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.

    • davelA
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      8 months ago

      I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

        • Amerikan Pharaoh@lemmygrad.ml
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          8 months ago

          Course not; they only ever quote cuddly Selma-era MLK who still believed the crackers could be salvaged. Same reason they don’t EVER teach that MLK was taking cue cards from Malcolm X before the FBI found a patsy to bring him down. “In many ways, I must confess the Dream that I had has by all counts, become a nightmare.”

          • taiphlosion@lemmygrad.ml
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            8 months ago

            Yeah all that Christian turn the other cheek shit was never going to work against oppressors who wanted to see us all die anyway. If they had no sympathy for the Natives and took delight in committing genocide against them, why would they have any for their subjects that they enslaved?

            They don’t think about none of that, just the parts that exempt them from their status as the settler crackers that they all are.

            • Amerikan Pharaoh@lemmygrad.ml
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              8 months ago

              If they had no sympathy for the Natives and took delight in committing genocide against them, why would they have any for their subjects that they enslaved?

              The very root of why I advocate for self-armament, regular range time, and gun clubs.

    • Erika3sis [she/her, xe/xem]@hexbear.net
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      8 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.

    • Rom [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      8 months ago

      If I made the same example you provoded but switched skin colours around, people would say that’s racist, and they would he correct

      If you change the words in a sentence the meaning of a sentence changes, holy fucking shit!!!

    • CyborgMarx [any, any]@hexbear.net
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      8 months ago

      70% percent of white people do not associate with a single person of color and considering the racist nature of the media and politics they consume, it is absolutely appropriate for the average POC to assume a racist character until proven otherwise, especially considering this 17th century make-believe colored coded caste identity holds so much political and economic power over the rest of us

      Unless of course you want to claim white people are oppressed because their skin is the color of uncooked pizza dough? Is that what you’re saying FriendBesto, are the Marshmallow Minions oppressed, my heart goes out to you you poor devils

    • Amerikan Pharaoh@lemmygrad.ml
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      8 months ago

      “Dr. King’s policy was, if you are nonviolent, if you suffer, your opponent will see your suffering and will be moved to change his heart. That’s very good. He only made one fallacious assumption. In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none.”

      Kwame Ture

      While I’m here, I know this cracker wasn’t talking “It’s has not been 1979 for 45 years” when thousands upon thousands of Black men and women have been pressganged back into chattel slavery thanks to the way the Fourteenth Amendment is written. I know this honky wasn’t talking “It’s has not been 1979 for 45 years” when Black men and women have been getting lynched by cop at rates of roughly a thousand per year, with half of those murders making it to the 24/7 news cycle to traumatize the survivors. I know this genocidal fucking demon wasn’t talking “It’s has not been 1979 for 45 years” when we still get redlined into ghettos and tenements, JUST FOR THOSE GHETTOS AND TENEMENTS TO GET BULLDOZED, REBUILT, AND GENTRIFIED WITH PRICES TO SHOVE US OUT OF OUR HOMES AND NEIGHBORHOOD.

      I hope when they find your bones a couple hundred years from now, it’s in a fucking mass grave.