DEAR WHITE PEOPLE
let's have a chat, shall we?
It’s 2025, which means that your tiring, neoliberal “woke-ness” isn’t gonna cut it anymore.
I don’t care how many friends of color you have, how much you’ve participated on your company’s DEI committee, or whether you think Donald Trump is a complete asshat (which he 1000% is).
Claiming to be “anti-racist” whilst profiting off the labor and energy of marginalized community members is just problematic. Yes, racism is a social construct. Unfortunately, it is one of the most grueling, barbaric, and dehumanizing forms of genocide to ever exist in history.
Instead of striving to be “anti-racist”, how about working to decolonize your mind?
I am a second-generation cisgender Asian American femme, with socioeconomic mobility from lower-class to lower middle-class. I have a Bachelor’s degree and am working on finishing my Master’s. My parents raised me with scarcity drilled into my head, which I still carry with me today. Despite the majority of my upbringing being marked by complex and historical trauma, I have the privilege to choose to confront it—and also help others confront theirs.
This is not lost on me, and as a non-Black person of color with intersectional privileges, I write this to myself as much as I write to you.
Moral of the story: we cannot build a united front of radical leaders and workers without you.
This means that you must be prepared when the time comes. That is, now.
In what ways have you analyzed your positionality in modern society?
How are you challenging your implicit biases?
Who are you reading and what are you consuming?
What do you believe to be true about the future our world is headed towards? What do you believe to be false?
What are you doing to ready yourself to combat injustice and oppression?
I get it, every white person has to start somewhere. There would be no socially-conscious white allies without the first white abolitionist to have rebuked slavery.
AmeriKKKA is predicated on a longstanding run with violence and control. Turtle Island, this precious land mass that we stole, belonged originally to the hundreds of thousands of Indigenous and Native tribes that still exist today. Not only has their tradition and wisdom continued to inform the way we live, but they have taught us far more insight about the state of our humanity than any stuffy academic course. And they never fucking owed that to us.
Let me be clear: healing is only possible within relationship.
Without others, we are relegated to the insufferable void of our own selfish insanity, spinning in circles and chasing our own tails. Pretty soon, we will likely be consumed by pitiful tunnel vision and narrow-mindedness.
Although there are many thinkers, scholars, and writers who claim that “identity politics” are divisive and unnecessary, I would argue that it is instead “identity reductionism” that draws lines of oppression between me and you. Flattening the original meaning is quite frankly just misogynoir, as evidenced below.
“We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else's oppression.”
—Combahee River Collective Statement
The CRC is one powerful example of a group that has mastered the art of addressing intersectionality: their core beliefs as an organization are rooted in the fight for collective liberation from class, race, and sex oppression. Existing as a woman or femme-identifying person cannot be divorced from existing as a Black woman, let alone a poor Black woman.
There are countless other exemplar revolutionaries who show us that these concepts are not new to the 21st century (the Black Panthers, the Chicano Movement, the American Indian Movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, etc.) nor are they as easy to dismantle as many of you white folk like to think.
I have white people in my life whom I love dearly. They are some of my longest friendships, and I have grown tremendously with their support and care for me throughout the years. Our relationships cannot be replicated elsewhere, AND I say this knowing full well that it took multiple hard conversations, trust, and vulnerability to build said relationships.
I know I speak for many people when I say I’m tired, grandpa. This battle against settler-colonial violence is uphill, sweaty, and hard as fuck.
So, white people, here is my parting call to action: gather your fellow whites (your weird uncle, your siblings, your moderate parents, your childhood besties) and go be in community together. Why are you so afraid to talk to each other?
Dream. Brainstorm. Cry. Rage. Storytell. Fight.
We need each other, earthside. We are nothing without community.
Our ancestors did not leave legacies for us to squander ours.
Thank you for sharing this. I had no idea about the Turtle Island creation story. I am now prompted to make sure I read more indigenous voices and center them in my conversations with others.