atax1a

plural atomic queer, OG demon core

  • they/them^xe/xer

we make bad posts // discord: atax1a



having to carefully explain to white people that the much-bandied-about 'hostility' they're picking up from us is the same kind of 'hostility' an abused animal displays, not sure we're getting the point across

difficult to convey this when the standing preconception of us includes raging and baseless hostility with no end to it, because anything we have to say gets read as violent, and this entire goddamn society treats us as a potential danger

we give as much grace as we possibly can, but it is never sufficient because the mere presence of our anger gets us marked as intractable and our self defense against a white supremacist society is considered unacceptably harmful

once again: white supremacy consists in part of a hierarchy of who is allowed to inflict discomfort on the Other, and our various marginalizations mean that, to white people, we aren't allowed to make anyone uncomfortable at all, we can only be discomforted, and any discomfort coming from us is grounds for expulsion

"have you considered not being mad" yeah i have but as it turns out, ignoring the problems does not make them go away, the mere passage of time does not undo harm done to us, and we are expected to understand this for other people and act accordingly, but the same considerations are not reciprocated!


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in reply to @atax1a's post:

Yeah I’m starting to come around on this worldview tbh. I always thought MLK’s “the white moderate prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice” was just a really sharp observation in one situation, not literally the working schema for the majority of US society. But it seems to keep coming up…

sharp observations tend to be penetrating. i get some of this same imbalanced hostility from comfortable professionals wrt disability. i am white, everyone who has ever abused me for needing more or being able to do less has been white, and it looks like this! it is everywhere in our culture, anywhere power can be expressed.

Yep. Even as someone who’s fairly passive by default, autism means I have a hard limit beyond which I display the hostility of an abused animal, and suddenly nobody wants to be nice to me anymore.

"i cant" is the absolute worst thing you can say to a certain type of person, which i feel is probably hugely overlapping with the dynamic youve been talking about. you dont even have to add "and youre shitty for asking" because they will infer it for themselves regardless of whether it is true.

we have been trying to resolve a conflict between myself and the seattle phone museum clique for over 5 years, and we approached one of the principals of the scene and said something like "are you actually experiencing a real peace there or is it the absence of tension that MLK spoke about" and got back "oh it's very peaceful" in one breath, and then later on "yeah, the people you're talking about are as bad as you say, but i'm not really part of their community, they don't want to hear from me, and what can i do anyway" and we just had to start pulling our hair out and yelling