Notes on Kitty Genovese: initial reporting of the case was very sensationalized and has been steadily walked back in the decades since, with the total number of witnesses and the inaction of police remaining a point of contention. I maintain that this death was entirely preventable, and the confirmed facts of the case point to multiple onlookers failing to intervene with anything more than a phone call. Folks who want to learn more about her murder can do so here.
These past couple months have been profoundly rewarding and inspiring at times. When Trump got re-elected, a lot of left-leaning white people finally “woke up” and realized they need to start doing shit. I initially started posting first aid content geared towards protesters getting shot at, then moved to topics like community organizing, physical fitness and effective political praxis. My voice resonated much more than I expected and I now sift through thousands of comments nightly.
While I do target a certain audience as best I can—and the vast majority of interactions are with that audience, and very positive—among the maelstrom of leftists engaging with my content are thousands of my oldest sworn enemies: white liberals. These interactions are less inspiring, and more of an exercise in abject masochism.
Side note: a part of me is perfectly fine with losing this app in a few weeks, because I’ve learned that I am not cut out for content creation. But I digress:
Last week a woman was set on fire while sleeping in a NYC subway station. Bystanders and law enforcement alike failed to intervene as the attacker stood silently and watched himself; precious minutes passed and expired, and she died. The event has thrown back into the headlines the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese, who was repeatedly raped and stabbed for over a half hour while a neighborhood watched, before she was finally killed.
The operative theory behind “the bystander effect” is the individual assumption that somebody else will deal with it and the subsequent result of nobody dealing with it, and thus a sleeping woman can be burned alive while passersby watch and film.
It’s a phenomenon that’s much discussed but I don’t find it that complicated: these folks’ decision not to intervene is a matter of self-preservation. Folks watched Kitty Genovese fight for her life for thirty minutes; they watched that man stand quietly over his victim while she screamed and burned alive; but they simply would not risk their own safety to save either woman’s life.
Another example of this is the 2020 murder of George Floyd, and while this event commands some nuance since the perpetrators were police officers, the bare bones remain largely the same: a crowd gathered around the murder as it took place, filming and screaming and begging for mercy, but nobody stepped in for almost nine minutes and thus their inaction allowed Floyd to die because they were scared for their own safety.
Last week’s grisly murder & ensuing discourse, the mass panic following the election, and these stupid TikTok comments are all coalescing around my personal crusade that is trying to understand the paradox of white activism:
No matter how fiercely a white liberal believes in a cause—no matter the stakes or the human cost—they remain categorically unwilling to risk any personal safety to fight for it.
Any meaningful social change is taken by force and often at great peril. I know this. Every non-white community in this country knows this. We are tooling up for a fight for our lives, informed by hundreds of years of history filled with effective praxis, and the understanding that human rights activists are far more likely to be assassinated than listened to.
And while I would love to meet these liberals’ confused and impotent screaming about MAGA-this-or-that with exhausted indifference for the sake of my own peace, I can’t. I need them to finally get with the fucking program right now, because outspoken white supremacists and eugenicists hold both the highest government offices and the overwhelming support of White America right now. Fascism is beyond a cause worth fighting; rather, it is the certainty of industrialized violent death for millions of people.
I’ve written before about the nonsensical liberal approach to combating fascism and the ideology that informs it. I also see profound similarities between the psychology of the bystander effect and that of white liberals. John Clark analyzes the idea that liberals assume, for several reasons, that there is a universal force which naturally creates more blue voters every time capitalism destabilizes the politics of moderates, thus absolving them of any personal responsibility to solve the problem; this is the passerby’s hope that someone else will deal with it as they watch the murder. He also analyzes how this assumption is fundamentally opposite to reality for several more reasons; this is the collective inaction of the passersby, and the grim outcome when nobody deals with it.
