#white racism and hate groups

[ausetkmt]

SCOTT MARTELLE, SCOTT MARTELLE NEWS BOOK REVIEWER

The road to August Kreis' home in Ulysses, Pa., once you make the right turn at the dairy farm off the paved highway, follows a long stretch of gravelly dirt through farms and woodlands, then a twisting, rain-gutted path to the top of a hill. You try to ride the crest of the ruts first on the left, then on the right, like skiing a giant slalom.

You don't see the chained-up Rottweilers off to the side until they start barking and snarling. Another watchdog -- a mongrel -- runs back and forth across the road on a runner lead, and you concentrate on slipping past him, windows rolled up just in case, before you spot Kreis' home, about 50 feet down the side of the hill.

The house is an old trailer, its exterior dusty-white with age. There's an unfinished bedroom addition tacked on to one end with an outside door opening perpendicular to the trailer's main entrance.

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It is here, two hours south of Buffalo in Pennsylvania's rural Potter County, that Kreis and his small band of heavily armed followers await their Armageddon.

"We are ready," says Kreis, a former Ku Klux Klansman who spent his formative years in the urbanized East Coast. "We are always ready. We are prepared to fight."

And who is the enemy?

Just about everybody.

Jews, whom Kreis and his followers believe to be the children and soldiers of Satan. Blacks, whom they believe Jews have led from their God-granted station as servants of Anglo-Saxons, the true Chosen People. And anyone of mixed race, or gays and lesbians, all of whom Kreis and his followers believe to be aberrations of God's will.

In the end, Kreis says with religious fervor, the nation -- created by God for whites -- will be saved.

"We are going to accomplish this by any means necessary," says Kreis, who has emerged as a vocal force in America's ultra-right wing hate movement, a movement that has found new vigor in a nation suddenly reminded of its racial schisms. "If it means our lives, then it means our lives."

All of which makes August Kreis' neighbors very nervous.

"Most people here don't know the history of the (hate) movement, but they get the feeling, especially after he started bringing the skinheads in, that violence follows," says Donald Gilliland, 26, a native of nearby Coudersport. "People are real concerned that something could happen."

If it weren't for the guns and his ambitions, Kreis' neighbors could just dismiss him as another crackpot up in the hills. With some 16,800 people spread over 1,100 square miles, there's a lot of room in Potter County in which to be alone.

That makes it a good place to go off and shoot your guns in solitude, to hate in solitude, to achieve the ultimate in personal segregation.

But going off by himself isn't Kreis' plan. God -- Yahweh, Kreis calls him, after the Old Testament name -- has given him his marching orders. So, as a minister in the obscure but fiercely white supremacist Christian Identity church, Kreis courts notoriety. He is a regular on tabloid television talk shows and radio call-in programs. He updates his far-flung supporters by computer. Two years ago, he hosted "Aryan Summerfest '93," a day-long gathering in the backyard at his homestead, attracting some 350 skinheads and racist hard-core rock bands from around the country. He hopes to hold a sequel in that backyard next summer.

Yet Kreis has grander plans.

Over the past year, up to a dozen men and women -- calling themselves The Messiah's Militia -- have moved into or regularly visited Kreis' homestead. There's a convicted killer known only as Dago. A construction worker from Eastern Pennsylvania who will only give his first name, Mike. And Sal Ganci, a refugee from Brooklyn who learned to hate in race-based street fights as a kid, and who now has found his calling as a "theologian."

They are all settlers, Kreis says, colonizers in his mission to convert this rural stretch of Pennsylvania into an all-white enclave of hatred.

Kreis, who looks like an aging biker without the leather jacket, claims that other supporters, including people from the Buffalo area that he won't identify, have already moved onto their own homesteads in the Potter County hills. And more settlers are expected over the winter, possibly including James Wickstrom, a former leader of the violently anti-government Posse Comitatus, whose parole on a counterfeiting conviction expires in February. Wickstrom, living in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, declined comment on Kreis' work or his own plans.

