“We thought that we had hit rock bottom and then we heard a knock from below.”

The host of one of my favorite podcasts repeated this quote in the introduction of his latest episode to give context to the conversation he has with an artist about her theatrical piece on the constitution. And I thought, what a perfect analogy for the way I feel about this election and about this entire administration actually. I began to see this in earnest immediately after 9/11. I witnessed hatred and xenophobia emerge and concentrate in groups and chat board discussions that scared me in ways it never had before. And when I’m scared, I usually try to escape by surrounding myself with what I believe to be common sense people, discourse, informative literature and lectures. However, no amount of immersion in common sense and facts on my part will ever change how a large majority of White America feels about Black and Brown people in this country. And it’s not lost on me that racism has been alive and well in America since before I was born. What does shock me is the lack of concern reflected in a vote for 45 by people who espouse values and morals of any kind.

A large majority of women in this country voted for a man who is on record joking about assaulting women on an Access Hollywood bus. Just let that sit for a moment.

Women voted for this man. Women with daughters. I did not know self hatred could run this deep and in such staggeringly high numbers.

And, I don’t think that it’s necessary to look two steps ahead of what was said on that bus to begin to understand how far a racist White majority will go to maintain their undeserved privileges while still daring to uphold some perverse pretense of decency, morality and humanity, none of which they ever truly understood ever. A democratic process, it seems, is only working fairly, when it works to their advantage. They would have us all destroyed just to hold on to the last decaying pieces of an illusion constructed through indescribable violence, swindling, suffering, fear and hatred.

And as Eddie Glaude stated so eloquently on MSNBC this week, we cannot place this blame primarily on 45’s shoulders. He is a manifestation of the sick, ugly, pathological truth about what this country has been built on. A crumbling foundation of theft, lies, genocide, rape, false narratives and standards of acceptability tailored towards White mediocrity in ways that have taken ages to disengage from.

But the process of disengagement has never stopped. The fight for injustice has never stopped. The seeking of truth has never stopped. The call to serve all vs some has never stopped. The strength to confront the darkness without allowing it to contaminate the soul has never stopped. In the lives of those who are committed to the struggle for human rights it doesn’t stop. In the spirit of our ancestors, it doesn’t stop.

So I try not to spend too much time frozen like a deer in headlights, gaping down the barrel of the bottomless, fathomless, danger that is Whiteness and listening to the knocking from below. So many of us have tried for so long to be what they said we needed to be in order to not die, to not be tortured, to not be murdered, to not be raped, to not be decapitated, to not be humiliated, to not be kicked and spat upon, to not be turned away. But you can’t make deals with madness without becoming mad yourself. And there are a great deal of us in that number as well.

Instead, I choose to proceed playing my part to reveal the light of truth in this world with the knowledge that I am worthy without even trying. Yes. Worthy without the struggle. That I am a divine manifestation of the love I choose to accept within me. And that struggle of this nature only exists in a system bent on constructed illusions of measurement, comparison and selection based on superficial identifiers that define not one of us as human beings. Not one. I’m not saying that struggle isn’t necessary but all we have ever really known of struggle for the most part is what has been forced upon us by oppression, opposition, deception and a lack of self acceptance.

Who the fuck would choose that kind of struggle? Who would choose to normalize and accept it?

I don’t think that Eddie Glaude was asking us as Black and Brown people to shoulder the blame that many of us put on 45. I think he was clearly indicting Whiteness as a device which was not only conceived explicitly to motivate through hatred, fear, racism and division, but which has also unraveled, undone and inflicted nameless damage on those who have wielded it.

Whiteness wants to be rescued by that which it has attempted to enslave. It is an abuser that wants its victims to absolve it of its constant assaults in a cycle of violence with no end because White America refuses, as Glaude states, to acknowledge its sins; to stop the bullshit and look itself in the eye so that the rest of us, and generations to come might be saved from Whiteness.

And see, Whiteness, you can’t have it both ways. You never could.