tal9000:

cocojigglypuff:

setfabulazerstomaximumcaptain:

morenamagia:

cupcakesupremacist:

elonjames:

The cops have fully blocked off Snyder. About 35 in riot gear…

… ._.

fucking bastards

Receipts receipts boost boost BOOST! 

so my friends found a livestream on facebook (its off now tho) evidently it was a candelight vigil and the cops showed up , people got angry, and the cops went into riot mode

(bold mine) I’m making sure to spread this around this way: It’s not a riot, it’s police violence. Police abuse of power. Calling it a riot legitimizes this police presence as a response.

(via sapphrikah)

oohhcomely:

Racism is based on ideas from a selected group of white men (in the exception of Germaine De Staëls, who was one, if not the, richest woman in France during the Napoleonic era; responsible for introducing the idea that in a utopian, egalitarian society, race would define class, and a country will benefit from making race the basis on who would receive what privileges) and their basic lust for power, their need to justify the atrocities they committed throughout history, and their personal beauty ideals.

To go into depth on the issue of racism and whiteness, let me start off by saying that I’ll be quoting Nell Irvin Painter in the following points I’ll be making. In case you’d like to read through this for a somewhat quick history lesson, continue reading. If not, I’ll place a tl;dr right here.

“Today we think of race as a matter of biology, but a second thought reminds us that the meanings of race quickly spill out of merely physical categories… the meanings of white race reach into concepts of labor, gender, and class and images of personal beauty that seldom appear in the analysis of race. Work plays a central part in race talk, because the people who do the work are likely to be figured as inherently deserving the toil and poverty of laboring status…

Those at the bottom were slaves. Slavery has helped construct concepts of white race in two contradictory ways. First, American tradition equates whiteness with freedom while consigning blackness to slavery. The history of unfree white people slumbers in popular forgetfulness.”

Before the self-identifying white folk start celebrating and using the “See! Us white people were enslaved just like you, and if you deny this, you’re a reverse racist,” let me be the first to tell you – lolno.

The Greek and Roman empires, respectively, deemed themselves to be the most sophisticated societies in the existing world (starting from around 590 BCE). The idea of race or whiteness had not been invented, and people’s skin color held no true meaning. Translators later added that in themselves. Classification of tribes, their geographic locations and the climate of said locations, their sterility, and figuring out if the tribe was “elegant and sophisticated” under Greco/Roman standards, or warriors made the call in figuring out how to treat other people.  I’ll get into what tribes these were and where they were located, even though all is speculation because of cultural blending between tribes and mass migration caused by wars that were spearheaded by the Huns or the Persians, to name just two.

Anyway, Northern Europeans were known by the following – Scythians, the Celts, the Gauls and the Germani. There were subsets of tribes within these. The recorded accounts of these tribes were made by the ruling class. The Caucasus, which was unknown to Greece, was ethnically and geographically “complex”, since it was located in between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea and surrounded by the Caucasus mountains. It’s modern day Russia, and separates Turkey and Iran. Georgia lies within the area, and Armenia and Azerbaijan could be classified as part of Caucasus. Look at Greek mythology, the Caucasus was all over their myths. Look at Jason and the Argonauts, Princess Medea, The Odyssey.  Even Christians believed that Noah’s arc “came to rest” between the Black and Caspian Seas. All that we know on the supposedly “indigenous” population (everything that was not Greek or Roman was indigenous and barbaric according to them anyway) is what they wrote down. It isn’t known how these tribes situated themselves in the different parts of Europe two-three thousand years ago. Also note that to the Greeks, Africa meant Egypt and Libya, Asia was from Persia to India and Europe meant Greece to Sicily.

The lines begin to blur between the Tribes when Julius Caesar wrote down all of his tales of conquest during the Gallic War. He blurs the division between tribes and Pliny the Elder, being the douche that he is, took Caesar’s work as an eyewitness, unbiased account of the tribes throughout Europe, but with a twist – he began to create absurdities on the tribes he supposedly witnessed in action.

