So in the coming days you’re going to notice that a lot of white people (“allies”) who rightly post constantly and routinely about things like canceling student loan debt, abortion rights, LGBTQ issues, immigration reforms and other glaring social injustices, will suddenly have nothing to say about Affirmative Action being overturned. Not because they haven’t had time to form an opinion, but because they believe in “reverse racism” against white people, and deep down they agree with the ruling. Pay attention. Take mental notes. These people are not our allies. Believe people when they show you who they really are.

Dark features/people as blessed, white and light people as sick

ladyoftheseastuff asked:

I'm writing a fantasy story where the world is permanently covered in snow & ice. The people share a common culture & are loyal to their city states, but they are not homogeneous in appearance; there will be many, many characters coded as PoC. The main religion centers on the sun, & those with dark features are 'favoured' by the sun god, while pale people or anyone who has white/blonde hair are thought vulnerable to "snow sickness", a disease caused by environmental factors (1/2) & have other rules and customs to gain religious approval. It's dangerous & infectious but not well understood. It affects social standing and opportunities, but it's meant to be tied with ideas of youth, vitality, & fear of aging & sickness: it's not limited to those coded as white. This is a cultural detail and not part of the main conflict, but I want to avoid unintentional allegories/parallels & fetishization. Is this a concept that's too close to crossing any of those lines? (2/2)

This feels less like a means to show dark skinned people in an empowering light and more like a weak attempt at subversion. My primary concern (which you have not specified) is how do the "blessed" class treat the "sickly" so to speak. We have fantasy stories like The Grisha Trilogy and Girls of Paper and Fire, which deal with magical ability/feature-based segregation and conflict.

In both cases there is a sense of entitlement which comes with hailing from the "favoured" class, quite obvious, since there will always be an inherent othering metaphor whenever you create such a division, whether it was meant to be a source of conflict or not.

However, the two mentioned series use the "magical people are blessed, non magical people are to be pitied" arc which is somewhat more subtle than divisions created just on the basis of skin colour.

Disclaimer as I do not have albinism or vitiligo: The latter can be extremely harmful, and not just in a racial context, but in cases of albinism, vitiligo etc.

~Mod Mimi

The pitfalls of subversions

While it is always lovely to see dark features considered in a favorable way, there are some issues you may come across. Such a story could easily end up dressing those you wished to uphold as bad guys in the readers' eyes, even if the story's society and the sun god etc. thinks they're amazing, and white and light people as the victims of dark people, deserving reader sympathy. This may especially be the case based on how these groups get treated in the story.

These sort of subversions lean dangerously into "reverse discrimination" plots which are not overall accurate or favorable allegories for your real, human audience. There being diversity on both sides doesn't necessary fix this issue or remove racial or ethnic implications. On that note, and as Mimi mentioned, being demonized and ostracized particularly for skin and genetic disorders like albinism is already a thing. What does your concept say of them?

I think Dark/Black as good and Light/white as bad is a doable concept. Your concept differs a bit from simply subverting black/white tropes. This is not just Black good guys and night skies being peaceful or neutral. It's not just white/light villains (as opposed to victims) or snow symbolling death or sickness.

White and light people are quite blatantly being declared as sick and unfavored and they may very well be victims in the reader's eye with the dark people being the villainous, unsympathetic bunch. Is this your intention?

More to consider

Such a concept requires thoughtful, careful planning and intentional writing. You should have an understanding of what your story implies to the readers and the real-life takeaways.

I think it's possible to make dark skin the favored skin of the sun god without it meaning white/light people stand in a negative light and are sick or unworthy.

Consider what it is that you like about the concept of your story. Can you keep the essence of whatever it is that excites you about your ideas, without denying a whole group of people favor? If not, how will you go about telling such a tale that is not meant to symbolize a sort of reversal of roles discrimination?

Why does the sun god get to determine what is good?

Are there other gods that might have different strong opinions? Perhaps who is favored varies by time of day, season, region, culture, god?

Can dark skin get its favor without white and light features being deemed unfavorable as a whole?

How big of a deal does this favor have to be? I advise reconsidering it being the point of discrimination to white/light people for all the reasons already described.

No matter the directions you go, please research and get the appropriate beta-readers for feedback on the in-depth concepts and story.

~Mod Colette

How many influential Jews in the world Hitler had to point out to no longer be racist?

Source:

Someone gets injured in a car crash and is given a bandaid for their injuries.

You see this and you're outraged. But instead of being outraged that all they're getting is a bandaid when that's clearly not enough to treat their injuries, you're outraged that you, who were not in the car crash and are not injured, didn't get a bandaid also.

That's what "straight pride" or "white lives matter" is.

Look 👀 Anyone is free to disagree with me on this and give me their reasonings, but I’m pretty sure these three things can’t exist. One, misandry. Two, reverse-racism. Three, heterophobia. Why? Because for these to exist, an opressed class would have to hold systematic power over the opressor class. Gay people commenting how straights are eww because we’ve lived out lives overwhelmed with straight media and homophobia from straight people… is not compared to the gay panic law, nor homophobic hate crimes nor the deaths that have come about just because a person is gay.

