Middle-class white activists always see the best in everyone, so they get scammed. I see through people’s bullshit and I tell my coworkers, and then some of them get upset because they think I’m being judgmental. They say I’m seeing the glass half-empty. “We should believe that people can change.” But others are also jumping up and down saying they see the same warning signs, and then it turns out that someone really was taking advantage of the organization. Money gets lent, and some people have a different excuse every week on why they can’t pay it back. But my middle-class coworker says, “but they’re really hurting,” and I say “that’s why they talked with you and not me, they know you’re the softy.”
— Lisa Richards
White middle-class activists go to one of two extreme on black experiences. Either they think they already know all about black experiences, or they assume they don’t know anything and rely on any black spokesperson to be their interpreter. There’s a middle position, not relying on a racial spokesperson, but also not making assumptions without investigating to learn more about particular black experiences. It shouldn’t be “whatever you say” to a black person. They have to bring their critical faculties and their own experiences to bear.
Sometimes they have a well-meaning impulse to include people of color in a coalition, but they sometimes primarily choose a person on the basis of their race and not their politics, and they sometimes get someone with politics contradictory to the organization’s. All black people experience racism, but we respond differently to it, some in individualistic ways. If you don’t look at politics, not just on racial issues but on class issues, you are going to get into trouble. If instead whites approach coalition politics by simply saying “I need one of these and one of those,” then that’s problematic.
— Preston Smith