“Pliny’s catalog of humankind includes an amazing number of freakish peoples. In addition to the one-eyed folk, it describes others who grow a foot so big they pull it over their heads for shade from the sun. Still others come into the world with heads like dogs. So strong were Pliny’s fantastic notions that over a thousand years later, medieval English texts show these monstrous peoples as illustrating several varieties of mankind. The thrilling notion of monstrous people existed out there in the wide, wide world survived well into Enlightenment science.”

Pliny was alive from 23-79 BCE. The Enlightenment happened in the 18^th century. No one questioned one man’s farfetched ideas as it transcended through centuries.

“As the Roman empire crumbles, our narrative of people who would later be called “white” moves north. During the so-called Dark Ages… seafaring Raiders appeared, perturbing northern societies in a ceaseless quest for plunder. Although much history of these chaotic times has not survived, a key name – Saxon – appears for the first time. It does not denote the people of England, but foreigners: radiers from continenetal Europe – Scandinavians, Angles and Jutes, whoever could reach for plunder in Roman Britain… While warlords fought in the west, medieval cities and kningdoms at the edges of Christendom glittered in far-flung, cosmopolitan empires. Trade made the difference, trade in people as well as spices, silk, cotton, dyestuffs, salt, and increasingly sugar.”

Take note that the majority of these goods came from the Crusades and people of present Arab descent.

“First, the seafaring merchants of Pisa, Genoa, and, most gloriously, Venice controlled the Asian trade. After the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, Venice began to decline. Iberian kingdoms in the far west fattened on trade with frica and the newly discovered Americas. In Italy and Iberia, wealth and peoples from immense trading networks met and fornicated within polyglot, multicolored, and religiously diverse populations.

Here was a rich and glorious world built on subjugation. Hundreds of thousands in the Italian and Iberian empires were, in fact, not free, but were objects of an ever-flourishing trade. During Roman and medieval times, this traffic in workers had flowed one way, from various peripheries toward the metropoles. The Greco-Roman historian Diodorus Siculus offers a clue. When the Celts discovered they could buy Italian wine even without money – for they had no money – they flooded the market with slaves. A good Celtic bargain exchanged a slave for one amphora of wine holding about seven gallons. The various slave trades brought thousands of northern barbarians – Celts, Gauls, Germani – into the centers of wealth and power, altering those gene pools as surely as did the older flow from the Black Sea. Up in their impoverished, cold, and remote land, ancient Germans saw no such influx from afar. Compared with wealthy centers to the south, German tribal territory remained relatively contained, while the Roman world and its successors blended the descendants of many a hapless barbarian.

This millennium of Venetian and Iberian hegemony barely appears in American white race history as it jelled over the past two hundred years. Rather, race-chauvinist history depends on Tacitus’s ancient Germani and medieval German heroes called Saxons. The race narrative ignores early European slavery and the mixing it entailed, leading today’s readers to find the idea of white slavery far-fetched. But in the land we now called Europe, most slaves were white, and that fact was unremarkable.”

So the white race was built on enslaving all populations for the sake of trades. Sounds like indentured servitude for the sake of capitalism today, dunnit?

Fast forward-  the Puritans brought in their own slaves comprised of minors, kidnapped persons, convicts, and indentured servants from the British islands and were shipped to Barbados, Jamaica and North America (Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania). “Between one-half and two-thirds of all early white immigrants to the British colonies in the Western Hemisphere came as unfree laborers, some 300,000 to 400,000 people. The 18^th century created the now familiar equation that converts race to black and black to slave.” So if you were a slave, you were considered black and if you were black, you were a slave. This emerges as a caste system type of social classification and was somehow switched over to who was black and who was not black and their roles in American society as slaves.

