#white american guilt

[azrael-5]

I hope you dumb niggas who voted for Stein because she'd be good for Palestine even though she has ties to Israel, is running with an anti-abortion transphobe, and is genuinely just a shitty grifter are super fucking proud of yourselves right now

[alwaysbewoke]

the lies white people tell themselves to escape accountability and a real adult conversation on race, racism and history is just so sad smfh

[whetstonefires]

wrt whatever's going on in the sandman tv fandom--the thing about Hob Gadling in the format I am familiar with is that of course you can't ignore the slave trading phase. Because the point of Hob is that he's an eight hundred year old Englishman.

that's his basic concept. there's a reason he's a contemporary of Chaucer; Middle English is when English starts to be recognizably the same language, is about as far back as the English can really be considered to have a continuous cultural identity at all.

hob is self-absorbed and self-satisfied and has almost no imagination; he grows as a person, but not really of his own volition. he is totally normal except that he doesn't die.

he is an everyman, and he is an address to the concept of the everyman, to the white Englishman who expects the everyman to look like him as a matter of course. he's history, but he's the particular history of his nation.

in the 18th century the average Englishman didn't think slavery was too terrible a thing, and in the late 20th (and early 21st) century he does, and this is true even when they are literally the same guy.

how does Hob square himself with himself; how does England carry what it has been and done, these eight centuries? what role do your crimes play in your identity? (how do you make moral judgments, if not by general consensus?) it's not a question the story is meant to be able to answer, just to throw into relief.

and of course, recurring theme: you can never leave your past behind you, but you are always more than the sum of your transgressions.

it's just, does that matter? to who?

[eddiediazenjoyer]

can i speak. i think that eddie Catholic Guilt is hard to believe and dare i say. not real. for many reasons. one of them being Not All Latinos Have Catholic Guilt especially not in the way that white catholics conceptualize it. and TO ME it’s a bit of a cop out . and i don’t think we should believe eddie when he says that’s the reason for literally anything bc it’s a really convenient excuse for being insane and repressed but i just don’t think it’s true . and i think that something much more nuanced is afoot (aka a complex racial identity and relationship with expectation).

to me he was really like. barely raised catholic tbh. he was raised AROUND folk/cultural catholicism which ofc impacted how he was raised and his perspective. but this kind of catholicism is so different from institutionalized (and white) catholicism it's difficult to even compare the two. and i honestly don’t think that the catholicism is the main problem. like his parents just don’t strike me as being devout in the way that imparts guilt onto their children (they have fun OTHER ways to do this). i think they are traditional and crucially. catholic when it’s convenient and when it allows them an avenue for control (biggest example here is eddie getting pressured into getting married to the girl he impregnated as a teenager.) but to me. this stemmed from complex cultural traditions and beliefs. which catholicism is an easy simple explanation for . but isn’t really the root of the problem. it's a part of it ofc but honestly i think things are often ascribed solely to catholicism bc catholic guilt is a widely applicable perspective when it honestly doesn't make much sense. like i think that eddie being a mixed race mexican-american has more to do with anything than catholicism does. and again. these things are interwoven. but not in a way that it makes sense to blame capital c Catholicism for things where culture (and cultural catholicism) makes way more sense as an explanation

like ik that eddie talks about how he was raised going to mass every sunday etc etc. but even the way he says that he just... stopped... says so much. like the fact that he was even allowed to do that tells me that his parents honestly never really cared that much about that kind of devotion. and the way he talks about it really makes it sound to me like he was one of those kids that never really bought into it at all and so the institutionalized teachings of the church never really got to him. what did get to him however is the folk catholicism/mexican-american teachings of Right and Wrong (aka you get somebody pregnant you commit to them. you feel emotions you tamp them down in order to protect others etc.) and this is not necessarily Catholicism in it's classic conception.

i have no idea if this makes sense and it is really hard to explain how this interplay works if you haven't grown up in it but basically.... hegemonic constructions of catholicism are vastly different from the kind of "catholicism" that i think eddie was raised in. and bc of that i think that "catholic guilt" is a weak explanation for eddie's perspective and best and just. inaccurate at worst. and we should NEVERRRR listen to eddie when he gives too clean of an explanation for his repression. that man is a liar

[finalgirlsamwinchester]

re: last post and rambling thoughts on torture before i pass out - the key thing about represented torture to me is a matter of bodies being humiliated and punished before an audience. there's a distinct line between who experiences bodily torture and gets violated on screen vs. the threat of or implied past torture. more important to me is the matter of who gets visually stripped of power before us, as the voyeuristic audience. when i speak on humiliation - it can be something as simple yet starkly different as dean getting to keep his shirt on while hooked up in hell vs. meg strapped to a table naked in s6. abbadon threatening dean with possession described as a kind of rape (9.02) vs. crowley making a rape joke before possessing sam a few episodes later. (and yeah, stuff like possession falls under the added filter of genre fantasy, separating us from the reality of the violation that's occuring). really, torture just comes down to one thing: what gets shown to us. what gets lingered upon.

