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.

    • davel [he/him]@lemmy.ml
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      6 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.

    • Erika3sis [she/her, xe/xem]@hexbear.net
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      6 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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      6 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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      6 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

    • yarr@feddit.nl
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      6 months ago

      If you do not trust them just because of the colour of their skin, then you might just be a racist. That is literally the definition of racism, friend. If I made the same example you provoded but switched skin colours around, people would say that’s racist, and they would he correct. I cannot be the only one who can see that.

      Focus on the content of their character, at the individual level, not the group, that is what MLK stated and he was quite right. It’s has not been 1979 for 45 years. Times change. Statistics prove this.

      Sounds like something a WHITE PERSON would say. Hey everyone! There’s a white guy over here!

    • Teekeeus [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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      6 months ago

      Anti-white racism doesn’t exist. White supremacy is literally at the center of modern “racial” ideology as we know it and there’s no such thing as discrimination against the “race” at the top of this nonsense “racial” hierarchy that you melanin-deficient animals shit out.