We are still trying to process how, when we posted about how, due to (white) fragility, the externalization of the preservation of individual personal comfort becomes entrenched, and how this means that content-warning discourse is used as a silencing tactic against people who don't conform to white culture, that one of the wrote-the-book-on-rust trans people on Mastodon/Fediverse responded to being indirectly criticized on a non-mastodon/fediverse website by accusing us of being bad at consent.
Like... they went to another website, where their most recent post said that they weren't going to use that website until the website revised its terms of service, saw that we quoted them without tagging them (because we didn't want to pick a fight) and they picked the fight for us, turning the discussion from us trying to talk about weaponized white fragility, into casting us in a bad light for "not understanding" how content warnings are consent.
This happens to us fairly often: we mildly criticize a white person or their culture and their immediate response, in yet another instance of a white person evading the issue and blaming it on us, making it once more our problem, is to imply, with varying levels of clever dogwhistle, that we're a rapist!
Then when we try and talk about it around other white people, we are told things like "that isn't white fragility", "you both escalated" and we get accused of picking fights and holding grudges when we went out of our way to not. We had no quarrel with the individual in question until they did this.
How are we meant to talk about this? When we went to another website and didn't tag them in, we got told "youre obviously subposting me, why didn't you tag me into this", but if we did tag them in, do you think we would have gotten a better response? I don't think so.
Then, the core of the argument that they posted was this:
What I am not interested in is having essay-length posts about how a space I really like is Bad, Actually be half of my
[non-fedi website]feed with no way to avoid seeing them other than not using the website or unfollowing the people who repost them, which I don't want to do, because I like and respect those people.
a) look at how this is framed: "I don't want to see posts about the space I like, on the space I don't like. I have no way to avoid that, because I don't want to unfollow, and I don't want to not use the site." This is exactly the weaponization of fragility that we're complaining about. b) Super cool silencing tactic! They weaponized their fragility, demanded that we tag them into a discussion that wasn't meant to be about them, making it hazardous for us to directly quote them because doing that got us yelled at in the first place, and if we paraphrase it, that opens us up to accusations of passive aggressiveness!
It is always the white person's right to say "this makes me uncomfortable and i don't want to see that" and cast suspicion on the person provoking the discomfort, and this puts us in an incredible double-bind. We now have no safe response, because anything we do will be interpreted as escalation, even though what just happened is the other person just recentered the discussion on themselves, and away from their weaponization of white privilege, putting the onus on us to de-escalate, and portraying us as potentially violent and dangerous.
And then this doesn't even begin the processing of what happened the day after: this same person, on fediverse, subtooted us without tagging us in, for criticizing fediverse software! Do you think it would have been appropriate for us to barge in there with "you're obviously subtooting me, why didn't you tag me"? No?
Being mixed-race white-passing sucks because of shit like this. White people, you need to do better. If this post made you uncomfortable, then this post was for you. If you're friends with anyone like the person we're describing, you need to do the work of calling them in, to better the lives of your non-white friends who would otherwise be subjected to white fragility.
Thank you and good day.
