I've spent the last few days arguing with other black people about Joe's "you ain't black" statement. I'm gonna tell you why *I* feel this statement is so problematic...

Prepare for a thread...

**********CAVEAT******************
--I'm voting for Biden
--I'm not saying he's as bad as Trump
--I'm NOT recommending that anyone sit out the 2020 presidential election

Now that I've gotten the disclaimers out of the way, let's start the thread...

In order to properly understand the concept of "blackness," it helps to understand the concept of "whiteness". Or, more accurately, why "whiteness" was even invented in the first place...

Yes, "whiteness" was invented. Before the Columbian exchange, most Europeans had no contact with the people of Africa and Asia and, consequently, had no idea that Africans and Asians even existed. They also had no idea that North and South America existed so they had no idea...

That there were tens of millions of indigenous Americans existed, either. In the late 15th century, Europeans simultaneously "discovered" the "New World" and began directly trading with sub Saharan Africans and Asians. Suddenly, Europeans became aware that other humans...

Didn't look like them. When Europeans decided to colonize the Americas, Africa, and Asia, they had to set up a system where they obtained then maintained their power. After they subjugated sub-Saharan Africans, indigenous Americans, and Asians through slavery, displacement...

Disease, etc, the Europeans then quickly began defining exactly who belonged to the in-group and who belonged to the out-groups. Because the Europeans had much fairer skin than the Africans, Asians, and indigenous people they sought to subjugate, they began calling themselves...

"White." But it wasn't enough to call themselves "white," they had to define everyone else as "not white."

Once the now-white Europeans determined who was "white" and who was "not white," they established a political system/social hierarchy that very deliberately privileged "white" people over people were "not white."

A person's whiteness or lack thereof determined their eligibility for legal enslavement, displacement, forced religious conversion, voting rights (at least for men), legal marriage and a host of other rights.

Note: White men determined who was white and "not white," no one else. It was one of the many facets of white male power.

What does any of this have to do with Joe Biden?

Well, when Joe Biden said, "you ain't black," he was participating in a 500 year long custom of white men arbitrarily assigning in-group/out-group status to "others" WITHOUT their input.

It's 2020 and the fact that a white msn made an unforced error of this nature at this point in human history tells me a lot of not-so-great things about Joe. The "you ain't black" comment tells me that Joe, while not being overtly racist, still subscribes to white...

Supremacist ideology that posits that white men are allowed to make such determinations. It tells me that Joe doesn't understand that political ideology/party affiliations do not (and never did) change racial identities. It tells me that Joe has gotten a little too damn...

Comfortable riding Obama's coattails. It also tells me that he paid little to no attention to the trials of his former boss. All the GOP did for 8 years was question Obama's degree of blackness. Remember, any time Obama referred to himself as a black man, GOP operatives...

Pulled his white grandparents out of their asses. Any time a black person expressed pride in America's first black president, GOP operatives reminded us that Obama's mother was white--nevermind the fact we "already been knew." That said...

Where the actual fuck was Joe Biden when all this stuff was going on? Did he seriously NOT notice ANY of this?

Like I said before, I am voting for Biden. I really don't have a choice right now. But Joe has to stop acting like his colonizing racist-ass ancestors whenever he cracks his mouth open to speak to black people. It's 2020 and his obliviousness to just how problematic his words are

Will only hurt him at the ballot box.

And, to reiterate....QUESTIONING THE BLACKNESS OF BLACK PEOPLE, EVEN JOKINGLY, IS NOT COOL. It's just not.