If you’re worried about the feds putting you on a watchlist, if they maintain them that extensively, you’re almost certainly already on one for being on this site, and it’s out of your power to change that now. Engaging in political-economic study is not going to put you on a worse list.

What coincidental timing, I just published a post about my experiences dealing with anxiety and fear! It may be a tough read because I’m rather hard-nosed and critical but it may be helpful. https://hexbear.net/post/6306275

I feel being in America makes consuming leftist material unsafe, like it’ll immediately put a target on your back. Especially because I’m of a minority race

I will say, one racial minority leftist living in AmeriKKKa to another: we already have that target on our backs. There’s no such thing as safety here because systemic racism makes AmeriKKKa unsafe, and it is important to process that discomfort. At the same time, that also means that we can’t exactly make it worse. I mean we can by being exceedingly reckless, but we’re not likely to make it worse by just living life and trying to engage in politics. However, we might be able to make things better by living life and engaging in politics. One way to look at my entire engagement with politics is as a way to improve my environment so I didn’t have to be crushed under the boot of racism anymore. I’m not sure how accurate that reading is, but it is a reading with at least a kernel of truth to it.

I remember you and I have spoken before about standing up for yourself, boundaries, harassment, emotional manipulation and abuse (my description of behaviors you’ve described being done to you, I am putting words into your mouth because you didn’t describe them with those terms). I propose to you that perhaps you worry about not putting a target on yourself because you’re used to trying to act in a way that keeps harassing or abusive people off your back, and it maybe sort of works with them enough to make you feel like that is a viable strategy. Maybe it is in your personal life, (though I doubt it works perfectly!) but it is not generalizable, and it does come with a heavy emotional and psychological cost that I can see you bearing in what little I’ve seen of your posting.

One cost of trying to slide under the radar by going to extreme lengths to conform with an idea of what “one of the good ones” is like is that you may remain uneducated and ignorant of the problems we face. You may struggle with the constant cognitive dissonance of seeing how terrible the current system is, but not being able to acknowledge or articulate that it is bad, why it’s bad, or how it can be made better. A cost of folding and not engaging with material at all is that you may not meet friends, comrades, partners, community, who could be better for you. I watched someone make “friends” of apolitical centrists who were accepting of everyone, only to be thrown away as soon as that person became inconvenient to be friends with, because being friends with a marginalized person sometimes means taking a principled stand in solidarity with them, and that’s not fun. So these liberals who were supposedly their closest community suddenly abandoned and betrayed them, and only we on the left had their back because we are the ones who actually care and actually mean what we say (well, some of us).

We have targets on our backs, and what little safety there is to be had is found in forming support networks with comrades and friends whom you can rely upon in a pinch. Those are not found by hiding and giving up, but by engaging in defiance in some fashion or another.

I feel like people on this site are ninjas at not being in trouble somehow.

Truth is just that most of us are small fry. We aren’t worth killing because we aren’t actually a meaningful threat to Fascism at present. If you want to read theory, you should. Use a good VPN (Mullvad or Proton are my recommendations) to access it. Or buy books in cash if you must, or 2ndhand. Don’t disclose too many personal details about yourself, use different protonmail accounts for different accounts, wear masks if you go to organizing or protests (you should be masking because of covid anyway tbh), that sort of thing. Be aware of what a VPN does and does not obfuscate, because they’re good at what they do but they’re by no means a guarantee of privacy or anonymity. And do some reading or get some training about what to do if you are ever questioned by the cops and how to handle interrogation (the short version is you say nothing). Having a bit of training helps with feeling like it’s something you can handle, and that makes it less of an active fear that must weigh upon you.

cops can’t read, so they can’t enforce the anti-theory laws. its the practice that gets you into trouble