State Police in Coudersport, who have keeping track of Kreis' activities, say they know of no laws having been broken at Kreis' homestead and will respect his right to live there in peace. Still, citing their Kreis file, they recently helped thwart Wickstrom's request to have his federal parole transferred there.

Kreis has anointed Potter County as a new Aryan homeland because, he says, he feels welcome there, despite a wall of opposition that has risen against him.

"It's a white Christian community," says Kreis, 40, a chatty, bearish man with a full red-tinged beard. "There are practically no Jews here, compared to 'Jew York' and 'Jew Jersey.' It's a white farming community, and we're educating the people.

"What we're finding up here is that a lot of them agree with us, but don't want to say anything because of society's stigma."

From a classic conspiracy theory standpoint, Kreis' contention is inarguable. Over a three-day visit, no local supporters of Kreis could be found for interviews. Kreis says that just proves his point -- his supporters are afraid to be counted. Their absence proves their existence.

Residents, though, say the supporters just aren't there.

"I don't think he's finding any support here," says the Rev. Douglas Orbaker, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Coundersport, a village of 3,000 residents in which much of Kreis' opposition has mobilized.

"There is in all of American society a certain amount of racism, racism in the sense of not liking black people, not liking Jews," Mr. Orbaker continues. "And (that racism) is probably because they have never known (minorities), never been close enough to become acquainted with them. That kind of racism. I don't like it, but it's part of American society.

"But it's very different from arming yourself and planning to exterminate the Jews and enslave the blacks."

Mr. Orbaker and others say Kreis' presence has filled Potter County with a tense sense of foreboding. His beliefs, and his arsenal, have bared the darkness that lies within the human heart.

And Kreis presents his new community, his neighbors and anyone else who hears his message of hate, with an uncomfortable specter. He is the extreme extension of their everyday American racism. His hilltop homestead, erected in the name of exclusion and hatred, is the ultimate expression of the beliefs that lead to racist jokes told alongside a bar stool or water cooler, the epithets hurled in anger, the venom that is so pervasive in society.

August Kreis represents the logical extreme of the racism that many people embrace but never consider, whether they live in a small town in Pennsylvania, or a hard-edged post-industrial city on the edge of Lake Erie.

"He says he feels right at home here, that he's no different than most of the people here, just more vocal about it," says Gilliland, who actively opposes him while covering him for the local newspaper.

"Anyone with an understanding of American racism knows that it's second nature. But people here don't buy Kreis' radical form of racism. They don't like him. This is a small area with an insider/outsider mentality.

"Kreis is an outsider."

August Kreis wasn't always a minister of hatred. Born in Newark, N.J., he was raised Protestant but never trusted its teachings.

"I was forced to go to Sunday school and church," he says. "It never made sense."

Kreis dropped out of high school and wound up in the military, serving, he says, on a naval vessel off the coast of Vietnam. After his return, he earned an equivalency diploma and flirted with college courses, but quickly gave up. Kreis managed garden apartments and office complexes in suburban New Jersey, supporting his first wife -- a nurse -- and their three children. His boss, a developer, was Jewish.

"I separated how I felt about them, separated my personal beliefs from business," he says. "So I got along all right."

At the same time, he was becoming increasingly active in the Klan, a response, he says, to watching Newark change from a white working-class community into a mostly black city beset by unemployment, crime and violence. To Kreis, the change in social conditions had less to do with the cold realities of economic racism than his racist perceptions of the character of African-Americans.

"I had seen white flight first-hand," Kreis says. "Once it turned and it was more blacks than whites, the whites were fearful. In the beginning, I thought the blacks were the problem. I didn't understand there was an underlying cause. . . . The Jew is the enemy of all races on the planet."

As word of his increasingly reactionary beliefs became more widely known, his job as a property manager became at risk. "In 1981 it came to light that I was in the Klan and was having meetings in a complex that was 90 percent Jewish and owned by a Jew," Kreis says. "The guy I worked for said 'I have to fire you because nobody wants you here.' "

Kreis moved around for a while, settling near Easton, Pa., before local officials shut off water service to his home for non-payment and then condemned the house, according to Pennsylvania State Police officers tracking Kreis' movements. It was then that Kreis moved to the hilltop camp bought by his brother, a New Jersey contractor. Kreis says his family doesn't share his views, and that he has little contact with them.

