for the people who missed it the first time

Whiteness and the Necessity of Violence

Insofar as whiteness incorporates violence, and depends on violence to reproduce a division it perceives as natural, biological, and inherent, it incorporates and is dependent upon the violation of non-‘white’ others, a violation it justifies through the allegation or belief that it is, in fact, the ‘others’ that violate the ‘white,’ that intrude upon its space and threaten it with contagion. In this sense, whiteness exists in playing the victim of ‘race,’ and whiteness racializes the world, itself, and others in order to perceive itself as and become this violated victim that must strike first in order to protect itself from the other’s aggression. Whiteness consists in believing that non-‘white’ others threaten and value and quality of whiteness, when whiteness actually depends on otherness to perceive its own specifically ‘white’ value or quality. The violation of others that staves off the violation of the ‘white,’ the activity of other-focused violation that protects ‘white’ identity, protects only the broken mirror through which violence is perceived as necessary. Whiteness exists to justify the necessity of its own violence, the violence that is required for race to continue to be a discernible and useful category of human organization. Whiteness exists to make its own originary violence invisible, and to assign violence to the outside. In the ‘white’ mind, ‘white’ violence exists only as a counter-violence, responding to an initial aggression from the ‘racial’ other. Whiteness is this fear of racial violation, this fear that the other will hurt it, contaminate it, ruin it, kill it, or cause it to become extinct. Because whiteness is not human, and does not see itself as human, its violence exists to protect itself from a humanity it does not see itself to be a part of. The counter-violence of whiteness serves to protect those who believe they are ‘white’ from the ‘violating’ knowledge that they are human—merely human, all too human, human like all the rest. The violence exists to protect the division, and the division exists to protect whiteness from the knowledge of its own history, making the division seem timeless, eternal, and part of a ‘natural’ order. Without this historical knowledge, the false and purely mythic identity of the ‘white’ is protected from the knowledge of its own being, and protected most importantly from knowing that the foundations of its identity are rooted in the presence of an ‘other’ which it is constantly shunning, debasing, abusing, and trying to eliminate.

            The violation of the other that protects the ‘white’ from violation does not protect the ‘white’ individual’s life, but instead protects them from the knowledge of an identity rooted in violent activity carried out against the species it is a part of. Whiteness protects the ‘white’ not only from the knowledge that they are human, but conceals and protects the foundational act of violence that divides the species into god-humans and human-animals. Whiteness normalizes the violent bifurcation of human value and strives to institute, protect, and disseminate the ignorance of the species. The very existence of whiteness asserts that self-knowledge would be a human disaster, when in fact it would only be a disaster to a socio-economy organized around the protection of specifically ‘white’ value and meaning. White violence exists to protect white ignorance, and white ignorance exists to protect a white myth, a myth of identity whose value depends on not knowing what or where it comes from, or why. It is ignorance protecting itself from the violation of knowledge.

As they say in the industry, you either know fashion or you don't. And Miss Rarity certainly knows it!

It's blindingly obvious Facebook and Twitter are BOTH colluding to help buttress the white identity.

Danny was livid.

The Guys In White had been following Phantom around constantly and while they weren't much of a threat, they were a massive nuisance. They had shot him down on Thursday and caused him to crash into some poor kids birthday cake in the park.

On Friday they had accidentally released ghost rats into the school.

On Saturday they had somehow managed to turn Paulinas hair ectoplasm green. She refused to leave her bedroom until it was reversed

On Sunday they tried to commandeer his parents GAV and earned the ire of his mom. They found out exactly why that was a bad idea.

On Monday they bardged into Danny's classroom, interrupting his math test because they were looking for a ghost parrot. It was mostly harmless but kept insulting them in a cheery tone. Danny decided he liked that bird.

We won't speak about what happened on Tuesday.

On Wednesday, he scowled at an agent that had accidentally blasted him and his friends with liquid ectoplasm while they were sitting and eating lunch. It was then that Danny began plotting his revenge.

That night he when ghost and lead the GIW on a while goose chase. Did danny take them across state lines? Yes. Did he manage to pull a massive following of these creeps? Also yes.

Did he plan for his target-the guy he had been leading them to- to already be in cuffs when he arrived in Gotham? No. Not at all.

"Hey, uh..." the words died on his tongue as Batman- The Batman- turned to him with narrowed eyes. Mustering his will, he started again, "Could you let him out? Just for a little bit?"

"No."

"Aw, Cmon!"

Condiment King began raving about something, but Danny didn't particularly care to pay attention. "If you're not going to let him out, then can you at least call the rest of the paw patrol? I wanna ask if they wanna throw mud at evil secret organization people. For enrichment." Danny gave his best, most cheeky smile for extra measure.

