optimal strategy

all i know is I love this discourse from the same crowd that is all “race essentialism in dungeons and dragons is fascist, you can be a good goblin, frieren is a fascist show because literal demons are shown as evil”

I’m going to suggest a new thing called Terminal White Person Syndrome (TWPS) that’s more common among white people. Interpret that how you will.

Depending on where you are in the world, changes the definition of Leftist… and Progressive isn’t really much of a coherent thing outside of incrementalism and reformism.

Just from wallowing in the USA liberal/progressive/lefty spaces on the internet for the last 20+ years, most of us white folks use Leftist/Progressive as a very shallow and vague descriptor/aesthetic label. So when somebody says they are “Progressive” it means one thing to them and can mean something else entirely different to you. Simplest example I can think of is when a liberal/BlueMAGA/Democratic Party cheerleader labels themself as Socialist because they believe in a not for profit healthcare system. The only definition of Socialist they’ve ever learned is “when the government does something” instead of "the workers own the means of production and the profits, if any, are spent keeping society functioning instead of being siphoned off to make a few people disgustingly wealthy at the expense of everybody else.

Like… it would shock me in my younger more liberal days when a woman would repeat a misogynist talking point or when a gay man would say something homophobic about a gay woman and in both cases they were being serious. It would short circuit my brain a bit because, I had fallen into the default state of “You’re of minority group X in a society that shits on minority group X, of course you’d be aware of it and against it” and that not always being true.

So having the privileges of “whiteness” drastically changes the boundaries of what the words “Leftist” and “Progressive” mean. Until you’ve felt out what those ideas mean to another person, you are probably more right than wrong in viewing us whites with skepticism until our actions have shown you what those terms actually mean.

Not saying the people in here who wouldn’t trust me immediately are wrong to do so but it does make me sad because frankly I am extremely cool.

I have erased like an entire essay in this post three times now, I guess I really don’t know what to say but I feel there is some worth in making it known that hidden away in strange places there are sometimes whites to be found who have done the reading (and drugs!) to be an ally, even if it means being an ally from a distance

Cause you have object permanence?

With all the white people self flagellating in this thread it does make everyone seem less sincere which validates op question lmao. This thread is just a dumpster fire, people arguing if interracial marriage or having Black friends makes you racist or not, are asians poc?

Because that’s how it keeps going. I have tried time and time again to ignore the little danger signs from White people and kept getting burned by some, even by self-professed leftists. Not by all, of course, but by enough to be wary. It’s unpleasant; this hypervigilance around White people is a real burden and I wish it hadn’t been forcibly inflicted on me, but that’s what living in a White Supremacist society does.

I find it helpful to differentiate between “White” and “white” people.
Capital-W “White” means the person exhibits a lot of the toxic settler-colonial, imperialist, and casually racist behaviors that Amerikkkan society perpetuates.

Lower-case w “white” means the person has skin tones that make them look like the Capital W’s but they don’t do that shit. They’re actively antiracist, they’re vigilant and purge any trace of white supremacy from themself, they’re learning, and they support people of color in our fight against white supremacist fascism.

It’s not about skin color, and it’s not even essential to who they are – White people who rehabilitate themselves can become white people, that is, people whose skin is light but aren’t being toxic or shitty in any way.

A pretty basic litmus test I’ve found is checking how they feel about American Imperialism. If I say, “Joe Biden belongs in prison for what he did to Iraq” and they agree, then they probably understand on a visceral level that brown people are people. If they argue, that tells me they don’t actually value our lives – because it is fundamentally impossible to care about nonWhite lives and also be ok with any of these genocidal fucks.

When I first met my housemate she called herself a communist and has been doing everything to prove that she is just an awful radlib since then

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This is how I feel about French people, unless they’ve explicitly clarified that they’ve read works by anti-colonial writers and have read the history of their evil empire and recognize the current imperialism of it today, they’re a Nazi in my eyes.

I feel like this is just how it goes as a symptom of the inescapable perpetuation of oppressive ideology within our society.

I only ever really feel safe around poc, socialist, queer non-men. I feel a natural kindred and love for everybody and especially the people of these categories but I also tend to notice when somebody is for instance a queer poc non man that is not a socialist and also a socialist poc who is not a queer or non man etc.

It’s the sad reality of the nature of ideology within a capitalist society that every single person will internalize the hegemonic discourses, and as we all know oppressed people will oftentimes even internalize the discourses about themselves.

It’s not an unwarranted assumption either as experience may prove, but we should and (clearly you do) still struggle to find unity with all who can be united!

If it was easy to overcome the hegemony of a society we wouldn’t need to be revolutionaries in the first place, and none of us are free from brain worms. Freedom is a constant struggle etc

I don’t know how else to say this but if this is real you sound like such a weird person, do you actually get anything done in the organization where you practice this or do you only organize (and talk) with people who don’t pass as white?

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Nah, that’s fair. Not all white leftists are grifters or liberals, but it’s good practice to assume a baseline of distrust until proven otherwise. Source: I’m white.