First things first: white people bad! If you have questions I’ll try to answer em, but the settlers in a settler colonial state are unequivocally bad.
With that out of the way, the person you’re replying to is assuming you are already aware and recognize the ways that protest and direct action are coded and racialised in media. Pictures of white people are used with captions about a peaceful protest, pictures of black and brown people are used with captions about them “turning violent” and looting.
The narrative that creates is one where white people are nonviolent and it’s the black and brown people who are associated with direct action.
The point the person you’re replying to is making by saying
turns out that when white people actually want something they magically know what effective forms of protest actually look like
Is that the media narrative about white forms of protest being nonviolent is a lie.
Ah, I see the point. I didn’t realize it was a commentary on how media portrays these issues.
I struggle with the idea that all white people in the U.S. are somehow bad.
When I, or anyone else for that matter, talk about how white people are bad I’m talking about how the position they occupy in society is bad, not how an individual has committed some original sin of whiteness and must atone.
Whiteness is a social construct used to enforce racialized class society.
A person can no more atone for the classification society created and laid upon them than they can shake off that classification itself.
The thing that is bad about white people is their position in racialised class society in the settler colonial state. An individual white person can uphold all the rules and morals you could name but will still occupy the role of oppressor in the hierarchy everyone lives under.
The usual response people give to me is something along the lines of “well what if a white person fought against racial oppression, they wouldn’t be bad and you would be wrong!” Combined with usually either Lincoln or John brown as examples. Those are great examples of how the settler colonial state will protect itself and will find an outlet for its appetites. Lincoln fought against the Dakota uprising and brown was killed for his insurrection.
I don’t bring that up to make an easy dunk over the head of some guy I made up, but to preempt the response that seems to be on everyone’s lips.
If a person is raised as a certain type of person with every aspect of society behaving towards them with respect to that typification, included in which is the normalization and reification of the relationship that type is a part of, the person will “be” what that type is within that relationship.
Remember the funny dub king fu movie, “we trained him wrong as a joke”? Imagine “we trained him to ~be white~ as a ~way to ensure the propagation of class society~”
All of what you’re saying makes sense, and I believe you believe what you’re saying.
I don’t know if I buy that everyone that says white people are bad have this much thought going into it. My experience with people suggests that this simply can’t be true, as there are far too many individuals (especially with the access to information we have these days) that seek others to think for them and act according to their declarations.
What you’re saying, however, all adds up. I don’t disagree with anything you’ve said.