sourcedumal:

trashcatz:

You know what feels disingenuous? The fact that we (non-Black PoC) suddenly decided to organize selfie days, like, right now. Right after BlackOut. In the midst of BlackOut, even.

Whenever Black people organize, we feel the need to co-opt that movement, or create a spinoff that’s entirely dependent upon it (like slapping our identifiers over theirs ala YellowOut).

We’ve had trouble organizing ourselves over the last few decades. Some of that might have to do with safety, or lack of access to resources or networking opportunities (speaking from my own experiences, I know a lot of my undocumented latinxs comrades *have* to remain underground, especially when it comes to wide scale public protests). But that still doesn’t give us the right to blatantly reappropriate movements created by and for Black people.

And we don’t know where to draw the line between appropriation and inspiration. The creators of Blackout have even said that if their event inspired non-Black people of color to host similar events for themselves, then good. Go do it. But instead of being inspired and supporting and further empowering Black people, what did we do? We complained that they were doing it in the first place. We organized our selfie days // YellowOut, BrownOut, etc, out of spite. Out of an attitude of “We can do this too!! It’s not all about Black people!!” And wanting to redivert attention. And these events were intentionally organized to be in conflict with BlackOut.

So all these spinoff movements that just so happen to be scheduled for today? Tomorrow? This week? The motivation is transparent. We’re not doing the organizing that Black people did for BlackOut day (which was in the works for quite some time). We’re not making viable, standalone events. We are profiting off of and relying on all the organizing done by Black people already. We expect these events to come together because they depend upon another movement that Black people put so much time and effort into.

Enough. We can’t do this. If we can ever be genuine about organizing a similar movement for ourselves, the time CANNOT be now. Recognize how meaningful BlackOut is to Black people. Support them.

This 10000 times over. The reaction to the #BlackOut is the blatant anti-blackness in the other POC communities.

Y’all demand Black folks be your attack dogs and then when we want something for ourselves, you gaslight us, tell us how selfish we are and try to take attention away from us.

Our shit was a comprehensive, inclusive ass moment. We had the whole damn spectrum out here. We did what y’all love to tell us to do: “make your own”

Y’all ain’t making ya own shit unless we do the work and you profit from it.