yet again bashing my pointer at the enormous sign that says "it's not that [witches/goblins/vampires/motherfucking krampus] are necessarily specifically jew-coded in an antisemitic way - though they may be and in fact often are, but you do have to take that part case by case - so much as it is that the entire european idea of what is monstrous is so deeply intertwined with ideas of jews as inhuman outsiders that some of that is going to leak in from the groundwater no matter what you do".

do not piss on the poor about this post i do not have it in me.

the other thing the sign says (it's in smaller text though) is:

once you have used your basic eyes and critical thinking skills to decide if something is racist - it is 2024 and we are all capable of this - i would also like to radically propose that we do not need to reclaim krampus. just because a folkloric tradition says people like you are/look like a hideously ugly child eater does not mean you have to get defensive and say, well what if being a hideously ugly baby eater was good. you can just say, "wow, that's racist" and move on with your life. your life that doesn't have krampus in it.

pulling these very very relevant tags from a reblog of @creekfiend's original krampus post bc i want the tags on my blog but i do not want to put krampus on my blog again, bc i think they're really really incisive.

#I feel like possibly. Certain cultural trends have led people around to a weird point where they will jump right to #'I think the monstrous is cool and hip and sexy! That guy looks cool!' and just completely skip over considering #what other things 'monstrousness' might be symbolizing and conveying in the context of origin #such as for example. Directing hatred and dehumanization against specific groups of real people.

#Also I think there's a weird thing going where people are like. Abstractly aware of certain checklist traits of antisemitic caricatures #like oh yeah the things about horns and tails and hooked noses. Those are used as antisemitic signifiers. #But you hear about this in text-based contexts. Or in reference to certain modern media depictions #And then when presented with an image that is literally one of THE historic examples that such a checklist might be derived from #There's this reaction of 'but did they mean it that way in this case?' Because I don't fucking know. #It looks different than you imagined it?

#Or like. Hm. I think if you're accustomed to an era where racist caricatures generally look like humans with exaggerated features #You could fall back into denial based on 'how could that be a racist caricature when it's obviously not even a human?' #Which uh. That's the dehumanization.

#Anyway I don't mean that as a defense of ignorance. If you're going to engage with European folklore or imagery at all you need to #get read up on this stuff and know it when you see it. And not expect it to work exactly the way modern forms do. #I'm just picking at my thoughts about why this seems to be a blind spot for people who could describe in words an antisemitic caricature #But not know it when they saw it. (tags via @screambirdscreaming, emphasis mine)

What, and I can't stress this enough, the ACTUAL fuck.

So here is my problem with the "by virtue of being a man, you have to make your peace with the fact that some people will be uncomfortable with you, and thus you have to make yourself a safe person"

I've heard the same thing about being black. A lot of people have taken my very presence as hostility. I have had people escalate situations just because I am present as a black person in front of them. Before, and after transition.

You know what the problem with bending over backwards to make other people comfortable with your presence even though you haven't actually done anything to them besides breathe the same air?

It's never enough. You can be One Of The Good Ones for ages and at some point you will fail your Good One inspection and people will turn on you at the drop of a hat. People who you thought you had a good rapport with. People you thought were your friends.

I have *experienced* this, both online and in person.

The onus is on everyone to be safe people to be around. Singling someone out and blaming them for daring to share a demographic with someone else who has caused harm isn't cute when people do it to me because I'm black, and it's also not cute when they do it because I'm a man.

People are uncomfortable about my blackness all the time. I didn't magically stop experiencing racism when I started taking testosterone. So it's absolutely wild to me that people think "well, you know, with what you look like, some people won't want you around" is going to fly when I was explicitly taught *not* to tolerate that shit by every single one of my black relatives.

Someone doesn't like that I'm occupying a space? Well I'm not hurting them, so that's a them problem and not a me problem. That's how I've learned how to exist as black in white-majority spaces. Why do you think you can change the demographic and get me to agree with you?

Similarly scrolling past a post that was effectively "trans mascs should sit down and shut up and let other people do the talking" and I WISH that I was exaggerating but the post did literally use the phrasing "you need to sit down and shut up" and here's the thing.

