Sometimes to be a Black person who organises around anti-racism and other -isms with non-black POC means that you have to prove through your labour and through how ‘radical’ you are that you are worthy of being part of the POC group.
Black people are assumed to be radicalised, to have a radical history and to be badarses (not to mention, are apparently not worth caring about as a person)—so when one isn’t ‘as radical’ or radicalised or misspeaks — then a hundred bricks come down.
This has been my experience and I have interpreted it as happening to other Black folks too. It’s mainly perpetuated by really controlling non-black POC.
I posted once about my son being biracial & how being black & X is different than other forms of being multiracial especially when (like my son) your black ancestry is visible. He knows who his biological father is & he’s in regular contact with his white cousins. But, just as they refer to him as their black cousin he sees himself as a young black man.
I got a series of increasingly angry comments from someone who ID’d as multiracial (but not black) about me forcing him to deny parts of his identity. I don’t know if she ever quite grasped that my kid owns a mirror & is the same complexion as his brother with two black parents. My politics might be radical, but they are not unrealistic & that interaction taught me a lot about anti-black racism within anti-racist activists.
