#antiblackness

[temoevoorjegelul]

I'm retaking an exam on the history of natural sciences and. The way some of the scientists faced controversy because people cared more about the theory of some Big Shot, instead of the material findings of the young new scientist... Too close.

[greatrunner]

Everything I'm seeing and hearing about the MCU for Black actors and characters is fairly disappointing, but not unexpected. I definitely think not recasting Kang the Conqueror set the tone.

[okyappu]

sundown tumblr really makes sense because of all the behavior i see around this site. white queers forget they're queer and think being marginalized in like one way immediately absolves them of their bigotries and that they don't have access to their other privileges

or they're enabled to a terrifying degree (see: isff, taxxon, pocketdeer,that byjove guy) to where you see white queers come to the defense of their fellow white queers or the only black queer on this site who panders to them (salem) because uplifting racists means more clout.

they reblog salem, go that's enough black people for today, and then throw slurs at us & be super microaggressive since their audience is... well... white!

then they'll run over and point to the black person they've harassing to nazi-jacket them, as if they're fighting fascism.

i need the popular white queers on tumblr to go fuck themselves for helping grow this ecosystem.

[hothiminh]

everyone will talk about how certain beauty standards are racist, misogynistic, or classist but when fatphobia is addressed, its suddenly a matter of health and everyone becomes a dietician, totally devoid of intersectional analysis. like do you not understand that fatphobia has its connections with racism?thinness seen as a white trait & a moral good after the slave trade?

[razzberrydazz]

Can we talk about how the very widespread proliferation of AAVE terminology and maliciously ignorant mislabeling of such terminology as internet speak/gen z lingo/gay speak treats this manner of speaking as inherently 'lesser' than 'standard english' in a way where it is both shameful and trendy because it's used as a punchline and cheap trend. The way people online assume terms originating from AAVE are stupid gen z slang (ageism) or that it's all inherently gay sounding (hello homophobia). The way I have to endure hearing European lily white gay men using AAVE terms as if they're just commonplace gay slang and not, you know, from Black Americans. Like no little gay Irish guy I don't think you should so flippantly be throwing around 'unc' and 'chopped' and 'kiki' and other such terms when it's clear you assume it's just gay slang and don't know the origins or the actual meanings and grammar.

The way that Black people's faces are so often used for memes and treated as inherently more funny and emotive than non-Black people, and if you think about it long enough you realize this is a remnant of a long-standing culture of Black people only being represented in western media via minstrel shows of white people doing blackface and doing comedy acts that openly mock and stereotype Black people. The way that in order to get recognition and make a living in entertainment, Black people also had to participate in this minstrelsy act of reinforcing the negative stereotypes about themselves, and this type of stereotype reinforcing excuse for comedy can be found even today.

The way that people will mis-use AAVE slang in order to sound funny and make jokes, which covertly communicates they think a certain way about the people who predominantly use that terminology aka how they see Black people. Because a lot of the jokes that misuse AAVE are also classist by nature, treating AAVE and American Southern accents as sounding less intelligent.

The way I see the latest trends of misusing and misappropriating the current trendy AAVE slang and how every time a term from AAVE goes viral the meaning of that term gets twisted and warped and watered down by the non-black people using that word because they assume it's just a funny internet meme. Seeing that happen a lot lately with the term 'Unc' where people are throwing the term around to mean a stupid and/or elderly person and giving it far more negative connotation than it originally had.

See what they did to Woke. How racists took that term and turned it into a bad thing, used it as the butt of their jokes, characterized things that are 'woke' as 'liberal bullshit' they love to hate.

Woke was originally about being aware of the antiblackness and racism in the world around you. Woke has and always will be about being aware of the injustices around you. Can y'all quit using it like a stand in for the N word you wanna say so badly.

I think far too many people have completely forgotten or never learned that making racist jokes and saying the N word are examples of OVERT anti-blackness and racism, absolutely not excusable or justifiable, there is no plausible deniability.

Using the N word has been an overt display of antiblackness and white supremacy for DECADES

Loudly tapping the sign that says 'using the N word if you're not Black is not acceptable and hasn't ever been acceptable because it has always been meant as a word to harm Black people.'

Also tapping the sign that says 'calling Black people monkeys or any other kind of animal or degrading thing is inherently racist and shows that you see Black people as lesser'

The way that complaints about racism and antiblackness get treated as an American problem when it is a worldwide problem and America is just a side effect of long-standing European racism. America has just distilled it down into a particularly heinous flavor. Racism is racism no matter the country.

[bugpurity]

being black on picrew moodboard

[autogynophelia]

I was reading this article by Zoé Samudzi where she talks about Rachel Dolezal (a white woman who claimed to be Black for several years and even took on positions of power in Black community organisations like her local NAACP chapter) and it sent my mind back to that era when Dolezal's anti-Black behaviour was used constantly as evidence of the supposed analogous absurdity of "trans woman" as an identity.

The Dolezal situation was one of those things that always made me think, "Oh shit maybe I'm wrong about this," and I always had to stop and relitigate my own views just to be sure they were correct, I was perpetually unsure of myself back then. There was actually substantial support for Dolezal from right-wing white people (probably as a gotcha for trans women), which honestly should've been enough for me to understand at once that the two situations were different, but my mind works in a way where everything must be relitigated constantly, in the same way that I have to go back twice to check that I've closed the front door every time I go out.

