I never realized how deep racists’ obsession with Black people went until I began voicing support for Palestine of all things. I just kinda assumed the only real targets of Israel and its supporters were Arabs, most Palestinians, and that I could be this untouchable ally or whatever. I was wrong.
These last few weeks have made me even more aware of how much imperialists weaponize anti-Blackness. Even when Black people aren’t directly involved in a conflict, we’re targets. While talking about Israel with some friends online, I basically said that child death is more tragic than soldiers dying while performing their job (i.e. indiscriminate killing, in the IDF’s case). I made this one supposedly apolitical person mad but they pretended not to be as they made edgy jokes about the Arab slave trade and buck breaking. The shit he said was so cruel that I had to break off all contact to preserve my sanity.
Even the people pretending to be leftists are using the genocide in Palestine to be racist to Black people. Lee Fang literally thinks that BLM is like the Israeli government. There’s also currently a post on TrueAnon complaining about how there isn’t a Palestinian Lives Matter, how unfair it is that libs just looooooove Black people so much, blah, blah, blah, wah, wah, wah—all while completely disregarding the many, many ways this country intentionally brutalizes and kills us. It’s fucking tiring, man. I’m so sick of this shit. Like, fine, we get it, you don’t like BLM or Black people—how about LBPFA (leave black people fucking alone) instead?
I never asked to be the permanent focal point of every awful loser’s convoluted political worldview. Literally everything I do triggers psychos. Honestly, sometimes I want to be reincarnated as a rock and just chill without any thoughts.
One racial slur used against Arabs is "sand n-word." Because amerikkkan racists hate black people so much they still have to be anti black while in the middle of their racism against other races.
4chan type people too. They abuse the word so much that it doesn’t even make sense. They’ll call anything they hate the n-word. It’s so weird. Their hatred of Black peoples is so all-encompassing that it’s a language.
It's like how "g**k" (slur for Asians) started in Korea based on how American soldiers heard the Korean language but then it just became a catch-all slur for people from Asia and was famously used in the Vietnam war.
But I've also heard "Jungle N-" for SE Asians because racists are never clever.
From my experience living in the South, any excuse for most white people to go full racist against anyone is met with outright psychopathic glee. And this is coming from a white person. Capitalism and it's tools of oppression and division are destroying our communities and humanity.
The glee is the most disturbing part. People on Reddit were legit cumming their pants when they found out about the Black kids jumping that White kid in Vegas. Yeah, I touch grass. I work with everyday people face to face and can feel the vibe shifts irl when enough losers get hopped up off the latest race thing.
Even being in the middle of the midwest, I sometimes watch people practically pop blood vessels trying not to explode into a racial tirade (am also white)
complaining about how there isn’t a Palestinian Lives Matter, how unfair it is that libs just looooooove Black people so much
What the fuck are they talking about? Black liberation activists have been one of the most, if not the most, committed groups in the US to Palestinian liberation. Concern trolling about the BLM slogan is bad enough, but doing it in relation to Palestine is fucking unhinged
I was surprised when I first read that you've been getting this shit from nominal leftists, but then I remembered how the Atlanta DSA used and disrespected the black organizers they collaborated with. When the Ex-DARC Letter came out, they doubled down on their behavior in their "apology" and purged those of us who called them out
This shit sucks
being normal around black people
It's really really not that hard, too. Like, just don't be a weird freak about things.
they want to blame us for everything and also do the revolution for them.
EXACTLY! The magical negro trope runs that deep. We are both somehow inferior to them in all ways but also the key to their salvation? Like what the fuck libs? Pick one.
They’re doing a major disservice to themselves. They genuinely think that they can abuse a group endlessly and then seriously expect their support when the time comes. Very delusional.
lol I had a friend (no longer) back in college who tried to shush me and prepare me one time when were about to enter a gathering that included black people because he "knew how to talk to black people"
in my defense I will add that it pissed me off enough that I made sure to very enthusiastically talk to the people he was referring to, who ended up being Ethiopian exchange students. They were pretty racist tbh
They were pretty racist tbh
You mean the “friend” was racist, right?
The Ethiopian students were saying some pretty racist stuff about black americans is what I meant, but yes him too. My guess is that the Ethiopian students had discovered that a dash of racism is a quick and easy way to ingratiate yourself with white college students. It's a dark memory to be sure
I was hoping that wasn’t the case, but it was ambiguous. That’s unfortunate to hear.
White guy pro tip: any white person who brings up the Arab slave trade or “white people were slaves before black people” is actually waaaaay more racist than (they think) they are letting on. Like, bringing that up is not something white people who aren’t racist do in response to whites enslaving blacks (you may already know this, but it’s something I have seen firsthand).
I once knew a guy who said the arab slave trade was wrong because slavery by kidnap violates the rules based international order unlike voluntary sales which were ok
That guy I think was an actual nazi and from what he told me I think he has family that were in the SS
he also suggested that we put the Irish in concentration camps (yes he called China authoritarian)
How did they think the Africans who sold them the slaves got the slaves? Its like saying if you bought a slave from an Arab it would be OK.
How did they think the Africans who sold them the slaves got the slaves
indentured servitude and slavery as a punishment for a crime
they believed you can be born a slave and that's fair and square
Raiding and kidnappings neighboring tribes/kingdoms has also been the other form of slavery for just as long. Which version do you think can scale to meet the demands of the Atlantic slave trade?
yeah I agree the nazi who wanted to put the Irish in concentration camps had some bad and inconsistent ideas
It's false equivalency. Things like thralldom and the Arab slave raids are not on the same scale of inhumanity as the Atlantic slave trade. There is a reason that abolitionism became a large political movement in those times and not before.
