yesterday's enthusiast

fuckingrapeculture:

nostalgebraist:

However, while white leftists like myself have a responsibility to recognize that our tactical emotional remove is a luxury not shared by everyone in our coalition, that responsibility cuts the other way as well. We have a responsibility to recognize that we have the ability to inject more anger into the situation without having the same personal stakes as members of outgroups. And that responsibility really is profound, because too often these days, self-professed white allies inject emotion into inter-left debates in a way that is an artifact of their privilege, without considering the inherent superior need of the oppressed for political victory.  This is my problem with the third camp.

I have come to calling the third camp the accelerants.

Last semester, I started to develop an academic research project on #CancelColbert. I had to abandon it, as I just had too much on my plate. But I did a bunch of initial data gathering, and in that period I looked at literally thousands of Tweets from that controversy. It was there that I really got a sense that the typical conception that toxic online politics emerge from people of color, women, or the working class is wrong. Again and again, I found that the people who really caused the deepest nastiness appeared to be self-style white allies. Given the anonymity of Twitter, it wasn’t always possible to ascertain these things, and I will admit that this is more of an anecdotal impression than a systematic review. But so often, the people who raised the rhetorical stakes, the people who got really nasty, the people who made it all personal, were not the activists of color but the white allies. And I found this slice of people to be a really strange phenomenon. Often, they did not have any particular markers of being activists away from Twitter. They typically didn’t have their own writing careers. They seemed to only engage in that space. And they seemed only to engage in that way. I can’t tell you how many accounts I found that seemed simply to pinball from one online controversy to another, raising the stakes wherever they could, making progress impossible. They don’t do the organizing and advocacy that the actual activists do, and they don’t perform the necessary function of internal criticism that all healthy political movements need. They just exacerbate conflict and slander people.

-Frederik deBoer.  This rings very true to me.

Summary:

The White “allies” being talked about here are often needlessly rude and personal over something (racism) that doesn’t actually affect them. They’re not interested in doing anything actually useful for anti-racism causes, all they want to do is piss people off.

(It’s not covered in this excerpt, but this is also something to consider for all anti-oppression work. If you’re not personally affected, you should not be angrier or more aggressive than the people who are. Take your cues from them, because it’s their movement).