see, yes. the feeling that i come away with is that white media intrinsically politicizes our existence to such a degree that they will let a lot of bad things happen if it's mostly us who are being harmed. like "that's a politics issue, so it's not a human rights issue" https://twitter.com/lparker732/status/1329245166029447168

this is the real crux of it, to me, the part about racism that white people by and large refuse to accept: that to be raced at all is to be nonconsensually politicized. you create illusory politics in front of actual human beings so you don't have to interact with them

whiteness is inherently violent so i don't want to advocate moving off of that position but there's a specific salience to the idea of raced versus non-raced that isn't quite captured wholly by a white versus poc dichotomy

one of the reasons whiteness can retain its power at all is that white america won't let us get past "color of their skin" arguments (that's a fucking analogy, it's not meant to be taken literally), which trivialize serious and entrenched politics surrounding race

so the formulation becomes important, because certain things are granted to white folks not necessarily because of what they are (white) but because of what they are not (racialized). it's usually not a worthwhile distinction to make but when it is, it's absolutely crucial

for example: banning the teaching of critical race theory. i've tweeted about how this effectively only bans racialized people from teaching critical race theory, because whiteness is not seen as a race. right there, you have to be specific in order to even understand it

it's not whiteness that's granting them a carveout from the executive order, specifically; it's the societal expectation we have that only racialized people ever need to deal with race. that's obviously and hilariously untrue if you consider white to be a race, which it is

but the actual power and inequity in that equation comes not from being white specifically, but from being non-raced. at one point italians were racialized here, so even though it's accurate to call 15th century italians "white," their racialization at the time was an issue

(tangentially, this touches on a whole separate thing i'm working on having to do with analogies between class and race being inherently flawed because they falsely assume a mobility binary, when reality is much more complicated than that)

(i got really distracted by this tangent, i've been working on this for a bit and it's such an interesting framework to play around with. so i forgot what i was saying and am thinking about this other thing now. sorry, thread finished)