DURHAM, NC—White activist Daniel Yellin might be passionate about posting instagram stories about the Black Lives Matter movement and educating his all-white friend group on how to be anti-racist, but when it comes to speaking with people of color about issues that affect them, Yellin appears to lose all awareness of his own whiteness.
After spending hours correcting people of color on what they need to overcome their systemic oppression, our reporters had to ask the question: does this guy know he’s white?
“I mean the movement is color-blind, no?” Yellin deflected, and went on to show Instagram posts of himself at so many BLM protests that is only eclipsed by the number of Black protestors who got into trouble because of him provoking the police.
As the interview progressed, TFN observed that Yellin is entirely incapable of grasping the reality of his whiteness and the privileges it affords him. Rather than reflecting on his own complicity as a white person and commit to uplifting Black voices, the prep-school and Harvard educated activist who also works as a barista at a hipster coffee shop in gentrified Brooklyn instead spends most of his day cancelling other white leftists on twitter or patronizing BIPOC activists when he is asked to de-center himself.
Regardless, Yellin seems poised to go further in his activism by obtaining a PhD, and returning to an Ivy League University as a professor on race relations while living in a gentrified neighborhood and sending his kids to majority-white private schools.
