Benjamin J. Davis, born on this day in 1903, was American lawyer and communist who was elected in 1943 to the New York City Council, representing Harlem. Davis was persecuted by the state via the anti-communist Smith and McCarran Acts.
Davis became radicalized through his role as defense attorney in the 1933 trial of Angelo Herndon, a 19-year-old black communist who had been charged “attempting to incite insurrection” because he tried to organize a farm workers’ union.
In 1949, Davis was among a number of communist leaders prosecuted for violating the Smith Act. He was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison. In 1962 Davis was charged with violating the Internal Security Act (also known as the McCarran Act), but died before the case could come to trial.
“Whether one agrees with the Communist Party or not, one must at least know the truth about it. One must not permit his ideas to be shaped by the hysteria which now passes as a ‘crusade against Communism’… For example, the canard that every Communist has his pockets lined with ‘Moscow gold.’ If that were true, one could be sure that there would scarcely be any room in our party for workers. The capitalists, to whom gold is god of the universe, would crowd them out.”
- Benjamin J. Davis
I hope you nerds have a good month of September 
Remember no crackers
I think especially with whites, a large part of it is that if youre someone who doesnt think of themself as racist but havent actually done the work to be specifically anti racist (and apply this to the other examples I had earlier) youre usually willing to accept that being a poc influences the way you see the world because they experience racism.
However, privileged people arent willing to accept that them being privileged also influences how they see the world because they see themselves as the default and thus neutral.
When you tell these racists/imperialists/transmisogynists that their limited compassion for oppressed people is a result of their own privilege influencing who they see as human, they have their cry baby tantrums about their childhood or their dog died or youre the real bigot because how dare you tell me that a coin cant have one side
Anyway, id force people to read Orientalism at gunpoint if I could
It’s really similar to when people leave abusive/extremist religious sects, but don’t do the work of unraveling their brainworms. Example: recognizing the Mormon church is problematic and leaving it, but then clinging onto racism influenced by the mark of Cain nonsense or homophobia present in most Abrahamic religions.
One of my in-laws is like this. He’s a turbo “”““centrist””“” reactionary libertarian crypto fascist who no longer practices Mormonism nor believes in Christianity in general and thinks this makes him some type of authority on philosophy and politics. Yet he’s still incredibly queerphobic and, while not outwardly racist towards black people, is incredibly racist towards Arabs and Latine people.
It’s pure laziness to avoid doing any kind of introspection or investigating similar experiences by other people. It’s the assumption that, because you figured out one problem in your life, you know everything there is about all other problems. White so-called “anti-racists” are similar. They think because they figured out racism is wrong, they are now the greatest authority on the topic and have no need to continue analyzing the rest of their beliefs.
It plays into the white savior trope, where a white person must lead infantilized PoC and become better at being that ethic group than the actual ethnic group. It’s like every white person’s dream to be put in charge of a Native American organization, where they will personally lead the liberation of indigenous people. They will transform from being white into some type of Crazy Horse replica, showing Native Americans how to be Native American after they’ve consumed the lived experiences of PoC as though they went through those same experiences.
Anywho. I’m ranting and sleepy but yeah. People don’t want to continue doing the work of unraveling their problematic behaviors.
I… never thought of it in those words… certainly I believed that the more marginalized you are, the more you can see the ugly truth of the world, the truth that the vast majority of people are practically oblivious to
But it never crossed my mind that the opposite could also be true, that the more privileged you are, the more it affects your worldview without you knowing
Thank you so much for the reply, you really put into words things that are easy to overlook