Chapter 5 of White Supremacy on Its Deathbed: Nazi Alert

Let's workshop Chapter 5 of my book-length lyrical essay (White Supremacy on Its Deathbed), which aims to promote true black excellence by exposing the harmful implications of mainstream antiracism

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Chapter 5. Nazi Alert

Until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally abandoned, until the color of a man's skin is of no more significance than the color of his eyes, the dream of lasting peace . . . will remain but a fleeting illusion.—Haile Selassie

No matter what we might hope, that original sin—white supremacy—explains everything [according to today’s mainstream antiracist discourse]: an all-American sonderweg [(or special path of fate)]. The most shocking aspect of today’s mainstream antiracist discourse is the extent to which it mirrors ideas of race—specifically the specialness of whiteness—that white supremacist thinkers cherish. “Woke” antiracism proceeds from the premise that race is real—if not biological, then socially constructed and therefore equally if not more significant still—putting it in sync with toxic presumptions of white supremacism that would also like to insist on the fundamentality of racial difference. Working towards opposing conclusions, racists and many antiracists alike eagerly reduce people to abstract color categories, all the while feeding off and legitimizing each other, while any of us searching for grey areas and common ground get devoured twice. Both sides mystify racial identity, interpreting it as something fixed and determinative, and almost supernatural in scope. This way of thinking about human difference is seductive for many reasons, but it has failed us.—Thomas Chatterton Williams[1]

To exacerbate the already-suffocating extent to which inherited identities define all of us; to make race the overriding factor, overshadowing the multifaceted aspects that shape an individual's life, choices, and outcome; to stoke white racialist consciousness more effectively than any self-described white-supremacist ever could; to divide the land into extremes of uncompromising polarity where, on the one hand, right-wing opposition to white-supremacy (once the standard orientation) withers to nothing and, on the other hand, left-wing opposition to whiteness (once a fringe orientation) swallows the entire side; to cultivate resentment among white individuals who feel they are being unfairly blamed or marginalized or targeted; to incite a seething white backlash (more effectively than redlining, which denied more white people than black people the opportunity for home ownership since many of the redlined neighborhoods were majority white); to incite a seething white backlash, one that would “prove” (in ghoulish self-fulfilling prophecy) whites to be the racists they are declared to be by birth and thereby further entrench the deceptive narrative of continued black victimhood (since whites can never not hold the reigns of power); to bait whites, the heavily-armed majority population whose patience is running thin, to the brink of a hot war that would appease both the victim-and-identity Molochs of Trumpestan and Wokestan alike—what might white supremacy do from its deathbed?

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, through so many sadistic (usually sadomasochistic) books and articles and new-employee courses and quarterly training modules and sensitivity seminars aiming to “dismantle the plague of white-supremacy,” whiteness—a regressive fiction—is sold as an often-hard-to-detect disease admitting of no redeemable expressions and no grounds for pride (a disease, although perhaps suppressible and redirectable with extreme psycho-social interventions, likely ineradicable once and for all given the human-rights protections under which it hides)—or in the more refined language of one scholar (language spreading from universities into regular homes through the shock filter of social media; language completely normalized in the neo-racist bar talk of college-town “friend groups” across the US; language repeating, alongside “reclamation” messages like “Black is King,” in webinars and hashtags and activism bullhorns and middle-school hallway signs and Disney cartoons and fashion apparel, and so well beyond just the millions in the BeyHive):

Whiteness is a condition one first acquires and then one has—a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which “white” people have a particular susceptibility. The condition is foundational, generating characteristic ways of being in one’s body, in one’s mind, and in one’s world. Parasitic Whiteness renders its hosts’ appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse. These deformed appetites particularly target nonwhite peoples. Once established, these appetites are nearly impossible to eliminate. Effective treatment consists of a combination of psychic and social-historical interventions. Such interventions can reasonably aim only to reshape Whiteness’s infiltrated appetites—to reduce their intensity, redistribute their aims, and occasionally turn those aims toward the work of reparation. When remembered and represented, the ravages wreaked by the chronic condition can function either as warning (“never again”) or as temptation (“great again”). Memorialization alone, therefore, is no guarantee against regression. There is not yet a permanent cure.[2]

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, in light of the righteous swarms of social-justice warriors professing to believe what they cannot possibly believe (that there really is a contagious disease of whiteness going around) and even going to great lengths in their teary sincerity to prove that they believe it, one cannot help but think of Thomas Paine’s description of “infidelity” in The Age of Reason.

Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what one does not believe. It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief . . . that mental lying has produced in society. When man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime.

It could just sit back and revel in our world where it is fashionable to have articles and books unironically titled—mostly by white authors, of course—“The Unbearable Whiteness of X":

The Unbearable Whiteness of Hiking (and How to Solve It)

The Unbearable Whiteness of Gunsmithing

The Unbearable Whiteness of Coffee

The Unbearable Whiteness of SATs

The Unbearable Whiteness of Clarence Thomas

The Unbearable Whiteness of Pornography

The Unbearable Whiteness of Social Media

The Unbearable Whiteness of Math and Logic

The Unbearable Whiteness of Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner

The Unbearable Whiteness of the Workweek

The Unbearable (and Unbeatable) Whiteness of Clocks

The Unbearable Whiteness of Skiing and Snowboarding

The Unbearable Whiteness of Milk (and Other Dairy Products)

The Unbearable Whiteness of John Krakauer

The Unbearable (and Unbeatable) Whiteness of Toilet Paper

The Unbearable Whiteness of Hospitals

The Unbearable Whiteness of Beards

The Unbearable Whiteness of Chemotherapy

The Unbearable Whiteness of Diabetes

The Unbearable Whiteness of Booker T. Washington

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, according to mainstream “antiracism” (which shares with white supremacism an eagerness not only to block the free flow of knowledge and art and technology and ritual between cultures, but also to regard whiteness as somehow extraordinary), to be white is to be irredeemably evil—well technically, and taking a twisted cue from those antiblack racists of yesteryear who insisted that worthy of demonization was merely blackness (not individual black people themselves), it is simply the whiteness in white people that is the evil (a whiteness that is at once (a) a viral force of violence commanding disproportionate material and symbolic power over black bodies, (2) an under-criticized location of structural advantage for whites and their allies, and (3) a shifting set of often-undetectable attitudes and behaviors serving to keep black people down).

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, unraveling the hard-won progress that led to judging each person on a case-by-case basis (as opposed to reducing them to mere tokens of identity groups), racism—a constant, like slavery, throughout recorded human history and always threatening to mushroom into malignant proportions—crops up with renewed vigor (across the US and beyond) in the form of righteous-feeling but bitterness-fueled vilification of individual people and Western superpowers alike for their whiteness:

that modish scapegoat for all the world’s afflictions (and especially for black failings);

that essential feature behind, for example, the atom bomb; that core characteristic explaining—like phlogiston does combustibility—why, for example, “the Native Americans would have been just fine had any other group aside from whites sailed to the New World”;

that original sin that, although inborn and so technically no one’s fault, it is “everyone’s ethical duty to keep in check by means of local dismantling.”

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, under the spell of a common-enemy identity politics (as opposed to a common-humanity identity politics), any person (not just white people) can be afflicted by scourge of whiteness—a multiracial malady that manifests itself in manifold modes (way more undetectable than the following):

in black scholars (like Glenn Loury and John McWhorter and Shelby Steele) who deny that blacks continue to be held back by an omnipresent white supremacy or who adopt any of the characteristic orientations of whiteness as stated by The National Museum of African American History and Culture (individualism, pleasantness in attitude, protestant work ethic, food with little seasoning, delayed gratification, punctuality, objectivity and linearity in thought, quantitative reasoning, planning out the future, competitiveness);

or in black cops (like Tadarrius Bean and Demetrius Haley and Desmond Mills Jr.) who, even when they have the blackest names, brutalize black citizens;