Every single one of the women in my family whether they consider themselves feminists or not taught me to never tolerate someone telling me to sit down and shut up and let someone else talk over me. That my voice is my power, and that I should never let someone take that power from me.

Why do you think I'm going to tolerate it now?

Okay, but black people (and any other oppressed minority) don't benefit from a system of privilege and culturally-imbued sense of superiority and entitlement. Men do.

So long as patriarchy is the hegemonic social system, men have an obligation to undermine it, and respect the lived experiences of those harmed by it.

I don't know how this interacts with the trans man experience. Messily, from everything I've heard. And I'm not gonna pretend that I have a solution. But I definitely know that telling a world full of women and other people imperiled by patriarchy that they're wrong for being on the defensive around men ain't it.

crazy how the uncomfortability people experience while being around a man and while being around a black person come from two entirely different things, and how men as a social class and black people as a social class are treated completely differently. people are uncomfortable around black people because theyre assholes. People are uncomfortable around men because men commit the large majority of sexual and violent offenses and have violently oppressed and objectified women for thousands of years ❤️ fucking obviously not every single man is a horrible person, but almost every woman has had some sort of negative experience with a man. I dont know a single woman in my life who hasnt had to deal with creepy men since a terrifyingly young age. I dont know a single woman in my life who hasnt had a man be violent towards her. So yea lol, if you have a problem with an entire social class of people being uncomfortable around men because of the trauma men have caused them, then thats honestly on you op. its similar to getting in a car wreck and now everytime you get in a car its fucking terrifying. maybe instead of crying about it online and acting like youre the victim in all this, how about you help take the steps in building a society where people dont get so traumatized they’re uncomfortable around men 🤷‍♀️

Hey quick question to you and everyone else who has specified "black people" vs "men" - do you think black men aren't people and thus don't count?

Hey quick can you tell me something.

What danger was she in when she used this same logic to make a false police report and stated he was trying to kill her and rape her when he was just birdwatching? Because this is the behavior I'm tlking about that you and everyone else with this logic is ignoring.

Hey can you tell me something else?

What demographic are these kids vs their adoptive mothers and what happened to them? What danger did these boys represent? Do you think they utilized any power of manness before or after they died along with their sisters?

Can you tell me the justification for this boy's trial and execution?

How about this one?

Hey weird it's almost like the logic you're using is used constantly as a facet of racism deliberately intended to hurt and even kill black people, including black men! Who are just guilty of existing in public when racist white people decide that their discomfort matters more than anything else.

Again, I think people are missing the point that racism against POC and the actual legitimate fear/mistrust women/fem people have towards men are 2 entirely different things. Are we forgetting that black women are the most oppressed group because of the racism AND misogyny they have to deal with? Yes, in a perfect world, we shouldn't have these preconceived ideas about anyone, ever. But the legitimate fear and mistrust women have for men is not inherently racist (yes, of course it can be magnified for certain women because of their racism) women have been literally been the dirt under men's boots for most of our documented history. Yes, these things can go hand in hand, but one does not cancel out the other or mean that the responses women have to the trauma that's has been endured for centuries is invalid. As a white person, I have to be aware and understand that POC can feel unsafe around me from the inherent fact that white people have subjected and put POC through the worst kind of shit, for all of history, and that it's still not over or fixed. Men have to understand that women are reacting to them in this way because there is so much history that made us react this way.

📢 ALL of these examples are examples of white women using LITERALLY THIS EXACT LOGIC to hurt and KILL black people INCLUDING BLACK WOMEN 📣

Example 1 leaned on this logic as she called the police on a birdwatcher and made a false police report stating that he assaulted and raped her, then gloated to his face that he would be believed because she is a white woman reporting a dangerous and aggressive sexually violent black man. It's ON VIDEO. Thankfully, he survived this encounter.

Example 2 are a pair of white lesbians who adopted and fostered a gaggle of black children and used them as props during the black lives matter protests to tell black people to stop protesting the false police reports and unjust police killings of black men and women, even when they were crying in the photographs because they were afraid of the police they were forced to hug. The pair was in legal trouble due to STARVING AND BEATING the kids so bad they had to move several times to outrun the state coming to take the kids away. When they finally couldn't run anymore they superglued the kids' seatbelts shut and drove off a cliff, killing them all.

