I hear with increasing frequency this lament of liberal elites: The left will eat itself. Cries of concern are usually focused on people like me, people who are marginalized: the loud and disenfranchised, the uncompromising and unforgiving, the brown, the queer, the poor, the disabled. We are never satisfied. We sacrifice the greater good for our own selfish needs. We are distracting the left from their mission. We are dividing the party. We are creating a quagmire. We are the regressive left. We are the illiberal left. We are the new dictators. We are why the left eats itself.

I hear from white men about how I have demonized them, the founders of liberal ideology, and made them afraid to speak their minds. I hear about how they used to support me and my feminist and anti-racist causes, but how I’ve made it impossible for them to do so now because of my anger at their privilege.

I hear from white women about how I’ve fractured feminism with my need for intersectionality. I’ve made feminism too personal, too selfish. I’ve sacrificed them for the needs of black men, trans people, disabled people. It used to be about something bigger than your own needs, they cry.

“[T]he new political correctness has bludgeoned even many of its own supporters into despondent silence,” says Jonathan Chait in one of his many essays dedicated to raising alarm about how hard people like me are making things for good white people like him.

College students who shut down appearances by problematic figures, Twitter rebukes that coerce apologies for questionable statements, protests that shut down political appearances — all of these have been used to sound the alarm in the progressive movement. All have been used to paint a picture of a world where the oppressed has become the oppressor, and the ultimate victims are the allies who used to fight next to the disenfranchised.

But this imagines a world before where we were once united. Where people of all races, gender identities, incomes, and abilities worked together in harmony for the true good of the left. We were all freedom fighters united by the call of justice and equality.

This world did not exist.

Yes, we worked together for women’s suffrage — only to find that the white women at the front of the movement would use the fear of the black vote to get it. Yes, we marched on Washington together — but when the marching was over, it became clear that many white liberals would turn on us the moment we asked for changes in their actions and in their communities.

We were only supported so long as we did not ask for too much too soon, so long as we asked politely and thanked profusely. And we were not satisfied with that arrangement, not even then.

As Martin Luther King, Jr. put it:

“I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action;’ who paternalistically feels he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by the myth of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait until a ‘more convenient season.’”

What we see now is not the left “eating itself” and the destruction of the great coalitions that brought so much progress in decades past. What we are seeing is what we’ve always seen: privileged white liberals demanding that those of us on the bottom sacrifice ourselves on the altar of the greater good. What we are seeing is a privileged class of liberals who still refuse to actually listen to those they claim to represent. What we are seeing is a privileged class of liberals who see the acknowledgement of the left’s racism, sexism, classism, ableism, and transphobia as a larger threat than the bigotry itself. What we are seeing is a privileged class of liberals refusing time and time again to reflect upon their actions and actually get better.

It is ironic to see privileged liberals bemoan how the left is now eating itself when they have been eating the less privileged since their inception. We have been used for food and fuel, barter and trade. Our issues have been raised when convenient, silenced when not. We finally have some power to say no, to refuse to be sacrificed, and for that we are accused of destroying the movement. The privileged among us refuse to see that every call-out is an opportunity to learn and engage, an opportunity to fix our mistakes and become more of what we claim to be: progressive.

What we are seeing is a privileged class of liberals who see the acknowledgement of the left’s racism, sexism, classism, ableism, and transphobia as a larger threat than the bigotry itself.
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Those with nothing new to say should not be speaking for our progressive movements. Those with little to lose should not be defining the greater good. Those who refuse to be inconvenienced should not call for the sacrifices of others. Your place at the front of a movement is not grandfathered in because the leaders of the past have always looked and sounded like you. By definition, progressives move forward, and we should not let the pace of that movement be set by those who like to sit and rest at the stops that meet their goals.

If the privileged of the movement refuse to let go of their trickle-down progressivism, they will find themselves increasingly embattled with the demands of those who are not content to wait their turn. But if they hold out, the cries will fade. And this won’t be because the privileged few have won — it will be because they will have become irrelevant and nobody will bother.

I do not need to be surprised by injustice or bigotry to be outraged.

Recently, there has been a spike in people explaining to me that a thing I am annoyed about or find infuriating is “unsurprising,” inevitably followed by a “because” clause. As the heat of real, white-hot rage boils up from my toes through my chest and out my ears, turning my head into a tea kettle, I scan back to see if I indicated any surprise in what I said. Inevitably — as I am rarely surprised or prone to unintentionally over-the-top language at this point in my life, therapy, and recovery from childhood — what I find is that I didn’t in any way express surprise.

Of course I didn’t. Injustice is enragingly common. So why dismiss and downplay my outrage with a “oh, that’s unsurprising” response?

