Category Archives: white privilege

White America is Eating its Tail

Black Lives, dear white people, equality, equity, racism, Voting, white privilege, women

“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.

Racebook

Facebook, race, white privilege, ,

Oh I love the way Stacey Patton goes in with this article about Black women not being here to wipe the tears of White Women or White anybody for that matter over hurt feelings as the daily onslaught of Facebook posts and revelations about race and the damage done by White Privilege come pouring in. For me Facebook has actually become one of the most meaningful places to be for reasons other than Pet Society and Farmville! LOL!

At some point, both my husband and I who have a few white friends, some mutual, exchanged our reluctance to be blatant in our FB statuses about or feelings on White oppression in regard to the recent injustices in the case of Brown and Garner and many more. Always on the fence about hurting my white friends feelings, I finally got fed up a few weeks ago and said my piece about it, still worried that there would be some awful comment waiting for me in a long thread when I checked it hours later. There was none. In fact nothing I have shared about race or racism from For Harriet or Junot Diaz or any site has gotten a significant comment from the White people on my FB network. Oh wait I did get one “Wow” from a quote I posted from Chris Rock about the ridiculous lack people of color in Hollywood films. And I appreciated that wow more than the silence.

At first I was relieved that the Whites on my FB page made no noise, because I didn’t have to feel so anxious but the lack of comments actually started to worry me more. I have this reoccurring mental image of them crouched in a corner somewhere waiting for all this “Race talk” to die down so they can go back to the coziness of their privilege and come peeping out again to complain about inane, first world problems. But what I’ve come to realize in all this and what Stacey Patton has helped me to realize is that I don’t have the time, energy, nor the obligation to both point out the subtle and overt violence of White privilege and racism and make White feel not so bad about it. Awww poor baby, you’re a latent racist. Your attitude contributes to the senseless murder of thousands of innocent Black men, poor thing. These two sentiments cannot exist in the same space.

This afternoon, one of my White male co-workers, a guy I haven’t known very long but like a lot, came in and asked me if I wanted to see something funny.

Sure.

He’s someone who has been participating vigilantly in protests and anti-police brutality demonstrations for weeks now. As it turns out someone took a photo of him at one of these demonstrations with his hands up and head down and posted it on slate.com with the words of an article posted underneath.

“What White Privilege Really Means: It’s not about what Whites get. It’s about what Blacks don’t.”

…yeah.

Well….

He took it well.

It’s a damn good image and he’s on the right side of history. He’s a white male so he fits the profile. What can you say? I asked him how he felt about it and he really had no significant argument against it. But what I now realize is that I asked the wrong question. If I had to ask anything at all, it should have been whether or not he would have agreed to have this image posted with that headline if someone had given him the choice he did not get.

But I’m not asking questions like that anymore. It’s not my problem. I have enough problems.

#crimingwhilewhite

crimingwhilewhite, twitter, white privilege, ,

CWW tweet

There were many #crimingwhilewhite tweets that I faved and retweeted last night in between reading and feeling stunned, angry and validated and just amazed. This one really captured how I was feeling while looking at 20-60 tweets pop up every 5 minutes or so.

I found out about  #crimingwhilewhite while following Romany Malco on IG. Not only is it one of the most incredibly revolutionary ideas I have seen as a response to the failure of Grand Juries to indict the police officers that killed Michael Brown and Eric Garner but it also made me stay on twitter for nearly an hour which is something I never do outside of tweeting about “Scandal” and “How to get Away with Murder” every Thursday. Ironic isn’t it? Cops definitely know how to get away with murder. We know this.

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Among the hundreds and hundreds of tweets that poured in from whites who were exposing their privilege through countless testimonials of run ins with the law which would gotten any Black person brutalized, beaten and killed, there were some people who tweeted how “surreal” this was, how these can’t all be real, how they sounded like “jokes” or were “bizarre”, many of them from Black Twitter. While I’m sure there might be a few false or exaggerated admissions, what’s bizarre to me is that people would be so quick to believe that #crimingwhilewhite is significantly false but that Fox News or CNN are reputable purveyors of truth.

#crimingwhilewhite is Whites joining the cause is one of the many ways that is actually useful for a change. And I hope that those who have been honest and forthright on twitter will also use their voices offline to effect change. As vocal as many of us have been online, we need to step away from the keyboard and the smart phone and also take some action offline.

If you’re in the NYC area there will be a demonstration this evening around 5:30 in Union Square. Look up a schedule of demonstrations in your neighborhood. Use technology for good.

Peace be with you.