white people will never be able to understand black and indigenous power as anything other than domineering or seeking to become top of a power pyramid because that's all they can imagine power doing. Diseased by white supremacy so immensely that they can't even imagine that phrases like "Palestine will be free" could mean anything other than genocidal hegemony.
We agree on racism being bad, and we agree on quite a few more things too.
But we seem to disagree on the definition of racism. The original post associated power hunger and oppression with whites.
If you take a step back and look at that, don't you think that's the same mechanism as "all blacks are thieves"? It's attributing flaws in the world to a specific group of people, based on race (and yes, I know that there aren't even different human races, we are all homo sapiens).
Don't blame a group of people with one skin color for any problem, can we agree on that?
@hans Whiteness is an invention, the utilization of which requires it to be 'naturalized,' treated as an inherent quality of people that they "are white," and to the extent that they engage in whiteness, indeed they are, though not as a biological category but as a political one tied inextricably to the colonial project writ large. A people can be granted whiteness, and it can be taken away.
@hans In any case if by "racism" you are not referring to the same thing as others, then "racism is bad" from you is merely formally similar to "racism is bad" from them. They aren't the same statements. You cannot be said to be in agreement if you are not in agreement with, or even familiar with, the terms. The actual statements may be substantively different, as they certainly are here.
You cannot be said to be in agreement if you are not in agreement with, or even familiar with, the terms. The actual statements may be substantively different, as they certainly are here.
There are definitely different ideas about what racism means, and I'm trying to understand how that works. Only thing I can do to get familiar with the terms, as used outside my personal world, is engage in discussions about it. I'm actively trying to understand things.
I'm not trying to "hijack" this thread, as someone suggested, I'm only trying to understand the position of "anti-white racism isn't bad". To me, that's a double standard.
@hans It's not that people are saying "anti-white racism isn't bad," but rather, that "anti-white" racism is not real, and in fact is unreal in multiple ways. The very concept of anti-white racism is nonsensical as whiteness is not a biological trait but a conferred status which precludes the notion of some structural force against it. The avenues by which someone deemed white might be "discriminated against" by someone who is not white are so vanishingly few as to broadly not exist at all.
> The very concept of anti-white racism is nonsensical as whiteness is not a biological trait but a conferred status which precludes the notion of some structural force against it.
Are you asserting that blackness/indigenousness/etc, by contrast, *is* a biological trait? That seems like playing into the racists' hands to me...
@nasado @hans what do you think the term "racialized" means and why do you suppose I have asserted that black people are maximally racialized? Do you think it's because I think there is an inherent quality to them, or do you think that a person *being racialized* is a thing done to them and not an inherent quality? Bad attempt at concern trolling
I'm just saying that if you're arguing that anti-white racism can't exist because whiteness isn't biological, then you're also arguing either that racialization is biological, or that actual racism can't exist. Don't get me wrong, anti-white racism doesn't exist, just not for this reason.
@hans that wasn't to you