I mean, yes, the US is a white supremacist settler colonial nation. But it seems like just in the last year that all over the country at school board meetings white folks are getting whipped up into a frenzy over the idea that maybe the US isn't quite so perfect, and that white people just might happen to have had some historic advantages that POC were never given. These meetings are something else. White folks getting into fights and making threats over it.

So what has changed? Is it just a reaction to BLM? I don't think material conditions for white folks have degraded all that significantly in the last year to where there's a materialist answer (though I'm open to hearing it). Is it manufactured outrage from conservative media? I genuinely don't know. But this social phenomenon fascinates me - meaning how white people are reacting to relatively minor attacks on white supremacy and the fact that demographics are shifting and will create a more diverse country in the future.

  • antiantiantidepresso [comrade/them,she/her]
    ·
    3 years ago

    we are a white supremacist, settler colonial nation. that cannot exist without a massive campaign of truth regulation - disguise the founding genocide of the nation, diffuse the purposeful creation of whiteness as social control, and reify the "rights" and "freedoms" the country has had to be dragged kicking and screaming into acknowledging.

    so if schools teach their children that whiteness was constructed, that natives were not hapless friends who accidentally all died, and that racism was not washed away in a cleansing baptism in 1965... they have to react.

    we're a reactionary country so all they know to do is react. plus the news media is owned by billionaires who want to see those structures of oppression remain as stable as possible.

    one example I'll leave you with is the push for charter schools. a perfect intersection of neoliberal privitization ideology, the re-capture of public space by billionaires in the face of legitimate left wing awakening, and the reconstruction of racial hierarchy that was "abolished" in schooling back in the late 50s and 60s.

    any loss of power is top much power lost, so now CRITICAL RACE THEORY is some horror as opposed to an academic and rational analysis of the world.