I’m still chewing on why some white women feel the desire to appropriate Blackness, & yet I bristle at being dismissed as a white woman. I *am* white, but as my face & real name are both hidden, it seems like an exercise in white supremacy: you’re white until proven otherwise.

I think this rhetoric is particularly fraught for those whose whiteness is conditional (Mediterranean folks, Eastern Europeans, Ashkenazi Jews, white Latinx people) & who certainly benefit from white privilege but also often carry/experience racialized trauma & violence.

It aligns whiteness with white supremacy. As white supremacists & neo-Nazis are hella antisemitic, my being called a white woman, despite its accuracy, feels like being told that I‘m my own oppressor. Am I?

We need more nuanced distinctions between privilege & power.

Being told you have power when you feel disempowered feels like gaslighting. But then mfers like Krug pop up and I wonder...well shit, AM I reproducing the same structures that call me a kike by my existence as a white woman rather than as a Jew? Does the distinction matter?

How can I be actively anti-racist without centering myself? Is discussing my own oppression a distraction from epidemic anti-Blackness, or does it expand anti-racist work towards dismantling white supremacy? Or am I not staying in my lane & inadvertently reifying white supremacy?

(Note: I keep my ethnicity to myself #onhere to try to prevent doxxing, but I’m...not Western European lol. I’m comfortable saying that I’m a Jew because academia is full of us.)

Some WOC civilians are referring to me and few other SWers, most of whom are BIPOC, as white girls to imply that we’re racist. Whiteness in this context seems to me a rhetorical category rather than one with concrete privileges—from which not all of us benefit.

The use of whiteness as an accusation perpetuates the idea that there’s some material benefit to oppression. We know this to be untrue. And its use against BIPOC doesn’t push back against racism or some white women’s minstrelsy; it just silences more women of color.

But by resisting the categorization of us as white girls, am I grasping at the same tools Krug wielded to maintain her power for so long? Because I very much doubt this is the one instance where WOC are “making it about race” when it isn’t. Then again, half of us *aren’t* white.

The pandemic has amplified this because virtual spaces like twitter enable and encourage people to lie. It’s wise to remain skeptical. But, at the risk of sounding like woke Carrie Bradshaw, I can’t help but think this ultimately gaslights people into performing authenticity.

Krug and Vitolo did this shit irl, & regardless we can’t limit it to the internet. Racists & non-Black people pretending to be Black will learn from this & adjust accordingly because that’s how power works. I’m trying to adapt, too, but I’m struggling to do so productively.

But the cultural capital some ascribe to marginalization—the funhouse mirror of empowerment that leads predators to accuse their prey of “playing the victim”—is easily manipulated into upholding the structures it’s meant to subvert, as white women’s tears demonstrate regularly.

Weaponizing our trauma is an effect of white supremacy in that it only perceives us by how it abuses us. We saw this play out last week when that dipshit adjunct sent a racist email & leftists decided it was a labor issue, a critique that addressed neither a) racism nor b) labor.

Anyway, this is a structural issue, not an individual one. What made it possible for these assholes to get away with this? What made the deception desirable in the first place? And how in the fuck do we move forward knowing that they benefitted from it for as long as they could?

...and the kicker of course is that one of these folks is still pretending to be “part Black” as of like yesterday, but that’s a separate issue