zenosanalytic reblogged
My friend blocked me because I wouldn’t stop sending him this picture
zenosanalytic reblogged
"it's just because of who's willing to answer the poll/who gets to see it" there has been about 7-8 polls atp asking the race question. And every time, it skews 70-75% white.
There's no "well it didn't reach the pee oh cees" it reached us lmao. These often get into the tens of thousands. We saw it! There's just not that many of us here! I'm not sure why it's so hard to admit for some folks that this website skews white. Yes, odds are, you don't know nearly as many people of color (or their beliefs) as you think. Yes, you likely have racist biases that are going unaddressed due to the lack of people of color in your life. And yes, being on Tumblr does not automatically make you more progressive on these topics- not if you're only ever listening to other white people, which is likely due to the cultural whiteness of this app. This has been my TEDtalk 👍🏾
zenosanalytic reblogged
This article is from 2022, but it came up in the context of Palestine:
Here are some striking passages, relevant to all colonial aftermaths but certainly also to the forms we see Zionist reaction taking at the moment:
Over the decade I lived in South Africa, I became fascinated by this white minority [i.e. the whole white population post-apartheid as a minority in the country], particularly its members who considered themselves progressive. They reminded me of my liberal peers in America, who had an apparently self-assured enthusiasm about the coming of a so-called majority-minority nation. As with white South Africans who had celebrated the end of apartheid, their enthusiasm often belied, just beneath the surface, a striking degree of fear, bewilderment, disillusionment, and dread.
[...]
Yet these progressives’ response to the end of apartheid was ambivalent. Contemplating South Africa after apartheid, an Economist correspondent observed that “the lives of many whites exude sadness.” The phenomenon perplexed him. In so many ways, white life remained more or less untouched, or had even improved. Despite apartheid’s horrors—and the regime’s violence against those who worked to dismantle it—the ANC encouraged an attitude of forgiveness. It left statues of Afrikaner heroes standing and helped institute the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which granted amnesty to some perpetrators of apartheid-era political crimes.
But as time wore on, even wealthy white South Africans began to radiate a degree of fear and frustration that did not match any simple economic analysis of their situation. A startling number of formerly anti-apartheid white people began to voice bitter criticisms of post-apartheid society. An Afrikaner poet who did prison time under apartheid for aiding the Black-liberation cause wrote an essay denouncing the new Black-led country as “a sewer of betrayed expectations and thievery, fear and unbridled greed.”
What accounted for this disillusionment? Many white South Africans told me that Black forgiveness felt like a slap on the face. By not acting toward you as you acted toward us, we’re showing you up, white South Africans seemed to hear. You’ll owe us a debt of gratitude forever.
The article goes on to discuss:
- "Mau Mau anxiety," or the fear among whites of violent repercussions, and how this shows up in reported vs confirmed crime stats - possibly to the point of false memories of home invasion
- A sense of irrelevance and alienation among this white population, leading to another anxiety: "do we still belong here?"
- The sublimation of this anxiety into self-identification as a marginalized minority group, featuring such incredible statements as "I wanted to fight for Afrikaners, but I came to think of myself as a ‘liberal internationalist,’ not a white racist...I found such inspiration from the struggles of the Catalonians and the Basques. Even Tibet" and "[Martin Luther] King [Jr.] also fought for a people without much political representation … That’s why I consider him one of my most important forebears and heroes,” from a self-declared liberal environmentalist who also thinks Afrikaaners should take back government control because they are "naturally good" at governance
- Some discussion of the dynamics underlying these reactions, particularly the fact that "admitting past sins seem[ed] to become harder even as they receded into history," and US parallels
And finally, in closing:
The Afrikaner journalist Rian Malan, who opposed apartheid, has written that, by most measures, its aftermath went better than almost any white person could have imagined. But, as with most white progressives, his experience of post-1994 South Africa has been complicated. [...]
