chapotraphouse

Depending on where you are in the world, changes the definition of Leftist... and Progressive isn't really much of a coherent thing outside of incrementalism and reformism.

Just from wallowing in the USA liberal/progressive/lefty spaces on the internet for the last 20+ years, most of us white folks use Leftist/Progressive as a very shallow and vague descriptor/aesthetic label. So when somebody says they are "Progressive" it means one thing to them and can mean something else entirely different to you. Simplest example I can think of is when a liberal/BlueMAGA/Democratic Party cheerleader labels themself as Socialist because they believe in a not for profit healthcare system. The only definition of Socialist they've ever learned is "when the government does something" instead of "the workers own the means of production and the profits, if any, are spent keeping society functioning instead of being siphoned off to make a few people disgustingly wealthy at the expense of everybody else.

Like... it would shock me in my younger more liberal days when a woman would repeat a misogynist talking point or when a gay man would say something homophobic about a gay woman and in both cases they were being serious. It would short circuit my brain a bit because, I had fallen into the default state of "You're of minority group X in a society that shits on minority group X, of course you'd be aware of it and against it" and that not always being true.

So having the privileges of "whiteness" drastically changes the boundaries of what the words "Leftist" and "Progressive" mean. Until you've felt out what those ideas mean to another person, you are probably more right than wrong in viewing us whites with skepticism until our actions have shown you what those terms actually mean.