This essay could be improved with a stronger conclusion on action and what to avoid doing. White dude leftists can be very annoying, are more often class reductive, and can lta the knowledge of marginalization that might otherwise be taught through personal experience, as the author notes. And while some of the points are incorrect, such as Bolsheviks being ethnically homogeneous (Stalin himself was called provincial even after his death by those who looked down on Georgians), I was planning to overlook that because the core truth is real, which is the extent of racialization of the US and what rope it plays. But then it kind if just fizzles out. All polemic, no practical organizing advice or “prove yourselves white dudes” step outside of what can be gleaned from an early (valid) criticism: that white guy organizing spaces that aren’t actively addressing this by elevating non-white guy perspectives will reproduce thr patriarchy and white supremacy, in one form or anorher.
As someone who has dealt directly with this issue in orgs, that isn’t very good advice, as it leads to tokenization. Both by the aforementioned white guys, who understand that by doing what a brown woman said they have done well, and by non-“white guys” who learn that advancing an understanding and accounting of, for example, racial justice is about whether they feel heard in a meeting. You have to put the responsibility for education and actual community embedding on everyone involved. The white guys need to read and reeducate themselves and take on real projects that integrate racial justice with the people most marginalized, not for those most marginalized. And the non-“white guys”, well, they do have a lot of shit to put up with, but in my experience just being wary of self-tokenization would be the best way to personally develop in this context. It can be (reasonably) frustrating for a white guy to take up space on something you know better than him, and especially if he has decided he is going to lecture you about it or spread some bullshit. Nothing invalid in that feeling. And to return to tokenization, I cannot tell you how many conversations I’ve had with white liberals for whom the discovery that many black people don’t want police abolition is like a free pass to resume supporting the racialized carceral state. They end up tokenizing the black people that don’t want immediate abolition as the only black voices that matter, even, and ignore all of the context of social violence and how withdrawals of policing are also used as weapons against black people.
At the same time, I think it is valuable to ask oneself what it would mean for someone with the same identity or experience they have to disagree with them and how that might look in a communist org. This is often the first “wake up call” for the internalized tokenization that people bring from liberal spaces where they were “the one X” or where the space was so absurdly wrong that everyone with “X” identity was in unanimous agreement: in a left space, a person brings up their own experience to make a political point and someone with the exact same experience disagees vehemently. A very common next step is for such a person to try to find an angle by which their experience should be counted as more real, perhaps by finding another marginalized identity. If a brown woman is disagreeing with a brown woman, well it may be time for a self-tokenizer to reach for another label, like them being queer etc, to shut down discussion and reduce it to egos. This kind of thinking can be the death of organizations if it is internalized. It tends to lead to unnecessary conflicts and crashouts because it is not really about education or correctness, it is about a liberal tokenization that reduces societal marginalization to a defense of one’s own ego and self-worth. To be clear, being a queer brown woman will mean having distinct experiences of marginalization from a straight brown woman and it is valuable to educate with those experiences and appreciate them both personally and analytically. But one has to be self-critical around relevance and whether one is tokenizing oneself to elevate their own personal opinion vs. building understanding of the meaning of variable vs. shared experience.
Anyways, I think the keys are an onus of education and a political education for members (the author could provide a reading list) and to authentically embed with your local communities and work in coalitions. It is better to do the education first so that your org doesn’t alienate other orgs with ignorant takes. But embedding is essential, it is the only way to actually integrate liberation struggles into your org. Real projects aligned with your goals and the needs and thoughts of the community. This will also help you distinguish invalid identity-based reactions to your work, which will inevitably happen. A local NGO headed by X identity might go on a radio show and start criticizing your work and the only way to be ready for that is to be educated and embedded.
This essay could be improved with a stronger conclusion on action and what to avoid doing. White dude leftists can be very annoying, are more often class reductive, and can lta the knowledge of marginalization that might otherwise be taught through personal experience, as the author notes. And while some of the points are incorrect, such as Bolsheviks being ethnically homogeneous (Stalin himself was called provincial even after his death by those who looked down on Georgians), I was planning to overlook that because the core truth is real, which is the extent of racialization of the US and what rope it plays. But then it kind if just fizzles out. All polemic, no practical organizing advice or “prove yourselves white dudes” step outside of what can be gleaned from an early (valid) criticism: that white guy organizing spaces that aren’t actively addressing this by elevating non-white guy perspectives will reproduce thr patriarchy and white supremacy, in one form or anorher.
As someone who has dealt directly with this issue in orgs, that isn’t very good advice, as it leads to tokenization. Both by the aforementioned white guys, who understand that by doing what a brown woman said they have done well, and by non-“white guys” who learn that advancing an understanding and accounting of, for example, racial justice is about whether they feel heard in a meeting. You have to put the responsibility for education and actual community embedding on everyone involved. The white guys need to read and reeducate themselves and take on real projects that integrate racial justice with the people most marginalized, not for those most marginalized. And the non-“white guys”, well, they do have a lot of shit to put up with, but in my experience just being wary of self-tokenization would be the best way to personally develop in this context. It can be (reasonably) frustrating for a white guy to take up space on something you know better than him, and especially if he has decided he is going to lecture you about it or spread some bullshit. Nothing invalid in that feeling. And to return to tokenization, I cannot tell you how many conversations I’ve had with white liberals for whom the discovery that many black people don’t want police abolition is like a free pass to resume supporting the racialized carceral state. They end up tokenizing the black people that don’t want immediate abolition as the only black voices that matter, even, and ignore all of the context of social violence and how withdrawals of policing are also used as weapons against black people.
At the same time, I think it is valuable to ask oneself what it would mean for someone with the same identity or experience they have to disagree with them and how that might look in a communist org. This is often the first “wake up call” for the internalized tokenization that people bring from liberal spaces where they were “the one X” or where the space was so absurdly wrong that everyone with “X” identity was in unanimous agreement: in a left space, a person brings up their own experience to make a political point and someone with the exact same experience disagees vehemently. A very common next step is for such a person to try to find an angle by which their experience should be counted as more real, perhaps by finding another marginalized identity. If a brown woman is disagreeing with a brown woman, well it may be time for a self-tokenizer to reach for another label, like them being queer etc, to shut down discussion and reduce it to egos. This kind of thinking can be the death of organizations if it is internalized. It tends to lead to unnecessary conflicts and crashouts because it is not really about education or correctness, it is about a liberal tokenization that reduces societal marginalization to a defense of one’s own ego and self-worth. To be clear, being a queer brown woman will mean having distinct experiences of marginalization from a straight brown woman and it is valuable to educate with those experiences and appreciate them both personally and analytically. But one has to be self-critical around relevance and whether one is tokenizing oneself to elevate their own personal opinion vs. building understanding of the meaning of variable vs. shared experience.
Anyways, I think the keys are an onus of education and a political education for members (the author could provide a reading list) and to authentically embed with your local communities and work in coalitions. It is better to do the education first so that your org doesn’t alienate other orgs with ignorant takes. But embedding is essential, it is the only way to actually integrate liberation struggles into your org. Real projects aligned with your goals and the needs and thoughts of the community. This will also help you distinguish invalid identity-based reactions to your work, which will inevitably happen. A local NGO headed by X identity might go on a radio show and start criticizing your work and the only way to be ready for that is to be educated and embedded.