i don”t want to comment on the thread and derail, but i keep seeing that ask/answer where someone is like ‘Australian First Nations” aren”t Black! the answer, of course, is great. going into history, current knowledge about where/when they came from etc. great. but what is this fucking notion that, by default, just bc some group of poeple is in asia they are asian? can”t be Black? not ever. i mean. obvs there is a lot of colonial fuckshit happening with the ontological sorting of some ppl as ‘Black” some as ‘Asian” and some as ‘Indigenous”.

but. fuck. i hate this pervasive notion that one cannot be Black AND Asian AND Indigenous at the SAME time. like. when the spanish creeped onto the shores of the PH they took a look around and called one group “small Black people” and everyone else ‘Indios”. and, yes, bc anti-Blackness is a real thing, the ‘small Black people” ended up at the bottom of the racial hierarchy with Indios just above them. and Chinese settlers above those two. local mestisa above that and so one, etc. of course. bc this is white supremacy using race as a reductive ontology, these categories were largely exclusive.

so… like. it should be pretty obvious that sticking with a firm notion of each being its own thing is, well, to buy into white supremacist notions of race as a thing.

in reality, the ‘small Black people” (Aetas and other groups) are actually the ORIGINAL inhabitants making them… drum roll … Black AND Asian AND Indigenous. all at the same time. like magic. likewise, they have cultural/ethnic/racial cousins in places like Papa New Guinea, Indonesia, Malaysia, and other pacific islands.

it is weird (ok, not weird bc i know how anti-Black my own ppl are) to me that people would seek to disavow the Blackness of these ppl. especially when, um, their current colonial/pejoritive name LITERALLY MEANS ‘small Black people”. and it is pretty clear that the spanish (and other colonizing groups) very much put them at the bottom of the racial hierarchy reserved for… drum roll … Black people wherever they happen to exist in the world.

and it is undeniable that this Blackness is, in part, why non-Black Asians of the same lands/areas have zero issues mobilizing the tools and methods of white supremacist settler state structures to erase them from nationality/patriotism narratives, the land, the history, all while benefitting from land/etc. again… this is also why their structural position as Indigenous is undeniable even when they are dealing with other ethnic groups who”ve been living in the same area for a long time too.

one does not need to be white to utilize the logics of anti-Blackness and settler colonialism. and following a colonial blueprint does not absolve us (us = the non-Indigenous and/or non-Black Asians) from the heinous shit we do in trying to construct and reify an ~asian~ identity that fundamentally excludes Blackness and Indigeneity. upholding whiteness and white supremacy is to be a willing participant in the evil it visits upon the world.

and, sure, we can have a discussion about what it means for ‘original” inhabitants of a place to invoke settler colonial logics and structure themselves as ‘settlers” by framing others of the same land as ‘the natives which must disappear”. actually. i WOULD LOVE to have such a discussion about the PH and groups like Tagalogs vs. Aetas and/or Kalinga (and other such Indigenous groups) if i actually thought that such a thing was possible in a non-shitty way.</p>