"My brother is part of the system, and I guess I scare him," Kreis says, laughing. "He's afraid if they associated him and I, he'd lose his business. I guess I'm an embarrassment to my mom. She's in Florida.

"I don't worry about what anyone thinks. We'd rather stay with our own."

In Kreis' case, that means followers of the Christian Identity movement, which Kreis says he discovered as he was leaving the Klan. The religion lent a pseudo-theological base to his growing belief in an international Jewish conspiracy -- a holdover from old European racist beliefs that historically have launched pogroms and World War II's Holocaust.

"I spent 13 years with the Klan, and I knew something was wrong," Kreis says. "The blacks weren't smart enough to accomplish their agenda. There had to be something evil behind it."

He found the answers, he says, in Christian Identity, an obscure hate-based movement developed in London in the 1870s by author Edward Hine. According to "Armed and Dangerous," a 1987 book by Chicago Tribune reporter James Coates, the religion was imported to the United States by followers in New York City and Detroit.

Hine argued that white Anglo-Saxons are the chosen people of Yahweh, and that Jews are children of Satan. The "religion" teaches that blacks are animals endowed by Yahweh with human traits to better serve their masters, the Anglo-Saxons. Asians, Hispanics, mixed races and homosexuals are insults to Yahweh's will.

"We're trying to do what we believe Yahweh wants us to do," Kreis says. "They should all be destroyed."

It's a religion of lunacy to most people, a mix of invention and selective Biblical readings to build a theological foundation for racism. But it is the operating code of life for Kreis and his followers. Identity ministers and adherents often create their own versions of basic theology through their own readings of works by other Identity followers and the Bible itself.

As Kreis left the Klan for Christian Identity, his first marriage dissolved. Kreis took custody of the children -- two daughters, now 17 and 14, and a son, 7 -- and moved to Ulysses with his new wife, Karley, now 21, a former skinhead. They have a 19-month-old daughter and a second child due in February.

The family, supported by welfare and child-support payments from Kreis' ex-wife, forms the core of the compound. There is no garden -- Kreis says he doesn't know how to put one in. But there is a shooting range where Kreis and his followers can practice their skills with the compound's arsenal, lightweight 9mm handguns to AK-47s and other assault-style weapons, which Kreis claims were bought before the Bush administration banned the most powerful and deadly of these. All on the compound, including children once they're old enough, learn how to use the weapons.

Sentries with two-way radios guard the road. They are waiting, they say, for the inevitable -- a Jewish-directed raid by federal agents, as they claim happened at David Koresh's compound in Waco, Texas, and at the cabin of white separatist Randy Weaver in Ruby Ridge, Idaho.

"But we shoot first," Kreis says. "It won't be like Waco. They won't have to wonder about who shot first. It will be us."

Kreis' arrival in Potter County has drawn three general reactions from his reluctant neighbors: indifference, a wish he just fade away into the forests and indignant fear.

That fear led to a group called Potter County United, an effort by mostly local ministers to counter Kreis' hatred with public awareness about what he stands for. And what they stand against.

For Anne Zedonik, a native of the Erie County Town of Boston and director of a local domestic abuse program, the Aryan Summerfest was a call to action. She helped launch involvement by Potter County United, including petitions printed in the local weekly.

"We had no clue that this gathering was going to happen," Zedonik says. "We realized you don't do confrontational stuff. What you do is state what you believe in.

"August Kreis put himself here, but it's a bigger issue. It's the bigotry and hatred that resides in everyday people. If August Kreis moves, I would hope that our group would go on."

Yet Kreis is the issue. He is the catalyst. And a conundrum.

"I'd say 99 percent of the people here do not sympathize with or come close to agreeing with his theology or his views," says the Rev. Joseph Wolf, pastor of St. Paul's Evangelical Lutheran Church in Coudersport. "Of that 99 percent, maybe 10 percent would take an active stance, which, of course is just what he wants."

