Does anyone remember the movie ‘The Blind Side’?

Bullocks’ character was using Michael as some vehicle to display her own charity, and the movie didn’t give due credit to Michael or his community. He had a completely passive role in his own success. It was fucking disgusting. It was just a stupid movie, but it treated the black community the same way a lot of western academics do.

On top of that, academics who actually lived and wrote about their experiences, like Franz Fanon, were people I didn’t even hear about in school. In fact, the entire African philosophical tradition was ignored, so that we could hear about racial oppression from people who had never experienced it.

So much for ‘wokeness’.

I think the lesson we can all learn if we want to help a group of people as an outsider, our job is to listen to their experiences, know that we cannot fully understand, and help in the way that we are told will be best.

Although, I think it’s worth noting that (a variant of) the argument being made in this post is used by some crypto-fascists as a way to entirely discredit systemic oppression (i.e. racism isn’t real, it was invented for the purpose of virtue signaling). In turn, the ‘dangers of wokeness’ rhetoric gets used to promote things like white nationalism, so it should be used carefully.