I’ve been over this before but maybe it bears repeating. I don’t think I’ve annoyed the SJW crowd lately.
The National Institute of Mental Health on Schizophrenia:
Schizophrenia is a serious mental illness that affects how a person thinks, feels, and behaves. People with schizophrenia may seem like they have lost touch with reality, which causes significant distress for the individual, their family members, and friends.
Psychotic symptoms include altered perceptions (e.g., changes in vision, hearing, smell, touch, and taste), abnormal thinking, and odd behaviors. People with psychotic symptoms may lose a shared sense of reality and experience themselves and the world in a distorted way. Specifically, individuals typically experience:
- Hallucinations, such as hearing voices or seeing things that aren’t there
- Delusions, which are firmly held beliefs not supported by objective facts (e.g., paranoia – irrational fears that others are “out to get you” or believing that the television, radio, or internet are broadcasting special messages that require some response)
- Thought disorder, which includes unusual thinking or disorganized speech
Or paranoid schizophrenics:
Typically, a paranoid schizophrenic experiences auditory hallucinations along with deluded thought processes and beliefs. They often believe others plot and conspire against them or their family members.
Paranoid Delusions – When suffering from paranoid schizophrenia, you feel that others are conspiring against you. As these paranoid thoughts intensify, you may behave aggressively or commit violence in self-defense against those you believe plan to cause harm to you or a loved one. You may also think you possess special powers, such as the ability to breathe underwater or fly like a bird. You may believe you’re famous or that a famous person wants to date you. Even though others present contrary evidence, you hold onto these beliefs anyway.
Now we have An Everyday Feminism Training.
For so long, the work was focused on getting white people to acknowledge that racism is real and it’s happening right now.
And that was a super hard, emotionally exhausting uphill battle for years.
Now with the Trump administration’s blatant racist policies, more and more white people are acknowledging its existence.
And they’re desperate to do something to stop racism.
That’s great!
But it’s still not enough…
We have a different obstacle in front of us now, because…
Privilege means that you don’t know what you don’t know.
Just because you’re ready to do something about white supremacy doesn’t mean you even know what it actually is.
People often don’t realize everyone (both white people and People of Color!) has internalized white supremacy to a certain degree — because it’s the air we breathe.
Unfortunately this means most white people who are newly coming into racial justice work are still very unconscious of how unconscious they are about it.
This unconsciousness can make bringing white people into racial justice work extremely fraught.
They are often emotionally resistant to seeing how they’re expressing white supremacy – and get mad when it’s pointed out or beat themselves up for it.
Perhaps they actually become angry because they don’t want to argue with the voices in your head, telling you that it’s a white conspiracy to hold you back.
And amusingly, “Social Justice Howler Monkey may be a more appropriate term than they realize.
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