Example 3 was arrested and framed for the rape of two white girls. Despite prosecuters knowing that there was reasonable doubt that he had anything to do with it, they pushed the execution through by reasoning that he was a black male and thus it was only a matter of time and the women in the area would be more comfortable with him gone. The process was neither quick nor painless, and he suffered while he died. He was 14.

Example 4 is Emmitt Till, who was wrongfully accused by a white woman who was "uncomfortable" with him walking past her and told her KKK buddies that he raped her. They beat him so bad that he was not recognizable during his funeral. His grave is still desecrated to this day. She admitted recently that he didn't even look at her.

If you want to invoke the suffering of black women here, understand that this hurts black women as well. The entire situation with the black athletes in the Olympics is due to this exact logic being used to hurt both trans women and intersex women. Black women are frequently forcibly masculinized, so they too are targeted by this in addition to misogynoir. Police resist investigating domestic violence and rapes of black women done by black men because they feel the black woman was asking for it by choosing to involve herself with a black man.

Like it or not, your logic IS racist, and has a body count that continues to harm black people as a whole every single day.

some interesting highlights.

So I'm pretty sure the "uncomfortable around black people" quote is meant to read as "People are uncomfortable around black people becuase [these people who get uncomfortable around black people] are assholes", not as "because black people are assholes". It's a grammar failure, not blatant racism.

(It's also a logic failure, but that's another thing)

I hate this mentality so fucking much. No, the Australian desert is not mostly sand. No, you will not die if you visit. Yes, it is racist to think like this.

showing non-australians (and tbh a fair amount of racist australians too) this map and asking them to explain how come the “empty and uninhabitable” desert is home to dozens and dozens of Indigenous language groups 🤨

link to a better quality version of the map:

How is misunderstanding the climate and geography of a place in any way related to race?

When you look at a place that has some of the oldest continuous cultures in the entire world in it and declare that nobody could live there when said cultures are largely wiped out and those remaining are struggling to survive because they got genocided by a bunch of people who showed up and said they don't count as real people living there then yeah

If you don't know about the history or culture of a place it's fine to just say you don't know rather than declare that it must clearly be uninhabitable wasteland because it's different to your home

Racist intent is not required for racist results

@the-great-ladyg Hope you don't mind I'm answering in a post, hun, I just have a lot to say about this!!

I think the reason Antis don't attack big name authors it's because Antis are "brainless". And no I don't mean this in the ableist sense, I mean this in the sense that they don't think for themselves. They're victims of mass media fearmongering, they like or dislike whatever is dictated by the general level of current tolerance.

Everyone has read big name author books with questionable themes. The thing is, nobody brings that up because it, genuinely, doesn't matter. So the public doesn't ponder about the nature of those questionable themes, and if they do, because the general public it's a lot more smart than Antis give them credit for, disregard it as simple fictional content and for what it is: As something that doesn't matter.

Now, because there's been such an upraise in fandom puritanism in the last few years ―I'm not sure why but what I am sure of is that there's not just one source of why―, people do stop and ponder about these things. And because there is a widespread fear and sense of "urgency" and "danger" about these things, Antis thusly are born.

Think of it as the tide-pod challenge a few years back. There most likely wasn't a huge number of kids who did it; a big part of the reason many did was because of the mass media reports about the subject. But Gen-Z got blamed and labeled and attacked for it just because there was a mass media panic about an issue that pretty much no one was seriously considering at the time.

Same with proshipping. The amount of proshippers who do genuine harm is nothing compared to the amount of proshippers who are just normal, everyday people. Mass panicking over this only breeds more hostility towards proshippers, who are in turn more reachable and brought up in reachable social media; i.e. TikTok, Twitter, etc.

So I genuinely think that the reason for this phenomena comes from a misconception about the nature of publishing.

Got this theory off of reading a few threads full of what I call Anti Logic. These conversations contained statements that published material is somehow inherently different from fanfic, and further implied this is because published works are 'reviewed' prior to publishing. There seemed to be the idea that someone in the publishing chain had made sure the published material handled topics the 'right' way.

