What talking to White men taught me about antiracism
Reflections on a year of expanding into my allyship
Last year, I made a video on my YouTube channel called “white men, do we ACTUALLY hate you?”
I’m not a big YouTuber. I have a very small amount of subscribers. My YouTube is overwhelmingly focused on my work as a beginner neuroscientist. I only have maybe 5 videos out over 100 on anti-racism.
Those 5 videos are the ones that got the most views. This one in particular got 1,000 or so, which is not that much in the grand scheme of things but it was a lot for me back then.
I didn’t try to make a claim for the “facts” of structural racism at all. I didn’t put numbers in their face. I wasn’t negative. I actually tried to be nice. I told them that I trusted that deep down they were people who cared about their communities. I said masculinity is definitely not a bad thing and sometimes, yes, it can be part of their experience.
I was surprised when people actually started watching it and it started getting views. The response was honestly overwhelmingly negative, and it was mostly White men who watched it.
I have had a lot of mixed feelings about it. It’s not my favorite video on my account because it doesn’t feel as interesting nor as productive. I don’t like the format. It’s not particularly exciting. I thought often about taking it down for those reasons.
But I’ve kept it up for a few reasons I find important. It changed how I navigated racism and the path I took forward.
The comments taught me a lot about how people view racism and the reality of what lives in people’s heads. I got a lot of really telling comments and had interesting conversations I think deserve to be learned from by everybody.
It taught me how people view kindness and empathy.
It taught me how people see nuance.
It taught me how people relate to statistics and how quickly they will distort historical facts after the matter. Particularly how they relate to slavery.
I don’t believe this man about being a precinct officer but if that is true, it taught me how quickly people on the Left will give up on actually fighting for People of Color and it showed me something about the nature of Democratic officials.
And by the way, Moderates and racists, please keep MLK Jr’s name out of your mouth because he was not just a random peace symbol.
It was an interesting look into a world of people I don’t normally interact with and how they view race. Doesn’t mean everyone was nasty but a lot of people were and that really changed my perspective, ironically, as I tried to see the best in people.
It was interesting that it stuck with people though. A few people commented hate, came back a few days later after having no response, and commented again. One even went out of their way to go to a whole different video and comment on that. Ironically, I was intentionally being nice and didn’t even bring up any controversial points.
I kept it up because I found it to be a good “educational resource”. I want people to learn the same lessons I did from it on what makes a good conversation on race and what doesn’t.
It helped me grow resilience in my own activism and in my voice.
It was extremely uncomfortable to get what was for me, a lot of negative attention. I felt annoyed, disheartened, and anxious. I get annoyed when I still get negative comments on the video.
And that’s okay. Life is not all peaches and cream. I’m a tough girl and I can take it. The reality is that the negative attention I got is a fraction of what a person of color gets in our world today. Non-white people have fought this same fight for centuries before me and what they were afraid of was death. I will be okay with some people not liking me. I am not fragile. I am strong and I can learn and I can adapt. What kind of limp noodle type of inner will would one have to have to give up after one mediocre try?
I learned from Noel Ignatiev that Whiteness is a club, not a culture. People want to do anything they can to make sure you do not break the rules of the club nor choose to leave it. They will rewrite the rules of it around you. They will pull ICE or the police on you and intimidate those around you by using you as an example (the first people openly killed by ICE were all White protestors). And most of all, they will shame you. What I saw in my comments is that first they will try to act like they understand you so you see that the club is actually a nice place. And when you push back, they will get angry at you and try to embarrass you. They are betting on you backing down with your tail between your legs and hopping right back in the club. A lot of people will. A lot of people will do an acceptable bare minimum and leave one foot in and one foot out.
No.
I don’t want to be in the stupid club.
I am not going to be in the stupid club.
And the task is not to let anybodystop me. Nobody can shame me back in. Nobody can manipulate me.
And that will make people uncomfortable because you are supposed to want to be in the club. You are supposed to let out a big sigh and think, “Well, I did the best I could. What am I supposed to do?” Deep down, you’re meant to breathe a sigh of relief because luckily that means you don’t have to be uncomfortable anymore.
