Thursday, May 9, 2013 Friday, August 24, 2012 Tuesday, August 14, 2012

How To Be A Reverse-Racist: An Actual Step by Step List For Oppressing White People

blackgirldangerous:

July 7, 2012

Dear Readers,

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by A.D Song and Mia McKenzie

White people who are confronted with their white privilege and the white supremacist acts they perpetuate have been known to cry, “You’re being a reverse-racist!” That is completely true: people of color have the power and control to create, perpetuate, and maintain brutal systematic reverse-racism that oppresses white people every day.  As such, we have created this handy list on how to continue this oppression.

1. Enslave their bodies.

Ship them from Germany, Sweden, and other exotic countries. Force them to build entire cities, roads, bridges. Force them to plant and harvest all the food everyone eats. Let an entire economic system be built on their backs, with their blood and sweat. Later, deny them access to the system they have been used to build, and accuse them of being extremely lazy.

2. Steal their land.

If they were here before you, steal their land. This is essential. Basically, just go in there and take it. If you have to kill some of them to get it…no worries. If you have to kill almost all of them to get it…shit, no worries. After you steal their land, make sure you create laws to keep them from ever returning to it. If they try to return anyway, build fences, and let bands of POC vigilantes patrol the borders with guns. If they somehow get past the borders and into your country, no worries, you can always just deport them.

3. Enslave their minds.

From these systems, build a long lasting institution of reverse-racism until all the violence and microaggressions make many white people into suspicious people with a lot of internalized self-hatred, health problems, and mental illnesses. Then deny them access to adequate mental health care. Or, adequate health care of any kind, while you’re at it. ‘Cause, you know, fuck ‘em.

4.  Wipe out and/or appropriate their customs.

Since many of their customs are savage and unworthy of preserving, wipe out their traditions of eating mashed potatoes and meatloaf, playing miniature golf, buying khakis at Banana Republic, and sleeping with thousand-count Egyptian cotton sheets. For the customs you think are kinda cool, culturally appropriate from them. Sometimes wear a beret and lederhosen, because Swedish culture is really exotic even though it’s inferior to ours.

5.  Break their espresso machines.

With baseball bats or large hammers. Or, you know, just unplug them all.

6.  Call them “cracker”.

As people of color, we have been rightfully accused of being racist to white people, especially when we call them “cracker”. As we all know, calling them “cracker” is egregiously offensive and horribly shocking because of this long, violent, reverse-racist history.

7. Just keep being terrible to them.

Do everything you can think of to make it so that white people make less money; their children are shot by cops; white women are at higher risk for assault and they are exotified until they no longer seem human; white men are beaten and thrown into jails because they look “suspicious” and “threatening”; they are racially profiled everywhere they go.

8. Make sure most representations of them in the media are negative.

They should almost always be portrayed as pasty, stringy-haired, rhythm-less, sexless, uptight, and booooring. Also, there should be very few representations of them and when they’re portrayed at all, they should always only be the comic relief, the silent exotic sex object, the Debbie Downer, or the incompetent sidekick. They are only allowed to be easily forgettable, one-dimensional characters. Sometimes use POC actors in white-face to portray these white people. By presenting this ONE image of them all the time, you will be able to convince the rest of the population that all white people are like this, thus ensuring a widespread belief in their inferiority.

9. Keep telling them how beautiful they are not.

White people know they will never be beautiful with their boring sour cream complexions and blonde hair (that was actually caused because of mutations). Plaster people of color on every magazine, show them in every television show and movie, and praise them as the most beautiful. When white people cry at these injustices, bottle their tears and sell them as health creams for people of color. Nothing like a soothing lotion made from the pain of white folks!

10. Go bananas!

Force them underground and away from the sun to become even whiter, while you laugh manically like the cruel, bloodthirsty, oppressive person of color you are! Take their thousand-count Egyptian cotton sheets to make POC-supremacist flags and hoods and march through the streets, spreading fear and terror. Every time a white person thinks your behavior is unfair or wrong, tell them that they should stop being so sensitive! We live in a post-reverse-racial society now! Jeez.

