alexispointy:

tbqh i’m extremely uncomfortable with white people who talk about white people as a group the way poc talk about them.

like “fucking white ppl are getting their shit all over [poc thing white ppl are appropriating].”

you realize this is a group you belong to, right? like, this is not how radical antiracism works from white people’s end.

poc don’t need or really want white people’s help talking shit about white people. it’s a thing we do to untangle all the shit that white people do to us internally and externally, to take the people who have always been tacitly and explicitly portrayed as “better than” us down a peg. there is nothing radical or antiracist in white people talking shit about white people.

if you want to really be a useful white race traitor, you gotta refuse the privileges granted to you and interfere with the privileges granted to others for being white. at the very least, use your white privilege to help serve the immediate needs of poc if you can’t be assed to sacrifice the comforts of your white life.

and as far as dealing with other white people who you see or hear act out racism or cultural appropriation, it doesn’t help anybody to respond to it by yelling about white people as a group doing those things. YOU don’t need to vent like that. you should challenge the statements or behavior directly and individually or in a meaningful group context and make sure you engage directly with the person(s) who are doing the thing. in doing this, you spare a person of color having to choose between the exhaustion of letting another fucking racist thing go to spare them a fight or doing the same thing (in which case they’d be putting much more on the line than you ever could—materially as well as emotionally; think about how badly employers, police, officials, and service providers think of “militant” poc and you’ll see what i’m getting at).

tell the person who’s fucking up that they’re fucking up and how. rip them individually apart if they won’t budge or if they double down. it will never be as difficult or risky or draining or painful for you as it is for us.

and individual white people don’t connect their behavior to racism when you talk shit about white people as a group doing that, as you’ve probably noticed as you never seem to feel you’re what poc are talking about when we repeatedly say white people getting in on jokes about white people makes us uncomfortable.

when i see a white person talk shit about white people as a group, i see someone who’s trying to act like they’re not part of the problem and too materially invested in white supremacy to actually work to stop being the problem. it’s making yourself out to be an exception to the white supremacy inherent in being white without doing a fucking thing of any significance to undermine white supremacy.