Antiracist-Kids Snippet from "Nazi Alert": Section 9 of White Supremacy on Its Deathbed
Let's workshop a paragraph from section 9 of White Supremacy on its Deathbed, a sequence that shows the "bravery" of the US teachers who prepare their students to call out the disease of WHITENESS
Antiracist-Kids Snippet from “Nazi Alert”: Section 9 of White Supremacy on Its Deathbed
[White supremacy on its deathbed] could just sit back and revel in our world where, in yet another day preparing them for “a menacing world of white devilry,” middle-school children with bowdlerized Twain on their desks are shown what is packaged as “a heartfelt sit down of racial reckoning”: a spliced montage of various hipster-like black people in a cyclorama studio of slate austerity (a lime wingback chair next to a side table on which a Starbucks cup sits, logo centered) each taking turns answering the loaded question “What, if anything, are white people superior at?” posed by the veteran broadcast journalist who vows to “shut my white mouth of privilege and just listen”—their responses (some snickering, some seething, some sighing) amounting to a rebarbative collage of normalized bigotry that would ignite global outrage if directed at any other race.
“They’re real good at violence. And yet all they like to talk about is ‘black-on-black violence,’ never seeing that black-on-black violence is the scream of a people unheard by Amerikkka. And yes, I’m using the triple k!”
“It’s 2021, and after all them thousands of years running shit they stay good at thinking their emotional wellbeing matters just as much as ours.”
“Creating racism, of course.”
“Being racist. They created it.”
“They good at talking to me like they redeemable.”
“Stealing black pain, pain they created. And then they got the nerve to talk all that nerdy mess about ‘We’re only trying to appreciate the human condition in all its riches.’—Nah, stealin’ the riches!”
“They’re good at being out-of-their-mind psychopaths and pathological liars. Think about it. They call everything they steal a ‘discovery’: lands, yoga, music, hairstyles.”
“They like to say convenient things, things convenient for them. ‘Let’s stop paying attention to race.’ ‘Let’s stop saying that blacks can only win if whites lose.’ ‘Let’s stop thinking of black people as nothing more than victims of oppression.’ ‘Let’s stop painting blacks as so helpless and pathetic that the only way they can have a voice is to suppress the voices of privilege.’ White folks just itchin’ for a way to stop paying us our due! We’re owed. We’re owed and they have the nerve to be outraged when we loot some TVs or jewelry or some iPhones all covered by insurance anyways. Please.”
“Doing the sneakiest things to make blacks feel inferior. I mean, why they have to make the small piano keys black?”
“White men are superior at being school shooters and serial killers. Tell me I’m lying.”
“Genocide.”
“Stealing people’s lives just because they feel like it.”
“Insecurity.”
“Defensiveness, talking BS like ‘Do the descendants of colonial blacks who owned slaves need to pay reparations?’ It’s all a game to them. They are menaces. Ta-Nehisi Coates put it best. They could be rescuing me and my damn kids from a fire and still I would call them menaces to their damn tomato faces! Excuse me. But you don’t know my pain.”
“Whites are really good at blaming others and they seem to enjoy traumatizing black bodies.”
“They are superior at being dicks (little dicks).”
“Playing the victim. Oh, your store got robbed? Try slavery.”
“I don’t know what they are good at, but I hate when they bring up how ‘healthy’ black families were a hundred years ago and how much black-on-black crime has increased and how much more safe black people were. It’s like they want us to go back into segregation times.”
“Ooh don’t get me start-ted. Whitey real real good at gaslighting. Like when he says that racism is a human invention, not a white invention. Or when he tries to tell black people there are things to be grateful for in the US (of all places). Receipts, Mr. White man. Receipts.”
“Intellectualizing oppression, making it seem like it’s not really the oppression it is.”
“Taking what’s not theirs and will never be theirs.”
“Whites are the best at cultural appropriation. They steal practices and styles born of black experiences they could never understand. Then what do they do? They say its just ‘appreciation.’ They say its just ‘appreciation’ even as they go and make money off of it like Elvis.”
“They are good at convincing us that there is such a thing as property, which is—when you really think about it—as much of a white-supremacist notion as three meals a day and transphobia. We didn’t know of no property in Africa.”
“White folks are good at gentrification.”
“Well, they definitely ain’t good at cooking or staying in their lane, I can tell you that.”
“Absorbing the cultural practices of those they torture and enslave, and then making everyone believe they invented those practices.”
“Destruction of land and people.”
“Wearing dreadlocks and then talking ’bout ‘Vikings.’ White boy, please!”
“Whites are manipulators. That’s what they are superior at.”
“White fragility: whites are very good at white fragility.”
“Lying and withholding information.”
“Controlling Mother Earth whether by building dams and big cities and lawns, or by turning melanated bodies into their slaves.”
“Saying they discovered things already there. ‘No Mr. White Man, indigenous peoples already done knew about that herb.’”
“Omg yes, white people be saying they made all these ‘discoveries’ (like the ‘New World’) and then they get all small-dick defensive about it when we call they asses out, talkin’ ’bout ‘Haven’t you ever said you discovered a new hiking trail?’ ‘No, hun. You ain’t never gonna find my black ass hikin’ no woods.’”