To the apathetics who go into rhetorically shallow, verbally deep detail about why I shouldn’t be surprised at the thing they super-wish we’d all stop talking about because they find it so bothersome, I have this to say: Give it the fuck up. I see friends and writers and culture-change advocates who express opinions both in person and online go from zero to boiling over on a regular basis when this happens. Depending on our backgrounds and levels of privilege, we are growing increasingly intolerant of this bullshit — particularly when it comes from “our side,” which it usually does — for a variety of reasons. All of them have to do with where the “unsurprising” shrug-off stems from: We’re being told to calm down about something we see and/or experience regularly.

“I’m not surprised” as an online comment is a close cousin to “Who cares?” The Who Cares People stop by to let you know how much they think the thing they’re taking the time to comment on is a waste of everyone’s time. They don’t get the irony here, and it for some reason doesn’t occur to them to keep scrolling; They simply must let everyone know what is and isn’t valuable or interesting.

“I’m not surprised” as an in-person comment has long been used to announce the necessity of topic change. I’ve heard it in bars, at the Thanksgiving table, in conversations with friends’ obnoxious partners who think they know more than me about topics I cover for a living, and by onlookers in every imaginable public space who aren’t even part of the conversation they’re policing.

When you tell someone you aren’t surprised, it’s the same as telling them they shouldn’t be surprised and, frankly, something about them is lacking or deficient since they are reacting in this irrational and overly emotional manner. This is especially infuriating when the person being dismissed hasn’t expressed surprise or otherwise reacted in any emotional manner other than to say something is wrong, sad, unjust, frustrating, or any other number of pejorative, but hardly inflammatory descriptors.

Oh, and if you’re a man telling a woman “I’m not surprised,” you might as well be telling her to smile.

The “it’s not a surprise” rhetoric acts as if injustice can only register as such if it’s shocking. But in reality, those of us engaged in social justice are more righteously angry about the things that do not surprise us than we are about the rare instances of unexpected awful. This should make sense not just from an experience standpoint, but also from a common sense one. The everyday-ness of certain brands of injustice, from misogynistic advertisements, to the hatred spewed by those who twist religion to suit their bigotry, to the microaggressions where our country’s entrenched racism plays itself out in what should be innocuous interactions, ARE ALL THE MORE INFURIATING due to our lack of surprise. That we as a society have allowed such things to be shruggable, letting the privileged apathetics and the young view them as accepted norms, means that whatever rage we are expressing is more justified, not less, as you would like it to be.

Perhaps it is not we, the unsurprised and yet enraged, but you, the dismissive and actively ignorant, who should pause to consider your reaction to said event or statement. Your condescension and silencing are a bigger problem than the issues we’re raging about. Silence would make you complicit; purposely policing our anger and lived experiences is actively engaging in strengthening the oppressive systems that continue the cycles of injustice we’re upset about and make it unsafe for us to navigate this world.

Even if I were rhetorically off-base (and I’m not) about the justification of our collective and individual rage, you sidling up to say how unsurprised you are smacks of superiority. If you aren’t surprised, you could just listen to Elon James White, who is offering you an alternative:

If you’ve never done it before, today is a really, really great day to start following the 1st rule of #ElonsLAW???@elonjames

So, next time you feel the need to weigh in with how much a thing isn’t a thing, while people are sharing how they’re affected by said thing, pause to reframe your thought: Ask yourself not why we are overreacting, but why you are underreacting. And then reread our words to see if we actually overreacted or if you are projecting that onto us while hiding behind your unwillingness to hear people and participate in making shit better.

When it comes to social progress, shame is proven to be an effective tool.

By Aja Barber

Contrary to increasingly and troublingly popular belief, your racist relatives on Facebook aren’t funny. They’re racists, which means they probably think less of people who look like me. So why do so many people insist on treating family members who say heinous things as harmless or even borderline-endearing?

Casual, blithe mentions about that “crazy racist aunt (or uncle)” are getting thrown around so much, it’s starting to feel like white people collectively consider racism a lighthearted joke. As if having a racist relative is just “one of those things,” like a run in your tights or a partner who never picks up after themselves. As if the racist relative isn’t actually that big a problem, because you feel untouched by their problematic views.

Just recently, a website I occasionally read featured a pop-up declaring that you should “like” them on Facebook, because they do social media just like your racist aunt! If you identify and chuckle at that “joke,” you should feel ashamed of yourself — because it’s not funny. But mostly you should feel ashamed because it definitely means you haven’t stood up enough.

And yes, I know the question that’s going to be asked now: Have I stood up to my own problematic relatives online? And my answer is: Of course I have. I don’t get to pick my coworkers, and when it comes to holiday dinners, I don’t really get to pick who I break bread with. But in my online space, I get to say who comes in and who stays out. And I’ve decided that racists and other assorted bigots always belong in the latter camp.