Which is bunk; the nature of the review & editing process is to make sure there's nothing glaringly missing; that it flows and is generally spelled correctly, etc. Publishers aren't controlling the material being published in that nature. Esp not in America.

But if you think the review process is about 'fixing' or 'correcting' what's 'wrong' with the work then maybe there is a belief that published works - due to the aforementioned review process - don't romanticize/glorify/etc. A third-party already made sure that wasn't the case. Fanfiction, then, would be a different beast because there's no review expert or hell hardly any review at all. That would make fanfic open to all the stuff books aren't subject to.

I genuinely think it isn't that deep:

The reason that small creators get attacked but nobody goes after the "big names" - nobody is demanding HBO apologize for Game of Thrones or that The Color Purple be taken down - is because small creators are close enough to hit.

I realized this when I went through it several years ago over the Lesbian Flag Drama in queer creator land - and just thinking about that makes me want to throw up - people were harassing me, my partners, my kid, was not because they thought that I was legitimately "anti lesbian." They weren't going after @simakai bc they thought they really hated lesbians either.

It was one hundred percent because we were close enough to hit. We were people they could actually bother in a meaningful way. They could hurt us, they could at least try to damage our reputations, they could fill our inboxes with harassment and tell my kid that I secretly hate her.

And that, genuinely, is what I think makes up 99% of why small creators get targeted. Groups like this know that big creators and big corporations are immune to the damage they can do, but small creators aren't. Even if they can't do anything that really hurts us in the long run, they can make our lives quite unpleasant in the short term. And they have absolutely harassed some people back into the closet, off of platforms...

I think there's also this idea of, by hitting whoever is close enough to reach, they're contributing to The Cause, and even a tiny contribution to The Cause is a moral imperative no matter what it might cost. and I think there's this feeling that by advancing The Cause, maybe that can eventually add up to enough impact to take down bigger targets

this is, of course, all complete bullshit

for the record, I can think of at least one case where people will readily accuse creators and fans of larger-scale media of being or supporting sex pests based on the media's content: if the creators are japanese

If you see prominent right wing figures "suddenly making sense" when they talk about Israel or Palestine - don't be tempted to think you have common ground with them.

It's not "wow, even this evil person sees how bad these people are."

It's "this right wing propagandist found a tool to push their views into the mainstream."

They're using the cause to make you listen to them. They're trying to get you used to their conspiracies and their talking points. Anyone who has a platform full of antisemitism or Islamophobia shouldn't be listened to, even if you think their words right now make sense.

That's intentional. It's a recruitment tactic. It's a way to normalize their views. Watch who you're listening to.

as a person of color it’s so important to me that miles looked at hobie—rule-breaking, conflict-provoking, dark-humored hobie—and couldn’t help but call him cool, that pavitr and gwen see him as a reliable dude when adults call him a “piece of work”. we see him just fuck around and cause trouble and joke about capitalism and silently advise miles to be skeptical about authority.

idk like its easy to have another charming (usually white) rebel without a cause who stirs the pot for shits and giggles with a smug grin on his face to match his devil may care attitude, that the kind and humble protag shrugs off in his quest to seek approval from authority. but then instead we get teens from marginalized identities looking up to a young black man who challenges them to think about their actions carefully and question what they know, who jokes about things that other people would politely grimace at in response to, who makes adults uncomfortable. i can think of some people in my life like him—those older kids whom i was told were troublemakers, whom adults told me to ignore, to be scared of, to reject, yet were the ones who gave me wisdom and whom i ended up looking up to and whom i bitched about colony and homophobia and fascism with.

and it isn’t just hobie and his throwaway lines barbed with criticism and discontent, it’s also when gwen says “can you stop being a cop for once”, it’s also when pavitr says “this is where the british stole all our stuff”, it’s that level of awareness of unfairness and injustice in the world they live in and as kids they just have to passively accept the status quo and kick the dirt and angstily, cynically point at injustice with a half-cocked smile of irony. of course young vigilantes would say shit like that. of course young vigilantes would have blm pins and trans lives matter flags and jokes about colony and capitalism. of course kids like me would understand that. of course kids like me would look at hobie and say he’s one cool fucking dude.

