Read on Twitter
Whiteness includes a conversational subtext that poc have much more practice seeing and understanding, because we need to see and understand it in order to properly contextualize the circumstances of our entire lives
And the truth is that that subtext communicates very unflattering things about left-of-center whites that, if you bring it up, they'll argue by appealing to white-defaulted "universal principle" arguments, because they literally cannot conceive of their own whiteness
I had a conversation with a well-known director, someone who did an MCU entry, about the racism involved in defending whitewashed casting choices, and the thing that caused me to end that conversation was the question "but shouldn't artists be free to make any choices they want?"
That's a principle that only works in a default-white construction: who gets to be considered an artist? What responsibilities should they have besides art? You can't put "principle" questions in a vacuum just to make a point
Why? Because there's a whole systematized landscape you have to consider before you can assume that any non-white artist is free to make any creative decision. If you were an AsAm artist wanting to make an Asian sitcom, you were shit out of luck for 25 years
The ability to get to the point where you're even allowed to be "free" to make creative decisions is itself a concept that excludes non-majoritized folks, even including marginalized whites, so the question in defense of further exclusion is wildly disingenuous
White people can become massively successful without knowing basic, basic fundamentals about how race works in this country, and poc have to understand for our survival, but if we understand it too well, it makes us "angry"
So we need to hit a butter zone of consciousness in order to "succeed," and that success will always be very visibly conditional, because history proves that in the vast majority of cases, the threat of loss is used as an explicit means of respectability control
If more of you assholes could just admit that appearing to stand in solidarity means more to you than actually acting in solidarity, we could maybe get somewhere. Otherwise, you're just dooming us to this living purgatory forever
You think it's hard to be so in flux for so long, not knowing what the next pandemic developments will bring, when it will end; even before this I had to check the news before leaving the apartment, every time, to see how much they hated Chinese people that day
Welcome to provisional life, life that brings new and surprising and horrifying news every single day that forces you to reevaluate your threat model. Marginalized people have been living here our whole lives, and yeah, it's awful and hopeless, just like we've been saying
And now that constant terror is merely a backdrop to the other constant terrors that majoritized folks are now experiencing, and they're freaking the fuck out trying to deal with a half-serving, burrowing deeper into self-interest as survival instinct
This is the life that all of you, and all of us (yes, I am part of majoritized groups as well) have consigned folks to, and believing that it's good enough is dangerously ignorant and wholly dehumanizing, so cut that shit out
