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by arthur_pryor
1949 days ago
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> It's kind of a stupid idea for anti-racists to even keep using the term, given that the group has no identity outside of defunct 20th century pseudoscience notions of race and preserving and promoting the idea of it as any kind of coherent group is only fortifying tribalist lines we should instead be trying to dissolve. yeah, this is kind of a tough one, though... because people need to be able to talk about the hegemony of the group that identifies itself as white at the expense of the groups that are excluded from that identification. and always saying something like "the cartel that calls itself white, where some members aren't even consciously colluding" is kind of a clunker. esp for people who don't think/read about this stuff on their own, and who just think of "white" as a simple and natural ethnic delineation, to the degree that any ethnic delineation can be thought of as simple or natural =) race, including "whiteness" is a scientific and biological fiction invented and accepted to maintain (and hide) a caste system. but through the assiduous maintenance of that lie, it has become a different sort of social reality. not using the term "white" makes it incredibly hard to talk with most people about the issue. but using the term "white" as most people (superficially) think of it also helps cement its pernicious effects. pretty difficult jam our society has gotten into there. "the people who call themselves white" is the best terminology approach i've seen to dealing with this, but even that is still quite clunky, and may still make the speaker sound like a hand-wringing liberal to anyone who's not already on board with the viewpoint that race is a pernicious and unscientific lie. |
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The answer to this is to use it only when dealing with people who go around "identifying" themselves as white. You find a "white dating" site, you know they're the jerks, and then we have to have this discussion about why that's stupid and those people suck.
But there is also a modern tendency to use it in entirely other contexts. For example, it's more the rule than the exception that the good school district in an area is gated by high real estate costs. If you can't afford the more expensive house, your kid can't go to the better school.
It's easy to cast this and similar situations in racial rather than economic terms because the people who can't afford the more expensive real estate are disproportionately black. Then you get fake anti-racists talking about "white people" (implying the upper middle class) and "black people" (implying the poor), and for a specific reason.
Because that city will have 30,000 upper middle class "white people" and 25,000 poor "white people" and 25,000 poor "black people" and if the affluent can make it about race rather than economics then they get 55,000 votes to 25,000 in their favor instead of 50,000 to 30,000 against. It's an attempt -- often successful -- to preserve racism to serve as a wedge between poor black people and poor white people who would otherwise see that they have common interests.
Notice how many of the people who do this are college educated "white people" who for inexplicable reasons speak against the self-interest of their supposed ingroup, until you notice that the reason is actually quite explicable.