When a person of color, especially if they're black like me, affirms their support for causes such as queer liberation, feminism, animal rights, or socialism, I immediately feel that I can believe, with minimal doubt, that they're truly convicted and principled in what they're advocating for.

However, when a white person claims to support leftism, until my skepticism is proven wrong, I immediately assume they're a dishonest and performative libshit. I then proceed to interact with them with hefty amounts of caution. If my assumptions are proven true, I'm never shocked.

  • Erika3sis [she/her, xe/xem]
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    edit-2
    6 months ago

    Yeah, of course you'd quote MLK and not Sakai or Fanon or Sankara or Bishop or Du Bois or Newton or bell hooks or Barbara Smith or Malcolm X or literally anyone but the most absolutely sanitized of Black activists or politicians... To quote MLK, not just in general but especially to quote the literal only speech of MLK that you ever hear about in school, is rhetorically equivalent to saying "but I have a Black friend!" — it's an extremely tired trope just like this whole Reddit Speech thing you've got going on that shows zero comprehension of the issue and zero reflection or self-awareness on your part. Especially when you focus so much on definitions and seem to define race purely by skin color, rather than understanding racial issues through dynamics and relationships. This is the exact type of thing OP is talking about.

    It is not at all unreasonable to understand that when there are systemic differences in housing and employment and generational wealth and health outcomes and so on and so on and so on, that someone who didn't get to experience the shorter end of the stick is going to have the lack of those experiences get reflected in sy beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors, just like any other facet of lived experience. Assuming that white people generally aren't going to ever fully "get" racial issues, and will therefore have an incomplete understanding of all other issues with which racism intersects; and moreover assuming that when white people benefit from the oppression of racial minorities which they get to live shielded from, that they broadly get to live in enough comfort that they won't be easily driven to genuinely radical thinking... That's not being a racist, really, that's just like assuming that a medieval peasant isn't going to ever fully "get" microbiology when microscopes haven't even been invented yet.

    When you pull the old device of "oh so it's OK for them to do this but when I do this to them then it's a problem" it's denying that differences do exist in the lived experiences of people of different racial and ethnic categories. The following is what it means when someone is judged by the content of sy character rather than the color of sy skin: that everyone has the potential to understand others or to achieve great things, when the systems of society that blind some to the suffering of others, or keep those others down, no longer exist. "Content of sy character" should not be taken to mean that race is a non-factor in someone's lived experience.

      • Erika3sis [she/her, xe/xem]
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        edit-2
        6 months ago

        Well I don't really have much else to say... I guess read your theory, do your praxis, always wear a seatbelt, and most importantly remember that if you don't want to be counted among the victims of the prospective infinite genocide on the First World, that you can always simply stop being a anti-cracker-aktion... Like, you can just do that. At any time. Honestly, it isn't nearly as difficult as people say, although having a moderately complicated relationship to nationality among other factors probably did make things a little easier for me.

    • EelBolshevikism [none/use name]
      ·
      6 months ago

      Can I save part of this to deprogram buddies? This is the most succinct way to describe why people aren’t being “reverse racist” when being afraid of white people I’ve seen.