Also abolitionism can only really come from industrial slavery. Industrial as in quantity, not just manufacturing. I consider a large slave plantation to be "industrial" slavery.
A good example is that there is no Greek analog of Sparticus. Roman slaves were used for large scale industrial projects at the command of the wealthiest elite. Greek slaves were usually the property of small farmers and businesmen.
The practical upshot of this is that if youre a slave in ancient Greece all you have to do for freedom is kill your master and his familly in his sleep and then run to the closest enemy city state. Freeing yourself in ancient Rome required either being a good boy or large scale collective action.
Please tell me about thralldom. I love the history of slavery. Was it industrial, as in, did the existence of thralls threaten the livlihood of peasants who owned no slaves? That was a major problem in the Roman Republic - small farmers being bought out by hyper aristocrats who built mega plantations worked by slaves.
The most famous examples of thralls are people taken as plunder in Viking raids. They were expected to work but could buy their own freedom or be set free by their master. Of you killed someone else's thrall you were expected to pay a weregild to the person who owned him, but not as much as for free person of course. So it's a lot like the Greeks.
According to lore, the person who first settled Iceland permanently, Ingólfur Arnarsson, made a stop in Ireland to get some thralls. Some of those thralls killed his brother and fled to an group of islands near the south coast. They were hunted down and killed and the islands have been called Westman islands since, as the Irish were called Westmen, since Ireland is to the west of Scandinavia.
Another thrall, Náttfari, may actually have been the first one to settle in Iceland, but he came with Garðar Svavarsson and escaped or was set free and we don't know enough about his story except a bay in the north of Iceland called Náttfari Bay.
Like the wikipedia article says it was also a feature of Anglo-Saxon and maybe Norman society but I don't enough about that to comment, also that you could become a thrall through debts.
It always manifests in the most disgusting ways too. They love to use black slang to the point it's considered Zoomer slang after spending years calling it "ghetto." Any black man interacting with a non-black woman gets all the weird bbc jokes from porn-addicted white men.
White men will always make edgy jokes about atrocities when you say something that offends them. After a while all you can really do is laugh it off and fuck with their insecurities.
Our culture needs to somehow deal with this weird racial porn shit, it's so bad, it's so corrupting
It’s so weird how ubiquitous racist porn about Black people specifically has gotten, especially in the digital age.
It's crazy how big porn sites like pornhub are mainstream and essentially as widely used and discussed as Facebook, but our society just allows all sorts of evil insane posts on there that we would never tolerate on a more respectable public platform. It's like people in our society's minds accept any and all reaction if it's tied together with sex and being horny. It's ok to be racist, misogynist, homophobic, transphobic, incestuous and violent as long as it's in a "consensual sex scene". While that may be true (debatable) on a one-off basis, it's certainly not true about an entire system of pornographic commodity mass production and consumption.
i think the bizarrest extension of that is the widespread enjoyment of hip hop and rap among white supremacists.
The cultural laundering machine loves to reappropriate black culture (and a lot of queer black culture at that) and language and claim it was "American" culture. From rap to cowboys to any food in America that has any flavor - none of it came from the white plague.
Sometimes I think to myself, I wish my white ancestors contributed something positive to the world and built a real culture to pass down... Instead I was taught self loathing and that mayo is an individual condiment and not an ingredient in more elaborate food.
there is no white culture and there never was. There is an American culture, a Dutch culture etc
I'm part Dutch. We don't have a cuisine or music that I know of and I equate food and music as the bedrock of a culture. We've got windmills and irrigation techniques that hold back the ocean... Cool I guess. But then we've got Calvinist protestantism and a lot of awful exploitation around the globe... Expanding capitalism around the globe through the Dutch East India Corp... Making a casino like market based on fucking flowers... Wooden shoes. Yeah, the Dutch are particularly vile throughout history, and there's little bits of it that have embedded into American culture and certainly made it worse, notably modern evangelical christian nationalism.
I've had traditional Dutch food. It's not good but it is a food tradition
there's nice and interesting aspects of Dutch culture
As a whitey, I remember growing up with white guys who insisted they could say the n word without the hard r. The hard r was racist, but with an -a it was okay. I just remember them getting very mad about being told they shouldn't say something.
What about the proper application of the n-word to white people? You see, it's a totally legitimate derogatory term, just replace the "N" with a "W"...
So Xi's not genociding the Uyghurs...he's genociding the Wig--
MRS. BIDEN GET DOWN
There was also that time in like the late 90s early 00s where it was really funny for white people to sing the n word, like Will Ferrell on SNL or Ben Folds covering Snoop Dogg. So glad that's mostly over
Anyone bringing up the Arab slave trade who is not already in an academic conversation about the Arab slave trade is not worth listening to
Any USian who explicitly states they are apolitical is a jokerfied reactionary.
right wing "allies" to palestine who use it to sow racial division are openly and gladly doing the work of empire.
I saw one reactionary weirdo use apartheid in Palestine to minimize the severity of the one in South Africa. One of the Radio War Nerd hosts did of soft version of the same thing on Chapo recently (yeah, that's right, I just critiqued Mark Ames because he's a pos sex pat and I don't gaf how insightful his views on international policy and warfare are.)