White slavery then becomes a beauty ideal, as seen with the odalisques (Circassian, Georgian and Caucasians women slaves of the Black Sea) who were valued for sex and were considered luxurious and the others, the ones responsible for brute labor (Africans) were equated with ugliness. If you want to look more into this concept (because it is a lot to synthesize), look up early human classification schemes by Francois Bernier (“the four races”), Jean-Baptiste Chardin (his descriptions of ugly and “smelly” Caucasian people), Edward Daniel Clarke (the unraveling that the Circassian slave which was so doted by men and referred to as “the purest example of white race” possessed “light-skinned Negro traits”) and Hiram Powers (his sculpture of the Greek slave). “Power’s white slave and the white-skinned slaves of the American south, where no measure of beauty or whiteness or youth sufficed to deliver a person of African ancestry from bondage.” So the white slaves mixed with the black slaves because they were of the same caste, and their offspring were black regardless of white parentage. If there was so much an inkling that a person may have had “black blood”, they were labeled as such.

“Nowadays, both the reality of harem white slavery and the figure of the odalisque have largely disappeared, gone the way of that slavery itself.” Note that this does not include post-slavery Europe or human trafficking today. “…European and Turkish imperial power closed down long-range slaving out of the Black Sea region. In the west, an abolitionist movement ended the Atlantic slave trade by the mid-19^th century. In the east around the same time, Russia abolished slavery and severely curtailed the eastern European-Caucasian slave trade. As this slavery faded, so did its iconography, but ideals of white beauty endured. They had become firmly embedded in the science of race.” So the whites stopped the slavery of their perfect white specimen but kept slavery to those who were already disenfranchised (i.e. felons and the homeless) as well as those they considered black.

There is much, much more to this lesson, but I have not yet finished my reading. I still have to do an in depth analysis of how the idea that the perfect egalitarian American society based on race and not on class was introduced by De Staëls, and the American spectrum of slavery and the illogical transcendence of hypocrisy through the concept of whiteness and anti-blackness was incorporated into society and has remained here ever since. This probably ties in with white supremacist capitalism in one way or another… I think I’ll do a series on this particular study.

 So yeah, whiteness was invented by self-identifying white men who took pleasure in demonizing and raping and enslaving populations, then dictating what their races were based on a selected number of men who deemed themselves intelligent, then the farce being forced through history and civilization as okay until

WAIT, GUYS, SLAVERY, WE’VE BEEN DOING IT WRONG THE WHOLE TIME. WHY NOT FREE THE WHITES AND ENSLAVE EVERYONE ELSE? YEAH! YEAH! LET’S SEE IT COME INTO FRUITION IN — AMERICA! Holy shit, what a brilliant idea!

lmao, wow.

knowledgeequalsblackpower:

I had to type and post the entire section because I found it to be such good information. I think I may finally understand White people.

From Being White, Being Good: White Complicity, White Moral Responsibility, and Social Justice Pedagogy by Barbara Applebaum

Pgs. 35-41

Privilege…gives whites a way to not know that does not even fully recognize the extent to which they do not know that race matters or that their agency is closely connected with their status.

Cris Mayo’s provocative but discerning quote highlights the connection between privilege, ignorance and denials of complicity. It is Charles Mills, however, who has drawn special attention to the epistemology of ignorance. Mills’ work is guided by the question, ‘How are white people able to consistently do the wrong thing while thinking that they are doing the right thing?’

In his oft-cited book, The Racial Contract, Mills argues that a Racial Contract underwrites the modern Social Contract. The Racial Contract is a covert agreement or set of meta-agreements between white people to create and maintain a subperson class of non-whites. The purpose of the Racial Contract is to ‘secur(e) the privileges and advantages of the full white citizens and maint(ain) the subordination of nonwhites.’ To achieve this purpose, there is a need to perpetuate ignorance and to misinterpret the world as it really is. The Racial Contract is an agreement to not know and an assurance that this will count as a true version of reality by those who benefit from the account. That such ignorance is socially sanctioned is of extreme significance. Mills refers to such lack of knowledge as an ‘inverted epistemology’ and contends it is an

officially sanctioned reality (that) is divergent from actual reality…one has an agreement to misinterpret the world. One has to learn to see the world wrongly, but with the assurance that this set of mistaken perceptions will be validated by white epistemic authority, whether religious or secular.

White ignorance, thus, will feel like knowledge to those who benefit from the system because it is supported by the social system of knowledge.

