I've been pretty quiet about going-ons in DC, and it's not because I'm not horrified, fed up, and generally ready to set the world on fire with my rage...

It's because I'm seeing a lot of rhetoric getting thrown around that is making me pretty damn uncomfortable...

Context: Columbine was my freshman year if high school, 9/11 was my junior year. I came of age in a world where the term "terrorist" got thrown around to excuse some incredibly hinky and war-crime-y behavior.

I wore a trench coat in high school, and spent the next 4yrs... 2/

Getting randomly searched, arrested by campus police anytime there was a bomb threat. I had bricks thrown at my from car windows, my locker defaced, and my ass kicked a couple of times.

I was 14, didn't talk, and was a pacifist.

It was rough. 3/

Fast forward a couple of decades, a Patriot Act or two, the increased militarization of the police, and a whole hell of a lot more reading and listening around prisons and restorative justice, and the reaction to what went down at the capitol is freaking me the fuck out. 4/

So here are some things I would like to highlight:

1. The term "terrorist" is most often deployed to drum up fear around racial and ethnic groups in order to justify military action. Calling what happened at the capitol terrorism is... incorrect. 5/

The Proud Boys are a terrorist organization, abso-fucking-lutely. So, yes, there were terrorists there, but it wasn't an act of terrorism. It was insurrection, protest, rebellion, and dissent. And while I think most of those people are racist fuckwits... 6/

I think we need to shift the narrative.

We have been using the argument that if the folks in DC had been black, they would have been murdered, and that is 900% accurate and I'll come back to that.

But what if they had been white liberals? Berners? The ISO? 7/

What if they were people we, the non-fascists, agree with?

I think police action would have been more aggressive, but still would not have been violent-- and I don't think we'd all be screaming, "terrorist" quite so loud.

We may use words like "revolution" instead. 8/

Context matters, and I feel like white people are using anti-black racist acts as a justification for both validating that they are not "THOSE" racists (ignoring how the language that they are using has been historically been used for racist action) and... 9/

...for reinscribing police state actions and policies that been historically deployed to protect white property, white lives, and white communities.

Let's not pretend that post-9/11 language around "terrorism" wasn't almost entirely used to terrorize... 10/

Black and brown communities, demonize the Muslim faith, and rally self-aggrandizing evangelicals to the hate soaked pulpit they worship at now

All those folks getting pulled off planes? Arrested in airports? Reported to the Feebs?

I giggled, not gonna lie, b/c I'm an asshole11/