saying something this edgy does not absolve you of bigotry
edit: for anyone stumbling into the drama, i probably should have elaborated on this post. I am not saying you can't make fun of white people not being able to eat spicy food or anything, but at some point it becomes self-flagellating. to quote comrade RedQuestionAsker:
It's good to challenge white supremacy in all of its incarnations at all time. It's certainly good to refuse to be proud to be white considering what the concept of whiteness is.
It's another thing to performatively hate yourself in a cocktail of millennial self-deprecation and liberal white guilt. It's not revolutionary, and it's probably not good for you.
that is all. comrades just know i dont hate any of you. i'm not trying to start a slapfight. i just saw this as weird performative behavior and wanted to call it out.
It is a shame how often these go together.
can't there be a middle ground between thin-skinned identification with mayoism and performative self-flaggelation?
I imagine so but personally I prefer people being a little cringe but accepting critiques of white supremacy to people who get knee jerk angry and take it personally (and often go mask off being kinda racist). I mean the amount of times I’ve seen “you leftists made me hate black people!!” Bc of some light ribbing of white people is wild.
And I personally don’t love this growing sentiment of being really adverse to white jokes bc I’ve seen it preamble some shift to more reactionary community culture when it comes to the discussion of whiteness.
I have seen this too and obviously that doesn't fly. I'm not convinced any of those people were left to begin with though. At best amenable to it
I like ribbing and taking the piss. I think it can be funny and in good taste. It's just a very different vibe when, say, a black stand comedian has a bit about white people doing such and such than when this website (that is maybe 80-90% white) posts threads like "IMMEDIATE GENOCIDE OF ALL KKKRAKKKERS NOW". I think the former can be really funny, but the latter comes off as... weird, at best. A lot of the time it doesn't even have the structure of a joke. There's no punchline. Compare that even to
, where there is a setup and a payoff. I think that meme is pretty funny, and at this point, a more accurate lampooning of some people than I ever expected before.
genuine theory-based understanding of white supremacy and an active willingness to not reaffirm and complete the self-flagellation rituals. this ironically means believing you're One Of The Good Ones, but innately, instead of trying to affirm it. (This makes sense because I always got the impression the issue with "not all men" type statements was their implicit ignorance of what are social statements, not blanket statements, so the reason they're annoying is because they're technically true but in a way that misleads readers away from social analysis. I'm just some cracker but if you were to apply this same principle to this conversation it seems like saying "I hate white people" isn't actually annoying in that way because it doesn't draw attention away from societal issues, though it may be annoying in the sense that it's a form of toxic self-harm that could spill over if you used in excess)
I really agree overall.
On this site and in similar contexts (i.e. with an audience already pretty on board), I agree it doesn't really shift attention. This site has never been about "optics" and I think that's fine. In a different context, like if you were sharing critiques of white supremacy (in person) with someone who is ignorant of them, I do think that would be a distraction from the point and likely to confuse.
Thank you
Yeah, and I do have some faith, maybe misplaced, but some, that most people would immediately regard it as weird for someone to just constantly talk about how much they hate white people while someone else does serious analysis right in front of them.