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”
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.
I am disgusted with the fact that I used to be one of the ones that would ask myself, “What privilege? I got a shit life.”
My eyes are much more open now. It is frankly very disturbing to learn how easy it was to be blind to the injustices forced on those around me. I cannot imagine what it must be like to deal with an ever present dread surrounding your day to day life. Women, too - every woman I’ve had a close friendship with is a victim of rape, including my mother. It’s horrifying to realize the virtually all women around me will at minimum be subjected to some form of sexual assault. But for anybody with darker skin than mine to logically fear ANY interaction with police. Fuck.
When will we get past this? How? Even if I can accomplish nothing else, my eyes are staying open. There is no peace in trying to pretend the pain around me isn’t there.
If you create a genocidal ethnostate based on your religion, don’t be surprised when people hate that religion
antisemitism is prevalent in among the more fundamentalist groups of course but their antisemitism and why it grew due to Israel being perceived as a Jewish state is different from antisemitism in the west. the context and history is very different.
It makes sense to hate who your oppressors claim to be. “Israel” wants to be associated with all Judaism so they can say their enemies are anti-Semitic. Some fundamentalists take them on their word and hate the entirety of Jews.
