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.

@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*.