Non-Black People of Colour, Anti-Blackness, Social Media

I find the type of conversation that I allude to in the tweets above to be quite unbearable and at times triggering. The same oppression supposedly being deconstructed (anti-Blackness) is shaped by some non-Black people of colour via anti-Black conceptions (i.e. “monoracial privilege,” “White/Black binary”) erasure through co-opting/generalizations, stereotypes, and objectification through exclusion (i.e. how it’s always someone non-Black praised for discourse on anti-Blackness). It’s framed as if non-Black people are experts on anti-Blackness…because they engage in anti-Black racism and are “checking” themselves publicly. It feels Tim Wise-esque. And then I don’t see the same interrogation of White supremacy and colourism within their own races and cultures, two things which partially (not totally; or that would mean all people of colour experience anti-Blackness; they don’t) impact anti-Blackness.

It’s a source of anxiety for me. It’s why though I experience it online all day and offline from non-Black people of colour, I still do not write about it as much.

Some non-Black people of colour need to work through some things before publicly tweeting what they think helps but is in fact incredibly anti-Black and harmful as hell. It honestly makes me think of when Whites plaster my comments section with racist things and then state how they are “different” from the racists who do those things that they mentioned, and they do so without regard to how I may feel about the first part. And though admittedly these conversations on anti-Blackness by non-Black people of colour aren’t always occurring in my personal space (i.e. not in Twitter mentions or blog comments in the way so many Whites colonize) so the space violation isn’t always there, when I see these massive public conversations, I still feel just as lousy.

I really cannot take these conversations at all, especially when it feels as if Black people are spoken of as objects and especially in that while Twitter seems large, the groups who discuss these things are not as large. It’s hard to avoid this content at times even with all the tweet mute/filtering in the world. I know people have to work through the things they need to learn on the topic but I would assume that the work would come before being positioned as thought leaders on this. I mean really basic stuff like knowing Black and White people do not share equal political power–solely because Whites choose to make Blackness hyper-visible and degrade Black life as completely antithetical to Whiteness–should be something known before even daring to articulate on this topic as a thinker. And literally anyone non-Black who speaks of anti-Blackness will be considered accurate long before us who live with it are.

Some non-Black people of colour are making the notion of “solidarity” as useful as Whites and the notion of “allies,” which is to say useless. Sadly. It’s not a case of total myopia or anything like that on my part, but honestly lately it seems like a case of self-care for me to avoid many of these conversations.