Building off some good discussion in the other thread today. I’m thinking about how can white Hexbear users can be better here, and in leftist spaces, AND when we engage with the broader BIPOC communities? What are we doing wrong, and what can we do that’s better?
And I 100% get that’s it’s not on marginalized folks to explain it to us. I do. It’s just, at this moment I’m trying not to get overwhelmed with feeling like it’s just not possible to make the world better. Not even get us to socialism, just getting things to be a tiny bit better. I don’t know what else to do. So I’m reaching out to my BIPOC comrades with an open hand. If you feel like sharing, please do.
For the white folks, we need to be better. We do. It may not be comfortable to hear, but we do. Maybe we’re not as bad as the libs and the chuds on this but that’s not a valid measuring stick. Come on.
pretty much the same deal as being a communist approaching workers. Try not being a savior or having a savior attitude.
live among the people, be among the people, learn from the people, serve the people.
Nobody likes outsiders who tells them how to run their lives or trusts them if they say they can make their lives better.
basically if you can't shoot the shit and grill with 'em, you're just a passing face in life.
Not dismissing our indifference over the support of Ukraine after no support has ever been given to us as “whataboutism” or telling me that it’s not the right time to worry about xyz. That’s not to say anyone here is guilty of such, but I believe the majority of white American liberals outside of here consider themselves “leftist” and ask the same question.
I think it’s incredible that what made me stop having a baseline level of respect and trust for white people is seeing them dehumanize another group of white people in real time and advocate for nuclear war. Partly because the same language and tactics have been used against us in the past. It’s like these people buried it deep down their brain and now have an excuse to pull back the tropes without the fear of being called racist.
And I 100% get that’s it’s not on marginalized folks to explain it to us.
I never understood this sentiment. Yes it’s annoying to repeat myself, especially if it’s in response to some bad faith asshole. But if it’s some white guy who’s genuinely curious about what I believe then I have no problem explaining it
People used to laugh at me when I said that if the US ever went to war with China, it would not hesitate to put Chinese Americans in camps.
Many of them stopped laughing in 2022.
seeing them dehumanize another group of white people in real time
some points about Germany's racism history
I would like to expand on that a bit. The thing is that from a German perspective - so CW - (and that of plenty racism and othering/group based hate theories, and historical anti-slav racism) they aren't "another group of white people", as the criteria is often factually one of power dynamics.
In Germany before the second world war in the non-materialist parts of society there often was a fiction of a Russian, a Russian soul, about Slavs etc. during the second world war due to the genocidal policies of the Nazis one of the largest groups of victims were Slavs. After the end of the second world war the differentiation between ethnic groups within Eastern Europe from the Central European perspective was not that relevant. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Germanies reunification, the EU eastward expansion you had countries in the East which were dominated by poor economic situations, with it you had plenty of economic and further exploitation in regards to them, especially when people would try to get income or refuge in Germany. This meant that for years racisms were at work that connected to anti slav sentiments. Of course discrimination against precarious marginalized work migrants i.e. from Italians, Turkish hiring were even before 1990 common. This changed with time slightly, but especially in situations in which skin color markers are used to assign others the status of the other and was connected with for example anti muslim, anti arab, anti palestine, anti jewish ideas etc. it is still more prevalent.
I wrote this to give some more perspective from Germany's history. I would like to mention that the concept of "white people" doesn't really work so well transferred from the US perspective as the everyday racism within "white people" work slightly different ("whiteness" still works well, though). For plenty of colonialism related things it is a really fitting concept even within Germany, though.
CW excursion genocide against the Ovaherero and Nama
In 1904-1908 Germany as colonial power unleashed a genocide within a colony in which the aforementioned "white people"/whiteness and racism work well explanatory. Due to the genocide against BIPoC groups in ethnic extermination processes up to hundred thousands were killed, often in camps, virtually indiscriminate in terms of age or gender.
In 2006 there were still streets named after the military commander execution those killings. Successes in the continued political struggle of remembrance are slow. If you are interested in that topic the texts by Israel, one of the speakers of relevant actors, are well worth a read.Which of course supports your point though, that
seeing them dehumanize another group of white people in real time
is what happened. But it is in continuity with historical ways and anti russian and anti slav sentiments that are commonly established are in work, too. In the 90s I remember reading a newspaper article in which a doctor was writing about refugees from the former Soviet Union and how many are faking illness, even though
CW
"Russians experiences less pain, but are prone to faking things to game the system"
which is a continuation of Nazi thought that became luckily more rare, now that the professors at medical schools aren't people educated in Nazi Germany anymore.
For competitions sake I would like to also mention Romnja and Sintezza (some prefer in English the term gypsy, others don't like that term) and the anti-ziganist racism against them, who are PoC and whose discrimination continued in West Germany by the same people who were executing the Pojaromos.
