This post and the notes did make me laugh a bit. It has so many notes in part because a non black person said it. People love to hear about anti-racism when it's not a black person. Which could mean nothing!
It’s like stormfront for toddlers on here
This made me laugh specifically, because I think the problem is precisely that because it is actually not like stormfront! Non black people in general, and white people in particular, have this very specific idea of racism. If they’re not saying direct slurs to people, or advocating for Transatlantic Slavery 2.0, they are not racist. This is why I have seen several blogs I have seen engage in antiblack racism happily reblog this post because to them, there is no contradiction.
But in this white supremacist, capitalist hellscape we live in, Antiblackness is a community bonding activity, as many black people have continued to point out before and since the days of Ida B. Wells.
Antiblackness is like a campfire people can warm their hands at, and experience camaraderie with other people.
Marginalised people on here and IRL participate in antiblack racism, because the process of being actively forced to the margins of society is painful, disabling and alienating. Non black women, disabled people, poor people, queer and trans people etc who find themselves at the margins of society often desperately cling to whatever lifeline they can, and that lifeline is frequently antiblack racism. It’s familiar, easy, and already embedded in society! Then, at the margins, these people reproduce the *same* logics of patriarchal, settler colonialism white supremacy as the cis white men and their institutions at the centre who pushed them to the margins in the first place!
if black people aren't comfortable or safe on here then that is our failure. Be anti racist or die.
This easy to agree with, especially when it’s not a black person saying it! Which is evidenced by the fact that this post has been reblogged by users that have carefully built communities with a hard vein of antiblack racism at the centre. lol.
Black people are uncomfortable in communities on this app precisely because the glue holding a lot of your online circles together IS Antiblackness. The glue is clear and thus invisible so it’s easy to deny. It’s like the ghost in the machine! It’s so much a part of your social circles, what you talk about, how you talk about it, then you feel so confronted by us shining a light on it, you lash out or melt down until the black person feels so uncomfortable they leave. Or when it’s pointed out, you can rationalise that it’s not even a problem:
Black people who called you out are too blunt, too mean, too African American! In 2016, the excuse given to ignore Black bloggers talking about police systematically killing black people was called ‘election interference’. Lol.
This line of thinking has evolved; recent dismissals of the Black people who make critiques are: oh these Blacks are imperial chauvinists and have misunderstood and misapplied Marxism (or anarchism!)
Another new trend: the womanhood and femininity of these Black (trans) women is alien (not white enough!) and so they can’t understand our superior (white) feminist theory;
Another big one: Black people are too vengeful, emotional or childish, and can’t understand or prison abolition, or youth liberation. (This one genuinely spun me)
Non black people on here can be generally trusted find a convenient and social-justicey reason as to why Black peoples criticisms can be dismissed. because the reason isn’t ‘we hate them because they’re black’, they can rest assured they aren’t actually racist.
Conscience clear, the average antiblack tumblr user
reblogs posts like this, which are not written by black people (what a relief not to be confronted directly by Black people’s words!)
and goes back to the embrace of their antiblack community.