ON WHO HELPS, IN MY EXPERIENCE: A THREAD. Took this screenshot over the summer. A white guy who regards himself as Woke and on the right side of history, says that most of the people he sees arguing against critical social justice don't do a thing to help another human soul. 1/12

I already knew, from my college experience plus twitter, that many people who tweet or otherwise do "activism" on social media regard themselves as helping. Thus, it's understandable, if illogical, for them to think that what they see on social media from "the other side" is 2/x

sufficient evidence to conclude that they're "not helping." That didn't surprise me. But it did make me think. I've thought about this for months now. I grew up with the absolute worst of religion and conservatism in a profoundly dysfunctional community rife with horrific 3/x

abuse. Perhaps Mr. Woke did too, and this may explain his view to some extent. It's hard for me to admit this out loud, because a sick part of me, a part stuck in the comfort of justified resentment, doesn't want to say this. But I must, to be honest with myself, 4/x

and twitter has given me a shockingly large platform so I may as well say it out loud. Starting with the non-religious and liberal, the anti-CSJ types have done the most to help other human souls, in my lived experience. The loudest crusader against CSJ I know of, 5/x

@conceptualjames, took time out of a busy life to help me find the confidence to stick with mathematics when it was brutally hard. The people who have the busiest lives I know of, mostly dealing with the fallout of opposing this stuff, are @BretWeinstein and @HeatherEHeying, 6/x

who have been kind to me beyond any usual definition of that word. But what of the religious conservatives? What of those scary, scary people who put the American flag in their bios and proudly profess their belief in an invisible deity who loves them, you, and even me? I'm 7/x

not going to tag them because they wouldn't want me to. They didn't do it for recognition. But I can name six of those people from here on twitter. When the pandemic hit and my job went on hiatus, they sent me Amazon giftcards that let me get everything I needed to sustain 8/x

myself for, in total, eleven weeks. That gave me time to make other arrangements with no worry of running out of what I needed. I finished college with enough toothpaste, blood sugar test strips, and everything else I needed. My job search went on hiatus when I got COVID 9/x

and was sick all summer, but now that it's back on, these same people DM and email. "As soon as you finish your coding portfolio, send me a link and I'll put it in front of my hiring manager." I'm not voting for Biden and I'm not Woke, so by standards of Twitter Leftists, 10/x

perhaps I'm not a human soul. But plenty of these opponents of CSJ, including many (gasp) religious conservatives, have done a tremendous amount to help me. I am grateful to them. I am sad we are so polarized that this thread needed saying, and will likely surprise some. 11/x

Those people know who they are and I've thanked them privately, but if they're reading this, thank you again. And if anyone actually made it to the end of this bit of navel-gazing...thanks for listening. /end