I have much more understanding now and I can see it much more clearly. The argument that, if trans women are a legitimate identity, we must accept Dolezal too, is simply doing politics in reverse. The question of whether (to use their phrase) "a man can become a woman" is not the starting point, it's the end point.

The starting point is that there exists a sizeable class of people who were assigned male at birth but who are on average subjected to far more violence, marginalisation, unemployment, homelessness, sexual abuse, etc than any other gendered category. We can study the kinds of abuse this class faces and analyse it in detail. If you try to understand this class as a type of man, it makes no sense. If you try to understand it as a type of marginalised woman, it makes perfect sense. "Trans women" is simply the name we give to this class of people, in acknowledgement of the fact that "marginalised women" is the social role they fill.

That is, there is a reality out there that exists independently of how you personally define what womanhood means, and asking if "trans women are really women" is just an admission that your personal definition is inadequate to describe objective reality. To make a somewhat facetious point, you can tell that they are women because of the fact that you're questioning and critiquing their every waking moment, and you don't treat men like that.

But there is no corresponding class of people who were "born white" that are treated far worse than any other racial category. There is no data for us to study, no new marginalised class of people that we need to integrate into our understanding of how racism operates. Dolezal has not had a worse life than an equivalent Black woman (even though she herself would probably disagree, since she once sued for "anti-white discrimination" she claims she experienced at a Historically Black University).

Whether or not a legitimate "transracial" (a word appropriated from the experience of non-white adoptees of white parents btw) identity could exist is literally immaterial, because it doesn't actually exist right here and now as a class of people actually materially suffering for it. To use the racist Dolezal as a bludgeon against trans women is to use hypotheticals to dispute material reality.

I myself am white and benefit from all the racialised privileges that come along with that. I'm always at risk of physical violence through being a trans woman, but it's a small risk compared to the Black trans women I know in my local area.

I do, though, want to talk about a different marginalisation I have that I think is more apt as an analogy for gender. I am an Irish Catholic who grew up surrounded by the descendants of Protestant English and Scottish settlers. I know it seems very odd to those who are not Irish, but this divide is ingrained into every aspect of society in the North of Ireland. Your body language, accent, hair colour, clothing, name, even the way you pronounce certain letters of the alphabet, all of these are mentally clocked by everyone you meet in order to make a snap judgement about which side of the divide you are on within 3 seconds of meeting you. And this judgement determines how they interact with you, whether you get a job offer or not, whether they charge you more or less for work on your car, that kind of thing.

It is not racism, but it's a form of cultural oppression that has a few similarities with racism. I was one of a tiny number of Catholic kids at a Protestant school, and you can be sure I was made to know it. Being beaten up for being Catholic was perfectly normal, and the all-Protestant teachers didn't care, obviously. The framing that the divide was not actually about a religious dispute (that's how many still think of it) but rather a colonial dispute, in that my Protestant oppressors were actually the descendants of settlers from a foreign country, was one that I didn't put on the situation until later on, when I learned about the Plantation of Ulster and how my ancestors had been colonised by theirs.

My cousin, Ryan, had the same experience as me, Catholic kid, Protestant school, all the same bullshit. (And this is ignoring all the other aspects of the oppression, like the fact that Protestant families were nearly always much richer because Catholics had been historically banned from owning land.) The only difference was that he was from a "mixed marriage": Catholic mother, Protestant father, raised Catholic. That did not stop his abuse at all, but it did mean that he grew up in a very different context to me, where he had a large Protestant extended family with all the advantages, and a large Catholic extended family with none of them. He was born seeing both experiences close up and told that he was Catholic and he didn't have a choice in the matter.

These days, Ryan is a Protestant. He was formally baptised into a Protestant church as an adult, after having been christened (Catholics don't really say "baptised") as a Catholic in his youth. Some Protestants are suspicious of him because of this, and he will probably always struggle to be treated as a full and unambiguous member of their community, but largely no one questions that he is indeed a Protestant, and it's probably no coincidence that he is now by far the highest-earning of all my many cousins, the rest of whom are all Catholic.

I find Ryan's experience a pretty good analogy for sex/gender. Nearly everyone grows up around both men and women throughout their youth, we hear gendered messages intended for both genders, we see how differently different family members or friends are treated along gendered lines, we see how wealth accumulates on one side and not the other, we see abuse leveled against one side by the other. In short, nearly all of us come from "mixed marriages", not in the sense that we were raised in a heterosexual nuclear family, but in the sense that we are exposed to both gendered cultures growing up and we are close to people on both sides. To be told you are on one side, go along with it for a while, but then realise you're actually far more at home on the other side, should not be considered nearly as weird as it is!

We could call Ryan "transcultural" in a sense, but he also started life in a "mixed-culture" setting and it's not surprising that he aligns with one more than the other, and that happens to be different from what he was told to do from birth. Ryan grew up feeling a kind of "culture envy" for his Protestant relatives (that I cannot honestly understand tbh), and felt trapped in a Catholic identity he never wanted. When he was old enough he realised he could actually choose that for himself, he made that choice.

It's far from a perfect analogy, there are many ways in which it doesn't work, but if you must have an analogy this one makes way more sense than Dolezal. The only problem for transphobes who want an analogy is that this one makes gender transition seem like it should be perfectly uncontroversial, and that's not what they want to prove.

[this-is-antiblackness]

ho is you coo?