A lot of your favorite leftist/radical/abolitionist accounts are actually extremely mean and quite harmful.

And we’re all capable of causing harm, so that’s not what bothers me. What bothers me is these people LOUDLY use their platform to do it.

I can definitely be a mean girl! I gossip and cackle and alladat. But I try not to use my platform to punish friends under the guise of accountability. A lot of people’s entire platforms are based on bullying people and calling it social justice. That bothers me.

I fell out with a popular account over this. They went after this completely random girl, not a public figure at all, she had like 100 followers. And she tweeted “I’m not toxic, I’m damaged. It takes a real one to deal with me.”

And this person, who is very beloved in leftist circles and talks about mental@health and trauma often, QT’ed her and called her “manipulative, abusive” and something else really horrible.

And it really did not sit right with my spirit. Especially because this person has edited vulnerable pieces I’ve written about my own struggles with mental health, and people perceiving my symptoms as inherently dangerous or toxic.

But at the end of the day, I would have preferred a dismissive “dis bitch is crazy” to what they did. Bc they were trying to use social justice lingo to justify what they did, which is really just take glee in a pile-on against a girl who might have been really hurting

If you’re gonna be bitchy, be bitchy. Being bitchy is fun sometimes, own it. But don’t lie to me and say you’re doing it for the good of all of us, that you’re just inherently right in your bitchiness.

And I will never write for that publication again, because I would never want to risk vulnerable parts of my work reaching their hands before publication. All because they can’t separate being a bully from their professional life.

I... am not judging the girl who tweeted “it takes a real one to deal with me.”

That is the exact opposite of what I’m doing. What I’m saying is we have no fucking idea what was going on her life, who had said what to her, etc.

And so how can we call her abusive?

Also, we are large accounts. We have fucking bylines and book deals. What business do we have going after small accounts owned by Black, traumatized women and calling them abusers with absolutely no proof of that?

And when you do shit like that and try to enlist the internet into deplatforming a friend you had an argument with, why are you surprised that people are hesitant to join in? They learn not to trust you, or your interpretation of events, or your ability to distinguish...

Harm from abuse, and conflict from harm.

And you can’t use social justice lingo to get mad at people for that. You’ve literally shown people that maybe they shouldn’t feel safe around you, and maybe your judgement is off.

I write this today And it reminds me of that whole situation. https://twitter.com/yumcoconutmilk/status/1343223043527766016