Microblog Memes

No one is targeting white people.

I hear that all the time, but as a white person who has faced bigotry (what some call "reverse" racism), it sounds the same as if a white person were to say "no one is racist anymore." In other words, people who have never experienced being a white person, telling me that my experience has a white person isn't true and never happened.

It gets to be kinda old after a while, so I don't really engage with it anymore. Especially when the usual response to me getting upset about statements like "white people should be excluded from class solidarity" is to call me racist...

You're right, hate is easy for the ignorant. And that includes hating white people and men (not to the exclusion of other demographics of course, but we're already so familiar with the plights of those).

Look, I feel for the Latino community, especially now. I empathize with the Black and Queer communities because I understand they've had it rough with a pattern of injustices. But when that empathy gets thrown in my face, and those very people I had empathy for decide to hate me and call me an oppressor just because of my skin color and gender, things I didn't choose and can do nothing about, then it makes it difficult for me to continue empathizing.

I'm not afraid that lifting people up will diminish my social standing. I don't have any social standing to begin with, but even if I did, I would believe in a world where everyone could be lifted up, because life isn't a zero-sum game. Hence, this whole discussion started with "class consciousness."

Unfortunately, many people do seem to believe life is a zero-sum game, and that the way to uplift vulnerable/marginalized groups is to tear down the privileged white men. Not even necessarily as a demographic, but as individuals. I've definitely felt targeted as an individual for being a white male that people viewed as an oppressor. That's not me misunderstanding the message, that's the people who were targeting me misunderstanding the message if they think that targeting me (a white man, but not born into wealth and social status, and thus lacking a fair amount of this privilege that whiteness is supposed to confer; I've been marginalized within my demographic for having mental health issues and no social skills) is the answer to everyone's problems. They just view me as an "easy target," and who doesn't love teaming up on someone vulnerable to let out all that anger pent up at the actual authorities and sources of oppression whom you don't have the power or the courage to focus on? (/s, obviously, teaming up on vulnerable individuals is wrong regardless of demographics).

I mean, you do sound (in this quote) like you probably come off a bit unnecessarily harsh. And do you think that, perhaps, your feelings about your cis/white/male status making you a target may actually make you unnecessarily difficult around people who are different? I'm a latino, and people do treat me differently when they find out. Guess why?

I mean I know I sounded harsh in that example, but it was retrospective. It's not like I was proofreading someone's paper and suddenly went "lol, you're illiterate." But if I so much correct a punctuation mistake I would get a lecture on structures of power and institutionalized racism and how grammar rules are colonialist tools of oppression and yadda yadda yadda. So naturally I stopped making corrections. And then they got upset when they got a bad grade. Like, dude, you didn't want me to correct your grammar when I was proofreading. Don't act like I only got a better grade because of racism. Unless you want to blame the school systems in redlined zoning districts, but that's got nothing to do with whether or not I deserved an A.

It's that kind of attitude I'm talking about. I could have helped you get an A, but instead you're just upset that I didn't get a D-. How am I supposed to feel any empathy for that?

I even went to an honors conference once, and I was one of only a few white guys there. Out of the other several white dudes, I was likely the only one who wasn't queer just based on looks. Everyone else was either a woman or a POC, and most were both. And yet I had to sit through a bunch of presentations about how underrepresented women and POC are in education. It felt like a sick joke. They must have been using data that was at least a decade old.

As for my "feelings" about being a target making me difficult to be around, I used to have a solid conviction that smiling at everyone I pass could turn a person's day around, and potentially snowball into making the world a better place. So I smiled at everyone. Until some black people seemed not to like that; they glared at me meanly, so I stopped smiling. But I kept trying to smile at everyone who didn't glare at me. The effect was that people started to notice I was smiling at everyone except for those people who happened to be black. So of course they blamed racism, and then all the other black people started glaring at me. So I stopped smiling at them to, until it turned out there were very few black people left whom I could still smile to. So at that point, of course everyone thought it was racism, so I had to stop smiling at everyone. It's been a few years now, and a long, slow fade, but needless to say I don't smile anymore...

So I'm sorry if my feelings made me difficult to be around, that must have been so hard for them. The next time a black person's feelings make me uncomfortable I'll just avoid them. Fair play, right?

The institutionalized racism and oppression people experienced for literal centuries does create situations where white men are likely to succeed by greater margins.

Okay, the Tulsa travesty was atrocious and there's still a lot of institutionalized racism that has yet to be reckoned with. I haven't denied that. What I am saying is that that doesn't mean I should get a C- on a paper that deserves an A just to make people from systemically marginalized groups feel better about themselves.

And you're right that where I grew up was not very diverse. I was also homeschooled through elementary school when most kids are at the most formative years of their social development. I went back to public school for middle school and was bullied for having no social skills and generally being a "loser." So I have very little sympathy for anyone who wants to belittle me, and my refusal to tolerate belittlement might not have sat well with people later in life who wanted to treat me like I was their oppressor.

I went through a time in my mid-twenties where I examined my biases and did all that uncomfortable work of unlearning patterns that I didn't even know were ostensibly racist/sexist or whatever. I did that because it felt like the right thing to do, not because I wanted recognition. But after all that effort, to be treated like I would always be an oppressor no matter what I do because of immutable characteristics I was born with, to be honest it kinda broke my will to even make the effort anymore.

You're right, I do have pent up issues, and I do have self-destructive tendencies. I've been to therapy. But no matter how much self-work I did or how much progress I made, whenever I would go back out and try to socialize again I was always hit with the same roadblocks. Because I can't change my whiteness, and I can't change my maleness, and nobody needs another token cishet white dude in their friend group. Literally nobody wants that, so there's no place for me because I refuse to hang out with racists.

I'm a total shut in now. I have too much anxiety to even go to the grocery store, so I order groceries from an app. It feels pathetic, but I already spent years in and out of the psych ward with suicidal tendencies so at this point I don't really consider that an option either. I'm just surviving, but barely, and every day I wonder why I still am.

I did pick up magic: the gathering for a little bit. It was one of my last desperate attempts to break out of my isolation before giving up completely, but at that point I was already too far gone. In fact I had first learned how to play during one of my trips to the psych ward, when one of the CNAs brought her cards in. I already couldn't sit in a room full of people without having a panic attack at that point though, so after discharge I went to a game shop a couple times to play but ultimately I just couldn't keep it up.

And this point, I'm learning to be okay with it. I have a cat who loves me, and I'm finding enough diversions to get through each day without thinking about killing myself. But still, at least a few times a day, I'm hit with this dreadful feeling that I'm wasting the only life I get, that I'm getting older by the day and not spending my time on anything worthwhile or important. I just tune those thoughts out now. I'm getting better at that. I spent years torturing myself, trying to think my way through it and figure out a better way. Not anymore. I don't have that kind of energy these days, sorry...