by scarecrowbob | 2026-01-11 21:55:11+00:00
[Pardon the following essay and feel free to ignore it- this kind of writing is how I think, but I am only posting it here because you may (though likely not) find it to be a worthwhile read.]

Personally, I don't feel one way or anther about my reasoning- I feel like I am simply taking folks at their word and trying to understand them in a way that doesn't reduce their position to hypocrisy. There are other tools to understand them, this is just one

I do agree that if Taylor was white-identifying people would have found some other reason to support her murder.

However, I often think of the quote about how "I didn't shoot you because you're a n--, you're a n-- because I shot you".

One fact about white-supremacy culture is that it requires the adoption of very narrow and constantly changing cultural signals. It is, thus, an "empty" signifier: there are both "no white people" and any specific person can theoretically enjoy WS culture if they "act correctly". In that way works very well under conditions of neoliberal capitalism, as someone like Mark Fisher might point out.

In that way, I understand that "whiteness" is about how people are interpolated by the state/community/themselves rather than, say, "skin tone", even if those physical traits are often a hard barrier for the folks doing the interpolation.

That culture is how a lot of folks, as I understand them, square their "love of freedom" with the murder of, say, Renee Cross; she violated XYZ norm (about whiteness) and should rightfully be subjected to the state violence reserved for non-white folks. It's no accident that the current political violence of the state is oriented around "illegal" (to be understood as 'brown') people rather than, say, the world bank or climate justice or student loans or housing.

To be fair, those freedom-loving folks would probably say that their position isn't about "whiteness"- that is certainly my interpolation of their position in an attempt to take them seriously instead of dismissing them as hypocritical idiots. I believe they would, as a short-hand, say that that thy just want people to "act correctly/legally/quietly/with civility" or whatever (not be a lesbian, don't honky your horn, don't color your hair, don't yell at the gestapo, etc).

However, it feels easy enough to unpack their desire for norms into a set of "very narrow and constantly changing cultural signals".

And while there are a lot of tools to analyze how these folks came to believe that their norms are "the" norms, I feel like WS Culture is one easy and useful tool for that work.

Or, at least that tool feels like an easy handle to start to dig out why WS culture is a death cult, harmful to the folks who lean into it: there is no one who is really white enough to survive getting murdered by the state, yet that culture's adherents have decided that somehow that culture won't harm them (and, further, that anyone who can't adopt that culture really isn't a human anyhow).

I used to be a Marxist but at some point I've become a kind of race-reductionist instead of a class reductionist:

for the same reason that if the police can't summarily murder black folks, they probably would have a hard time murdering me,

if WS culture has a hard time operating, then all the other class conditions which operate through it (here I am thinking about subject-ifying people into an authoritarian state through cultural hegemony or, if you prefer, the ISAs, or if you prefer the main tools of "Capitalism") will have a hard time operating against me and my fellow humans.

That is to say, I find the math a lot easier when I just examine these kinds of state-sanctioned murders through the lens of White Supremacy culture; other tools I've found helpful have required me to work out the psychology of a bunch of idiosyncratic cultural practices that end up expressing themselves as internal contradictions and hypocrisy, and I am too old and tired to do that kind of comparative literature any more.