Marco Rogers @polotek Did y'all know that a lot of white people don't have the cultural concept of "real talk"? You know where you stop saying the diplomatic thing and tell people what's really going on. They just don't have it. You try to have a moment of "real talk" and they freak the fuck out.
Marco Rogers @polotek It's one of the things that makes it difficult for PoC, and Black people especially, to form real trust relationships with white people. Y'all don't know what's going on because no one tells you. And no one tells you because you can't actually handle the truth.
Marco Rogers @polotek I've come to understand that white people have their own seemingly convoluted way that they decide what's going on and what to do about it. I have a really hard time navigating those rituals. I think a lot of us do. And it damages our ability to be successful in white spaces.
Marco Rogers @polotek @ekp (spitballing) if WASP culture is that you don't publicly discuss *ANYTHING* that could be the source of conflict (no politics or religion at the dinner table), when conflicts are brought up in the workplace, the cultural standard is to ignore them vs. discuss them.
@polotek yup. i’ve been noodling on this and the amount of communications misses that happen because of it.
if you violate the “no discussions about conflicts” rule, you have to go. on the flip, Black folks expect real talk and never get it, which ends up putting us at a disadvantage.
Right. Even those of us who have been relatively successful so far in figuring out how to move in white spaces can eventually run up against this. Failing to figure it out can put a hard limit on PoCs upward mobility.
Marco Rogers @polotek Did y'all know that a lot of white people don't have the cultural concept of "real talk"? You know where you stop saying the diplomatic thing and tell people what's really going on. They just don't have it. You try to have a moment of "real talk" and they freak the fuck out.
This is true, and white women are tasked with sensing that “real talk” might be on the horizon, and “smoothing things over” to keep it from happening. Many of us have internalized the notion that we are responsible for other people arguing to the point that ...
Oh shit. I've definitely experienced this, but I don't think I connected it in this way. If white women are tasked with keeping the peace, it explains a lot about why Black folks so often end up being "intimidating" or "aggressive" in their minds.
This is so real, for all forms of marginalization. WASPy types will go way out of their way to avoid actually facing uncomfortable truths, even if it means getting extremely angry at their own strawman. Trans people face this exact same wall when trying to educate cis people on how their behaviors harm us. Especially when they know they’re in the wrong but don’t want to admit it because it makes them feel ugly.
Twitch streamer Negaoryx put it very well the other day:
Someone is holding a mirror up to you and it makes you uncomfortable, because you know you and you know the parts of you that are good. So in your heart, you have to come up with a narrative that makes you feel better about the fact that someone is asking you to confront the parts of you that you hate the most— me asking you to hold yourself accountable to be a better person, because you aren’t right now.