"Hn."

thinking about mizu from blue eye samurai. thinking. thinking so much. thinking about how mizu operates outside of gender. like we joke about her gender being revenge but straight up? it literally is. like she grew up as a boy and is most comfortable being a man, but behind that is the feeling of betraying himself because he isn't being honest about who he is and he lives in fear of being discovered. and when he lived as a woman, she found joy there as well. she fell in love, and though she wasn't good at it, she liked being a wife and enjoying a simple life. but in that life too, she isn't being honest about who she is. and when she reveals her true self, it's not a woman, she's a demon, a weapon. she's to masculine to be a woman, and too feminine to be a man. ultimately, mizu is most comfortable when they are being a murder machine. that's when they feel they are being the most true to themself. like a sword, they are neither man nor woman, but a blend of both, which makes them stronger.

"i have a sister now! thank you, granpa! we are going to do so much stuff together!"

(trans masc newborn shado btw. tag as ship and ill kill you)

It's been said before, it will be said again, but it's still worth saying: the fact that art centering on straight romance is allowed to just be bad, but art with queer romance in it always has to be indicative of A Serious Problem With the Way We Tell Queer Stories makes being a queer person making queer art deeply stressful

Business with Robbie and Little Girl.

Every single time I hear someone referring to a Jewish person as ‘white’ another little piece of my soul dies.

As a non-American Jew, the first time I ever heard Jews being referred to as white was when I was a full grown adult watching an American reality show. I FOR REAL thought they were making that shit up in order to generate buzz and get people talking about the controversy! That’s how foreign the notion was to me. Imagine my shock and horror to discover that THIS IS A COMMON MISCONCEPTION IN THE UNITED STATES.

It’s the way that referring to Jews as ‘white’ ERASES white people’s antisemitism, it erases our persecution at the hands of white people, it erases our suffering, it erases the OTHERING that Jews had suffered for CENTURIES from actual white people.

Based on what the skin tone of some Jews in a few places might afford them SO LONG AS NO ONE KNOWS THEY’RE JEWISH.

If you have to hide your real identity in order to enjoy the privileges of being perceived as white, YOU’RE NOT WHITE (this is true for Jews just like it is true for other white-passing People of Color).

White passing is not the same as white.

WHITE PASSING IS NOT THE SAME AS WHITE.

Jews are NOT white. Not a single one of us. Not even the ones who can pass as white, let alone all of the Jews who can’t.

Whiteness is hypersensitive to its own value...

Whiteness is hypersensitive to its own value, which means that whiteness is hypersensitive to the presence of anything which threatens the value of its particularity. Whiteness is sensitive and vigilant because it must constantly survey the landscape for anything that threatens the myth that organizes its being and its activity. Whiteness is a project of devaluation—the devaluation of everything that threatens its specifically ‘white’ sense of value. To create its own particular value and sense of worth, whiteness must devalue the very thing that gives it shape and meaning. The activity of maintaining a specifically ‘white’ identity is the activity of devaluing everything that is not ‘white,’ as the presence of the not-‘white’ threatens ‘white’ value. This is why people scream and get out of the pool, why they grouse and frown and move to a ‘better’ neighborhood, why they wanted ‘whites’ and ‘coloreds’ to use separate water fountains. To use the same water fountain, the same swimming pool, or to send their kids to the same public school to be educated alongside alleged inferiors threatens the value of so-called ‘white’ identity.

Whiteness is a social convention, and ‘white’ is the name of a conventional relation between human beings that adheres to a standard that transcends them. Because it is above them, it cannot be found within them or among them.

Whiteness is a system of signification, measurement, and evaluation that seeks to affirm human being as a material substance in accord with a myth rendering that substance as something other than human, i.e., either as god or as animal. In this mythic structure of binary value, the species is divided into god-humans or human-animals—the rightful citizens of a heavenly earth, or the criminal intruders to be kept at bay and confined to hell.

Oh! So you are also too shy and scared to show your face, right?

...

Right? •-•

Being a white is something people choose, not something they're born into.

DP X DC Prompt

Damian, who’s never seen danny before this moment: we’re twins.

Danny, choosing chaos: triplets, actually. I have an identical sister. 

Damian: what.

Bruce, listening in from a roof: Talia hid THREE children from me?!

Talia, on a different roof: Father stole one of my children?! >:(

OR ALTERNATIVELY

Danny: Quadruplets actually. You owe so much child support

Bruce: what-

Dani & Dan: pay up bitch

I hope I can express this properly and sensitively, but I think oftentimes people need to have Categories and Identities and to be healthily exploratory and playful and elastic about them, else they can get vulnerable to some negative things, sometimes really awful things

I wish I could remember where I read it, but there was something that wrote about whiteness in America as an abyss.

Whiteness is something that sheltered white Americans' ancestors, and at the same time devoured them. They used to have a distinct medley of heritages: Irish, German, Scottish, Italian. "Whiteness" ate it up, the languages, the cultures. There were privileges if you destroyed it, and punishments if you held onto anything that was "Other." In a white supremacist society, white people wanted to be "white" first before any other possible identity or connection they could have.