These make my stomach hurt, that people have to do these things in order to be as safe as possible when they travel through everyday life.

That I don’t think of these situations shows my privilege. I want the world to be better.

Years ago as a federal worker I was chosen to take an executive leadership course with other federal workers from across the country and different agencies. A white guy from Indiana started at me in awe for more than six weeks because he had NO idea a black woman could be erudite!

I remember when Anita was testifying on Clearance Thomas, my white couldn't believe how educated and "well-spoken" she and other black citizens were. White colleagues were "astounded." 🫤

The older y'all get, you'll start to turn that right around. I haven't done respectability in over a decade and at any point that someone acts like I should, I put the pressure on them to be embarrassed about thinking that way. I can hardly wait until you're all comfortable enough to make them behave when you're simply existing in their presence.

A pattern of dismissal and retaliation: the experiences of Zixin Z. and the Chinese volunteers

The OTW and its volunteer team started off as “mostly white, middle class, middle aged, [American] coastal ladies,” but over time it has grown into an international community spanning across several countries and cultures. Serving a multi-cultural, multi-national community inevitably comes with its own challenges, such as accounting for different community needs and norms and recognizing the varying risk levels associated with volunteer participation. 

The experiences of Chinese volunteers at the OTW, including 2023 board candidate Zixin Z., exemplify how the OTW has fallen short. The Chinese volunteers at the OTW have been continually ignored, dismissed, mocked, or threatened for voicing concerns when OTW activities stumble into sensitive political, cultural, or legal issues. They have also faced retaliation for speaking up against the racist behavior of OTW leadership.

We believe that the OTW can find a way to handle these conflicts equitably, rather than dismissing or retaliating against volunteers who raise concerns. We’ve provided an overview as well as analysis under the cut. 

everyday white women complain about weaponized incompetence with men and everyday they turn around and do the exact same thing to poc

“I didn’t know what xyz meant!!” why on earth would you repeat it then without looking it up first if you didn’t know the meaning. google is right there you can use it.

“How am I supposed to learn if you don’t educate me?” once again, Google is at your fingertips, use it for the love of god.

“Well I can’t find any sources on [this topic]” found four within a minute, you just want poc to do the labor for you.

“Being mean doesn’t mean you’re right!” “You’re just aggressive!” “Well if you don’t want to have an ~civil~ conversation..” “You’re overemotional” do y’all even hear yourselves. Like do you never stop to think that maybe, just maybe the shit you’re parroting sounds a little familiar?

ok so most of this sounds about right, but GOOGLE SEARCH RESULTS ARE PERSONALISED. You found what you were looking for instantly BECAUSE GOOGLE ALREADY KNEW THIS IS WHAT YOU'D BE LOOKING FOR. A person new to the topic IS going to get completely unhelpful results. And if you go past the second page of results or so, Google gets suspicious that you're a spambot. So, you know. That part is real.

This is a memo from within the office of a Florida prosecutor.

I always get a kind of… reality shock, you could say, from things like this. Because most of the discussion of racism I see is about stuff like a fan artist drawing a dark-skinned character with not-dark-enough skin. 

And then I take a look at the real world and I see people entrusted by society with the power to destroy lives, blatantly using that power to punish anyone who dares to be born the wrong ethnicity.

There is no shared white history. Europeans all hated each other from the first settlers up until the 1500s. No Italian has even fucking heard the word “Odin” until long after (”white”) christian missionaries nearly eradicated that religion. If  you and I are both white than our ancestors probably fucking hated each other. Hell, if you’re a white mutt like me, various roots of your own family tree fucking hated each other and considered each other foreign savage barbarians. The only thing that unifies the white race is skin color and privilege, and neither of those things fill me with any kind of pride.