or in the black administrators and educators (like Tabia Lee) who, even when they otherwise make it a point each day to showcase their commitment to fighting back against “Amerikkka’s total war against the black body,” participate in white-supremacist culture in one way or the other (engaging in “whitespeaking” by suggesting that the team lay out a tentative meeting agenda for the upcoming year, or engaging in “whitesplaining” by calling someone out for reasoning fallaciously, or engaging in “whitecentering” by having a lot of handouts that prioritize the written word, or engaging in “whitetrapping” by holding standards of punctuality and civility so alien to BIPOCs that it sets them up for failure);

or in the black-on-black slavery (like that perpetrated by the Ashanti and the Dahomey and the Nubians) before any physical contact with Europeans;

or even in Japanese racism against Chinese people, the so-called “sick men of Asia.”

It could just sit back and revel in our world where “whiteness, along with the institutions and philosophies that promote its disgusting presence,” stands as the chief indictable energy—a malevolence of such magnitude, in fact, that it becomes imperative, as a matter of (bitterness disguised as) justice, for the academic discipline of history to channel its focus to weaponized extremes:

condemning the various ruinous expressions of whiteness (even, or perhaps especially, the “mayo-ketchup" alliance that colonized global cuisine);

ridiculing any “Nazi assertion” suggesting that whiteness has been or could be nonruinous;

pointing out the often hard-to-spot behavioral, as well as psychological and epistemological and political, expressions of whiteness through the medium of black bodies over human history;

shining a roach light on all the creeping modes of whiteness that, although unmarked and unnamed, pursue the whiteness mission of hoarding capital and other forms of power over black bodies;

interrogating the role of whiteness in producing black victims throughout history beyond just the slave trade (like, for example, how it produced the black victims of Hurricane Katrina);

exalting every form of nonwhiteness (“the only hope we really have, because whiteness is just too hard to destabilize as the racial equivalent of normal or natural”), exalting every form of nonwhiteness even if it entails exalting the oppressive regime of Idi Amin and even if it entails undoing progress (two things it likely does not entail, though, since “both oppression and anti-progress are glaring signs, in fact, of whiteness”);

refuting or “problematizing” any claim as to the ruinous expressions of nonwhiteness or, when that is not feasible, proving (especially by drawing upon “black testimony and lived experience”) how such expressions are, ultimately, expressions of whiteness). 

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, as we have seen with the garbage-bag policy of many schools and corporations (“using white garbage bags instead of black serves to dismantle the longstanding equation of white supremacy (black = garbage) and at the same time gives whites a taste of their own goddamn medicine”), we have witnessed a bloom of “whiteness-dismantling initiatives”—initiatives aiming to “provide people of color at least a small pocket of breathing room in an apple-pie culture of racism radiating from every porch flag”—like the popular Race2Dinner Experience, which features two non-white women (the Gordon Ramsays of antiracism) attending dinner parties—watching, scrutinizing, provoking—in order to “capture the inevitable signs of xenophobic and downright slave-master behavior” exhibited by the white host and her white guests (a perfect spectator-sport parallel to Kitchen Nightmares)—and always, yes, the same basic pattern, a pattern brought into stark relief in the charged excerpt below: (1) hounding all the white women in the room (each of whom dishes out $500 to attend these punking-flagellating-humiliating events of narcissism-feeding “racial reckoning”), hounding and hounding (Maoist-struggle-session style) ultimately until these red-faced women confess their “collusion with white supremacy,” and then right after the confessions (2) pointing out how the confessions themselves, on top of being too insincere, are somehow tainted by whiteness (whitespeak, white tears, white fragility, white values, white logic, white privilege, white silence).

SAIRA

Saira's gaze scalpels through the gathering of women, dissecting their unbearable whiteness with the same scrutinizing precision reserved for a newly-conquered serfdom. Shoulders squared and formidable like the buttresses of Stalin’s Kremlin, her eyes narrow upon her subjects with the mercilessness of Catherine the Great. Each accusatory syllable she utters lays claim to the room, annexing its very air (as if it were her own personal playscape). Having already proven the ruthlessness of her interrogation technique, Saira corners her next victim onto the chopping block with a glee almost too ferocious to restrain—as if savoring that never-old tremble of prey beneath the grim shadow of the guillotine blade.

