Thread by @soychicka

Somebody needs to write the canonical book called “Black History for White People.”

Explicitly put the focus on social structures and POWER, and fear - not on whiteness or presumed racial characteristics. Inherently, that’s not what it’s about.

TBC, a more accurate title would actually be “Black History for Everybody Else,” but the black vs white dichotomy and the origin of the term “black” is such a fundamental conceptual metaphor that it needs to be addressed too.

Black is dirty, scary, to be avoided.
Think about it.

In that sense, “black” references a concept - as opposed to clarity and purity of “whiteness” (see Mary Douglass, “Purity & Danger”) - and the extension of that metaphor is a fundamental pathway to the perpetuation of injustice and oppression.

Black is what lurks in the shadows, it’s what we primarily fear - and the very use of that term to reference a group of humans creates a fundamental cognitive bias towards applying the same inherent fear and distrust towards “black” people when you consider yourself to be “white”

I think that given the deep-seated, primal fear of the unknown and unseen, it’s harmful to perpetuate the use of the term "Black."

Aside from its lack of utility in differentiating based on ancestral heritage, the term is inherently a weapon against those to whom it's applied.

And, while in most cases, I understand and support the reclaiming of terms that have been used to cause harm to any group of humans, anything that plays off this fundamental, primal fear of the unknown and the dangerous is beyond reclamation.

So, I think that the title "Black History for White People" should be taken as a metaphor as well - the history of how we are ALL manipulated into perpetuating racism - rather than referencing ancestry as a "check all that apply," as a binary judgement on purity + taint.

Because that's what the real fear behind pushback against "Critical Race Theory" is about - unmasking the deep manipulation by a few into perpetuating the artificial divisions amongst us.

It's not about allegations that any ethnic group is inherently good or bad -it's wanting to obscure that manipulation that exists to service the interests of a select few.

And the starker and clearer the terms by which we address the root of the problem, the easier it is to grok