#whitesplaining

[icedsodapop]

When it comes to paranormal explorer/cryptozoology/mythology circles, Native Americans will literally spend their time and labour explaining to non-Native people why we can't use certain terms like, sk*nw*lk*r or w*nd*go, and there will always be some fucker (usually a White person) claiming how Native Americans aren't actually offended when these terms are used but overly sensitive White SJWs who are getting offended on behalf of Native Americans. And it's like, okay bitch, aren't you also speaking on behalf of Native Americans as well? 🤡🤡

[alinahdee]

Yellowstone is a terrible show and I hate it.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

Consider the psychology of a person who wants someone who doesn't feel like an oppressed victim to feel like an oppressed victim.

Because nobody knows what it's like to be a black woman in America better than a white girl who learned everything she knows about oppression from a Humanities class ending in "Studies" she took at an elite school costing her father the equivalent of a luxury SUV every year, in which she took notes on her MacBook Air with the "Destroy Capitalism" sticker.

Ideologies such as Critical Theory, derived from postmodernism and Marxian power analysis, come from extremely privileged, extremely sheltered, mostly white elite academics in elite academies.

Saying, “I’m not a victim, I’m not oppressed” offends so many people viewing the world where you’re either a victim or an oppressor because you’re erasing what gives meaning to their unimportant lives. Who are they if they don’t have a dragon (even if imaginary) to slay?

-- @EricsElectrons

They need her to feel bad about herself so they can feel good about themselves and sustain their theology.

[sleepynegress]

@danepopfrippery

You are completely free to disagree with facts, but using white performers when the context of Black performers, associated products, and paraphernalia is *everything* in this subject gives away your lack of knowledge on this subject. Josephine Baker didn't revolutionize minstrelsy. She was a performer before she was a spy and in fact, her fame as a performer is what helped her spy, since she carried Nazi secrets in her music sheets. Josephine Baker did incorporate minstrelsy in her act. And she gained fame not because the French were especially evolved on race, but because she wisely took advantage of their limited gaze. The Banana dance made her famous because the French were fascinated by what they saw as an exotic other from the "wilds" and her dancing. In other words they fetishized her blackness. She catered to that (initially) and gained fame exaggerating her eyes and making funny faces.

Note the style of the vintage poster advertising her, the French were not immune:

She even had branded make-up sold in her skintone, popularly sold to the French so they could achieve her fashionable tanned skin. I know this because I saw it in person at the National Gallery's Josephine Baker exhibit. Minstrelsy was performed by Black artists because it was a norm and the only genre space where most could regularly perform. It started *before* the 1910s during enslavement with white people mocking the people they enslaved. It became an economic survival point for talented Black performers on the Chitlin' Circuit, in the Edwardian era through the early 20th century. They also performed these caricatures, at times using blackface (burnt cork) over their own skin color. Elements of it lasted from the 1910s on through the 1950s and later depending on the country. Some countries today still use minstrel tropes in their characters, products, and advertising. I mentioned Mickey Mouse specifically for a reason. Early cartooning modeled many of their characters on caricatures of Blackness, including Mickey.

This is important since the coven uses animation and animation tropes in the show written for Lulu which does change how the minstrelsy appears. This is something I was referencing specifically which you do not mention.

Claudia's pain is the punchline, her ignorance is the punchline. Her being a bird along with the implied caging of the window bars... ...The blue that completely surrounds her eyes making them appear wider, like the cartoon pictured in the above relevant book cover.... which also hints at the style of make-up application specifically used in blackface. The dingey shadows in her blue dress and framing of her face with her hands with an exaggerated smile are also hints along with the cartoon, these are all specially minstrel-coded dehumanizing antics when performed by Black people.

The context of her color matters, when she lays an egg on stage and is trying to free herself but is ignorant of the fact that she can't fly. It's subtler in this show yes than reality, because one has to be mindful of today's gaze. But it's still pretty obvious. It brought to mind the bigger extremes of the dumb servant negress tropes of Sunshine from 1940's Fantasia:

....and the hypersexualized "magic" in Coal Black and de' Sebben Dwarfs from 1943: Again, please understand, that these things have very different meanings depending on the performer's race. That's why your white performers do not matter here, (one of whom performed in blackface herself). I lived in DC just 6 miles away from The Library of Congress. I developed a hyper-fixation on early Black Hollywood and basically deep-dived into the subject because of it. I saw and got to handle many of the materials myself. This ad is for a little black girl performer imitating the world-famous Lil' Baby Esther. And while I won't show the photo here, I will link the original Lil' Esther the arms of Ernst Rolf in blackface in Sweden.

