Read on Twitter
@theashleyray, Don’t speak over or on behalf of an entire group without truly engaging or knowing what’s at stake.
When Kim K and cursory tweets are some people’s only exposure to you, the stakes are pretty high. https://twitter.com/theashleyray/status/1287026619861929987
When Kim K and cursory tweets are some people’s only exposure to you, the stakes are pretty high. https://twitter.com/theashleyray/status/1287026619861929987
It’s disheartening and painful to feel silenced when erasure and invisibility are at the core of your people’s historical and current oppression.
If everyone from said group is telling you that something feels wrong, then that’s probably a good sign that you’ve done some damage and should’ve chosen your words better.
Lately, we’ve been having many conversations about race, anti-blackness, and privilege in our community and the ways Armenians can use their collective privileges to uplift and support Black people around the world. There were even a few #BLM protest in Armenia 
The story of Armenian racialization did not end in 1925. Today, there is a movement of SWANA (South West Asian/North African) people attempting to decenter whiteness & resist the colonial, Eurocentric, & Orientalist logics that continue to oppress us in Tr*ump’s America, post-911
We also can’t ignore the geopolitical reality that US imperialist forces continue to wreak havoc in and be invested in the destruction of countries we consider home.
Let’s continue these conversations. Instead of speaking about race as static and final, let’s talk more about the many ways that our racial categories confine us and fail to encompass our full selves, flattening the depths of our diverse and multilayered realities.
Let’s talk more about how the white supremacist US settler state necessitates the participation of immigrant groups in systems of Black and Native dispossession via the pursuit of national citizenship.
Let’s discuss how whiteness manifests in toxic ways and is harmful to us all—but ESPECIALLY to Black people, whose historical and ongoing oppression laid the foundations for everyone else’s freedom and who continue to be experience racial terror globally every day.
In the words of Janice Okoomian, “Border positionality has the potential to make powerful antiracist interventions by disrupting the stability of white identity.”
In solidarity with BIPOCs, Armenians and other liminal minorities have the radical potential to denaturalize and challenge the construct of whiteness collectively.
Let’s have more conversations about how we can forge coalitions based on our similarities and build bridges across our differences. Let’s continue view our struggles in relation to one another.
And finally, what got us here in the first place: Let’s make sure to be more careful about what we say and how we say it. Context and specificity are crucial to relational understandings of race. Language matters.
We can acknowledge and take accountability for the harms done, use the privileges Armenians gained through legal whiteness to uplift others, AND actively work to transform the language we use to name ourselves.
