Rolling Race 2021

no worries! walker's work is hit or miss for me on computer screens and print but it's generally impressive as all hell to see in person. I regret missing "A Subtlety" as all the video and conversations people had with me about it made it sound monolithic and intense

I've only seen her silhouette work in person, but yeah it was striking and formidable

This article about people who take on racial identities not their own is pretty fascinating, and also baffling. I mean, my maternal grandfather was Mexican — my mom's last name is Guevara — but I would never call myself Latin, especially not in some kind of "I deserve tenure/a book deal for my pain" kind of way. These people have zero connection to the cultures and ethnicities they're claiming, and then they (frequently) have the stones to accuse other people of being inauthentic.

https://www.cnn.com/us/live-news/atlanta-area-shootings-03-17-21/index.html

This shit is going to keep happening for a while

i am so sad about this. reminds me of Charleston, reminds me of how often racist violence is directed at women, worried about my Asian American students who feel like their peers don't think racism against Asian Americans is "a thing," so despairing about guns in this country that mean no one is safe, worried already about fucked up responses to these killings because of the dehumanization of Asian women, particularly sex work-adjacent Asian women, just overwhelmed and don't know what to do with myself.

also i wish my twitter feed weren't full of the killer's fucking face.

it's very concerning. part of me still (optimistically) wants to believe that maybe some of these anti-Asian hate crimes are being mislabeled or coincidental, like freak attacks by mentally ill homeless persons, but this one is impossible to ignore.

I've been hearing statistics of anti Asian violence over the last week on several podcasts sounds like it is a rising number.
Doesn't help that to certain people they 'all look alike' and the last President was trying to fob off the virus as being Chinese and he had been doing a lot of counterintelligent shenanigans aimed at the Chinese since he was elected.

i think it is hard to generalize about the attacks that have popped up in the news lately--there are a lot of things happening at the same time, and it's hard to identify what the connections are. there's growing anti-Asian resentment of the "these people are taking our jobs" variety (i remember shortly after Trump was elected a white cabbie telling me all about the Asians taking over, and he didn't seem to consider me Asian, maybe because he was thinking about east Asians, though I doubt his thinking was very clear), the anti-Asian sentiment rooted in anger about coronavirus and Trumpian "Chinese virus" comments, a much older dehumanization of working class Asian women rooted in American wars in Korea and Vietnam and sex work, and then the older intra-American forms of anti-Asian sentiment about exploitation of Chinese labor beginning in the late 19th century. complicating everything is that some of the incidents getting a lot of publicity pre- the Atlanta shootings were incidents where Black Americans were attacking Asian Americans, and i agree Nhex, that some of those attacks may not have been racist in motivation, but there is a history of fraught relations between the two groups based on complicated neighborhood relationships, obvs. i do think the post-coronavirus wave of hostility is real and has a complicated relationship with previous history.

xp

It's good that Biden explicitly condemned racism against Asian-Americans in last week's speech.

I just listened to a podcast on sex work fro the Red Nation podcast this morning, talking about how a lot of native women were forced into sex work wherever countries were colonised..
Comes from like 3 weeks ago so doesn't mention current events
https://open.spotify.com/episode/0YsoRuEpT5m9gsJrQmWMtP?si=2Ixb9QLHRy6If5C-aPSQ_g

will be available on other platforms if spotify doesn't float your boat.

It's good that Biden explicitly condemned racism against Asian-Americans in last week's speech.

― pomenitul, Wednesday, March 17, 2021 10:04 AM (fourteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

it is good, and i am glad he did it, but he also said it was un-American, which is lol

lol you're right, I forgot about that part.

i don't have a news source, but i'm seeing on Twitter that there are reports of a witness to the shootings saying that the killer made an explicit statement about intending to kill Asians fwiw.

this is what i mean. chosun ilbo has already reported that a witness, a worker at gold spa, said the gunman shouted that he would kill all the asians https://t.co/EUyd2eXoKO

— E. Alex Jung (@e_alexjung) March 17, 2021

i saw a lot of sex workers pushing back against that red nation ep. the asian-american sex-worker collective red canary song has called af3irm (which one of the guests is from) a toxic organization, after trying to engage with ezperanza's piece from last year. a thread on af3irm

They also work with organizations that actively weaponize the police against critics, this one is fucking wild and completely unconscionable: pic.twitter.com/Eja3DWphRy

— for the self abolition of the proletariat (@thecoleslaws) February 24, 2021

*esperanza

this is truly unsavory, if true:

the law enforcement spokesperson just said the shooter frequented these massage parlors and said he did this because he had a sexual addiction.

"this was a temptation he wanted to eliminate"

SEXUAL FIXATION AND RACIALLY-MOTIVATED HATE CRIME IS NOT MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE #Atlanta

— Jenny Yang (@jennyyangtv) March 17, 2021

what the actual fuck

I maybe could have come up with a different expression of incredulity there

"he's not racist, he's a sex-obsessed terrorist who also is racist"

no, it seems appropriate. i need to stop doomscrolling on Twitter, but i can't seem to focus on anything else.

xp yeah, judging from that Twitter thread, the law enforcement offical in the press conference was trying to minimize any racist motive, but it really sounds like he does not understand what racism is.

Betcha he's diabetic.

also, sorry that i inadvertantly put the killer's face in this thread after complaining that my twitter feed was full of the killer's face.

The shooter claimed this was not racially motivated, took responsibility for this shooting, understood the gravity of what he did and said he "had a bad day."

No kidding

"Upon hearing this, Daniel Powter said, 'Do NOT drag me into your bullshit.'"

