male presenting anglo canadian here, every interaction i have ever had is in some way tinged with white supremacy and male privilege. i’ve been treated better and assumed by default to be more competent than non-whites pretty much every day.
also like have you ever talked to another white person? if a white person or man talks to someone they assume shares their values they say the worst shit. i thought it was funny when libs were condemning trumps “locker room talk” defense like it’s so unbelievable to them that men would discuss sexual assault like that in a male space. “i’ve never heard anything like that in a locker room.” you are lying. most white men are thinking and saying the worst possible things at any given moment.
non-white people can tell by the way they are treated by white people and western society that white supremacy is the thread that binds the western world together. but if you look like them, they will just tell you straight up their terrible ideas assuming you will agree. if you cant figure it out when you actively benefit from it daily, if you cant notice that you’re being held to a different standard by other white people daily, if you cant figure it out when they LOOK FOR EXCUSES TO TELL YOU, than i dunno how much self-crit is gonna help. at that point it seems like an empathy problem
if you identify as an anarchist or a communist and also identify with your whiteness, you missed something, probably a lot of things, along the way. try to be more perceptive geez.
love to my comrades of every skin colour and gender identity, death to the first world and any framework including race used to justify it
I grew up in the southern US and if you’re white and assigned male at birth, at some point around the age of 13 or so, you’re gonna get sat down by someone and have a serious talk. It might be you’re uncle, your dad, some kids from school, whatever. It might only take 30 seconds too.
They’ll sit you down and explain that you’re part of something, part of some society above all the others. Maybe they’ll frame it in terms of defending yourself. They’ll let out a stream of slurs about how non-whites make a town poor or dirty. They’ll poorly articulate how white society has to be defended. They’ll articulate it so poorly they might not even use words like white or race. They’ll put all the focus on the other, on supposedly lesser races and a list of imaginary dangers
And that’s supposed to be one of the entrenching moments. I know that racist ideology is based on material circumstances and constant lifelong reinforcement, not a single speech from an older relative, but it was so common to growing up in the south. Everyone I knew got it at least once. I got it four times and each time it scared the shit out of me.
Death to America, it’s an unsalvageable racist mess. Malcolm X was right.
Jesus Christ, my indoctrination was much subtler. Just every older male family member making constant racist and sexist jokes and comments when there was no one else around.
I got that speech at the age of six.
My dad and I are not really on speaking terms and tbh I instinctively didn’t like him from a very young age but it was pretty wild how many absolutely cartoonishly racists things he said and did when I was very young dawned on me a bit later in life that they were completely not normal lol
9/11 happened when I was in elementary school and I remember him telling me all kinds of shit about how they hate our freedom and don’t use toilet paper and just shit on the street. And a bajillion weird things about Latinos since we were in the south as well
To OPs point, I’ve literally been in a car with an Uber driver who just started in on some racist shit bc I was male presenting and white and super surprised to get pushback
i remember when i first moved into this one place. the ancient guy next door shambles over to introduce himself while i am pushing a mower, which is already a dick move. it’s hot, i don’t want to be out here any longer than i have to be. anyway, the guy is like 85 so i figure i should be nice or something. within 30 seconds, after telling me about how active he is at his church, he’s complaining about how many mexicans have moved into the neighborhood. total left field, my brain took a bit to process that wasn’t having heat stroke… that part of the curated package of this guy introducing himself included going into a diatribe about too many mexicans living nearby. anyway, he’s dead now. not by my hand. but i certainly visualized it.
not an isolated incident of course. just the most glaringly and a recent one. i used to wonder if there was something about me that made these people feel safe coming at me with this heinous shit. but i now think this is just how it works and its maintained. also, i’d like to say that i responded to him by kicking his wobbly knees out from under him and pushing the mower over his head while maxing the throttle and laughing like daffy duck, but i’m not out here trying to catch a charge. instead i was just a huge prick to him and pretended to never hear him speaking, never see him waving, and not answering the door when he knocked, until he stopped trying to interact with me. took about 120 days. it was hard to override my habits of waving and having a smile or a kind word for the people around me. also, it blows living in a concealed carry state where there’s always the possibility that telling one of these people to cram it up their cram hole will get me clipped.
he’s dead now. not by my hand
I was about to ask why you didn’t go harder on the trolling until I got to the “concealed carry” part. Fucker that old has very little to lose and potentially very little control of a hypothetical aggressive impulse.
When right wingers are in their safe spaces, they will say the quiet part quite loudly
They sure do.
