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.

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More from @gwensnyderPHL

26 Nov
Never forget that white tears are a weapon, not just a defense mechanism
"White tears," for those unfamiliar, refers specifically to the phenomenon of white people who cry when BIPOC folks name their racist behavior.
It's a highly feminized phenomenon that works because it deploys white patriarchy's notion of white feminine serenity (a.k.a. passivity) as something to be protected and held sacrosanct.
Read 8 tweets
25 Nov
Also, scratch the "[Jewish person] is a pedo" trope and you very often find straight up blood libel.

(See: QAnon and TrueAnon)
For folks who are unfamiliar, blood libel is the very old and still alarmingly common myth that Jewish folks murder Christian children.
Antisemitic opportunists used the Epstein story as a way to shore up the overlap of Pizzagate/QAnon pedophile ring conspiracy theory with older blood libel conspiracy theory about supposed Jewish Illuminati child sacrifice rituals.
Read 4 tweets
25 Nov
My hot take of the day is that nonprofit direct action community organizing is on its deathbed because it saw radical foundations dry up and decided to beg for scraps at the table of the Democratic Party instead of focusing on creating its own sustainable revenue streams
Most nonprofit "community organizing" these days is just half-assed shit that EDs cobble together to keep their c3s busy and above water between GOTV campaigns, and oh boy does it show
In blue cities they end up toothless and unable to fight for real change because doing so would mean potentially pissing off the Dem establishment and Dem-linked grantors they depend on to keep them afloat in the long term.
Read 7 tweets
25 Nov
Tl;dr on all my Twitter threads today is that Nate Silver-style hot takery is actually incredibly fucking dangerous and it is high time we stop letting these assholes deny the existence of fascism just because they're mad it interferes with their Moneyball grift
Moneyball grifts depend on people believing that politics work like baseball, with a strict set of rules and parameters that are always followed

Acknowledging the existence of popular fascism is a mortal threat to that grift because fascists ignore institutional rules/parameters
We need to be very clear on the fact that Nate Silver and other Moneyball types have a vested financial interest in pretending fascism isn't real and minimizing its existence and impact at every turn.
Read 7 tweets
25 Nov
One way to be superhelpful in getting us out of the woods is to blast the internet with hot takes about how the woods never existed, actually
There has been & continues to be only one responsible way to combat the fact that we have a totalitarian fascist in the White House, and that is to loudly declare that fact and prepare to actively counter a wide range of possible fascist and totalitarian overreaches.
There is a whole entire fecal rainbow of ways that fascists secure & consolidate power, from coup to paramilitary revolt to just... winning elections.

Fascists could not care less about norms or laws, so you if you only plan to counter the things they're allowed to do, you lose.
Read 25 tweets
24 Nov
If I didn't know any better I'd say she's trolling the Chapo crew in the best possible way
In case folks have forgotten, those chuds managed to come out against mutual aid (bevause Food Not Bombs is bad for election work, according to them) and Mariame Kaba (because CTH thinks cops and prisons are good, actually) in the course of less than a month this past summer
It's not just the Gamergate harassment that makes them poison, they are such a plague on the left.

Reactionary dipshits cosplaying as socialists, all of them.
Read 4 tweets

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