At This Point, If You’re Not Antifa, You’re Fa

Neutrality in the face of rising authoritarianism is not an option

Tim Wise
4 min readDec 17, 2021

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Image: Roman Samsonov, Shutterstock, standard license, purchased by author

It’s like the old saying goes: you can’t be neutral on a moving train.

Or, if you prefer the metaphor of the moving sidewalk at the airport, fine, go with that. The same principle applies.

You can stand there, exerting no energy and making no effort to go forward. But you will end up wherever the sidewalk seeks to take you, all the same.

Only if you turn and walk actively in the other direction, pushing against the force of the sidewalk, might you avoid that place.

So whether it’s the B and C concourses at the Detroit airport or the death of democracy, if you don’t want to go there, you’d best be prepared to make a decision once the ground starts moving.

It’s like the old saying goes: you can’t be neutral on a moving train

And when it comes to America, the ground is moving. It’s been moving for a while now.

Your refusal to acknowledge it doesn’t stop the ride.

I prefer not to acknowledge that I’m getting older or the aches and pains that verify, brutally, that fact. But the clock hasn’t stopped. And neither…

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Tim Wise

Anti-racism educator and author of 9 books, including White Like Me and, most recently, Dispatches from the Race War (City Lights, December 2020)