For some reason I get a lot of chuds speaking their mind to me because if I’m in public the most I can do is make this face
Oh my god, yes. I sincerely hate how some of my coworkers think they can use slurs around me when there are only white people in the room. They think I’m one of them. I’m non-binary and they’ll even drop slurs for transgender people. It’s infuriating how they can be so comfortable with this shit
I’ve basically been forced by America to more aggressively adopt signifiers that separate me from right wingers. Like I’m vocal about my veganism, I’ll wear certain clothes, I’ll avoid social situations that right wingers might be present at. All in the name of avoiding hearing slurs whispered to me
was listening to some zoomers on the bus talk about how a primary school they went to was ‘overrun’ with asian people now. these were private school kids in new zealand lmfao, death to amerikkka of course but death also to pakeha ‘new zealand’.
Maybe those white nerds should go back to Old Zealand if they don’t like it, and give our shit back.
Crackers love the idea of meritocracy right up until other people start outcompeting them at the meritocracy.
Racists, whether they’re aware of their racism or not, are terrified of being treated the way they treat undesirables.
the next time you meet a canadian after telling them how cool it is that canadians are polite health care socialists (to lull them into liberal self satisfaction) ask them what they think about indigenous land rights. frothing dismissal of native rights to anything at all is sure to follow.
or just say “chinese person” to a british columbian and watch them short circuit
For someone completely out of the loop, why does that short circuit them?
Many white British Columbians will think of themselves as good little liberals and not racist or anything like that. But for some reason making racist comments about Chinese people is perfectly acceptable to many of these same people.
legit before i moved here i visited all the time because my dad’s family is from here, and every single person I know casually commenting on bad asian drivers was my first encounter with seemingly normal people harping in racist stereotypes
bc was, like washington in the us, a racist project from day one, a location for white people to go to get away from others. but bc also has a particular history with chinese people because they were imported en masse to build the railroads here. making opium illegal in bc was one of if not the first drug laws in canada because lawmakers were worried about white women being corrupted by orientals in opium dens.
that’s the history but also modern anti chinese racism is based around the idea that chinese people are moving here, buying up a lot of properly, and keeping to themselves in insulated communities. there are lots of people here who think that the only reason housing costs are so high is because rich chinese people are buying up all the living space in order to invest their money somewhere where the chinese government can’t get at it.
the only truth to any of that is that maybe chinese immigrants are maintaining their own communities in bc and not integrating. which like, duh, canadians here are actively hostile against them so why wouldnt they stick to themselves. other than that it’s all white canadians working themselves up about how unfair it is that chinese people get to live here too.
I had this same conversation (more or less) with a Canadian around 2020. He was talking about how violent and racist American cops are, and how Canadian cops would never murder someone like what happened with George Floyd. He didn’t appreciate when I responded with several examples of the Mounties brutalizing and killing native people.
canadian liberals haven’t figured out a way to justify the government’s treatment of native canadians so they prefer just to not think about it at all. much easier to care about black americans because they have a story they can tell themselves about how canada didn’t do slavery and was the end of the underground railroad and canada is a “mosaic” or whatever.
Or if you’re talking to a European lib, who laughs at how racist Americans are, ask them what they think of the Roma people.
If Michael Moore, a liberal boomer, could write the assertions of Stupid White Men in 2001, it shouldn’t be hard for a socialist to have them readily in mind.
I wrote a huge post about this in response to @axont@hexbear.net 's post but then upbeared another post before posting it and forgot that would delete my entire ass five paragraph post so I’ll just write a shorter version.
I never got like a “white supremacy talk” like axont talks about. I’m from New England. I literally cant remember a single time an adult influence in my life said something racist while I was a kid. My mom was proactivly anti-racist, my dad was like… annoyed to hear spanish but otherwise never displayed prejudice that i remember (both are really classist though, but decent on queer stuff and women, my mom was abliest to me lol but my dad is good). My grandma is a big influence on me and is also really anti-prejudice (though she’s had some trouble wrapping her head around trans stuff unfortunately, but that is a recent thing). Other random adult influences like teachers, family friends, church people, can’t remember any racism or slurs.
I remember in 8th grade I was at lunch and one of the kids I was sitting with made some racist jokes and I was actually surprised that racism still existed lol, and told my mom that. This is the indoctrination that I got as a kid, the liberal blue state version, that racism is bad but is a problem that is all or mostly solved, and is not a systemic problem when it exists, just individual people being mean. It primarily comes across in the way the Civil Rights movement is taught that gives this impression.
But honestly, for the most part, I have not really been exposed to OVERT racism unless I have just been neurodivergent oblivious to it or something. I literally just found out my uncle is racist and sexist this past Christmas and I’m in my 30s lol. Of my peers, I had like ONE friend who was an edgy 4chan kid and said racist shit on my friend group’s proboards. Maybe its because in a mostly white school there wasnt many people to be racist to, but I seriously do not remember hearing many racist statements growing up, a few from peers but thats it.
