Searcher08 » Fri Jul 29, 2016 1:02 pm wrote:kool maudit » Fri Jul 29, 2016 4:37 pm wrote:I am familiar with critical race theory and the work of Ignatiev, as well as other, similarly inclined people like Tim Wise.
I have considered the idea that whiteness is not in fact any sort of racial descriptor but is rather a word created to describe a system of institutionalised privilege, and the linked idea that abolishing the white race by any means necessary is in fact -- although it sounds like, and retains the precise syntax of, calls for racial genocide -- a sort of call for human liberation with regard to this system.
You know what? It's horseshit. It's all horseshit. It's horseshit created to sneak out of the back door of the statement "abolish the white race by any means necessary". It's horseshit because it allows, and is designed to allow, its speaker to mouth a severe call to violence and instantly retreat to an airy position of dispersed, theoretical justice-seeking.
However imprecise or problematic or biologically ungrounded its origin, the term "white race" is widely understood to refer to Europeans and European-descended peoples. Imagine a Kampala corner bar where one person of, say, Danish descent is drinking amidst a crowd of mainly Ugandans with perhaps some other people from other sub-Saharan African countries. You go from drinker to drinker with a clipboard and ask people which person is the "white"guy.
What do you think happens? Do you get elaborate dissections of insitutional power, or half-annoyed, colloquially brusque replies indicating the man with the pale skin, blue eyes, straight brown hair -- the man who looks most generally like the peoples of Europe?
And you know this! You know it. Ignatiev knows it. Wise knows it. But you have to go through this every time because maybe you're just not informed, maybe you just haven't done your reading, maybe you need a link or two... How can one live in the world -- the actual world, where people have common if flawed understandings across vast areas with billions of inhabitants -- and act as if this is a normal sort of thing to say without opposition?
It's infuriating. It's meant to be. But that's its nature, it's designed to work that way.
This is a bad thread and reflects badly on this board because its title is a call for genocide.
This.
I can't believe this thread has been allowed to survive this long and wasn't tossed into the firepit a long time ago.