My rants do not belong in someone else's comments, so here is a shiny new thread of my own.
I am thinking about Whiteness as a Thing & the escape velocity it takes to escape the gravity of that complacency.
I've spent a lot of today seeing a lot of (fellow) white people get very upset at PoC for mentioning their whiteness.
It's the same fucking compulsion as when TERFs object to being called cis, btw.
They think they are default, normal, unmarked.
To be clear I am not absolving myself here - I have done a lot of work to reach escape velocity but I am not immune to mistakes, & little bits of Whiteness keep turning up in corners and seams.
But I AM determined to keep learning, so I do have some advice for anyone who is in similar shoes, or maybe just trying to build up speed now. Because it is genuinely difficult! It's work and it's a giant shame spiral, and both of those things suck.
DO. IT. ANYWAY.
Shame avoidance is such a big piece of this whole mess, I think. It's so much easier to say "it's racist to tell white people not to respond to your post" than to reflect on why that request is necessary, bc the latter might reveal how often you have obliviously talked over & splained to people.
Again, we gotta do it anyway. It's the only way out of this shitshow we're in.
Fediverse is SO PROUD of banning Nazis. And, genuinely, it's a good thing. I'm glad to be here.
But that's not enough, and it's creating this situation where there are Well meaning White People in every fucking thread saying the same ridiculous shit that they were saying in facebook groups a decade ago.
It's not racist for PoC to want a conversation that doesn't center or even include white people.
We are not the experts on racism, as y'all continue to insist on making VERY OBVIOUS in these conversations.
Whiteness as a construct hurts everyone, including white people. It is the root of so many other bigotries, y'all.
I'm not trying for an exhaustive list bc I'll miss things, but one simple example is that homophobia & transphobia are outgrowths & expansions of white supremacy's need to police gender expression so that Nice White People continue to have Nice White Babies.
Anyway, my point is, I understand why y'all are responding defensively to these conversations about racism on the fediverse, I do.
Working through this shit is hard, it's deeply uncomfortable, and there's never a point where you're really done with it. It is a lifelong, imperfect undertaking, at best.
But you have to do it anyway, or nothing will ever get better.
Sit with the discomfort. Talk it through with other white people who are on the same journey.
Come talk it through with me! Seriously! If you are *earnestly trying* then I am happy to try to explain the things I have learned so far, or to help you figure out why someone got mad at you for something you intended as helpful.
The biggest thing is that you have to accept that you will keep fucking up, definitely for a while, probably forever.
And that is genuinely hard. I have a way-overactive sense of shame so when I do fuck something up, I really spiral about it! It sucks & I hate it & it takes me a while, after, to work up to speaking on the subject again.
But it's worth doing bc some white people are only going to be able to acknowledge these problems if it comes from other white people, and that work needs to be done.
And it's always a balance between multiple things, right? "Amplify PoC voices" yes but that does not mean that all we should ever do is silently boost their posts, bc that will not reach everyone.
I've already got one guy in my mentions here being a dick. Better for me to tank him than redirecting him at someone more directly affected by the issue.
But also, it's not PoC's job to acknowledge how hard it is for white people to not be racist.
Bc YEAH when I say it like that it sounds REAL BAD doesn't it?
But both things are true. It IS hard to unlearn a lifetime of subtle and all-encompassing white supremacy, BUT ALSO that is not the responsibility of PoC to help us unpack.
The first step is deciding you want to do the work, but the second step is understanding that racism shows up in many forms, not just in swastikas.
Shit, I punched my first Nazi when I was 15, but that didn't magically make me understand racism.
I understood my dad was a racist piece of shit, bc he used the n word freely.
But that's not all of it either. Susan in HR who is more likely to hire Kelly than Keisha, or Larry than Lamar, all other things being equal, that's racist.
All of y'all flooding the mentions of PoC on here, gaslighting and sealioning them about their experiences of racism on here, that's also racist!
"I haven't seen this happen" no dude you probably haven't.
My feed is full of PoC (mostly Black people, but not exclusively) repeatedly explaining that any situation where there are extra steps one must follow as a PoC to avoid/block/exclude all the racism is a situation that is made from racism.
Yes, it's true that in the moment, the quickest way to get rid of a racist is to block & report. BUT that doesn't solve the fact that this place has tolerated that racist so long just bc they're a smidge more subtle than an actual Nazi.
And y'all we keep falling for that over and over. Remember all the puff pieces for Richard fucking Spencer? Remember how they stopped promoting him since he finally got exposed (more widely, some of us always knew) as just another flavor of white supremacist, then punched in the face on live tv?
Racism comes in many flavors & if we don't learn to recognize them we will keep perpetuating them.
I unfortunately do not have a neat stack of academic texts to point you to in order to learn more. That's...not really how this works.
My best advice is simply: shut up. When you read something from a person of color and it upsets you, shut up. Sit with it, try to untangle why you're upset, talk it through with other white people who are working to be anti-racist.
Like, people of color are not infallible, bc they are also people. But we should fucking believe them about racism.
And finally: they don't need our ideas & suggestions (especially not in the volume that y'all've been supplying them), but they do need us as accomplices.
Report it when you see someone insisting "this is racism against white people" or "why do you have to make this about race"
If you know the person or they seem genuinely confused, offer to talk to them about it, & then do that somewhere else, not in the OP's mentions.
We have to do the day to day work of dismantling white supremacy in small ways and every day conversations, in order to improve things at all.
I don't know if I believe that we'll ever defeat capitalism, or white supremacy, or any of the giant systemic things that make life harder. But we have to try, even when it's deeply uncomfortable work.
