
floppunism [BOI, ID]
One thing we should consider is the fear that racially-based rhetoric brings into those who agree with it. They’re afraid of their race being destroyed, or at least are on the surface, so that’s something we should either take advantage of or try to alleviate. If we take advantage of it, it can have a crushing moral effect when done properly, but it can also make them lash out like a cornered animal.
I think one of the best ways of counteracting the racialized rhetoric of the right is actually to seek a balkanization of race in the same way that a lot of the Tumblr-born kiddie bopper queers have done with sexuality and gender identity. If we encourage people to look to their immediate roots, as Scotch-Irish, as Cajun, as Tejano, as 48ers, or whatever else, we can degrade race to the point of meaninglessness and dissolve the colonialist concepts of race that people to this day tend to focus on. And also, the reason I gave the examples I did speaks to another aspect of this strategy. Those identities I listed are all uniquely American. I wouldn't recommend encouraging people to identify as "German". A) If you're here, and certainly if you speak English, you're not German, and B) I feel like that could invite... other problems. But by focusing on recent history and the identities that spawned from the conditions of American life, we can simultaneously encourage solidarity on the basis that these are all American identities with a lot of shared history and culture. It allows to point out how stupid it is that we divide ourselves based on where our ancestors crossed the sea from hundreds of years ago, when there are truly American-born identities and cultures that come from uniquely American ways of life we can take part in and share with each other instead.