I’m going to refute this later, but I’m in the middle of changing a flat tire.

lol no you’re not

the answer to his pinned question is no btw

Everyone in the notes going “but everyone hated each other at one point so please stop talking about it” seems to completely “forget” that medieval Mongol tribes, Arab caliphates, indigenous peoples and Iron Age African kingdoms did not and do not have long lasting, globe spanning empires which specifically survived and thrived on the creation of artificial racial groups, mass genocide, and slavery. The Mongol Khanates, who were definitely guilty of genocide, collapsed in record time. The Caliphates did not have the European style of racialized chattel slavery, nor did the African kingdoms, nor did they murder half the population of the Congo for rubber in just a few years, or intentionally wipe out almost the entire indigenous population of the Western Hemisphere.

Do y’all just conveniently ignore the fact that European colonizers owned every single bit of land in Africa and the Western Hemisphere by the 20th century? I know it makes y’all uncomfortable to realize that modern racism is a product of capitalist hierarchy, and that the shared institutions of “the West” all have their logical conclusion in Nazi Germany. But you’re gonna have get over this bullshit guilt complex, look reality in the eye and own up to it like a functioning human being. Unless you’re in the military or a CEO, you haven’t contributed to imperialism, so stop acting like acknowledging it = admitting guilt.

Ignoring, deflecting, or flat out refusing to acknowledge that European racial ideology and colonialism (which are inherently tied together) has been the most violent, destructive force in human history is exactly how we get white nationalists running around with no consequences. Y’all watched it happen in Germany and did nothing, and you’ll do it again. You’ll do anything to not have to feel uncomfortable for even a moment.

HEY THANK YOU FOR THIS

If you are a white kid with a positive relationship (as in they are not abusing you and generally like you as a kid and want you to like them) with a casually racist family member have you considered guilt tripping them? It's been a highly effective tactic with my grampa. When he used to pop off with shit I wouldn't give him a dissertation like my mom and uncle did bcus he'd just dig in his heels and argue. Instead, I found a well placed "wow :( no it's fine I just like idk. I didn't know you were like that :(((( " worked WONDERS. If you want to deradicalize people, don't focus on writing essays for random trolls online. Just make your racist family feel bad for being racist. You might even be able to sneak some idk facts and logic into them after you've been doing that consistently while hanging out.

I'm middle aged now and have reached a status in my family and among my inlaws that I can even just douse them with a look of shocked disgust and they receive the message that what they're saying is way out of line for their social strata.

It seems to be slowly making inroads with some of them, because they start thinking over the bullshit they're parroting, and considering what about it is so nasty.

Letting them intellectualize their bullshit doesn't work. It's too comfortable for them to continue to regurgitate talking points they heard on talk radio. You gotta activate their anxiety about rejection, and prepare to actually do some rejecting.

If you want them to realize the ideas they're spouting have real world consequences, then they need to see consequences can happen to them.

Bonus: my kid sees me reacting with overt disgust and learns that racism is disgusting and horrifying, rather than something to be calmly abstracted and divorced from reality.

I think that all terfs who call themselves "females" should watch this video

Video transcript:

This is page 45 in the book "Females" by Andrea Long Chu.

In the United States the man known as the father of gynecology, J. Marion Sims, built the field in the antebellum South, operating on enslaved women in his backyard, often without anesthesia — or, of course, consent. As C. Riley Snorton has recently documented, the distinction between biological females and women as a social category, far from a neutral scientific observation, developed precisely in order for the captive black woman to be recognized as female — making Sims's research applicable to his women patients in polite white society — without being granted the status of social and legal personhood. Sex was produced, in other words, precisely at the juncture where gender was denied. In this sense, a female has always been less than a person.

Acknowledgement of this, however, would require terfs to give a fuck about black women. Which they never do.

So like, fandom has a racism problem, yeah. That's not a surprise. Fandom's just a microcosm of the rest of society, and society's got a racism problem. But the more I look across content, the more I've started to realize people don't seem to understand why racism is.... a problem.

And that makes it harder for people to see racism, when they don't really... understand why and how it's a problem. I've been thinking about this for the last day, and so I'm making this post today because I finally had a chance to sit and put my thoughts together in a way that I hope will make sense.

Because here's the thing. I've been getting... more and more the idea that people think racism is a problem because it makes people feel bad. That Jim stabbed that British officer because calling Frenchie a slave was an insult that hurt Frenchie's feelings. That Ed had the French captain skinned and thrown overboard because calling Ed a donkey hurt his feelings. That the ship full of aristocrats were jerks because they hurt Ed's feelings.

