Ethnic Minorities and People of Color

I'm having a hard time sitting with the fact that Black people so frequently push for ideas and logic that are antithetical to understanding race and thereby antithetical to Black people truly being liberated.

I'm baffled by how Black people can make sweeping generalizations about "biracial" people and nobody will see anything wrong with it, e.g., "Biracial people aren't Black because they have totally different experiences!"

Which ones!? Which "biracial people" are you talking about? Why are we taking a category of people who is so overwhelmingly and undeniably diverse and trying to reduce their presence in society down to a singular archetype that inherently erases the experiences of a multitude of people? How is it not obvious that this is extremely reductive?

This is why I say that Black people have an unhealthy relationship with race science, and it is a one-sided love. They love race science, but race science sure does not love us.

I never hear any actual arguments for this "Biracial people aren't Black" nonsense. It's always:

1. A meaningless tautology being pushed as an irrefutable axiom of sorts, e.g., "Biracial people are biracial. Black people are Black."
2. Race essentialism; something about biracial people not having "pure DNA." (It's 2026, and many Black people still don't know that race is a social construct. Geez.)
3. Something that erroneously assumes that there is a universal "biracial experience." By extension, people often assume that there is a singular "biracial phenotype," but this man is "mixed," this woman is "mixed," and this man is "mixed," so what the fuck are we talking about?
4. A misinterpretation of the one-drop rule so that they can posture and pretend that biracial exclusion is about "rejecting the slavemaster's ideas." Accepting biracial people as Black is not the one-drop rule. It is not the one-drop rule to look at a person who is unambiguously Black in their appearance and assuming they are Black even though they might have one non-Black parent. What the one-drop rule would actually be like is a person who has blonde hair, blue eyes, and pale skin being considered "Black" socially and systemically, regardless of how they personally want to identify, just because we discover that they have 8% Wolof ancestry or something like that. Many people find it very much understandable when a white-passing biracial person does not identify as Black. The problem is that these people do not want to reject the one-drop rule's problematic foundation: viewing race as a scientific, genetic, and biological thing. You cannot truly reject the "one-drop rule" without properly categorizing race first, and that's why, ironically enough, many of these Black people are effectively engaging in an inverted one-drop rule.

And, to be clear, I am not saying I believe that all biracial people (with a Black parent) should identify as Black. My point is that the race essentialism that tries to enforce a strict, uniform "biracial" categorization needs to be rejected, period. Like I said, experience can vary from person to person, so if someone feels like their experience as a biracial person is not a Black one, and, for that reason, they do not feel like it is accurate for them to identify as Black, I understand.

However, when someone like me, who has called myself "Black" my whole life, is being told that I am somehow "not Black" because of my Trinidadian Dougla heritage, I have to sit and wonder, "Where the fuck are we? How did we get here?" It also shows how US-centric this thought process is. Most people in the US hear "biracial" and automatically assume "Black American mixed with white American."

Speaking of Dougla heritage, by the way, something I find interesting is that I rarely see people "correcting" Black liberals trying to guilt-trip people and accuse them of misogynoir when they are screeching about people who did not vote for Kamala Harris. Though I have seen people deny Harris' Blackness, it's ironic how the race policing often stops when people need to fulfill a certain agenda that frames the electoral loss of a genocidal, neoliberal politician as being due to a "hatred of Black women."

In fact, people tend to be selective about this shit overall. People will start saying "That's it! We gotta exclude biracial people from Blackness altogether" when a racially ambiguous biracial person is expressing anti-Blackness on TikTok, but I rarely see people go out of their way to say that Bob Marley, Barack Obama, Beyoncé, J. Cole, Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. DuBois, Malcolm X, Amy Jacques Garvey, and Rosa Parks are "not Black."

And, honestly, this is just me getting into one facet of Black reactionary thought that tends to LARPs as revolutionary.

Race essentialism is one problem and a huge one at that, but we also have cisheteropatriarchy, prejudice against non-Christians, ableism, and Black capitalism causing so many fucking issues as well.

I am very, very proud of my Blackness, but I'm gonna be honest with you: I often feel like I have a hard time associating with a lot of Black spaces and Black people due to these reactionary impulses.