This is a "Topsy" doll. They were made up through the 1950's. I include it because it's another possible reference point.

It matters that all of my examples reference Black women and girls and none of yours do.

All this to say, you are wrong and you overstepped.

While I'm On Claudia...

THIS storyline she's in right now? ...is yet another example of the show gleaning more depth than the original incarnations of the characters because of race.

Her role as Lulu is popular for the most part because of its minstrelsy elements, which were big in that day. Her large eyes, her dance routine, the exaggerated smile, her laying an egg like a cartoon bird and not a human, her schadenfreude and "death" as comedy... She is playing a live-staged minstrel cartoon character, many of whom in that era were modeled on exploitative caricatures of Blackness.... Including the original Mickey Mouse. Which makes her plight that much more tragic, beyond being frozen in girlhood. It's not even a true girlhood, but one mocked and marked by her color. It's brilliant, but I think it went over the heads of a lot of viewers.

[neechees]

I feel like if you have to add something to the effect of "but don't blame people for enjoying it!! We can like something critically!!" Whenever you see someone criticizing something you like (for say, racism) then you probably aren't actually very capable of enjoying it critically lol.

I think annoying fans like to say this moreso to silence people into saying anything negative about their interests (especially if its for something serious like racism or transphobia) rather than an actual reminder of anything.

[radiocurrency]

I can't believe in the year of our lord 2024 I have to explain that whitewashing photos of Assad Zaman to 'show what book!Armand looks like' is inheritantly racist regardless of whether you meant it like that or not.

Just, don't do it.

[i-still-mask-because]

TIL: The person that picks up when you call your representatives isn't always going to simply listen, take notes, and pass it on for you. They may try to argue with you and gaslight you about your concerns! 😃🙃

So this is friendly reminder to take care of yourself if you're marathoning calling representatives! Take breaks if you need to, drink your favorite drink, eat your favorite snack, take deep breaths in between each call! And if you have an audio recorder feel free to keep it close to your phone in case the person you're on call with tries to say some slick shit 🤗

[alethiometry]

what the FUCK do i have to do to make my dipshit coworker remember to RETRIEVE OUR CODE FROM THE ORG before he makes changes and deploys back into the sandbox because i swear if i have to comb through diffs across 4!!!!! orgs!!!!!! ONE MORE FUCKING TIME and waste my time investigating defect tickets due to his constantly overwriting everything i do i AM going to fucking SNAP

[willgrahamsipodnano]

i think it should be required for white people on here to say they’re white in their bio……

[antinativefaves]

....they really infantilized a 40 year old racist white woman AND whitesplained anti-native racism to natives all at once didn't they.

Dear Lindsay Ellis, this is not how you begin an "apology' to Indigenous people who call you out on your racism.

[sinegard]

does barry keoghan keep his irish accent in the eternals movie? perhaps.......... I will watch a m*rvel movie............

[neechees]

Do you think I'm stupid like fucking obviously people will have disagreements on what dies or doesn't constitute appropriation (particularly members of the same group regarding outsiders) but it is literally not up to people within the outside group who are being appropriated from to decide what is or isn't appropriation from a culture they don't belong to dvg gb

[dwreader]

Daniel:

-makes racially insensitive jokes towards rashid, armand and louis (rent boy, SRK, white master black student, putting on a Mexican accent to joke about telenovelas)

-jokes about sexy claudia halloween costumes when she’s a teenager

-calls louis stockholm’d and minimizes his trauma at every opportunity

-whitesplains racism multiple times

Louis: “your wife said no the first time you proposed hehe”

whites in fandom:

[pretty-weird-ideas]

IWTV Twitter and the so-called "Fake Black Fans" Invasion

Something that I've been seeing a lot after it gained traction on Max is white fans condescendingly talking down to Black fans, some of whom have been in this fandom longer than they have, and acting as if they don't know what they are talking about because of their critique including a concept or subtext they wish to ignore. I want to repeat that this doesn't happen in the same amounts to white fans who make analyses or memes, it seems to uniquely be Black fans speaking AAVE or with Black pfps (visibly black bc of this) being bombed in the comments for having valid opinions.

