lowendtheory:

I find it rather humorous, really, but I have to wonder, what do I keep doing that gives people the license to assume or charge that I’m white?  This is one of the problems with PoC politics, y’all—sometimes if you don’t behave in a certain way, if you don’t deliver the blistering Critique of White People in an absolutely self-validating and self-satisfied manner, if you don’t scramble jealously to occupy the moral high ground, if you don’t act as though long established historical patterns necessarily have to determine the political choices you make today, if you don’t traffic in heavy-handed and reductive overtures about the ancestors, or if you don’t participate in a whole range of practices that explicitly put you on Our Side (which is always Not-Theirs), folks feel relatively comfortable suggesting that not doing these things somehow makes your racial identity inauthentic in some way.  So you become easily construed as white, because the term PoC so often assumes a certain set of relationships to other PoC and to white folks, that when you don’t perform them, you effectively become not-us.  Or not correctly us. 

For me this goes to show that the counter-normativities that emerge in PoC political spaces are just that—normative.  At the worst they can engender a kind of groupthink in which our security in the sense that we are marginalized and oppressed translates into an inability to think and act critically about the very contradictions that we inhabit, and that inhabit that complex collectivity that we call “us.”  Sometimes, I think, the counter-revolutionary stuff isn’t just out there in the world imposing itself upon us from outside; sometimes, rather, I think, the counter-revolutionary stuff is in us.  And sometimes, I think, the counter-revolutionary stuff is us.  Especially in the critical positions that make us feel most at home.

this is for marc and anyone else trying to think through a logically rigorous response to the shortcomings of straight-up identity politics