#houman barekat

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

I don't know how to say this politely but I've noticed a lot of people in the notes of my various Gaylor posts scoffing at how they can't believe anyone thought a rich cishet white woman" was secretly gay and like. I mean first of all rich white woman are gay all the time; those aren't the things that disqualify Taylor from queerness so much as the way she's repeated that she isn't queer.

but secondly. a lot of people rather derisively calling Taylor white are in fact my fellow whites, and I do need y'all to read this.

White People Love Calling Other White People "White People"

This is strange

[philologistandbibliophile]

The idea that whiteness should be synonymous with banality is essentially an updated variation on “First world problems!”, a pompous refrain customarily deployed by exceptionally dull conversationalists at parties who feel compelled to observe that whatever is being discussed is existentially superfluous because, if we didn’t have access to running water, we’d have bigger things to worry about. As well as being utterly inane, it was always implicitly condescending, premised on the idea that people in developing countries don’t also have inner lives, and are never prone to neuroses or whimsy; likewise, the equation of whiteness with middle-of-the-road blandness presupposes that non-white people, for obscure reasons connected to their structural oppression, don’t get to be straight-laced — they are inherently interesting, an edgy counterpoint to all that is staid and safe, a cipher for whatever bohemian impulses or anti-authoritarian hangups you wish to project onto them. It’s fetishistic and weird — an insult masquerading as a compliment.

—Houman Barekat, “White People Love To Call Other White People ‘White People.’”

[covertrook]

A visit to a McDonalds introduces us to “whole families sitting down together, sipping on straws, sedate, mulling with their fries like broken horses at hay”.

Houman Barekat quoting Ottessa Moshfegh