The same thing with misandry. Women, all women, are the oppressed class. Some more than others, of course, because class, race, home and sexuality all come into play. However even the richest white woman in the US living in a red state is oppressed and has less body autonomy than men (via lack of abortion rights). Some questions to prove whether systematic misandry is real or not:

1. Can you name 1 country where the entire government is female?

2. Can you name 1 country in the world where women kill more than 3 men per week?

3. Can you name 1 female led country in the world where it is illegal for men to drive a car or have a driving licence because they are perceived as too stupid?

5. Can you name 1 female led country in the world where men are not allowed to leave their houses without a female chaperone?

6. Can you name 1 country in the world where females in power have legally dictated that men should cover their entire bodies at all times, not show their hair or faces, and punish men and boys who do show their skin?

7. Can you name 1 female led country or community in the world that has legally banned boys from getting an education or attending school?

8. Can you name 1 country where large groups of women publicly flog and beat men as a form of punishment for being seen out alone without a female chaperone?

9. Can you name 1 female led country where the child marriage of boys as young as 6 years old to adult women is widely encouraged or legally allowed?

10. Can you name 1 country where men are not allowed to take part in sports at all?

Those are ten out of 37, the original article has more but massive TW for sexual assault and abuse.

Since there isn’t systematic misandry anywhere in the world and we still live in a patriarchy, I don’t think misandry can exist. Any prejudice against men doesn’t have power over them, nor does it affect them in any way (besides maybe their feelings), so how can it be harmful?

My Mom could easily be discribed as a misandrist ngl. We were looking at flats for me and she had come choice comments that were gruesome and out of proportion for what would happen if I had mixed sex flats. However I don’t think it can count as misandry because she’s seen and experienced enough harm by men that it crosses from needlessly rude, to wary and overcautious. Harmful to her mental health? Yes. Harmful to men? No.

One can absolutely be rude, cruel and judgemental towards men… but that is all reactionary to lived experiece and read experience. Or at least that is how I see it.

*I do not by any means support being rude and cruel, violent or abusive, towards ANYONE. Men included. I dislike my Mom’s way of thinking and I do not seek to replicate it. This is just to prove that misandry is a term used by men’s rights activists to put down feminists and women.

Lastly:

wikipedia, beloved, on its page about misandry

"Black people not liking white people and having a negative attitude towards white people in response to the racism perpetuated by white people is equally as bad as white people viscerally despising black people and seeing them as subhuman for no good reason because all racism is equally wrong"

and

"Women not liking men and having a negative attitude towards men in response to the sexism perpetuated by men is equally as bad as men viscerally despising women and seeing them as subhuman for no good reason because all sexism is equally wrong"

Are the same argument. If you can see the problems with one, then you should be able to see the problems with the other.

Intolerance

Whoopi hates "intolerance"

White people live in an alternate reality where it’s Black people who have all the advantages, despite all evidence to the contrary; where it takes only one exception to the rule—like Barack Obama getting elected, or a handful of Black people getting admitted into an overwhelmingly historically white university—to somehow “prove” that whites are disadvantaged, not Black people.

Men inhabit a similar alternate reality, where it’s women who have all the advantages, again, despite all evidence to the contrary. In this world, it’s men who are the victims of the justice system, because a statistically insignificant percent of women won cases against their abusers.

American Christians also lie and try to convince themselves that people of belonging to religious minorities somehow wield power over them…

Famous comedians and wealthy people with enormous platforms cry about how their (hate/racist/sexist/homophobic/transphobic/antisemitic/Islamophobic/etc) speech is supposedly being cancelled,…

Larger more powerful countries invade smaller countries, then turn right around and blame the aggression on the smaller sovereign nations they invaded…

We could carry this on with Lgbtq people and many other marginalized minorities, but the truth is, oppressors playing the role of the victim is one of the oldest, biggest, most reliable forms of ɟlᴉddᴉuƃ ʇɥǝ sɔɹᴉdʇ.

Throughout history, one of the most reliable ways the powerful impose their will on the powerless has been by pretending that their “freedoms” are being curbed, when nothing could be further from the truth. “Accuse them of what you are guilty of doing” is, unfortunately, a tried and true method of disempowering the downtrodden.

???

Has racism always existed?

(or "racism is non-abelian")

Conservatives like to stress the fact that America didn’t invent slavery. While it is true that slavery has existed throughout human history, all over the world. In most cases, people became slaves due to losing a war, as punishment, through debt. What made a slave was extrinsic. Even if enslaved for all your life, there was at least the notion that you *could have been* something else... under other circumstances. So, America didn’t invent slavery, but the kind of slavery practiced in the New World was unique in contrast to other instances of slavery in human history. 

