Anti-civ
Nihilist
Anarchist
Kinda "a baeddel"
Avatar from https://www.pixiv.net/en/artworks/51804726
I think people do a huge disservice to Black Feminism and Womanism when they try and make them the be-all-and-end-all of anti-oppression theory. Like, it's a specific intersection. Let it have its specificity!
Over the top reverence or a universalization/decontextualization of this work isn't being kind to it. It's pedestalization. It makes it harder to engage with it substantially and sets you up for a bad time when it can't meet the inflated, unrealistic expectations projected onto it.
Remember when I specifically complained about the erasure of black people from techno's history and libs immediately expanded it out to all popular music instead of letting it be about a specific black experience. bc i do.
Is there a word that basically means philosemitism but for black shit? Afrophilia?
I remember a lot of the comments on that had a very juvenile "let me add the thing I know about this!" air to them and some of them were like. Very clear paraphrases of popular posts abt various Black music history that have been going around for years. I don't have a real solid synthesis here but it's very sjw-core, almost gamified. I'm tempted to say the facts people brought up were almost like trivia but I don't want to trivialize those other stories, just that the presentation was a collection of facts with some amount of "and all music is like this!" slapped on in lieu of any real discussion or rhetoric. Iunno, you might feel differently, but my personal frustration with watching that all go down was yr original point getting buried by all the things that are Like That, rather than the ppl replying really trying to like, have a conversation. Treating your thought as the first bullet point in a list they can add to rather than giving u the space to express Your Thought and either letting that be that or bringing their Own Thoughts in actual conversation.
I guess that Other People were treating those stories as a trivia category rather than like. Letting each one be its own narrative worthy of individual space in the greater pattern. Idk if that makes sense but it does feel really similar to how many people treat Black feminism, piling in more and more as a bulleted list in a way that defangs and despecifies the actual narratives and arguments that make up the body of work.
It creates a really unfair kind of universalization and reification adjacent to what rav was saying. Talking about Black erasure from techno history creates space to like. Both grieve and repair. Revive specific stories and make real, explicit, contextual asks about how people treat the sphere and Do Better; and idk ballooning that out into an overarching narrative can be useful to a point but at some point you end up with "listen to Black musicians!" Or even worse "this thing Happened (complete past) and it's terrible and we should all feel shame about stuff we never got the opertunity to learn, don't that suck?" White-guilt-centric bullshit which is just. Worlds away from actually reviving and preserving specific shit as it exists in context.
OK I'm done now lol sry
No you're so right, especially with the whole "let me add on the one thing I know!" part.
Loading Screen Tip: Did you KNOW that black people are responsible for all popular forms of modern music? Woah!
It's like trying to discuss the relationship between racism and economics to investigate the lasting impact slavery of Africans has had on the world and everyone around goes "Ugh! Slavery was so brutal and awful right guys fuck racism!" and everyone chirps up to agree to the point that no one can hear the original point being made. No need to learn, no need to reflect, it's a past evil that we must move on from.
It's almost like generalizing black trauma is done by white people because the totality of it becomes overwhelming when you look into it with any granularity and requires deep interrogations of your own beliefs and experiences, so it's easier to just feel bad for five minutes and go about your life!
Lmaaaaooo loading screen tip 😭😭I think there's a level of abjection in it too. A Lotta white people r really deeply, morbidly obsessed with Black suffering. I do think a lot of it is this like, often psychosexual drive towards revulsion n so comes from that same defensiveness tho, and from 2010s social justice culture being so intensely shame based that it just nerfed an entire generations ability to engage with theory outside of a really deeply emotional place.