I will be uncomfortable every single day and make everybody else equally uncomfortable. So what now? What if that club wasn’t as tight as you thought? You want me to stop now? What if I come back even more adamant? What will you do about that then? What if I tell you that none of this is even real then? That it’s all completely fake? There is not even White culture in the first place? That no rule you could make would ever encompass all the people you’re trying to fit inside of it? There’s no real science to it at all?
Refusing to step back in is how you dismantle the club. Because people see that inaction and silence is not a requirement of light-skinned existence. It is a choice we make everyday because of our laziness and selfishness. That’s the real truth.
It showed me that you could be as nice and as understanding as you can be and it won’t make the wrong people listen, and that taught me that being appeasing isn’t the way to make a change.
After this video I would go onto make a close read of “The Point Is Not To Interpret It But to Abolish It” by Noel Ignatiev. I made it as a direct result of comments I was still getting from that video because it taught me how to be resilient with intentionality and why that’s important. I thought maybe the ideas in the video were a bit too radical of a thought. But in this era particularly, we are sold a lie which is that appeasing those with most societal power through being moderate enough to win them over will make change happen. And that’s why we’re here right now.
I remember when people were expressing upset at Bernie Sanders around the time of Trump’s election. They said it was partially his fault that Trump had won because he pushed more people to the left and separated out the Democratic party, rather than letting someone more moderate do the talking. They forget that of all the politicians on the podium that year, he was the only one pulling in some interest from the most hard right individuals on Trump’s base. If giving people the option for more creates interest and a wave of something new, so be it. Nobody owes you votes just because of who they are supposed to think you are, and if they want more, they want more. We do not get anywhere in life without people who will push us forward. He paved the way for people like Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani who is now doing amazing work on a slightly smaller but still important and widely visible scale — because people were exposed to those ideas. Because of Sanders, there was less stigma around phrases like “Democratic Socialist” and he could go off and do even more for people with more unified support than I’ve ever seen for a moderate Democrat.
We are often convinced that moving forward means appeasing people and giving them a little light pat forward, just moving forward millimetre by milimeter. That is not how you make change happen. That is how you go leave space for both sides to go further right and oscillate within a small surface area without much movement.
Leftists spaces are dripping with the idea that to move forward socially and economically, what we need to do is cater to the needs of the innocent White lower class and if we’re nice enough to them, they will catch on and pass it down to the “lesser” struggles. It’s the “trickle-down economics” of political theory. We shouldn’t “alienate them” through conversations about racism. We shouldn’t “distract” from the point by catering to the needs of people of color. We shouldn’t say what needs to be said. If the trickle-down effect didn’t work in the U.S. economy, why would it work for our structural oppressions?
What we should be doing is starting with the most intense pain in our society and working our way up in the most intersectional possible way. People of color are suffering from class warfare too. Nobody will change until we create an environment where change is necessary and that will not come from White people coddling the feelings of other White people until they learn to be nice. Take it from me. You just have to rip the bandaid past a certain point. They will be fine. The White lower class are not the ones at risk from more “radical” antiracism, and Leftists, please let’s stop pretending they are.
There is not going to be a point in the story when lower and middle class Whites are “liberated” enough from their class struggles to start being nice to minorities. While race does assist the upper class in keep the lower class separated and fighting a smaller fight, lower class White people are not being “manipulated” into being racist. That’s a very kind imagination we White liberals superimpose onto racists because of our proximity to them. What is actually happening is they are having their racism manipulated, which is a different thing. They stay racist because they benefit and our lukewarm attempts to dismantle White supremacy give them the go-ahead. In fact, Noel Ignatiev, who I referenced earlier, was an active member of the Communist Party in the U.S. He worked for 20 years in a Gary, Indiana steel mill and in the manufacturing of farming equipment and electrical components. He was a lower class White man. He set out to organize and to have conversations with other people in his environment about how they as lower class people could mobilize and fight for their advancement. What he found in his time doing so was that White chauvinism was the exact thing keeping the White lower class from gaining class consciousness and joining the fight. Their racism gave them an exit route from sitting with the reality of their circumstances, because they could dump the blame on non-White people. He committed the rest of his life to staunch abolitionism, even writing his dissertation, “How The Irish Became White” at Harvard in later life. He details his journey trying to mobilize the working class in his collection of essays, “Treason to the White Race is Loyalty to Humanity”.
