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In 2020 there's still a near-total void on the topic of how poc felt and feel about the whites of this country post-2016 election night
I know that's a strong statement, and those tend to be untrue because they overreach a bit, but I can only think of pieces that explore what poc think of Trump or Trump voters, not how our perceptions of white people in general have been impacted in four years
That's actually incredibly essential to understanding anything about the politics of the past four years at all, but you can't really do that kind of reporting, for a lot of reasons that I'll just bundle up and call racial pragmatism
Some very prominent journalists of color have shifted into what people disingenuously call "activist journalism" (it's really just journalism without the automatic authoritarian reference) and that has something to do, imo, with extraordinary circumstances
To a lot of white people, those circumstances are solely the chaos that this administration creates, but I'd also posit that there's an element of "this is pushing norms a bit, but if you're going to elect a man like this, I need to be able to play with the Hallin spheres"
(That's a term of art; this thread from a while ago gets into it) https://twitter.com/nototally/status/908910081835622400
I don't like putting it this way for a few reasons, but I keep thinking of it as whites breaking the contract on that night. It isn't to say that overt bigotry in government wasn't a problem until then, but among poc I've felt the vague vibe of feeling betrayed by someone
And whether or not that's actually true isn't the point. We could talk all night about what they "promised us" and what they didn't, that's all relevant perhaps but not to this specific concept. That vague feeling still exists regardless of how you choose to intellectualize it
And even if you knew, even if you were really really cynical and saw it coming, the fact that it happened alone is enough to make you feel... something. Betrayal might not even be the right word, descriptively. But there's a thing there
It's like being in a relationship, though. When trust is tested, sometimes one or both or all partners can't just walk away from it and forget it happened, it's just there and it'll ruin you eventually but no one knows when
I think white people feel like if Trump loses this time it'll be a reversal of 2016, like the result alone will be the reparations. But a lot of us are never going to look at white strangers the same ever again, no matter what happens on Tuesday
And I don't think they're ready for that, I don't think they're going to be willing to accept it. Which would mean that the resentment of white america would be even more bipartisan than it already is, and that's an unpleasant thought
Imagine being through all of this and then realizing that white america learned functionally nothing. The "good ones" waited until the 11th hour to even say BLM, like a month ago, and even then that was mostly pretense to discourage protests, which are "bad for Biden"
It's almost impressive how much they don't care, and therefore how bad it'll be if they think they solved the problem and we're still here saying uh lol you did not
My feed is a living example of what it's like when you aren't sufficiently worshipful of white allies. That, on a larger and more consistent scale, is just a shitty thing to be having to prepare for rn
Okay, but to wrap it up, let's go all the way back to the first tweet. The unprepared whites are going to be mad, but there's a reason they're unprepared, right? The fact that you can't report on how poc feel about white people in this country
It's an interesting asymmetry, because if you turn on cable news or visit a news site, it's wall-to-wall what white people think of us, of movements involving our communities, how they think we plan to vote
What white people think of poc is "politics" whereas what we think of them is "divisive," "racist." Only media orgs that cater to poc ever report the latter, which feels to me like an acknowledgement of how unreasonable and violent whites get when they hear us talk about them
The absolute lack of even surface curiosity or abject fear about reporting what we see and think about their largest consumer demos, across the political news spectrum, should be alarming, but it's just how it is. Which is funny
By the way: if you want to make a list of reasons why you can't report on what poc think of white people, a very significant but often overlooked one is what's known as the white default
The white default exists everywhere but in news it's easy to spot: usages of "people" when you're really talking specifically about white people is a big one. Here's one from the real world that's that basic theme but a little less obvious https://twitter.com/nototally/status/1084573114715987968
The white default is so widespread and normalized that when white people are confronted with the word "white" before "people," they lose their shit. They are grown adults who were not pointed out by race hundreds of times before they even learned to speak
But what are you going to do, write a headline that says "Here's what people of color think about people"? Because you know if you put "white people" up front you're just asking for a war over word choice with folks who didn't read the article anyway
The reflexive rage white people have about being pointed out in the way they constantly point other people out is an admission that to be racialized at all is to be targeted, which is always bad unless the government, cops, and population majority are all on your side
The fact that white people can't handle being called white plays a significant role in the subsequent fact that we are never asked what we think about the people who manage nearly every sanctioned bit of our existence here, isn't that some shit