He just couldn’t forgive Black people for forgiving him. Paradoxically, being left undisturbed served as an ever-present reminder of his guilt, of how wrongly he had treated his maid and other Black people under apartheid. “The Bible was right about a thing or two,” he wrote. “It is infinitely worse to receive than to give, especially if … the gift is mercy.”
zenosanalytic reblogged
one of my fave posts honestly
this is legitimately even funnier when you're an anthropologist because anthropologists would constitutionally not be able to answer this
zenosanalytic reblogged
I wanna come back to this, because I think its emblematic to something common that I hate to see in fandom interpretations of characters. Seeing a new character with different interest to your own should be an opportunity to expand your world view. literal children will see a character who’s a firefighter or an astronaut and develop an interest in that.
but adults will see a literal punk musician, and rather than decide to explore what music and culture inspired this character, instead re-imagine him engaging with material they find familiar, and ultimately safe.
I don’t like... have any feelings towards this guy personally... but this is a trend I see in fandom, especially around characters of color from cultures the fans are not familiar with. there is a desperate need to decontextualize them.
there is this absolutely DESPERATE need among especially white fans to prove that characters of other races but ESPECIALLY black characters are Just Like Them For Real by just copy pasting their favorite personal characteristics (or often just straight up stereotypes, like that shoplifter miles headcanon that went around) onto these characters. God forbid having to learn about a culture or even a subculture unlike your own, right
@blackfilmmakers
zenosanalytic reblogged
There being two movies now in the Benoit Blanc world, and both movies sharing some recognizable tropes and archetypes to build its flavor, there’s a specific type of character that I’m struck by, particularly as a white woman, in both Knives Out and Glass Onion:
The Sympathetic White Woman.
In KO it’s Meg. In GO it’s Whiskey. They both bond with the (WOC, very important to emphasize) protagonist by being less crappy to her than the rest of the cast, and both signal to the audience that they’re trustworthy as far as the protagonist goes. They tell the protagonist that they’re on her side. They try to be supportive. They’re sympathetic to the audience.
Then comes the moment when the Sympathetic White Woman’s security is threatened.
zenosanalytic reblogged
i found the second funniest map in the world today
What’s the funniest map?
^ magic spell of get assassinated by the turkish government
zenosanalytic reblogged
Anonymous asked:
Anakin is not racist
oh, man, that was fast!
listen. i’m gonna assume you’re an anakin fan — great! so am i! — but anakin is objectively an awful person and a canonical space-racist. that’s apparent even if you’re new to Star Wars like i am.
from Legends:
when asked about his view of the tuskens, anakin’s immediate response is “i have no use for tuskens.” i mean, i don’t know what there is to explain about that, because it’s right there. a whole race of people he doesn’t care for because they aren’t “useful,” as if that’s all people are meant to be to him. his issue with them is apparent but he won’t name it.
a’sharad hett directly names anakin’s issue: he is prejudiced. and anakin does not deny this. he “apologizes” but does not specify for what, because he knows he’s supposed to. you don’t just admit you’re a racist, especially not to a Master Jedi. which is exactly what irl racists do, lmfao.
when push comes to shove, anakin outright SAYS it.
“I know what you are — filthy, sneaking, Tusken! Animals! Hiding behind your masks! Your kind tortured and killed my mother and I’m glad I killed them all!” (Emphasis mine)
like, listen. this is racist as hell. the racist dog whistle is now a racist klaxon, alright. he sees the tuskens as subhuman, as inherently untrustworthy because of their appearance and their culture, and he is not only not bothered by killing them, but he’s happy he did it. you could argue anakin is shielding himself from his guilt with self-righteousness, which i might buy with any other character, but anakin is down right unrepentant.
it wasn’t enough for him to kill the tuskens responsible, which even a’sharad notes would have been acceptable in Tusken culture; anakin wanted them all dead, because they’re all guilty to him solely by virtue of being Tusken. this anger and hatred and bigotry pushes anakin to even lash out against a’sharad, a tusken jedi, fully dropping any pretense that he is okay with a’sharad despite him being half-tusken and a jedi. because you know what anakin is following? the ONE DROP RULE! even a drop of Tusken blood is too much tusken.