*

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A.D Song is an API student activist interested in QTPOC politics and sprinkling glitter everywhere they go. They blog at glitterotti.tumblr.com .

*

Mia McKenzie is a writer and a smart, scrappy Philadelphian with a deep love of vegan pomegranate ice cream and fake fur collars. She is a black feminist and a freaking queer, facts that are often reflected in her writings, which have won her some awards and grants, such as the Astraea Foundation’s Writers Fund Award and the Leeway Foundation’s Transformation Award. She just finished a novel and has a short story forthcoming in The Kenyon Review. She is a nerd, and the creator of Black Girl Dangerous, a revolutionary blog.

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Wednesday, August 8, 2012

How an MRA’s Mind Works

filmsandfrocks:

“I’m a white male in America and yet, I can’t get laid or stay in a relationship! It’s so fucking frustrating and unfair. Here I am, in all my youthful glory, and masses of girls are not bowing down to my dick. WTF is up with that? Why are girls not as submissive and loving and obedient as I expected them to be? How come they don’t hate themselves enough to get with a winner like me? Omg I know why! It’s because they probably respect themselves and won’t sex up any random douche that comes along proclaims to love them and is as charming as me. That’s it. They totally have standards and I don’t reach up to them. Hey, in the good ol’ days, we wouldn’t have any of this women self-respectin’ shit! We could just marry any 16-year-old broad and keep them under oppressive and gender-biased marriage laws, make ‘em cook us dinner and pop out babies and generally deprive them of any other roles that didn’t relate to appeasing men. Hell, what changed that? GASP. Feminism! An ugly, sordid ideology that proclaims that men and women are entitled to equal rights and autonomy and that men should stop looking at women as just purely sex and fantasy objects and actually think of them as similar to……themselves. What the hell! Feminism is cockblocking me! That’s right, it’s not me that’s failing at all these dysfunctional relationships, it must be the feminists. I’m not getting laid because of this equal rights shit! Hey, did you ever notice that men generally PAY ON DATES? I mean, some people tell me it’s because that unequal, gendered social norms that persist to this day were established under this thing like the patriarchy but I don’t know what that means and I don’t intend on finding out. White men in America are SUPER OPPRESSED! More oppressed than like, minorities and gays and stuff. That’s it, I’m joining the MRAs.”


Saturday, July 21, 2012

“Anonymous asked: tabarnac girl when you say ‘whitey’ and mean it as a derogatory term solely based on someone’s race how on earth are you being ANYTHING but racist?”

asianhistory:

But…I still didn’t say that. But I’ll bite:

Because at the end of the day, that word will float into meaningless oblivion for that white girl. It won’t matter someone said it. Having “whitey” hurled at you is essentially a word that conceptualizes all that is positive and privileged about life born as a white person. It’s a mark of anger and frustration at the unfairness and inequality in place because someone is white - the right and ability to be ignorant and not questioned by society for it! To walk around uneducated about the world, about how things got to be the way they are, and to retreat the moment it gets hard or difficult or tough! 

