When you grow up white in America, there’s so much that you have to deprogram from your brain before you can even move left. I had some really shitty views as a kid and I know I held to those just because it was coconut tree in which I fell out of. And beyond that, so much of society is geared towards privileging whiteness, you have to actively work to break out of it.

That said, I am grateful for people in my life who have called me out of stuff and have helped me be better. This is a reminder to all the white folks, if you get called out on something… apologize, understand - actually understand - where you went wrong, and be better.

Because that’s how it keeps going. I have tried time and time again to ignore the little danger signs from White people and kept getting burned by some, even by self-professed leftists. Not by all, of course, but by enough to be wary. It’s unpleasant; this hypervigilance around White people is a real burden and I wish it hadn’t been forcibly inflicted on me, but that’s what living in a White Supremacist society does.

I find it helpful to differentiate between “White” and “white” people.
Capital-W “White” means the person exhibits a lot of the toxic settler-colonial, imperialist, and casually racist behaviors that Amerikkkan society perpetuates.

Lower-case w “white” means the person has skin tones that make them look like the Capital W’s but they don’t do that shit. They’re actively antiracist, they’re vigilant and purge any trace of white supremacy from themself, they’re learning, and they support people of color in our fight against white supremacist fascism.

It’s not about skin color, and it’s not even essential to who they are – White people who rehabilitate themselves can become white people, that is, people whose skin is light but aren’t being toxic or shitty in any way.

A pretty basic litmus test I’ve found is checking how they feel about American Imperialism. If I say, “Joe Biden belongs in prison for what he did to Iraq” and they agree, then they probably understand on a visceral level that brown people are people. If they argue, that tells me they don’t actually value our lives – because it is fundamentally impossible to care about nonWhite lives and also be ok with any of these genocidal fucks.

My friend you fucking know why, it’s the same reason why I don’t trust self-proclaimed “progressive/leftist whites” until they prove themselves also, and it’s also the reason why I tend to go out of my way to prove myself early on too. Like, I have touched grass and I have been to predominantly white activist spaces, I have seen white bullshit and I have done white bullshit. I have learned through all practical experience not to trust whites for even a second, especially not those who refers to whites as a “”“we”“” or in any way identify with whiteness, as if “white” is an actual meaningful group identity rather than a fucking Indiana Jones sandbag of a “”“culture”“” whose continued existence is inherently destructive and antithetical to decolonization, anti-imperialism, Black liberation, and socialism.

You do not have to ask “why” you lack an ability to trust whites, you are in fact very wise to do so. It is not something you should feel guilty about, as if you’re being racist by “judging books by their covers”, it is in fact whites who are racist and it is on whites to prove themselves to you.

because white people can’t be trusted, simple as

This is how I feel about French people, unless they’ve explicitly clarified that they’ve read works by anti-colonial writers and have read the history of their evil empire and recognize the current imperialism of it today, they’re a Nazi in my eyes.