and still the wrong lessons are learned. for some godforsaken reason a’sharad learns he needs to be seen as a Jedi first and not a Tusken, which is not only antithetical to the Jedi way, but totally opposite to the point of this encounter, which is that we are all many things all at once, and pretending otherwise leads to destruction. anakin is a jedi and a murderer and a racist and the chosen one. ignoring the unsavory and cruel parts of him, never exposing him to the jedi council, and hoping his “better nature” would win out over time ensured that it never would. a’sharad is a Tusken and a jedi and many other things, but his wrongful assumption that pushing aside his heritage will gain him favor eventually causes more problems for him.
the only reason anakin and a’sharad stop fighting is because a’sharad removes his mask, revealing, tada, a hot human face! now anakin is capable of an insincere apology. but he still assumes the markings on a’sharad were forced on him, because he still believes tuskens are a barbaric and cruel people. then the moment is moved past so they can escape.
and despite this shit-ass “heart to heart,” anakin walks away with zero appreciation for a’sharad or the Tusken culture. he fails a’sharad’s lesson: it’s not that he can’t see a’sharad as human, as a person, as a jedi, it’s that he won’t, because he is attached to his view of the tuskens as lesser than, because it excuses his behavior, because it makes him righteous, because it makes him feel better, because it solidifies his entitled view of the world. which is exactly how irl racism and whiteness work.
and the final word on the subject is this. when all is said and done and anakin is asked if he would kill the tuskens again, knowing what he knows about them now, his answer is a cold, unmoved, “Yes.”
now, i know the Legends comics are not officially canon; the new canon is whatever Disney chooses to use and whatever appears in the movies. however, even if we just look at the clone wars, which are now canon to the Disney SWU, there are several instances in TCW where anakin makes disparaging comments about another species’ appearance, intelligence, and capability. i don’t have those on hand because i am not trawling through 7 seasons for quotes for you, but you can find them if you want to look.
my final thought here is this: i am not disparaging anakin fans (fanakins, if you will); like i said earlier, i am fascinated by his character, and enjoy him as a concept. what i am doing here is asking you (especially if you’re white) to consider the lengths to which fandom goes to ignore the very obvious signs that anakin is not just genocidal but racist. like him all you want but don’t ignore that part because that makes you uncomfortable. he kills kids. that’s not any better than being racist.
understanding the role of racism in his depiction, and his turn to fascism, only aids your storytelling and view of him, because it’s true to life. society is willing to ignore massive red flags if someone is white (and in Star Wars universe, we’ll add “human” to the list), male, and conventionally attractive. obi-wan is willing to ignore these things because he is the same, and because anakin does not treat HIM this way, obi-wan can blindly believe anakin would never treat anyone like this — which is, again, a phenomenon people of color call out often, where white people will say “X can’t be racist because he’s never said anything racist around me!” well yeah. because why would he? nevermind the fact that obi-wan and ahsoka witness anakin treating non-human suspects with extreme prejudice, abusing his power and authority as a jedi to get what he wants, and worse. anakin is and always has been a shitty racist cop on a power trip, but because he worked with “good cops” and knew better than to say anything out loud, he got away with it until he killed them all too.
this all feeds into the concept that while anakin’s fall is tragic, it is by no means unexpected. the only reason the main characters of the prequels are surprised is because they willingly looked away from the warning signs. the characters who didn’t — the Council, Mace, even Ahsoka at some points — are vilified by anakin, and because the main characters love anakin and have an attachment to him being the chosen one, they believe anakin over those who are suspicious of him and ignore or downplay the warnings until it’s all too late. the tragedy of anakin isn’t a tragedy of not being loved enough, or having people fail you; it’s the tragedy of refusing to get help, of refusing to let go of things even when they hurt you, it’s the tragedy of the bitter man drinking poison to kill someone ekse, and it’s the tragedy of the bystander: of what happens when we all stand by and watch people we love do terrible things without stopping them, because we’re as afraid of them not loving us anymore as we are of confronting what it means that we still want to love and be loved by cruelty.
