Dear White People, I Give Up.
I’m sorry. I’ve spent my life feeling like one of you, raised by one of you, thinking I understood you. In this First Year of Trump, more than ever, I’ve looked for common ground with you, looked for sameness and empathy: You have suffered. I have suffered. You have been poor and despised and excluded. I have as well. But it’s all been one-sided. While I crawl around in the dirt, searching for for roots of sameness and seeds of compassion, you stand aside and shuffle your feet, just wishing the whole conversation could go away. You justify your privilege. You vilify your victims. Sinking further still, you shut your very eyes and declare the whole conversation a conspiracy and a farce.
And I just can’t fight for you today.
It’s Philando Castille’s murder that finally broke me. It was brutal, unprovoked, unjustifiable, inexplicable, RECORDED ON VIDEO AND LIVESTREAMED TO THE WORLD….and still…the White People System made sure the Black Man’s Murderer was exonerated?!? Position gave the light-skinned man permission to murder the dark-skinned man. Now what - tell me, what - can I do or say or ponder to make this make sense to my darker-skinned self?
How can I ever feel safe again?
I see you now as a group, you white people. A tribe. All of you descended from the arrogant white aristocrats in the Medieval romantic dramatic narrative. You may not play the part. You might choose to abstain from active oppression of the disenfranchised. You may sing your songs of freedom and blessing. But you all benefit from the cruelty of the very System that erased Philando. You can oppress the colored man, if you so chose. If you’re smart, or rich, or an active member of the System, you’ll probably even get away with it. Your chances are a lot better than mine, anyway. Not because of your virtue, your work ethic, your high-minded religious morality or your notable contributions to society. It’s simply because you look like the Ruling Family. Your bare, white body is your status symbol. You remind cops of their children. You remind judges of their nieces and nephews. You remind the House and Senate of their campaign donors.
And that, my white friends and family, is the inescapable point. That is why we will never eradicate racism. It is imprinted in our ancient, animal subconscious that we should save the Similar, and conquer the Other. Blanch if you will. Shrink back in horrified denial. But what makes our generation of humans so different from the thousand generations before us? Are we not driven by the same love and fear and longing? Do we aspire to even more virtue? They, like us, were the most advanced, the most progressive, the most sophisticated and enlightened of curly-tailed pigs, standing with dirty hooves on their fancy dinner table in their fancy top hats, shouting and arguing about the nature of God and the rights of men and the end of the dark age, which had been created and so hatefully nurtured by the now-conquered Others.
See? They were just like us. We are them.
So the racist, misogynistic, Fox News Baby Boomers may indeed die off, but their systems will go on, saving the Similar, brutally crushing the Other.
Saving your children, white people. And crushing mine.
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