Or, Why I Do Not Have Conversations With White Men On The Internet
If you have found yourself directed here, it’s because we’ve had a misunderstanding on the internet which needs to be clarified.
Education is the individual responsibility of adults. You are a smart and capable man, someone with the knowledge and means to pursue information.
Once you graduate from high school, no one is obligated to educate you for free. In high school, guidance counselors are widely available and ready to jump in whenever you decide you need an assist. This isn’t university, and even if it were, no professor is obligated to meet with you on your schedule, on a whim, to teach you the bits and pieces of the syllabus that you decided right now you needed to know.
There are many valid ways to acquire knowledge. Asking random women and non-binary folks online to provide education to you via “conversation,” tweets, Facebook comments, email, or any other form of digital communication is not one of those ways.
Conversation is not power-neutral. Asking for education, conversation, or engagement is not a neutral request. Especially when a man lacking knowledge he could easily acquire on his own attempts to create a conversation wherein a woman or non-binary person is being asked to do the intellectual heavy lifting, all while Google is one tab over.
Because conversation is not power-neutral, asking for education via conversation is not a posture of humility, but rather one of entitlement. I can tell that men feel entitled to my time when they immediately turn to sneering, condescension, or sarcasm when I refuse to engage.
I am a person with the right to pursue happiness.
I am a mother.
I am a partner.
I am a friend.
I am a business owner.
I am a consultant.
I am a human being who gets to do things she enjoys.
Once all of these needs are met and obligations fulfilled, and if I have free time, then and only then do I engage with people I do not know from Adam on Al Gore’s internet.
I am an educator and consultant. I love to teach. There’s little that gets me more excited. Because we live in a capitalist society, I require a fee from clients who want to learn from me directly. I do not have any moral or humanist obligation to educate those who do not pay me unless I have the free time, bandwidth, account balance, and personal fulfillment available to choose to do so myself.
There is no amount of cajoling, coercion, challenges, manipulation, condescension, intimidation, or threats will change the fact that strangers online remain my absolute lowest priority.
Finally, I do not respond well to demands. A lot of you are rude, loudly ignorant, and not fun to converse with, all while believing your ask is a form of being humble and wanting to learn.
If this is the first time you have ever experienced push back from a woman on the internet who has access to limited resources and limited hours in the day, don’t worry. For starters, if you are over the age of 12, you have already been in my position, declining to do something for someone else because it didn’t work within your schedule, you didn’t feel like it, and you don’t owe anyone.
No one, not even your friends, expect you to perform physical or intellectual labor for free on a whim whenever someone asks. And you, reasonable man that you are, would rightly refuse such a demand were you to find yourself faced with one.
So it is with women and non-binary folks.
We are not your couriers, conversationalists, curators, or caretakers. Just like you, we have our own problems, bills to pay, and ways we’d rather spend our time.
Being online does not render me a one dimensional caricature of a human, nor should it communicate to you that I am your personal Google/Siri/Alexa/wife. If you have not already begun to research these topics for yourself, your (lack of) action informs me that this is a subject to which you are not committed. If you are not committed, you will not learn, no matter how much time and patience I expend. If you are here because you want to begin to learn about race, racism, and white supremacy, I have put together an entire resource list under the White Homework tab on this very website.
Let’s do what’s best for both of us: you commit to self-education and I’ll cut my losses and go back to whatever I was enjoying before this miscommunication occurred.