Ethereal white boys self-deprecate via selfie, all expensive clothes and sad vibes with an ultra-glossy coat of pre-Internet irony. Pale blogs are so distanced from anything remotely individual that their problematic obsession with heteronormative beauty ideals is almost immune to criticism. They sift through our cultural memory for the newest relevant thing, filter their significance and repackage it in bite-sized subcultures with the heavy—handedness of Instagram filters: seapunk, soft grunge, pastel goth. White bodies writhe in ecstasy at their reflections, relishing their near-universal desirability and privilege.
picture this if u will…xanax pills…and……the nike symbol…….plants of some kind………………………..japanese text……………………………………………….damn that sounds cool as hell doesnt it — sucm
It’s laughable how disingenuous their aestheticized sadness is. Playfully acting the marginal by appropriating their struggles—the history of black prosecution, the anger of anti-establishment punks—they can avoid the political implications of those subjectivities. These L.A. fashion goths and bougie European twinks somehow don’t win my sympathies as an oppressed minority. White kids can hotbox their parents’ cars all they want but they’re not the ones being disproportionately imprisoned on minor drug offenses.
The notes speak for themselves, evidence enough of the dark, swirling mass of rebloggable sixpacks, bulges and ass shots lurking beneath the surface. Take what you want from the endorsement: the aesthetic hierarchy, the aspiration to white life, the romance of privilege. It doesn’t change the fact that pale queerness is a pretty racist way of putting me in my place, amongst my supposed allies and peers in the queer community. Every aspirational white body is experienced as a small death, one‘s compounded with every reblog. Every respite comes with—surprise bitch—another wound.
I always wondered why my friends got more Grindr messages than I did. Maybe Grindr’s an antisocial purgatory masking as Dark Sexy Bad Decisions, just like I thought. “I don’t want to play the race card—all gays have intimacy issues, right? My passably white friends are just particularly good looking, right?” Nope—unequivocally, as if the response was as natural and inevitable as death, they get at least two to four times as many as I do, a reasonably attractive person of colour. I’m sitting here wondering if my application is corrupt because I’ve only gotten four messages this month, while they‘re nigh on a shame spiral if they don’t get four a day. It’s not a fucking coincidence. They are white, I am not.
My mind and body, darkened by self-doubt and shamed by stigma, are comforted when racism is not made explicit. It’s the difference between living on a busy street during rush hour and at dawn. I can’t forget that the cars were there, nor can I ignore the road that facilitates their presence just beyondmy front door. To cut the metaphor short, I’d just greatly prefer it if the world didn’t shove racism down my throat on a daily basis; at least that way, I could be a white apologist, giving people that don’t give two shits about me the benefit of the doubt, while living my own life in a constant state of blissful discontent.
Pale blogs, as much as they profess to being sad all the time, never genuinely express this kind of discontent. They make it their business to sell it as exactly that, a business, and a commodification of sadness, which as shitty as it is, isn’t all that unsurprising. I mean, making money by making people feel like shit is a time-honoured tradition in the West. But that doesn’t stop me from being pissed off by the fact that I care about the well-being of the white man, socialized to worship and preserve the beauty of the fairer-skinned. I’m pissed off that people of colour ignore non-whites like gay men ignore the non-masculine. This isn’t some love has no colour bullshit; it’s the glittering altar to white worship that racial minorities are tasked with maintaining, plain and simple.
It makes me sick to my stomach. I feel less-than, worrying whether or not my slightly wider nostrils make me look like a gorilla. I feel pathetic because all I want is them to pay attention to me, even knowing that I don’t and won’t ever meet their criteria of desirability. I’m a damn fool because my dating preferences aren’t limited by my mostly white environment — they’re biased towards them, to the exclusion of everyone else. And for what, some fucking Boiler Room tickets so I can post pictures of me looking blankly in a fish-eye lens, the token ethnic minority who’s probably a rapper? Fuck no.
No matter how angry I get, no matter how many times I can yell at the Internet, I can’t ever say, “well they’re gonna die alone so whatever” because I know in my heart of hearts, that that’s not true. They’re going to live awesome lives having shit handed to them on a silver platter because they’re pretty and white. I can’t and I won’t win.
Tumblr is the one place where like literally all the butt hurt people in the world come together and outnumber the people who literally don’t care about anything. Like I can say “my best friend is black” and someone will say “omfg they’re of color not black wtf and did I mention lgbt pride and that I also have anxiety so don’t be an asshole and ignorant ugh” — babyorgans
It’s not even like I can escape this fact — I love fashion, but it sucks being constantly reminded that since at least 2008, more than 80% of NYFW looks are shown on white models (Jezebel). Looking at any magazine tells me that I’m an afterthought, some diversity quota to be fulfilled. All my porn’s white too, because I can’t stand seeing people like me confined to the Ebony or Thug section.
I’m completely complicit in all of this, as guilty as they are. I definitely enjoyed light-skin privilege in a predominantly black school. I know that black people everywhere are raised being told to wish upon a star for a white man to save them from the ‘hood. I hurt when I see 16 year olds of colour with blogs in Brazil, South Africa and Italy endlessly reblogging the white models they hope to grow up looking like, every photo another paper cut towards death.
“This is White America. Any other nationality that is not of the White set knows this and accepts this ‘till the day they die. That is everyone’s dream and ambition as a minority: to live and look as well as a white person. […] This is White America, and when it comes to the minorities, especially Black[s], we as a people for the past 400 years [are] the greatest example of behavior modification in the history of civilization. We have had everything taken away from us, and yet we have all learned how to survive.”
I’m so far past thinking that looks are all that make life worth living, that I have to remind myself that I deserve to be happy. I should be okay with my bare ass getting belted by some tokenizing white daddy (like my own Daddy before him), because I’m a slave to this desire that’s not my own, in body and in mind. I’m motherfucking Toby Waller, I’m so whipped. “I didn’t expect you to be so well-spoken!” is just one of many indictment of my complicity to this ideological conspiracy that subjects me to my own oppression, one that prevents me from living or dying outright.
So you know what? I will play the race card. This is the lived reality of queer people of colour antagonized by the dominant white set. I’m not them, and I don’t want to be. If I must be a gorilla, I will find beauty and solace amongst the other gorillas. I will live amongst others pushed deeper and deeper into Nature and defend our right to exist when the white man inevitably comes to raze it for another industrial plastics facility.
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