Similar reason I curse like 99.8% of whites, really. Imagine being told all your life that you just have to live with your oppressor killing you in one breath and having all the choice in where they live, where they work, and how little they get harassed in their day to day in the other; knowing you will never get any of those same benefits, and don’t get to even entertain ideas of separating yourself off from the people who have made sport of having you killed in the streets without getting finger-wagged for “being a ‘segregationist’ or ‘genocide enthusiast’”.
Imagine knowing your community has only been fully and truly free for all of about thirty years, between the end of Jim Crow and the start of Joe Biden’s crime bill; and knowing ever since then, things have just gotten worse for you and yours-- and the settlers who have enslaved, raped, killed, and made tap-dancing minstrel-show misleaders of hundreds of thousands if not millions of your people over the centuries of oppression say it’s ‘legal’.
What Palestine lives through is an accelerated, more-brutalized iteration of the Black struggle for liberation; and as a result, it’s an absolute riot to me that these crackers in the West expect me to up Israel, to up Little Amerika, knowing everything I know.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it til these lungs are airless: “terrorist” is nothing more than the 21st century “savage” in the way the crackers weaponize it against people.
When we create, they call us copy right breaking thieves. When they kill us, they call us weaklings who can’t defend themselves. When we starve, they tell us we can’t live without the white man. When we fight, they call us terrorists. and we build something, they calls us a dictatorship regime. and just like we say in Algeria “Yetnako”
This reminds me of a video portraying Tencent as le evil mastermind corpo from the movies, which starts by saying how they never made something original, just copies. Then goes on to say how their version of ICQ was a) adapted to Chinese internet b) had extra features. I wonder what Chinese companies should’ve done according to him, just accept that ICQ solved chatting once and for all? Of course that’s a stupid question because he’s just fearmongering/spreading propaganda, but still…
In the United States, for over a hundred years, the ruling interests tirelessly propagated anticommunism among the populace, until it became more like a religious orthodoxy than a political analysis. During the Cold War, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them. If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.
– Michael Parenti, Blackshirts And Reds
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Honestly, I’m having a hard time seeing how it’s ‘essentialism’ when I’m decrying things that white folk never stopped doing– if anything, they just found sneakier ways to go about the same objectives of Manifest Destiny, the same objectives of Intentionally-Downed-Reconstruction, the same objectives of Jim Crow, the same objectives of the '94 Crime Bill, probably so on, probably so forth.
Just 'cause a smaller fraction of the settler majority don’t doesn’t suddenly make it all sweet. Talk like that is giving real “#notallmen” in this moment, and… If we don’t fuck with that, we shouldn’t be fuckin with “#notallwhites” or “#notallisraelis”. My 2c on the matter of ‘essentialism’.
Well yeah. It’s just a term for it, it’s not a statement. Criticisms of essentialism can be just as problematic (or not) as essentialism itself is (or isn’t) (see Glen Coulthard’s Red Skin White Masks). It is has been useful for a long time. Certainly figures like Pontiac and Tecumseh used it in their rhetoric.
It is ‘strategic’ because the essentialism is usually borrowing white notions of race and flipping them around (I.e. Calling the white man barbaric because he does exactly what he accuses others of doing and calls them barbaric). It’s not meant to justify the notion of barbarism or lack of civilization, or to double down on white ontology, rather it’s meant to flip the script and name the oppressor. It’s how the Seminole clans describe the White War, as barbarism, but this is a flipped version of essentialism that is created by white settlers and weaponized against Native people and enslaved people (especially those that escape). Thus, strategic essentialism. It is meant to have rhetorical utility accross major political divides while also uniting a coalition.
And your point about women and men also works well. Women that use strategic essentialism are generally not intenting to advance sexist paradigms, but are naming the system they are subjected to.
Okay, had to be sure where you were coming from-- why I tried to couch what I was saying to defang it towards ‘you’ and more seat it in a societal sense. I’ve dealt with way too many people who operate off a very liberal sense of “I can just call this essentialism and never have to address it from there” on some thought-termination shit; I appreciate you expanding this out.
My original comment was a bit cryptic and could have used clarification. It was just the first thing my nerd brain thought. I’m sure there is nuance to add considering anti Jewish sentiments are quite real (and not always easily compared to whiteness, for example) but yet the whole idea of “strategic essentialism” still seems worth mentioning.