To oppose Kreis publicly is to draw attention to him, Mr. Wolf says. But to ignore him is to create a vacuum that Kreis' hatred can fill, leaving room for Kreis to argue that if the community isn't against him, it must be with him.

"He doesn't care what we say about him as long as we spell his name right," Mr. Wolf says. "How do we confront him without giving him the publicity he so desperately seeks?"

The answer, says Mr. Orbaker of First Presbyterian Church, is to set the terms of the exchange. Ignore Kreis while affirming your values.

"I'd be happy if Potter County United never mentions the name of August Kreis again," says Mr. Orbaker. "I would rather (stress) how important it is to live in a world where we get along with each other . . . At the same time, it's necessary to keep some tabs on him."

Potter County United has held 10 private organizing meetings and sponsored two public forums on hate groups in Pennsylvania.

"Kreis tried to intimidate the people there by videotaping them," Mr. Wolf says of the first session. "He was pretty quiet. He had 15 or 20 people with him. At the second meeting, Kreis was more outspoken. Kreis was a dominating force, challenging local ministers to public Bible studies and debates.

For Mr. Wolf, nothing can be gained from a public Biblical encounter with Kreis. "I believe (Kreis) creates his own reality," says Mr. Wolf. It's hard to debate meaningfully with anyone who does that."

Beyond revulsion, Kreis' presence in the community has forced others to consider what they believe, Mr. Wolf and others say.

Some have discovered that when confronted with such hatred, they'd rather ignore it than react. Some have found they can't abide by their own Christian precepts of live and let live, and they have rallied to counter Kreis' venom. Some have looked within themselves and their own feelings about other races.

"One of Coudersport's biggest problems is that it's too comfortable -- people are happy with things the way they are," says Mr. Wolf, who moved to the village 2 1/2 years ago from Columbus, Ohio. "We need to be ready to challenge our own prejudices and biases. The clergy, through the schools and our own congregations, can confront those biases.

"If there can be some good out of this, it may be that."

The community has saved its strongest attention for the weapons. They can ignore the words. The guns are another story.

"The people of Ulysses are scared of him, and rightfully so," says Mr. Wolf.

The American hate movement has a long history of violence. Since the 1983 killing of two federal marshals in North Dakota by a Posse Comitatus leader, more than two dozen people have died. Most of that violence went unnoticed by the nation. Then came the April 19 bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 169 people and injuring 600. Timothy J. McVeigh, formerly of Pendleton, is one of two white separatists charged with the crime.

Kreis believes the federal government was actually behind the bombing, and expects its agents to eventually come after him, too.

The belief borders on paranoia. As a recent interview was ending at Kreis' camp, a helicopter could be heard in the distant hills. Kreis and two armed followers glanced anxiously at the sky. One spoke over the two-way radio with a sentry as they tried to figure out whether the helicopter signaled an imminent assault on the camp. The chopper never came into view, and Kreis and his followers shrugged as the tell-tale whup-whup of the rotors faded into the distance.

Kreis says he expects a showdown soon.

"Our only fear would be with our children, with letting the government get ahold of them," says Kreis. "I would rather see the children be in Yahweh's hands than the state's hands. But we would never commit suicide. It would be the government that did it. We're not kamikazes. If we're going to do something, we're going to get away with it.

"In our mind, we are not afraid to die. Yahweh will take care of us. If he wants to make martyrs of us, he'll let them kill us."

As Kreis and his followers await their Armageddon, so do their neighbors. But they have different visions of what it will mean: good versus evil, or insanity versus reality.

In some ways, the fear Kreis has injected into Potter County is drawn from theater. They're in the first act of a Chekhov play, and a gun has appeared on the stage.

The only question is when, and how, it will be used.

[odinsblog]

Nazis, openly waving Swastikas and doing the Sieg Heil salute in Orlando, Florida

Not a single uniformed police officer in sight. I say “uniformed” because the odds are that some of the people doing the Nazi salute are probably in law enforcement.

