Facebook Publication Date: 44027.588194444

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Another community member wrote this comment in response to the recent post about the primacy given to white women and *selected* parts of Blackness, as well as Lace’s framing on how the quoted comment was sent privately. Read, locate yourself, and respond.

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“I am chewing on the two-fold message that I am not safe for Black and brown peoples. I acknowledge this to myself a bit every time I remind myself what our goal in this space is (lessening and mitigating the harm done to Black and brown people by white people, i.e., me).

First, specifically in a space with that goal, that I am among the reasons that push it beyond “safe” to “safe-ish”, and how the “safe” part of “safe-ish” is not intended for me. I am… chagrined that we don’t reach “safe” for the people we NEED to be MAKING safe. I accept that this is so, and it is so because I have done my part to make it so.

I… locate myself, in terms of the message of this post… within a body of whiteness that considers any sort of economic resource my right to have. I might consider myself as “earning” it, but that means very little when so very many people have also earned plenty more, are working much harder than I do, and still aren’t accorded what they’ve earned. Earning itself is based on the transactional nature of capitalism, and I’ve been recognizing more and more how the “objective metric” of work performed in exchange for money gets modified by the intangible whiffs of morality that we tie to race, so that work harder than mine gets devalued. I get the resources for my lesser work, that others are not accorded for their greater work.

And it’s because of the wealth my family’s whiteness allowed us to accrue and amass. And it’s because I’m white within that whiteness. I also do work that is highly technical, and so tends to be thought of as a white man’s work, and is thus more highly valued that work that is typically expected to be a BIPOC woman’s work. Even as a woman, I benefit from my proximity to the next rung up on the white supremacist and patriarchal ladder. I’m viewing that position now, in reading this article, as a conduit, a funnel, and the flow of resources is mostly one way.

How do i personally abdicate that role? I believe I have two primary actions I can take. I can redirect my resources to Black women and their communities. I work towards a world that’s not ordered by racial capitalism. These each have a lot of subsidiary actions to them. That… helps with the broader ways in which I’m not safe. There are still my individual contributions to harm and risk. And there’s a range in between those. I have a lot of work to do.”

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