Even as an adult… look I don’t get out much, especially for the past few years. But I very much am a big white guy with a beard that racists might feel “safe with” and I have never had that experience of people going mask off in certain company. Not about race anyway, that I can remember. Women yes, lots of sexism that I can remember, and some homo and transphobia but really about race… not really? Its weird.
I do remember my own casual racism as a teen. Like thinking affirmative action is “unfair”. Hating Al Sharpton for demanding racial justice (though I was barely aware of what he said, just that he said stuff that other people called unfair to whites or whatever). Siding with a casual racist on Survivor when a black castmember called him out for saying casually racist things and the racist said he wasn’t being racist and getting angry when the black guy said “you have to be aware of history”. Then I was on Tumblr during the Mike Brown BLM wave and got radicalized so that was over.
So like I said earlier, I think my version of white supremacist indoctrination was the “racism is over” version. The “measures to address systemic racism are unfair because there isnt any” version.
Yeah hearing stories like yours is like hearing from an alternate dimension or something. I grew up in a town where the Klan still exists and actively does stuff. My parents would openly scream the n-word when they learned my sister was dating a black guy. Even the more tolerant people from my childhood would still occasionally complain about black and creole people.
Even as an adult I’m still very wary around white southern people and I think I always will be. If it means anything I’m told that even within my hometown, I had a particularly racist upbringing because I came from one of the more stable families in the town. There was a correlation between how stable/wealthy your family is with how racist they are, probably because your stability also correlated exactly with how white your family is. A lot of people in my hometown came from a mixed creole or cajun background, lots of people had family trees that would swing into native american too and they’d drive out to reservations for family gatherings.
So in a sense with your family upbringing, they believed structural racism was over. My hometown racists also believed that, but they believed they needed to reconstruct structural racism, since they thought they were living as the lingering remnants of a dying pure white race. These people would sincerely believe they needed to revive the cause of the confederacy. I can’t express how much I despise the poison of racism and privilege that infects even tiny places like my hometown in the backwoods of nowhere. White supremacy is so entrenched into every atom of social existence in western countries that we need some serious decolonization to even move forward an inch.
Based on some of your other posts, I think this is an ND issue because there are constant instances of, let’s say implication involved in how white people tend to speak both to and about nonwhites.
Yeah that probably plays a part. I think its a mix of location, extraordinary luckiness in adult influences (its been constantly pointed out to me by friends that I also had absolutely bonkers luck with not having an awful experience with public school and having a string of good teachers), and autism meaning I missed the subtle stuff. Also a bit of it not coming up often? Just due to living in areas where there weren’t a lot of bipoc around lol (though I did have black neighbors in elementary school that I played with the kids. My mom was supportive of this and while she told me that my stepdad at the time was racist he never expressed it in a way I detected around me.)
I mean tbf I am aware that my mom’s “anti-racism” was very white saviory in retrospect for example. I’m also remembering more instances of overt stuff (mostly in adulthood) that I forgot about before. But even then, that was still peers. The adults in my life when I was a kid… I think I just got really lucky to not have a lot of nasty influences. Like my mom is literally my abuser but on this subject I’ll give her credit for the most part.
Fair enough!
But I very much am a big white guy with a beard that racists might feel “safe with” and I have never had that experience of people going mask off in certain company.
I’ve noticed that the amount of these interactions fluctuates depending on how well I’m masking. There’s a pretty large cross-section of people who hold prejudices against POC, LGBT+ individuals, women, and the disabled, and NTs often seem able to tell we aren’t part of the club even when they can’t identify exactly which of those categories we fall into.
Ive been given the old “i never would have known you were autistic if you never said anything” fairly often so idk how obviously ND i come across or not lol. Ive had other people say its obvious as well so shrug.
I’m also from blue parts of the country where racism is mostly left up to “market forces,” the police, and casual micro-aggressions at the supermarket or in the workplace. All you need to do to scratch a liberal (or someone who is “apolitical”) is bring up Russia, China, or homeless people.
Cw: child molestation, sexual predation
spoiler
Or call Biden a child molester heheh, liberals go nuts when you do that. Add to the confusion by saying the truth, namely that Trump is also a child molester and that both parties enable these sexual predators. This is the way to short-circuit the liberal mind, comrades. In the liberal, it produces on their faces the blue screen of death.
Also, I don’t spend much time around liberals anymore, but I think masking would probably suggest that you are not onboard with the white supremacist project (even if, as a white person, you are still benefiting from it).
Yeah im ngl theres two things here
- My policy with libs irl is usually go along to get along, particularly on geopolitics which i find is rarely worth fighting about with someone entrenched, so i havent had these confrontational moments about those subjects.