To glide away from unpleasantness. Being a whitey means that stuff doesn’t stick to you, not even words about your race. Whitey will never have a home denied to them based on the fact that they are a whitey. Will never be vilified in the media as a potential terrorist, as the face of crime, will never be killed by a cop even when they aren’t doing anything, will never be murdered in cold blood when carrying home a back of skittles and iced tea. Whitey will never be less likely to get a job or an education or to make less money than literally anyone else. Whitey is the ultimate achievement in a game where achievements are nothing more than what color you were born as. Whitey will win, every time, every game, every way.  Whitey can be saturated in the media that looks like them, every time, all the time, and still complain they have no culture - following it up with stealing others’ cultures for the novelty of it - like shoplifting from the oppressed. Whitey is safety and protection in your home, in your neighborhood, on the streets, and expecting the police to be on your side. Whitey is rarely the reason you get beaten to death, or hung, or burned. Whitey means rightness, means imperialism happening because of you not to you! Whitey means you history and your culture is the pinnacle of Civilization, the best of humanity and everyone else is called backwards, or wrong, or pitied. Whitey is safety. Whitey is doing more crimes - murder, rape, illegal drug use and possession - in American than ANY OTHER RACE and still being convicted for it at a lower rate than blacks or latinos. Whitey is the magic ability to step all over other people and get away with it, to have that be the norm and unquestioned.

Being called whitey means your feelings are hurt for about five minutes and then forgetting about it. Because in the end, being Whitey has never ever systematically stopped you from anything, has never hindered your life simply because you were white in the same way being a person of color dictates how your life is different than a white person’s.

Can you even really call that derogatory?

— rebloggable by request. They are insulting me quite splendidly in French, however, if you didn’t catch the irony of calling me tabarnac. It’s roughly like ‘fucking girl’ so in addition to all that, they’re a misogynist. beautiful.

Friday, May 11, 2012

“Why WON’T you educate us and hold our hand? We ARE the ones in power, you know, but we are good people.”

cruelyouth:

I’ve seen this shit before and have been meaning to write about it.

Imagine an abusive relationship (can work with romantic relationships and/or with family) and this is said by the abuser:

“Why do you want to leave me?  I allowed you to live in my house, and I make all the money.  You’re dependent on me.  YOU need ME.  Nobody will ever love you like I do, and I have everything you need right here.  All you need to do is behave and say with me.  Why do you want to leave me?”

It’s the EXACT SAME shit abusers tell their victims so that the victims stay, and the abusers retain power and control.

EXACTLY.

And you’re not good people.

They might be subtle, but these are threats.  And you’re trying to make false promises of “equality” if ONLY PoC submit to you and behave the way you want us to. 

And you should be able to step on our foots all you want to, but we better not complain about it if we REALLY want equality, which YOU try to set the standards for.

But, you know, you are “trying to help” us.  Because you’re a “good person.”

White people who think this way and tell PoC who tell them to go away, “But don’t you want equality?  We are the ones in power and COULD give it to you if you would just act how we want you to act and say what we want to hear!”

It’s intimidating bullshit.  You are THREATENING PoC into submission, waving around your privilege and power and threatening to use it against us if we don’t submit.  You are crossing our physical, emotional, intellectual, and time boundaries all at the same time and saying “we must not want equality” if we try to enforce them while you invade them.

Nobody has to teach you shit, and nobody is obligated to hold your hand, change their tone, or take the time to accommodate their personal spaces for you. 

And who the hell would want to be “equal” to an abuser like you?

It’s impossible.  You actually don’t want equality.  All you want is control over others and will do and say anything to get people to submit to you.

PoC and marginalized people who get this from privilege people, RUN, don’t just walk, RUN away from them and blast them for the abusers that they are.  Please do NOT fall for this shit.

In the end, you cannot reason with abusers.  Just walk away, and don’t even bother wasting your time.

Tuesday, May 8, 2012 Monday, April 30, 2012
About fifteen minutes and four cigarettes later, an elderly white cis woman from our event walked outside, attempted to cross the street and was struck by a car. It was terrible, and gruesome. I am in no way diminishing this. I am not trying to connect the actions of the radscum at the event with this woman, because I have no idea who she is or what her politics are. I was deeply disturbed by the event and prayed for that woman and that she would survive. I watched her get struck by the car, ran to the corner, and stood around while every person around called 911 (my phone was dead or I would have called, too). Within literally no longer than two minutes there were three ambulances, a fire truck, and police from both Oakland and Berkeley on scene. Lots of police. Everyone was freaked out. I heard talks of people from our event wondering if the news was going to show up. Like, queer folks were actually genuinely hoping/curious that it would get written up in the papers, to hopefully “prevent” cars from speeding down Shattuck and hitting another person.

