Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin - Colourism is the New Racism

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March 2, 2018 - Sargon of Akkad - Carl Benjamin

12:57

Colourism is the New Racism

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	Why would black people in Brazil get upset about a black woman winning a beauty contest?
	The answer ends with ism, but probably not the one you think.
	Well, you guys do have an awful lot of isms, but I think that this is going to be one of those cases where you've defined a word in such a way that it doesn't include a certain demographic of people, and so you've had to make up another word to actually include the bigotry that these people have used, because your first definition has kind of screwed you over.
	Today we're talking about a mode of discrimination that predominantly impacts people of color.
	And you might be surprised hearing this from me, but this episode's not about racism.
	Oh, it's always fun to play semantic games with the far left.
	Let's have a definition of the word racism so we can be sure that you aren't talking about racism.
	Racism involves discrimination based on things such as skin color, but it's also dependent on power dynamics that becomes perpetuated by years of structural oppression.
	That is an adequate version of the far left's redefinition of the word racism to include prejudice and power.
	But what happens when two people that you have defined as having no power, whether they do or don't, end up being prejudiced towards one another?
	Well, fuck, you are up shit creek without a paddle, and so you need a brand new word to describe the thing that everyone else calls racism.
	I'm talking about colourism.
	First, let's be clear about what the word colourism actually means.
	Colorism is not synonymous with racism.
	It's a form of discrimination based on skin colour.
	Disagree.
	Colourism is not synonymous with your definition of racism, which is not the same as everyone else's definition of racism, which is why you've made up a word called colorism so you actually have a way of describing the concept that everyone else calls racism.
	And before you're like, wait, isn't that like the literal definition of racism?
	I honestly have to say that this is highly amusing to me because suddenly the agency of non-white people has come back to bite intersectional social justice in the rear.
	This is one way racism and colourism are different.
	Systems of oppression favor white people, meaning black people can't technically be racist towards other black people.
	But clearly in this case, they can and do perpetuate colorism in their own communities.
	The discrimination is coming from inside of the house.
	Yes, that is what racism means.
	No, racism does not require institutional prejudice.
	Racism is the description for prejudice against someone on the basis of their race, usually described as skin color, because most people aren't actually thinking about the shape of the orbital socket or the propensity they have to develop sickle cell anemia.
	But if you are a social justice academic and you've spent your entire career justifying a kind of linguistic slice of hand to steal the word racism away from other people who might be white and might want to use it against a black person who is abusing them on the basis of their race, and if that black person were to turn around and abuse another non-white person on the basis of their race, you can't use the word racism to condemn those actions.
	So you have to make up a whole new word that means the same as the word racism as used by everyone else.
	And this is how colorism was born.
	The thing is, the intersectional social justice definition of the word racism never caught on with the general public.
	And so if you think that you will be able to replace their term racism with the term colorism, I think you're wrong.
	I think it's not going to happen.
	And it amuses me that intersectional social justice has arrived at this philosophical point where they need to fill in all of the gaps left by their own deliberate blind spots.
	The really great thing about this is it just makes intersectionality even more esoteric and labyrinthine than it already was.
	I do not think this is going to catch on with the general public at all.
	Because we often conflate race with skin color, sometimes distinguishing between colourism and racism can get tricky, particularly in Latin American communities, where someone's heritage might include a combination of indigenous, black, and white European ancestry.
	And let me give you a hint.
	It usually doesn't get better the darker you are.
	Oh, this is just brilliant, isn't it?
	I mean, it's easy to differentiate people into different color schemes when you're in a majority white country with a black minority.
	That's very easy.
	That's very simplistic.
	But as soon as you go somewhere like Latin America, where you've got a whole range of different skin tones and races and backgrounds, then it becomes a lot more difficult, doesn't it?
	Then you have to start making up new terms.
	I wonder if Latin America will be the thing that actually kills off social justice, just because of its irreducible complexity.
	Maybe, just maybe, we don't have to categorize every person in the world based on their race or their gender or their sexuality.
	Maybe we can just treat every person that we meet with the same kind of politeness and respect that we ourselves would like to be treated with.
	This is something that most people refer to in a kind of colloquial way as colorblindness.
	We don't have to be colorblind, but combating colorism means embracing the full spectrum of our skin tones, especially in our own communities.
	I disagree with you.
	I think that the only way to solve the problem of racism is for us to be colorblind.
	But I know that you don't want to be colorblind because your entire career is based in intersectional social justice.
	This is all Francesca Ramsey does.
	So it's no wonder that she wants to avoid the actual solution to the problem of the phenomenal complexity of actually doing what she suggests.
	But I think fundamentally the worst thing about this is that it goes against what Francesca acknowledges that most people actually want, not to be arbitrarily discriminated against.
	Ultimately, no one wants to be judged solely based on their external appearance.
	Whether these judgments come from people who look like you or don't, your skin color shouldn't determine your job prospects, your worth, or your place in society.
	Woo!
	That's an impressive list you've got there, Frenny.
