Very short thread about race, because some people are trying to say I'm being "racist" for identifying white supremacism as a major system of oppression that has directly impacted my life (and continues to):
Races (in the biological sense) do not exist. Races are not real, they are manufactured. They're a technology of power used to include certain people under the "liberal promise" and exclude others from it. Whiteness is not about skin color but about status in this system.
The reason why "you can't be racist to white people" is because those who are perennially underprivileged and excluded do not have the power and aren't running anything that allows them to exclude white people from anything. Racism is not bigotry, it's exclusion.
"To be racist" isn't to say mean things about others. It also isn't to point to the fact that races exists. It also isn't to point to the inconvenient truth that privilege is tied to race. It's to *institutionally exclude*. I do not run institutions. I have no power to exclude.
Now I get that most humans (including white people) never voted for this system of institutional inequality. They were born, and there it was. But you have a choice, to either decide to embrace it (and supremacism), or to reject it (and embrace equality).
As for me (and people like me), we aren't going to deny the facts of our own lived reality, or shut up about our own lived experiences, or bite our tongue about what we've been put through, just to reduce your anxiety or coddle your ideology. We are not compromising anymore.
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