the_dunk_tank

Shut up.

Those top two, and sometimes even the third, aren't things people choose to identify with, and in the case of trans people and immigrants, self-identity is often ignored.

Ok, and I'm saying whiteness IS something you can choose to self-identify with because unlike many minority groups, "white" people do have the social capacity and ability to affect change in that arena

Also you're conflating light-skinnedness with whiteness again, people can't help light-skinnedness, but they can help identifying their light skinnedness with an over arching political and social ideology like whiteness, and there's only one way to do that, which is what op in that thread was decrying, so your previous examples don't apply

A person denying a job based on stereotypes of their race is racism. They don't need intent, scale nor reach for that. Racism is still divisive garbage that fucks up social movements no matter if it's instutionalized or not.

Ok, but that's not happening to "white people", you know why? Because if the "person denying a job based on "light skin" stereotypes" is discovered, they're the ones who are gonna get fucked, as they should. Because you actually do need intent, scale and reach to enforce prejudice, otherwise society and most importantly the state is gonna push your shit in

But people who identify with whiteness don't suffer from that dynamic, instead they prevent others from enjoying that protection, which is why it's inappropriate to talk about "mirrors" or equivalences of any sort when it comes to this topic and why you shouldn't conflate skin color with the ideology itself

Now, how are we meant to overcome those obstacles (even just within a local setting like a socialist org) with people like Othello embracing it?

Except they weren't embracing it, they were literally decrying it, because they recognized that people who identify with whiteness don't have their best interest at heart, the worst you could call that post was cynical or doomer, but not racist

As far as I'm concerned, their redacted reply made it clear that they think continuing dividing the movement on whiteness is justified because of historical racial injustices in US socialist orgs.

Ok and you're dividing the movement because you want to preserve some kind of organic conception of whiteness, tied to people's phenotypical traits, devoid of its historical and social role in human affairs? Because otherwise we'll start being racist to light-skinned people? We don't live in a world of simply light skin supremacy, we live in a world of white supremacy and to combat it we have to deconstruct whiteness and the ideologies and assumptions that underlay it, and yeah average people who ignorantly identify with it are going to get pissed off, but that shouldn't prevent critique or making fun of people who turn it into their central personality trait

No, I suspect the concept will never be abolished socially until the capitalism that sustains it and simultaneously uses it as a functional tool is destroyed or negated, but as the contradictions of capitalism develop further in conjunction with climate change, so does whiteness as a concept; maybe it expands, maybe it contracts, maybe gen alpha resurrects the Young Patriots Organization and bisects whiteness and transforms it into some pseudo-radical identity, who knows, of course I highly doubt that will never happen, because at the end of the day whiteness has no content beyond exclusionary hatred

But what will definitely happen is whiteness will change over time along with the contradictions of capitalism, and as that happens the artificiality of it becomes more apparent, and as materialists it's always a sound strategy to point out the artificial, to de-essentialize racial rhetoric and stress when something is not set in nature, despite ideological claims to the contrary

And I take your point about being "ideologically advanced" well, but ironically my usual approach is simple and fully in line with American socio-economic history; desegregation, but instead of arising out of segments of the black community like in the past and mediated reluctantly by a hostile state, it's an "internal position" advanced by white radicals as a social movement, hardly an ideologically advanced position

Of course, don't ask me the likelihood of something like that happening, because I can get real doomer about the United States