“Whites are the best at being murderers and rapists. And they continue to murder and rape black bodies just by failing to fess up to their demonic traits.”
It could just sit back and watch our world where, to hammer home the narrative of whites as the unrelenting perpetuators of systemic racism, the post-video assignment is for students to surveil their white friends and family—“Arm yourself with a notebook and observe just how painfully true the insightful words in the video are,” with “extra credit for catching whites behaving in problematic ways not called out by these beautiful kings and queens:
exhibiting defensiveness when it comes to their privileged and terrorizing natures (one of the biggest signs of just how entrenched their white supremacy is);
displaying insensitivity to black styles of knowing;
invalidating the tapestry of black lived experience;
talking over black folk, silencing their voices;
using language and tones that activate black trauma;
judging black bodies as pretty or ugly or any other way that makes black folk feel like they are back on the auction block;
disagreeing with the overdue removal of the traumatic name ‘George Washington’ from our school;
parading divisive emblems and banners (like Blue Lives Matter or Trump flags);
erasing black existence (even in small ways like referring to the peach crayon as ‘flesh-toned’).”
It could just sit back and watch our work where, after a student asks the teacher what the person in the video meant by saying that white people are “gaslighters,” the teacher explains:
Gaslighting is when you make someone doubt what they know to be true. White love to make black people doubt many things, the main one being that this really is a white supremacist country. They’ll deny they are racist even while—and in the same breath, mind you—they oppose certain antiracist policies as “going too far” or “being unfair” or whatever. Even a kindergartner knows that to oppose antiracism is the very definition of racism! But the way whites say it, the white logic they wrap it in, makes many people think it makes sense even though it makes absolutely no sense. Typical white manipulation. That’s what it is.
Let me give one more example. It was something we have already saw. Whites like to dismiss cops always slaughtering blacks as what they call “multifactorial”—an old Nazi term meaning that the cause is “complicated.” In reality, the cause is simple: white supremacy. It’s typical white evasion. They don’t want to face it—no, not so much because it causes them shame, but simply because it is their way to terrorize black people with lies.
Does this mean we should be excessively cruel to our white peers? No. Think of a lion going after a gazelle. In many cases they cannot help it—although if you’ve ever been to a zoo, you know there’s hope for them to be tamed or at least prevented from acting upon their instincts. And thank God. If whiteness could not be diluted or redirected there just wouldn’t be any hope.
It could just sit back and watch our work where, after a student asks the teacher what the person in the video meant by saying that white people are “good at white fragility,” the teacher explains:
White fragility refers to the defensive reactions—the crumbling, the unraveling, the meltdown—that whites typically exhibit when confronted with the truth about their oppressive nature. Whenever the spotlight of truth shines down on their privilege, or whenever they’re asked by black folk to check that privilege, they fall apart: delicate glass ornaments shattering with the slightest touch.
I’ll give you a perfect example. Ever wondered why Mrs. Tarquinno no longer teaches here at Glenmoore? The simple answer is that she was asked to stop talking over black folk—she was asked politely, and yet she refused to apologize or take part in the necessary training to show she has the ability to participate in a diverse community of students and colleagues. She quit instead of budging. That is white fragility. When called out on her white privilege, she claimed that Glenmoore was “a racially hostile workplace.” She demanded—using white tears to get people to comfort her like she was some Scarlett O’Hara—that we all, including black folk, stop reducing her to the ‘abstract color category of whiteness’ and stop insisting that her whiteness means she’s an oppressor. That, my dear student, is white fragility. She just couldn’t take the truth. And it doesn’t stop there. Remember when we watched that video of a Karen calling the cops on a black man, weaponizing the law to her ends? Well, Mrs. Tarquinno did just like that. She filed a lawsuit against Glenmoore. That is white fragility.
It could just sit back and revel in our world where the high school teacher, Mx. Moorez (the “z” added to as a way to distance himself from whiteness), gives the following response to a brave parent who wonders how, on the one hand, she can assign rap lyrics full of racism and sexism and ableism as reading material but, on the other hand, refuse to teach Shakespeare on grounds of it sowing seeds of bigotry in impressionable minds:
The rap lyrics I assign, yes, can be tough at times. I don’t deny that they harbor a rawness, a visceral honesty, reflecting deep pain. But that pain needs to be heard if we really are going to take our antiracist agenda seriously (instead of just going through the performative motions like so many other schools).
And I mean no offense, but I must inform you: technically speaking, black lyrics cannot be toxic in the ways you mentioned. The beautiful black men and women making that music are oppressed. Black folk, for that reason, lack the power to perpetuate racism (a white creation). On the other hand, the works of Shakespeare and Homer and their ilk, works with antiblack racism implicated in their creation, are classics of a white-supremacist culture that continues to this day to holds the reigns of power.
Besides, there is already an undue elevation of these white authors to the exclusion of diverse voices. That reason alone justifies my pedagogical approach. It’s crucial to give diverse and inclusive voices a chance.
How about this? How about we think of replacing Mark Twain and Harper Lee with Ibram X. Kendi and Ta-Nehisi Coates as no more radical than replacing our school statue of Jefferson with George Floyd? That was a noble move, and one that pretty much all parents were on board with. It’s the same here. Just think of it like that. It’s about representation, you see. It’s about dismantling white supremacy!
That pussy good