It was hard to highlight anti-polish and anti-slav sentiments even within the Left in Germany in the 90s post reunification, but especially within the left liberals. Race (the English term) was often put below the economic conditions and put below the main contradiction of capitalism we had to work against.
Don't accuse literally anyone who mentions racism of being a wrecker, psyop, neoliberal, obsessed with idpol, etc.
I once was called out on here for “racism-jacketing” lol had never heard that term before. Still don’t really understand what it means z just assume it’s another way to deflect racism
Stop trying to victimize/forgive our oppressors and the very people who volunteered to destroy our countries and murder our people. (Im talking about your soldiers/vets)
Mentioned elsewhere here but I cannot overemphasize the importance of not jumping to "but I have a different opinion" quite so easily, particularly when it comes to issues relating to existential threats. Not that every BIPOC person is right or you have to agree with every BIPOC person, but dialing the contrarian instinct back a bit is one of the best things you can do. Instead, recognize, empathize, ask questions, and suggest your position respectfully and after consideration.
This is basically the same way to create sn inclusive space in general, btw.
white people need to give the metaphorical guns and ammunition to their bipoc comrades to help overthrow whiteness itself, since they have an inside understanding of how whiteness works we need to utilize the material support of white people. They basically have to give everything and get nothing in return, i think something that scares a lot of white people is that there will be a significant decline in their standard of living in the process of uplifting others. We need to abolish the suburbs, cars, the western style of agriculture, and the overproduction of treats, ect. They have a reason to be scared since white people are only prosperous because they stole the wealth of others.
The thing is, the avarice is not working. We have the supposed easy life and it fucking sucks because it's still late stage capitalism. If abandoning luxury goods means that the people around me are far less miserable, that's not really "getting nothing in return", is it? Having less people suffering around me means that my day is better too.
You ever watch the Atlanta episode on reparations? Its literally has to be like that. There needs to be some kind of tax on white people that directly goes to black people. Such a thing would cause a lot of discontent among whites, we need to push hard enough to get shit done but not too hard that whites don't cooperate, this isn't south africa we don't outnumber them yet.
Even a meaningful tax on billionaires would get us 75% of the way there… if only because most of them are various flavors of Anglo Saxon
They basically have to give everything and get nothing in return
Okay, but I'm not gonna do that, and you shouldn't really ever expect anybody to do that.
Not for moralistic reasons, but because from a materialist perspective, that's just not how coalition building works.
Here comes
Judge Jury with some low-hanging fruit: Seek out non-white voices, listen to what they have to say, and make sure to think again before talking if you find yourself thinking "cool, now I understand The (monolithic) Non-White Perspective"Is there a reason why people say "BIPOC" now instead of "POC"? I thought "people of color" included black and indigenous people.
With the added presumable redundancy, does BIPOC do anything that POC doesn't?
It's to emphasize the central role that anti-blackness and anti-indigeneity play in the conception of race in the US.
I don't see where BIPOC works in a case where POC doesn't. I looked it up before posting my last comment and out of 4 articles I read most of the content emphasizes how it's still a blanket term that you don't want to use when talking about Black-specific or Indigenous-specific issues, and lots of interviewees saying "don't call me poc or bipoc, I'm Black".
What if we called a herpetologist "a STRologist" (one who studies snakes, turtles, and reptiles) becaulse of the central role that snakes and turtles play in human culture?
It's like a Band-aid Invocation of People Of Color.
We can do this for any category, making new redundant names with extra virtue signals included. We can satisfy our thirst for change and novelty by making up all kinds of replacement nouns that probably have a half-life of 7 years. We can devote our energies to making oppressed groups feel more special under imperialist white supremacist patriarchal capitalism, why don't we devote our energies to being efficient and rigorous in destroying it?
That's a lot of dismissive things to say despite not addressing my one-sentence response, lol.
This is exactly the kind of thing that can be exhausting for BIPOC folks, by the way. The urge to have and share opinions rather than listen even a little bit.
So why not be extra considerate, and have something that speaks directly to the variation and degrees of oppression that exist in the historical experiences of people racialized into a periphery? Descendents of Slaves and Victims of Genocides and other People of Color. DOSAVOGAPOC. Or if you're going for semantic rigor, POCIDOSAVOG. Is that not even better in recognizing the shape of our world and the injustice therein?
People Racialized Into A Periphery could be turned into a concise and catchy acronym. People might call it some kind of -ism though.
Because BIPOC is pronounceable and because language is descriptive, not prescriptive. This won out over POC, not some other term, and it's not like it was invented and adopted by some committee.
anti-blackness and anti-indigeneity manifest in POC communities as well, especially those that are closer to the whiteness boundary and could theoretically cross it one day
So it's better and sensible to distinguish and specify for the sake of simply acknowledging that basic fact
Why not add a letter so it has a consistent internal logic to it?
