Thread by @gwensnyderPHL

Any time you meet a white person with even half an ounce of decent racial justice politics, you are almost certainly looking at the product of several or more likely dozens of BIPOC folks who showed that person dignity and grace despite their (many, inevitable) fuckups

For white people, the work of racial justice is learning to see all the myriad injustices that we have been trained our whole lives not to notice.

It's our job to educate ourselves, but all the books in the world aren't enough to make us see the whole picture.

White folks can never understand white patriarchy fully, because seeing it fully would mean seeing it from an angle inaccessible to us, the perspective of BIPOC experience.

That means we fuck up.

BIPOC folks have every right to see those fuck ups, say "nope, that person is engaging in an oppressive behavior that does me violence," and peace without saying a word.

It is their prerogative to protect themselves from that violence.

We as white people will never see white patriarchy in its fullness, never see it from the most revealing angle, which means antiracist work for us is lifetime work, a lifetime work of self-educating but also fucking up and learning from it.

In a liberatory framework our chief two forms of learning about white patriarchy should be self-education & white folks calling each other out/in, but to wait for that education to be over before engaging in space shared with BIPOC would mean staying in white-only space forever.

(I have... a lot of things to say about "liberatory" white-only spaces, none of them good, btw.

In my experience, they spit out white folks who are just as racist but think they're fixed now because they have a few weeks of theory under their belt.)

Because there's no being completely cured of racism, ever, BIPOC folks who share movement space with white people at all are already doing us a massive grace.

They are knowingly putting themselves in space with people who *will* engage in oppressive behavior.

And then there is the additional grace of call-in and call-out.

Call-out can feel like a smackdown (and it often is), but it is still a grace. It isn't a service--it's a BIPOC person demanding respect-- but it's also a stern choice to give a white person an opportunity to learn.

And then there's the near-infinite grace of the call-in, of the principled and stern but also incredibly kind and patient choice to be present with a white person who did something fucked up and is still trying to understand why it's fucked up.

The thing about grace is, it's a gift that is by definition unearned and undeserved.

Many religious folks talk about grace as a miracle for that reason.

Acts of grace are acts of miraculous love.

If you're white and on the road to addressing white patriarchy (and that's a road that is a lifetime journey), this is the way to understand BIPOC's call-outs and call-ins both, whatever the tone is.

They're acts of education that can immensely speed your travel.

Sometimes call-outs aren't genuine or aren't fair, but in my experience that's very, very much the exception, not the rule.

And even when a BIPOC's call-out of a white person doesn't necessarily come from a great place, there's almost always a grain of truth there to learn from.

I have a lot of misgivings about heartfelt capital-T Thanksgiving talk in large part because it tends to involve giving thanks for our possession of resources that are not ours as a white nation, resources that are rightly the domain of indigenous folks.

That said, gratitude practice is an essential part of liberatory work, and it seems fitting to use a day built around the idea of thanks to engage intentionally in that kind of practice.

So in keeping with the spirit of liberatory gratitude, if not the problematic norms of US Thanksgiving tradition, I'm practicing gratitude for the many BIPOC friends, neighbors, teachers, comrades, and community members who have done me the grace of helping me learn.

Gratitude for the folks who showed me incredible patience and sat with me talking through the fuck ups, and/or stayed in my life despite the fuckups while holding me accountable.

But also, gratitude to the folks who showed me the grace of telling me off and letting me know how I'd fucked up even if they did not want to spend the emotional energy reconciling with me or being around me anymore.

They could have walked off silently.

Instead, they taught me.

In keeping with the work of gratitude practice, I'd invite other white folks to use today to try and learn to see that sort of grace, and to think about how it's been shown to you in your life.

I'd invite you to remember moments where you saw a BIPOC call-out or call-in as an attack and experiment with shifting your paradigm around it, to see the grace in that moment.

See if you can separate the way it hurt your ego from how it helped your heart.

We live under white patriarchy, it's the air we live and breathe.

It's the weather that rains all the time, and there's no ever staying completely dry unless you abdicate your social responsibility and give up entirely on the outside world.

And even then, your roof will leak.

The first step in addressing it is to learn about weather, about why it rains and what the impact of that deluge is, who it harms the most.

The second step, though, is to learn to be grateful when someone hands you a towel, and to use it.

That's what those call-ins and call-outs from BIPOC folks are, someone handing you the towel so you can sponge off some of that white patriarchy.

It's a grace, even if they toss that towel at you in exasperation.

Gratitude is a discipline.

Practice it.

Hone it.

That's a challenge I make to other white folks, and also to myself.

Learning is lifework, and so is gratitude practice.

There's always and forever room to grow.

The end.