chapotraphouse

My general rule is if I don’t feel like I could hand them a gun if something popped off then the question really answers itself.

That's fair, talk is cheap

The only white people i trust are David Gilbert, Judy Clark, and the United Freedom Front people.

I’ve also met plenty of opportunistic and full of shit non-white activists. Just FYI. don’t get conned.

But your instincts are correct. Most white people are not to be trusted to varying degrees.

Honestly this but cis people. Honestly this but trans/nb people that can't easily hide it. I don't trust anyone fully unless they have no choice in the matter but to fight back or die. I bet most of the people here would sit back as Trans people got exterminated if it came to it. Would I fight and die for a minority I'm not a part of? I would like to think so, but when the time to die actually comes that's gonna be fuckin' scary and I bet a lot of us won't pass that test, so POC not fully trusting white people like me makes a lot of sense even if it feels bad.

Because you damn well should distrust fucking crackers

I've congregated with white self proclaimed leftist/socialists who are aware of their "privilege" but still have weird views about "bad" neighbors that borderlines into fear. How white people talk about crime or "bad" areas is my litmus test.

I’m going to suggest a new thing called Terminal White Person Syndrome (TWPS) that’s more common among white people. Interpret that how you will.

Prescient

You should be distrustful of anyone and everyone. As there are plenty of POC~~feds~~ grifters that are performative and do libshit. So…yeah.

I am so glad I dont live in a country like the US where skin colour is apparently core to your identity.

I fully relate even though i'm white. I listen to my PoC and immigrant friends, and i know how whiteys talk when nobody listens, and it's just gross to see what's going on once you start to question all the racism that's normalized. I obviously lack the direct experience of being at the business end of racialized opression, but as a trans person, i also see way too much performative support falter once it causes the tiniest bit of controversy to be on my side, and as a woman i've seen way too often how even hardcore leftist orgs let misogyny fly, including protection for people who've committed SV and turning them into "missing stairs" that keep endangering people in that community because nobody removes them from their position. Wouldn't bring that up in a conversation about race normally, i'm not doing this to center my experience here, not equating anything either, just saying that there's paralells that make me distrustful of certain lib and leftist people as well.

There's a fine line between caution and paranoia, ofc, i find that it takes a toll on you when you don't check in on yourself once in a while and question your MO, but at its core it's a necessary survival strategy to watch out who you can trust.

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.

Not saying the people in here who wouldn't trust me immediately are wrong to do so but it does make me sad because frankly I am extremely cool.

I have erased like an entire essay in this post three times now, I guess I really don't know what to say but I feel there is some worth in making it known that hidden away in strange places there are sometimes whites to be found who have done the reading (and drugs!) to be an ally, even if it means being an ally from a distance

I know this is you venting, but it's because they're white, and in this racist settler colonial society, whiteness always comes first regardless of their professed ideology or whether they belong in any other marginalized community. A white fascist cishet man and a white socialist trans woman are just two white people when push comes to shove. I suspect you found this out the hard way.

I only trust white people who either:

1. Have biracial kids with a POC partner (although they're plenty of white fetishists and some biracial pairings like white dudes with Asian chicks are so filled with fetishists that I no longer find this reliable)

2. Exclusively hang out with POC as the token whitey

If a white person does both, then there's a good chance their anti-racist views are genuine.

Nah, that's pretty normal.

Am I white? Yes. Am I a leftist? Yes. Am I trustworthy? Hell no!!