When I discussed Mills’ work with one of my white colleagues, he charged that Mills’ arguments with promoting a type of ‘conspiracy theory’. Thus, it is important to emphasize that Mills is not implying that an actual racial contract has taken place. Rather, the racial contract is a sort of imaginary device that can explain how systematic white ignorance remains unchallenged. 

In his 2007 article titled ‘White Ignorance’ Mills further explains that white ignorance is distinguished from general patterns of ignorance ‘prevalent among people who are white but in whose doxastic states race has played no determining role.’ Moreover, white ignorance is not exclusively focused on the type of ignorance prevalent in overtly racist white individuals who are uneducated but additionally covers the type of not knowing existing in even those who are well-intended and ‘educated’ which ‘after the transition from de jure to de facto white supremacy, it is precisely this kind of white ignorance that is most important.’ 

White ignorance, accordingly, has a number of characteristic features among which are that it is intimately connected to racial positionality and works to protect white interests. Both these features of white ignorance need elucidation. First, white ignorance involves a ‘not knowing’ that is intimately connected to racial positionality. As such, white ignorance is part of an epistemology of ignorance, ‘a particular pattern of localized and global cognitive dysfunctions (which are psychologically and socially functional), producing the ironic outcome that whites will in general be unable to understand the world they themselves have made.’ 

A good illustration of such white ignorance can be found in George Yancy’s ‘Fragments of a Social Ontology of Whiteness.’ Yancy describes how a white philosopher whom he deeply respected cautioned Yancy with deep concern and out of good intentions not to get pegged as someone who pursues issues in African-American philosophy. Yancy immediately thinks,

‘Pegged! I’m doing philosophy!’ It immediately occured to me that the introductory course in philosophy that I had taken with him some years back did not include a single person of color. Yet he did not see his own philosophical performances—engagements with European and Anglo-American philosophy as ‘pegged’; he simply taught philosophy qua philosophy. Such a philosophy only masquerades as universal.

In this illustration, race is a fundamental factor in the type of   ignore-ance exhibited by the white philosopher.

As Mills underscores, such ignorance is connected to the conceptual framework that white people have at their disposal. Such ignorance is made possible because the conceptual framework from which one interprets one’s social world ‘will not be neutral but oriented toward a certain understanding.’ While Marxists refer to this ideology, Mills notes that Foucault refers to this as discourse. In addition, Mills, enormously influenced by standpoint theorists, maintains that ‘…if the society is one structured by relations of domination and subordination… then in certain areas this conceptual apparatus is likely going to be shaped and inflected in various ways by the biases of the ruling group(s)’. Whatever one perceives, it is the ‘concept (that) is driving the perception’. 

Mills, futhermore, insists, ‘whites (are) aprioristically intent on denying what is before them.’ In other words, the exhibited ignorance is not merely a lack of knowledge that results from a cognitive flaw of a particular individual or, as Linda Alcoff explains, merely an individual’s bad epistemic practice but rather is ‘a substantive epistemic practice itself’. White ignorance is a product of an epistemology of ignorance, a systematically supported, socially induced pattern of (mis)understanding the world that is connected to and works to sustain systemic oppression and privilege. White ignorance parallels what Joe Feagin and Henan Vera term as ‘sincere fictions’ or the “personal ideological constructions that reproduce societal mythologies at the individual level’. Most significant, these white delusions about racism also function to protect white people from having to recognize their own racism.

Eve Sedgwick brings to our attention how systemic ignorance is not a passive lacking, as the term ‘ignorance’ implies, but it is an activity. Extending Sedgwick’s insights to the discourse of color-ignorance, Cris Mayo contends that such ignoring is not a ‘lack of knowledge’ but ‘a particular kind of knowledge’ that does things. Mills argues that one’s social positionality and the knowledge connected to it will influence what questions one believes are important to ask and the problems one believes are valuable to pursue. White ignorance involves not asking or not having to ask (i.e., having the privilege not to need to ask) certain questions.The Racial Contract, according to Mills, involves

…simply a failure to ask certain questions, taking for granted as a status quo and baseline the existing color-coded configurations of wealth, poverty, property, and opportunities, the pretence that formal, juridical equality is sufficient to remedy inequities created on a foundation of several hundred years of racial privilege, and that foundation is a trangression of the terms of the social contract.

