This is one of the reasons I always say that I never trust "organizations" that center around "leadership" that got their position just starting a Facebook page that happened to take off.

If there isn't accountability to existing organizing community, this happens. https://twitter.com/wagatwe/status/1288672092368461824

It's almost always a privileged white person who ends up doing this and grabbing the reign without doing the actual organizing work or practicing accountability on the ground, because they have the time/capital to successfully push their idea without pay or institutional backing.

It's absolutely possible (and in the time of COVID, often necessary) to do meaningful organizing in digital space.

But if it isn't rooted in accountability to the people most impacted and the people already doing the work in/with those communities, it isn't good organizing.

Whenever I say this stuff about podcasts, people are like "uh derr gatekeeping."

The reality is, it's about accountability.

Skilled, experienced organizers are people with relationship to community and each other.

If the person behind a hot Facebook idea decides they're an "organizer" without ever building those relationships to impacted community and the people who actually have organizing relationships within it, they are broadcasting their sense of entitlement and ownership.

This isn't new.

This is something that WOC especially have been yelling from the rooftops forever, since long before opportunistic co-option of oppressed people's movement entered its current digital incarnation.

Watch for white dude left reactionaries who use this as "proof" that women who take to the street are just wine mom posers.

When they do that, ask yourself what they're using that narrative to do.

Are they using this story to lift up Black women's leadership?

Are they supplementing their hot takes by actually amplifying Black women who are in the streets?

Are they critiquing how white men have always sidelined WOC and POC and women in general from protest leadership?

Or are they using it to justify the marginalization of women in general from protest, and/or rationalize their own unwillingness to bother to get out into the street and put their asses on the line for BLM?

Every white woman who is here for me slamming dirtbag podcasters for misogyny needs to understand that we *also* need to be walking the walk when it comes to refusing to let white feminists marginalize Black women and other BIPOC from their own movements, as is happening here.

That's true first and foremost because it's the right thing to do, and secondarily because when we let other white women pull this shit, we give ammunition to the misogynists who use white woman feminism's fuckups to justify harassing *all* women in left space.

As white women, we have an obligation to use our bodies to deescalate police and serve as shields against them for more vulnerable BIPOC bodies, whenever it is within our capacity and wanted.

That is a SUPPORTIVE position, not a central one.

In BLM protest, white people need to understand that we are the stagehands, not the stars.

It's deeply disappointing that white women behind Wall of Moms couldn't figure that out in time, and it's a crying shame because their tactics would have continued to be deeply useful if they hadn't transformed themselves into an opportunistic symbol of white supremacy at work.

Humility and accountability could have saved them.

When you're rooted and accountable to intersectional organizing community, you can organize effectively as a white person without having to be the star.

The problem is, we never hear about the white organizers who engage that way, because the left *still* assumes you aren't an effective organizer unless you're the star organizer.

Only once we learn to think of effective movement leadership as being effectively and intersectionally networked, rather than being a star, can we begin to actually become a political culture that respects the most-impacted peoples ownership of their issues.

Until then, the left is still a culture that will shoot itself in the foot trying to locate privileged stars to stan within emergent movements instead of nurturing effective, relationship-based organizing.

Accountability and humility are woefully undervalued on the left, but critical to our effectiveness and success.

We need to stop looking for saviors and start leaning on those principles.

Otherwise, we're doomed to keep failing over and over again.

The end.