I am thinking about wish recycling as an analogy to white people’s anti-racist participation. My understanding of wish recycling is that it is when people put things that aren’t recyclable in the recycling bin because they wish those things were recyclable. It makes them feel good because they feel like they are recycling more and wasting less… so long as they don’t think about it too hard. Often times the things wish-recycled are containers they didn’t take the time to clean, so they are full of the person’s food waste and possibly mold. But they don’t think too hard about it and tell themselves that there is a washing process involved in recycling and that the food waste and mold will be removed then. And maybe they tell themselves that the city pays homeless people to sort the recycling so even if not everything in there is really recyclable, they are creating jobs for homeless people, so it’s a good thing. (Can you tell yet, that, yes, I am a recovering wish recycler?)

The reality is that wish recycling is making it possible for people to feel good about continuing their wasteful habits. They can continue to choose to not take responsibility for their impact on the planet (and also on Black and brown people who are hit hardest by climate change) and their choosing convenience over less wasteful choice and even over washing their wasteful choices so that they can be recycled. Less in the garbage can looks like less waste, but it isn’t less waste. It is more waste because those containers that weren’t cleaned out contaminate other previously clean things that could have been recycled, but now can’t be. It is making recycling more expensive for the city and therefore contributing to recycling programs folding when American waste can no longer be sold overseas. It is supporting economic inequality because we feel like we are addressing homelessness by paying homeless people minimum wage to sort through our dirty, moldy garbage. In all of these ways it is sabotaging progress being made in all the areas we feel good about “addressing” through wish recycling.

I am thinking that not only is wish recycling a thing, but wish anti-racism is a thing too. Wish anti-racism is in the emoji reacts. It is in the at-my-convenience participation. It is in the thinking that contributing to the Chromebook fund deserves a cookie response free of hard truths. It is in the not returning again and again to the posts and the videos and the comments to find deeper and deeper layers of our own supremacy. Contributions, like Jim’s contributions (here I mean both his post about what is not taught in schools and his money contribution), are dirty and moldy because the work wasn’t done to get to a place where we could offer a clean contribution. By throwing dirty money and moldy words into the bin, Jim created more work for Lace, both the more quantifiable work of sending it back and having to engage with him again and the emotional work that would have happened internally even if she had chosen to take no action. Wish anti-racism lets white people feel good about continuing to hoard resources and engage in white supremacy. We can feel good about choosing convenience over self-work.

Just like when we put something in the recycling bin that looks like recycling, but later it’s opened up and discovered to be full of food waste and mold, when white women learn how to be well-read racists, they look like anti-racists on the outside, so they get further along in anti-racist spaces before their internal workings are exposed as being racist and then often it’s too late because they’re already tainting what’s around them. And here we have the emotional work and possibly also the more quantifiable work of experiencing and responding to a betrayal from a covert racist. Covert racists (wish anti-racists) make anti-racist spaces more expensive to run though the expense here might not show up in accounting. Wish anti-racism is sabotaging progress being made in the areas that we feel good about “addressing” through wish anti-racism.

As I transition from being a wish anti-racist to doing new things in new ways to reduce harm to Black and brown people I have been noticing in myself feelings or thinking patterns that I previously wouldn’t have had any metacognition about. I didn’t have a clench reading the Kinfolk Kollective comments about the Chromebook funding. We were just fish swimming although actually most of us weren’t even bothering to swim. At the same time, I also know my thinking isn’t in the right place yet in terms of my financial engagements. I have made a lot of progress in terms of financially engaging in the last year or so, but like Shay says, I haven’t even gone 2 blocks in a 26 mile run. I haven’t gotten down the driveway. Maybe I’m starting to open the door. But I’m a recovering wish anti-racist, and Kinfolk Kollective would be fair in expecting me to relapse and shut the door instead of stepping outside. I see how I am thinking of financial engagement as transactional even if it’s not my only thought anymore. Like after financially engaging in this community for the first time and writing my first comment in months, Lace responded to my comment and my first thought was “she’s responding to me because I paid my dues so she sees me as valuable to speak to” (the words feel awkward maybe because I don’t think it words exactly or maybe because they are clashing with the identity I have constructed for myself). My second thought was “WHAT?!” And “Yikes!!” And “where did that thought come from?! No no no! That is exactly what she says she doesn’t do. That is exactly the sort of thinking that causes harm to Black and brown people and I came here to reduce harm caused to them!” And of course that thought came from my own internalized white capitalist supremacy.

When it comes to the communal funding of Chromebooks, that internalized white capitalist transactional supremacist voice in me is not telling me this time that Kinfolk Kollective or Lace or anyone should be seeing me as a valuable person because I contributed money to people who should have had that money (and more) instead of me having it in the first place. What it is telling me this time is that the problematic aspects of pandemic schooling and pods go away because I contributed to the Chromebook fund. As if this is a transactional situation where I buy a Chromebook and you stop making me feel bad about the choices I make for my own kids during the pandemic. But that internalized white capitalist transactional supremacist voice is not the only voice in me now which is why I can recognize it as a voice rather than as a truth. Since wish anti-racism…. Or just racism is like addiction and there is always a danger of relapsing, perhaps those voices will always be there and the question is whether I listen to them or not.

By community member/contributing writer Emily Holzknecht