DagSeoul: Positions, Populations, Punk, Poetics

(Source: not-leyla, via kyaryarchy)

dagNotes: On the privilege TO RETURN

What your typical white socially-progressive tumblr user doesn’t understand—nae, refuses to acknowledge because she knows all about it—is that she has a privilege that permits her to deny her anglo heritage and that encourages her to replace it with a fashionably colorblind identity. (Look at me, I’m not white! For now.) She has the privilege to leave and to return to the social order.

It’s insidious. The activist can deny the other and participation in activism at any time, may betray her privilege to return to the comfort of (her dominant and uniform and constructed) traditional every day life. I witnessed thiswhile training to be an organizer in the late 90s. It’s like a Superman or Wonder Woman Syndrome. At work or home, these activists look like all the other mainstream white employees, sons and daughters, parents, what have you, until that moment when they see injustice and they slip out only to return disguised as social justice warriors who seek liberty and justice for all. (It’s all right, folks, I’ve got this.) Only we think about it the wrong way. The disguise is that banal uniform of socially constructed whiteness that they choose to return to at regular intervals each and every day. This is the source of white guilt, by the way, a repressed confession of capitulation to a racist white power structure in society.

“Occupy” was such an ironic title for an urban, intellectual movement of social activists who can (and did) return home at any time.

Come to think of it, this is what I experienced in Korea where foreigners often become activized minority and labor rights experts and sudden civil disobedience supporters only to fail to recognize their supreme privilege, the right to return home, where, once settled in, they can re-assume the comfort that comes with being one of many in a socially constructed white society.

dagSeoul: Regarding Complicity in White Power and Its Manifest Destiny

dagseoul:

Let’s not forget that a raging debate has been ongoing because people want to deny complicity in white power and its supremacy because they are poc. Actually, we have a handful of people talking about complex problems and a chorus of yapping jackasses crying ANTI-BLACKNESS, and one white black-feminist academic chasing romance. It’s dramatic.

It’s a debate I tend to stay away from for what should be obvious reasons, but I did jump in the other day because the American poc tumblr community and its white social justice fan-base has a problem thinking about immigrants and immigration. It’s an undeniable fact. For pointing that out, I was called anti-black. Ludicrous, but true.

Here’s a summary of my position. Anyone wondering what I’m talking about can find the discussion raging on. I wanted to remind everyone that though I’m staying out of the debate, for now, that I am not going to change my mind about how I see the bargain with white power working in the entire people of any fucking color community, especially in the US.

Yesterday I wrote:

I think it’s important to recognize social justice tumblr bloggers, some of whom are poc, often implement a white standardized minority experience, that I wrote about yesterday, to address poc on how they should write about hierarchies of oppression and privilege, implementing interpolative modes of white ideology, only to later reject such standards when it suits them. After all, who wants to betray their reliance on shitty structuralism? Nobody.

Fact is there’s bound to be grand disagreement about what conflicting poc narratives say about traditional narratives. That’s certainly no reason to deny poc narratives in favor of the standard tales for minority experience in white supremacist society, that by design contrast all white subjects, by which I mean all individuals composed as white subjects, against black individuals.

And the day before, I wrote:

Tired of reading posts where people attempt to justify standardizing/quantifying various narratives of oppression and privilege to compare “racial” groups in order to argue which groups are more or less privileged, hence, more or less oppressed. This isn’t going to cut it and for one very important reason. Quite frankly, it’s a white man’s game. As such, it’s reactionary and regressive.

If we’re speaking of privilege in communities of color in the US, then we’re examining individuals (and the communities they represent) who have been interpolated as white subjects. To use those interpolated subjects as if they usefully represent actual communities of color, in other words as well-defined minority communities, reinforces the white power structure. Why do we insist on objectifying—using quantities and percentages—to talk about oppression, or worse “the oppressed”? I think it makes it easier to ignore history, for one thing, and easier to cultivate a proper, civility for traditionally white scientific discourse about society as a whole.

How can we compare Asian-American experience(s) of oppression and privilege to Black experience(s) of oppression and privilege without necessarily standardizing their experiences as a standard minority experience (SME) thus privileging the notion that communities of color are monoliths of ethnic experience organized according to dominant white modes of observation. White power helps creates an SME that permits comparison across “color”. White power literally counts on it. We criticize this attempt to standardize narratives of experience when we see it in colorblind discourse, don’t we? Why not everywhere it’s implemented, then?

