i am fucking begging you all, when you’re taunting a racist, you don’t need to make fun of his teeth or his weight. there is far more valid criticism of his belief system that won’t end up hurting your own comrades & perpetuating the kinds of oppression we’re trying to dismantle.
people i love are fat! people i love have bad teeth! these are not manifestations of evil. this is not what makes the white supremacists we’re yelling at from the other side of a police line bad people.
please do not reply to this with the scenarios in which you personally believe it is good, actually, to hate fat people. i’m not interested.
i don’t fucking care if you think i sound like a tone policing liberal. we keep having to have this conversation. if you can’t find a way to insult a racist without insulting a comrade who would fight and die beside you, you need to step back & reevaluate.
are you fighting for our collective liberation or are you just out there screaming at racists for catharsis?
i’m no advocate for civility. i think it’s good to be mean as hell to the people who want to kill us. but if the rhetorical rock you lob at your enemy bounces off him and hits your comrades, was it worth it? did you do what you set out to do?
we’ve (mostly) come to a place where we all agree it isn’t ok to say homophobic and transphobic and overtly racist things to hurt our enemies... if you insist on hanging on to fatphobic & classist insults, maybe it’s because you are fatphobic and classist.
this isn’t about civility or moral high ground or being nice to bad people. it’s about who you are treating as appropriate collateral damage. if you insist on hurting people on our side, at some point we’re gonna start treating you like you’re not on our side. because you’re not.
i am referring specifically to the crowd of white liberals i stood with yesterday who thought they were fighting racism by exerting pressure on a slightly different axis of oppression. i see it over and over again and it’s not helping.
