Can we normalise learning things on here please?

If you get critique online it is 100% ok to read it, sit with it, reflect & learn. We don’t have to know everything & we are all learning.

Not knowing is ok.

What’s not ok is doubling down when marginalised folx educate you.

Straight up I was about 20 years old when I did my first social anthro paper & learnt that institutionalised and internalised racism was a thing. It literally blew my mind and I was buzzed out for MONTHS.

I literally walked home from class and noticed myself wanting to cross the street when a guy in a hoodie was walking towards me. I noticed myself noticing other POC. I noticed the language I used, the content I shared online, the assumptions I made about people.

I fully had months of just being mind-blown and having no idea what to do with it because I’d experienced internalised racism (along with other forms of racism) my entire life. But I sat with it and I try still to learn from it.

I sometimes think about people who met me 10 or 15 years ago and what they thought of me, but I have to remind myself that I didn’t know better then, and now I do, so I do better. And I’m sure in another 10 or 15 years I will cringe at my past self.

I have been ableist. I have been racist. I have been homophobic. Even though I am myself disabled indigenous and queer.

I’m not standing here expecting people to be perfect, but I am asking people to be open to learning, and to take that learning into action.

And lastly, the thing that has helped me the most on my journey of anti-oppression activism has been to sit with discomfort.

You don’t need to self-flagellate for being white, or abled, or straight, etc and you don’t have to force yourself into traumatic situations or a lifetime of apologising to make up for your privilege (that’s super annoying anyway).

But just notice when discomfort comes up, when your worldview is challenged, and try to sit with it a bit before jumping in, defending, or engaging in a way which puts more labour on marginalised folks.

Heoi, kua mutu. Happy learning from Twitter University folks. There are so many people on here to learn from. And it’s a privilege to do so.