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)