See, for me, the mental illness admission did not change things. For one thing, I have zero confidence that she ever told us the truth. About anything. She came here with an agenda, and she disrupted the forum. She was happy to disrupt the forum and she never had any intention of helping with the work we do here.
As I said to Gwaewael in private, mental illness doesn't change the fact that she still has to abide by forum guidelines. I asked her to please apologize to those she had insulted, and to stop insulting people. Instead she chose to leave.
I agree completely that one of our aims here is to help keep vulnerable people from being exploited. But I don't believe we do that by enabling abusive racists. Abuse survivors who come to the forum and see that kind of sadomasochistic bs going on don't feel welcome, they feel triggered. Gwaewael was not asking for help with having been abused or exploited. She said none of those things have happened to her. She wanted attention and to attack people in a sadomasochistic way. She admitted she wants to learn how to manipulate NDNs, and to pick up some tricks about how to disguise her intentions. So to me, that says she was here to harm NDNs, and to learn how to be more stealthy in doing harm. That is absolutely unacceptable to me. It also leads me to think that she could have the type of disorder that simply cannot be fixed, not by talk therapy and not even by medication. But even if all she needs is therapy and meds, we are not her therapists and I think it would ultimately be
unhelpful to her to lead her to believe that an internet forum of strangers is the place to go for that. And again, I don't believe she really wants help; I think she just wanted to disrupt. I have seen a number of communities make life hell for the good members by refusing to set limits on abusers. Gwaewael was acting abusively. She was given ample chance to change, and she chose to leave rather than apologize or change.
As the situation developed, I was saddened to see that almost everyone who asked her to stay is white. In private communications, almost everyone who wanted her banned, is NDN. Think about that.
While some of you who are non-Native, who posted in that thread, do contribute helpfully and well to our work here (and I for one am grateful for that), other non-Natives came out of the woodwork to encourage her to stay. That was shocking to me. While some of the lurkers who wanted her to stay may not have realized it, it gave me the impression that those posters care more about comforting abusive racists, and welcoming abusers to come and disrupt our work and our community, than they do about fighting abuse of NDNs and NDN ways.
This clear racial divide, happening here, made me feel physically sick to my stomach. While we also cover other kinds of exploitative spiritual leaders here, at heart, and at root, this is a forum about protecting NDN traditions. Allowing abusive racists here, racists who only want attention and show zero signs of ever changing to help with this work, is offensive to our very purpose.
When a white person says, "I wasn't acting this way because I'm white, I was doing it because..." I have to say: "You have no way of knowing if it's because you are white. You don't know what it's like to see the world any other way." Hopefully through sharing your life with friends and family who are not white you can gain empathy and understanding of their experience, but you will never
really know what it's like to live in the world as someone who is not white. This is because you can always take a break, and walk around as a white person. So even if you try some sort of "Black Like Me" experiment where you pass as another race, you would do it knowing that you can always take off the disguise and go back to who you are. No matter how much time I spend as the token white grrrl, I am still white. My experience will always be different from my friends who can't pass.
One other small thing that has led me to some understanding of what my NDN friends go through is that, online, I have sometimes been mistaken for NDN. If I'm hanging out in a group where everyone knows me, I don't always remember to immediately self-identify when a new person shows up. I try, but it's not the first thing I think of when I'm with friends and family. So I have had white people treat me in really bizarre ways, projecting onto me the same romantic stereotypes or condescending racist attitudes that my friends deal with all the time. Then I tell them I'm white and their behaviour changes.
Again, with one simple declaration I can change how I'm treated. This is white privilege. I have it; every person who passes as white has it. The only way we will begin to overcome it is with work, with diligently observing our own behaviour, and with humbly listening to what NDNs and other people of color have to say about how we act.
As I've said in the private discussions that have run parallel to the public debacle set off by this incident, For me, the only way to salvage the time and energy that was wasted on dealing with this disruption is if it provides an opportunity for the non-Natives here to learn more about racism and privilege. I hope we are doing that.