And like. Yeah, I mean, on a very surface level, their feelings were hurt, sure, those were shit things to experience. But it's not about their feelings, first and foremost. Racism isn't about making people feel bad. Those things weren't bad just because they were especially shit insults.

Racism is about making structural oppression. It's about making people less - not making them feel less, but legally, socially, morally, literally, less than. It's about establishing "this is a person, and that is not a person". It's about society wide depersonalization. And in the context of OFMD especially, it's about whiteness and colonization, and the way that racism is the socially created and legally enforced system through which whiteness decides who counts and who doesn't. Who is a person and who is a thing.

Slaves and donkeys? These are things. These are items to be bought and traded and sold and put down and compensated for the loss. They are not people with rights and freedoms and protections, they are line items on someone's accounting sheet, objects with monetary value pre-determined and understood.

Frenchie isn't called a slave because that British officer (yeah, I'm not learning his name, not sorry) felt like being an ass or wanted to make him feel bad. He called Frenchie a slave because he was furious that some thing, some object, some less than creature, was speaking to him as if they could have even the faintest hope of being on the same playing field, let alone equally human. He was declaring Frenchie an object and a tool that should be silent unless spoken to.

That's why Jim throws that knife at him. That's why Jim is pissed enough to blow their cover even with a fuck-off huge warship right next to them.

Because everyone on the ship knows exactly what being a slave would make Frenchie. And Jim especially has reason to be aware of and sensitive to that, given that Jim is in love with a Black man who's already been being demeaned, dismissed, and disdained through this whole encounter.

Those British officers get their shit wrecked because they're declaring people the crew loves to be less than they are, less than human, reminding them all that in the world outside of piracy Frenchie, Oluwande, and Roach aren't people but property. Objects. And that shit's not fucking acceptable.

This logic directly follows through with the French captain Ed has killed - which, let's be clear, that French captain was definitely going to be killed no matter what, because this is a pirate raid and if they massacred what seemed to be a majority of the crew already, there's little chance they'll leave the dickbag captain alive behind them. So this isn't a man who got killed because he was a racist fucking dick.

This is a man who got himself a worse death being a racist fucking dick.

The scene plays out in a very similar way as the previous dickbag racist to get got, except in this case, there's no Jim to to take control of the situation (Stede is not able particularly helpful here because of his own implicit biases that he's yet to unpack), there's just Ed and Fang here to react to this situation.

And the situation is - the French Captain being a racist, and specifically choosing to focus on being a racist to Ed rather than just being generally anti-pirate. I'd thought that was pretty clear until I came across the sentiment that Ed is lashing out here because his "feelings were hurt" rather than because he was responding to racist bigotry, so let's be blunt about that.

Stede starts the interaction with a characteristically bitchy remark about how there's a distinct lack of saucier spoons on this "supposedly first class vessel", but when the French captain throws out, "my apologies... hadn't imagined we'd be hosting your kind", the meaning of that statement goes right over Stede's head. He registers insult, sure, but the way Ed stills there? The way he closes his eyes and then turns and requests clarification in a way that is clearly meant to give this asshole a chance correct his mistake?

That's Ed identifying what Stede missed. That when the French captain says your kind he's not referring to pirates. And that's made clear by the fact that when he continues on, he doesn't direct his response to Ed And Stede, he directs it to Ed specifically.

"A rich donkey is still a donkey."

That's the French captain doing what the British officer did. Naming Ed for an object, a beast of burden, a thing that is not worthy of recognition or respect or acknowledgement. Ed's Blackbeard and yet as far as this asshole is concerned, by the very fact that he's not white nothing he's ever accomplished, not the fear he inspires or the legend he's built, matters in the face of that.

That's what racism is about.

It's about whiteness establishing that the most successful, the most fearsome, the most legendary of all pirates is an indigenous man and that makes him worth less than any white man. He's got this captain's life in his hands, and even that can't make the man treat Ed with a crumb of caution or respect. He's not a person to that French man. He's an upstart, an animal stepping out of line.

