If you’re thinking of leaving Twitter because you always thought it sucked but never got around to deleting your account, this doesn’t apply to you.
If you’re thinking of leaving because you’d rather not sift through ads or pay $8 for verification — apparently needed to help the world’s richest man cover the monthly interest on the loan he took out to acquire his new toy — so be it. Again, this doesn’t apply to you.
But if you’re one of those people — and there are many of you, or others you know — threatening to bolt because Elon Musk’s takeover will bring less content moderation and a likely explosion in trolling and hate speech, I need you to think about some things.
Look, I get it. Who wants to see constant streams of racist, misogynistic vitriol in their mentions or beneath their posts?
I certainly don’t. And I say that as someone who has had my life threatened on Twitter and was doxed on the platform in 2018, leading to still more death threats by phone against my entire family and an eventual visit by an FBI agent to warn me of a credible threat to my safety.
So yeah, I know. Hate speech sucks, and those who refuse to do anything about it suck even harder.
But there’s something I’ve noticed.
The threatened Twexodous is predominantly a white liberal phenomenon. And yes, this matters.
It tells us a lot, not about Twitter, but about white liberals.
I can’t prove it scientifically. I’m not even sure how to demonstrate it quantitatively. But I have over 150,000 followers on the platform and follow a few thousand myself, so I see what people are saying.
And anecdotally — but with lots of qualitative data points — I can tell you: it is white folks who seem most concerned about the increasing toxification of Twitter under Musk’s leadership.
This, even as it will be disproportionately not white people who bear the brunt of that toxicity.
I don’t see Black Twitter — that collective body of Black creators and thinkers who have used the platform to push back against racism, both online and IRL — talking about bolting.
Sure, certain Black individuals have left, and more will. But most of these are not folks who use Twitter as an activist space or primarily for social commentary (not a criticism, by the way, just pointing this out).
Those for whom Twitter has been that place are overwhelmingly staying put, even as they always catch the most hell — the racism, the misogynoir, all the things, all the time.
They are buckling up, refusing to concede even an inch of ground.
And that’s true, even as Twitter saw a 500 percent spike in the use of the n-word the day Elon took over, so eager were the 4Chan shitposters to hate-jizz all over a platform that doesn’t look like it was coded by some 8th-grade Ritalin junkie fresh off a six-hour anime porn session.
Meanwhile, as Black folks looked around and said yep, same old shit, only louder, many a white progressive headed for the exits, or at least threatened to. For too many white liberals, the thought of dealing with an uptick in Twitter toxicity is a bridge too far.
But here’s the thing: America has been toxic for Black people for hundreds of years.
In that sense, Twitter is incredibly on-brand as an American company. And it was from the beginning. Black people were dealing with the sludge that passes for deep thought on the right from day one on the platform, long before Richie Rich got involved.
And here’s the other thing: if they can manage to fight on, survive and thrive despite all that, I’m pretty sure you can deal with some ugliness in your timeline.
Indeed, to decide not to — to decide it’s not worth it, or that you need to get distance from the awfulness — is to say to Black Twitter, “Y’all are on your own. Good luck dealing with the worst of our people.”
Black folks have never had this luxury of turning away from the ugly.
They have never had the option of saying, “I can’t deal with the racism and hate today. I’m out.” Or rather, they did have that option, but exercising it required something quite a bit more drastic than just ending their time on a social media platform.
. . .
The fact that so many white people fail to understand this even as they embrace progressive politics and values is maddening. What’s more, it’s illustrative of one of the biggest problems I’ve noticed in my nearly 40 years on the white left.
Namely, too few of us are grounded in the Black freedom struggle.
We know too little about it, have been connected to too few people who have been a part of it, and fail to understand its lessons for anyone seeking a greater measure of social justice in an unjust society.
Because for those of us whose politics came after our grounding in the Black freedom struggle — a grounding one finds, ironically, more among white Southern progressives than those from elsewhere, for obvious reasons — there is at least one advantage we have over others.
Namely, we know that justice takes time, and there will be lots more shit to wade through before we get there.
Oh, and this: there is no fucking safe space.
But white progressives who didn’t come to their politics through the crucible of racism awareness, or who perhaps only came to that awareness since the 2020 uprising, often miss this.
If your politics came first and your antiracism emerged as an extension of that — your anti-Trumpism, for instance — you will have skipped a few steps. As such, you’ll likely get discouraged faster, having not been exposed to the importance of intergenerational resilience, the likes of which Black people have had no choice but to develop.
If you come to antiracism as just one more thing in your liberal/left bag of issues, you won’t be ready for the difficulties and pushback you’ll face, no matter which issues you prioritize. If you focus on health care, LGBTQ liberation, reproductive justice, or any other subject, a failure to appreciate the long game will sink you.
But if you start with a grounding in the Black freedom struggle or develop that grounding, you will build the kind of resolve that keeps you in the fight and wards off the kind of despondency that leads others to pack it in.
. . .
The pending white Twexodus reminds me of something I witnessed many years ago.
It was 1996, in New Orleans, and I was participating in a community coalition-building workshop facilitated by a national organization known for that kind of thing.
About halfway through the session, a Black woman gave a detailed and wrenching description of her experiences with racism: on the job, in the schools, at the hands of police, landlords, doctors — all of it.
Immediately afterward, a white woman spoke. Through tears, she despaired of ever being able to defeat the kinds of racist forces about which the Black woman, seated right next to her, had just spoken.
She felt helpless, powerless to even confront the racism in her own family, let alone at her job or in the larger society. She knew she needed to do it. She even wanted to do it. But she was worried, uncertain that anything she or anyone else did would make a difference.
“It’s just so hard,” she lamented through her sobs.
At this, the Black woman reached out, touched her knee, and with a snark, so razor sharp the white woman couldn’t even understand she’d been gutted, said:
“Is it hard, dear?”
“Yes, yes it is,” the white woman responded as the Black woman closed her eyes, breathed in deeply, and then expelled from her lungs not just air but the collective wisdom of a dozen generations of Black women before her.
Women who knew, as she did, precisely how hard it was, how scary.
But who also knew how much harder and scarier it is not to do the work.
James Baldwin explained it this way:
Black people know this. White progressives must learn it. Or else we will be no use to the freedom struggle — not merely on Twitter, but anywhere else.
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This post was previously published on Momentum.
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You may also like these posts on The Good Men Project:
White Fragility: Talking to White People About Racism | Escape the “Act Like a Man” Box | Why I Don’t Want to Talk About Race | What We Talk About When We Talk About Men |
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