Being a woman of color in politics is really hard. Most days you deal with microagressions that get under your skin but you can brush off. Other days it feels entirely too hard being a woman of color. Today is one of those days. 1/

My candidate, also a woman of color, got called a carpetbagger today. It's a term that implies that you are an outsider, someone who doesn't belong. But what does it mean when you are a WoC who has lived in a community of color for over 20 years and are told you don't belong? 2/

1, the implication here is that the white woman who called her a carpetbagger gets to dictate the terms of who does & does not belong in this community that is 88% PoC. Calling my candidate a carpetbagger means that she has decided who gets to say they are from the community. 3/

2, in calling her a carpetbagger, she has decided that she gets to say whose work for the community is or isn't enough. The problem with both is obvious: the work that women of color do has historically been ignored, dismissed, and overshadowed by the work of white folks. 4/

Sometimes when white folks notice a problem happening in the their community, they so rarely ask themselves "who is already doing this work? Who can I uplift?" Instead, the assumption is that no one else is doing that work, which leads to the complete dismissal of our labor. 5/

Our labor is ignored, erased, dismissed, and in the rare case that it is acknowledged, it's still not enough. It's done in the wrong way, it's done for the wrong people. WoC level themselves up because that is the lengths to which we have to go to be noticed and acknowledged. 6/

We know people are going to dismiss us. But it's one thing to know it intellectually, and it's another to see it written out in black and white by someone who purports to be any ally, who seeks to represent the very people she may one day say do not belong. This is too much. 7/

And all of this because this white woman couldn't bare to see a woman of color shine. 8/Fin.