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Legal racial categories and how using them perpetuates racism

9 tweets · August 2023 · 29 likes · 0 retweets · read on Twitter

I had some thoughts about race while writing this thread about "legal sex" but I decided to separate them because  sex is real (tho messy & multifaceted)  race is fake (tho melanin & genetics & culture are obv real) so best to look at them separately

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

isms are systems of thought, enshrined in institutions, and part of the way out of them is to rein in the institutions Q: why does ID have "M/F" on it? A: to indicate whether you can legally vote or own property, and who you can marry, etc

laws in America (and many other places) used to function very differently based on whether you were classified as "white", thus it became very important that the laws knew exactly who that term applied to hence absurd gerrymandering

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

I'm not denying the concept still has a lot of power and is even probably still written into many laws but look at this absurd chart of rulings about who gets to be counted as "white" this is a textbook sign of a bad ontology source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definitio…

did you know about the "one drop rule", where laws said that *any* known "black" ancestry made someone not "white"? (did you know that Obama, "black" via his Kenyan dad although his mom was "white", probably has a slave ancestor... on his mom's side?)

what are the rules now? discrimination based on race is officially illegal but does happen and people are still regularly asked to self-report race, using a modified racial ontology that includes a category for spanish-speakers

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

fascinating article about how the basic racial classifications used in American forms are completely incoherent, and were explicitly stated never to be used in science/medicine or program eligibility, two of the main things they're now used for 🤦‍♀️ discoursemagazine.com/ideas/2022/09/…

these lists, these categories, are part of what is perpetuating racism as an ongoing system of thought.

Emmett Shear @eshear ·

@Malcolm_Ocean -phobia implies gut level rejection for emotional reasons, -ism implies a system of thought. “Racism” classically was a psuedo-scientific system of thought that had a list of Offcial Races “Homophobia” classically was just a rejection of gay sex based on fear of contamination

getting people to say "I'm white" or any sincere talk about "white people" is participating in racism—the system of thought that invented these categories to justify itself

Malcolm Ocean 🏴‍☠️ @Malcolm_Ocean ·

I've recently been noticing that I don't have a way to conceive of anybody as "white" without it increasing my racial prejudice it's a fake category whose main (only?) uses are: - justify white supremacy or defaultness - blame people based on skin color both of which I reject

to be clear, that's not to say we should ban the terms! we may need to talk *about* them in order to deconstruct them but using a term and mentioning it are different & using "white", outside quotation marks, seems to me to always be supporting racism

💎ₕᵢgₕ🪞ₙFC🔍🆙 🚹🤝🚺🪽(egosyntonic productivity) @ForCognition ·

Race as a construct was created to harm, divide, and oppress, not to help. Any use of the concept, except with intent to deconstruct it, preserves the original harm. We can bring about a world with fewer arbitrary divisions along which to oppress others by rejecting race itself.

some people would make a categorical exception for comedy, but in my experience most comedy that refers to "white people" reinforces rather than deconstructs 👇 this is quality tho 😙👌 twitter.com/nat_sharpe_/st…

looking forward to trying this if it's ever relevant

critter @BecomingCritter ·

An employee today told me that "I don't think you'd understand, because you're white" and without pause I replied "You think I'm white?" She started blushing and began apologizing profusely (I am white)