#color-blind racism

[batmanbeyondrocks]

Credit: julliaamarieee, @nicolemjeffery, and @cdough08

[bixels]

I'm not explaining why re-imagining characters as POC is not the same as white-washing, here of all places should fucking understand.

[local-redhead-bookworm]

I love how Rings of Power has added depth to Orc culture. I've read a decent number of academic papers on Tolkien for college projects, and one of the things I've read that Tolkien said was that he could not reconcile how his protagonists treated Orcs with the idea that Orcs were fully people, because that would have made the callous manner in which his protagonists kill Orcs in combat wholly unacceptable. It's a moral dilemma he was well aware of, and I'm so glad that they're getting to be people with their own culture. They have mourning rituals, they have familial bonds, and they have kids. They've been inconsequential monsters for too long.

[crimeronan]

On the topic of How Do You Handle XYZ Comment, I've always wondered how you handle terrible responses on your toh takes. Like I know the toh fandom doesn't lack piss on the poor reading comprehension and they also really enjoy wildly out of touch takes, but I've never seen any comments on your princess luz stuff of that nature. I'm sure they must be there but maybe I'm too early? But anyway, how do you tend to deal with the "acktually shipping luz and Hunter is incest" and the "ur not a real lesbian because putting amity in a poly ship is lesbian erasure" and the "as a white person kinda sus you make the poc woman an empress" kind of responses? Ones that are technically not hate and maybe if you squint could be from people who aren't inherently trying to do bad but just lack the maturity needed to engage with the internet at large?

this ask made me giggle. honestly, i haven't received as much pushback as you might expect! way less pushback than i expected. in the princess AU, i've gotten a LOT more "this is actually too grotesque for me to stomach" comments than "this is problematic" comments, which is fine. horror-thriller isn't for everyone, those comments do not upset me.

i have had a Few run-ins with bad faith people, whom i mostly block. there's one prolific commenter in toh tumblr fandom who would repeatedly write angry essays on my humor meta posts -- essays that were all about how belos is too evil to be sympathetic and/or about how hunter is a soft gentle boy who shouldn't be jokingly referred to as evil. then they'd go "i can't help my active and conscious decision to type a bunch of rude fucking words and then my active and conscious decision to send those rude fucking words because i'm autistic :(((" around the fourth or fifth time this happened, i was fucking done with that nonsense and finally blocked them. shoulda done it after the first comment tbh!! no more autism exceptions.

as for the rest of it, my main management strategy is to simply.... preempt the bad faith comments?

i had a LOT more unpleasant and conflict-filled fandom experiences when i was in the raven cycle fandom. that was my first exposure to "you can't ship multi-gender polycules if anyone involved is gay" and "queerplatonic het relationships are just heteronormativity shipping that you're trying to get away with." having dealt with those takes before, i've found a few different ways to disarm bad faith readers before they get started.

first is to be super open and honest about my interests. i talk about what i find compelling in different relationships All The Damn Time. it's really hard for anyone to accuse me of only wanting hunter to fuck amity if they've seen, like.... anything i've said about hunter and amity.

same with hunter and luz. the only negative reactions i've really gotten to how they're written in the princess AU is like.... two people being squicked by camila thinking they're romantically involved. i REALLY expected more pushback on the touchyfeely bed sharing stuff, but from what i remember, there's never been Any....? not even from people who consider them siblings.

i expected a lot of pushback on how mean hunter and amity are to each other, since it's taken So much farther than the canon. but it turns out that there's a very large overlap between people who like dark horror AUs and people who like hunter and amity murdering each other. (in a fluffy fic i don't think this characterization would fly Nearly as easily.)

i find that being funny really disarms people, too. when you look at any of my toh meta posts that could be controversial, they're basically all funny. people are a lot more willing to listen to what you have to say if you make them laugh, and it's harder for them to get angry at you.

and then the last thing is that i think i'm in sort of a privileged position in toh fandom. i've written a lot of controversial subjects and relationships and characterizations.... but i've also written some WILDLY popular mainstream fic. and people who like the mainstream fic don't really want to beef with me about differing niche opinions, bc there's a level of respect there. which they might not have for a writer they don't like.

but anyway. when things Do happen, i almost always just block and move on. there are so many people here who get what i'm talking about that there's no need for me to try to convert people who don't, you know??