no one's free from physical torture/humiliation on this show. but there's a hierarchy for depicted humiliation etched out on the basis of masculinity (a Hero can never appear too weak) and gender - but most importantly, divided by monstrosity/humanity - especially obvious in how it treats its women (thinking on the good charlie/bad charlie plot from s10. who gets brutalised on screen?). there's also the added dimension of race, and the brutality of deaths inflicted on characters of colour on this show. there's a difference between a regular on-screen death and an excessively cruel one. the difference between getting stabbed vs. being made to drink bleach while your wife watches (3.01) vs. your head garroted on screen (3.07). one carries heavier overtones of humiliation. because to bring it back around again - torture is a theatre of punishment, first and formost, just like a public execution. it functions as a warning, but it also acts as a social sacrificial ritual. a means of collective punishment.

and on this show, the lines get blurred between its metaphorical hierarchies (monstrosity/humanity) and incidental inclusion of real world systemic oppression (along the lines of represented gender/race/disability etc.). monstrosity often gets used metaphorically in speculative fiction to stand in for categories of marginalised people, and it also functions similarly on this show. it all boils back down to a fundamental truth: torture, just like sexual violence, just like abuse, is the natural language of hierarchies. it's the language by which power (re)asserts itself. everything falls under the umbrella of systemic violence.

Black Sails S2E1 because this is one of the clearest illustrations of this principle i've seen yet on tv

(yes i'm throwing Foucault's Discipline and Punish onto a harebrained Supernatural meta i'm writing at 2 am. what about it)

[llitchilitchi]

do you ever see a lore analysis take and you just know it was written by an american that has never learned a lick of world history

[steveyockey]

I know people are busy and have lots of potential valid reasons they can’t but it really feels like anyone who isn’t right now making time to go to protests and call their reps is living in a parallel universe

[bnnuy-wabbit]

this entire Music Taste debate thing re:rap is getting annoying really fast. Im not USian enough for this.

[alltimewhat]

this is not new to say but i feel like the internet and social media and instant gratification have absolutely destroyed people's will and understanding of being uncomfortable. sometimes it's good to be uncomfortable. sometimes it's necessary. refusing to ever engage with ideas that make you uncomfortable will never get you anywhere but complicity and moral laziness

[hussyknee]

This is very important: Part of USAmerican egocentrism and exceptionalism is believing that white Christian USAmericans are a special kind of oppressive, ethnosupremacist demographic and that the USA is a uniquely oppressive imperialist. Neither of those things are true. They are exactly like every other race and ethnicity that has been and will ever be given majoritarian power over others. Imperialism is an outgrowth of nationalism, which is in turn created by ethnosupremacy, colonization and exceptionalism. The same power dynamics play out in microcosms within the smallest states in the world. It's power, privilege and the paranoia of losing both that makes people harmful by default, and not anything inherent in their racial, religious or national identities. None of us are special or exempt from this reality.

[cannedpeachess]

Gil constantly being way too nice to Yang out of the special American edition of white guilt:

[novelistparty]

today I remembered something my mom used to say all the time. she'd talk about her fears that "they" would eventually come for her and take away her home and make it illegal for single woman like her to even own anything I used to blame it on general boomer brain worms but today realized it was really genuine because those property rights weren't available to any women until about the time she became an adult. She was the first woman in her family to own her own home. She could feel that it wasn't a settled and sure thing. She could sense that the culture she lived in didn't really want her to have those rights.

[gabriestat]

you hate to see it but one of my favorite moments of supernatural has the angel in it. but what can i say "so you're saying you're just well adjusted?" / "no, god. i am just well fed" scene in my bloody valentine ep sits so much in my head

[bijoumikhawal]

one dumbass tweet about how white "and Black" actors are "incorrectly" cast as MENA characters and it unleashes race scientists, antiBlack Imazighen, and a guy trying to argue there's a trend where Alexander Siddig would not be cast as African today vus 20 years ago because of woke I guess

Alexander Siddig. Who has self described as Black and only has been cast as an explicitly African character a few times in his 30 year career.

[wachi-delectrico]

Spent all of yesterday studying on the problem of Nationality and the creation of a National Identity and ngl I haven't stopped thinking and trying to figure out how yankee's modern idea of nationality came to be, specifically thinking of white American people who say they're of a nationality based on "ancestry" with no personal cultural ties to it

[itssideria]

when this barbarity one day ends—and it will. it will—i don't want to hear one fucking word about antisemitism within the arab community. i don't want to hear one word about the human rights those countries lack. i don't want to hear it. i don't want to fucking hear it.