Something I’ve been thinking about a lot as a non-Black POC trying to be of help rn is this pressure of time. Well-meaning people can be distracted by the urgency of the moment to say things that have already been said better by Black Indigenous people

who have been the experts and have *been* producing the most incisive analysis and information and histories since colonialism started. I’m saying this here also as a reminder to myself and a kind of check-in. We need to keep asking ourselves if we’ve first check with experts 2/?

Not experts determined by the white gaze and privilege, which will ALWAYS put the work of people closest to the system’s message in front of us first, but experts in the decolonial sense: the people on the front lines, who are trans, queer BIPOC

I’m speaking from the lens of a lighter-skinned brown person of BIPOC heritage who has been in the liminal spaces and bridging places of privilege and marginalization, speaking to other people like me, and non-Black POC, and white people: go to the experts first. We’re students.

Be good students. Sincere, diligent students. Humble students. You’re part of a cause, which means you are responsible to the leaders of that cause, who are ALWAYS the people most affected, who have BEEN saying these things already. If you feel like you’re out of your depth,

overwhelmed, speaking from emotion and pain first, check in with yourself, get calm, speak to the expert. Check with your teachers. Then go back and speak. You’ll save yourself a lot of fuckups and anger from the people you’re trying to be a good accomplice to.

this thread is not just informed by how I occupy the world as a racialized person, but also having worked in the service industry (“let me check with the kitchen” that’s FIRST DAY level stuff guys. You’re a beginner. Not the expert.)

And like, if what I’m saying is clicking with you, what I’m asking you to interrogate is why ME, a person with relative proximity to whiteness, saying this is clicking, rather than the BIPOC who said it first, and have BEEN saying this.