#and if you fail and Kurds somehow form a nationstate we will inevitably become the whiteness of that state

[deqdyke]

Cw: race, genocide denial, antiblackness

Just working through some thoughts after seeing the millionth annoying "Are x group white? Discuss" tweets.

Honestly I think like 90% of discourse around race and whiteness in leftist spaces could be solved by people saying "I don't know that history well enough". Like, people when they discuss race, have these competing internal desires to treat race as solely defined by current social standings, and also point to historical oppression as evidence. Neither works. If you go purely by current social standings, then we have absolutely nothing to build off of besides personal lived experiences. I've met Italians who have had old white people call them wops. Does that mean Italians aren't white? Are Polish people not white because of the existence of anti-polish sentiments? Are Russians not white because of how often they're portrayed as villains? Are Armenians white universally bc of the Kardashians?

But then if you base it entirely off history, then you have to accept that no Jewish person has ever attained whiteness. That race is a permanent and immutable aspect of someone's character - something that just... That's just racial ideology, same as it ever was.

The reality is whiteness is nebulous and difficult to pin down because it serves a social function. It needs to be fluid, but it needs to justify itself by appearing as if it's immutable. It also props up European nation-building myths. Like, if the question is "Are Italians white" the question should be "Well, who's an Italian?". Who's a Russian? I know Black Russians, and Black Ashkenazim. Is the understanding they're somehow less part of those groups due to their Blackness? Because I know they would take serious issue with that. Romans (as in, Italians from Rome) are a core part of the Western nation-building myth. You can't exclude them from whiteness without whiteness collapsing. But Sicilians were ruled by North African Muslims for hundreds of years - they're noticeably darker, and their culture is distinct. So Sicilians were denied whiteness, and they were used as a scapegoat for xenophobic sentiments during waves of Italian immigration. When they had sufficiently assimilated, then suddenly Sicilians were "Italians" and Italians are white, so Sicilians are white. So you've now managed to redefine whiteness across an era of immigration to build white unity and maintain a white supremacist majority.

White Fascism is self-destructive and suicidal because it maintains rigid immutable boundaries and requires constant expansion, which means eventually whiteness WILL be a minority. Liberalism upholds whiteness by redefining whiteness over time to maintain a White social majority. When whiteness needs to be mutable, there needs to be a population that can be used as the scapegoat. (Which is also why anti-Blackness is a core component of White supremacist racial ideology - it functions as a permanent fixed class to pivot other groups' whiteness around).

That's how it functions in America. But the rules of whiteness ARE mutable, and they change based on time and region. So the question of "Is x person white" really depends on time AND location, and how their identities exist in relation to nation-building myths. And it reaches a point where asking a question like "Are Armenians white?" or "Are Balkan Muslims white?" or "Are Jews white?" stops being useful, because the point shouldn't be to reify race, it should be to point out that people who fail to fit neatly within these national racial narratives are the best possible example to show how Whiteness contradicts itself. Is an Arab white? Is a Jew white? Is a North African white? It depends, when, where, and who are we talking about?

#this was prompted by the billionth annoying arab #posting about how al anfal was about purging whiteness from thr middle east #like my brother in Allah you ARE THE MAJORITY HERE #you are the whiteness here #we'll both be not white in Louisiana but you'll still have the money and backing of Arab nationalism #and if you fail and Kurds somehow form a nationstate we will inevitably become the whiteness of that state #and also like one of the most famous Kurds in history was a Black man freed from the Arab slave trade #you did it because your nationalism fails to account for the falsity of racial ideology #and you need to justify your continued existence and power #This is also why I've stopped really fully IDing as Kurdish bc like #im Shabak and a Kurdish Jew #both things ive seen the KRG fail to account for #so even if Kurdistan somehow becomes a nation state my family will still be SOL and stranded #also I only touched on it but it does need to be made clear that antiblackness is a core part of white ideology #even in supposedly post-racial ideologies like Anzaldua's Mestizx ideology #Blackness is positioned as something that needs to be solved to resolve the contradictions in post-racial nationalisms #the only people who have given me kindness about my complex familial history in the US are other nationless minorities and Black folks #and being allowed to sit in on an Anakarta reading group changed my life #if anyone is curious for more about the discussion of racial construction in the Middle East #read Nesting Orientalisms and The White Turkish Man's Burden #this is basically just me processing how coexist with my experiences + the knowledge I've gained from loved ones #also if anyone has issues with anything I've said here feel free to DM me but dont reblog this #I'm def open to discussing things and having my understanding corrected or challenged #but if you do it via reblogs ur getting blocked lmao