When you make bigger decisions than what shirt to wear or if you should take a shower or not, then you can lecture me on ethics. Till then, keep your preaching to yourself. Don’t worry, I will repeat this to your face when I see you, so don’t think I’m hiding behind a computer…

Not everything is a fucking civil liberties issue! Nothing in the meme mentioned her being black! You just seek any opportunity to make your tiered moral judgments and that got old about three seconds after I met you.

This is a sample of the message sent by one of the people who was complicit in alienating my interpretation of the situation. Notice that he automatically defaults into colorblindness and indifference (also as a side note, this person resorted to ad hominem attacks yet went on to describe us both as “philosophers” when he wanted to make it appear as though we would just have to “agreeing to disagree”, which I never do - I never back down from an intellectual war of manoevre).

When the situation involving non-black “people-of-color” utilizing internalized antiblack racism is pointed out for its political problematic, it also becomes a non-issue for “people-of-color” because the singularity of blackness as slave or being-for-the-captor is rendered invisible in the colorblind ideological paradigm.  The label “people-of-color” provides for, in this situation, the hiding of whiteness beneath a cloud of racial ambiguity that makes blackness indiscernible from the various systems of oppression at work in an apartheid regime with multiples historical trajectories of colonialism and genocide upon Black and Brown people.  Although, the gratuitous aspect of antiblack violence seems to be the key feature of global white supremacy that doesn’t register in other forms of racist state violence.

The highly developed system of surveillance and policing of Black bodies plays out in the everyday here, where we are least likely to see and identify it.  The highly developed self-reproducing structures of  antiblack violence inherent in this system of policing and surveillance are cloaked in the air of post-raciality, which is conveniently deployed like a fog by “people-of-color” to disavow blackness and Black bodies without making it appear racist.  While they do the work of a white supremacist political context, they complicate their own position(s) as oppressed people by continuing to participate knowingly in the quotidian forms of racial violence and humiliation fundamental to the preservation of white civil society and its apparatus of roundup. 

Sources:

“People-of-Color Blindness” by Jared Sexton

“Prison Slave as Hegemony’s (Silent) Scandal” by Frank B Wilderson, III