I could have kept it simple and done “COMMUNITY Part 2” but… here I am instead. Why am I here? There’s a book called Emergent Strategy that keeps coming up when I research community. It looks like a great book! Someone has shared the principles from the book, and I agree with them. Seems like a lot of people really like the book, but when I saw the author (a Black woman), I got the “ick.” Like… I didn’t really know anything about her other than the fact that she wrote this book, and I didn’t like her. This has been bothering me for a while. She came up a few weeks ago for the first time, and I’ve been carrying this question with me ever since.

I’m not thinking about this in real time. I was mulling it over last night. The best thing I could come up with was my experience with the women who are credited with starting the Black Lives Matter movement. I came up with a rating last night regarding trustworthiness…

• white guy – Instantly suspicious
• white women – Instantly suspicious
• Black man – Somewhat suspicious
• Black women – Low suspicion (unless activist!)
• Biracial person – Welcome, sister/brother/person! lol

I hope you don’t take these too seriously… lol many factors play into suspicion levels (except for white guys… LOL!) The key bit is “unless activist” for Black women. I could write, and actually have, a whole blog post laying out how fucked up it is what the Black Lives Matter women did to a second group of women, the Black Life Matters women. I thought I had squashed that beef internally, but it’s clear I haven’t. To make a long story short, the Black Life Matters women started their thing a full year before the Black Lives Matter women. The Black Lives Matter women did what they had to do to make it pop off and gave absolutely no mention to the originators of the phrase, made up a story about how they came up with it on their own, and created a page on their website called “HERstory” to talk about how women are always left out of history (true). I was shellshocked because the Black Lives Matter group was more about looks and the Black Life Matters group was about action. I was shellshocked because they totally wrote women out of history, just like men do and would. I was shellshocked because this was a digital movement, and no journalist had done the digital digging to see whether what they said was true or not (my distrust in the media skyrocketed).

Were they industry plants? Were they allowed to rise because they talked about radicalism but weren’t actually radical? I have no idea. What I do have an idea of now is that this is why I have trust issues with the author of Emergent Strategy.

I have another lens through which to view this, one I picked up from the book Decolonizing Wealth (spoilers ahead). The author, a Native man from an East Coast nation, talks about a lot of things in the book when it comes to charitable giving. How fucked it is, etc. One thing he talks about is how few seats at the table there are for minorities. This limited seating makes minorities fight for table scraps. He ends up telling a long story about how his seemingly supportive boss is doing everything she can to help him out. Then he starts to get some shine, and weird things start to happen. Anyhow, turns out that once he started getting big, his boss sabotaged him. The whole time reading, I was thinking about some white chick but, PLOST TWIST, it was a Black woman.

I didn’t think typing this out would help me move the bar on my distrust of Black activist women, but… I think it has… maybe I’ll get it dissolved by the end of the day. I had this working in the back of my mind already, but Black women have it HARD… like the WORST… I think that’s a part of why I felt I had already made peace with the women from Black Lives Matter. “They’re doing the best with the cards they have,” but clearly that wasn’t enough. Clearly, that was just a band-aid to make me let go of it temporarily. If I blend Black Lives Matter, the stray bullets Emergent Strategy got, and the story from Decolonizing Wealth, it gives me a better understanding. I suppose I could throw a “crabs in a barrel” in there as well.

Any and all angst I have towards Black women, large or small, needs to be redirected at the systems that force them to fight the way they do, even with each other sometimes, to try to bring about change… I’m going to buy and read Emergent Strategy, and maybe I’ll even buy and read at least one of the books from the women who started (see! I leveled up from “are credited” lol) the Black Lives Matter movement. To be honest, I have a severe deficiency in consuming content created by Black women… I definitely have much to learn from them.

Note: Shitty Black women are still shitty. No free passes! lol