“Actually Margaret, you didn’t say yours.”

MARGARET

As the clinking of wine glasses and silverware dies into a tense silence, all eyes turn to Margaret. Her complexion blooms with a telltale crimson, a silent beacon of her distress under the scorching scrutiny of Saira’s withering glare. The other white women—loyal to their “Queens,” grateful to be out of the hotseat—nod with grave servility.

“What?”

SAIRA

Saira's voice drips with a saccharine disdain that could rival the simpering malevolence of Dolores Umbridge, each note tinged with a venom thinly veiled by an outward composure. Saira would be the modern-day version of Annie Wilkes from Misery, itching to flip from maternal to violent in the flash of a razor’s edge, if only her wardrobe were more provincial, more homely. But her tailored blouse of silken black—power-chic, officious even—veers decidedly from the domestic, evoking nothing homespun. An authoritarian menace more cosmopolitan in appearance, people will most likely think of Hillary Clinton before Annie Wilkes.

“Your racist thing, thing that you’ve done. . . . You have something inside of you that’s racist. So you must have, you must have examples in your own life.”

MARGARET

Margaret’s eyes shimmer with vulnerability, wide and imploring like those of a woebegone puppy. She is the picture of trepidation, round face pink with bewildered embarrassment like young Neville Longbottom. Her demeanor shrinks, exactly the reaction expected from a white supremacist unaware of her guilty complicity. In her private silence of visible jugular and forehead throbs, she is clearly grasping for any answer—a lifeline—that might appease her tormentor. No doubt she knows by this point that to stay silent would be an expression of white silence: the practice of refusing to speak about race-related issues, a practice especially egregious—toxic, triggering, terrorizing—when a Black person is asking for something more than silence. The other white women squirm in painful empathy, chairs creaking in commiseration. Margaret’s panic is palpable, like a kid braced for the bully zeroing in on him at the bus stop before school. Rapid-fire jump cuts magnify the drama, the urgency and intensity, exactly like in Kitchen Nightmares. Beads of sweat on her brow betray her inner turmoil, the weight of accusation literally hunching her over soup (now salted with the essence of her ordeal).

“I also work in environmental engineering. I have absolutely no people of color, or minimal people of color (possibly the exclusion being slightly Hispanic).”

NARRATOR

In the measured timbre of a discount Sir David Attenborough, the narrator's voice makes an appearance. The quintessential white British accent lays down each syllable with the resonant and reassuring clarity of nature documentaries: detached and yet still imbued with a sense of wonder. (Given the credible and intellectual connotations of such knightly elocution, its inclusion almost seems to undermine one of the struggle session’s chief missions: namely, to show that white does not make right—indeed, that it often makes wrong.) The camera zooms in on Saira’s Hitlerian fingers tapping out a staccato rhythm of amphetamine impatience.

“Saira doesn’t like her attitude.”

SAIRA

Saira pounces on her wounded Karen with the gotcha tone of the apex predator she is—seasoned beneath a cunning cloak of victimhood. Her smile, regal in its decree of imperial contempt, skewers like Vlad the Impaler. Her hand gestures, timed impeccably for each incontrovertible pronouncement, reanimate in miniature the theatrical bombast of Benito Mussolini on his balcony.

“I can say a racist thing you’ve done. I can say it because it just happened! When you talked to me the way you just did [(stressing the “me,” as if Margaret failed to showcase enough groveling respect)]. This is how white women [(Saira gestures to all the sorry white women)] talk to us all the time. These are microaggressions.”

MARGARET

Margaret writhes with confusion and distress. She clearly does not understand her sin. That itself is a sign of whiteness (just like the alcoholic’s denial is a sign of alcoholism). She falls into the trap of trying to defend herself. That itself broadcasts her racist fragility at bullhorn decibels—yes, even though her Neville tone radiates a genuine desire to learn and be better as much as it radiates terror.