And honestly, I think too many people think Stede's reaction was the right one. Because it wasn't. At all.

Stede's not helpful here, I mentioned earlier, because he's got his own implicit bias acting as baggage. When Ed expresses his absolute fury at this man calling him a donkey, a beast of burden, an animal, even though he doesn't know nothing about Ed, Stede's response - is to try and stop the anger, rather than address the source of it. "Don't debase yourself for a man who doesn't have a single tureen on board." @knowlesian has written some great meta on the subject of this response, but to put it simply - Ed also doesn't have a tureen on his ship, Stede, and there's nothing debasing in a natural and normal anger response.

Someone labels you an animal, a beast, a creature, you should get angry. They should get cussed the fuck out. Especially because again, it's not unique. The French captain is very effectively reminding Ed that the greater society, the world, will never see him as a full person, deserving of respect and acknowledgement, no matter what he has or how he carries himself or what he accomplishes. It's foreshadowing how the party will go - to the white world, Ed will always be a novelty at best, a disobedient animal at worst.

Lashing out at that, especially with words, isn't debasing yourself.

And honestly, that guy getting thrown overboard? And skinned? (Though really, it's up in the air as to whether Fang actually bothered with that.) That's a power fantasy for so many of us fans of color, lmao, the idea that god, one of the fucked up assholes out here doing their level to remind us that the world does not see us as full and equal people, gets to suffer and die.

It's not because his feelings were hurt. It's because just like the British officers, this man is reminding Ed and the audience that the structural power of racism is such that you can never win within the system of it, because the system is built to keep us out, keep us down, keep us pinned.

Stede's reaction makes sense, because he's part of that system too - he's been born and raised in it, in the respectability politics, in the genteel illusion that the upperclass way of doing things, where you direct the initial response to the person reacting too loud, too public, showing all that messy, uncouth emotion rather than the person who's actually the problem. You look at the response rather than the source.

And Stede, to his credit, isn't trying to shut Ed up. He's trying, in his own way, to be helpful, actually!

But Stede doesn't know what it's like, to be considered not a person. As a white gay man who everyone has been able to clock as gay his entire life, he's been treated as lesser than and wrong and disgusting his entire life, by his father and his peers, but he's till a rich, land-owning white man. That makes him a person, even if a despised, rejected, undesired one. His society sees him as a person, someone who could even, theoretically, plausibly, be treated with respect if he could just behave according to their rules.

That's not an opportunity you can have, with racism. It's one of the underlying differences in homophobia and racism that I've personally felt, as someone who's experienced both. With homophobia, what you are is wrong but the expectation is that you can, should, and must, act "right", behavior "appropriately" and then you can fit in. At the bottom of the pack, but in. With racism, you're always out. You can't change your race. You can't change what you're identified as on sight. You can't do anything to overcome what you are, and that's why you're treated as and understood to be less than.

And in this time period, that's very much a legal standing, far more overtly than it is in 2022. Black people aren't people, in 1717, they're property or soon to be property or creatures without real intelligence who need to be minded by their betters. Indigenous people aren't people, they're savage animals who need to be minded by their betters, uneducated, uncontrolled.

The response to the British, and the French, and later to those aristocrats, is appropriate in this world, because this is a world that does in fact, cater a bit to that fantasy - what if some people got what they deserved, sometimes? What if it was in fact, the right thing, to fuck up a racist? The internet loves to talk about punching Nazis and TERFs, as they should, but the same goes for a racist too. These guys are reinforcing a corrupt, horrific system of abuse, and they get what they deserve.

I'm sure this won't reach many people. But if you read this post, I hope you think about what racism is, and how it works, and understand that it's not about the individual at all. It's about the system at play and how that system dehumanizes and minimizes and objectifies whole classes of people for the sake of uplifting a single race and making everyone else into objects and novelties and creatures rather than people.

Next time you see someone say Ed "had his feelings hurt" by the French captain, or imply that the British navy were "rude" to Frenchie, Oluwande, and Roach, remind them that they weren't fucking rude, feelings weren't hurt, they were being actively dehumanized in accordance with an overarching system of widespread oppression.