You Are Not Immune to Bigotry

I intended to post this during February, but life has a habit of hindering us all during the most inconvenient times. But the topic of racism, especially within our own communities, is a conversation that needs to be happening constantly anyways. I feel it's also necessary to establish that I am not immune to the things I am critiquing, I am a white queer and I come from the broader culture of White America. So please know I am not attempting to put anyone down, I am writing this to bring more attention to an incredibly pervasive issue.

Black and brown queer people have been attempting to tell us white queers that we've been perpetuating racism since well...forever. But in recent years, especially with the rise of social media, it has become far more visible. And with that, acts of racism have to become more covert to protect the comfortability of the white people committing them. Instead of bold acts of exclusion and violence, that could get plastered online and ruin our reputation in a matter of minutes, we instead attempt to get ahead of the game by preemptively position ourselves as "good white people." Through performative Instagram posts, white knighting, and becoming community cops, we find ourselves uplifting our own self image while never getting the point. We tell each other to be better, but we refuse to actually do the work of educating one another on a regular basis. We instead continue to expect specifically black women to hold our hands through the process of them rehashing their worst traumas, only to use that experience to position ourselves as better than other white people. We use our queerness to separate ourselves from our whiteness, and then neglect the fact that our whiteness is always what comes first. Society views the color of our skin before quite literally anything else, with only economic class being near equivalent in terms of who gets harmed the most. The people with the most power are always those with the most money and proximity to whiteness. And I specifically use the words proximity to whiteness because it is through everyday acts that we uphold white supremacy as a structure. I've seen over and over the way that queer people attempt to separate ourselves from whiteness, only to further perpetuate white supremacy by using that separation to hold power over others in our own community. It's like the stupid cliques in high school, we gain popularity through meaningless social performances, only to abuse the power we get from said popularity. Is it because as queer people, we didn't get to experience high school drama in the same way as other kids?

When I was a teenager, I remember seeing other white kids mimic the culture of the black students in my high school. Whether it was distorted AAVE, shit taste in hip-hop, or giving themselves alopecia from trying to wear box braids, I never really understood why some of my white peers did this. Which isn't to say I wasn't also a stupid white kid, anyone who knows me from high school knows I was a god damn mess, but it wasn't until years later that I started to understand why they did what they did. While the exploitation of black culture is a major phenomenon, I don't genuinely believe that was what was happening. I was in a special program at school for kids who struggled and were at risk of not graduating on time, and so most of the other white kids in that program were also kids with disadvantages from life. And white culture frankly doesn't allow for this. White culture teaches that we are alone in the world, that the only people we can trust is ourselves. No one has our backs, except for maybe family, but what do you do when your family isn't safe? As queer people, many of us grew up in households that were not safe or welcoming, and that only furthered the belief that we were in this alone. But we're human. Human beings are not meant to be an island, we naturally crave community and solidarity within each other. But again, white culture does not teach us community building skills, it teaches us to be in constant competition with each other. And so as a white kid, I was able to subconsciously see that the not white kids in my school had something with each other that I didn't understand. I could understand the weird social dynamics between the white cishet kids, though I didn't know how to participate as an autistic child, but I knew that there were power dynamics at play. A constant push and pull for attention and validation, the most valuable thing you can get as a young adult. But now, I understand that when my classmates were poorly mirroring their peers, it was an attempt to feel belonging in a way we are not taught as white children. We're taught we only belong if we can conform to white supremacist ideals. And as kids who were already failing at that, we turned to what we thought might fill that void.

But, again, we were never taught how to truly have community like that. White culture taught us that everything was a competition. And that competitiveness breaks down any real connections you may have with the people around you. If you are constantly vying to be the best, you are also putting others down to get yourself there. And we see this exact behavior in white queers now. Instead of using whatever metric they used in high school, we now use moral reputation as a way to hold ourselves above others. We fight to be seen as the best white person, to be the most inclusive, to do the most out of everyone around us, but at the end of the day we're not doing it for the right reasons. This also leads to a very fragile relationship with our understanding of racism and whiteness, which then leads to white queers to become terribly defensive about being called out for racist acts. Again, we try to distance ourselves by clinging to our identities outside of being white, but that defensiveness is only going to cause harm. If we do these things to uphold our place within our own niche white societies, we completely miss the mark and end up doing more harm than good.

In an enlightening Instagram post by @pat.radical.therapist, the author Patricia eloquently describes this very issue, and I implore you to read it for yourself. Because of our cultural ties to white supremacy, we create these competitive cliques that ultimately make it so much more difficult to survive. And I only ask that we, white queers, practice more self reflection and awareness to prevent this pattern. And not only do we need to look inwards, but we need to look outwards and stop giving so much social power to those who uphold these behaviors. Don't look to someone for guidance because they seem to be "better," look to those who actually have your best interest at heart. Also be more open to discomfort, become okay with making mistakes, with others making mistakes. If we want to build something that will last, we need to prioritize restorative acts and mutual support.

But that's all from me for now,
Have a lovely evening~