“But I say the exact same thing to my white girlfriends.”

SAIRA

Saira removes her glasses. A smug satisfaction unfurls across her face, as if she were a street apologist who just witnessed the unsuspecting atheist swallow the rhetorical bait of a leading question. Saira’s gaze, steely and probing, rivals that of Joseph Stalin's. It holds a chilling depth, penetrating beyond all pretense (yes, much like the General Secretary's notorious scrutiny of his subordinates). Saira’s voice has the force of Hitler deep in an oratorical pocket of jazz, each term bearing the heavy inevitability of historical edict.

“I don’t care if you talk to everybody like that. The way you just spoke to me was straight-up white supremacy. You actually just answered with racism!”

NARRATOR

The narrator provides context for why the cat torments the mouse instead of just killing it already, his detachment belying the cruelty on display. Our instinct as viewers might be to wish we could rush in and save Margaret, who has been reduced to a Biff-bullied George McFly from Back to the Future: insecure, stammering, twitching, mumbling. But the narrator, in effect, tells us not to let our emotions get the better of us. That would amount here to defending white supremacy.

“White supremacy is said to be hidden in innocuous phrases and banal behavior. The smallest things could be considered racist. It’s enough that a person from a minority group feels insulted.”

MARGARET

Margaret stands alone in a narrow hallway for a talking-head segment, the aftermath of the thumbscrew questioning still visible on her. Her face is sweaty and red, not in defiance (or rage at the feeling of having been raped by ideologues) but in a way that indicates an inner capitulation. It has been a victory of antiracism. She now seems ready to admit that she perpetuates racial injustices (often invisible to her kind) and that her most important contribution to society is to do whatever she can to stop committing them—or, more realistically, whatever she can to lessen their impact. That is her newfound responsibility: to curtail the harm she can never fully stop committing (barring, of course, going through with the sotto voce suggestion throughout the dinner: suicide, self-erasure, “kill yo self”). Indeed, a special—albeit twisted—honor comes with facing that you are a werewolf and then taking measures to prevent yourself from wreaking havoc come the full moon.

“Yes. Yes. I’m sounding terribly white.”

SAIRA

Saira is now in her own talking-head-segment next to Regina, the other interrogator (more like the good cop) and co-author of White Women: Everything You Already Know about Your Own Racism and How To Do Better (with a guide to start the unlearning). These proud women of color, called to do a thankless job more traumatic in a way than ER surgery and Alaskan crab fishing combined, exchange sidelong glances and weary head shakes. Both look as exasperated as a thoroughly slimed crew of Ghostbusters after a long day of wrangling poltergeists into ecto-containment chambers. Viewers might get the feel that the information presented on the title card before the dinner footage began—namely, that both women are “available for private consultation”—is an offer no longer on the table. But despite the fatigue etched in their expressions, an unmistakable spark of unwavering commitment radiates through their spent demeanor.

“We know not to have unrealistic hopes. These women are completely oblivious to their racism. In some cases they are lying, but in most cases they sincerely believe they are not perpetuating white supremacy. I mean, let’s be realistic here. How far, really, can they be expected to grow? These women are over 40 in most cases! So we set doable goals. Sure, we would love to inspire some of them to become white traitors, who publicly stand to tell the grim truth about white supremacy, or even white abolitionists, who actively try to dismantle whiteness and to prevent it from reasserting itself. But we are reasonable. I am happy enough if I simply get someone to confess their whiteness and see the damage it does. Even if they keep all that tucked away in their private world, that is a precondition for moving on to exposing the white regime. Seeing the painful truth—that they uphold white supremacy each day of their lives—is something they can never unknow. . . . The next step? Well, we do have a resident white woman on staff. Lisa is an experienced and effective advocate for antiracist change. Her white features (bob, light skin) are more welcoming to stubborn cases like Margaret. Quite frankly we have seen Lisa attain results we never thought possible. So yes, the next step is to meet with Lisa. A one-hour post-dinner consult—that’s already part of the package. But these women need years—believe us: years!”