Now, contrast that to how overly militarized police have routinely shown up at peaceful Black Lives Matter protests

Or how the police treat peaceful college students protesting for free higher education

Or how the authorities treated Black people simply walking in our own communities, after the murder of Mike Brown

Oh, and how about six months before the January 6, 2021 white supremacist riots, when National Guard troops were deployed to the Lincoln Memorial on June 2, 2020, during George Floyd protests held in Washington, DC? Where was this overwhelming presence on January 6, 2021??

And finally, Ron DeSantis, a leading Republican candidate for President of The United States(!), has a large following of Neo-Nazis, but he has yet to explicitly denounce them. I guess maybe he’s too busy banning books, or making sure drag queens aren’t reading books to children, or making sure that accurate Black history—aka American history—isn’t being taught in schools.

I could go on and on and on, but the police never seem to have that same energy for actual fucking Nazis, or the Proud Boys, or Oath Keepers, etc etc etc

Domestic terrorism by white nationalists is the biggest threat to social stability, justice, democracy and to America itself.

👉🏿 https://www.thepinknews.com/2023/09/04/orlando-florida-nazis-march-blood-tribe/

👉🏿 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna103186

[sprimpfriedrice]

White dungeon meshi fans sound like this to me:

It's extremely fascinating and frightening to me how hateful some of you people are towards shuro, a man who is clearly depicted as japanese, (a man who could look like me or literally any member of my family in real life) for being a normal, complex, and flawed human being.

Why do you single him out for getting frustrated with and mad at laios when chilchuck and marcille do the same literally all the time? What's the difference between them and shuro?

Why do you feel the unnecessary need to protect these white women from a japanese man?

Do you expect that this japanese man is inherently going to have some kind of ugly negative quality that has not been once hinted at canonically? Do you know what that's called? Because i do and it's fucking racism.

You people get scared the moment a character that is a person of color isnt a quiet little model minority or a sweet mammy archetype. You grasp at your pearls the moment they are revealed to have complex personalities and histories; when they feel negative, big emotions that are literally part of the human experience. Or god forbid, when they show romantic interest in a pure, helpless, little white woman.

And when a person of color stops behaving good and docile the way you want, when they decide that theyre not going to put up with a situation that makes them uncomfortable or miserable or RIGHTEOUSLY FURIOUS, they become the bad guy. As seen countless times in the medias demonizing depiction of the Black Lives Matter protests and even of black people who get punished for just living their lives. It happens so often i shouldnt have to reiterate it to you but it somehow keeps flying over your head.

And when that dirty, conniving, perverted, slant eyed, buck toothed, stumpy little japanese man understandably snaps at the white person you guys are projecting onto and all you see is this:

So dont be surprised when i say that id rather kill myself than entrust the safety of my oldest aunts and uncles or my youngest cousins with any of you who act like this. Im terrified of what could have happened if people like you worked at the facility that my great grandmother lived out her final years in. Would you have seen her as a wild animal that needed to be subdued too when she had one of her many dementia-induced violent episode?

I will not apologize for saying that i find it deeply disconcerting to see so many of you happily posting hateful vitriol or even about committing acts of violence against a man that looks like me, solely because he was experiencing his humanity

[alwaysbewoke]

[giantkillerjack]

Favorite part about Death Note is that Light gets the Note and IMMEDIATELY becomes a serial killer fascist with a god complex.

No build-up, no Fall From Grace, no slow corruption of a good boy gradually becoming a monster. Just-- SPEED RUN STRATS. And I love that for him.

Tbh, I think there are a lot of folks (especially boys) from my high school days who would have immediately become monsters if given the power of life and death over every person around them.

It's kind of like how when people have apparently casual ableist beliefs, and you push them to elaborate on that just a little bit, they'll often end up openly saying stuff like "well, some people are just too disabled to be worth the resources it takes to support them." - Which is... eugenics. It's just eugenics, justified by the myth of scarcity. Now these folks almost certainly won't call it eugenics, or even think of it that way. But that doesn't make it NOT a core belief of the Nazis.

In a similar way, Light seems like a nice and well-adjusted boy with strong beliefs. No harm in that.

