#white leftism

If our racial fragility drags conversations backwards instead of forwards, requiring the additional labor of our Black and Indigenous friends to assuage our thin egos and comfort us emotionally, then we are not contributing to any cause. We are actively detracting from these efforts. We become part of the obstacles towards liberation and revolution.

"oh but voting doesnt matter"

June bug there are only 2 real scenarios this hellscape was gonna have for me and I am living in the WORSE one.

Me and my friends are being pulled like thread from each other. We are unraveling. We are moving apart. We are FLEEING. We are refugees. We are waiting to become refugess. We are getting ready to run for our lives. We are googling other states, other countries... We are bugeting if we can even afford the move. We are leaving our families and roots behind. We are being hunted. We are being watched. We are screaming internally. We are screaming aloud. We are writing wills and are under 35. We are literally terrified and numb and watching the world come to tear into us. We are preparing for the worst.

And the worst is on our doorstep.

Don't tell me the parties are "the same".

The ONLY objective was to assure me and my kin could survive another couple years while -we- make more change. But your purity politics took that too. There are already many of us who havent even made it this far. They were leaders and friends and people with voices of their own for the revolution, but their govenor put their life on a bounty and now we're here.

treat voting like survival because that is exactly what it is. And many of the ones most dependent on the outcome get the LEAST access to it.

The consequence, Reed points out, is a problematic kind of political representation:

By the same token, in this view of black politics the constituency issue is resolved from the onset; there is one, generically racial constituency, as all members of the organic community are presumed to share equally in its objectives and the fruits of their realization.

What emerges, in other words, is the assumption that all the members of the community possess the same interests, and that representatives are therefore immediate embodiments of this collective will. This was not without its challenges. Operating with such a deeply organicist conception of community, it became very hard to evaluate representatives. The only way to condemn a black politician whose policies did not benefit the allegedly undifferentiated black community they were elected to represent was by recourse to the language of authenticity: they weren’t really black. In addition, assuming the identity between representatives and a predetermined constituency opened the door to a kind of tokenism. The result, Reed describes, was that white outsiders, socialists or otherwise, came to argue that since they were not a part of the black community, they needed to identify black individuals or groups “who reflect the authentic mood, sentiments, will, or preferences of the reified community.” “This impulse,” he goes on, “places a premium on articulate black spokespersons to act as emissaries to the white left.” Inter-racial solidarity risked being reduced to tokenism.

Salar Mohandesi, “Identity Crisis”

also see

“The key problem is that whites on the left don’t want to confront complexity, tension, and ambivalence in black politics. In general, they simply do not see political differences among black people. They do not see that blacks are linked to social, political, and economic institutions in a variety of different ways, and that those different links, and the networks that flow from them, shape interests and ideological perception no less, and no less subtly, than among whites.”

…[A]ttention to black politics on the left tends to revolve around thin and simplistic definitions of good guys and bad, “true” leaders and false. This distorts political judgment into a search for authenticity, hauntingly like white youth’s quest in the 1960s for the most “authentic” blues-“pure” and untarnished by instrumentation, cultivated virtuosity, air-conditioned nightclubs, or indoor plumbing. (No Bobby Bland or Little Johnny Taylor need apply, just solitary old guys on porches of croppers’ shacks in the Delta, playing acoustic guitars with neck bones.) It’s also the exact meaning of exoticism and has horrible political consequences.

The “pure” black experience is monadic and antithetical to complexity in either orchestral arrangements or politics. Assigning authenticity requires “finding” the pulse of the community. (Actually, as with SDS and the Panthers, it requires designating the pulse-thus whites determine black legitimacy, as they have since Booker T. Washington’s day at the turn of the century.) This places a premium on articulate black people who will talk to the left. Whites tend to presume their inability-or tend not to want to expend the effort-to make critical judgments that might second-guess their designated black voices of authenticity, and therefore do not attend closely to the latter’s substantive arguments. The result is that these “authentic” voices are treated mainly as personalities-without much regard to the political implications of the stances they project.

White lefists: only we can protect PoC from nazis by waving our willies in the air, liberals just roll over

White leftists: constantly talk over PoC when they say what they actually need, sell them down the river with their inane purity politics, doom us all

White leftism: anyway white working class neonazis kinda had a point, don't bully them. Black and brown working class people don't exist, of course. And they should shut up, anyway. Silly whiny centrist identity politics.

White leftists: any black person praising or commenting on the Obamas and their meaning to black culture is actually a murdering neoliberal sellout.

White leftism: no liberal can ever beat fascism, only my kind of leftists can do it, centre leftists are the same as centrists who are the same as centre rightwingers who are the same as nazis. Everyone is a nazi lover except me.

White leftists: But also, I prefer literal neonazis to bland centrists. I'm so woke.