This post will very much have the potential to piss off white people and PoC alike…
…but so does my mere existence as a mixed-race person, so.
Plus it's been on my heart for YEARS and I've never been more compelled to say it than now, so here:
I hate—
and I do mean HATE—
this widespread belief that "being anti-racist" is simply a matter of memorizing a list of words one can/can't say, having all the basic politically correct talking points down pat, and proving what a Good Ally you are by noisily declaring yourself one on social media.
All of this is yet another sticky ugly tentacle of our monstrous culture in which we don't CONNECT WITH EACH OTHER.
We don't know each other or get involved in each other's communities, physically, real-ly.
It's all online, it's all hearsay, it's all I-spy-with-my-little-eye, it's all Search And Destroy with no intention to create, at all.
This whole race conversation, like every other political conversation, is reduced to memes and slogans — words, just w o r d s — as a measure of whether an entire human being is totally racist or totally not racist.
My dude, what? The fuck? This gross over-emphasis on language as a litmus test for racism is very Rahuvian, cerebral, analytical, visual, virtual, theoretical... but it's not real. Real in the experiential, demonstrable sense anyway. It's not real life.
Quick sidequest:
Consciousness raising has its place, YES. I've been that jerk who's flagrantly critiqued "virtue signaling" in the past, and I realize I was wrong to write it all off, and I'm sorry. Genuinely, truly.
But OH MY FUCK, if virtue signaling and online debating and self-satisfying blockhammering is ALL you ever do, then you are 1,000,000,000% missing the point of what racism is.
So how can you claim to be anti-racist?
What is racism to you?
Have you even asked yourself that?
Is racism words, or is it actions?
Both?
Neither?
(Ooo, make that one make sense, I dare you.)
Are you trying not to be racist, or are you trying not to look racist?
Did you think they were the same?
Did you think people wouldn't notice that you don't know the difference?
👀
Also, context: I have the, haha, ~*~luxury~*~ of being not-quite-white and not-quite-black, so I can see the culture war from "both sides" (and it turns out there aren't any "sides" at all — but this post is inflammatory enough as it is, so let's not rn).
But the downside of this position is that if you open your mouth to express any opinion that doesn't fit one "one side" or "the other side", you're canceled by "all sides."
Only certain people get to speak at all. People are — figuratively and literally — making this a "black and white" issue.
Race isn't black and white.
Our conversations must reflect that.
Hell, our conversations must be *conversations*, not 140-character manipulations disguised as education.
I am absolutely done with blue-hats automatically canceling everybody and their brother John for not being born with a Master's degree in race relations and politically correct speech.
And I am JUST as done with red-hats playing endless semantics games like ~how can i have 'privilege'~ and ~why can't i say 'all lives'~ and ~"Karen" is misogyny~ and FUCK I can't even continue listing examples because it's so ANNOYING 😤
I think, once we can figure out that people don't own words — moreover, that words don't determine people — we might start to understand what racism is, enough to IDK, heal from it?
or whatever it is we're hoping to accomplish with this endless analysis that's so sorely detached from reality that it, honestly, shouldn't be considered analysis in any serious measure of the word?
</virtue signaling>