Something that white folks with one or more marginalized identities (trans, orientation, disabled, etc.) have a hard time coming to terms with is that even their suffering is bolstered by their whiteness. This doesn’t mean that you didn’t suffer, but it means the color of your skin wasn’t making it even worse. You’re allowed to speak about your suffering and be heard, but your suffering doesn’t negate the ways your whiteness shores up your experiences against dealing with even more..
As a marginalized but white person, your suffering isn’t made lesser by the fact that you’re white, but it doesn’t make it More either. Through the suffering you endure due to your marginalization(s), you are still required to do the work of unweaving the web of whiteness that binds you.
As a marginalized but white person, you don’t need to hide your whiteness behind your marginalizations to prove yourself “free from sin”. You can face it, acknowledge the ways in which it inherently benefits you over non-white folks, then adjust and move on without it being a huge deal. You are allowed to do that.
There’s a trend I see in a lot of marginalized but white folks of all types where even if they experienced some sort of oppression prior, there’s a point that it suddenly becomes Real to them and they respond by desperately clawing at and perpetuating whiteness to try and claim some semblance of control.
This can be a white trans person who was tortured (such as via conversion therapy) for not being their “assigned gender at birth” coming out and experiencing the further othering that comes with being visibly trans. It can be a white disabled person who’s condition suddenly worsens and instead of just being “annoying” it becomes debilitating and affects their life significantly.
And they then find comfort in whiteness instead, and use that tokenized role of a “good” white marginalized person, of clinging to the scraps a predominantly white society is willing to throw to them, and continue to dance faster instead of questioning why they’re dancing for them at all.
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Across races/ethnicities, the more marginalized you become, the harder it gets to find communities of people who understand you and your experiences. I’m Black, Trans, and Disabled; these are the communities I primarily seek out to find solidarity with – but I don’t want to have to undergo some mythic adventure simply to find other people who understand the confluences of disability, race, and gender, especially given that split between various social media, various locales, each group that covers all of it is almost vanishingly small.
We shouldn’t have to break away from the larger overall communities simply because of our race if we want to find people who understand. For example, it shouldn’t be nigh impossible to easily find and build community with other Black transfemmes in the Twitter/Bluesky communities, without divorcing yourself from the larger communities and the benefits of information, mutual aid, and more that can come from them.
We need to work on making our communities more racially accessible in multiple ways – primarily by making it so that BIPOC don’t become more and more boxed out of community by any other marginalizations they have, and by dismantling the structures of whiteness and white supremacy that we continually reinforce within our communities. If a larger community is so visibly, overwhelmingly, white that BIPOC give up because it feels that there’s no space at all for them? That’s a huge problem for that community that will only calcify if active effort isn’t expended to correct it.
Our ability to be heard or have our needs met shouldn’t be reliant on whether we receive the grace of a white person helping us be heard and seen or whether we perform our anger well enough for the audience, but often that’s the price we have to pay on social media – if a white person with a larger account doesn’t pick up and amplify what we’re saying, it’ll often be dead in the water unless its based in our rage.
In a world where we’re so interconnected, where we have so much to say and share, BIPOC folks deserve to be heard without needing a “patron” to uplift us, and that’s the type of communities we need to work towards building.