Two days later, when I am trying to figure out how to deal with the aftermath of the event (it was organized by the non-profit I work for) a trans woman is shot and dies in Downtown Oakland, in the arms of an #OO medic, blocks from the fire station and the police station, after police walked away from her. I cannot stop processing these two events in tandem with each other. It is impossible for me to think about Brandi’s murder and not think about the reaction of the people in my house when we found out, the reaction of the queers on the street when that cis woman was hit by a car, the reaction of people when they heard the radscum talk about being disgusted by trans folks, and the institutional response on the behalf of paramedics and police in both occasions. I mean obviously, fuck the police, burn every cop… car, destroy every prison. I am not surprised it happened this way. I am just so jarred by the close proximity of these events in my life, am freaked out by having cis people in my life, and don’t know what to do next.
feral-femme :: re: Brandi’s murder in Oakland (via ultralaser)

(Source: tendertough)

Saturday, April 28, 2012
But as a general rule, if you’re not the original target of an insult, you can’t be the one to reclaim it.

- Jay Smooth

White people need to shut their stupid asses about racial slurs in general.

(via brandx)

(Source: florida-uterati)

Wednesday, April 18, 2012 Thursday, December 8, 2011

Racism’s Mental Toll May Explain Some Health Disparities

strugglingtobeheard:

Friday, 25 November 2011 — HealthDay News

Racism is similar to trauma in how it affects the mental health of black adults in the United States, a new analysis finds.

An examination of 66 previous studies that included more than 18,000 black adults concluded that there are common responses to both racism and trauma, including somatization (psychological distress that is expressed as physical pain), interpersonal sensitivity and anxiety. The more stressful the racism, the more likely a person was to report mental distress.

The study is published online in the Journal of Counseling Psychology.

The researchers suggested that the link between mental health and racism could contribute to physical health disparities between blacks and other Americans of different races and ethnicities.

“The relationship between perceived racism and self-reported depression and anxiety is quite robust, providing a reminder that experiences of racism may play an important role in the health disparities phenomenon,” study lead author Alex Pieterse from the University at Albany, State University of New York, said in an American Psychological Association news release. “For example, African Americans have higher rates of hypertension [high blood pressure], a serious condition that has been associated with stress and depression.”

The study’s authors noted that therapists should routinely assess their black patients’ experiences with racism during treatment.

This is something many people of color have known for awhile, but now I guess they are starting to collect real data to prove the correlation or certain causes. We know racism will get that pressure up and fucking stress you the hell out, but I’m hoping more people acknowledge this. Also, this should touch on INSTITUTIONAL racism and not just “racist people” because those racist institutions are the ones that deny us the income and education to get the access to other institutions that help improve our health and wellbeing. 

Don’t read the comments. Really. Just don’t. It will ruin your health, as in point of article.

(Source: sfgate.com)

Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Tracking the Hindu tag and being inundated with tr00 Hindu posts

thesavagesalad:

When I started tracking this tag, it was so I could find something to engage with. I don’t get many places or spaces out in the non cyber world to express or learn these things.

However, the True Hindu TM talk thrown around is working as a major turn off here. I don’t even KNOW how it is possible to be A True Hindu considering how diverse this faith/ philosophy is. And when I read the posts that outline what it means to be True, all I read is a load of misogynistic, transphobic, cissexist, anti-sex, racist, heterosexist and classist dribble. Or posts that say that Those Who Question The Literature were not Good People in the first place.

Excuse me? I hate to break it to you all, but the collection of literature that makes for this faith is loaded with problematic and oppressive shit. Yes, there is certainly beauty and reason with in it-but  come on. I mean you seriously think the Caste system came out of no where? You honestly think people to this day do not face oppression within this faith or oppression in a society where the faith is dominant despite calling itself a secular nation (India)?

