People understand that there’s a difference between being complicit in a white supremacist system and being a white supremacist, right? I’m not arguing that the first thing is GOOD or that you should want to hang out with people like that but i mean this is like EXACTLY the problem that I was discussing when I was talking about evil the other day.
If you put someone in a box that says “white supremacist” you go “this person is unfixable, this person is inhuman, this person is a person that I can excuse myself from reaching out to because they’re not real people, they’re a white supremacist.”
The fact that saying my neighbor came back from voting wearing a MAGA hat has made at least three people decide that he’s a white supremacist is deeply concerning because that means there are a bunch of people out there going “all republicans are inhuman and unreachable” and my dudes it’s the exact same kind of demonization that makes people go “yes all antifa are terrorists and should be locked up.”
And I want to be very clear that I am NOT SAYING that it is activists or antifascists who are responsible for the increase in Trump voters (because they are not) but the casual dehumanization of activists and antifascists as a threat to civilization made it a lot easier for a lot of people to vote for Trump. Fox News saying “look at the violent thugs attacking our democracy” when they showed pictures of Portland protests got a reaction.
Saying “if you voted for Trump you’re a white supremacist” certainly gets a reaction but what that reaction is is to wall yourself off from being able to reach people because you are part of an exceptionally tiny minority and there are at least seventy million people out there who you think aren’t worth the effort of talking to.
That is setting yourself up to lose, buds.
Here’s a fun (by which I mean not at all fun) thought experiment: Do homeless rapists deserve housing? Do pedophiles deserve food? Do white supremacists deserve health care?
Yeah. Yeah, they do. Everyone deserves those things. Everyone. HUMANS DESERVE THOSE THINGS AND WE ARE ALL HUMAN EVEN IF SOME OF US ARE THROBBING ASSHOLES.
It’s funny the way that some parts of the left approach the “right” way to do politics.
A few years ago it was “it’s not my job to educate you” and that left a wide open void where horrible racist shitheads and transphobes and misogynists were happy to educate people who had questions. Then it was “if you’re a white cishet it’s your responsibility to educate your family and the people closest to you because you’re in a position where it’s safe to do so” and it was “if you’re a white cishet it’s not your place to talk about LGBTQ+ BIPoC, just point people at the correct resources” and you know where that’s left you? With a collection of people who want to do “allyship the right way” who are too terrified to do it the wrong way and so they don’t do anything. They watch from the sidelines and wring their hands and wish they could help and then they don’t do any work because they’ve been told they’re being complicit in an oppressive system if they do it wrong.
I said that if my neighbor, who I was surprised to find out had voted for Trump, asked me to borrow a pair of goggles I’d lend them to him and I am being accused of “excusing the behavior of white supremacists” and “being fine with it if people hate people of color more than they like human rights.”
Reminding people that Trump supporters are human beings with complex inner lives and personal relationships and unique motivations isn’t excusing white supremacy you fucking assholes, it’s attempting to address it at a deeper fucking level.
Look, we talk about the way that the carceral state perpetuates itself and how that leads to long-term negative outcomes in black communities because we are clearly and obviously over policing them and it leads to less generational wealth and less family stability and less overall community stability and how we need to address that in order to help correct the damage that society has done through white supremacist institutions?
And then if you talk to a conservative about it they’re like “well they shouldn’t have robbed a house if they didn’t want to go to prison” and you want to sit there and tell the conservative about high rates of drug use as a form of self medication and about the rat park experiments and about the lack of opportunities in some of these places and the impossibly high costs of college and the pay differential between white people with a high school diploma and black people with bachelor’s degrees and redlining and everything that goes into the things that could have led to a place where someone is in prison. You’re not saying that they should have robbed someone, you’re not saying that it’s a good thing that they stole, you’re saying that there are complicated things that led them to being in that situation.
And there are complicated things that lead to homelessness. And there are complicated things that lead to high drop-out rates. And there are complicated things that lead to under employment. And there are complicated things that lead bankruptcy.
Everything is complicated. Nothing is simple.
I can absolutely see why a family that were victims of a mass shooting would have a strong positive reaction to the law and order “keep the police” messaging of the Republican Party in Nevada.
I can absolutely see why a Catholic family would vote for Trump when it looks like the one thing they’ve been aiming for politically since the 70s is going to happen because of him.
I can absolutely see why Cuban-Americans whose families suffered under Castro would vote for Trump.
And none of those reasons are “well they’re just white supremacists who hate people of color” so writing them off as unreachable white supremacists seems pretty fucking stupid.
This isn’t how you build a fucking coalition. This isn’t how you build sympathy for your movement. This isn’t how you get people to change their minds you fucking dipshits.
