an update
regarding the story highlighted in my first presentation of this project
i know -- i am so familiar with the tactics of social justice / identity politics discursive language, strategy, conversation, relationship -- we live in this social sphere where marginalized identities and experiences get weaponized against each other -- i guess it is naive of me to hope that maybe we could hold space for so many traumas and marginalizations -- maybe it is my non-Black privilege here, i feel like it must be, and it is also my grief and trauma at the reductionism that i have experienced and witnessed in so-called ‘communities’ -- and so maybe i will keep fighting for that and -- and maybe there are other fights that are better, more necessary -- i really don’t know -- i don’t know if this is a centering of my feelings as a non-Black POC, as many would say. i am looking for something more in discourse but i cannot find it so i will just remain confused, i guess --
i've been loosely friends with alix for maybe two years? i don't know. i never really got very close to them, but did follow some of the stuff that was going on. i am still so confused
i found out about the tumblr sam made to ‘expose’ alix’s lies maybe a year ago, i'm not sure. since recently alix submitted their story of sam abusing them to this ongoing (though currently fledgling) academic/creative project, i used their story, along with screenshots from the 'exposing alix' blog, in my first presentation. i initially wanted to use screenshots of the conflicting narratives, as sam documented on the blog, to show how complicated trauma is, how narratives can be so inconsistent. but alix didn't want me to use those, so i stuck to the ones that were more consistent, and which either showed abusive behaviour from sam & her friends, or showed support for alix from their friends. i do wish i could have showed more of sam's side of things, which i still don't know enough of. i also recognize that my prioritizing consent from alix to use this story in my work but not sam's is hypocritical and also damaging. (i also have many complicated feelings about the privacy of 'public' blogs, whether name-changing -- which i did -- is ever enough, etc., whether and how to gain consent from all parties when there is always someone’s voice being left out...)
anyway, the thing is. now a callout has been going around on facebook -- many more people, many of them non-Black people of colour and white people, are coming forward talking about ways in which they have been emotionally and financially manipulated and taken advantage of by alix. i would link to it here but i think that could really be damaging to many people’s privacy and safety, so i won’t. there are a lot, lot, lot of stories in that post. alix’s most recent ex, lola, talks about how they had to pay huge sums of money during a trip that alix made to visit and travel with them in europe. many other people have expressed a lot of hurt and confusion over how alix would constantly ask for money, but then seemed to spend it on custom dresses and fancy expensive makeup and other things while also talking about how they were starving and needed money for basic living expenses. i have also wondered about this, admittedly, and maybe the truth lies in a muddled, muddied space between ‘support femmes and however they spend money!’ and ‘this person is completely and utterly lying’ ... or maybe not, i don’t know. i am inclined to believe that truth is multiple and always more complicated, but perhaps i am naive in this, too. or removed. far too removed, perhaps.
from everything i have seen, and since before this callout, and also as i tried to say in my presentation, i really feel that both alix and sam have been so, so, so hurt, have hurt each other... isn't it possible to acknowledge the anti-Blackness of believing alix, a white femme, over sam, a dark-skinned Black femme, at the same time as also acknowledging the deep woundedness that exists between them (and how this woundedness is so very primarily implicated in anti-Blackness, but still cannot be reduced to a unilateral believing)? and not just that, but i strongly believe that people are not just evil, that first deciding that sam was terrible and now deciding that alix is evil is also a way of getting out of accountability for -- the depth of friendships and relationships that happened here, the messiness that can't be contained.
i feel uncomfortable with the ways in which these callouts tend to go, here and elsewhere, because it always ends up with endless loops of abuse accusations, various mobilizations of identity politics at the expense of lived experience (while, ironically and perhaps pivotally, the marginalization of some people against others tries to desperately be noted), and with the cycle of: someone is demonized, then maybe later it's spun around again and it's the other person is demonized, and so on and so forth... i feel like it would be worth more to think about -- what kind of trauma and complexity goes into lying, into desperation -- what kind of violence exists before the fact of a relationship, in the very foundation of a relationship (as a white person, it was always possible for alix to fundamentally exploit sam) -- and also, how can we recognize anti-Blackness at the same time as valuing rather than discarding or reducing multiple inconsistent narratives of trauma. it's true that alix's trauma got a lot more attention in some dominating social circles because they were a white femme, and that their abuse is only being recognized now because non-Black people of colour and white people are calling it out, but it wasn't recognized when sam first started being harassed and systematically disposed of. i still think -- why this fixation on whether alix lied about being raped in order to 'scam' people for money -- why this idea of the scam in the face of clearly inconsistent but revealing narratives of trauma -- or, how can their using financial support perhaps 'irresponsibly' (so much lies in this statement, so much that i just don't know how to parse without talking about how the very concept of a 'scam' cannot exist without capitalism)
tom, the guy who alix says raped them (after earlier saying that their resultant bruises were from bdsm, then from heroin use), commented in the callout thread. he talked about having proof -- text messages, pictures, everything -- that alix consented. but here there is something about consent that gets missed -- and i felt scared as i read his comments, not because i think there has to be a singular truth, but precisely because there are so many truths when it comes to consent, often. i don’t think people want to believe this, because it can give ammunition to white men with capital to get away with rape. but i also don’t think that dismantling rape and abuse culture can happen if we maintain unilateral ideas about rape and abuse. the whole function of trauma is inconsistency, often. trauma wounds, burrows, escapes deep into the body. what is at one moment consensual becomes violence in the next. how to be accountable for violence and desperation? tom talks about trying to be accountable at first, but alix just descended into hateful spewage or whatever. i instinctively understand why someone might devolve into hateful spewage, not just because i have done so, but because, again, the very function of trauma is a desperate violence -- so inarticulable, often. maybe it seemed consensual to tom, maybe it even did seem consensual to alix at first. i don’t know, but violence can happen so easily when we live in a violent culture.
someone also said, in the callout post, that alix raped a friend of theirs. very quickly after this, and tom’s comments, people started describing alix as a monster, as a psychopath. sam joined the thread, bitter that people never believed her until white and non-Black people with cultural capital started coming forward with their stories. this is true. i can imagine that sam has been so alone, so despondently desperate, and so angry, for so long. and to always know that such injustice is the cornerstone of anti-Blackness.
now alix has deleted their facebook or something. i don’t know what happens now. i’m sure a lot of new developments will occur. or maybe not. right now the focus is on donating funds to sam -- out of white and non-Black POC guilt, perhaps, but also as reparations, and on a very practical level, to help sam out of homelessness. i hope that sam can find some healing and some semblance of safety...
but i also still do hope that alix can, someday, too. i think one of the saddest things about this kind of fallout is that it becomes about a culture of scarcity, about who really deserves help. ultimately, if people do lie about needing financial and other support, or not getting it when they actually are getting it, it’s because it is never really enough. it’s not right to put this on other people, and alix has surely behaved so abusively to so many people, but there is still the reality of it. i really don’t want to deny that, and as some other people have said, hurt people can hurt people
but now it seems to be about denying that alix was ever hurt at all. and i doubt that alix wasn’t ever hurt. i think anyone who can mistreat and abuse so many people is deeply, deeply hurt. and i do think the fixation on whether alix being raped was ‘real’ or not because of inconsistent narratives is a kind of violence. the point isn’t in the proof or in an attempt at singular ‘truth’ but in the trauma.