-fin-
(I will probably think of something else later but I have to try to stop somewhere)
Oh, yep, one more thing: none of this means that you are required to patiently engage with people who are acting in bad faith. That is a waste of everyone's time.
If it's someone you care about or someone who is trying, then yeah, we are the ones who should patiently hold their hands, but if someone is angry or trolling, you are not required to try to fix their heart.
I've certainly made the attempt from time to time, but I always end up feeling like Basil Fawlty being scolded by Sybil: "You never get it right, do you?!" :/
I don't need anyone to pin a medal on me, but often there's no way to know if I've mitigated harm in some small way, or just made the whole thing worse. Because of how online works, I can never really know, which is aggravating.
@xenophora @caztastrophe Think of it this way, and it may sound harsh, but it's not my job to coddle you any more than it is a Melanated person's to give you the soft-soap: it's not about YOU because you are not that important. Accepting blunt truth is REALLY important. This goes for everyone, not just you as an individual. It goes for me too.. It IS about the thing you said or did.
Examine yourself, access information from good sources & education from other WP who are further down the road.
That's fine. That's why I was addressing my comments to
@caztastrophe , and no one else. He mentioned a willingness to discuss it, and I took him up on it.
Regards.
Hi, so, my pronouns are actually they/them!
You're right that it can be hard to know if what you said helped or not if people don't respond with thanks or acknowledgement.
I find the best thing to do is to take note of the points that the affected group are making - in this case I went out of my way to follow more PoC on here, especially those directly addressing these problems - and then try to reiterate those points to the people being difficult, in your own words.
Yep. Sorry about the pronouns error. I have fixed that.
And reading back, perhaps I should've been clearer that I wasn't referring to other people scolding me if I effed up... via a quote from a very old sitcom. That is more a reference to the argument in my own mind as to whether it's achievable to do right by others or not. Thanks.
I really think this is where a lot of the "sit with the discomfort" comes in, but I do think that if we try to educate those who seem reachable, and help block/report/defederate those who are not, then it's a net good.
But it does tend to be a little thankless, and that just has to be okay. Because the only real alternative is to demand that the person/ppl most affected give us cookies and headpats, and that also sucks!
We really just have to do our best to get in between the racist and the person they're bothering, and let that be enough.
@caztastrophe thank you for this wonderful thread.
Here's a favorite tool of mine for unpacking one's personal white supremacist tendencies: https://www.whitesupremacyculture.info/characteristics.html
White people have to do this work on ourselves. It's essential.
@caztastrophe great thread! Especially noting how white supremacy drives homophobia/transphobia as well—not that it should take that for white queer folk to care, but I don’t think many grasp how tightly that web of oppression is woven together, even though it’s often the same groups pushing the hatred.
BUT as you say it’s not just hatred but the microaggressions on here are out of hand. I’ve been tagged twice in 24 hrs by white queers whitesplaining Masto to BIPOC & like…whyyyy 😩
Why beat around the bush? #WhitenessAbolition
@caztastrophe Agreed on ALL fronts, from a White woman in mid-life.
If a WP gets freaked about something a Melanated person says, the best thing for that WP to do is get quiet with a mirror and look for the fear. Is it fear of losing what you have, fear of not getting what you want, or both? All negative, exclusionary mindsets boil down to those 3 options, in my experience.
I too am on the path, yet a fuck-up. Being born & raised in Whiteness is not an excuse for not learning & growing.
@caztastrophe I Hope you meant this, because here I am crashing into your mentions …
I have been thinking a lot about positive inherent identity and I've come to the conclusion that for much of America, there is a sort of … diaspora injury? that's driving a lot of whiteness problems. And that gets really hard and exhausting, because oh boy Europeans do not like hearing that eg diaspora Germans get to identify as diaspora Germans, and I don't know what to do next
@caztastrophe I'm actually thinking about the other way around. I'm a statistician with an interest in emergent behavior of stochastic systems, and I tend to look at these things and think, what is perpetuating this system?
And I really think *part* of the answer in America specifically—not all of it by any means, but a part—is the lack of inalienable positive identity for white people. An identity that's yours by birth, that's something you *are* rather than something you're *not*.
@caztastrophe I've done some work with local white people on reclaiming our identity as people of European diaspora—getting white folks to identify as German rather than White, for example—and most Americans I talk to are *hungry* for that. They *want* to be something, something that's not just White, and when I succeed, I can often get them to break some of the toxic whiteness behavior.
Problem is, I get a ton of pushback from Europeans, who don't want to admit they had a diaspora.
@caztastrophe the biggest thing for me was understanding that "being wrong" isn't the same as "being bad". That I could be a good person and still be wrong in the way I treated people, that I didn't have to condemn myself in order to admit fault.
I think that's where a lot of white people struggle. There's this internal dialog that goes something like this: "Racism is bad, but I'm a good person, therefore it's impossible for anything I do to be racist".
@caztastrophe That's why we're taught phrases like "I don't see color" because if you don't see color then it's impossible for your actions to be racist, right?
But accepting that it's possible for you to be wrong, and to have treated people wrongly because of their race, unintentionally, and still be a good person who doesn't want to do that, is an important step in the journey.
@caztastrophe I think that's a huge part of the problem: white people don't know when to zip it and just observe and learn from the conversation. And not take grievances personally.
I'm "white" as they say, but also from two cultures, one of which was heavily oppressed for centuries. The other, actually, was rather priveleged (albeit under a siege mentality the whole time).
Still, I know to keep my trap shut and just *listen*.
Yeahh. I mean. I am white, in basically every way that matters, so that is how I talk about myself.
But it's also true that I am white because my Mamaw was put on a train, first to residential school & then at 14 to marry a white man she'd never met, so I know nothing about her family or even her tribe, and that was the entire purpose of residential schools.
caz
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