YOU are speaking!
Have you made any poignant commentary on the recent election in the U.S.? Do you have a good response to liberals who are upset with the results or process of the election? Have you written or seen something as a comment reply/post that you think has standalone value? Did you see a new take or analysis you hadn’t previously considered?
Whether it’s a long idea with lots of context, or a short and sweet one liner, we want those thoughts aggregated here. This post is intended to be a resource for comrades to draw from when having actual discussions outside of Hexbear both online or IRL regarding the election.
Consider this a mini-effortpost aggregator. This is not for shitposts, but humor is completely acceptable if it helps make the point.
I have come across a somewhat uncomfortable scenario more than once this past week that I need some advice on from non-white folks here as a white woman in real-world organizing/activist spaces that do not necessarily lean very far left. I do not know how to approach BIPOC folks in these spaces (or even just in the general public I’ve encountered) espousing the virtues of voting Kamala Harris. I feel like @Angel@hexbear.net’s response to this in here is absolutely the correct perspective, but…is that even my place to say? I do not want to tell any non-white person how to express their frustrations and especially not as a white person, but…voting for Kamala was not it. It was never going to be it. I heard the same things back in the Obama days, too, and we have the benefit of hindsight now to tell us how poorly that goes. But I feel like I can’t be the one to say it. Is that the correct way to handle stuff like this? I feel very stuck.
There was discourse on tiktok where a white leftist called out democrats and Kamala. Kamala liberals then went on to smear them for being racist or whatever. Then other leftist, including POC, came to their defense because they were right. I don't think people changed their minds after but even if you're right, you'll have to be strong enough to take whatever backlash comes, even if wrong or in bad faith. The people who are open to dialogue will follow.
I don't technically think it's good to self censor but if you need to talk around something for people to understand better then by all means do that. Ask questions and make it a conversation, if they're dead set on holding onto liberals then move on, it's not your fight.
Never talk down on BIPOC people either because then it'll be harder to defend you. You may know more than SOME but lived experience is a bitch, dismissing or undermining that will backfire. Eventhough you and I are likely on the same side, I still take your word with caution because white folk are finicky. It's nothing against you personally.
Wanna know something interesting?
That creator has ADHD and they suspect that they have undiagnosed autism. ADHD comes with auditory processing disorder at a really high prevalence rate (~40%, from memory). Autism and auditory processing disorder occur so frequently together that they might as well be considered a package deal, although I'm not aware of any studies that have looked into prevalence of auditory processing disorder because it's almost like looking for tiredness in insomniacs.
People went after them in part for saying Kamala wrong, claiming the way they said it was racist. Thing about auditory processing disorder is that it can cause people to mispronounce words.
This person actually mispronounces things fairly regularly. There's a video where they mispronounce about 3 words in the span of 30 seconds. Not in an egregious way but enough that it pings my decidedly unexpert radar. So as far as I'm concerned there's a lot of evidence for them likely having auditory processing disorder. (Armchair diagnosis of people especially remotely via media is a loathsome habit but I'm okay with breaking personal policy in this instance.) Meanwhile evidence of their being racist is nonexistent.
I did drag one person who came for them asking them if there was any circumstances under which mispronouncing Kamala's name would be permissible to them. They said no, of course (which is, ironically, racist to expect that everyone knows Kamala Harris and knows how to pronounce her name correctly). So I figured to fight fire with fire and if baseless accusations of racism are okay then I'm well within my rights to accuse this dingdong with being ableist. I'm sure that they didn't consider that disability might be the cause for mispronouncing Kamala's name but then ignoring the challenges that people with disability face is inherently ableist anyway. So I levelled that accusation against them and gave the reasoning for the likelihood of the creator having auditory processing disorder and how this would explain a mispronunciation of an unusual word like an uncommon name such as Kamala. Of course, immediately they accuse me of making a diagnosis.
The exchange we had didn't prove anything besides the fact that this type of person operates without any semblance of good faith.
Did I bait them? Sure. Was there going to be any personal expense whatsoever for them to make an admission like "Well I guess I didn't think about how a person who survived a stroke might have a good reason for why they mispronounce names"? Nope.
Marxist understand it's useless to view politics through identity alone.