Honestly, I gotta make it a goal to interact with Black people who genuinely understand Marxism, race, and revolutionary thought because whatever the fuck this is, I'm not taking it.

Just as Black people can endorse any other reactionary tendency, Black women still can uphold toxic liberal feminism, too.

Walter Rodney, born in Guyana on this day in 1942, Pan-African, Marxist intellectual who was assassinated by the Guyanese government in 1980 at 38 years old.

Rodney attended the University College of the West Indies in 1960 and was awarded a first class honors degree in History in 1963. He later earned a PhD in African History in 1966 at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, England, at the age of 24.

Rodney traveled extensively and became well-known as an activist, scholar, and formidable orator. He taught at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania from 1966-67 and 1969-1974, and in 1968 at his alma mater University of the West Indies.

On October 15th, 1968, the government of Jamaica declared Rodney a "persona non grata" and banned him from the country. Following his dismissal by the University of the West Indies, students and poor people in West Kingston protested, leading to the "Rodney Riots", which caused six deaths and millions of dollars in damages.

In 1972, Rodney published "How Europe Underdeveloped Africa". Historian Melissa Turner describes the work this way: "A brutal critique of long-standing and persistent exploitation of Africa by Western powers, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa remains a powerful, popular, and controversial work in which Rodney argued that the early period of African contact with Europe, including the slave trade, sowed the seeds for continued African economic underdevelopment and had dramatically negative social and political consequences as well. He argued that, while the roots of Africa’s ailments rested with intentional underdevelopment and exploitation under European capitalist and colonial systems, the only way for true liberation to take place was for Africans to become cognizant of their own complicity in this exploitation and to take back the power they gave up to the exploiters."

On June 13th, 1980, Rodney was killed in Georgetown, Guyana via a bomb given to him by Gregory Smith, a sergeant in the Guyana Defence Force, one month after returning Zimbabwe. In 2015, a "Commission of Inquiry" in Guyana that the country's then president, Linden Forbes Burnham, was complicit in his murder.

"If there is to be any proving of our humanity it must be through revolutionary means."

• Walter Rodney

I hope you nerds have a great March.

Remember no crackers

William Frank Jr., born on this day in 1931, was an indigenous environmental leader and treaty rights activist known for his use of the "fish-in", a civil disobedience tactic used to win indigenous rights to natural resources.

A Nisqually tribal member, Frank is particularly known for his grassroots campaign for fishing rights on the tribe's Nisqually River. Frank was arrested more than 50 times in the "Fish Wars" of the 1960s and 1970s because of his intense dedication to the treaty fishing rights cause.

The tribal struggle was taken to the courts in "U.S. v. Washington", with federal judge George Hugo Boldt issuing a ruling in favor of the native tribes in 1974. The "Boldt Decision" established the 20 treaty Indian tribes in western Washington as co-managers of the salmon resource with the State of Washington, and re-affirmed tribal rights to half of the harvestable salmon returning to western Washington.

https://billyfrankjr.org/

I hope you nerds have a great March.

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Wounded Knee Occupation (1973) in February 27, 1973, a 71-day uprising began when approximately 200 Oglala Lakota and American Indian Movement (AIM) members seized the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation to demand treaty negotiations. Paul Manhart S.J. and ten other residents of the area were apprehended at gunpoint and taken hostage.

The town was promptly surrounded by an army of U.S. personnel. John Sayer, author of "Ghost Dancing the Law: The Wounded Knee Trials", wrote - "The equipment maintained by the military while in use during the siege included fifteen armored personnel carriers, clothing, rifles, grenade launchers, flares, and 133,000 rounds of ammunition, for a total cost, including the use of maintenance personnel from the National Guard of five states and pilot and planes for aerial photographs, of over half a million dollars."

Although the Department of Justice (DoJ) prohibited media from the site, the occupation received support from the Congressional Black Caucus and prominent public figures, including Marlon Brando, Johnny Cash, Angela Davis, and Jane Fonda. Angela Davis was turned away by federal forces as an "undesirable person" when she attempted to enter Wounded Knee in March 1973.

Marlon Brando asked Sacheen Littlefeather, President of the National Native American Affirmative Image Committee, to speak at the 45th Academy Awards on his behalf. She appeared at the March 27th ceremony in traditional Apache clothing and stated that Brando declined the award due to "the treatment of American Indians today by the film industry...and on television and movie reruns and also with recent happenings at Wounded Knee".

