How Do I Overcome White Woman Fragility Brain? How Do I Build Solidarity with Activists Who Kinda Suck?

A quick Autistic Advice round-up.

I’d like to celebrate the long weekend with a couple of extra Autistic Advice mini-columns for your inboxes. Our first question come from Tumblr user Tinker-Tanner, who is wondering how to become less tone-policing and fragile in the face of conflict:

Tinker-Tanner, I'm going to depart from my usual gradual tolerance-building exercise approach here (though all that stuff still applies) and give you a more targeted recommendation:

I think you need to find a friend who can be a bit of a shitty little outrageous bitch in how they speak and emote, but who is at their core a wonderful, reliable, and morally stand-up person, and make a special place for them in your life.

You are looking for the type of person who is not afraid to be disagreeable, the type of person who, when asked how their day is going, cries out "terrible!" and launches into a whole long rant about why. The type who will show up to your house with groceries when you are sick and start cooking and cleaning all around even when you've (lyingly) said you do not need the help, lecturing you about your performative self-neglect all the while. The type of person who will teach your nervous system that negativity is not bad, that ruining the vibe is sometimes needed, and that we can be good people even while not worrying about making other people feel superficially good about us all the time.

You can often locate such people in hard-core activist spaces, as the people steadily Doing the Work for years on end are unlikely to be motivated by soft, tender feelings, because those emotions sure don't keep. You can also find them in places like AA programs (or SMART Recovery meetings, or even better, harm reductionist groups), support groups, queer discussion groups, book clubs, Marxist reading groups, church groups, food kitchens, and any other gathering of people that is driven by a strong ideological commitment or interest in intellectual pursuits but which can be rather dry or unpleasant in its execution of its ideals. You can also just like, throw a stone in places like New York or Boston or Philly and hit three to five people like these. Even as far out as Pittsburgh or Cleveland there is a lot of us.

Now, if you have chronic white woman everybody-must-be-happy-all-the-time syndrome (which really just means I will *make* everybody pretend to be happy or else I’m going to lose my shit), it can be tempting to fall in with someone who *seems* like a person like this, but who in actuality is a manipulative, undermining type who is only taking advantage of your tendency to excuse and downplay their many slights and offenses. You do not want that. You want someone who can accept criticism just as readily as they dish it out. You want someone who will challenge you on your failings because they know you can do better and might even tell you how, not because they want you to feel like a failure.

You are looking for kind of person who will fire off at the mouth sometimes, but then go, “Oh dammit, you’re right, I hate it but you’re right,” the moment you point out a valid flaw in their logic. Someone brash, but with a heart and the capacity to move forward. Someone who can teach you that conflict is inevitable, and needed, and that saying something weird or off-putting is not the end of the world, and that arguing and complaining can actually bring you closer to someone when it is done authentically and from a place of good faith.

Such a person will empower you to speak up more frequently, and to become a more moral, more unpleasant version of yourself, saving you from the ugly, fragile resentment of always leaving your true opinions left unsaid. It’s amazing how much we can grow in our conflict resolution skills the more we surround ourselves with people that welcome it and learn from it themselves.

To find this kind of person, keep putting yourself in places that align with the type of person you'd like to be, filled with people who are doing things with their lives that you admire. You’ll soon learn that some of the most ethically consistent and morally righteous people out there are downright weird and prickly and unusual, and that such a correlation is probably not a fluke.

Notice your initial reactions to people. Who is off-putting? Is that a fair judgement? (Sometimes it will be, sometimes it won’t). Who are you afraid of upsetting? Who expresses themselves in a way you'd never, ever dare to? Who is great at leading the chants or bringing an unfocused conversation to a halt? Do they get things wrong sometimes? What would happen if you told them?

Most kind-of unpleasant people won’t be the special Prickly Friend for You, they'll just be kind of annoying features of the environment you don’t want to have occupy a focal point in your life. (Being annoying is not a crime, it’s a human inevitability, and we can be in community with people who benignly drive us up the wall).

But at some point, you will have the experience of getting to know someone grumpy and difficult and thinking to yourself hey actually, this person is a little off and irascible, but I notice they always come through for people. They might have a short temper, but they never are harsh to a person in a vulnerable position when it really matters. They’re only tough to deal with because they’ve been doing this work a long time and have seen and heard it all.

Your new friend might not be the most elegant in how they express their views, but when you think about them and the work they do, they will be someone who you respect and view as broadly in the right. Over time, a truly good person will prove themselves through their behavior and their interpersonal track record, not how they present themselves to others on the most surface-level, and as you get more acclimated to their way of communicating, you'll find your voice of disagreement dwelling within you, too.

Good luck in finding them! On to question #2:

Our second question today comes from a queer Autistic woman of color living in a rural area. She wants to get organized within her local activist scene, but many people around her are racist or infuriating to deal with. She wants to know what her options are for building community where she’s currently planted, because heading off to a more diverse and liberal-minded city certainly isn’t an option for everyone. How does one build solidarity with people who don’t always show it for you?

Thank you so much for your wonderful message and question, Anon. I am admittedly a little out of my depth in some ways in answering this, as a white person and a man who people don’t tend to subject to the worst of the kind of treatment that you’re speaking to. (What I do get is people thinking that expressing the prejudices will be acceptable to me, which I have the responsibility to shut down as often as humanly possible, so that spaces don’t have a such a dogshit culture and alienate tons of people like you).

