#sorry if anything is misspelled or slightly incorrect or incoherent

[cyanide-sippy-cup]

Middle of the night but I gotta talk about some frustrations. 'Cause you know what pisses me off? The mainstreaming popularization of punk. Don't get me wrong, I love seeing it become more popular and I love seeing people discover themselves and the culture. I mean, I got into it from a young age with RATM, for crying out loud.

The problem is that when something becomes more and more popular, you get a lot of... unsavory types. And I'm not even talking about the Tiktok punks that do it for the fashion and the "cool factor" (ignore how punks weren't considered cool and actually disregarded and disrespected as a group of "radicals" and "unsightly" which is what makes punk punk to begin with) and talk about "posers" but then the moment you ask them about their favorite local band or even their opinions about the BLM protests or Drag Queen Story Hour the real them *cough* bigot *cough* comes out. I'm talking about how everywhere you turn, there's an increasing erase of the culture and history, and it's turned into yet another thing for cis white people to use to make up for their lack of culture.

Punk is based in queerness and blackness. Period. That is an undeniable fact. It is a culture started and rooted by black musicians which then bled into the equally black queer community. It is impossible, when you go through the origins, to separate the three. From the fashion to the music, we owe everything to them.

And it's just like what happened with the gay community. A massively marginalized group, technically allowed to live in society but not allowed to be our true selves. And then, like, you have super famous and historic movements lead by black activists through the 60s to 80s. And progress is finally made. Huge celebration. We're finally allowed in public, we start appearing on TV again. But then fast forward to modern day, and white people, like we've always done, we get our grubby little paws on it. And we scrub at it in all the soap we can until any instance of black or brown is gone. And then we claim it as ours. Everybody acknowledges where it started, but nobody celebrates it. In fact, we put down black people in our community. We appropriate their culture and their language, because stealing your voice is actually our way of celebrating you so you should be happy. We make movies of those movements, and we erase any evidence of them ever having been there.

And it's relatively the same thing here. The more mainstream it gets, the more people are doing it to be performative, the more we erase and cover up the "unseemly" history that makes it so beautiful in the first place.

And, like, I'm white and I'm pissed/tired. I can't imagine how black punks feel. Cause, like, think for a minute. Some group decides they want in but they don't like how it is, they want it their way. The "correct" way. So they begin to "kick out" everybody who they don't want, appropriate everything they like about it, and rewrite and recontextualize the history that made it. Isn't that, like, the textbook definition of fascism? The whole thing we're trying to take down? Like come on.

And to the white punk/gays who read this and got confused or upset. No, I'm not saying there aren't any white punks. No, I'm not saying there weren't white gays from the get go. Nobody is saying you can't be white and punk. The point of this post is, just, be a good person. Respect, acknowledge, celebrate the culture that created this thing we love. The gay community that we know is specifically a product of blackness and black efforts. Stop appropriating them, start learning how to celebrate them properly.

#this rant was brought to you by an aggravated sleep deprived person seeing two videos back to back being completely wrong #sorry if anything is misspelled or slightly incorrect or incoherent #I'm running on like four hours of sleep in about three days total and i wrote this at midnight #ish #punk #punk culture #queer culture #ramblings #ranting #the white washing of everything is horrific and i feel like nobody else in white circles wanna talk about it #we're so far up our own asses not only can we not see our own prejudice we don't even understand what it means