Max Toth is tired of being treated well.  He’s angry that he’s gone from, “being dismissed as a crazy acerbic feminist to validated as a virtual authority about everything that comes out of my mouth.”    

“Since people began perceiving me exclusively as male… it was as if I had been given a certificate of personhood.  This all makes me even more angry than when I was perceived as female and had a nagging suspicion about the mechanisms of male privilege.”

“I’ve never been the kind of person to ignore…oppression,” says Toth who has been a national organizer with United Students Against Sweatshops—a national grassroots, student-labor solidarity group—and now manages the website of Working America, a community affiliate of the AFL-CIO. Toth grew up in San Francisco and recalls testifying on behalf of a shelter for homeless queer youth to be built in San Francisco’s largely gay Castro neighborhood.  There he says a hostile group of (mostly) gay Castro homeowners tried to block the building’s construction. “After two hours of listening to them talk about how inconvenient it was to step over hungry, cold, queer young people and their fears about property value decline, the word community in conjunction with LGBT felt like a bad joke.”

Attending a Challenging White Supremacy workshop, Toth says, raised his consciousness about America being a “white supremacist nation,” and how “racism affects everything I, as a white person, do.” To change the system, Toth says, one must also fight for the liberation of all people, but doing so is not without risks.

“To become a race traitor has consequences. [You] know you’re succeeding when you lose friends [and] jobs, and the state finds you more interesting than ever before. For anyone to directly confront racism in this society is deemed dangerous... people of color know this already. White people—including myself—have to learn it the hard way.”

The Challenging White Supremacy workshop spawned a number of projects that Toth participated in, including a collective that provided free childcare to projects led by low-income women of color.  In his work, Toth encourages men to use their privilege to assist oppressed groups, but he says, “Using an identity-based privilege to help oppressed groups can be a road paved with good intentions—but not leading to liberation.

The underlying principles and orientation to this work matter. Listen to people, learn about the histories of resistance, and you can better understand your role [in] helping to dismantle the system that keeps us all down.”

Although Toth sees whiteness as a social construction, he argues, “No white person can avoid or reject white privilege. It’s an entrenched system, not an unfortunate fashion choice.” White privilege, Toth says, is “an entire cultural and educational narrative that puts white people front and center.”

“It is not fair, even if it is true, that people be given more or less power based on their appearance. It’s not right that being born black…means a shorter lifespan.  It’s not fair that low-income trans women of color face the largest burdens of combined oppression this society has to offer.” Toth muses, “Fighting for liberation doesn’t mean re-creating the same old power setup in the LGBT world, with rich white gay men at the top and poor trans women of color at the bottom. We all need to be in the struggle to turn this upside down.”

Still, Toth remains positive and hopeful.  “By working together,” he insists, “ We have the power to change this.  I’m trying to do my part.”

Trans writer Jacob Anderson’s co-authored Blind Eye mystery series premiers March 2007 with Blind Curves from Bold Strokes Books.