I think it’s more of a thing where Nezua is obviously not being two-faced about it. If a privileged white person who participates in oppression (and we all do in some ways) makes this kind of call for understanding it’s kind of bullshit unless they’re actually taking the steps to really understand where the oppressed are coming from and how their own actions hurt others.

And trust me, if someone is a priveleged white person who really understands the way the system is stacked and has compassion, they wouldn’t expect people who are oppressed to meet them halfway, because it isn’t fair.

Nezua’s call is very self-reflective. He looks at his own flaws and understands that others have them too. Too often when similar things are said by the privilege, it’s simply a request that people who are being seriously oppressed lay off them for awhile because, hey, nobody’s perfect. Nezua isn’t advocating making excuses for racism, he’s just saying let’s not dehumanize racists. Two different things.

Personally I don’t quite agree with setting myself up as the arbiter of the “legitimacy” of others’ anger. But if I am compassionate, and kind, I will do my best to perceive what it was that roused that other person to anger. I will do my best to notice the conditions and experiences that made that other person angry, and often enough, I will feel a fellow feeling and solidarity for it.

If I am also compassionate and kind to myself, I will not use that other person’s anger as an excuse to do harm or violence to myself, even psychologically. I will not “internalize” that anger. I will continue to accept myself, but I will extend myself in compassion to that other person.

It is in the nature of compassion that I cannot command it of another. Nor do I need to. All I need is to feel it in myself and for myself, and to understand the other as she or he is, as best I can. If someone does extend friendship and compassion to me, I should accept it as a gift, in the spirit it is given. If someone is angry at me, I should, ideally, also accept it for what it can teach me, without, as we used to say in the old encounter groups, “catching the medicine ball” to my solar plexus, and letting it destroy my spirit.

It is easy for me to see why a privileged person preaching compassion and gratitude to others can be an arrogant fool. But that does not mean that the same privileged person should not undertake to make compassion and gratitude central to his or her own life, and in that spirit, there will, ideally, be no need for resentment that others do not do the same. For the moment one resents the lack of compassion in another, one loses one’s own, and one’s own is the more valuable, to oneself.

….the Unapologetic Mexican. They very title makes it clear that his defense of friendship and kindness isn’t just another well-meaning but clueless attempt by the privileged to silence the legitimate anger of the marginalized and the oppressed.

Yeah, funny how two people can espouse the same principles, but only one of them is legitimate. Funny in kindof a racist sort of way.

The flip side being, that online communication is absent the visual and aural nuances that make someone non-Otherly as well. Cold, hard print can’t be modified by a smile, a certain tone, volume or pace of delivery, a gesture, a gaze. To me, it’s a difficult medium to communicate in because of that nature.

And at the same time, blogging encourages a false sense of intimacy amongst the participants—folks who frequent the same blogs get to communicating as if they know each other better than they really do.