Not like “I went to school with one” but have had an actual friendship?
I’ve had a couple of conversations recently where people have confidently said things about the Black community that are ridiculously incorrect. The kind of shit where you can tell they grew up in a very white community and learned about Black history as a college freshman.
Disclaimer: I am white, but I grew up in a Black neighborhood. I was one of 3 white kids in my elementary school lol, including my brother.
I thought the last of you “race isn’t real lalala if I don’t acknowledge it it’s not real” people got shamed into silence decades ago.
I thought the last of you
You are confusing this with the “see no white supremacism, hear no white supremacism, speak no white supremacism” respectability politics that has been the default camouflage of liberal political establishments throughout the (so-called) “Cold War” up till today.
And no - they are still at it today.
Same thing.
“Race isn’t real” provides cover for less blatant forms of racism, especially institutional bias. Also, it’s an obviously stupid philosophy.
Same thing.
No, they are not. White supremacism is very real - if you exist in the colonized world (as both of us do) it’s so real that it literally dictates everything about your reality. That is why we say places like the US (and places like Canada, South Africa or Israel) is fundamentally white supremacist.
Race itself isn’t real and has never been - apart from a reasonable command of the English language and our place on the racialized caste system dictated by white supremacism, me and you have absolutely nothing in common. In our fundamentally white supremacist world, it’s the latter that is socially constructed as important in our respective societies. That doesn’t make our (supposed) “race” any more biologically real.