I reached about the fifth tweet of white women going onto posts of Black people (particularly older women on Black Twitter) talking about IWTV and saying "You don't know what you're talking about, read the source material/finish the show" or entirely saying that "You don't understand fandom culture". Prompting those Black people to respond curtly that they, in fact, have read the source material, finished the show long before they have, and have been a fandom elder since before they even rolled into town. I witnessed someone doing BABY talk to a 30-year-old Black woman who was talking about episode 5, with "Well you see, it's not my fault you can't read". And when the woman professed anger back, she was the one blocked.

I witnessed this backhanded shit FIVE TIMES over the course of this week. With different white women doing the job of whitesplaining fandom culture and Anne Rice to random Black fans who already know unprompted with a level of passive aggressiveness and annoyance that only comes with doing it repeatedly. I must assure you (white people who are doing this) nobody asked, you can put down your task and stop pretending like you are doing something Sisyphean. You are not legally required to explain and describe IWTV poorly while getting into screaming matches with far more educated Black fans on Twitter and Tumblr.

People are acting as if there's a rising population of Black fans who are "Fake Fans" and must be stopped, lest they start up the freaky discourse. OOHHH NOOOO! Whatever are we to do then???? And therefore it is completely normal and a civic duty to blast Black fans in the comments of everything that they say about the show or the books.

I've been seeing people unironically football tackle reaction posts of the show with paragraphs worth of text that is inflammatory and backhanded. This is even more apparent when the poster is visibly black or uses AAVE. The association is that Black people who use AAVE or memes obviously are uneducated, lack media literacy, and cannot consume content the way that "White" fans do.

It is an attempt to tone police Black fans away from creating new topics of discussion or creating/expanding the fandom space with the growing watcher-base. It always has to happen in their chosen language, on their time, in the places they can reach us and yell some more. They are very discomforted when Black fans have pockets in fandom where they can't be outnumbered and they do in fact control discourse in a way that isn't productive to respectability. (As much as I am a big fan of big words and rambling, that is somewhat what is expected in this fandom as a Black person to be considered "respectable" and I'm not willing to ignore or shy away from that).

This is also hand in hand with my previous thoughts about fans' dog-whistling about media becoming accessible/mainstream and how "Others" will ruin it and outnumber them. I noticed that in the IWTV fandom, it seems like white fans believe that the "Others" is just Black Twitter in general. Not just "Twitter" but specifically Black people who don't fit into their narrow respectability politics.

I hate to tell you all this, but Black fandom culture is still fandom culture, and Black people do in fact read and write. I should not be seeing a pattern of random white fans going into the comments of Black people who mention IWTV and automatically assuming that they have no clue what they're talking about.

Like clockwork, exactly as when the show came out, racist white book fans started up the discourse of "The Black people are going to ruin fandom with their racism discourse and spit on Anne Rice!" and then when that time passed, the show reaches Max, and here they go barking again.... We really need to get a muzzle.

[animentality]

"no shit an Asian country isn't that inclusive of trans people."

Finally, someone who recognizes that most Asian countries are homophobic and doesnt sugar coat it

idk why this is a point of contention today.

TAIWAN IS THE ONLY COUNTRY WHERE GAY MARRIAGE IS LEGAL IN ALL OF ASIA.

how am I supposed to sugarcoat it??

There are LGBT people and LGBT supporters everywhere in this fucking world, and maybe people themselves are more tolerant than their governments, but it's not like it's inaccurate to say most of Asia is homophobic.

and actual queer people in Asia could tell you that, but white people in America have decided that their act of social justice today is to harass ME for pointing an obvious thing out.

it's also bizarre because I am fucking Asian.

so calling me a racist is weird... am I a racist, white girl?

tell me more, I need your white wisdom on this subject.

not like I have a literal masters degree in anthropology and wrote a fucking masters thesis on racism and racial violence in America.

whitesplain it to me.

[meat-wentz]

i literally still remember a white woman whitesplaining being biracial to me, a biracial person, in a bar circa 2016 and i have not forgiven her for it nor would i ever tbh i hope she lies awake and cringes about it sometimes i hope she feels the shame of her loud loud mouth at 12 am when she is trying to go to sleep and she has work in the morning i hope i am the reason she wakes up tired and insecure of her racial awareness and i hope i am the reason she bites her tongue the next time she attempts to inform a person of color about their own experience i think about her all the time with a malicious intent for her to be better