But to paraphrase Lindsay Ellis in her analysis of the Game of Thrones ending, "Power doesn't necessarily corrupt. Power reveals." [I think she was quoting someone else when she said this. It was someone who wrote a biography on LBJ. Whatever. Lindsay said it and she's smart as hell and I recommend her videos.]

And 15 minutes into the Death Note musical, I'm already thinking about how so many beliefs "casually" held by well-adjusted, nice people immediately reveal their monstrousness when talked through to their natural conclusion.

And I wonder how many of those people, given the power of life and death over everyone around them - the power to take their ideas to their natural conclusions - would also immediately reveal how their lack of self-reflection has laid the groundwork for them to become monsters.

[himejoshikaeya]

everyday i think about how little people actually care for black and brown children. the years of trauma that me and countless of other non white children around the world have experienced at the hands of white teachers and white parents will never not be heartbreaking to me

[shorelinnes]

I get why people don't want kpop groups going to american events because of how condescending and flat out racist/xenophobic people can be, but the issue is never going to get better for idols if people like them don't keep getting invited to these things

[crazycatsiren]

"Not all radfems are white women!"

Yeah, and it makes me want to weep, how many of you would rather lick the boots of white feminists who've never given two shits about you and who are literally allying with white supremacists, when you should be standing in solidarity with the intersectional feminists of color who actually care about women who aren't white.

[eye-in-hand]

My bf is Georgian (like the country not the state), grew up in Russia so despite moving here because of how his ethnic minority was/is treated in Russia (and Georgia) - Americans think he's Russian (as he puts it - hes Russian in the States, Georgian in Russia and x minority in Georgia)

Hes constantly harrassed about Ukraine - even tho he moved here forever ago - constantly called a tankie even tho hes not, called slurs, and called a Russian supremacist even tho hes not Russian, by fucking dumb americans who probably dont even know where Georgia IS let alone any of its history or its history w Russia

The Russian language and History teacher I see gets harrassed despite living in the States for a decade

Ukrainian businesses are harrassed because people think they're Russian

Im bringing this up because with Jews that happens too. We can't exist w out everyone bringing up Israel, calling us slurs, or nazis or genocide lovers

Regardless what your feelings are on the i/p conflict, or Russia/Ukraine, harrassing individuals who have nothing to do w the conflict other than ethnic relation (or perceived relation) doesnt fucking help anyone - it just makes you an asshole

Yet liberals get so mad and distance themselves from Trump, or American imperialism - w your logic you love bombing people too, right? You're the colonizing, imperial capitalist too, right? Oh but wait I'm sorry I didn't see the communist/anti-west labels in your bio lmfao my bad you're not like the other americans

I'm so sick of the needless hate, the unnecessary violence and harrassment of people who are just trying to live their lives like anyone else, who aren't harming anyone by just existing.

You want to help people? Go fucking volunteer instead of harrassing people all day. I work at the food pantry every week in my rural area - wtf do you do ?

[ausetkmt]

The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in 17th Century North America and the Caribbean

The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, and Capitalism in 17th Century North America and the Caribbean

Chronicles how American culture - deeply rooted in white supremacy, slavery and capitalism - finds its origin story in the 17th century European colonization of Africa and North America, exposing the structural origins of American "looting" Virtually no part of the modern United States―the economy, education, constitutional law, religious institutions, sports, literature, economics, even protest movements―can be understood without first understanding the slavery and dispossession that laid its foundation. To that end, historian Gerald Horne digs deeply into Europe’s colonization of Africa and the New World, when, from Columbus’s arrival until the Civil War, some 13 million Africans and some 5 million Native Americans were forced to build and cultivate a society extolling “liberty and justice for all.” The seventeenth century was, according to Horne, an era when the roots of slavery, white supremacy, and capitalism became inextricably tangled into a complex history involving war and revolts in Europe, England’s conquest of the Scots and Irish, the development of formidable new weaponry able to ensure Europe’s colonial dominance, the rebel merchants of North America who created “these United States,” and the hordes of Europeans whose newfound opportunities in this “free” land amounted to “combat pay” for their efforts as “white” settlers. Centering his book on the Eastern Seaboard of North America, the Caribbean, Africa, and what is now Great Britain, Horne provides a deeply researched, harrowing account of the apocalyptic loss and misery that likely has no parallel in human history. The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism is an essential book that will not allow history to be told by the victors. It is especially needed now, in the age of Trump. For it has never been more vital, Horne writes, “to shed light on the contemporary moment wherein it appears that these malevolent forces have received a new lease on life.”

