#racial constructs

[profeminist]

“Most of our assumptions have outlived their usefulness.”

- Marshall McLuhan

It’s time for humanity 2.0 y’all. 

See: gender, race, and other constructs that are based in social oppression not god, destiny, or science. Oppression masked as nature.

Language is a key part of this. Changing pronouns and new identities may take getting used to, but they are 2.0. The binary is version 1.0 and it’s OUTMODED.

[goldleafer]

Hulu in Germany don’t let you stream Seinfeld

They don’t welcome that Jew boy comedy

[goldleafer]

The Rock should’ve kept his mouth shut.

You know these white NFL owners and managers ain’t trying to give that much credit and power to a brown-skinned man

[goldleafer]

Racism at REI DC

Last time I went to REI, there was this loud alarm that goes off anytime anyone enters or exits the store. I think this is an embedded racial system bias thing. 

Black people have like so much more heightened hypervigilance compared to white people.

When black people enter the store and the alarm sounds goes off, they’re not gonna like it. They’re gonna feel uncomfortable and they are primed to have a negative in-store experience. They’re not gonna want to come back to this store.

White people don’t have so much of that vigilance mindset, so when they walk in the store and the alarm goes off, they just brush it off and continue shopping. They will have to problem coming back to this store.

So the result is that the store is kept white. The blacks are kept out.

Am I doing this racial construct awareness thing right?

[blackgirlinrussia]

Dzhokhar Tsarnae​v was ‘black’ in Russia. Is he white in America?

"Billngual speakers of Russian and English all recognize the disconnect between the terms “Caucasian” (i.e., “white”) and “Caucasian” (person from the Caucasus region of the former Soviet Union); for Russian speakers, the two terms are functionally opposite. What, then, are “people of Caucasian nationality” (as the Russian bureaucratic phrase would have it)? Can their difference be mapped onto a grid of whiteness and non-whiteness?

Part of the problem in mediating between American and Russian understandings of difference is that Americans are accustomed to seeing race as the default category for otherness. The American preoccupation with race as a primal category makes complete sense, given that the country is haunted by not one, but two racial original sins (native American genocide and the enslavement and mass murder of Africans and their descendants). The power of American racial discourse threatens to suck the life out of other analytic categories; in the public sphere, the only way we can even broach issues of social class is to conceive of them as issues of race.

Russia is another matter entirety. Social class is not a taboo topic, and the notion of “race” has played itself out quite differently. Scholars of the (post-) Soviet Union traditionally ignored the very category as irrelevant (though that has started to change in the past decade). Russian discourses of race overlap with their American counterparts, but only in part. Rather, race in Russia functions within the much more common category of “ethnicity” or “nationality.”

On the one hand, ethnic Russianness is certainly ascribed a default whiteness, but this does not necessarily translate to Russians thinking of themselves primarily as “white.” Instead, the equivalent to the American understanding of “Caucasian” is “European.” Whiteness is invoked conversationally as a function of status and comfort, with a casualness that would cause their American interlocutors to, well, blanch. Georgia State University professor Jennifer Patico provides an example of a common Russian expression when she tells of a woman who is proud of her improved housing accommodations: “We are now living like white people.” Here whiteness points to the speaker (who is, of course, white) in an unselfconscious fashion that would be impossible in the United States: whiteness without guilt.

In the absence of a significant population of descendants from Africa, race and color cannot play themselves out in Russia along American lines. The former empire’s vast Asian population can be and is understood in racial terms, but is spoken of more often in terms of ethnicity and even civilization. Here Russia’s own preoccupation with geography trumps America’s preoccupation with race: Russia has historically been far more concerned with its status as Eastern or Western, Asian or European, than it has with skin color or “scientific” understandings of race.

This does not mean that no one in Russia is “black.” The Russian word for “black” has recently started to be applied to people of African descent (as part of a compound term, “black-skinned”), but only as a reluctant adoption of American terminology and in the face of English speakers’ discomfort with “negr”, the traditional Russian term. The reluctance stems from the fact that “black” as a categorical descriptor of human beings is, in Russian, negative by definition. And it is applied not according to skin color, but to hair color:  In Russia, the “blacks” are the people from the Caucasus. That is, the “Caucasians,” and anyone who might look like them."

Click on the link to read more

For those of you who are interested in how Russians perceive race, this is a helpful article.