[lovinnelily]

Y'all do know you can't make Jason be NOT white without changing his whole character, right?

For other characters, yes, because their physical appearance are not that influential in their story, on how they are viewed by people, on their personality formation — you can have a black/asian/indigenous/arab/brown/latino/etc Nico and yes, the hate he gets will have a undertone of racism but at the same time nothing significant on his story, motivation or personality will need to change. This is also true for other characters: Clarisse risks repeating the "aggressive WoC" stereotype but the character itself doesn't change.

This isn't true for Jason, whose main character trait is how he is perceived by others and how he showcases himself to others based on that perception. (specially with how little effort Riordan put on him besides making him perfect-er Percy who's somehow also weaker and less important than him).

Let's not pretend a black, Arab, indigenous, Asian, Latin man, etc, in the USA would ever be treated with the universal reverence Jason gets from New Roma, you can't have the illusion of perfection and most of all, of invincibility they have about him when you see him suffering racism or xenophobia in the middle of a mission. In theory, nothing in his life has ever gone wrong, that's his image, destined to be king, he is supposed to have no weakness on his peers eyes.

He is not trying to prove people wrong, he is trying to prove them right; he isn't worthy despite their prejudice, on the contrary, he only tried to make himself worthy to fulfill their expectations. He can't be a woman or an immigrant or have a visible disability or any other thing that strays him from a perfect ideal by western society standards, and be that same character.

[whatisthisnonsense]

"mutants are poc analogy" "mutants are queer analogy" Listen, X-Men and as such mutants as a whole should really be disability representation, and I mean representation and not analougous to it they just occassionally also get to blast ice while having furniture not built for them, struggles with keeping their mind in the present, and constantly having people casually discuss sterilizing or euthanizing them and being considered either dangerous or simply incapable of understanding when they get mad about this. But nobody is ready for this conversation.

[gamer2002]

But the day after my talk, I heard from Chris Anderson, the head of TED. He told me that a group called “Black@TED”—which TED’s website describes as an “Employee Resource Group that exists to provide a safe space for TED staff who identify as Black”—was “upset” by my talk. Over email, Chris asked if I’d be willing to speak with them privately.

I agreed to speak with them on principle, that principle being that you should always speak with your critics because they may expose crucial blind spots in your worldview. No sooner did I agree to speak with them than Chris told me that Black@TED actually was not willing to speak to me. I never learned why. I hoped that this strange about-face was the end of the drama. But it was only the beginning.

[tododeku-or-bust]

Oh ho ho this is about to be a GOOD book 🔥🔥🔥

[millennihilist]

on linkedin reporting companies for requiring video intros as part of job applications😇😇😇

[bingqiuhateabortion]

So ⭐️ember put out that half-assed passive-aggressive apology for lotr fanfic fanart with nazi uniforms saying these accusations are ridiculous bc she's from a country that suffered a lot during ww2 and they aren't really nazi blah blah as if she hasn't been very much into orientalist fetish art & colorist hualian depictions since forever and the whole deal with drawing banyue people like that... nah fuck you girl

[cassatine]

The thing with "racism just isn't the same in Europe" is that it's not exactly untrue, but you could say the same thing about any other geopolitical entity. It's like, congrats on noticing! It sure is a thing that the exact shape racism takes isn't the same in Europe and the US or anywhere else you may deign to look at, but it shouldn't be any less obvious that the differences stem from the fact that the sociohistorical contexts are different, not from some underlying qualitative or quantitative difference, which is all too often what the observation implies.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Grayson Slover

Published: Feb 5, 2024

“This is a revolution to get in…Revolutions have been centered on destroying something. Whereas in this revolution the quest is for the Negro to get into the stream of American life.” 

When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. made the above observation in 1965, the Civil Rights Movement had just achieved two monumental victories in the “revolution to get in”: The Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. It had also, however, been forced to reckon with events that suggested these legislative victories might not be enough. The day after the Voting Rights Act was signed into law, the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts was decimated by riots sparked after a young black man, in the course of resisting arrest for drunk driving, was struck in the face with a police baton and the confrontation with onlookers escalated. Over the following four summers, similar racially-charged riots broke out in virtually every major northern city across the United States. 

