters of State and sovereignty however, each of the people who contributed to the point we have reached today have made necropolitics their own. They have gone as far as appropriating and repurposing feminist ideas to attract white women into their fodder. For them, the personal is necropolitical.

When the personal is necropolitical: on Inauguration Day and alliances of hate – This Political Woman – Medium

Something I wrote about Trump’s inauguration and what we can expect for the next four years.

[redlightpolitics]

For the past year, with election cycles in the US and most of Western Europe, a specific set of data points is being collected with the purpose of setting up platforms and policies: white voters’ emotions. Fear, disgust, hatred, rejection, aversion, antipathy: all of these and more are being exhaustively measured to determine platforms and talking points for candidates.

When white fears become Big Data: racist emotions and the populists who love them – This Political Woman – Medium

Another essay on the series about Big Data I started last year.

[redlightpolitics]

Enter what I call “the alt-fem” or “alt-feminism”, a repurposing and expansion of white feminism to explicitly serve white supremacy. As part of this expansion, women like Megyn Kelly or Ivanka Trump are lauded as feminists advancing the cause of women’s equality, even though they both support extreme right and racist ideologies.

The new Alt-Feminism, when white supremacy met women’s empowerment – This Political Woman – Medium

I wrote about racist and nationalist ideologues co-opting feminism to support the advancement of white supremacy.

[redlightpolitics]

Last week I published a very simplified history of Big Data. In this simplified history, I hoped to trace a genealogy that does away with the myth of data as a neutral field and, instead, present a case for data as the site of dominant political interventions and the basis for our contemporary “racial hierarchies”. As a follow up, I’d like to explore how privacy is currently conceived in relation to both databases and physical spaces. With the advent of technologies such as “body cams” and the built in facial recognition capabilities of these technologies, I am mostly interested in how we conceive of privacy and data protection in virtual and physical spaces.

Private Internet and Public Streets – This Political Woman – Medium

On part two of the Big Data series, I explore current conceptions of “private vs public” and how these conceptions are influenced by a built in protection for the white male gaze.

[redlightpolitics]

One of the most widespread myths around technology states that algorithms and data are “neutral” fields. Both spawned from some supposed objectivity that transcends personal bias. “Beyond the subjective and into the machine”, as if there was no human intervention mediating the creation of these algorithms, data sets and their subsequent use.

A simplified political history of Big Data – This Political Woman – Medium

I am currently writing a series about Big Data. This is part one, a brief history of Big Data as the foundational grounds of contemporary racial hierarchies.

[redlightpolitics]

I discussed how these profiles that present white supremacists as desirable go beyond mere normalization of extreme right wing political figures and are instead a tool of the biopolitics of desire and sexual reproduction.

The biopolitics of desire and neo-nazi fashion icons – This Political Woman – Medium

I wrote about the “fashion profiles” of extreme right wingers as part of a broader strategy of making them and their supporters “sexually desirable” for white cis women.

[redlightpolitics]

2012 was the inaugural year of what I like to call “jizz in the face feminism”. Barack Obama was nearing the end of his first term as President of the United States and white male anxiety was reaching a peak. Simultaneously, the gradual but steady growth of interest in “cucks” was building up towards a trend that wouldn’t be noticed until years later. The white cisgender heterosexual man’s sexual desires, embodied in unspeakable fears of seeing their women taken by a Black, powerful man (a common porn trope and topic of countless fetish tales). So pervasive was this fear that the word itself, cuck, was turned into an insult. The racist fantasy, so unfathomable that it became a mechanism to degrade political opponents.

The erotizacion of abusers: from jizz in the face feminism to dapper white supremacists – This Political Woman – Medium

I wrote about how the mainstreaming of sexual abusers led to white women’s massive support of Donald Trump

[redlightpolitics]

For years, mainstream media has been repeating the myth that “The right is on the rise”. I have compiled 20+ years of headlines repeating this statement ad nauseam. While the media has been treating the right as either a “new phenomenon” or a topic of ethnographic curiosity peddling the myth of the “disenfranchised working class white voter”, they networked. They formed alliances. They grew stronger. They aligned.

Introducing Post Trump Europe - I wrote something about what Donald Trump’s victory can potentially mean for coming elections across Europe.

[redlightpolitics]

Here is what has been piercing me since watching this documentary: not once during the film were the words “white” or “whiteness” used. Twenty minutes or so into watching, I went back to the beginning of the documentary to see if I had missed something. From that moment on, I waited. Needless to say, I waited for nothing. The absence of “whiteness” as a framework, came at me like a brick when the images of Arline Kercher, Meredith Kercher’s mother were shown.

Amanda Knox, Netflix and the making of white innocence – Medium

I wrote something about the new Netflix documentary about Amanda Knox.

[redlightpolitics]

How do we create strategies of political action that would ameliorate the effects of precarity and improve labor conditions? How do we navigate these disciplinary forces that intervene our urban spaces? How do we uplift ourselves from these different violences inflicted upon Othered bodies?

Tourist Attractions, Displacements and Feminist Resistance – This Political Woman – Medium

I wrote about the material consequences of displaced communities, mass tourism and racial(ized) politics.

[redlightpolitics]

For how long does Europe’s racist right need to “rise” before it is acknowledged that Europe is racist and this is not the by product of recent social discontent?

Europe's racist far right is not on the rise. It’s always been there. – Medium

I dug into the archives of the past 20 years of European media to highlight the nonsensical nature of the claim that “the European far right is on the rise”. Not only has the far right always had a prominent place in Europe but time and time again, the media acts like the whole thing is new and came out of thin air.