a lot of people on here maybe do not think enough about paradigms and frameworks of racial power within the united states, particularly as it is structured around whiteness & white supremacy
i was scrolling through the asiam tag the other day and there were some posts that were like “oh no one would find it acceptable if someone did blackface but it’s totally alright if an actor were to yellowface!” which i think we can all acknowledge as anti-black bullshit being spouted by people who do not follow enough racial discourse from black activists and who clearly equate hypervisibility with some sort of protective shield against racism which is so obviously not how it operates, which i feel like is suitably obvious if you looked at the wider scope of media representation of black people? and there’s no excuse for these people but what i want to talk about
are the self-flagellating asiams who constantly post things like ‘asiams are some of the most anti-black communities’ or ‘asiams have relative privilege’ or ‘asians are not as seriously discriminated against’ because i find this to be a troubling, really unnuanced sentiment that’s a really popular one in mainstream tumblr activism and i find it kind of unsettling also, and also really lacking education & perspective towards both critical race theory and anti-asian racism
because like. modern racial discourse owes a lot to black scholars. a lot. many of the foundational theories and the ways we talk about race and racism in america come from them and this is really important, and this also informs a lot of the way we talk about racism against other communities of colour as well, right. but because a lot of racial discourse today uses the language of black scholars and theorists and activists a lot of our understandings of race necessarily come from a black experience of white supremacy
& i want to argue that it’s not a problem of degree (i.e. ‘asians do not experience racism to the same extent as other racialised groups’) but a problem of differing experiences (i.e. we experience racism in a different way because we are situated differently to white supremacy, we have a different history with whiteness, and so you cannot expect that racism be enacted upon our bodies in the same way)
& also when your only experience to asians & the discrimination we face is financially privileged light skinned east asians your understanding is ultimately incomplete?? because asia is huge and it is diverse, and there are many different types of racisms lobbed at different asian populations, different immigrant generations, different ways of interacting with whiteness and with america.
idk i just have so many Thoughts and i’d need a whole dissertation to organise them all but
i’m so frustrated with the way some of the #discourse operates on tumblr it’s so??? simplistic and also ultimately very western-centric and there’s zero push and pull a lot of it ends up being performative acts of narcissistic self-flagellation that do not ultimately do anything to either take concrete steps towards a concrete goal or even to help us further understand complex issues??? idk
People seriously have such a hard time wrapping their heads around the concept of, as you’ve said, Asian Americans experiencing racism in a different way due to the different ways we are situated with white supremacy. And people constantly end up butting with the idea of “but then how do we modify a system of racial understanding that is founded upon anti-blackness” in trying to reconcile these two things.
Claire Jean Kim has a concept called racial triangulation that could be considered to actually get in people’s heads that Asian Americans honestly do experience a racism that isn’t exactly like anti-black racism, which is still wholly legitimate and not some kind of pseudo New White/relative privilege status
ie according to Kim, Asian Americans may receive more Relative Valorization (the model minority stereotype) compared to Black Americans, but we also uniquely face Civic Ostracism (forever foreigners, consistently locked out from immigration & paths to citizenship, having assumed citizenship status be used as tools of oppression, NOT to be confused with things like trying to prevent poor Black communities from participating in community/state/federal voting)
Yeah but I took a class with Claire Jean Kim just two years ago and she expressed explicitly that her formulation of Racial Triangulation has been misused by the Asian American establishment to make false comparisons between Asian Americans and Black Americans in staking out a ~unique Civic Ostracism~, and that her views are evolving from critiques she’s received, especially in regards to “Are Black people really ‘Insiders’?”.
Also how can you misread CJK’s “Relative Valorization” and say that it has nothing to do with “Relative Privilege”? One type of privilege is exemption from certain kinds of violence and that’s exactly what Relative Valorization does - it marks certain people as exempt from the violence that those marked relatively more inferior are subjected to.
This is the exact quote from the text, emphasis mine: (1) processes of “relative valorization,” whereby dominant group A (Whites) valorizes subordinate group B (Asian Americans) relative to subordinate group C (Blacks) on cultural and/or racial grounds in order to dominate both groups, but especially the latter
If you (mis)use Racial Triangulation to argue that Asian Americans have a special unique oppression comparable to Anti-Blackness you are missing the fundamental point of Racial Triangulation, that the ultimate target is still Black people. Racial Triangulation and its graph is not supposed to show “where things are” (the simplicity of the graph has contributed to its misuse), it’s meant to show “how things work”.
don’t try to tell me otter facts i already know all of them. yes i know otters hold hands. yes i know they keep special rocks. yes i know they use their bellies as tiny tables. i know it all
Oh I hear you Sea otters get all the love and get all their facts spilled all the time.
But do you know about otters big asshole brother? In South America there are Giant Otters. These are six foot long tubes of muscle who give less fucks then a honey badger. They are Apex predators and very, very good hunters.
They are known for stealing food from gators. They eat small caiman and friggin anaconda if they venture too close because why the hell not. They also eat Piranha because they fear nothing and consume the weak. They are attracted to watermelon (there are stories of them stealing them out of gardens) Which is weird as heck because they apparently hate the taste.
Best part. They hunt in packs. These guys are bamf.
No Fucks given
Fight me bro
Giant fucking otters
RODENTS OF UNUSUAL SIZE
I first heard about giant otters in a Kresley Cole book (paranormal romance), and I thought they were interesting so I looked them up and was ASTOUNDED that they were real. Like, not just “used to be” like dinosaurs, but “currently living” real.
You wasted an opportunity to show the faces they make when they eat watermelon. They obv hate it, they CRY and GRIMACE, and yet they keep eating. Let me fix your mistake for you.
I wanna know what drives them to eat something they find so unappealing. What do watermelons have that they crave??
