this is just addressed to white people bc it’s not my business to tell not white people what to do or think ever
Every white radical in my inbox right now like IT’S NOT OUR FAULT! and lecturing me about vote margins: I sympathize with your feelings. I really do. It is hard and unpleasant to feel disliked. I think some of you (ALTHOUGH NOT ALL!) are very young, and I don’t expect you to go through your entire moral/political evolution by the time you’re 19, for fuck’s sake.
But the thing is, “It’s not our fault” is like….really not relevant. I don’t think anything I have posted or reblogged has suggested that the result of this election is the “fault” of white leftists. What they do express is “anger.” Anger is not the same thing as blame, but frankly it is very typical of white radical purist leftism, or as i like to call it “pointless garbage nonsense,”** to conflate the two. “This person has made a point I do not agree with –> therefore I am angry –> therefore the person at whom I am angry is to blame [for whatever]” is lazy. It stops there. It doesn’t take steps. It makes blame an end in itself. Anger, on the other hand, can be complex and productive.
I hope that if you read those posts and think they are unfair, you can examine those feelings, put them somewhere useful and move forward. That is what I try to do when I feel knee-jerk attacked: i try to figure out why I feel that way, and the process of examination soothes my stupid jittering rabbit heart. Then I am able to see what is of value to be found in the statement that made me feel bad.
What I would like you to take from those posts is that people’s lives really do depend on our ability, as white liberals, to put get off our stupid fucking moral high horses and live in the world. Otherwise we are living in a reality as self-righteous and delusional as Trump’s. Otherwise we are complicit, and whether we are “more complicit” or “less complicit” – whether it is our “fault” or not – could not be more fucking irrelevant.
**sorry if that seems like a rude mischaracterization but I really do think that’s what it is and I hope you find, sooner rather than later, an ideology that values results over talking.
