So the perennial habit of lefties playing protest police has struck again, this time in the form of arguments that white people are too prominent and present at protests inspired by Michael Brown and Eric Garner. I’m not sure how a mass protest movement can emerge in a country that is still 78% white without an outsized presence of white people, but such concerns are gauche. Of course, it’s a bad look for white people to get pushy in protests against our racist police state. You’d just hope the focus stayed on black bodies instead of the 13-dimensional chess of cultural studies, but I’m not the boss. Often, in practice, it all shakes out as “black people aren’t socialists!” which, aside from the fact that I’ve known hundreds of black communists and anarchists in my life, is about as parochial and condescending a sentiment as I can imagine. But it is socially convenient.

Of course, that article and similar sentiments are right now being breathlessly shared on Facebook and Twitter… mostly by white people. And those white people, in turn, exempt themselves from the critique by sharing it. They stack meta-critique on top of meta-critique, building an impossibly tall tower of theoretical structures, designed, ultimately, to exempt the ones who make the most arch, most complex criticism. “Aha! But have you considered this?,” asks the undergraduate. We have less a genre of essays assailing white racism, online, than a genre assailing other people’s white racism. White subjectivity has a voracious appetite; escaping it appears to be, for our progressive elites, like swimming away from the horizon. The next time I read an argument about white racism by a white person that isn’t fundamentally a declaration of personal blamelessness will be the first time. And I read all my own work.

In moments such as these, I always advocate an inversion of Gandhi’s famous maxim. Think of the most privileged person you have ever seen, and ask if your next act will be of any threat. The cops neither know nor care what the word intersectionality means; those with the guns are above such concerns. Remember Occupy. Remember it was strangled in the crib.