#chris chen

I feel like we learned everything and nothing about Chris this week. Suspicions we've all had were a little bit enforced but I also feel like we could wind up being blindsided still. I don't think Pete is fully satisfied with the answers he got, and it makes me sit in uncertainty as well.

Because Pete can read his mind. And Chris is almost too eager to let him. Like he wants Pete to see something. And I do think it's because he sincerely wants Pete to trust him about certain things. But I don't think he's saying everything. In fact I almost feel like he may be manipulating the truth so that Pete will be more likely to believe him. Sort of like how Charlie kept twisting the real truth without revealing too much about his actual motives in s1.

Speaking of Charlie 👀 I did say I thought Chris was a s1 Charlie parallel. And the more thats revealed about him, the more I'm truly convinced of it. I don't think Chris is necessarily twisting the truth to betray him. I think he has motives he's not fully prepared to reveal yet, but I still don't think they're going to be nefarious. We still have to deal with a mole and at this point, I can't deny I'm suspecting Sonic more than anyone else. But that's an explanation for a whole new post because my thoughts on that are just as word-vomity as this.

Going back to the bit about reading his mind, though. I really can't shake the fact that Chris is SO forthcoming about his thoughts. I still feel like either Pete's powers are limited in what he can read, or Chris is able to manipulate what or how much he sees. The latter power seems most likely to me because fabricating whole thoughts and truths in order to decieve someone over and over seems like it would be a lot for anyone.

But in that same vein, I'm still going back to Way. Not because I think he is Way. To me, it makes sense that their powers would be just similar enough to lead us down a certain train of expectation. Which reinforces my belief in what he said to Pete, because if I'm right and his power does involve some kind of manipulation like Way's does, that will reinforce the chances of them being brothers.

Which opens a completely new can of worms. Because Chris said he was Tony's real son. And if Way is his brother and Tony's other son, that completely changes everything everyone thought they ever knew about him.

Anyway @cosmicmoonwhisperer

YOU

But what if we did not center anti-racist struggles on difference but on domination? To understand “race” not as a marker of difference but as a system of domination poses the question of the material abolition of “race” as an indicator of structural subordination. Both anti-racist critics of class reductionist Marxisms and Marxist critics of liberal reformist, “merely cultural” anti-racisms gloss over the strategic similarities between the increasingly desperate, defensive struggles of the US labour movement and the race and gender-based “identity politics” to which it is so consistently counterposed. As the 2011 labour struggles in Wisconsin so dramatically revealed, the US labour movement’s turn toward the state and electoral politics to secure its very right to exist mirrors the extreme difficulty of securing even minimal racially redistributive programs in the aftermath of the Great Society programs of the 1960s. Which is to say that, in an era of declining membership in mass-based labour and civil rights organisations, the prospects are dim for both a “politics of race” and a “politics of class”. Shifting the analytic focus from difference to domination directs our attention to the entanglement of race and superfluity, as well as the racialising impact of violence, imprisonment, and warfare. Rejecting an understanding of capitalism as an increasingly inclusive engine of racial uplift, and the state as an ultimate guarantor of civic equality, an abolitionist anti-racism would categorically reject the continuing affirmation of the fundamental respectability, productivity or patriotism of racialised groups as a way to determine their relative fitness for racial domination. Beginning from radically different histories of racialisation, abolitionist anti-racist struggles would aim to dismantle the machinery of “race” at the heart of a fantasy of formal freedom, where the “limit point of capitalist equality is laid bare as the central protagonist of racial ordering.”

“Race” is thus rooted in two overlapping processes of allocation and control. Past and present racial discrimination is cumulative and distributes precarity, unemployment, and informality unevenly across the economy along “race” and gender lines. But “race” is also operationalised in various state and civilian political projects of social control which classify and coerce “deserving” and “undeserving” fractions of various racial groups while determining their fitness for citizenship. Eroding the institutional separation between policing, border securitisation, and global warfare, a massively expanded security state now sends 1 in 3 black men to prison in their lifetime, deports nearly half a million undocumented immigrants annually, has exterminated anywhere from 100,000 to over a million civilians in Iraq alone, and is now gearing up for a $46 billion dollar “border surge” which includes drone surveillance and biometric exit scanning. 21st century “race” emerges from this matrix of securitisation.”

Insofar as labour markets organise the ratio of paid to unpaid labour, “race” as a marker of economic subordination is grounded both in a permanently superfluous population and entrenched racialised wage differentials. The expulsion of living labour from the production process places a kind of semi-permeable racialising boundary bifurcating productive and unproductive populations even within older racial categories: a kind of flexible global colour line separating the formal and informal economy, and waged from wageless life. Though this wageless colour line is minimally permeable and explicit racial criteria are no longer formally sanctioned, the material reproduction of racial domination, including the proliferation of intra-national non-white ethnic hierarchies, is grounded in intertwined processes of exclusion from the wage, the increasing criminalisation of informal economies, and elevated vulnerability to state terror.”