Offer Me That Deathless Death

Offer me that deathless death

Oh, good God, let me give you my life

HEY GUYS I JUST GOT AN EMAIL ABOUT TRADEMARK ISSUES FROM TUMBLR I—

And I realized with the latest round of stupidity that nonblack ppl and perhaps even some black ppl unfamiliar w the US just don’t seem to understand what a race riot is. It’s bad enough that Louis is blamed for it, but the discussion around Claudia’s turning is so totally removed from context once again bc Blackness is not taken seriously as a category of analysis. But race riots are part of genocide like it’s not a typical or even mildly heightened form of violence, it is the epitome of white supremacist violence that murdered so many Black ppl, often entirely randomly, just if white ppl got mad and took out that anger through state sanctioned massacres of Black Americans, but sometimes they’d try to pin it on a perceived or fabricated slight by a Black person, as if a disdainful look at a white woman or talking back to a white man was grounds for a murder spree and mass rape (which was already always happening anyway, because white men raped Black women much more often than they lynched Black men, as rape is always used under genocidal state policy, which this was). The race riot in the show was historical fact, it wasn’t made up just for the show, and why do we think it matters that we’re told that whites used to hang enslaved Black people on the pike where Louis stabs fenwick? But Black ppl couldn’t and didn’t just rush in and massacre entire white neighborhoods.

What the show is trying to tell us here is not that Louis is irrational or purposefully put his community in that position, but that even if you did take a Black man and make him a vampire, make it possible for him to pay back in blood just a small fraction of the racism he and his ppl have faced, that’s still not enough, because these aren’t individual issues, Fenwick’s racism was not a unique flaw, it was the law of the land, it was the system, and the system would never tolerate any Black person’s minor liberating moment. Imagine if Louis caught on fire while walking through storyville to try to see if there was anything he could do in the midst of this worst nightmare. It’s one thing for him to blame himself the way so many colonized people have blamed themselves for any colonial violence that came about bc they “stepped out of line” in asserting their humanity against the colonizer whose life goal is to deny that humanity, but it’s another thing entirely for the viewer to minimize what was quite frankly genocide (and I don’t use this lightly or flippantly, Jim Crow was literally genocide and the race riots were heightened massacres within that continuous genocide—the nazis copied Jim Crow law and social conditioning to build the holocaust, and you must be willing to acknowledge this when viewing historical fiction) and another thing entirely for Louis’ white partner to minimize this by suggesting they commemorate this by making it their wedding anniversary. The closest disgusting white liberal minimization of Black suffering I can think of in our contemporary moment is like if a white man told his Black fiancée that they should throw the wedding ceremony at a former plantation . Surely we can understand why calling it emotional abuse if the Black man broke up with his white partner would be racist.

But you’re not going to make this connection if you don’t take race riots seriously, and you won’t take the race riots seriously if you don’t acknowledge the centrality of race in this story. It also completely changes how you understand Louis begging his materially powerful white husband to help save the only Black person he could save. It changes how you interpret the depiction of Louis during the trial in 207. And it definitely changes how you interpret Louis saying I was just glad nobody wanted to lynch me while sitting to the materially powerful nonblack man who did try to lynch him and successfully lynched the Black girl that Louis saved from genocide a century ago. There’s certainly a tragedy in a disabled Black girl coming into this world that so completely denies her space, but do we villainize Black parents for having children nonetheless? Having children is an essentially selfish act—was every other Black children born the night of a race riot doomed to early death, though statistics might suggest they should be? Armand says she’s too young too disempowered too traumatized too marginalized; she had to die. Was it emotional abuse for Louis to demand of Lestat that this one lives?

It's been a while

motherfucker said PROFESSIONAL