What he discovered from decades of work is that we need to create discomfort. All the reading and information sharing in the world will not do half the work being uncomfortable will do, just as all the reading in the world was not going to teach me half as much as getting my hands dirty would do. It is an illusion on our end that true class consciousness can exist without anti-racist work and that racists will one day decide to be kind. They will not. Racism is not that simple. It’s deeply imbedded in our systems and in our culture. It will not go away without our intentional work.
We need to be more active and say what needs to be said. We need to show that we will not stand with them and they cannot include us in their club even a little bit. We need to create a world where light-skinned people are not all on the same team when it comes to racism. We need to break the rules. We need to stop putting ourselves first. We have to stop making space for fragility. We need to make other White people uncomfortable. Anything else would be adhering to the rules of Whiteness, even if we are against it. We would be maintaining the conditions of racism and selfishly putting our needs and our perception of liberation first. There is no such thing as “trickle-down liberation”. Anything trickle-down is oppressors putting themselves first to maintain oppression.
The problem with the idea that we shouldn’t “alienate” the White lower class through more passionate anti-racism is that it also strips lower and middle class White people of their agency, condescends them, and diminishes our own personal responsibility in the matter. The lower class is not stupid. They can be oppressive too in their own context. As much as White liberals will parrot the “color blind” idea that race is just a distraction from class struggles, the reality is that race is a massive part of how we move through the world and it’s not a simple “distraction”. It is a harsh reality we are privileged to not experience and are often blind to in its subtler manifestations because of our privilege. It exists in the way we speak to each other, the things we learn in school, and honestly even in White liberals’ inner perception of who will lead a “revolution” and who will take charge of society afterwards. It is not just a distraction. People are not just tricked into being racist. Many will be so gleefully and pass on a lot of harm because it brings them pleasure or makes them feel connected to the culture of their community. They aren’t just “coping”. People of color have often expressed their frustrations at the way we perceive White people as innocent no matter what. The truth is that we do the same thing with how we coddle the White lower class and change our narratives with their inability to cope with antiracism at the center. We speak about grown men as if they are simply unable to understand or that they would feel too unheard or misrepresented. Trust, I learned in this video that they understand just fine. Sometimes, feeling “misrepresented” can be a manipulation tactic to avoid dealing with racism too that we make space for and validate for the sake of moving our own ideas forward.
The idea that the lower class cannot understand or deal with more demanding antiracist tactics also attributes a certain “inherent” quality to the lower class which is untrue. The lower class is not inherently illiterate, nor conservative. Many White lower class people grew up in close proximity to people of color and are not immersed in the idea that non-White people are hindering them or dangerous or bad. In fact, quite the opposite. So the problem is not that the lower and middle class are being “manipulated” into racism. The problem is that we have created a culture that allows White people to be soothed and avoid the discomfort of their circumstances by imposing their irritations and anxieties on non-White people. That is not manipulation. That is privilege.
If you strongly feel that this privilege is what is stopping the White lower class from becoming cognisant of their circumstances, the solution is not to coddle them, shield them, or validate them until they gain class consciousness. The solution is to become staunchly anti-racist until no such shield exists. Racism does not need to exist in our culture. We have the power to eradicate it through dedication and committing to our own personal growth. It comes first because without eradicating that privilege, there will be no class consciousness. There will always be a hierarchy where a group of people sees themselves as being above another. If you haven’t eradicated racist thinking, it will not magically go away in a world without class hierarchies.
As long as we refuse to handle it and we continue to walk on eggshells, we are continuing the conditions that encourage White fragility. We can meet the needs of all lower class people through politics now and create policies that are intersectionally useful while also not giving up on structural racism. White supremacy is a secondary oppressive structure alongside class oppression. White people can also leverage that institutional power to force politicians away from navigating and handling the needs of people of color by forcing their needs to be met first and foremost and making policies that support lower class people of color taboo. We cannot give up on them because an oppressive force is trying to unify away and leverage their power, knowing that we will always put their fragility first. Creating a situation where we discard the needs of people of color to survive is an oppressive tactic too, not just a reaction of innocent emotional survival as we often treat it.