Meanwhile, Dr. King and the other leaders of the Civil Rights Movement were confronted with their first organized challenge for leadership of the movement against racism in America. In 1966, the truly revolutionary (and often violent) Black Power movement burst onto the scene, insisting that the goal of a harmonious and equal relationship between the races in America was a farce. According to them, what the Civil Rights Movement upheld as achievements were in fact trivial and superficial changes that served to maintain an indelibly white supremacist American government. 

Despite all of this, the majority of black Americans remained convinced that MLK’s message was the right one. A 1968 study of fifteen northern cities showed that 72 percent of black northerners approved of Martin Luther King and just 5 percent disapproved of him. In the same study, the most well-known leader in the Black Power movement, Stokely Carmichael, received only a 14 percent approval rating and a 35 percent disapproval rating; more than a quarter of respondents had never heard of him. Similarly, a 1966 survey of black Americans found that a mere five percent approved of “Black Nationalism,” while 63 percent disapproved. 

One might assume that the discourse around racial justice in America today, six decades later, would more closely resemble the philosophy of MLK than of Stokely Carmichael. If most black Americans were still supportive of Dr. King’s hopeful message of racial integration even during the tumultuous late 1960s, then surely they—and indeed most Americans of all races—would continue to support Dr. King’s dream today. Unfortunately, that is not the case, as author Coleman Hughes explains in his incisive new book The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America. In fact, in many parts of American society, the socially acceptable opinions on race today are strikingly similar to those of the Black Power movement that Dr. King fought so hard to oppose. 

The simplest way to describe Hughes’ book is an unfortunately necessary defense of the philosophy and legacy of the Civil Rights movement, and Dr. King in particular. As Hughes points out, today’s self-described “anti-racists”—whom he calls “neoracists”—attempt to trade on the legacy of Dr. King while spurning his philosophy. They will misleadingly claim, without evidence, that Dr. King was a radical, and that his legacy has been, in Hughes’s words, “sanitized, co-opted, and weaponized by conservatives and moderates.” They try to decouple Dr. King’s ideas—which they dismiss outright as mischaracterizations by (white) conservatives and moderates—from Dr. King the historical figure, whose legacy is rightly untouchable in America today. 

Take for example the concept of racial “colorblindness.” Today, we are hearing the term “colorblind” in the context of race to describe what critics deem the outdated and naive attitude that well-meaning but ignorant white people have toward people of different races—or worse, a smokescreen that racists use to mask their goal of maintaining white supremacy. In his book Racism without Racists: Color-blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America, law professor and critical race theorist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva defines “color-blind racism” as “a new racial ideology” that “explains [and justifies] contemporary racial inequality as the outcome of nonracial dynamics…the product of market dynamics, naturally occurring phenomena, and blacks’ imputed cultural limitations.” 

The neoracists, like the Black Power activists decades ago—and, Hughes observes, like old-school white supremacists—believe that “race matters in a deep and enduring way.” They argue that the antidote to colorblind racism is “race-consciousness,” which they promote in every facet of life: from school admissions, to hiring practices, down to everyday interpersonal relationships. Failing to focus on race at all times and in every context, they claim, is to fail to recognize the racism that is ubiquitous in American society and baked into the foundation of all our institutions. 

Yet Hughes reminds us that the colorblind approach to race that has become so controversial today is in truth what the heroes of the Civil Rights movement risked their lives fighting for. It is precisely what Dr. King promoted in his legendary “I Have a Dream” speech. Colorblindness, Hughes states simply, “is the philosophy that we should treat people—both in our private lives and in our public policy—without regard to race.” The colorblind approach is different from “not seeing color,” which Hughes correctly explains is a caricature that critics use to dismiss the idea as superficial and obtuse. Far from ignoring racism where it exists, Hughes aptly notes that the very concept of racism—defined as prejudice based on skin color—is meaningless unless it is measured against a standard of “race neutrality” or colorblindness. 

The “real problem of racism in America,” Hughes tells us, is that “our society keeps failing to enshrine colorblindness as its guiding ethos.” Starting from the founding of this nation, through the inadequacies of Reconstruction, but also to the systematic restructuring of public policy to take undue account of the race, color, and national origin of individuals that ensued after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964—which expressly prohibited the drawing of such distinctions between individuals—all the way to today, our leaders have consistently chosen to turn away from the ideal of treating individuals as individuals rather than members of racial or ethnic groups. To finally solve this problem, Hughes proposes that we “embrace our common humanity and the colorblind philosophy that follows from it. We need to embody that philosophy in race neutral public policies. And we need to strive to ensure that our personal relationships don’t get infected with toxic race thinking of any sort.” 

