always support workers striking but i truly hope this isn’t just about “spreading awareness” and i hope nba players understand just how much power they have, and formulate a list of demands toward material support for marginalized people and grassroots radical organizations
the last couple weeks, the in-game/post-game interview questions about “social injustice,” the t-shirts, the ‘black lives matter’ commercials & logos next to corporate sponsors, was pure neoliberal performance & we should all be exhausted with it—as it’s been proven ineffective
so i truly, and i mean truly, hope this is part of a long term scheme to eradicate these structural racialized violences—beyond just “voting” for the white supremacist architect of modern mass racialized survellience, policing, and incarceration in joe biden—‘cause it’s needed
but i have a very hard time being too optimistic seeing how the last few weeks have went; while knowing most of these guys aren’t tapped into the community, or specifically any radical on the ground organizers, and knowing radical change requires giving up something materially...
let’s wait & see, though...
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joel olson, on whiteness as power as opposed to cultural identity:
"the problem, of course, is that whiteness historically has not been an expression of culture so much as a form of standing reflecting relations of inequality, discrimination, privilege, and terror."
"it is more useful to understand whiteness as a form of power rather than as a culture. after all, it is not white culture that unites a brooklyn cop, a silicon valley entrepreneur, a rural west virginian, a portland hippie, and a phoenix metal head; it is white power..."
"whiteness studies’ failure to understand whiteness as a form of power follows from the politics of recognition’s tendency to understand racial conflict in terms of the misrecognition of cultures rather than the persistence of relations of privilege and subordination."
he’s $2500 away from being entirely caught up on rent, and getting a head start for the next month while he starts a new job we were able to help him get in the city!
can you help me help him? please continue boosting and supporting!!!
this just speaks to the larger phenomenon of viewing racial violence thru the lens of individual prerogatives as opposed to an actual existing structural institution of power. who has the power to enact racial violence w/impunity? how is orientalist racism ideologically enforced?
you can’t understand contemporary instances of racial terror & violence, specifically as it targets asian people, without understanding colonial-imperialism—and even if non-white faces can/do serve as upholders of such structures—who/what are they serving?
even if it’s true that indiv. black persons are the primary proponents of racial terror against asians (it’s not regardless of ig polls stating otherwise); the phenomenon has to be understood as an ideological consequence & continuation of an imperial-colonial state’s mechanisms
i just love how you can always bet on western bourgeois gay/lesbian organizations & media publications to come in right in time—as an established wing of empire—when it is time to beat those drums for imperialist war. just incredibly consistent in their role.
what we’re seeing here is a consequence of the ‘lesbian & gay rights movement’—which was petit-bourgeois in nature—belittling the struggle for gay liberation to “marriage equality.”
and divorcing said struggle from the struggle against other forms of violence: imperialism/war, colonialism, racial capitalism, etc. what a tragedy we find ourselves living in the afterlife of, homonationalism continues to be a useful instrument of imperial warfare.
this criticism is incredibly misplaced & inaccurate. the implication that deray’s inorganic, opportunistic positioning as “movement leader” is comparable to malcolm or mlk… then, implying it’s some innate privilege to be hypervisible when they were both assassinated young?