short rant about "race"
I'm going to repeat my opinion about "white" not being a real thing. I'm Ukranian-Russian-Byelorussian-Middle-Eastern-possibly-Evenk-possibly-Romani, I'm not "white" even by the central issue of Jewishness (whether we're "white" or not depends on how convenient that is to the non-Jews making that judgment call). I don't go to White Festivals where I can get loukoumades and go watch caber tossing, right next to the shumka dancers; nobody does.
The whole horrible thing is an invention intended to separate out light skinned European descendants from dark skinned people (and if you're African-American, you've probably got ancestors from Europe) to create an elitism separate from wealth, as a distraction from wealth inequalities (King talks about this a lot at the beginning of "How Long? Not Long") and as part of culturally annihilating any European identity that wasn't comfortably bland "American," so basically being "white" does not mean only that you benefited from anti-Blackness, it means you're *also a victim of it*.
I feel with any prejudices, that the offenses of the horrifying past wouldn't matter so much if they weren't *still happening*. Every bit of the whole superior/inferior/blah blah blah thing (and who wants to live their life out believing they're in some constant contest of intelligence, toughness and ability against everyone else? I grew up with that and it was shitty!) is basically spawned off 19th-20th century *marketing gimmick* to get people to own other humans, fight and die so other people could own other humans, and as a giant distraction.
People are suffering and dying right fucking now for what's essentially someone else's ad slogan. Hell, you look at the party of anti-Blackness in the USA and even the guys who are dyed in the wool white supremacists, like Reagan and Trump, were using it as a cheap gimmick.
The whole thing's fucking vile.
re: short rant about "race"
@Leucrotta if you haven't read it, i recommend it. it's a thoughtful look at history that shines a spotlight on stuff most of us weren't taught in school
re: short rant about "race"
@Leucrotta have you read A People's History of the United States by Howard Zinn? he makes basically the same argument, the idea that racial hierarchy was used to divide the working class in particular. the working class is very dangerous to the wealthy, unless you can convince a significant chunk of it that they are on the same team as the wealthy, actually