It’s easy to assume the mantle of anti-racism guru when you’re a Black man.
After all, what makes life uncomfortable but the damn racism, right?
Wouldn’t life be fine and dandy without it?
Black women, otoh, still have to deal with men like you selling our rights out from
under us so you can be the loudest voice in the biggest chair.
When are you going to stop appropriating other people’s oppression, or did you think this was something only White people do?
You take the struggles of Black people who don’t think like you, love like you, act like
you do or want what you want, and you turn them into a platform from which to launch yourself.
Who even are you? Who do you speak for if not for yourself?
You tweeted the most trite of truisms and rt’d your own praise.
Are you not embarrassed, man?
Is this what it takes?
Then, when a respected lawyer adds a harmless caveat
*while agreeing with you*
you respond in the most thin-skinned, no-debate stonewalling, and go off about terfs in your timeline.
HOW are you not embarrassed?
You remind me of Darcus Howe at his most sexist, self-regarding,
self-pitying low. Not a compliment.
Nobody was coming for you.
We just thought there might be some substance with which to enrich the debate.
But there’s nothing there, just empty performance.
What good is free speech to sounding brass and tinkling cymbal?
Perfect.
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.@Critic_Speak asked me to contribute to a podcast discussion around the subject of race in the Welsh Arts scene.
They wanted me to talk about how I might have suffered, as a Black artist, from the gatekeeping White hierarchy that has dominated Welsh culture forever.
my piece talks about how being Welsh, being Black, being an artist, is not based on some outward evaluation, someone’s acknowledgment of my oppression, nor on some outside validation of my identity; I base my value on the meaning that is left when all else is stripped away/
That is, simply, How Do I Live?
How do I live when women and girls are subjected to such violence on their bodies, their psychology, their education and choices?
How do I live when to be born female is still to be thought of as lesser, to be treated as of little consequence?/