This question has been devouring my mind forever now. I am at all of the intersections of privilege: a financially comfortable cishet cracker man in the imperial core. The only way I could be more privileged would be if I was bourgeois. I’m aware enough to know that my way of life is only possible due to the subjugation of others both here and abroad (even if I’ve so far put off reading theory to better understand how that works like Fanon, Amin, and Cope), but I am so entrenched in a social circle of people that consists almost entirely of protofash or cryptofash. Instead of challenging them on stuff all the time, I regularly let things slide - if not feed into it. The closest I can eke out anymore is spouting back the vile shit they imply rephrased to be completely mask off and feigning agreeing with them. Instead of shocking them, this seems to please them more, and I’m not sure if I’m “feigning” agreeing with this shit so much as actually agreeing with it.
To give you an idea of the level of kkkrakkkery we’re dealing with here, I’ll rattle off some things I remember off the top of my head:
- Saying Tortuguita (I’m using his name, it’s not like they fucking knew it) had it coming when he got shot protesting cop city. In fact, they have no issue with cop city at all.
- Saying that redlining was effective at “isolating the problem” with respect to a very poor town in the county I live in. When I asked if he considered redlining based, he answered in the affirmative.
- Celebrating the shiny sparkly treatsball district that is being built in our city, displacing shittons of people living there in an act of gigagentrification.
- Regularly making jokes about “indians”, e.g. “Bruh sickass gun, bruh imagine if you were using that gun to fight indians”.
- Large, prominently placed blue lives matter car window sticker
- Going on about how important it is to keep property values high
- Trying to convince me to invest in starting a meme coin that we could attract investors with and and then sell our coins in what is, after me asking him multiple times, “not a rugpull”
- Spouting off about how Pakistan is invading the UK because all the people immigrating there are military age males
- Always referring to undocumented immigrants as “illegals”
- Celebrating a bill to fund a local LGBT center being shut down due to some made up sex predator bullshit whipped up by libs of tiktok
I’m becoming more and more convinced that the vast majority of my already pretty small friend group should get the wall. At the same time, I find it hard to justify cutting them out of my life because they haven’t done toxic shit to me and I’ve known these people most of my life. It doesn’t help that I still live with my parents in my hometown and that they’re the only people I see somewhat regularly in addition to my parents and a hand full of extend family. No matter how I try to justify it to myself, by handling this problem as I currently am, I am committing a serious liberalism.
What’s tearing me apart is that I know that while me sticking to the status quo is infinitely easier and more comfortable than getting involved organizing, having principles, and sticking my neck out - something that is guaranteed to alienate me from basically everyone in my life. But I also know, even from a selfish perspective, that the knowledge that I was too much of a coward to actually help make a better world will be torture the further in life I go. It’s already torture now.
I’ve talked to my therapist about cutting people out because of politics and she said it wasn’t worth it, but she’s also a lib, so I’m not inclined to trust her on that one.
Edit: Thank you to those who answered. You’ve all given me a lot of food for thought, and it’s comforting to know there are options I can take besides the nuclear one. I’ve already been paying the highest dues tier to a local Marxist org but had stopped reaching out to them, partly due to my depression and partly because it’s hard for me to rouse myself to drive into the city. The last time I had done anything with them in meatspace was some canvassing to support the UPS strike. They do have online meetings though, so that at least gives me a way to stay involved even if I can’t rouse myself.
Apologies for not directly replying to anyone’s comments. Trying to think of good responses for comments on an effort post is hard.
How to lose friends and alienate people, eh?
I would reconcile yourself to the fact that you’re going to crack a few eggs in the process of making this omelette.
Although — better fewer but better, as a wise man once said.
I would pick your battles, given that you are in a position to do you. You might be surprised at how far you can shift individual’s perspectives if you take a gradual approach; it’s very easy to denounce someone and cut them out of your life but, unless it’s because you find their behaviour reprehensible, that generally only makes people more entrenched in their position. Sometimes allyship means being behind enemy lines and doing the hard work that the groups who you are an ally to are unable to, whether due to the fact that they aren’t welcomed into the Old Boy’s Club or due to the fact that they have to prioritise their own family/community/mental health.
In these situations I find that I am constantly engaging in a degree of calculus: how much goodwill and trust I have with this person, how much goodwill will be eroded by challenging them, how high a priority any particular issue is to push back on… basically it’s weighing up how much far I am able to stretch the relationship without it snapping and how important it is to leverage the relationship for driving critical consciousness.
What that means is that I do not swing at every ball. Sometimes I let smaller shit slide in order to tackle the bigger issues. It sucks to have to compromise but this is the nature of doing hard work in the community and agitating for change. Sometimes I don’t tackle that bigger issue head-on but I choose to voice dissent or to point out a pointed semi-rhetorical question before moving the conversation on.
[CW for mostly abstract discussions of everything awful - queerphobia, murder, SA jokes, the like - and stuff like suicide from here on]
Some of the tactics I include are:
Humanising the victims (e.g. “I feel for their family though - nobody deserves their kid to die like that” as a small aside for someone’s queerphobic quip about a trans person who has recently died an early death due to suicide or murder.)
Refusal to engage
This can be not laughing at the rape joke, excusing yourself from a discussion when it gets gross, opting not to engage in a discussion about what “should” happen to an oppressed group or not to respond to a question etc.
Bringing in the historical context of the issue at hand
Just voicing dissent (e.g. “I don’t agree” without dragging the discussion down into a debate)
Asking them to explain the joke or the argument (e.g. getting them to explain how the joke they made was yet-another example of The One Joke™ and being like “Eh, that one’s a bit played out”)
This one works well for when people are putting out snide insults that target you because it kills all the fun and they get deprived of their desired reaction from you.
Idk how this works for other people but there are certain topics where I am like a dog with a bone. It’s probably on account of being autistic. But whatever the case, I have 5 mins+ diatribes that people around me can trigger. Metaphorically, I will cling to the mic for dear life and I will talk my diatribe through until it’s over. If you try to interrupt I’m either going to relate that directly back to what I was saying or I’m just going to continue on with what I was saying. This is a softer sort of redline for me in a social setting - basically I’m just draining all of the fun out of a situation and, after that same diatribe has been unloaded on a person multiple times, they develop an aversion to raising that topic around me again. Works for me. No doubt some people think I’m insufferable for it but idc much because if your opinions are insufferable then I’m just levelling the playing field.
e.g. instead of going in on the discussion about George Floyd and the “need to maintain law and order”, I’d shift the discussion to talking about police abuse of power as this is a much more serious problem and a much greater personal threat than whatever George Floyd did/may have done
e.g. asking them if they’d agree with that statement if it was their child etc.
I’m sure there are other tactics that I engage in too. But that’s some of how I deal with it and what my strategy is as a person who is white and who more or less passes as cis, straight, a man, hetero etc.