[andsheoverthinks]

i am so tired of how easily people slip into anti-Blackness to defend their arguments

recently (always tbh but also recently) i've been seeing a lot of disdain circulating for African Americans, disappointedly but not surprisingly from a lot of non-white people as well.

[f appropriating other cultures is so repugnant to you... why do you have a kpop profile pic... but i digress]

specifically this is about the Cleopatra tv show? casting that people are discussing right now, it's really highlighted how Black people, especially African Americans, aren't allowed to do anything a little bit cringe without racist, violent blowback. Cleopatra has been played by many many actresses, most of whom aren't of Greek or Egyptian descent. So it's weird that people are acting like Black people are uniquely horrible and ignorant for the casting of a Black woman as Cleopatra, when many castings have not been historically accurate.

Liz Taylor was British-American, Vivien Leigh was British, Monica Bellucci and Sophia Italian... you get the point. and yet people aren't hurling racist slurs at white people (there are none) for casting Cleopatra as non-Greek/Egyptian all these years. if you're upset about this particular casting, you can at least be civil with your discussions. but, no, it's easiest to call us dirty, ignorant n******s because half the time people are just waiting for an excuse.

let me explain something to you, gently. a lot of people ask, well, African Americans and Caribbeans were sold from West African countries like Ghana and Nigeria, why don't they go appropriate those countries.

the answer's quite simple. we don't learn anything about West Africa in school.

laugh break, haha, dumb USAmericans.

okay, back to business. in the U.S., we learn a very short list of non-European civilizations: Mesopotamia, China, and Egypt. Maybe one line on Mali if you're lucky. the school system here is very sensitive to teaching anything that triggers 'white guilt' aka anything more than a cursory glance at anything concerning Black people and our history, which is deemed as unimportant. you can say we were obviously enslaved from West African countries so we should learn about those cultures, but... we don't speak our old languages, save for some loanwords like 'duppy' instead of 'ghost' in Caribbean vernacular and such, we don't eat our old foods, wear our traditional clothes... we don't even know what they were, what ethnic group(s) we would have belonged to. we're not immigrants in that sense that we have a home country, a definite place of origin. do you know what it's like to feel that so much of your identity is rootless? do you know how endless that emptiness is?

so when these three non-European civilizations were laid out before us, we latched onto the closest one, and ran a little too far with it.

in fact, my generation is less dependent on Egypt as a sort of crutch; this is more of an older people thing. we have healed enough to be able to look within.

this is not a sob story. this is just a story of how we got here, and how this construction of the world -- disregarding the effects of white supremacy and racial trauma while enacting racist behavior and showing incredible fluency with white supremacist imagery and rhetoric -- is fundamentally flawed.

this is just a sample of the racist tweets on the actress's twitter. i have chosen not to include the images that titilate these people but they are equally horrible, depicting violence against Black people.

in fact, i should stop calling this pathological behavior pattern 'white supremacy' at this point because a lot of people are actually getting off is to Arab slavery. the parallels between misogyny and anti-Blackness are so interesting -- misogynists are addicted to the ego boost of subjugating women, racists are addicted to the ego boost of subjugating Blacks. yes, your ancestors spearheaded an appallingly brutal slave trade of African people which lasted thirteen centuries and is continues to this day (yes, Black people are still being enslaved in your countries but you're butthurt over a tv show so it's time to go ballistic -- by the way white people were also kidnapped and sold but since the rise of European imperialism they'd been able to shed that 'shame'), even more evil than the triangular trade and there are fewer survivors because of the reproductive control methods (read, violent sterilization). source1 source2. you people spouting this nonsense because of a tv show are just as racist as the white people over here, possibly worse. do you feel edgy villain enough now? happy?!

and by the way, 'threatening' to cast white actors as Harriet Tubman or Martin Luther King doesn't hurt us the way that Cleopatra not looking white enough seems to emotionally wound you, we are used to being minimized and erased for our contributions to society and are not thin-skinned like the losers complaining about this like it's the worst thing in their lives.