The most illustrative difference between the neoracists and what could be called the “real antiracists” (the advocates of colorblindness) is the type of society they wish to create. We can leave aside for now good-faith disagreements on how big of a problem racism still is in America, or on how close we are to reaching that ideal society. What truly separates the two camps is what each thinks the ideal society should be. For the colorblindness advocates, we wish to live in a society where racial differences have ceased to carry any social or political meaning; a society in which racial differences are treated the same way as we treat differences in hair color today, to borrow a line from Sam Harris. The neoracists, on the other hand, believe that it is either impossible or undesirable for a society to transcend racial differences. According to them, race will always be a central and determinative feature of any society and in the lives of individuals within that society. 

When the two philosophies are compared in this way, I believe that the vast majority of Americans still instinctively align with the optimistic goals of colorblindness. Like Dr. King and the other liberal Civil Rights leaders, they are eager allies in the “revolution to get in,” to extend the promise of America to all of the people who have historically been excluded from it. The hopeless worldview of the neoracists and traditional racial supremacists alike is bound to fail if people are able to understand and recognize the ideas that comprise it. To bring about the ideal colorblind society will be a challenge, but it’s a challenge worth the effort, and The End of Race Politics provides a compelling blueprint for taking it on. 

[the-ocean-is-trans]

so there are pages and pages that could be written examining portrayal of race in og leverage cause hoo boy so much to unpack and a lot of casual racism to analyze but what i will say for now to folks who are feel like eliot having Black parents is at odds with him saying racist shit to Hardison in the original show... i am not a transracial adoptee however i am a person of color with a white father and he absolutely says and does racist shit not IN SPITE of having a wife who is a woman of color and a child who is also not white passing, but BECAUSE we are both POC and his proximity to us makes him feel like he has a better than average understanding of race and therefore gets to say a lot of bullshit

[floralovebot]

What are your thoughts on how nickelodeon made the Princess of Linphea lightskinned? Was this them trying to whitewash Linphea?

That's interesting!

I mean listen I wouldn't put it past them yknow? This is rainbow and nickelodeon, two companies very cozy with whitewashing and racism. But I do think this could've been more innocent on their part. We didn't see a lot of the people of Lynphea in the first three seasons but we did see some, notably Miele who is also very lightskinned and could very well be white or very white-passing.

I think it's also important to remember that Rainbow is,, pretty bad with racial sensitivity and they treat all of the planets as very "color blind" so to speak. Like Melody is considered the "Asian planet" yet the princess is likely wasian but so white-passing that most fans thought she was completely white. We've also seen multiple other characters from Melody that don't "look" asian (obvs being asian doesn't have a "look" but in the realm of animation and rainbow racism? yeah they do). Nabu and Helia are both heavily asian-coded, yet Nabu (and his family) is from Andros while Helia is implied to be from Lynphea or Solaria.

We also see multiple shots of the crowds on other plants like Domino and Solaria where you can see characters that are definitely Not White. And while those characters could easily be from a different planet, they're also usually wearing the clothing associated with that planet and are considered Part of the people.

Rainbow often mixes different races and ethnicities for literally all of the planets. Like the argument that a character couldn't be from one planet because they aren't a specific race does not work in the winx universe. All of the planets are incredibly "mixed". And again, while there's obviously a discussion to be had about whitewashing cultures, being color blind, uncomfortable implications of colonization, etc, the princess of Lynphea being a white girl or at least partially white-coded or white-passing is actually really on brand for them and not something that I would entirely blame Nickelodeon for.

[1o1percentmilk]

this just makes me sad.... when a member of any sort of minority group feels like they have to compensate for things that literally aren't their fault...

[dignityofapotato]

Entry 48

Well, I almost completely forgot to post something today. I will not allow myself to break this streak. Today I was at the internship like usual. I had a good conversation with my supervisor about cultural identity. We talked about what I put under race when I have to fill out paperwork. Interestingly enough I always have to put other for my race. It used to be that I would put white under race…