I’ve never heard someone say the N word in person until today I think. One minority (aboriginal) telling me how something about blacks but using the N word instead of blacks/African-american.
There are a lot of other smaller instances I’ve seen in my personal life too.
I’ve never seen Indian versus Pakistan racism, but I would at least get why that might happen, since history.
In public policy, the majority (caucasians) are prob the most racist here, but in casual conversation I might hear more minority vs minority racism. I think this partially might be because caucasians have it drilled into them (my city) that they have to not be racist in convo?
I’ve never understood why some minority groups didn’t come out to support black lives matter (here), but it seems to look like bc they don’t care to help out blm bc its not explicitly minority-name-here lives matter
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Good write up, but I think its slightly reductive to say that the sole motivator is a racial hierarchy.
Race as a concept of strict hierarchy hasn’t existed in its current form at all until just the last few hundred years or so, where Anglo-German supremacy managed to place itself at the top and rank the rest of the world beneath themselves (convenient for them since they now had a bullshit excuse to colonize the world for the cause of “civilizing” everyone). There was a time when the very people who sit at the top of our current racial hierarchy were considered to be inferior savages. Aristotle and his contemporaries have written extensively on the “barbarity” of the Germanic and northern European tribes, using the exact same language that would later be reused hundreds of years later by the descendants of those very peoples to discriminate and conquer the “inferiors”. As someone with ethnic minority background, when discussions of race with friends or family come up, there is often less consideration taken when choosing the correct words and terminology simply from the idea that “we’ve suffered too, so why can’t we call them what we want?”.
Obviously this isn’t a good thing, but its also not uncommon. The notion that all non-white people are all part of the same oppressed monolith who can’t be racist towards each other due to a shared history of discrimination.
It of course varies from person to person and their views on this kind of discourse, and as you rightly pointed out a lot of it is indeed this kind of race ladder where you envy those above you and hate those below, but in other cases it could very well be just ignorance to the importance of respecting those of other races and seeing that simply agreeing that the oppressors are bad isn’t enough, you have to lift each other up as well.
Yeah that’s fair, there’s definitely more to it agreed than the one lens I’ve written about. I think I got so focused on that concept I ran with it 😭
Nonwhite people aren’t a monolith because they think they are, they’re a monolith because the concept of whiteness and the way white people relate to them has made them one, regardless of their own relations to one another.
The difference between historic ethnic discrimination and modern racism is the arbitrary drawing up of racial lines around groups of people who form heterogenous clines of different genetic groups and cultures. Racism against “middle eastern west asians” functionally includes Arabs, Indo-Iranians, Sikhs, Tuareg, Kurds, Palestinians, Algerians, Moroccans, Turks, and Kazakhs and a bunch of other cultures who don’t exactly identify with one another but are lumped together in this mixed bag of convenient colonial categorization based on their relation to colonial production. Like a Moroccan person and a Pakistani person would more than likely be offended if you counted them as “the same”. And for good reason, their histories, base forms, and superstructural forms are distinct and erasing that distinction is meant to open them to commodification and exploitation. For another example, in the western mind, latin america is “that place where fruit and coffee comes from,” which erases local cultures to conform them to the global role capital has assigned to them. It’s in-part the sort of thing the Zapatistas are fighting against in their cultural war against Mexican liberalism.
These modern lines began to form during the colonial period of western history. During the medieval period, discrimination was based on religion. Laws and cultural norms targeted muslims, lutherans, calvinists, catholics, etc. Slavery laws were formed on the basis of religion, where adoption of christianity could buy the freedom of a black or indigenous person (or their children) after they’ve fulfilled their contract. Then in the 17th and 18th centuries, something shifted in the Caribbean. Creoles were beginning to form communities where locally born whites, blacks, and indigenous people started to have more in common with one another than with the “metropole” of the European power exploiting their labor. They began to form coalitions to overthrow the colonial government, and often freed slaves (who could form up to 80% of a colony) to gain the proper mass line.
This spooked the Europeans immensely so their response was vicious. They rewrote slavery laws to no longer be religious, but instead be based on skin color, making the caste of slave immutable and heritable. The mixed-race creole bourgeoisie were destroyed and scattered, some even enslaved, and lost all their status to white immigrants.
Whiteness was invented at this point, a camraderie between europeans based on shared heritage in order to separate themselves from the slave class. It became illegal to enslave or indenture whites. It became illegal to intermarry with whites. It became illegal to show aggression toward whites. And this change in status consolidated the previously differentiated creole whites, lower class colonist whites, upper class colonists, and the gentry under one unified group. This white supremacist group still exists today, and has come to allow or deny various cultures into its ranks based on its political goals.
With the theory of white supremecist racism (as an important tool of capitalist imperialism), it becomes easy to see why the distinction of Ukrainians as white and Russian/Baltic slavs as nonwhite has a chilling effect on the entirety of white culture. It justifies the acceptance of Ukranian refugees into the “cilvilized” imperial class and demotes slavs to the enslaved/colonized class (as all GZD users have pointed out with news articles). When we say “you can’t be racist to white people”, what we mean is that you can’t reverse this relation just with words or behaviors, especially as an individual. Racial discrimination toward white people doesn’t carry the same class distinctions. Say, for example, a Palestinian landlord denies housing to an Israeli. This is discriminitory, but it doesn’t have the same class character as an Israeli landlord denying housing to a palestinian. The former is technically anti-colonial and the latter is distinctly colonial.
TL;DR: In order to be racist to white people you have to change global class relations and dismantle Eurocentric neocolonial imperialism.
Thank you for wording this better than I ever could 🥰
Nah, you did fine. You used all the academic stuff. I just tried to make it sound more “marxist” as there’s a huge overlap in concepts. If hegemony/white supremacy and capitalist imperialism were on a Venn Diagram, it’d just be a circle. They’re different co-moving facets of the same thing.
Ngl I panicked the fuck out when I was accused of a “disturbingly racist rant” so it was validating that you and commiewolf recognised the point I was making. I’m no expert after all so I wouldn’t be able to ace the point if ya get me.
This is exactly the same situation as when I left the anarchist sub on reddit many moons ago. BAME Comrade essentially explained what I’ve put above and the white majority of the sub freaked out and dogpiled them for “being a racist to whites” for bringing up the concept of whiteness.
“If hegemony/white supremacy and capitalist imperialism were on a Venn Diagram, it’d just be a circle.”
Lol this is too accurate.
“Excuse me, but I’ll have you know that white lives also matter.”
Lmao my sides, they hurt 🤣
Belatedly just realized I used idpol to illustrate that Russia is anti-imperialist.
I guess this is it for you Comrade. Hand in your ushanka and grain. /s
You elaborated on one aspect of it very clearly, nothing racist about that at all. It is important to recognize that these sort of things are done by different people for different material reasons. Discriminated people come in different forms, and their history of oppressions will shape how their outlook towards other discriminated groups is. Its not racist to recognize the inherent racial hierarchy and how it shapes these views. It is one of many factors that can lead to discrimination among minorities. I think you explained it well.
Thank you, I’ll make sure not to get too focused in on one facet in the future 😊