Thus, white ignorance is a type of knowledge that protects systemic racial injustice from challenge. 

In a distressing illustration of such habits of selective attention, Tyron Foreman and Amanda Lewis underscore the intense surprise that many white Americans expressed after Hurricane Katrina about the social reality of racial inequality in New Orleans. Foreman and Lewis attribute this astonishment to a racial apathy that is a consequence of the white ignorance manifested in the ideology of color ignore-ance. White ignorance, therefore, generates specific types of delusions or wrong ways of perceiving the world that are socially validated by the dominant norms and protect those norms from being interrogated.

Second, white ignorance is not only itself a type of white privilege (Who has the privilege to be ignorant?) but also works to safeguard privilege. Mills underscores that it is white group interest that is a ‘central causal factor in generating and sustaining white ignorance’. Such ignorance functions to mystify the consequences of such unjust systems so that those who benefit from the system do not have to consider their complicity in perpetuating it. There are benefits for the dominant social group of such ignorance. In her analysis of willful ignorance in literary characters, Vivan May writes, ‘there are many things those in dominant groups are taught not to know, encouraged not to see, and the privileged are rewarded for this state of not-knowing’. Quoting from Peggy McIntosh, May explicates that willful ignorance involves a pattern of assumptions that privileges that dominant group and gives license to members of those groups ‘to be ignorant, oblivious, arrogant, and destructive’ all the while thinking themselves ‘as good’.

The connection between white privilege and white ignorance is intimated when both Alcoff and May refer to white ignorance as willful ignorance. Although such ignorance may be willful in the sense of intended, it often appears that white people are not even conscious of such ignorance, so in what sense is it willful? 

The term ‘willful ignorance’ has often been employed to refer to a blatant avoidance or disregard of facts or well-founded arguments because they oppose one’s personal beliefs, values or worldviews. Willful ignorance is customarily used to refer to laziness or fear of critically examining one’s personal point of view. In other words, it is to intentionally remain ignorant of something one should know but on does not want to know. Willful seems to imply a level of knowing, i.e., that one wants to ignore knowing and is aware of what one is doing, as is evidenced in Thomas Green’s description of such ignorance as

that condition that I note from time to time in those who (1) are ignorant on som matter important to their lives, (2) are aware of their ignorance, but even more than that, are (3) resolved to remain in their ignorance, (4) not the lease because it is such a source of enjoyment and pleasure to them. I suppose that each of us can recall someone who fits this description. It is a bit more difficult to admit what is probably no less true, that there are traces of this sort of thing in ourselves.

White ignorance may be but is not always the result of a deliberate and conscious decision. Yet, as already noted, often such ignorance does not seem willful in the sense of intentional but rather the product of a socially induced tendency to ignore that involves being unaware that one does not know. Why categorize white ignorance as willful?

I suggest that white ignorance might be understood to be a form of willful ignorance because willful ignorance is culpable ignorance. Interesting and complex questions about culpable ignorance can be found in the ethical debates around moral responsibility and will be addressed in Chapter 5. Briefly, involuntary ignorance is often thought to excuse one from moral culpability unless one knowingly contrives one’s own ignorance. Then one is culpable even if one ignorant.

White ignorance may be a type of willful ignorance because there is a sense in which white people deliberately contrive their own ignorance. But white ignorance might also be willful not necessarily because the ignorance is consciously or deliberately manufactured but instead willful because such ignorance benefits the person or the social group the person is a member of. Members of the dominant group, for instance, have a vested interest in not knowing. Linda Alcoff emphasizes that white people not only have less interest in understanding their complicity in social injustice than those who are victimized by such systems but also that white people have a positive interest in remaining ignorant. The point is that even if one does not deliberately manufacture such ignorance, white ignorance does not release one from moral responsibility and might be willful in the sense that it is something that someone would want. One of the types of vested interests that such ignorance serves is the sustaining of one’s moral self-image.