I think you do really have to look over your own bandwidth, and determine for you what is tolerable and what isn’t. As a trans person, there are slightly “off” little comments that I’ll accept from someone who isn’t well versed in the topic, and differences in how some of my elders talk and think about gender that I’ll tolerate bemusedly, but if it ventures into any area that makes the space explicitly hostile to trans people who are more vulnerable than me, then it’s something I need to fight about, or I need to abandon the space.

For a woman of color like yourself, I think that kind of decision-making is a lot more fraught, because frankly, I never have to worry about anybody really escalating their bullshit with me too badly. Usually, if I challenge someone on their viewpoints or statements, they want to forget the conflict as quickly as possible, which winds up working out in my favor much of the time.

(The propensity towards Midwest nicey-ness / white person fake-nicey-ness can sometimes be leveraged to win a battle or two – when I have obviously, unquestionably shut down someone’s ignorance or read them for filth diplomatically for making a really dumb point, often the other person’s impulse is to backtrack and make nice, or pretend that what they said never happened, while also never doing it again in my presence. They want to save face and not be singled out again as an embarrassment, and in plenty of situations, that’s plenty good enough.

I have seen this kind of maneuvering work for people of color too, especially in groups like churches, volunteer organizations, cultural affinity groups, and the like, where there is a strong bias towards everybody getting along…sometimes that awful cultural norm of group-cohesion-at-all-costs can be shifted to your advantage, if you Make the Person Saying the Fucked Up Thing the Awkward One. This isn’t fair, and it’s doubly difficult for women of color to do, but if you can calmly and assertively shut a person down for being out of line, and make them appear to be the flustered, outrageous person who is creating a distraction, you can win.)

I think a lot of what you’ll have to do, Anon, is discern between the groups where you can push back against the remarks and policies that are unacceptable to you but basically get along with well-enough intentioned people, and the groups where you will be singled out and treated poorly for speaking up or ever asserting yourself.

You mentioned that people often roll their eyes at your name and don’t bother to learn how to pronounce it correctly, Anon, and it occurs to me that challenging people on this reaction might make for an excellent litmus test of a person’s ability to endure conflict, and an organized group’s ability to withstand a light challenge to their existing culture. Since people mis-pronouncing your name is likely to be one of your very first experiences within a new setting, it is a great time to establish your boundaries.

The second you get eye-rolling, flustered comments, or signs of a person giving up on even trying to say your name right, you can repeat your name for them again, and add a brief, assertive comment like “It matters to me that you get my name right.” or “I believe in you, it’s [name]. Try it again,” or, “You can learn my name. It’s [name].”

When you make comments like these, some people will be appropriately embarrassed of their initial fragility surrounding your name, get your name right, and then act like nothing happened in order to save face (and then hopefully never forget your name again!). Others will escalate, feigning incompetence or hurt feelings without actually trying to do any better, then running off to complain privately to leadership about your “attitude.”

I think you only want to fuck with groups of people who fall in the former camp, people who can handle being corrected without flipping their shit. Some of them will still be annoying liberal white people with sensitive feelings and a lack of broader awareness, but they’ll mostly be the type who do not have the institutional power needed to punish people of color who challenge them, and generally are more interested in getting along with everybody than they are with accumulating more control over the group. If you’re lucky, some of the organizers you meet will be kind of like the Prickly Friend I described in the previous answer — someone who might be indelicate or difficult at times, but is not at all precious about their feelings and can move on after a brief argument having actually learned and respecting you more as a result.

Again, in my experience you see more of the tolerably annoying type of white person within activist groups that meet in church basements than ones in academia or at a nonprofit. Working-class activists are more able to hang with a variety of types of people in general, I find, and tend to roll with the punches far more easily than higher-status groups that care more about decorum and respectability. But it certainly varies a ton.

It also really helps to befriend all the other people of color & neurodivergent people in the space early on, so you have people to lean on and validate your perceptions, and so you can hear their lay of the land. From getting to know them, you’ll also learn what the broader group finds acceptable from marginalized groups within the space. Is every queer person there a married assimilationist who is concerned about ‘groomers’? If so, this is probably never going to be your scene. Are all the people of color in the organization super invested in smiley, performative gestures and disappointed in you for being visibly ‘awkward’ or “negative” because you’re neurodivergent? If so, that tells you a lot about how much the group as a whole tolerates dissent from POC. And so on.

I wish I had advice that was more targeted and immediately actionable, Anon, but I think a lot of very subtle vibe-checking is required, based on your political goals and interests, the number of spaces available, the nature of the organizations doing work in your area, and so on. You will probably have to try a couple of groups before you find one that is tolerable enough for you because a) the people aren’t unbearably racist, and b) they can kind of handle conflict some of the time, at least. You probably won’t find exactly what you want, but with some experience and information-gathering, you’ll know what your least bad, most hopeful option is and whether you have the energy to engage with it.

Please don’t be disheartened if things are tough, or if few of the groups you initially try have rancid vibes. You don’t have to stay anywhere that’s actively unsafe or threatening to you. You can also take steps to build the community spaces that you want – by reaching out to other people of color in the area and forming your own groups that can then partner with these kinda-annoying white majority organizations only for select events. The autonomy is useful and may preserve some social and emotional spoons for you, but at the cost of having to do a lot of sending emails and booking spaces and ordering donuts and pizza. So there are certainly tradeoffs to either approach. But you do have options.

I would love to hear in the comments from people of color who do organizing in non-urban areas and have to deal with a lot of white people’s nonsense. I know that my perspective on this one is limited and biased!

You can submit a question to Autistic Advice or suggest a future topic for a column using my ask box, linked here.