"White people suck" is synecdoche.
I was gonna do a whole thing about in-group language and anti-racist venting, but those five words are pretty much the whole thing. So I'm gonna go tidy my living room.
And hey look, @zackbeauchamp wrote the longer version, so I don't have to. vox.com/policy-and-pol…
I have a few quibbles with Beauchamp's piece, but only one worth mentioning: He frames this kind of conversation as a POC thing, but in my experience it's really common in conversations in which white people are participating too.
That it's a shared language within certain broadly multiracial communities, rather than just a way that some people of color talk about white people, is significant, I think.
That piece of it, by the way, gets at the broader claim of hypocrisy, and about whether this kind of license is a one-way street. I don't think it is.
There was an incident a few years ago at Lewis & Clark college in which a white student and a black students—friends and teammates on the football team—were making racially-tinged jokes at a party, behind closed doors.
There's no indication at all that either of them were bothered, or that anyone else at the party was upset, but someone else in the dorm heard them—again, through a closed door—and reported them to the administration.
That strikes me—and did at the time, and I think I wrote about it somewhere—as obviously, flatly wrong. Friends say things to each other that they wouldn't say to, or accept from, strangers. It happens all the time.
So while "comments made about white people are different from comments made about people of color" is one part of this story, so is "comments made within an in-group are different from comments made to outsiders."
Shockingly, it's complicated.
(And since this thread is getting traction and people are starting to ask about what the first tweet meant, here's the answer I gave the first guy who asked.)
Also, since people are STILL somehow interpreting this thread as "it's okay to say mean things about white people but not about people of color," let me be 100% clear about the Lewis and Clark incident.
That incident involved a white football player making a comment that an outside observer, who heard it through a wall, interpreted as racist. All the black people at the party—including the guy he made it to—insisted that it was an inside joke among friends.
Having read several accounts of the incident, I accept the white guy's teammates' account of the party, and accept their claim that the statement wasn't racist and that the guy did nothing wrong.
Racial hierarchy is an important part of assessing purportedly racist speech, but it's not the only relevant axis.