You'll never guess which broken-brained asshole couldn't stop himself from jumping in with both feet.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EwsLhmmXAAMVMYq.jpg

on the one hand, it is important to report on evidence for motives in crime. on the other, it is sort of hilarious that a white dude kills a bunch of women of a particular race and anyone would respond with total skepticism that racism has anything to do with it. also, an obligatory "fuck glenn greenwald."

and reporters should apply a modicum of skepticism to a cop who says, "he's sexually addicted to Asian sex workers, so he needed to kill some, so no racism here!"

The thing is I did have “what I did wasn’t racist, it was just motivated by this thing that is primarily driven by race” on my Bingo card; it’s the free square in the center

— DJP (@djperry1973) March 17, 2021

looks like we have some of the victims' names:

The dead: Delaina Ashley Yaun, Paul Andre Michels, Xiaojie Yan, Daoyou Feng. Four remain unnamed. (from @TheCut)

— Esmé Weijun Wang • 汪蔚君 (@esmewang) March 17, 2021

Sometimes it seems like all the squares. ;___;

I shouldn't be surprised, but the way this update is being reported is extremely appalling.

yes

My partner is Chinese, the amount of racism that's been thrown his way (and my way, weirdly) during our ten years together is fucking ghastly.

ALSO:

I just listened to a podcast on sex work fro the Red Nation podcast this morning, talking about how a lot of native women were forced into sex work wherever countries were colonised..
Comes from like 3 weeks ago so doesn't mention current events
https://open.spotify.com/episode/0YsoRuEpT5m9gsJrQmWMtP?si=2Ixb9QLHRy6If5C-aPSQ_g

will be available on other platforms if spotify doesn't float your boat.

― Stevolende, Wednesday, March 17, 2021 7:09 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

I know people who have quit Red Nation over this podcast. af3irm is an anti-trans organization, plain and simple, that acts with the carceral state to criminalize marginalized sex workers instead of advocating for them. fuck that.

yeah. (and my mistake, both are from the org.) turn here instead, for starters

https://indigenoussexsovereignty.tumblr.com/post/112162474275/centering-the-voices-of-people-who-trade-or-sell

https://indigenoussexsovereignty.tumblr.com/resources

I think I was doing several things at the same time this morning.
Crap, sorry shouldn't be sharing things like taht but did think the comments on how prevalent the forcing into prostitution thing was was pretty nasty.

JUst working through several episodes of that podcast after having been at a Land back webinar last week. Seems like a good podcast.Has there been debate about what they should and shouldn't be coverijng going on.

There's been some amount of drama within leftist communities of various stripes around Red Nation, but I'm not too aware of a lot of it except around this particular podcast episode.

perhaps this is just to repeat what was already said in this thread yesterday, but i want to register my frustration that the (white) journalistic consensus that seems to be emerging about this crime is that there is no racist motive, or that it is not yet clear there is a racist motive. basically because the white cop, who was later found to have posted racist anti-Chinese images on Facebook, described a racist, misogynist motive and then just CALLED it not racist, and apparently, no one who reported on it in the mainstream media exercised their own judgment about whether that motive, as described by the killer, was racist?

I just watched a coupl eo fepisodes of teh Black Lives Matter A global Reckoining series from Vice last week. The one from Denmark has the story of the killing of a half caste Danish youth by a couple of his acquaintances one fo whom had white supremacy tattoos in English all over parts of him.
There was a Danish magistrate who declared that there was no racist motive. Which has me wondering what does count as racist in the mind of so called liberals. Like it seems to be taken as given that any decent thinking person cannot be racist cos that's what other people do and there's a marginalisation and stigma about the idea of racism. Like its encapsulated and can only be done by the gauche, so whatver dodgy thoughts one has about an artificial categorisation of people well that can't be racist can it? Which until it is unlearnt will always be a stumbling block in combating racism. Owning one's prejudices so one can actually try to get to a point where one recognises what the distortion is.

it's just what does not count as racist to white people who avoid understanding racism

People writing in the mainstream media, who are overwhelmingly white, operate the same way as most white people— they will do anything to uphold white privilege and supremacy, and if that means not calling something racist that was clearly racist, then so be it.

One of the problems with such reporting is that it's seen as "not objective" to call something racist unless the racist person themselves says that there was a racist motive, or the police say there was a racist motive. There's little to no acknowledgement of the fundamental systems of racism and white supremacy that structure US society, and instead someone needs to be a sieg-heiling freakshow in order to be declared a racist by many in the media. It's pathetic.

I do not endorse or condone police brutality and, had the arresting officers beat the shit out of this dude and put him into a coma while arresting him, I would have shaken my head and said "oh, that is shameful" in an extremely insincere tone of voice

not even sieg heiling freakshows are racist, they're "racist" or "accused of racism" or some tortured euphemism.

everything about this is terrible & infuriating & so fucking transparent (i would have thought)

I just read Angela Saini, Kehinde Andres david Olusoga and a few others and wonder why everybody else can't be as woke the cretinous bitches and fucktards and all those progressive epithets i can aim at people.

what the fuck

JUst have been very disillusioned by some people who were supposed to be seting out to teach people about privilege among other things locally who don't seem to have any awareness of their own and theor own ignorance.
So been something that keeps reappearing as I read authors that are pretty enlightening.
I useed to want to seriously avoid ideologies after having been shown the limitations and hypocrisies by people I'd been exposed to and find I'm still in a paradigm. Is it human nature to be an a-hole or is it remotely possible to reclaim your wings, like.

what are you trying to do