We cannot keep implying even a little bit that racism is in any way emotionally justified because of class conditions. Racism is not okay in any circumstance ever. Only us White people would ever think something like that. Racism is not a “normal” response to suffering from class conditions. It is a historical relic of slavery and colonialism. Our society leaves racism open as a viable option and some people have the privilege of taking it when the times comes and they are offered it. It is not a privilege People of Color have in response to their class conditions. What makes it psychologically “normal” for lower class White people to do it? Who benefits when we create discourse that treats it that way, and give up more truthful lines of thinking to make room for it?
And for those who say, “We can’t be harsh. They don’t want to feel like something like that is their fault. It makes them feel implicated and guilty and they’ll stop listening”. Okay then, it’s not their fault. It’s your fault. What have you done today? How much have you unpacked inside? How are you moving through the world? Are you listening? Are you taking responsibility? Are you being more active? Are you taking up the fight as yours? Or are you ignoring, getting irritated when people of color try to bring up their pain, and getting mad at them for trying to fight for their fight? Are you fighting for a liberal world which meets every White need and calling it a day? Sure, you take the blame for them, if they can’t take it. It's your responsibility now. Unlike the poor, destitute, illiterate White lower class you have painted a picture of, you, oh holy college educated White liberal, can read just fine. You higher consciousness upper middle class individuals have plenty of money for a book. You’re not slaving away in the prairies or peeing in a cup in an Amazon warehouse. You’re not the one being supposedly manipulated. So you’re absolutely right. Racism still exists not because of them but because of you who has no excuse and yet will stop at nothing to hamper the attempts of your community members of color from getting the freedom and respect they deserve. Look the powerlessness you create for us, blaming “the elites” for everything and you for absolutely nothing. There’s nothing you can do, right? Racism is all their fault.
It feels bad to have a finger pointed at you too. Class does not change that. But if we can’t even be a good example of how to handle that gracefully, then we are the problem. The alternative is to close that hand up into a fist and force the pointer to clench it at their side forever. We’ve done plenty of that over time and reacted with surprise when that fist wants to take some action. Would you rather a finger or a fist? That’s your choice.
One the other hand, it taught me a lot about the idea that we just need to be “moderate” to win people’s favour rather than jumping off the deep end and just saying what needs to be said in its full truth. “Moderate” is not what we have to be to survive this political era. We don’t all need to just “dial back our needs” until the White people who voted for Trump in mass, who weren’t sure it was better to have a fascist or a moderate, are happy enough with us again to not vote for him.
That is what got us here in the first place. The world does not belong to this population alone. Politics should not be a constant game of keeping a White audience appeased. That is a sad mentality to expect of the American public. There’s been a massive expectation from the Democratic Party for us to stop moving left and expecting more from them until the Trump era is over. The Trump era will not end that way and it’s quite naive to assume that doing the same thing they’ve done for years and not making any shift in their general strategy will somehow produce new results by magic.
We don’t have we to do whatever this back-and-forth group wants and suppress our desires for more until “they’re okay with it” and things go “back to normal”. “Normal” for the Democratic party is a pipeline right back to this spot. It is a political groundhog day we will circle over and over again, which is perfectly fine for people with the money and circumstances to run away from it and survive it. “Going back to normal” is how you keep a shaky system. It is not how you dismantle it. It is not how you get to the root of it. Moderate politics claims to appease everyone, meet everyone’s needs, and in the meantime, meets nobody’s needs — especially not those of the lower class. That’s why they will seek somebody out who will. It’s going to be a fascist who makes people feel heard while robbing them blind underneath the surface or somebody like Bernie or Mamdani or any of the number of unique, truthful, and charismatic politicians out there trying to do good work for the people. It’s not going to be someone aiming for “normal”. The only people benefit from “normal” are other upper-middle and upper-class moderates who are not in the same dire need as the rest of us.