Is Afro-centerism inaccurate? Probably. Is it fearmongering to position it as equivalent to white supremacy? Absolutely.

[Pop quiz: Which ideology enslaved, tortured, raped, killed, and colonized across many centuries?]

Does calling us n******s and invoking 4chan 'we wuz kangz' (yes there was a we wuz kangz meme but i'm not reposting their childish shit on my blog) arguments make you sound like anything other than a whiny child? No. Just say you don't like the casting like a grown-up.

Why doesn't Hollywood produce West Africa period pieces in order to cast more Black actors instead? Now there's an actually productive question. Thank you. Actually, next they should do a long, high budget docudrama on the Arab slave trade so you can feel really uncomfortable.

[alwaysbewoke]

A federal judge on Monday threw out a lawsuit by Elon Musk’s X that had targeted a watchdog group for its critical reports about hate speech on the social media platform. In a blistering 52-page order, the judge blasted X’s case as plainly punitive rather than about protecting the platform’s security and legal rights. “Sometimes it is unclear what is driving a litigation,” wrote District Judge Charles Breyer, of the US District Court for the Northern District of California, in the order’s opening lines. “Other times, a complaint is so unabashedly and vociferously about one thing that there can be no mistaking that purpose.” “This case represents the latter circumstance,” Breyer continued. “This case is about punishing the Defendants for their speech.” X’s lawsuit had accused the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) of violating the company’s terms of service when it studied, and then wrote about, hate speech on the platform following Musk’s takeover of Twitter in October 2022. X has blamed CCDH’s reports, which showcase the prevalence of hate speech on the platform, for amplifying brand safety concerns and driving advertisers away from the site. In the suit, X claimed that it had suffered tens of millions of dollars in damages from CCDH’s publications. CCDH is an international non-profit with offices in the UK and US. Because of its potential to destroy the watchdog group, the case has been widely viewed as a bellwether for research and accountability on X as Musk has welcomed back prominent white supremacists and others to the platform who had previously been suspended when the platform was still a publicly-traded company called Twitter.

[indi-glo-archive]

ppl who only conditionally care about child abuse based on whether the victim makes them uncomfy while they're being abused contribute to a real life child's abuse by sending hate asks regularly, attempting to gaslight them, calling them terrible names, accusing them of terrible things, telling them directly how much they hate the characters the child relates to and enjoys talking about, and being generally racist and ableist in a way that seriously might have scarred me for life, making a literal teenager hate their hobbies, favorite shows, and the people who enjoy those things, and ultimately cyberbullying a child out of multiple fandoms because they don't want to think critically or acknowledge their own faults, all while being 35 and really embarrassing themselves because someone half their age has a better grasp on the concept of nuance than them: more at 6

but noooo, y'all "love neurodivergent/disabled people," have "racists/ableists DNI" in your bios, and don't say slurs, which is all you have to do to not be racist/ableist, so *I'm* some psycho black bitch and you're a wittle angel like the fictional character you infantilize

(P.S. I swear to fucking god if people respond to this post with "but he sexually assaulted someone" and ignore literally every other personality trait/experience he had that could've been relatable to a child abuse survivor and the way people mistreated me, a real human being, which Charlie is not by the way, I will start doing the things you wanted to do to Ben)

[striderstable]

(via A Few Words About White Supremacists, Nationalists, Neo-Nazis, and Other Fascists)

It’s a sad thing to live in a day and age when this has to be said, but I am vehemently opposed to white nationalism or white pride or whatever you want to call your fascist racism or dress it up as. I’m saying this here and now, loud and clear, because there is a blog making the rounds that purports to be about heathenry but is actually a thinly-disguised white supremacist blog and I’ve noticed that some of you have been liking their posts.

[fuck-em-up-your-grace]

Academia is so left-wing until you actually have to read research papers and then it’s just 20 different papers on why colonization was okay