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Whenever these "whites faking Blackness" stories surface, like Jessica Krug or Dolezal, it& #39;s striking how each one is treated as *fascinating* -- like we need magazine profiles to understand each individual& #39;s weird, specific origin story. But I wonder what happens if instead
we viewed these, materially, as merely improvisations within "normal" whiteness itself. Not a quirky departure, but a performance of one of old-fashioned whiteness& #39;s key functions: the brutal refusal to be *in proximity* without claiming as property.
I& #39;m thinking with @essaysmythe& #39;s point here: https://twitter.com/essaysmythe/status/1301563921011105792?s=20">https://twitter.com/essaysmyt...
Can non-Black people, esp. white people, exist in proximity to Black traditions of study, Black people and culture, *without* grasping for capture, without (attempting to) transform it into capital, yes, even "anti-racist" capital, or intellectual capital, or cultural capital?
I don& #39;t know. I don& #39;t think those questions are easily answerable, and certainly not answerable within terms set by white feelings, whether of guilt or innocence. But one thing people have taught me is to approach it within the material context of resources & accountability:
What actual resources - funding, grants, tenure lines - do you claim for yourself? What spaces do you occupy and how? Who does your work draw from and to whom are you *actually* accountable? Who materially profits from your work?
Okay, sorry, I never do threads, I& #39;m gonna go back to tweeting about how the theme song from Duck Tales is a bop.
These are extremely cold takes, by the way, nothing original here, but that& #39;s kinda the point, insofar as longstanding insights of Black Studies go ignored, precisely in a moment when doing Black Studies in the university is (for some) very marketable...