	So when say the BBC are literally not hiring people because they're white, when the Labour Party in Britain is actually charging white people more and considering brown people to be worth less, and Canadian universities are calling on white men last because they are white men, you are opposed to all of these things.
	Am I right?
	By what you've just said there, you should be opposed to all of these things and yet, oh, that's right, crickets.
	I don't hear a word from you.
	Obviously, I know that you can't oppose any of these things because all of these things are the product of intersectional social justice because it is built from the ground up on the notion that it is necessary to categorize every single person because of their arbitrary characteristics.
	There's no getting away from it.
	And this is what it looks like in practice.
	But you still appeal to the old liberal idea that we shouldn't be discriminating against people based on these arbitrary characteristics.
	Because at the end of the day, we're all humans and we should all be treated as such.
	And for those of you who haven't figured this out yet, skin color doesn't determine intelligence.
	Here's another true statement.
	Skin colour doesn't determine privilege.
	Go as Bill Nye or Neil deGrasse Tyson.
	Ah thank you.
	Prioritizing light skin tone also illustrates how colorism operates as a mechanism that encourages passing, particularly among Latinos.
	That's how you end up with the 2010 census, where almost 76% of Puerto Ricans identified as white, despite data estimating up to 46% of Puerto Ricans had significant African heritage.
	Puerto Ricans, who are we lying to?
	I don't know.
	I mean, if we're going on the heritage of people, if we're going to be looking at their genetic data and the information we can draw from the chromosomes in their cells, I think we may have an argument here against transgenderism.
	So if these people just happen to have developed light skin because their family members bred with other lighter skinned people until they feel that they're white, why don't you just let them be white?
	I mean, after all, they want to get some of that juicy white privilege, I'm sure.
	In Brazil, a model named Nayara Jacino faced the impact of colorism head-on.
	In 2014, she entered a competition to become the reigning queen of the Globalesa Carnival, which is televised throughout Brazil.
	The title had always gone to a woman of Afro-Brazilian heritage.
	But Jacino is black and very dark-skinned, whereas previous winners were traditionally lighter-skinned.
	Despite that, she ended up winning the competition, only to have her title stripped away after the Brazilian public was up in arms because she was too black to be the carnival's queen.
	In this instance, the outrage over Jacino's skin colour came from both white and black Brazilians.
	She was eventually replaced by Erika Mora, a lighter-skinned woman more in line with the color of previous winners.
	Colorism.
	It sucks.
	So I looked into this, and this actually happened in 2013, and The Guardian did a documentary on it.
	And it is exactly as they say.
	The woman did win this award, and after winning the award, she did get a flurry of complaints on social media directed at her and the organizers that she had skin that was too dark.
	The problem that obviously our social justice educators here have is that that's people of color criticizing people of color and people of color can't be racist.
	Therefore, they must be colorists.
	But I tell you what, that documentary was very interesting.
	So in my recent debating with the alt-rights, I had pointed out that the alt-rights trying to close themselves off and protect their genes from the inferior darkies, which is basically their position, was weak.
	And if they genuinely cared about the number of white people on earth, which they don't, they would do exactly what the people in this Guardian article suggested to their children that they do.
	Watch this and get woke.
	There's a painting called The Redenção de Cã.
	And the painting portrays the actual story of Brazil.
	So you have a picture of the dark, black-skinned grandmother.
	She has her hands in the air.
	Next to her, seated, is her mulata daughter.
	She obviously had a relationship with a white man, so her daughter is progressively lighter-skinned.
	Next to the mulata daughter is the Portuguese immigrant.
	He's white.
	And in the mulata daughter's arms is the white son.
	So after two to three generations, the blackness of the family has completely disappeared.
	And so the black grandmother is giving thanks to God, like, thank you for moving this black stain from my family.
	You can imagine how shocked I was to discover this when looking into it, because I had made up that as a meme, as a joke.
	Still funny to me now.
	But what's interesting is that both the lady in that documentary and Francesca Ramsey are both genetic imperialists.
	And just to be clear, I view this as nothing but a meme.
	I am completely on this lady's side.
	So how do we begin to eradicate colorism from our communities?
	Let's get to work.
	It starts with some self-reflection.
	Sometimes our learned prejudices can take over like muscle memory.
	So first and foremost, ending colorism means unlearning what we've been told about what beauty and success should look like.
	Okay, so what you're saying is that non-white communities are also hotbeds of racism, and you've found entire new groups of people to terrorize with intersectionality.
	So that goes for you, the I'm not black, I'm Dominican guy.
	You can be black and Dominican guy, but it also means breaking the steady stream of whiteness that still dominates Latin American media, politics, and culture.
	Okay, so it's not enough that you need to get rid of whiteness from majority white countries, but you also want to get rid of whiteness from non-white countries.
	Is that where we're at at this point?
	Trust me, I've been working in entertainment for a while and I've seen things.
	Oh, I can believe it.
	You probably work with a lot of male feminists.
	Perhaps most important, be conscious of elevating and uplifting voices that break our cultural expectations when it comes to colorism.
	Yeah, I think that's just going to create more of the problem that Francesca Ramsey pointed out accurately earlier that people wanted to avoid.
	And yes, have those tough conversations with family members, especially the ones encouraging a primitive to date a lighter-skinned guy.
	Oh god, there's something so amusing about these grandmothers who are also genetic imperialists.
	But yeah, I've actually got a much bigger and more well-developed video in the works.
	It's just that I was not going to be able to get out on time today because it's been remarkably busy.

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