Read on Twitter
Have I ever tweeted about how I feel like light-skinned asian men like me do have a specific responsibility to become involved in Black and brown issues because we occupy sort of a unique space between whiteness and everything whiteness decides to summarily exclude
Because I am a poc but not darker, white people (mostly left-of-center whites) have always seemed to feel comfortable enough around me to share their actual thoughts on Black and brown people, and... it doesn't quite fit the broad left-right narrative here
Which means that a lot of times we can match up actual background intent to the experiences Black and brown people have with nominally "anti-racist" whites, and 99.9% of the time, we're able to tell other poc: yes, that person is very racist in private, so you're not imagining it
None of this means that we have the right to speak over Black and brown people, which is where some well-intentioned light-skinned asian folks go wrong, almost certainly including myself at multiple points
It's admittedly difficult to draw that line because solidarity isn't conspicuously modeled that often, but there is also massive anti-Blackness and colorism among asian folks generally so that's a factor as well of course
I think the distinction is important but I also think it's very, very difficult to learn it in public, which might be stopping some folks. A tip for that: talk to your friends about it, privately and/or offline altogether, because you'll never be conscious enough to be perfect
I don't want to let anyone off the hook who shouldn't be, but I guess the point is the same thing I talked about in Portland: you do have to find a way to talk about it, and it's possible to formulate safe enough spaces to do so without demanding labor
But that's all really personal, so I can't tell anyone how to do it, really
I've probably never tweeted about this because I get very self-conscious about being seen as telling people what to do. Who am I to say? The answer is honestly nobody, but as with all advice I give, this isn't about control but better understanding where you might personally be
To be experiencing massive bewilderment and confusion as, for example, a non-Black poc learning about how you can very much still be anti-Black, is a human response, I think, but we communicate a lot on here like no one goes through it
Just... you don't have to process it in public. Not because "people are mean," but because of context collapse, and some asian men on here have very obviously taken that response as an excuse to bury deeper into various bigotry, anti-Blackness being an "easy" one
You do often have to learn to hold yourself accountable before you understand what it actually means when others publicly try to hold you accountable, so this isn't an argument for hiding your issues, it's an argument for giving your activism depth beyond conspicuousness
