me: american anarchists, due to their anarchism bringing them closer to Indigenous spaces than most other Americans, are one of the mechanisms by which America has access to causing me and my family immediate harms.

american anarchists: wow! it is very very mean to call me American! It was already pretty silly for you to expect people to care you, if you aren't providing them with positive value, and now you're calling me a participant in a socioeconomic structure that doesn't care about people who aren't providing them with value? That actively makes me feel bad, that's a negative value! My participation here is to visibilize the harms you will experience if you don't stop doing that, but again, I am not an American at all, I am an anarchist!

@emsenn i am not an anarchist or very versed in anarchist theory, what’s being said here?

cc @auriblackcat because fae’re the ones who boosted this onto my feed and might also know things

@shroomie Oh there's a lot in this little shitpost, but I kind of like the excuse to try and unpack it myself!!

So, part 1: different ways people line up:

In America, there's people who believe all sorts of different political things; normally things are painted "left and right" but you can also look at it as "normal and different": some political systems are pretty normal, compared to the current one, and others are pretty weird.

anarchists are into one of those weirder political systems, they end up closer to Indigenous people (like me) than lots of other people, because compared to the norm, our political systems are also pretty weird.

That condition, having weird politics, is something similar about us.

But it's not the only thing about me, or anyone: we also have culture. When we're looking at *that*, everything that was currently different-making (left or right, normal or weird), and put us on the same side, suddenly collapses into one thing: American, with my Lakota culture being the different thing. So, in some ways I'm closer to anarchist Americans than the general America, but in other ways, I'm just as distant as with any American.

America, at least sometimes, does things that hurt Indigenous people, and it does this through its own people. Because anarchists are closer to me, when America is doing certain kinds of harmful things, it happens disporportionately through those anarchists, because they are already close.

part 2: feelings

When I point this out, generally, American anarchists get more upset about being called American than about me saying they have a way they might be able to hurt me, if they're not careful.

Because they feel hurt, they feel like I've done something of "negative value" to them - rather than something positive (offered guidance on phenomena that are novel to them but not to me)

And because they feel I haven't done the positive thing, I haven't contributed anything of value, so therefore they aren't obligated to care about me.

But that "obligation" feeling there, as they explain it, comes not from anarchist ideas like mutualism, but American ideas like market economics.

Which shows that they are, in fact, enacting American values, at me, in a way that diminishes my ability to maintain cultural distinction, which is also very American, and none of this is very anarchist.

@auriblackcat

@shroomie Oh and if that didn't clarify anything at all, that might be entirely my fault; it can be hard to explain systems with so many moving parts through improv'd text posts. I appreciate you asking the question! If it clarified some stuff and you have more questions feel free to ask; I do not prefer writing research papers, generally :D @auriblackcat