"I hate telling the truth to white people, because I feel they do evil things with it."

THIS!!! Like I wishhh I could've put it into such perfect wording, but I'm soooo fucking easy with my blocks out here because there's always some white person in the audience about to hit me with "well actually... so you mean all white people... wah wah wah"

i don't have the capacity for that, and it's why you've noticed I barely post here if it ain't about skating

#BlackMastodon #ALT4me

@imp3tuz Did what I could with the transcript trying to explain the visual and text seen in the video, see next post

@imp3tuz I hate my white audience and feel I don't say it enough. I hate telling the truth to white people because I feel that they do evil things with it.

See, an issue I often run into as a black person making content about race for a predominantly white audience is that I have to lie to my white audience because they're predispositioned to be anti black. As most americans are.

To understand what I mean by this we need to look at Ta-Nehisi Coates' novel "between the world and me". Which I think is especially relevant here because it's explicitly not written for his white audience. It's framed as a letter to his then fifteen year old son. And a passage I found especially interesting is when he describes his experience self studying african american history at Howard university. He write that while "[he] had come looking for a parade, for a military review of champions marching in ranks. Instead I [he] was left with a brawl of ancestors, a herd of dissenters, sometimes marching together but just as often marching away from each other." And I think that this sentence specifically captures how I feel about a lot of black art made for white audiences.

In a society where black people already have to fight twice as hard to not be dismissed, anything that gives white people an excuse to see the black community as anything less than perfect is unacceptable. And so media made by black people for white audiences often has to fatten the ideological diversity within the community to paint this idea of a united front with no division or struggle within.

The video mentions the movie "bamboozled" by Spike lee as a great (albeit, exaggerated) exasmination of this phenomenon. Author mentions they had a whole 4 paragraphs written about it for the video but had to scrap it.

That's why Coates had to go to the black mecca to understand the messiness of the internal politics of the civil rights movement.

Here the video mentions a passage where Coates was specifically talking about the feud between Frederick Douglass and Martin Delany.

And I have mixed feelings about this. While I understand that white people won't interpret anything they know about us in good faith, I also feel like this faux image of complete harmony in the black community find of infantilizes black people as a whole. Black people are people, and people disagree with each other. I don't think it's necessarily harmful to acknowledge that.

@irrlicht @irrlicht bless you for this <3
@imp3tuz Thank you. I try to help…