scarletwoman
scarletwoman's JournalOMG, stop it! Just stop it!
It was NOT a mistake to do what BLM did yesterday! NOBODY has the right to tell the people who are being MURDERED just because of their skin color how and when it's appropriate to express their anger about it!
My god, this is NOT about Bernie, it's about people who are crying out and need to be heard! So what, that his little speech got messed up? What the hell IS the priority here? Not to inconvenience us nice white progressives with loud, messy direct action?
If Bernie is all that - and I'm certainly hoping that he will prove himself to be so - then he will take protestors' message to heart and reach out to them and open a real dialogue with them and place for them in his campaign.
Pressing for radical change is NOT about being polite. It's not about observing customary niceties. It's not about not discomfitting anyone. It's about disruption, it's about transgression, it's about letting your outrage be known - especially where there are others who would hopefully "get it"! You give those who claim to be on your side a chance to really prove it!
And dammit, it's just blowing my mind and breaking my heart to see all the posts since yesterday from all the people who love to claim they're on the side of POC, doing all this tut-tutting about how the BLM behaved badly and how it wasn't fair to Bernie.
And then, even worse, those that have been ginning up a bunch of conspiracy shit that absolutely DISMISSES and DEVALUES the very real pain and suffering that motivated the BLM people to take the action they did - as if there were no higher value to defend than a political campaign! A political campaign! More important than people who are actually dying?!?!
I feel deeply ashamed and embarrassed to be identified as a white progressive when I see all this shit.
Advice: don't fucking give advice to people who have been living through shit you will never have live through. Just shut up and listen and then ask what you can do.
You know, I've been doing my best to process what went down at the Netroots forum ever since it
happened. It's pretty much the only topic I've been reading about over all these hours - I don't know how many different threads, plus a few non-DU news articles and such.
Anyway, it's taken me awhile, but after all that reading it finally hit me that those protestors did exactly the right thing. Yup, they transgressed bigtime - they pushed us nice white progressives totally out of our comfort zone, pissed us off, outraged us, inconvenienced us, messed up our nice candidate speeches, and sent bunches of us typing furiously on our keyboards about it.
Indeed, typing furiously on our keyboards... And therein lies the power of that protest. Instead of having the pleasant experience of cheering for our guy after a well-delivered speech, we were confronted with the stark reality that these sisters and brothers don't just get inconvenienced when their day doesn't turn out so good - they get murdered.
I don't want to be that nice white progressive who feels inconvenienced about a speech being interrupted. I don't want to sit in judgement over what's a "proper" way to protest. My life is generally not at risk just from driving down the road in my car and forgetting to use my turn signal when I change lanes. There a so many things I never have to think about because I was born white. So I bless those protestors for getting all up in our faces like they did - for making me really THINK about the why of their anger.
Yes, it was well done, it was necessary, and they were right to do it. Transgression is powerful. I thank them.
Profile Information
Gender: FemaleHometown: Minnesota
Current location: up north
Member since: 2001
Number of posts: 31,893