Because of white ignorance, white people will be unable to understand racial world they themselves have made. One of the significant features of white ignorance is that it involves not just ‘not knowing’ but also ‘not knowing what one does not know and believing that one knows’. White ignorance is a form of white knowledge. It is a type of ignorance that arrogantly parades as knowledge.Rather than an absence of knowledge, white ignorance is a particular way of everyday knowing or thinking that one knows how the social world works that is intimately related to what it means to be white. Moreover, such ‘ignorance as knowledge’ is socially sanctioned. Thus white people tend not to hesitate to dismiss and rebuff the knowledge of those who have been victims of systemic racial injustice rather than engaging with them, inquiring for more information and having the humility to acknowledge what they do not know.

What do white people know, what do they not know, and what can they know? Although I will not explore this conjecture here, the binaries knowledge/ignorance and knowing/not knowing not only seem inadequate but also misleading in terms of understanding the epistemological dynamics of whiteness. Further study of these binaries is required especially for those involved in helping white students acknowledge ‘white ignorance that is taken as knowledge’. 

What is significant is that white knowledge of the social world, that is really white ignorance, fuels a refusal to consider that one might be morally complicit and further promotes a resistance to knowing. Consequently, concepts ‘necessary for accurately mapping these realities will be absent’. In a provocative but evidently correct observation, Mills notes, ‘the crucial conceptual innovation necessary to map nonideal realities has not come from the dominant group’. All the more important for white people to acknowledge white ignorance so that they can hear what those who are not from the dominant group are telling them. 

Although it is not only white people who are susceptible to white ignorance, white people are particularly susceptible because they are the ones who have the most to gain from remaining ignorant. As Sandra Harding argues, it is members of oppressed groups, those who have direct experience with oppression, who ‘have fewer interests in ignorance about the social order and fewer reasons to invest in maintaining or justifying the status quo than do dominant groups’. Again, this is not to imply that all members of oppressed groups automatically have such knowledge. Alcoff explains,

identity does not determine one’s interpretation of the facts, nor does it constitute fully formed perspectives, but rather to use the hermeneutic terminology once again, identities operate as horizons from which certain aspects or layers of reality can be made visible. In stratified societies, differently identified individuals do not always have the same access to points of view or perceptual planes of observation. Two individuals may participate in the same event, but have perceptual access to different aspects of that event. Social identity is relevant to epistemic judgement, then, not because identity determines judgement but because identity can in some instances yield access to perceptual facts that themselves may be relevant to the forumlation of various knowledge claims or theoretical analyses.

What Alcoff underscores is that there is a greater tendency for those who experience the harms of systemic racism than those who benefit from it to be troubled by the normalization of white space and to be more affected by the white norms that are mystified as universal when they are not. 

White people have a positive interest in remaining ignorant because such ignorance serves to sustain white moral innocence. White ignorance, however, simultaneously protects systems of privilege and oppression from being interrogated. Whiteness, according to Mills, requires certain ‘opacities in order to establish and maintain the white polity’. In her 1984 book, The Politics of Reality, Marilyn Frye similarly argues that ignorance is indispensable for the perpetuation of white power and privilege. She contends that ignorance is ‘not something simple; it is not a simple lack, absence, or emptiness, and it is not a passive state’. In order to know one must pay attention, Frye contends. So too not knowing requires an active interest in ignoring or a resistance to knowing what is right in front of you. White people, Frye maintains, actively refuse to pay attention to their complicity in racism. Ignorance is ‘the condition that ensures its continuance’.

Systemic benefit works not only to keep ignorance in place but also to keep the status quo from being challenged. Mills cautions that it is crucial that white people take these ‘recognition problems’ seriously since, ‘(I)t becomes easier to do the right thing if one knows the wrong things that, to one’s group, will typically seem like the right thing’. Yet it is not easy to get white people to consider their complicity. Denials of complicity are not understood to be ‘denials’ but because of white ignorance masquerade as white racial common sense.