8 tweets · June 2023 · 131 likes · 0 retweets · read on Twitter
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
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…
loosening my ontology here has made it EASIER, not harder, for me to also acknowledge that in some contexts (though not all) I get less racial prejudice than some people it makes it easier for me to stop seeing myself as a default-type-of-person
dropping "white" as a concept highlighted how I was using it in one utterance about my hometown, I tried replacing "white" with "people who look like me" but... look like me how??? they're taller/shorter, hairier/balder, men/women why privilege "race"? twitter.com/nat_sharpe_/st…
with this confusing "white" label pulled off, I can pay more attention to the stories I'm telling underneath some weird stuff in there! I noticed I'd confused two people because in addition to a few other things in common their skin was ~✋🏾 but of totally different origins
tell me about your pain and the pain of your ancestors and that of your family today I'll listen as best I can (I may need to pause and listen to myself first in order to really take you in without losing myself)
tell me where you come from, what you know of it and want to share—whatever story that feels most relevant to you and if where you come from is just "Chicago", you can just be from Chicago I'm sorry if that answer didn't satisfy someone else
and if you can't trace your story back as far as you'd like because some violence destroyed its traces, I'll grieve with you and I'll offer an apology from whatever larger scale entity I feel I can speak for