"those other men, those other white people "

"In a world where we’ve raised the social costs of failing to adequately signal our political righteousness to unprecedented heights, we find ourselves in a kind of political arms race, particularly among the white educated progressives who are unquestionably a part of the power structure that they decry. After all, you can either be the target of someone else’s critique or you can, preemptively, be the one doing the critiquing...

Were politics a matter of sorting the good people from the bad, political problems would not be nearly so intractable. But since male privilege is expressed through material, economic, and political inequalities regardless of the personal righteousness of individuals, engaging in a way that merely identifies the superior virtue of specific men can actually make meaningful change more difficult...

At its ugliest, this risks being an appropriation of anti-racist political theory for the social and political pleasure of a white person. Is ending up being that righteous aggressor ultimately the point?... if that engagement did not ultimately leave you, like the woman in the comic, telling other people to fucking educate themselves, would you still bother?"

http://fredrikdeboer.com/2014/09/27/those-other-men-those-other-white-people/

Mmm, signalling with politicals like this, I totally do this. And I often feel like I'm not actually doing much, besides trying to sort of be-in-spaces. And sort of try to hold up education that I like. But what am I doing about the systems and the structures? I think I'm waiting for something to come to me, or hoping that I happen to passively help educate someone who has the power and clarity about direction that I don't.