BIOPOC- Black, Indigenous, and Other People Of Color. At least that wouldn't sound redundant and disjointed. BIPOC makes it sound like Black and Indigenous people are separate from POC.
Who knows, maybe as soon as 5 years from now people will decide that whatever we're using
feels old and not fresh anymoredoesn't adequately address the historical injustices faced by certain demographics, and we'll add and/or alter another couple letters, and so on."other" people of color is already covered by the POC part of the term, anti-blackness and anti-indigenity are distinguished because white supremacists historically weren't simply preaching to their own, they acquired numerous converts in various poc demographics, thru colonial structures anti-blackness and anti-indigeneity hold a unique salience, they're both global and systemic on pan-continental scales that defies the usual regional structural racism other poc groups encounter
For instance, it makes no sense for me to sit here and pretend my home country (which is non-white) can be covered by the term poc while large portions of the population hold severe anti-black views, so BIPOC becomes a useful term
End of the day the term exists to knowledge the fact white supremacists don't actually have to be white, in fact I'd go as far and assert the majority of white supremacists in the world aren't white
It is also inclusive of "non" PoC ingenious groups (I know some Sorbs who see themselves as PoC via. the anti-slavism etc. and others not, so the BIPoC term is more inclusive), which marginalized by European anti-racism for quite a long time, too. I.e. Sorbs in Germany:
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20210615-sorbs-the-ethnic-minority-inside-germany
Plenty of land of the Sorbs was taken in the last hundred years, and not seldom were places in which they lived those in which lignite was mined and thus the whole village destroyed:
https://www.mdr.de/geschichte/ddr/wirtschaft/sorben-lausitz-braunkohle-tagebau-100.html
I am reminded of the flair on the old sub "polishpeoplearepocpolishpeoplearepocpolishpeoplearepocpolishpeoplearepoc"
I thought that was to inspire legitimacy and avoid looking like Golbat.
These are 4 separate but clearly related categories that work as parts of a group that is named by listing them, and they would work just as well in any order. It would sound weird if it were something like "Lesbians, Transgendered, and Sexual Minorities" where part of the list encompasses the whole.
I recognize how silly it is that I'm pursuing this angle of discussion though.
As I mentioned in that thread, there's no real way of Hexbear not beating the mayo city allegations unless there's a radical cultural shift. By radical, I mean a radical shift where people self-dox their faces, the admins and mods are all POC with their nonwhite faces as avatars, and the people who are white get a one-strike policy. This might seem radical, but that's essentially how Hexbear became so trans friendly. Half the mods are trans, and one of the trans mods went to town on terfs and other transphobic reactionaries early in this website's history.
All this talk about listening to POC's voices and whatever is fine except as demonstrated by the existence of /r/asablackman, various white people get off of pretending to be POC. Whether it's to claim some scholarship that's supposed to be reserved for Indigenous people a la Elizabeth Warren or as some disgusting form of digital blackface, white people do this shit all the time. This means that even well-meaning attempts like /c/em_poc won't actually attract POC users in the end because no one can be sure whether the mods and users there aren't just white people pretending to be POC like they always do.
The other option would be for Hexbear to no longer be exclusively English-speaking, which is even more untenable. Imagine if half of Hexbear was in Arabic. Obviously, it would no longer be mayo city, but it would essentially be two distinct communities awkwardly stitched together. Moderation would be impossible as well. What if someone from Arabic Hexbear said some transphobic shit in Arabic? Who's going to be in charge of moderation? How many people are bilingual in English and Arabic and willing to be a mod and are ideologically in line with this website?
A new Lemmy instance could be build from the ground up where you have to show your face so people would actually know what ethnicity you are. This, of course, would mean the politics of that instance would have to be completely toned down, and it seems extremely unlikely that people here would actually use this new instance.
Overall, this website will always be 80% white, and it will never beat the mayo city allegations lol. The 20% need to find other social media, ideally a non-European language one, that they can use whenever the 80% is being weird about race again.
As I mentioned in that thread, there's no real way of Hexbear not beating the mayo city allegations unless there's a radical cultural shift. By radical, I mean a radical shift where people self-dox their faces, the admins and mods are all POC with their nonwhite faces as avatars, and the people who are white get a one-strike policy. This might seem radical, but that's essentially how Hexbear became so trans friendly. Half the mods are trans, and one of the trans mods went to town on terfs and other transphobic reactionaries early in this website's history.
WTF incident inspired this thread?