What I am doing is biting my tongue and preventing myself from rolling my eyes while I am the white, straight-passing, cis-passing anarchist in the neighborhood who helps little old ladies with their yard work and who gives cash to the homeless folks in the greenway and who talks about disarming the police while also not being a scary antifa member of black block communist. I am cordially being the nicest anarchist these people have ever met and setting up a neighborhood tool share and phone tree and very pointedly working to include everyone from the resist democrats to the harry potter lesbians to the black and white trump voters and the guy whose business is cleaning pipes and bongs and the mean little catholic lady who called the HOA about my yard.
When I say work on your local community in order to make the world better and effect meaningful political change I fucking well mean it (of course if you are unsafe doing this or incapable of doing it don’t beat yourself up about it but I can so this is part of what I do). What do you think is going to be better for the world in the long run? Never speaking to anyone who fails your purity test or subtly teaching my neighbors what all of our other neighbors look like so they don’t call the cops on the “suspicious black man” who owns a house four doors down but whom they’ve never met? Is it going to be better to never speak to anyone who doesn’t meet the standard of “is also the exact correct kind of politically aware that I am” or is it going to be better to tell your trump voting neighbor not to call the cops on the homeless guy sleeping on the greenway because he’s in a hard spot since he lost his job two months ago? Do you think your neighbor is going to LISTEN to you if you’ve never spoken to them and glare at them in the street or are they going to listen to you because you brought their dog back when it ran away?
Get off of your fucking high horses and do some goddamned work.
Do you have any fucking idea how exhausting it is to be the only left anarchist talking to right libertarians about human rights at the hacker meeting then come home and get told that you’re a nazi apologist?
Do you know how fucking tiring it is to spend hours answering transphobic questions from a trump voter who is genuinely confused but wants to be nice to his coworker and then get told that offering trump voters any help is excusing white supremacy?
Do you know how wearing it is to talk to my fucking dad about my fucking life and the fucking catastrophe that it is because of high medical costs in the US in order to get him to rethink his stance on “disability moochers,” after being told that “if you can talk to your family about these things it’s your responsibility to do do so,” and then get told “sorry sweaty, you’re just forgiving your neighbor for being a white supremacist because you think he’s attractive”?
I don’t want to be *friends* with this guy, he voted for Trump. I want to meaningfully impact his world view and maybe lessen the harm he does in the future and I can’t do that if I never fucking talk to him.
Eat my sparkly blue dick and go donate some money to an abortion fund, you utter incompetents.
I’m going to quote Christian Picciolini on what it was that made him question his membership in a violent white supremacist street gang, and how he works to help other people leave similar extremist groups:
What it came down to was receiving compassion from the people that I least deserved it [from], when I least deserved it. Just before I left the movement, I opened a record store to sell white-power music that I was importing from all over the world. In fact, I was one of the only stores in the United States that was selling this music. And I also knew that to stay in the community and get their support I would have to sell other music. So I started to sell punk-rock music and heavy metal and hip-hop and when the customers came in to buy that music, who were often African-American, or Jewish, or gay, at first I was very standoffish, but they kept coming back.
The community, even though it’s Chicago, everybody knew what I was doing, everybody knew how hateful I was and how violent I was, but these customers came in despite that. And over time I started to have meaningful interactions with them, for the first time in my life.
In fact, I had never in my life engaged in a meaningful dialogue with the people that I thought I hated, and it was these folks who showed me empathy when I least deserved it, and they were the ones that I least deserved it from. I started to recognize that I had more in common with them than the people I had surrounded myself for eight years with — that these people, that I thought I hated, took it upon themselves to see something inside of me that I didn’t even see myself, and it was because of that connection that I was able to humanize them and that destroyed the demonization and the prejudice that was happening inside of me.
You have to treat people like people. You have to stop treating terfs or pedophiles or republicans or neonazis* like inhuman monsters because it isn’t helping anyone, it’s just programming YOU to see these problems as insurmountable and unfixable.
“Never talk to trump voters” is the easy way out and I tried that for a while and it turns out not only did it NOT work, it also led to finding myself in self-congratulating little bubbles of people who are happy to go march with a sign in a peaceful protest but who stop giving aid to homeless people they know are transphobes.
The goal is to drag everybody out of this shit, buds. Not just the ones you like.
*of course you do not have to and in fact should not attempt to change the mind of someone who is attacking you, or someone who shows up to provoke. You have to keep yourself safe in order to keep going and I’ll admit it’s a lot harder for me to do TERF outreach than it is for me to do right-wing outreach. You are also not obligated to do this kind of work or ANY kind of work toward leftist goals but if you are following me you are going to have to be okay with the fact that I’m willing to lend tools to Trump voters.
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