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one of the wildest things abt white supremacy is how white people's feelings abt racism are always the terrain being contested and always presented as The Stakes.
"... these are conventions that center the feelings of white people — as story subjects, as readers and viewers, as editor and reporters — for whom the lived experience of racism is necessarily the most abstract."
n.pr/2S0KWoJ
n.pr/2S0KWoJ
there's almost no asymmetry stark enough to upend this framing. No Black/Brown body count high enough or brutality sufficiently shocking.
it's always: is the white subject/consumer *really* racist? did the white subject/consumer learn a lesson?
it's always: is the white subject/consumer *really* racist? did the white subject/consumer learn a lesson?
This is a feature of stories we tell both in the news media (above) and in fictive spaces ("Green Book"), but also in policy, too.
How many times in the past half-decade have we actually *seen* a police officer gun down a Black person?
How many times has the entire defense of the officer been that they were good people and not mean old racists — and that argument been enough?
How many times has the entire defense of the officer been that they were good people and not mean old racists — and that argument been enough?
There were actual Native/Indigenous people on the Mall that day, yet this is somehow now about white people helping exonerate other white people from charges of racism.
Amazing.
Amazing.
It's interesting that this broader exculpatory project only extends in one direction, isn't it?
"Those boys were just being jackasses. Who among us?"
White boys enjoy a presumption of innocence. Black boys, meanwhile, have been gerrymandered out of the very notion of boyhood.
"Those boys were just being jackasses. Who among us?"
White boys enjoy a presumption of innocence. Black boys, meanwhile, have been gerrymandered out of the very notion of boyhood.
"Whether a black male is treated as a "boy" or a "man" has so often depended on which of those categories might invite the most consequence. White men of means, though, are seldom too old to have aged out of the benefit of the doubt."
n.pr/2CV2aMm
n.pr/2CV2aMm
gotta get lunch.
On cue:
You gotta wonder how much the ratcheting up of the rhetoric from folks like French is an way to distract from the above point — that even he acknowledges in that essay — that the material consequences of this aren’t even close to equal.
