We as white folks need to get real clear that when we tokenize or take shortcuts to assuage our own white guilt, we very often end up facilitating the very opportunists who look to exploit these tendencies for clout, profit, or personal entertainment.

A story: https://twitter.com/gwensnyderPHL/status/1303075275610128393

When I was but a young anarchist out living in an anarchist collective for the first time, one of my housemates got an email from someone looking to attend a Black anarchist convention in Philly.

No one knew them, they were looking for housing for the weekend.

Our almost-entirely white collective said great, sure!

That in and of itself wasn't assuaging behavior, we often let activists stay with us, and tried to prioritize marginalized folks.

All of which, great!

Now this person, who sure seemed to go to every effort to give my housemate the impression that they were a Black anarchist, shows up and...

They're white.

A... bit of a gray flag, to use a @wagatwe term of art.

Like, no, no one ever actually thought to ask, but also...

No one ever thought we needed to, given that they were asking for solidarity specifically for a Black event.

Anyway, this white person demands my white dude housemate's room upon arrival.

At this point we were getting into red flag territory.

They argued that privilege math dictated that because my white dude housemate was a dude (and they weren't), they deserved his room.

He gave it to them.

Now, at no point did this "volunteer" for the Black anarchist convention ever seem to... attend the convention.

They sure did help themselves to any food they wanted in the fridge without permission, tho, including food of those of us who couldn't afford much food at the time.

I remember being there in the kitchen watching them congratulate themselves on liberating someone else's food and talking about how privilege math made it Right and Good, actually, because they assumed they were less wealthy than the food-haver and therefore deserved it.

The next day, my white dude housemate realizes that the laptop this other white person demanded he loan out (because privilege math), is missing, along with our houseguest.

Come to find, so are several bikes. I can't 100% recall, but I think at least one actually may have belonged to the sole POC housemate living there at the time.

The white dude housemate peeks at the original email, and... there's really no indication this person was ever actually connected to the Black anarchist convention.

We ask the Black anarchist convention, and, nope.

They've never heard of this "volunteer."

Finally, we find out from some folks that this person was already officially persona non grata for the downtown infoshop collective, because they've conducted this exact same con under the exact same name using other Black anarchist events and causes as an excuse.

We were a bunch of white-guilty young anarchists who let our eagerness to be "good" white people keep us from practicing accountability w another white person- a white person who didn't even deny being white- because they kept using our fear of being called oppressive against us.

Rather than deal meaningfully with the broader lack of accountability and the toxic dynamics that made POC folks feel unsafe/unwelcome in our spaces, we kept trying to take shortcuts so people would give us not-a-racist cards and we could feel good about ourselves.

These shortcuts lead us to avoid practicing accountability and allow people to perpetuate those dynamics, just as long as those people could figure out how to manipulate us by making us believe that tolerating their bad behavior made us Not Racists.

It's extremely telling to me that I've seen white folks most successfully manipulate that desire for Not Racist rubber stamping.

It really, really highlights the fact that even people who immediately benefit from this kind of white guilt shortcutting/tokenism tend to be white.

Our special con artist houseguest kept doing shit that every single one of us knew in our guts to be manipulative and a problem.

That con artist houseguest didn't even claim Black identity and still used our white guilt to keep us from naming the issue.

When we as white people refuse to address toxic whiteness in our own movement spaces and try to mask our complicity by enabling (or pretend not to see) bad actor behavior, we very often end up enabling bad actors guilty of toxic whiteness.

Vitolo-Haddad was guilty of enabling and perpetrating a culture of toxic whiteness and Nazi apologism.

They targeted POC people, especially women.

That was true long before anyone found out about them being a white person in blackface.

POC folks warned others off them, not for race-policing reasons but for they-are-enabling-racism reasons.

White folks (including myself, for a time) didn't listen, and a principal dynamic at work was CV handing out short term/conditional Not Racist passes.

In other words, none of this is about success or failure arbiting CV's racial identity.

That is not where the need for accountability is here.

White people trying to arbit racial identity would be a very big problem in and of itself.

That's not what's at issue.

This is about white folks in very white antiracist spaces being unwilling to do the work of asking why our spaces are very white, and what to do about it.

It's about us instead looking to evade accountability for that whiteness with Not A Racist™ shortcuts and passes.

This was already the problem with the CV-enabling scene, long before it became known that they were falsely affecting Blackness.

It became abundantly clear some time ago that they were actively enabling Nazis and openly, willlingly putting POC and antifascists in real danger.

There's maybe conversation to be had about whether it was white folks' lane to call it out when we thought they were Black (I'm of the opinion it definitely wasn't our lane).

That doesn't make enabling their dangerous bad actor behavior during that time at all okay, though.

It especially doesn't make it okay that white people delighted in and actively encouraged that behavior, especially when CV targeted POC people in ways they couldn't.

The conversation about accountability with these dynamics back when we thought CV was being truthful about POC identity was messy and complicated.

Now that we know they were lying, the conversation is a lot more simple.

Any white folks who ever gave that bad actor behavior any positive engagement or oxygen-- myself included-- need to own it and own that complicity and be real about why we tried to take that particular shortcut to Not Racist.

There are a whole bunch of white people who were complicit at some level in giving oxygen to that bad actor behavior for some period of time, even after we should have known better.

Some of us are now trying to find ways to own that unfortunate choice in an accountable way.

But there are also the white folks who didn't just give oxygen to that bad actor behavior.

These are the white folks who sat in a clique with CV and relished that bad actor behavior and specifically encouraged it, most especially when it benefited them.

Those folks have A LOT to answer for.

Not for being bad race detectives (no one should be any kind of race detective), but for specifically encouraging and egging on that bad actor behavior, often tag-teaming and using CV's claimed Blackness as a shared shield against critique.

It's like if one of our housemates saw Con Artist Houseguest stealing bikes, and then accepted one as a gift.

That person wouldn't be complicit as a result of not detecting the original fraud.

They'd be complicit because they benefited knowingly from the bad actor behavior.

When you're knowingly complicit in a con artist's ongoing bad actor behavior, you have responsibility even if you aren't aware of or aware of the original fraud.

That responsibility was always there and visible.

It's just much more apparent now, now that we see the whole fraud.

These CV clique white folks squawking about "how dare u attack me for not playing race detective" know exactly what they did.

They're trying to play a sleight of hand and use a non-existent critique of race detective skills to evade accountability for their actions.

It doesn't matter when you found out that the story the con artist arrested in order to steal bikes was a ruse.

The fact is, if you knowingly helped them steal bikes, you engaged in bad actor behavior, and you need to accept accountability for it.