- Ive barely gone outside since the invasion lol. But also i became fully cognizant of geopolitical shit like that after i started to become more socially isolated. My only irl friend i talked to agreed with me on that stuff and now i dont even talk to her
Whenever I talk with another white person for more than 60 seconds, I’m always bracing for them to start going off on Q shit or talk about how slurs are ruining the fabric of society. If I get to 10 minutes with no red flags, I try to get their number because it’s like a 95% “success” rate with randos and going off the deep end and chill people are hard to come by.
This is kind of besides the point, but in Elder Scrolls Online, one of the companions that can follow you around, Azandar, shouts out “dullards!” during fights as he’s blowing dullards up with magic. It’s funny.
Removed by mod
What the fuck are you talking about? Are you even answering to the correct comment?
I’m white, live in a ‘solid-blue’ suburb orbiting Chicago, and I’ve had schoolmates drop the hard-R around me because they felt intrinsically comfortable in my whiteness doing so
CW: SA
I overheard some 20-something white guys at Taco Bell last week talking about how in an older car you can unscrew the lock post and then your date can’t get out until she gives you what you want
It isn’t the first time I’ve heard about that “trick” before either.
Tate-r-Tots make me worry deeply about the upcoming generation.
Oh is that one of his pieces of “advice” or just generally his kind of thing?
I don’t gaze deeply enough into the abyss to know for sure, but having worked around teenagers for years at my district, it’s genuinely distressing how often I have to hear Tate’s name being said by edgy boys that “joke” out loud about doing sexual violence to theoretical girls.
The school I work at is K-8th and I haven’t heard his name yet around here. I imagine high school is where it really starts.
Yeah, it is a high school thing for the most part. I was hoping him getting arrested would be the end of it, but then local memes of “Tate did nothing wrong!” started up among the edgelord kids.
I’m sorry you have to put up with that. You should get cognitohazard pay
I’d settle for covid hazard pay. Kids in a classroom are petri dishes.
The sheer number of people who I have met, complete strangers mind, on the bus or out in public, who think that the best way to open up conversation with a complete stranger is to just be openly racist (or making a racist “joke”) is staggering. And this is with a complete stranger, making smalltalk. Who the hell knows what these people are like behind closed doors. Or what they would say to someone with more melanin than a parsnip.
My white liberal coworker likes to open conversations with “now I’m not trying to be racial, but…” immediately before launching into a racist story. Lady you just told me about how terrified you were to be in a theater on 9/11 when a “Muslim-looking” man left his backpack in his seat and went to get popcorn. You said you almost got the manager because you literally thought this man was going to bomb a matinee screening of the Barbie movie.
The good news is she is categorically not a racist, though, because she was not trying to be racial!
I just quit a job where I worked with one older woman who would talk about her last job in Georgia and she would preface most of the stories with “I’m not trying to be prejudice but…” then she would typically go on to describe some aspect of an old coworkers culture, or pick out a stereotype. Just for no reason.
I forget what stand up comedian it was, but they said something like “if you’re telling a story about an interaction you had with someone, and you mention their race, but it’s not relevant to the story, you’re being racist” and that made a lot of sense
Here’s my full list of reasons you might mention someone’s race in that context:
- It’s a story about something specific to that person’s cultural background.
- Including a not-so-subtly coded message about how you feel about that race.
While I wouldn’t go as far as you did in terms of it being “most,” you are absolutely correct that a huge portion of men, when speaking among a “friendly” audience, will say the most revolting shit, and with extra racism if it’s white men.
I actually think the majority of white people genuinely believe racism is unacceptable. The problem is that they often adopt classicism as drop in replacement for white supremacy. It helps to perpetuate racial inequality and segregation in the same way. However, they’re less likely to get any pushback for being classist. Of course because racial inequality persists, that classism will get mapped back onto racial characteristics. It’s not dissimilar to how anti-Chinese propaganda feeds into hatred for Asian people. The net result is that prejudice remains even though white supremacy is not the vibrant ideological project it once was. It also means that it’s difficult for someone to understand how they’re supporting white supremacy unless they to begin to question class society as a whole.
That it’s entrenched? Sure.
How entrenched it is? That’s a lot to expect, and it’s probably best not to assume you have it figured out and don’t have blind spots.
yeah truth. i was mostly thinking of the people in that reverse racism thread who seem to have missed something in society and in themselves.
it’s probably impossible for white westerners to fully comprehend, i often learn things that in retrospect are obvious and feel dumb for not figuring out for myself. but meaningful self-crit is probably not possible if you can’t identify the existence of white privilege in general.
i posted this to support Othello and corgi, and also kind of wanted to see if anyone would come here to further show their ass, but i guess everyone who would do that was already banned in the wake of corgi’s dunk tank thread.
