I Fucked Up

What else is there to say? I fucked up.

I'm referring to an earlier post, "Criticism of the SWPD Community." There I ranted about how every time I wandered into a thread I found someone rageing about whatever I happened to be thinking about, calling it a white thing and (in my mind) accusing me of being some kind of savior and yadda. So I wrote a lengthy, ranty post on it.

Maybe I needed to write that post. I'm sure the catharsis at least helped me to get through that phase so I could eventually get to somewhere more stable. Doesn't matter. The fact is, it was a bad reaction. See, there is a lot of rage in old posts on SWPD. Rage directed against white people and their fuckeduppitude toward POC. And when I read those posts, I ended up absorbing that rage and feeling like it was directed toward me. And then I took it out on the writers, who I don't think really deserved it.

So, I fucked up.

Question is, what am I going to do about it? Well, the one thing I can do: use my fucked-up white experience to try and prevent further fuckuppitude in the future. How? Well, the takeaway lesson from this experience is that there's a lot more to Anti-Racism 101 than a single blog post or epiphany. I thought that since I'd read the post I was off too a good start, but all I had was a bad case of Novice Disease. I learned that breaking yourself of whiteness, no matter how good your intentions are, how smart you are, and how well you think you've got it, takes more than a few minutes of shock followed by a few days of radically rethinking your worldview.

BIG SHOCK, right? I know, I read that from people of multiple races. But I thought I was different. I thought I was getting it. That's something that a lot of white folks tend to do: assume they're getting it. Of course, assuming you're getting it + a safe space to blather about whatever you're supposedly getting without criticism or even a capacity to understand why you might deserve it = fail.

Starting now, I'm going to try and fuck up less. I've realized a lot of things that I think are going to help. I'm also going to try and turn my biggest disadvantage - my fucked-up white brain - into more of an advantage. I've figured out a few things, and I think that if I can explain them in a way that the white brain is actually capable of understanding, I can do some good. So I'm going to start there.

I'm really sorry, guys. I can only imagine that any POC who read that post (if any of them read it - I rather hope they didn't) were gobsmacked, disgusted, and probably enraged by the sheer amount of fuckedupittude. I don't blame you. And I expect any future readers to be good and cynical about what I'm about to do next.

(On the other hand, if you have no idea what I'm talking about and this post looks like so much existential baloney, feel free to ignore it.)