Similar reason I curse like 99.8% of whites, really. Imagine being told all your life that you just have to live with your oppressor killing you in one breath and having all the choice in where they live, where they work, and how little they get harassed in their day to day in the other; knowing you will never get any of those same benefits, and don’t get to even entertain ideas of separating yourself off from the people who have made sport of having you killed in the streets without getting finger-wagged for “being a ‘segregationist’ or ‘genocide enthusiast’”.
Imagine knowing your community has only been fully and truly free for all of about thirty years, between the end of Jim Crow and the start of Joe Biden’s crime bill; and knowing ever since then, things have just gotten worse for you and yours-- and the settlers who have enslaved, raped, killed, and made tap-dancing minstrel-show misleaders of hundreds of thousands if not millions of your people over the centuries of oppression say it’s ‘legal’.
What Palestine lives through is an accelerated, more-brutalized iteration of the Black struggle for liberation; and as a result, it’s an absolute riot to me that these crackers in the West expect me to up Israel, to up Little Amerika, knowing everything I know.
1830s headline: “Indian savages caught chanting ‘death to white people’; genocide against them now considered self-defense.”
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it til these lungs are airless: “terrorist” is nothing more than the 21st century “savage” in the way the crackers weaponize it against people.
When we create, they call us copy right breaking thieves. When they kill us, they call us weaklings who can’t defend themselves. When we starve, they tell us we can’t live without the white man. When we fight, they call us terrorists. and we build something, they calls us a dictatorship regime. and just like we say in Algeria “Yetnako”
This reminds me of a video portraying Tencent as le evil mastermind corpo from the movies, which starts by saying how they never made something original, just copies. Then goes on to say how their version of ICQ was a) adapted to Chinese internet b) had extra features. I wonder what Chinese companies should’ve done according to him, just accept that ICQ solved chatting once and for all? Of course that’s a stupid question because he’s just fearmongering/spreading propaganda, but still…
parenti quote applies to all the colonized, not just commies.
The quote
– Michael Parenti, Blackshirts And Reds
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Truth!
Strategic essentialism
Honestly, I’m having a hard time seeing how it’s ‘essentialism’ when I’m decrying things that white folk never stopped doing– if anything, they just found sneakier ways to go about the same objectives of Manifest Destiny, the same objectives of Intentionally-Downed-Reconstruction, the same objectives of Jim Crow, the same objectives of the '94 Crime Bill, probably so on, probably so forth.
Just 'cause a smaller fraction of the settler majority don’t doesn’t suddenly make it all sweet. Talk like that is giving real “#notallmen” in this moment, and… If we don’t fuck with that, we shouldn’t be fuckin with “#notallwhites” or “#notallisraelis”. My 2c on the matter of ‘essentialism’.
Well yeah. It’s just a term for it, it’s not a statement. Criticisms of essentialism can be just as problematic (or not) as essentialism itself is (or isn’t) (see Glen Coulthard’s Red Skin White Masks). It is has been useful for a long time. Certainly figures like Pontiac and Tecumseh used it in their rhetoric.
It is ‘strategic’ because the essentialism is usually borrowing white notions of race and flipping them around (I.e. Calling the white man barbaric because he does exactly what he accuses others of doing and calls them barbaric). It’s not meant to justify the notion of barbarism or lack of civilization, or to double down on white ontology, rather it’s meant to flip the script and name the oppressor. It’s how the Seminole clans describe the White War, as barbarism, but this is a flipped version of essentialism that is created by white settlers and weaponized against Native people and enslaved people (especially those that escape). Thus, strategic essentialism. It is meant to have rhetorical utility accross major political divides while also uniting a coalition.
And your point about women and men also works well. Women that use strategic essentialism are generally not intenting to advance sexist paradigms, but are naming the system they are subjected to.
Okay, had to be sure where you were coming from-- why I tried to couch what I was saying to defang it towards ‘you’ and more seat it in a societal sense. I’ve dealt with way too many people who operate off a very liberal sense of “I can just call this essentialism and never have to address it from there” on some thought-termination shit; I appreciate you expanding this out.
My original comment was a bit cryptic and could have used clarification. It was just the first thing my nerd brain thought. I’m sure there is nuance to add considering anti Jewish sentiments are quite real (and not always easily compared to whiteness, for example) but yet the whole idea of “strategic essentialism” still seems worth mentioning.