We have nothing to lose and everything to gain from dismantling race, a structure so deeply intertwined with class structures in the U.S. particularly. It cannot get any worse than where we are now in terms of a wealth gap. Your “revolution” or political movement will not be ruined by antiracism, I promise you. It is your fight too. Our world can get drastically better if we all commit to dismantling from the root in our mind to the trunk and leaves in the government.
Doing the work is about getting people who are willing to listen a bit closer to where things need to be.
Learning about abolitionism taught me a lot. In the final days of slavery, a lot of people in the South were for slavery, and there were a lot of people in the North who weren’t particularly for slavery. Did they go out of their way for it? Take a wild guess.
No… they didn’t like it but they weren’t Black. They weren’t going to do the most for it. They silently dissaproved and went about their day.
It took some people who were massively against it who went out of their way to create a fracture in how that group of people thought about it. And that energy snowballed until a country economically dependent on slavery was able to make it illegal within a relatively short period
Most people are just mirroring the community around them. They will accept anything as long as the people around them are doing it. They will go along with whatever the status quo is. They don’t actually care that much.
We’ve seen this plenty in the media. The minute the world started leaning more right, companies started capitalizing on it and leaning more right. Get the world more left, better believe they’ll make advertisements capitalizing on the left. A lot of people do not have a strong opinions or a strong set of morals, unfortunately. They are just doing what they will profit from. They do not care what it is.
If we make a world that is staunchly against racism, people will adjust to their new status quo over time. A lot of ideas that seemed pretty out there to one era are now the place we’re in today. Doesn’t mean things move perfectly. We’re always fighting our own lingering biases. But the status quo can change. At one point in time, the racists were actively spitting at people in the streets and harassing them out of stores. These days, they won’t even outwardly admit to racism. They’ll just make weird comments about “you people”. It’s a change. And it can get bigger. We can see many parts of how we operate today as backwards and nonsensical. We can move the average person away from it.
That doesn’t require getting everyone in on it. And I learned that it doesn’t actually require “changing racists’ minds”. They don’t want to change them. But we can push the status quo forward by a lot amongst those of us who want to listen. We can raise the standard. And then the bottom of the barrel has to elevate in accordance because you change what the average person sees as an acceptable normal. Going back to the Bernie situation, that is the importance of openly pushing forward. That’s the point of saying it even when you feel a touch too far ahead of the norm. It becomes the norm through repetition. Doesn’t mean everyone opposed will be happy about it. Progress is back and forth. But when you oscillate back up again, you’re at a higher place than you started. We would get nowhere without it, I’ll say it again. It’s important. We do not move forward by cowering away and appeasing people.
There’s no such thing as an idea that is “too radical” that is rooted in kindness, truth, and respect. Eventually, people accept it and we are shocked to look back and think it could have ever been different.
On the other hand, us White liberals spend a lot of time to convince people staunchly opposed to our ideas to “get there”. Let’s turn around. There are countless people of color already there, already fighting that fight who we actively impede and tell to quiet down so that “our people” wont’t be bothered by the noise. We push their perspective off to the side, labelling it alternative. If you won’t see your fellow comrades as “your people”, that’s the issue right there. We actively avoiding growing in numbers and power because we are so worried about “our people”. The sad truth is that many of them are just not there and are not at all interested in being there right now, as much as they should be. It doesn’t mean we stop communicating with them nor that we stop believing in them. But why are we splitting our fight up into pieces and ignoring the countless people that have never had the privilege of ignoring the truth of their circumstances? Why are we convinced that what they are doing is radically different from us? Let’s speak less and listen more. Can you name a Black communist whose work you truly know well? A non-European socialist you can cite from front to back? These are not an alternative opinion. These are the real truth through eyes we have been determined not to look through because we don’t want to feel implicated or add to our workload.
I learned through this video to take the past of least resistance to make the most change, not jump headfirst into a place that is not prepared to listen to your voice. We often spend so much time trying not to “isolate” the voices that don’t want to be there, that we isolate the voices that are already there, already want to connect, already want to do more together.
Conclusions
These are the big lessons I learned from making this video and sitting with it over the last year. If I didn’t think these lessons were important, I would have just taken it down because it wasn’t my favorite video but I’ve kept it up as a symbol of the journey I took and how that shaped the way I thought and communicated moving forward.