male presenting anglo canadian here, every interaction i have ever had is in some way tinged with white supremacy and male privilege. i’ve been treated better and assumed by default to be more competent than non-whites pretty much every day.
also like have you ever talked to another white person? if a white person or man talks to someone they assume shares their values they say the worst shit. i thought it was funny when libs were condemning trumps “locker room talk” defense like it’s so unbelievable to them that men would discuss sexual assault like that in a male space. “i’ve never heard anything like that in a locker room.” you are lying. most white men are thinking and saying the worst possible things at any given moment.
non-white people can tell by the way they are treated by white people and western society that white supremacy is the thread that binds the western world together. but if you look like them, they will just tell you straight up their terrible ideas assuming you will agree. if you cant figure it out when you actively benefit from it daily, if you cant notice that you’re being held to a different standard by other white people daily, if you cant figure it out when they LOOK FOR EXCUSES TO TELL YOU, than i dunno how much self-crit is gonna help. at that point it seems like an empathy problem
if you identify as an anarchist or a communist and also identify with your whiteness, you missed something, probably a lot of things, along the way. try to be more perceptive geez.
love to my comrades of every skin colour and gender identity, death to the first world and any framework including race used to justify it
The sheer number of people who I have met, complete strangers mind, on the bus or out in public, who think that the best way to open up conversation with a complete stranger is to just be openly racist (or making a racist “joke”) is staggering. And this is with a complete stranger, making smalltalk. Who the hell knows what these people are like behind closed doors. Or what they would say to someone with more melanin than a parsnip.
My white liberal coworker likes to open conversations with “now I’m not trying to be racial, but…” immediately before launching into a racist story. Lady you just told me about how terrified you were to be in a theater on 9/11 when a “Muslim-looking” man left his backpack in his seat and went to get popcorn. You said you almost got the manager because you literally thought this man was going to bomb a matinee screening of the Barbie movie.
The good news is she is categorically not a racist, though, because she was not trying to be racial!
I just quit a job where I worked with one older woman who would talk about her last job in Georgia and she would preface most of the stories with “I’m not trying to be prejudice but…” then she would typically go on to describe some aspect of an old coworkers culture, or pick out a stereotype. Just for no reason.
I forget what stand up comedian it was, but they said something like “if you’re telling a story about an interaction you had with someone, and you mention their race, but it’s not relevant to the story, you’re being racist” and that made a lot of sense
Here’s my full list of reasons you might mention someone’s race in that context: