Notices by Luci for Chai Tea (zens@merveilles.town), page 2

i am of course, completely what most would consider “white”, but I grew up believing I was part native american because that is what my mother claimed/believed.

of course, over time, after a couple of eye opening attempts to claim that identity, I concluded it was meaningless even if I did have an ancestor, cos I didn’t have the culture, the risk, or the skin (as in, in the game).

it was eventually discovered that of course even that wasn’t actually true.

it does make me wonder why white boomers were so eager to claim native american blood. cos it definitely wasn’t *just* my mom trying to do this.

like there is some form of legitimacy to be gained- or an escape from the culpability of colonialism…

but it’s so cheap i don’t get the appeal it just feels gross to me

in our particular case, we found out that the belief started because it was a fact that my great great grandmother was native american; in that, she was actually hungarian, but was inducted as a member of a tribe that she did good works for.

good for her.

technically- TECHNICALLY that means I am too. but no, i refuse. i didn’t do those works.

i don’t have the words for why it’s so gross. it’s like stolen valor, but more racist. I think a lot of hippies think of native americans as like, magical creatures, in tune with nature and more wise than white culture..

and not to discount the things they are in fact good at, but positive racism is still racism. end of they day they are still just people. just as flawed and human as everyone else and just as deserving of rights and dignity. weird fetishised pedestals are not it.

why did I tell this story?
i am not sure. I am definitely white, but i believed the native heritage stuff enough to have a huge familial level of empathy, but that’s also kinda gross in a way. I don’t identify with whiteness, but that’s not enough to absolve myself of the very real advantages of white privilege, or the historic crimes that made them possible.

am i confessing or apologising?

no. it’s just, kind of a thing i don’t see talked about much, the weird fetishised relationship between white americans and native americans.

the weird expectations of white activists who go into reservations to play out their Dances with Wolves fantasies.

but also just thinking deeply about what a cultural identity *is*, especially for an american with my *actual* ethnic background, where it appears historically, abandoning heritage and identity was the price of participating in whiteness

in other words it kind of feels like i don’t have a real culture
white culture is marvel movies and taylor swift- slick packaged cultural artefacts manufactured at great expense and sold to us, and we must have a netflix account, and have seen the latest game of thrones, or we have no common ground. it’s the price of participating, but it’s the matrix it has no connection to the land and there is no culture without land, no songs or stories of our own that we don’t buy. we have the grocery store

seize the means of plastic straw production!! stuff the environment councelors

you can make incremental changes to an existing system, which is too slow for some people, and maybe you don’t think meaningful change is possible in a corrupt system.

you can build a new small system, and slowly grow it, adapting to all the zillions of little challenges and decisions and niche needs as you go.

or you can smash capitalism violently if you’re okay with a bunch of dependent subsystems breaking for a while and letting people go without food or medicine while you figure shit out

whenever i see someone thinking we just need to destroy capitalism and all our problems will be solved?

i remember Gall’s law.

just a reminder: i am anti-capitalism and pro-socialism.

i just also happen to know that you can’t just make big sweeping changes to a complicated system without a lot of possibly important things breaking- in particular for marginal people, especially disabled folks who just never seem to be thought much about in discussions of utopian futures

indeed it’s not even particularly good for building such a site, really- i hear facebook doesn’t even use react?

when react first came out, its justification for existing was to simplify state management for social media sites that were really apps with a lot of moving parts- live chat windows, notification panels and badges, interactive voting modules with constantly updating values, and different interdependent pieces whose state would go out of sync.

that is not the kind of site i see react mostly being used for

the framework itself is what requires the large team, is what it looks like to me.

what’s notable about a lot of these comments is how many assume a website
1. must be built by a large team.
2. are some kind of commercial website.

i am old enough to remember when sites could be built by a single person, and web devs were shamed into obscurity if the site didn’t work without javascript enabled

are newer sites doing something special and different that necessitates large teams? is there some magical feature that can *only* be done with react?

as far as I can tell, no?

“maybe if the thing you wanna build is stupid and simple and you never need to maintain it”
oh hey look at that, I know where the block button is.

like, maybe if you’re coming here to make some kind of comment like this, think about what outcome you are intending.

do you want to start a conversation? or are you just here to fight with strangers and insult them? is this really as good a way of proving yoy’re better than other people as you think it is?

“X language sucks and it’s the worst and I hate it”

boring, unhelpful, not very thoughtful, based on pure emotion

“X language is useful for Y, but has Z flaws you should watch out for if you don’t wanna waste a lot of time”

productive, helpful, interesting, practical, geared towards getting stuff done instead of implying people are stupid for liking something

lotta people coming here just to tell me they hate javascript.

just FYI, i muted you because i don’t think you will have anything interesting to say ever.

not that javascript is perfect or the best language, but you do realise all programming languages are terrible right? and the only reason you like some more than others is because it’s what you’re used to?