Miles Leaving Letter

Posted By Miles on 5/2/26

I will never apologize for anything I've ever said or done at twin oaks, it has all been completely vindicated. My only regret is that I was more patient and kind to certain people who definitely did not deserve such respect. Ever since my home burned around me while I slept in it, there was never a place where I could even live at twin oaks without sacrificing my mental health, being surrounded by such hostility (aside from camping in the woods) so I'm glad to have spent so much time living away from there, in a Richmond airbnb. It has allowed me to heal my own mental health, be around some actually decent people, and share my experiences with the wider communities movement more openly. This attempt to avoid homelessness after the house fire has been weaponized against me, by throwing me into the “twin oaks debt money hole” effectively sabotaging my membership. The humane decision would have been for twin oaks to offer to cover my housing costs after such a traumatic crisis and alleviate my housing precarity, but they were looking for any excuse to kick me while I was down. A *real* community with even an ounce of human empathy, compassion, or decency, would have reacted much differently to a house fire that was still negatively affecting some of its own members. But twin oaks isn't a real community, it's a labor camp that’s all too happy to treat human beings as disposable if they become inconvenient to the maintenance of their status quo. Still, there was a silver lining in this, because that distance and time has allowed me to see the whole situation more clearly outside of the insular bubble of that filthy incubation chamber of human despair. It mirrors accounts I have read of people who leave cults, or abusive relationships in general, only to realize in retrospect how fucked up the whole situation really was.

I will never let my voice or my writings be censored by any white supremacy (cult)ure, what was done in the dark will be brought to the light. The world deserves to know the disturbing truth of what happens at twin oaks, behind the flowery performative marketing materials it hypocritically promotes online to attract the visitor labor pool it relies on to replace its high turnover rate. Fellow marginalized people need to be warned before they are lured into this trap under false pretenses of egalitarianism, anti racism, or social justice, none of which have anything to do with twin oaks. Its own 501d nonprofit bylaws claim that it “strives to eliminate the attitudes and results of the effects of racism”, but that couldn't be further from the truth. That claim either needs to be removed, or the 501d status needs to be revoked, because the only people of color who could ever actually feel comfortable in a place like that are those who have tragically internalized white supremacy culture (particularly anti-Blackness). twin oaks already has a terrible and well deserved reputation from almost all of the Black people who have made the mistake of moving there and inevitably getting burned as a result. The racial demographics of twin oaks are no surprise, and will never change due to the reactionary backlash that comes out of any prompt for self reflection. twin oaks simply doesn’t deserve Black people's time or presence at all.

This doesn't even represent twin oaks drifting from its original values, the system is working as it was designed to, the rot has always been at the core of the founding culture, as can be clearly seen in Kinkade's writing (read the review Racist Dystopia Now ) so for anyone to claim I somehow “worsened race relations” at twin oaks, that's actually more of a confession than an accusation, a nasty and petty act of victim blaming, I simply shined a bright light on longstanding issues that were always there, issues which many people would have rather swept under the rug and not acknowledged, and I called it out for what it was.

“White fragility” is really the perfect description for so many twin oakers. (If you're unfamiliar with the concept, read the chapter about white fragility in the workbook “Me and White Supremacy”: Or listen to a summary of that specific chapter here

The twin oaks racial (in)justice discord thread could be a masterclass in the harmful effects of white people who value their own sense of ideological comfort far above all else, certainly above the actual racialized harm they continuously perpetuate. Even the slightest suggestion that a member of The Enlightened Commune could ever possibly have some problematic attitudes or assumptions on the topic of race instills such a knee jerk vitriolic fear and backlash like an identity crisis, that they paradoxically start acting out some of their most racist latent impulses, then promptly shoot the messenger for daring to express any genuine human emotion, and not speaking in the “correct” palatable neutered NVC tone, or not operating within some vague unspoken definition of so-called “process” (Read the chapter about tone policing in the workbook “Me and White Supremacy”: or listen to a summary of that specific chapter here

twin oakers want to have their cake and eat it too, they boast about being such an "alternative to the mainstream”, yet the only people who they respect and validate are those who are closely aligned with white neurotypical culture, those who would perfectly fit into the mainstream capitalistic American society anyway. Whether it's through their anti-autistic-ableism, or their anti-black-racism (both on clear display in different discord threads) they shit on and invalidate marginalized people who genuinely need a *real* alternative to mainstream American society, while propping up the most privileged of its members. This is because twin oaks is nothing more than a microcosm of the worst aspects of mainstream white liberal sheltered middle-class America, distilled and fermented for decades in a moldy crumbling insular echo chamber. So it is not at all surprising that Black people don't last long at that Kulty Klanish Kompound. They only kept me around just to make them look good.

-Miles Rose