And I think what is worst with the tr00 Hindu dialogue is how dismissive they are on these things. Or they pretend it’s not real. Or that the experiences of those affected within and outside of the faith are nonexistent.

If there is one thing we all have to keep in mind is that we all enter into this faith on different grounds. We approach it for different reasons. Some of us have the privilege of learning about it open spaces. Some of us have had our identity as Hindus erased by outer society and even further within Hinduism. Some of us may only ever be able to take in a fraction to all that is there in it. And then there are some who can take it all in. 

There will be those of us who will only take the parts that suit us fine. And some won’t.

And there will certainly be those of us who will leave it. All for good reason too.

And I ( and I emphasise the I here) don’t think you’re any better or worse of a Hindu if you pray a million times a day or if you never pray at all. Some of us express our devotion in many ways through the things we do and the way we love and care for others. And I think that is valid enough example for you to be True as a Hindu if there is such a thing.

This post isn’t designed to be a guide for how to be a True or Good Hindu though. I don’t make for a model example of one nor do I intend on being one either.

Nor do I think I have the right to tell you how to be a True Hindu.

However, if we are going to have any dialogue/ discourse regarding to the things that are important to us as Hindus- we need to be able to hang out our dirty laundry as willingly as we do with the things that make Hinduism so important to us. When someone voices their negative experiences or the things that oppress them within this faith- don’t shut them up. Don’t ignore them. Don’t tell them that they’re “not worthy of being a Hindu”. Have the decency to listen to them. Pay attention to them.

It’s hard enough as it is having our identities erased, fetishised, appropriated or viewed as a source of evil to the “outside” world so to speak. But to feel that invisibility within? That’s a whole other level of pain going on there.

Simple speak- people who call themselves true Hindus? Look, it’s fine and dandy if you view yourself that way, but in the midst of typing up your passive agressive things-you-must-do-to-be-at-one-with-the-universe post, look out for the identities and experiences you erase and invalidate along the way, or the oppression those of us face. Or the privileges you may have that some of us will never have.

I dunno. In the process of memorising your prayers- don’t let the capacity for being a decent human being be forgotten in the process.


Tuesday, October 11, 2011
A young man, Jeffrey Lichtenstein, who is a part of Occupy Memphis wrote a beautiful anti-racist position paper on the organization. It was hard-hitting, and made serious points, none of which they intend to consider. They removed his comments off the FaceBook page of Occupy Memphis, and then somebody came along for good measure and removed my responses off of his FB page. This shows the amount of fear and hatred there is within this movement, and within the white Left generally. They simply cannot honestly deal with their internal racism, and will now engage in censorship against other activists. This show why racism has to be overthrown through ideological and political struggle, it can never be voluntarily defeated without a struggle.

This whole fight with Occupy Memphis shows us to what extent that it is really difficult for oppressed POC’s and whites activists to work together on a principled basis, in this the most dynamic struggle in decades, the OWS, but has the same Achilles heel as previous coalitions over the years in America:, internal racism and domination, which relegates peoples of color to the to the activist ghetto. It needs to be said again, that there is not going to be a revolution which does not include Blacks not just taking equal part, but in the front ranks with their struggles taking center stage. This society is based on slavery and the exploitation of the labor, land theft, and mass murder of POC: Indigenous, African, and other oppressed peoples. Capitalism got its very start in America from slavery, but these folks try to pretend that is not the case, and this is just the movement of the white working class. We need to reject racism and censorship by the Left, not just the state or corporations.
Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin - (via facebook)

I feel so resentful toward and frustrated with the white Left.

I STRONGLY ENCOURAGE EVERYONE READING THIS TO GO TO Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin’s Facebook page and see more excellent analyses.


(via leonineantiheroine)

(Source: unpoliceyourmind)