Tribal leaders called off the occupation after 71 days after the killing of Lawrence "Buddy" Lamont, a local Oglala man, by U.S. sniper fire. The terms of ending the occupation included a mandated meeting at Chief Fools Crow's land to discuss reinstating the 1868 Treaty of Fort Laramie, which stated that the Black Hills of South Dakota belonged to the Sioux people.

In the 1980 Supreme Court case United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians, the Court held that the taking of property that was set aside for the use of the nation required just compensation, including interest. The Sioux have not accepted the compensation awarded to them by this case, valued at $1.3 billion as of 2011.

"If we accept the money, then we have no more of the treaty obligations that the federal government has with us for taking our land, for taking our gold, all our resources out of the Black Hills...we’re poor now, we’ll be poorer then when that happens."

former Oglala Sioux Tribe President Theresa Two Bulls

• Wounded Knee from 1890 to 1973

• The 1973 Part, well almost

• Megathread for 27On February 27th-29th, 1973 the Independent Oglala Nation was declared by AIM, OSCRO and Traditional Chiefs

I hope you nerds have a great next week and also first week of March.

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Nelson Mandela Released From Prison (1990)

On this week (11th of February) in 1990, anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela was released from Victor Verster Prison following negotiations with South African President F. W. de Klerk. In 1994, Mandela was elected President, becoming the country's first black head of state.

Mandela, a leading member of the African National Congress (ANC), had been convicted on charges of sabotage at the Rivonia Trial in 1964, and was sentenced to life imprisonment, serving 27 years before his release in 1990.

During his years in prison, Mandela became a major symbol of both the domestic and international anti-apartheid movement. In 1988, hundreds of millions people watched the "Free Nelson Mandela" concert, televised from London's Wembley Stadium.

Following decades of mass internal resistance along with global boycotts and sanctions, newly inaugurated South African State President F.W. de Klerk lifted the state of emergency law, legalized anti-apartheid opposition groups such as the ANC, South African Communist Party, and Pan-Africanist Congress, and released many political prisoners.

Mandela was released on February 11th, 1990 to massive international attention. Driven to Cape Town's City Hall through crowds, Mandela gave a speech where he declared his intention to participate in negotiations, although he noted that the ANC's armed struggle was not yet over before change had taken place.

In 1994, he was elected South Africa's first black president in the country's first ever multiracial election.

"It always seems impossible until it's done."

• Nelson Mandela

Hello nerds i hope you all have a good february

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Hello nerds hope you all have a good first month of 2026

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Hello nerds hope you all have a good first week of december

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Hello nerds hope you all have a good first week of december

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The EFF aren't afraid to speak from the heart, they aren’t afraid of pissing of establishments why can’t more groups like them exist why do immigrant and POC politics have to be so fucking liberal and moderate all the time why can’t groups like the black panthers, EFF and more start propping up so we have a fighting chance for the inevitable race war thats coming why the fuck do we have to rely on the white “moderates” and “liberals” the same ones who degrades us and drag us down if it suits them we need more radical and we need to centre it on the real problem white people

Hello nerds hope you all have a good first week of december

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Hello nerds hope you all have a good first week of december

Remember no crackers

Apparently, I'm not Black.

That hurts.

I'm not being literal, of course. I know I am Black. I am treated as Black by the world. I could tell people that I am 100% African, and they would believe me.

But there is a portion of the Black community who holds that mixed-race people are not truly Black, and they often go unchallenged.

That is the source of the pain.

The Black community was the last thing I had.

Seriously.

I hardly associate with anything else about myself at this point.

I don't care that much about any queer communities anymore.

A sense of connection with communities around my views, such as veganism, Marxism, and atheism seemed to diminish more and more.

My interests? I love metal and writing music, but even that is a community I cannot care about.

But my Blackness? It was all I had, and now I do not even know if I have the community anymore.

I'm in tears.

I am stranded. I called 988, even, just to have someone to talk to, and what I get is some clueless white lady.

This hurts because, if I do not have Black people, I have no one.

I think I am alone.

Hello nerds hope you all have a good next week

Remember no crackers

Hello nerds hope you all have a good next week

Remember no crackers