In “Antifascist Praxis” I also discussed how liberals have a convenient tendency to choose the one method of fighting back that doesn’t require them to actually do anything, and how I believe this to be a fear response to Republican culture’s total seizure of all things scary in this country (guns, muscles, money, whiteness, masculinity) under the nakedly false pretense of “taking the high road.” Liberals will fight valiantly, provided that it’s from their homes where their personal safety is assured.
Sky Fisher appeared in my inbox and explained the racial crux of the paradox of white activism perfectly:
“White people in particular have been conditioned by the system to believe that any pain endured is intolerable and an injustice against their human rights. Ease of access to creature comforts [has always been] given preferentially to white people: the front of the bus, temperature control, internet access, being able to order your food, being able to recuse yourself from working in person.
“[This means] white people as a collective have an enormous aversion to pain, and that becomes an intolerance to pain. The system’s goal is to make sure you’re so pain averse that you will do not do anything that might force you to endure it: meaning, protesting in public, boycotting companies that you really like, or having social interactions that make you a little uncomfortable.”
Her tone of voice as she says this last statement is absolutely dripping with condescension and venom (it’s giving pissed off Alexis Schitt) and it’s truly cathartic to listen to. She goes on to explain more completely, in her deliciously cruel and passive aggressive tone, why white liberals are utterly useless at community organizing and meaningful activism as a whole.
Most white people won’t even cut off a racist family member, let alone risk their safety for a greater cause. Sky’s analysis cuts to the core of this: white people are literally intolerant to pain, unwilling to be slightly uncomfortable, no matter how grave the human cost. She is a sage of cultural anthropology and snide Los Angeles wit, and I recommend listening to everything she has to say.
Because I spend my time actively organizing in my community and fighting for change in real ways, I’m virtually never actually around liberals because they’re all online. But now I’m online too, and here they are waiting around every corner, staunchly determined to stand in the way of the very causes they ostensibly support.
I’ve been infuriated by this paradox since my first run-in with white liberal activists after the murders of Alton Sterling and Philando Castille sparked the first nationwide wave of Black Lives Matter protests in 2016. I was 21 at the time and had just left my racially and politically homogenous home state of Montana; suddenly I was in the streets of San Fransisco watching a real demonstration for the first time. I was young, radical, empowered, militant, I wanted to get involved right away, and I quickly realized that the folks there who looked like me don’t actually do much of anything.
I’ve continued to organize and march in the nine years following. Throughout this time I’ve studied the works of African American revolutionaries; the history of class divisions in this country and the racial lines which are deeply seared into them to this day; the teachings of Karl Marx and their militant praxis by Castro, Mao, and the Bolsheviks; and the endless schizophrenic bread and circus show that is American electoral politics. Most importantly, I’ve seen leftist praxis work in the fight against fascist ideology. I’ve seen anarchist groups operate effective mutual aid networks, feeding and clothing thousands of homeless who have been abandoned by society; I’ve seen anarchist civil defense groups protect unarmed demonstrators from open-carrying hogs; I’ve seen the Marxist core of labor unions protect workers from abuse, and seen tenant unions shield the working poor from the barbaric and relentless tactics of displacement used by landlords.
Every struggle for liberation in this country carries the implicit understanding that you may one day die for it. White liberals are unwilling to reckon with this, and as a result they’re rendered ineffective at best, and complicit at worst.
You need to approach this descent into fascism within the framework of the bystander effect, with you as the passerby at a crossroads. You’re watching communities being burned alive while the right wing fans the flames and the left wing films it. Those precious minutes are ticking by, and by now you know that while you may hope otherwise, nobody is coming to help; and like the grisly outcome of the NYC subway attack or the murder of Kitty Genovese, you know that your decision not to risk death makes it a certainty for another.
While I think you're the best judge of your abilities, I completely disagree that you aren't made for content creation. I think you've just realized that you are not alone and that in fact, there are many that agree with what you are talking about both in this essay and on tiktok. I find it refreshing to hear the voice of reason among the left. To few realize that peace is the opiate of the masses and an aversion to discomfort has contributed to how we've propelled this far into blatant fascism. Enjoyed the read.
Excellently written.