Me and White Supremacy Day #21: Week 3 Review
It’s taken me a lot longer than a week to get through Week 3, but at least that has given me more time to reflect. Saad asks, “What more have you learned about yourself and your unique, personal brand of white supremacy?” The biggest area I need to work on is performative allyship, because as I’ve said, I have a lot of emotional energy invested in the idea that I am a good, liberal progressive. So I go out of my way to perform that identity, and when it get challenged, I view it as a threat. I also need to resist the urge to engage in performative allyship by calling out someone’s behaviour when my primary motivation is to show off how woke I am, not to encourage any positive change in the other person.
Saad asks what I recognize to be my biggest challenge in personal anti-racism work. The first is to resist the temptation towards performative allyship, as I said above. The second is finding the guts to speak up, which I find difficult because I have such a deeply ingrained fear of confrontation.
Next prompt: Where am I starting to do my work, and where am I holding back? I don’t really know how to answer this question. I would say that I am still struggling to figure out how to have these discussions with people in my life who are discouraging me from doing this. That’s not the same thing as holding back though.
Saad’s final question is, “What other dots have you started connecting when reflecting on the work you have done so far?” Two things jump out at me. The first is that I need to stop compartmentalizing my activism. For example, I feel strongly about the self-sufficiency movement as a means of resisting capitalism and have spent many years trying to gain as many skills as possible to make and do things on my own. I never really thought of this as being related to race. But lately, I’ve become aware that this social issue is extremely intertwined with white supremacy. 98% of the farmland in the United States is owned by white people, and there is an unspoken white supremacist assumption that I never noticed or questioned until recently that black people belong only in urban environments. Activities like gardening, homesteading, camping, swimming, boating, fishing, etc. are largely considered white activities. BIPOC, depending on their particular backgrounds, may not have had opportunities to learn the skills necessary to engage in these activities. The self-sufficiency movement is incredibly white-centred. So to view self-sufficiency and white supremacy as unrelated is not accurate.
I’ve also noticed that a lot of the work I’ve been doing here is equally applicable to my LGBTQIA2 allyship. It’s made me discover ways in which I could be a much better ally. So there’s no point in compartmentalizing the types of ally I am. I am building skills that will help in all areas.
The second thing is that white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism are not separate things. This is a horrible metaphor, but it keeps reappearing in my mind: They’re all just different facets of the same ugly diamond.