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 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!
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