Facebook Publication Date: 43549.41875
This as well:
For the purposes of our focus here in this space, that of race, I assert that there is nothing about feeling contempt or performing contemptuousness that is at all beneficial for those whom ‘enlightened’ white people say they stand with and for.
To lean into contempt is not something you do for people of color; it is something that you do for yourself.
Contempt does nothing to confront and dismantle systems; it makes, for white people, racial justice work just another way to feel top down, except instead of directing that feeling to people of color, it’s locked and loaded on white ‘lessers’.
It also reinforces the abject fallacy that the white person expressing contempt has no racial and classist residue of their own.
This work needs to be, has to be done with love at the core; even to our putative enemies.
That does not mean we cannot disagree with vigor and rigor; we must. It does not mean we enable; we can’t.
It means we find humanity in all.
I will also say this, carefully, but I will say it: that white people whom I encounter who embody contempt for white people they feel are not as evolved or enlightened as they are also most often the quickest to turn; to abandon the work at the slightest pushback; to lash out, not only at their fellow walkers, but to all marginalized people, which is unconscionable; to consider their own work done and that they have nothing else to learn–we have seen this very thing so often in this very community in these last intense weeks.
All of the above to drive home the point hat is their allyship/accomplicing is both shallow and fragile.
Living in a top down way will do that.
Hubris is the enemy of this work.
Humility is the fuel.
If we want to really do this work, and not just look as though we are, this must be confronted.
For the sake of effectiveness and of long term change.
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