It’s starting to feel like white people collectively consider racism a lighthearted joke.

Someone I know, for instance, was always writing problematic posts and sending troubling messages to me about women on Facebook. Because I know these sorts of patriarchal, oppressive ideas are deeply held, I decided that wasting my sweet precious afternoon trying to educate them and their ignorant friends for the greater good of women everywhere wouldn’t be an efficient use of my time. So instead of engaging with them, I deleted them and kept on trucking. Now, not only do I not have to deal with their sexism, but I also no longer receive transphobic jokes in my inbox. Two birds, one stone.

Unfriending racists has had wider-reaching consequences than just protecting me. Sidelining people who spout off damaging views also spares my other Facebook friends, as there are a number of ways that racist relatives hurt and offend. From jumping ignorance-first into comment threads on my posts, to adding remarks — and sometimes attacks — to the posts well-meaning friends leave on my wall, bigots have many methods of spewing hate.

Friendship In The Age Of Unfriending

So, when you unfriend someone, you are not only protecting yourself, but others too from their vile “opinions.” Moreover, by making the active choice to block them from your online space, you are also sending a very loud message: I don’t want you hanging around me with those views. Yes, feelings get hurt. But whose feelings would you rather have hurt? Your unassuming friend of color? The person whose humanity is being stripped away by a diatribe about the “race card”?

Or that racist aunt you barely tolerate who makes you cringe when she talks loudly in public about “illegals”?

The fact is, when it comes to social progress, shame is proven to be an effective tool. When I grew up in Virginia in the ’90s, for instance, homophobic rhetoric was still somewhat acceptable. Now, if you utter something homophobic in public, you should probably expect to get a dressing down, and rightfully so. Of course homophobia still exists in our society, but it’s generally become very unpopular (unlike, say, transphobia, which still despicably gets a pass). Pop culture, marriage equality, and a myriad of other cultural shifts in our society have contributed to a change in views about homosexuality — but so too has the simple fact that at some point, people began telling homophobes that they wouldn’t tolerate their hate. Humiliation is an effective way to make people take note of their problematic views; it may make them uncomfortable, but that’s kind of the point.

Remember, too, that when you unfriend a racist relative, you’re doing your small part to stop the very real issue of Internet harassment. Ask a vocal, marginalized human being how many times a day they receive abuse or harassment on the Internet — the answers will probably surprise you. You putting your foot down is you doing your part to stop that. Maybe racist auntie or uncle will think twice before they harass an innocent stranger from the safety of their computer screen, for fear that others will also swim away from them like a turd in the pool. Maybe not. But it’s well worth a try, isn’t it?

I understand that all those people who choose not to take a stand against their racist relatives on Facebook are afraid of being ostracized by other family members. But as someone who has a long history of unfriending people (quite happily, I must admit), I’m here to tell you that at the end of the day, everyone always gets over it. I’ve never apologized or added anyone back until they learn from the experience . . . and they always do. Maybe there are glib comments here and there made about me, but ask me if I care. (Spoiler alert: I don’t.)

And even if they don’t get over it, I’ve decided that at the end of the day, the humanity of those who’ve been offended by hurtful remarks is way more important than bigots feeling hurt because certain spaces of MINE (that’s right, MINE) are no longer accessible to them.

When you unfriend a racist relative, you’re doing your small part to stop the very real issue of Internet harassment.

Everyone has problematic relatives — but keeping them around isn’t mandatory. Sure, unfriending them is messy. It’s not fun at all. But you know what your passive disapproval is at the end of the day? It’s a pass. And when enough passes are handed out, the implicit message is that racism really isn’t such a big deal.

And for the record, because this happens a lot, I don’t hand out brownie points if — after swallowing your tongue when a relative says something you know to be racist in a comment thread I see — you tell me in a private message that you “disagree” with their opinions. Whether you message me to apologize in private or not, you’re still letting someone get away with problematic behavior. You’re also putting the burden on me, unloading your racist problem like a cat delivering a dead bird to my feet. (Emotional dumping about racism to your friends of color is an entirely different essay in itself.) My day has been thoroughly ruined by racism a great many times in my life. I’d prefer to get a little less of it delivered straight to my inbox by well-meaning friends who can’t reconcile the behavior of a blood relative who they choose to allow in their online life.

So the next time your racist tea partier relative decides to chime in on an otherwise pleasant but topical discussion, please, for the love of God, don’t message me privately about it. You have free will. You don’t need my permission to unfriend them. You shouldn’t even need my encouragement. Just unfriend them. With reckless abandon.

And if you remain inactive one too many times, don’t be surprised if I unfriend you.

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