Phosphor [&]

(sorry for comment bombing) I've been doing some super-dark reading on the history of the legalization of interracial sex/marriage lately, and it's hard to describe the RELIEF that came with learning just how incredibly arbitrary, made-up, and CHANGEABLE whiteness really is. Like, as I read about Virginia instituting the one-drop rule, only for all the crusty rich old-school families to freak out because they all dated their American ancestry back to Pocahantas, so they CHANGED THE RULE JUST FOR THEM, and all I could do was laugh, because omg it's all made up! THEY JUST MAKE IT UP! AND CHANGE THE RULES WHENEVER, tying themselves in knots to make sure only the people on top get included and none of the people on bottom do! There are only TWO ethnic groups I can think of who were ALWAYS considered white in the USA! Two, of all the people in all the world!

The idea that there's some iron wall between "white" and "PoC" was never true! It was NEVER a binary, they just MADE IT UP! And then they went utterly apeshit trying to enforce it, make all these insane laws and rules just so they could keep everyone separate from each other, so they wouldn't figure out how bullshit it was!

Obviously it's horrible and evil and terrible. But it was such a relief to find out HOW MUCH SO! It's like, wow, no really, this is just Calvinball for evil! And when leftists regurgitate this binary, they're negating centuries of real history and real people's lived experiences! Because who gets to be "white" depends on the needs of power at the time, and that requires the lines be continually changed to serve those in power.

And I think about someone I knew online years ago, who grew up in a small rural town in Sweden, where, as you might imagine, it was white people far as the eye could see, by US standard. And they STILL had a problem with white supremacists trying to create "TRUE white people" and looking down on people who didn't have blond or red hair. Even in the depths of Bumblefuck, Sweden, WHITE SUPREMACISTS STILL WEREN'T HAPPY! And realizing that... I dunno. It helped. It helped.