Aural Sects

lebanesepoppyseed:

My biggest challenge right now in the anti-racist/critical race theory stuff I’m always going on about is trying to communicate why it is I mention whiteness so much.

Even people who are anti-racist struggle with the constant mentioning and don’t understand what the point is. They think I’m merely engaging in pettiness after a certain point.

Here’s the thing. Obviously race, like 90% of shit in this world, is socially constructed. There is nothing inherent in our genes that makes us behave the way we do. White people are not naturally better or supremacist. POC are not naturally inferior or lowly. People construct these things AFTER they’re born, and we inherit the cultures and world our people created after them. Ergo, we’re SOCIALIZED with different beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors based on things like race. We set definitions in our cultures and then judge people based on them. Those definitions will have the biases, ignorance, bigotry, and backwards thinking of the people who created them.

White people, beyond just having privilege based on racist history, are socialized in inherently self-important, self-prioritizing, whitesplaining, racist ways AND are privileged by the way society is set in their favor, by the fact that definitions and means of progress and beauty and positivity having been created and set by their people. Ergo why yeah, shit like “whitivities” and “going about shit in a really white way” exists and is real.

It isn’t merely “You’re white and since you’re doing X as a white person it is therefore a whitetivity” it is “You are going about this in an inherently racist, bigoted, Western and/or ridiculously suburban way”.

That is a nuance that can be totally missed even by some really cool anti-racist folk, (white AND POC), & needs to be taken into account so we can truly move forward in anti-racist thought and struggle and so my inbox will be spared white people being really white about shit.

I’m just going to pretend that the following is how Mary wound up with a child:

So she had that near death experience and she had that failed marriage attempt and there’s all that “dad had another family” shit. I figure she was due for a midlife crisis. She says fuck this, and totally spur of the moment goes and gets herself knocked up via artificial insemination. Afterwards, she totally has buyer’s remorse but you know, you can’t return a baby like you can a car. And sure she could abort, but she’s really not in the mood to have another doctor putting his hands up her vag so she decides she’ll just give it up for adoption. Because seriously, she’s not the mommy type, what was she thinking? But then Brandi fucks off with the wedding and the whole thing with the witness goes down like it did in the show and well, Mary has a weak moment and keeps the kid.

THAT would be no less ridiculous than what they actually did on the show. Also, I would actually fix Brandi’s thing, because I think it’s bullshit. I think she would’ve married her sweetie and been happy. So I’m going to pretend that too.

lebanesepoppyseed:

The thing about the word “Nigger” that we’re coming to realize with Rick Santorum’s telling slip-of-tongue is how it truly operates.

Nigger is not, like people commonly believe, just a rude way of referring to a black person. It isn’t simply a bastardization of the Spanish “Negro”.

It is a leveler. An oral devastation of sorts. A place-putting, a head-bower.

I truly realized the power of “Nigger” when a friend of mine took me to her friend’s house where she lived with husband and his two buddies. They were skinheads who were obviously not happy with my being there.

One of them was watching “Hitch”, featuring Will Smith. Will Smith, for those who don’t know, is an enormously successful and rich black Hollywood actor whose career spans decades. This skinhead more than likely didn’t past high school and lived in a trailer park, playing video games, getting high, and shooting BB guns at beer cans all day. When asked about what he was watching by someone else in the house, he said “The movie with that nigger Will Smith.”

With that, they switched stations. The skinhead was no longer a lower-class white male with little education and bleak prospects. Will Smith ceased to be an accomplished prosperous man with the world as his oyster. Will Smith was just a nigger, and the skinhead could laugh and spit on that, easily.

When I got home I hid in my closet and cried. Cried not because it hurt my feelings but because no matter what I did, how hard I worked, how far I went, I was always going to just be a “Nigger” to some. An uppity bitch leaving her station.

That is the true nature of anti-black racism in this country. Even one of the men who lynched Emmett Till said himself that he had “no problem with niggers”, he wasn’t a bully. He just liked them “in their place”. In our place, under your boot, quiet and castrated and cowed, right whitey? President Obama was a nigger who stepped out of his place, and Rick Santorum was more than eager to remind him of this sin.

amazonmusic:

Dear Tumblr Pals,

We’re kind of new around these here Tumblr parts and, well, we feel like it would be rude to show up to a party without a gift.

So, as a gift to you, we’d like to offer you a $2 credit towards MP3s at Amazon MP3.

Here’s what you have to do:

Read More

Yay! I am so happy to have AmazonMP3, seriously. iTunes is virtually impossible for me to access most of the time and I don’t care for the file format they come in.