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!
it's multifactor: "currently in conflict", "able to resolve conflict", "willing to resolve conflict", "worth resolving conflict with"
conflict and upset and rough feelings are normal, and pathologizing and excluding us for not handling it in the same way that white society handles it (mostly ignoring it and leaving it unaddressed) is bullshit
Simply put, it is good for white people to educate ourselves about what whiteness is, how it came to be, etc. It serves the capitalists, not the rest of us. Anti-blackness (which, fun fact, has the same cultural roots as misogyny and transphobia - the intersections go all the way back!) is the fundamental building block of the capitalist machine. By building this series of groups it's socially ok to not care about, to hate, to exploit and abuse, the vast extractive regimes of capital became possible.
To dismantle any of this, we must kill it in our own heads. Being white means being a cop. That's gross, learn to stop that shit. If we all would stop recreating the necessary preconditions for capitalism, ie learn about and work to undo systemic racism, it would in fact be better for all of us. Frankly, it's enough that it would be better for our racially oppressed fellow people? I dunno, I think it's good to see someone lifted up when they've been stomped on all their lives.
I recommend FD Signifier, Colormind, and Khadija Mbowe as a good YouTube starter set for white folks seeking to learn more in a pretty painless way. The book Racism Without Racists by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva is also great starter reading. If you have a greater grounding in economic and social theory and want to get really deep into it, Necropolitics by Achille Mbembe is the glowing eyes real shit next level stuff. Reading it with the right grounding in the theories it draws from (Marxism & post-modernist post-Marxism, critical race theory, stranger kings, Black anarchism, neocolonial anthropology, just to scratch the surface) feels like the Sheldon meme with the conspiracy string boards as it all comes together. And because the mechanics of debt are core to the wealth extraction machine built on this foundation of racism, I will always plug Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber.