In my opinion, this standardization becomes more problematic when we consider immigrants and immigration.

dagSeoul: Regarding Complicity in White Power and Its Manifest Destiny

Let’s not forget that a raging debate has been ongoing because people want to deny complicity in white power and its supremacy because they are poc. Actually, we have a handful of people talking about complex problems and a chorus of yapping jackasses crying ANTI-BLACKNESS, and one white black-feminist academic chasing romance. It’s dramatic.

It’s a debate I tend to stay away from for what should be obvious reasons, but I did jump in the other day because the American poc tumblr community and its white social justice fan-base has a problem thinking about immigrants and immigration. It’s an undeniable fact. For pointing that out, I was called anti-black. Ludicrous, but true.

Here’s a summary of my position. Anyone wondering what I’m talking about can find the discussion raging on. I wanted to remind everyone that though I’m staying out of the debate, for now, that I am not going to change my mind about how I see the bargain with white power working in the entire people of any fucking color community, especially in the US.

Yesterday I wrote:

I think it’s important to recognize social justice tumblr bloggers, some of whom are poc, often implement a white standardized minority experience, that I wrote about yesterday, to address poc on how they should write about hierarchies of oppression and privilege, implementing interpolative modes of white ideology, only to later reject such standards when it suits them. After all, who wants to betray their reliance on shitty structuralism? Nobody.

Fact is there’s bound to be grand disagreement about what conflicting poc narratives say about traditional narratives. That’s certainly no reason to deny poc narratives in favor of the standard tales for minority experience in white supremacist society, that by design contrast all white subjects, by which I mean all individuals composed as white subjects, against black individuals.

And the day before, I wrote:

Tired of reading posts where people attempt to justify standardizing/quantifying various narratives of oppression and privilege to compare “racial” groups in order to argue which groups are more or less privileged, hence, more or less oppressed. This isn’t going to cut it and for one very important reason. Quite frankly, it’s a white man’s game. As such, it’s reactionary and regressive.

If we’re speaking of privilege in communities of color in the US, then we’re examining individuals (and the communities they represent) who have been interpolated as white subjects. To use those interpolated subjects as if they usefully represent actual communities of color, in other words as well-defined minority communities, reinforces the white power structure. Why do we insist on objectifying—using quantities and percentages—to talk about oppression, or worse “the oppressed”? I think it makes it easier to ignore history, for one thing, and easier to cultivate a proper, civility for traditionally white scientific discourse about society as a whole.

How can we compare Asian-American experience(s) of oppression and privilege to Black experience(s) of oppression and privilege without necessarily standardizing their experiences as a standard minority experience (SME) thus privileging the notion that communities of color are monoliths of ethnic experience organized according to dominant white modes of observation. White power helps creates an SME that permits comparison across “color”. White power literally counts on it. We criticize this attempt to standardize narratives of experience when we see it in colorblind discourse, don’t we? Why not everywhere it’s implemented, then?

In my opinion, this standardization becomes more problematic when we consider immigrants and immigration.

What the fuck is this? An ad for a blog and a lot of self-righteous text from an unrepentent white blogger who wants to speak on behalf of poc.

Write about whiteness, but don’t write on behalf of others, you racist cracker. Do you think poc need you and your cracker blog?

stfuracists:

Recognize that the reason some people of color express pride in their respective ethnicities is, in part, because they have had to assert their identity, their equality, their humanity. If you’re white, you haven’t been challenged over those things because of your whiteness.

Someone has been challenged. You’ve been challenged. You’ve been asked to stop your pushy, self-righteous ally shit that you use as an excuse to speak for poc.

(Maybe if you’re a white person who isn’t male, cisgender, heterosexual, etc. But not because you’re white. Even if you were one of the first Irish immigrants and were discriminated against, it was because of your Irishness, not because you were white.)

But not if you’re a cracker who blogs as STFURACISTS. That blogger can say and do whatever the fuck she wants.

I mean, really. Look at this stupid fucking ad for her blog. STFU already.

But apologize, first. We’re all waiting to see that shit.

dumbthingswhitepplsay:

I am still waiting for STFUracists to apologize for the bullshit they pulled on me.

Mhm. Still waiting, you racist shit cracker ally.

(via ibehateontap)