Yay! You're white. You're on top. You win...what? Turns out the prize for "winning" is just that you get to perpetrate the violence of the game instead of being on the receiving end of it.

And that's the nasty twist—there is no prize. The deeply embedded vice of "Southern pride" is not just what the Confederate flag stands for, but also why they've got to cling so hard to that symbol of traitors and losers: they need to be on top of something so bad that even a pile of shit will do. My ancestors were ultimately dirt poor, loads of them ending up in prison or breaking their bodies down doing hard labor, but they were white. Their reward, and their pride, was being stepped on by the violence of poverty only, instead of also by the violence of white supremacy.

"White pride" is all about hate because white supremacy didn't give these folks anything to be proud of. It stripped away the culture and heritage their ancestors had in favor of "whiteness." All those jokes about how white people have no culture, well, it's true isn't it? This shit is how we ended up a primarily monolingual nation. And what looks like happened is that white Americans wound up just...scavenging most of their culture from those they oppressed. Food, music, all of that stuff. Our white ancestors didn't GIVE us anything that was their own to start with.

And this is something that really strikes me about the white supremacist and fascist movements nowadays: the starvation and hollowness behind them. These folks are empty inside. They were given nothing by white supremacy except a very vague sense that they deserve something, and they see people of all different cultures celebrating and flourishing in their unique heritages and identities, and they feel like...they've been cheated.

Equality is so threatening when you're in this situation because it feels like you've got less than everyone else at the end of the day. Not just because of comparison to previous privileges, but because your whole identity was "person that gets to step on everybody else" and your whole inheritance was "shit stolen from everybody else" and in a world where all is set right, you have no identity and nothing. You are nothing.

Anyway I was looking just now at a blog that seemed really white-supremacist-leaning and it was 99% about like, Norse and Proto-Indo-European paganism and "traditionalism" and that's what got me thinking about this again.

This person had apparently done DNA tests on themselves or something, and were really fixated on figuring out their Norse and Germanic ancestors and separating out their genetic and racial identity at a level of precision that seems really pointless that far back in time. And honestly all the paganism stuff seemed like totally arbitrary speculation as well.

And how to become satisfied as a person like this? I am just as much Germanic or Norse as they are, but I don't believe that distant ancestors determine who you are to such an extent that I have some sort of innate cultural tie to Vikings or Visigoths or what have you. I know what percentage Celtic or Anglo Saxon or Norse I am—zero. I learned about those things in books the exact same way I learned about all the cultures and past kingdoms of the world that I presumably don't have ancestors from.

I feel like the experience of being a baby ally and obsessing about apologizing for being white is the same kind of thing in another direction, or another outcome of the same process. Some people seem to get really twisted up for a time over how to stop being guilty about being white.

It's part of the same thing as this guy who is trying to genetically identify his ancestors from like 3,000 years ago. It's the emptiness and meaninglessness of "white" identity apart from white supremacy.

I talk about deradicalization sometimes and I've had the notion a few times that fascism appeals to people who are hollow and starving in terms of identity, and if it wasn't for the sense of emptiness and hunger, they would be less easily radicalized. But it's also a little bit awkward to talk about the deeply unsatisfying nature of white supremacy, because...well, that is pretty low on the list of things bad about white supremacy.

I think this concept is worth talking about in general, though: People want to feel like they come from or are part of something meaningful. They are drawn toward Identities and Categories and Belonging to groups. This is something I think is commonly true about humans, I think it is normal and not a bad thing, and I think we could stand to be a little more upfront about its reality.

I think this means that wanting, and seeking, a sense of cultural identity as a white person (particularly an American) needs to have some kind of non-horrible outlet for it. Because right now, it's nothing but a way to get radicalized, and the dominant other option people take (becoming the Guilty White Person) is liked by no one and helps nothing.

And maybe it doesn't need to have anything to do with race or culture or your ancestors or any of these things that can lead a person down such terrible paths. Maybe more of us should be furries!

As just another thing to consider, I'm reading the book Ecology of a Cracker Childhood and the author of the book uses the word "cracker" not like, with the gravity of reclaiming a "slur" or something like that, but seemingly because that is just the word she most strongly identifies with, the word that best articulates who "her people" are. This feels very solid and levelheaded to me, something that comes from someone with a good sense of themselves.

Personally I've thought a long time that more people should reclaim "redneck." Not in the sense of reclaiming a slur exactly, but in the sense of putting it in neutral usage among the folks it always referred to, instead of letting it increasingly be associated with any Southerner (regardless of working class background) that is the sort to wave a Confederate flag around. The very idea of gatekeeping "redneck" away from racists is just absolutely hilarious to me, I won't lie.