It's cowardly but I'm a mayo and usually just drop out and disappear from race conversations, I just don't know enough poc to know how not to embarrass myself. I get into intense arguments with IRL whitoid friends regarding race because I have done the bare minimum of reading though, hopefully I won't cringe at myself later for it
Listening a whole lot and talking very little has also been my strategy. But I can't get over the number of times middle class white people need to centre themselves and just dominate these convos.
i think this is the right way of doing it, short of just plunging yourself into poc spaces, inevitably inciting conflict and getting the brainworms forcibly struggle-sessioned out
i honestly don't blame them for the mayo-centric discourse that much anymore. no investigation, no right to speak is all well and good, but most of these people aren't even aware that there's anything to investigate, and while it's technically my duty to educate them wrt poc issues, they're likely resistant to education and i have better things to do with my time.
This is terrifying to me though since if I'm in a fun convo I usually wind up getting animated and trying to draw people in with directed questions, and "centering" my white ass in the process. I don't always realize I'm doing it, and I've had poc respond pretty well since I imagine it's a good social tactic with people regardless of race, but I cringe to myself thinking about how many times I've probably been a brash overbearing white guy to the people that stayed silent.
Unironjcally the best thing to do imo, as soon as the convo goes to race, i dip. If i cant, ill just agree with whatever the black person says
I've found white people who take a hostile philosophical approach to whiteness tend to empathize better when it comes to these subjects, a kind of process of de-identification that short circuits all the knee-jerk emotional mindsets white people wear like armor when the convo gets too heavy
Or meme version: we need a Karl Marx of white people who can flip the bullshit idealistic 90s era color-blind ideology on its head a la Hegel
have friends who aren't white, then you won't be extremely fucking weird (this includes the bizarre self-flagellation shit)
it isn't hard tbh
though from what i have been told by american friends, even the working class in amerca kinda do self-segregationi'm from england, which is a very racist society, but even here if you're working class and don't have BAME friends, then you were actively trying not to
the more i hear about america the more horrifying it is tbh
for this and also your lack of recent sleep, which i very strongly empathise with as a chronic insomniac
(this includes the bizarre self-flagellation shit)
It's basically this lol
This would require me to stop being an antisocial shut in. Also, the few times I do venture outside I rarely see Black people unless I venture into the nearby city, which means I have to find an overpriced parking spot to leave my car. Fuck burgerland's dependence on car based infrastructure.
i like it when whites self flagellate, its funny and i encourage it. just seeing how far they go with it is like peak comedy.
I think it would be cool if people knew I wasn't white. When I make fun of crackers, I genuinely mean it. I don't mind providing proof that im black if necessary. However, I am not Afro-American, so my knowledge of US race issues is somewhat surface-level. To delve further, I am a black guy from Europe, and although I have encountered racism, I believe my experiences differ from those of black people in the US.
thanks
I would be fully on board if the mods add a verification for poc/black people. Would give us certainly more of a voice.
if you're white and you wanna be less weird about race you should do two main things. make black friends who will call you out, and read black writers.
Yeah, I think us honkies need our TC69 "READ FEINBERG OR FUCKING DIE" moment for key POC cultural and theory texts. Sometimes we need bullying too.
The user running had to step down and the few users who had been trying to engage with it found their life situation changed so couldn't keep up with the reading (I had to get a second job and my brain turns off when trying to listen to non-fiction audio books
).I did try to keep up with the book club threads when I couldn't do the reading though. If another book club along this topic started I'd at the very least make it a point to read through the comments.
This is incredibly practical advice that I really appreciate, thank you!
The single most important thing white users should learn is that respect does not equal understanding. you will never understand what its like to be black or poc (and i don't care if your a spicy white like an italian or slavic) and there are many topics where your opinions truly don't matter
Damn man not disagreeing but I get sad as HELL reading stuff like this. Like I was into "cool" indigenous stuff from a very young age (Aztec and local native tribes mostly), but as I grew up, wanting to just get my eyes into every community of different looking people I could for the sheer childlike novel pleasure of it, I started to face what you describe here and had some painful experiences. Like I had a big crying meltdown as a little kid year old over it and couldn't figure out why for years. I came into a country/world where the cruelty of the past and its unaddressed consequences had shut so many doors off for me, doors that I had expected to be able to walk through. After all, as a white guy most other social doors were open, but not the ones that were important to me when I wanted to learn about my peers (especially considering that they were the peers who were responsible for so much of the culture I consumed).
Overly earnest post perhaps but I guess the distance of the internet allows me subconsciously to attempt to explore this separation from a position of safety.
Edit: man this reads so "boo hoo imma sad boy"
you're not an ally unless you are literally putting your body on the line for poc, thats the bar
even then, i would personally say that that is the lowest the bar could go for a communist
i have been kettled with people who put themselves at the front in defence of BAME people who are still racist on a personal politics level
The answer is right there, simply be really weird about other whites instead. It'll totally work. Youll be too busy making fun of mayos for eating like, boiled chicken or w/e to be racist
this comment genuinely shouldn't exist
