I think when a Slavic person doesn’t get searched on the street in Western Europe when an African person would, they are ‘white’. When talking about how they are racialised under imperialism and capitalism to be exploited mostly for Western Europe’s benefit, ‘whiteness’ or POC isn’t a useful framing for analysing that. Using POC specifically in that way fails to actually talk about imperialism and labour relations of people who ARE seen as racially inferior by other ‘white’ people. But this is a limit of POC / Whiteness as taxonomies for understanding racism. I guess playing with it and mocking it is good but it’s clearly a tool for liberals ultimately. It’s useful sometimes but not all the time.
I think when a Slavic person doesn’t get searched on the street in Western Europe when an African person would, they are ‘white’. When talking about how they are racialised under imperialism and capitalism to be exploited mostly for Western Europe’s benefit, ‘whiteness’ or POC isn’t a useful framing for analysing that. Using POC specifically in that way fails to actually talk about imperialism and labour relations of people who ARE seen as racially inferior by other ‘white’ people. But this is a limit of POC / Whiteness as taxonomies for understanding racism. I guess playing with it and mocking it is good but it’s clearly a tool for liberals ultimately. It’s useful sometimes but not all the time.