As more conservatives die of a virus their chosen leaders told them to ignore, I've been thinking a lot today about the subject of blame, empathy, reconciliation, class solidarity and the agency of people situated within white supremacy.

My instinct is always to understand how people become the way they are, and figure out ways of getting them to unlearn so we can move forward and build class solidarity.

But there is so much justified anger at white right-wing voters. So much to reasonably blame them for.

Marginalized people who are alienated from white working-class conservatives have very good reason to despise them and not want to build solidarity with them.

But I don't believe we can build the movement without reaching out to at least some of them. So what should we do?

We have to leave room for people to fuck up and then do better. But that doesn't make the resentment go away, and it doesn't bring back the people who have died because of policies put in place by white supremacists who were voted into office by millions of competent adults.

How do we draw the line between a mostly apolitical cultural conservative who can be educated and is worth reaching out to, and someone who is too far gone and not worth the effort?

How much empathy do the people killed by the politics they wanted deserve?

There's a common theme on the left that we can build a movement by reaching out only to apolitical people, and ignoring conservatives entirely. Maybe it's true. But that seems to be based on a belief that people's politics are more ideologically consistent than they actually are.

All of this is why I think factoring in emotions/affect is so crucial to organizing.

Who is doing the reaching out matters, because some of us have less emotional energy than others to spend time educating edge cases. It's an emotional process. Some of us are already drained.

I think it's possible to hold that reaching out and bridging gaps is essential to the movement, but also know that it's not always possible for everyone to do, in every moment.

This shit is personal, we're on a knife's edge doing our best. Sometimes catharsis is all we've got.

Sometimes I take the time to explain stuff, other times I've been called an idiot ten times already that day so I just tell the person to fuck off.

The former is always preferable, but we're also human and have breaking points. I just want to try to do more of the former.

The stakes are so incredibly, extremely high, so we need to figure it out. The right wing will take advantage of this crisis in any way they can. We should too, as grim as that is.