This is more like it…
_Witness the Whiteness_
I had said a bunch of intelligent-looking things about race and ethnicity, but realize it’s all pointless noise. I deleted it, replaced it with this. It’s funny, the world is infinitely complex, but we’re always trying to reduce it to words, and then hammer reality into the molds those words create. Stuff is liquid, it’s going to spill out of any shape we try to set for it. We all know the racists are wrong about practically everything, especially the racists who expel a bunch of greenhouse gases talking around the fact that they’re racist, like Sam Harris.
But I think the rest of us get a lot wrong on the subject too. Particularly when we try to treat cultures and ethnicities as discrete units for the purposes of discourse, when there are so many overlapping intersections and complications that the prevailing narratives have millions of local exceptions. This creates easy gotchas for the opposition when you talk about racism, like “look at all these people who are perfectly fine with what you call cultural appropriation,” etc.
People are people, said the white person, why you gotta separate us with divisive rhetoric? If we just forget about the past present and future of racism, it’ll stop existing on its own. No, I say, the discourse, it’s gotta keep discoursing along. For my part,
* insert honkey noises here *
I definitely feel some big feelings about race. There are reasons racism personally offends me, though it isn’t pointed at me. Still, what the hell do I have to offer to the discussion, from where I sit? When it comes to skin tone, those in my end of the gene pool are the closest to mimes, and so I think I’ll make like a mime now, and shut the fuck up. The end.
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A few years back I made this comic, like a ten page Chick tract for some antifas. Pro-bono job for a dear cause. I didn’t post it, perhaps thinking of the background check for an upcoming job application. Don’t remember for sure why.
I didn’t write the script, just injected some half-assed yuks, and you can probably think of a dozen reasons why the reasoning in it is flawed, even if you dig the spirit of it. I can feel PZ and Mano cringing at the invocations of science; I personally roll my eyes at the notion a “blade of logic” could scratch the skin of the masters of double-think.
Just enjoy the last high-effort visual art I’ll ever make, particularly my rendering of the freaky Charlottesville sweatbeast. And consider donating to The International Anti-Fascist Defence Fund.
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another bit of artistic self censorship from around the time, my blog’s tiling bg art:
feel free to use it for your (non-commercial) purposes!
Great work there, except they forgot to mention that Slavs are considered “white” by today’s racists; but yesterday’s racists officially considered them inferior and even (R slur redacted by GAS). Better than, say, Mongols, but still not good enough, unless we need them to help us keep other less-than-white people down…
there’s a lot of angles they didn’t bother to hit. as i’ve been pondering this, i think the thing that most bothers me about the “logic” approach is that it has nothing to do with why white nationalism is bad. it’s bad because it’s evil. i know that’s a whole other can of worms but it’s the plain truth. it’s just morally wrong, by any reasonably defensible ethical standard.
I mean, I think pretty much everyone who reads anything on this blog network accepts that racism/bigotry is bad because it’s evil. But it’s also bad, because it’s so fucking… (sorry, trying to think of an acceptable word, but nothing quite conveys the lack of forethought, lack of reason, irrationality, etc., of the 1-2 syllable words I would have used (also, feel free to edit/delete if this is too close to actually using those words))
Reminds me a lot of a rant/essay by Catherynne M. Valente (an author I really like), that some other FTB commenter linked to (apologies, I forgot who, but I think it was a Pharyngula semi-regular, and not one of the argumentative asshole ones…)
https://catvalente.substack.com/p/theres-no-such-thing-as-a-smart-fascist
content warning: frequent use of some of those words you don’t approve of, but if you can overlook that, I found it a pretty amusing/cathartic rant. but not really reassuring. :/
good effort to stay within the policy and justify yourself there, i’ll let it stand. my policy is largely for the benefit of the people who are bothered by that language, but i don’t know that there are any around, or if they are, that they even read comments. generally i wanna keep it better than the comments on this article have been tho, lol.