I don’t. White as a political category is at the root of racism and settler colonial genocide. To be white is to be a cracker, and a whole lot worse besides.
Whiteness is also an imaginary concept and a figment of the racist imagination, of course, but that doesn’t make it any less real, or deadly; whiteness is a thing because people insist that it is, and use force and violence to make it so. Whiteness is a thing because white supremacists needed a name for their violent subjugation of others, and so they gave it one. In this way, whiteness is a uniquely virulent and pathological form of social identity. It cannot survive its loss of supremacy; it cannot abide competition or mixture or “impurity.” Created by racial slavery and given a second wind by European imperialism, whiteness depends on the violent subordination of all others. Celebrate your Irish heritage if you must, or your Pennsylvania Dutch grandparents; that has nothing to do with the whiteness that names me, now, but which (partially) excluded my Irish and German ancestors when they came to this nation. Irish and Pennsylvania Dutch can and will survive incorporation into a multi-ethnic nation, but it is the sine qua non of whiteness that it cannot and will not. Inextricable from racial subordination, whiteness has no other content at all: whiteness is what’s left in the melting pot after everything else has been burned away. Without that xenophobic fire, it has no meaning, no substance, no fundamental.
This is why “white genocide” actually does have a meaning beyond “racial integration.” If you take away a white person’s ability to live as the undisputed master of the universe—to take his own experience as normal and privileged, and to presume all others to be debased copies of his own primary existence—then you take away his whiteness.
There is “being white” in the sense that your society defines you as white and there’s “being white” in the sense that you define yourself as white, identify with whiteness beyond recognition of the first sense, and seek to preserve whiteness. I won’t die on this hill, but I think it’s fair to say crackers are category #2 plus anyone from category #1 who gets offended at the word “cracker”.
I whined about cracker being a slur and those mean ol Hexbears just called me a cracker more instead of debating me
As a cracker, I can’t think of any time when calling a cracker a cracker is unjustified.
I subscribe to the “There’s white people and then there’s crackers” school of thought
I don’t. White as a political category is at the root of racism and settler colonial genocide. To be white is to be a cracker, and a whole lot worse besides.
in support of your comment:
from Buffalo Skulls
There is “being white” in the sense that your society defines you as white and there’s “being white” in the sense that you define yourself as white, identify with whiteness beyond recognition of the first sense, and seek to preserve whiteness. I won’t die on this hill, but I think it’s fair to say crackers are category #2 plus anyone from category #1 who gets offended at the word “cracker”.
Yeah anyone offended by the word cracker is a cracker. Thats why its a pretty useful word
big fan of your philosophy, is there any nohaybanda-thought i could subscribe to?