tl;dr: anakin skywalker is racist and prejudiced. you can still like him as a character; this is not a moral judgment. but maybe you should prod at your like at him a little, and investigate the ways in which both anakin as a character and the fandom’s dismissive view of his many faults is indicative of the insidious way racism and whiteness works irl. especially if you’re white.
zenosanalytic reblogged
wodneswynn-deactivated-deactiva
Without a doubt, whiteness is a bigger enemy of “white culture” than anything else.
As for me, if I had to name my ethnicity, I guess I’m German-American; and once upon a time, that used to really *mean* something, used to be something deeper and more meaningful than Lutheran church and polka music and pretending to give a shit about soccer. There used to be extended families, schools, Sprachenbund, festivals, distinct communities, all that good stuff, but that’s all gone now. “Now it is just another someplace where automobiles live,” as Herr Vonnegut once said. And it’s the same story with Irish, Hungarian, Swedish, Italian, Norwegian, Russian, et cetera and so forth immigrants to this brokedick country; there used to be rich, vibrant communities of European immigrants and the children of European immigrants that kept alive art, music, folklore, language, all that good stuff, that said loudly and proudly, “We are here, and this is who we are.”
That’s all gone now. Nowadays, ethnicity within whiteness is just an excuse to drink expensive beer at a folk festival once a year. And people of color didn’t do that, naw, the dominant WASP society did that, and we were complicit in going along with it, because we benefited materially from it, nevermind what we had to give up along the way. They’ll try to sell you a bill of goods about how integration did this; it’s actually the opposite.
White pride is not cultural pride because whiteness is not a culture; whiteness is the Borg. The truth is that white-identitarianism is how come I never got the opportunity to learn Diets on my Oma’s knee.
It’s stuffy and takes a long time to set up and is more reading than anyone feels like doing but Rudolf Rocker’s Nationalism and Culture is a huge-ass take on basically this by other means.
As a Jewish person who married into an Irish-German-Geek family, this is scarily accurate. They were astonished that my family had this entire side-culture that had nothing to do with America OR really to do with religion, but was entirely about being Jewish (culture) - music and food and jokes and language. They had no traditions that were specifically German or Irish or Greek (or even any celebration of that particular blending). My husband didn’t even have the (to me) expected smattering of German or Greek words in his vocabulary, and had no knowledge of the cuisines.
Even their Christmas traditions were kind of… homogenized Americana.
I have felt this strongly for a very very long time. I have nothing of my Greek or Hungarian backgrounds, and almost nothing of my Jewish background because to earn whiteness, my family shed its cultures, its languages, its stories, and its everything. What I have of those things, I have had to excavate myself and there is so much that I don’t have the tools to access. Whiteness is like a gaping wound in my identity, its a sucking void that prevents me from finding the ground of my history to put my feet on. whiteness requires that we do violence to ourselves in order to access it, there should be no surprise that it is expressed through diverting and amplifying that violence outward. I experience whiteness as violence, and I genuinely do not understand how other white people find a place within it, and doubt that any of us do. and maybe this is the source of white insecurity, the instinctual knowledge that we are trying to exist in a non-space, a space of lack, an emptiness. We defend whiteness because we live in a world that tells us that it will keep us safe, when we know on a gut level that the shield is made of cardboard, that the protection it affords is barely more than a placebo. Whiteness is a poison. we can choose to counter it with an antidote, or we can poison ourselves and those around us for the appearance of safety.
trashgender-neurotica
Whiteness = Cultural Bleach
zenosanalytic reblogged
And he goes, “What are you?” Which is fucking rude.
libertybill