On one hand, I thinking trying to "get" people on pronouncing her name wrong is just a way to do a gotcha because there's nothing else. On the other hand, I do recognize pronouncing names correctly is important. But the most important thing is if people correct themselves after being corrected then that's the end of the conversation. You're not automatically racist unless you're intentionally mispronouncing or butchering it completely to be funny.
Just curious, are you talking about Madeline Pendleton?
The one and the same
Forgive me for not understanding, but is that a yes?
Forgive me for being an unnecessarily verbose dork. It is.
It’s ok I’m sure it was clear and im the one being stupid so no worries lmao
I was honestly proud of the TikTok leftist community for rallying behind Madeline like that. It turned into some reallybgood discourse, and helped root out a lot of bad people from my FYP
Same here. There's always room for one more when it comes to my TikTok blocklist.
Respectfully, this applies to irl spaces too.
If you are objectively correct, you can’t live in constant fear that somebody might think you’re wrong. Beating around the bush and appeasement IS doing harm. Of course you don’t have to be rude, and I know you understand that this is obviously a very sensitive issue, but when push comes to shove it’s important to make your stance clear.
Be kind, be compassionate, be understanding, and make it clear that you stand on the objectively right side of the issues. In real life spaces, as long as liberals know you disagree with conservatives from the very beginning, they are far more likely to listen to what you have to say. Most people are not the online frothing-at-the-mouth liberals we talk so much about
But that’s what I mean — is it really not doing harm if me, a white person, tells a Black person who says something like “this is all the fault of you people who didn’t vote for the Black woman” they’re wrong, actually? Because this is a real life thing I’ve encountered, and something my partner did too, and I feel like I just don’t know how to tactfully handle this. I know the correct stance, but it doesn’t change the fact that there are frustrated POC who are not looking for two white girls to tell them they’re wrong even if they are. I feel like this is not my fight, but at the same time, if there’s no one else to do it…I dunno. I gotta say something, right? But do I actually?
Well of course you don’t say something like “you’re wrong, actually” but there are a multitude of ways to address that point without being self-incriminating. Just a few things that are relevant and I’ve brought up non-combatively completely fine:
•Voter turnout was down 20 million, and both republicans and democrats got less votes than in 2020.
•The democrats didn’t let the electorate pick a candidate in a fair election for the past 12 years. The last time there was a fair and open Democratic primary, the people chose a black man who went on the have the largest margin of electoral victory in a presidential election this century.
•Kamala ran AGAINST Joe Biden in the 2020 primary, and people did have the chance to support her and other minority candidates, but she was just too unpopular to even garner any donations or votes.
•The Democratic Party blatantly lied to us all for months about Joe Biden’s mental state and lost valuable time, money, excitement, and turnout trying to convince people that nothing was wrong.
•After Biden chose to no longer seek election in 2024, even after knowing how harmful and dangerous Trump is, apparently we are not important enough for the Democratic Party to even try to test the waters to see who the best candidate to run against him was. Our safety and wellbeing was completely, knowingly ignored through the subversion of the democratic process
•The Democratic Party subverted democracy by not holding a primary to see who the people actually wanted to run for president in 2024, which dramatically lowered voter enthusiasm.
•If the Democratic Party won’t be held accountable to pay for these mistakes, the people will instead. Instead of learning from what happened and apologizing or changing to ensure this doesn’t happen in the future, the Democratic Party is evidently perfectly happy to make us pay instead by suffering under a Trump presidency.
•After all of this, how can we trust the Democratic Party to protect us from who comes after Trump?
Obviously this is just a few ideas, but I’ve used pretty much all the points in this outline dependent on the context of the conversation.
I wanted to save this for last because personally it is the one I’ve had to use the most, specifically with family and other POC who still are adamantly liberal, and I think it’s the most damning and impactful:
•Most of the time, effort, and money that the Democratic Party spent in this election was to increase voter turnout in white, suburban or semi-rural liberal communities; the same ones we have turned to post-election and called out for voting according to the general interest of their whiteness. And yet, these are the same people that the Democratic Party was courting with the most effort. Follow the money, and you can clearly see that the Democratic Party is telling you who they care most about being part of their party, and it isn’t us.
Thank you. It really is a matter of approach and hardening my information it seems, then, and maybe even accepting that reaching everybody might not be possible, which is something I am still learning to manage and probably always will be.