The pseudoscience of “Racism” teaches that all of humanity can be divided into discrete categories of people; that black people are the category intrinsically suited to slavery. Hence, all children of black people are slaves, even if the father is white. This is the fundamental concept behind chattel slavery. Racism was a new way of implementing ethnic prejudice (ethnic prejudice, like slavery, has always existed in human history) Racism provided a justification for using generation after generation of people as low-cost labor. Racism built fortunes. The New World would have been worthless without billions of man-hours of stolen labor from enslaved people, some of whom were my ancestors.

This is why saying "racism goes both ways" is nonsense.

This is why saying that racism has "always existed between groups of people in human history" is incorrect. While "Ethnic prejudice/bigotry" can go in any direction,  the theory of racism was specifically about the inferiority of black people in an ordering of all people that places white people at the top. There was no such thing as "race" as we know it today before the theory of racism. This is not to say that people didn't have prejudices or stereotypes about groups. Racism is particular theory of  "science" and religion. 

Attempts to treat racism as a synonym for "ethnic prejudice" erase this history and make ongoing impacts of racism less visible— and thus harder to fight.

To make chattel slavery possible required a whole host of new myths and theories. Slavers needed to believe that all black people are unable to govern ourselves, that we only may live productively under constant application of violent punishment to prevent our inherent criminal and disorganized nature from ruining society.  This idea persists to this day in theories about black people being inherently criminal, less intelligent, oversexed and lazy.

It's not hard to find statistics that describe differences between the lives of people based on race. From lifespan, to income, education, to contact with the criminal justice system, black people fall behind. If you believe this is due to some intrinsic quality of black people or some intrinsic quality of culture created and propagated by black people calling these differences unjust is absurd. Efforts to address these inequalities are, then, giving black people more than we deserve.

Statements like “everyone is a little racist” can be very comforting to some. It’s fascinating to me how stridently some people will defend these statements. Why not just say “everyone has prejudices” or “everyone has some bigoted views” or “everyone has internalized some ethnic prejudices”  All of these later phrases are true, and convey the same ideas intended by “everyone is a little racist” the only difference?  Only by saying “everyone is a little racist” do we also get to generalize the idea of racism. Racism is simply another form of ethnic prejudice. Just as we might say slavery in the US is just another form of slavery and there has always been slavery. 

It would be like saying “everyone is a little anti- Semitic” to mean “everyone has some prejudices about religion.” But anti- semitism is a particular kind of religious, ethnic and, yes, sometimes racial bigotry. It has a specific history. 

The same thing is true of racism!

Race is, of course, totally "made up" -- arbitrary, fairly new in human history. Race is not only "made up" it is structured to place black people at the bottom and white people at the top of an imaginary hierarchy. Notions like the one drop rule, white purity, are embedded in our ideas about race to this day. Even though, we, those people denied a nationality/ethnic identity, have built culture within the boundaries of race. (for Black American culture the effort has been almost compensatory it its richness) An old "comedy song" from Will Heelan and Fred Helf was Every Race Has a Flag But the C**n (1900) this song struck a nerve with black artists of the time-- its ignorance distilled the unique issue with being black in "multi-ethnic" America. There is no identity for a Black person descendent from slaves outside of the (oppressive) framework of race. The only real option is to redefine that framework from the inside out. Every black person who is beautiful, intelligent, remarkable, compassionate, shocking, creative... every kind of human achievement that occurs within the framework of blackness destabilizes that old pseudoscience of racism and recreates a black identity. This is an incomplete project. Watering down the meaning of the word racism only makes it more difficult. 

you know what fuck it

I'm tired of people saying "You're People" or "my people" and im tired of this obsession with trying to portray people who don't agree with you as facists or commies.

Why are we all acting like certain ethnic groups and people who believe in certain political views all think exactly the same

Everyone is an individual

And everyone has different opinions

And as such individuals should be held accountable for their actions and their actions alone.

Furthermore reverse racism is still fucking racism

I know this is not directly feminist-related but I had to ask. Feel free to not answer, of course.

How do you respond to individuals who like to bring up the 'what about white people in majorly black populated countries' argument whenever you want to talk about the reverse racism myth? I can't tell if it's a valid point or a silencing tactic. I don't know, I just need an older black woman's opinion on this since I don't have any irl (my mom is fine but, we're different and I'd rather ask you lol) that I can ask.

Are they trying to say that white people in Black majority countries are somehow oppressed because there are less of them? Typically that's not the case and most white people. Zuckerberg's mansion in Barbados is something the average Barbadian will never be able to afford. He's not oppressed, he's a long term tourist at best and a colonizer at worst. White South Africans are often brought up as if they didn't run the government until the 90s and had to implement apartheid to do so. I've yet to see an example of reverse racism, a systemic oppression of a white class, in a Black majority country. But I'm always open to hearing more examples.

White supremacy is a global disease.

In this special episode we will discuss some basic concepts related to colonialism, imperialism, and racism. What is race? what is the difference between prejudice and discrimination? is reverse racism real?