Fucking bizarre watching people try to eject Russians from whiteness in real time
This is what colonized people have always been saying. Whiteness is an ontological category created to justify which part of the power hierarchy you are allowed to occupy in the sphere of western imperialist domination. It defines the proximity to the colonial halls of power. It has always been fluid until recently and it will remain fluid to resist as the power restructures.
Ukrainians are included doesn’t mean they matter. They are useful pawns for now geopolitically and bodies of labour to exploit. So they stay higher in the hierarchy for now.
The orientalizing of Russia also shows the extent to which “Europe” and “Asia” are ideological/discursive categories and not actual geographical boundaries (because if we’re being honest Europe is a large peninsula in northwest Asia). The boundary between “Europe” and “Asia” is constantly in flux and dependent on the geopolitical conditions of the day. Another example of this is the insistence by media and journalists this is the “largest conflict in Europe since WW2”, effectively brainholing the wars in former Yugoslavia because it’s no longer geopolitically useful to categorize the Balkans as “Europe.”
I’m just waiting for a major news outlet to refer to the Russian army as a horde
I do get the sense that even if the US hits 3.2 million dead, there will be folks like DeSantis who say, what’s the big deal, that’s only 1% of the country.
There will never be enough dead for them to admit they were wrong
“People fashion an image of fortune as an excuse for their own folly. For in a few cases fortune conflicts with prudence, but for most things in life intelligent clear-sightedness guides correctly.”
— Democritus, Fragments, B119 (via philosophybits)