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, in what ends up perpetuating a culture of division and resentment and atrophied agency, antiblack racism is to blame for anything negative that happens to blacks whereas—since whites, after all, have so much privilege—personal failing, barring cases of disease and coercion and the like, is to blame for anything negative that happens to whites (which explains the growing number of people—the same ones overestimating the number of black death at the hands of cops by three orders of magnitude—who sincerely cannot fathom, despite mainly seeing whites living on the streets, how a white person could be homeless in a white supremacist country such as this).

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, although it is encouraged as a form of mocking payback for blacks to call even senior citizens “white boy,” it is right up there with the hard-r n-word to call a black person “boy" (even in the lighthearted form of “Boy you crazy”) and doing so on social media will robotically prompt—even from celebrities, even if you are a nobody—a chorus of condemnation that again and again includes the phrase “Nazi Alert” followed by an arrow to your @-handle.

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, especially because the Nazi category has become so watered down (now that just anybody doing anything that a “real” black person feels challenged by can get you thrown inside), the higher category “Super Nazi” is becoming popular—filling up each cyber second with “US-flag-waving fucks,” “apple-pie-scarfing pigs,” like rappers Burden and Mesus who spread the following piece of “nazi propaganda” on YouTube and Spotify.  

[Chorus: Burden]

What if I was on my knees and executed by police?

What if I was bein choked and they knew that I couldn't breathe

If I was in the cop car, I was killed in the backseat

With hands cuffed and locked behind me, y'all ain't losin any sleep

Ain't nobody bout to riot for me and that's a fact

Ain't no protests with signs for me, cuz I ain't black

Ain't no hashtags online for me or fightin back

Ain't nobody bout to riot for me, bet y'all don't riot for me

[Verse 1: Burden]

Ain't it demonic, how the news make a piece of shit look iconic?

How ironic, if the ratings go up, so does the profits

You can change the station, but they're readin from the same script

White man, gunned down by the police, ain't nobody play that clip

No one gave a shit, I won't get no famous case

I won't get no downtown monument where they paint my face

I won't get no NFL jersey spot that say my name

Oh, that's right, since I'm white, the situation ain't the same

Black lives matter, Asian lives matter, Spanish lives matter

Ain't allowed to say caucasian lives matter, why?

That don't fit the narrative, that would mean equality

Truth in the mainstream media, that's mythology

They're usin my people, your people, good people, poor people

Either we wake up or they gon keep on usin more people

I tried to warn people, supplyin the truth

If the victim was me, y'all wouldn't riot and loot

[Verse 2: Mesus]

This is so exhaustin, way the news talkin

It's like black folks only ones dead in coffins

Black on black ain't a tragedy, huh?

Guess these news cameras ran out of batteries, huh?

Live by the gun, die by the gun

When it happens in the hood, y'all ain't sayin none

But soon as that trigger finger white

Y'all be tearin shit up on the same night, say I ain't right

Say I ain't white, let's say that I'm black

Get pulled over, try to run away, and scrap

Reachin for the strap but he get it first

So, I slug him in the face at the same time that it burst

Now I'm just another reason to riot, a name on a shirt

When the truth is out, just got what I deserved

When you playin dumb games then you winnin dumb prizes

'Less it's whites killin blacks, they don't give a fuck who dies

[Bridge: Mesus]

When you gon realize they just tryin to divide us?

Red, white, and blue is the colors that unite us

Gettin sick and tired of the lootin and the riots

When the truth is, if I was dead then y'all'd be dead silent

It could just sit back and revel in our world where perhaps the musical leaders of the so-called Super Nazis are probably Tom MacDonald and Adam Calhoun, bigtime “US-flag-waving fucks”—white men who not only are audacious enough to deny being racist at all (one of the biggest signs of being a racist nazi), but who even pump into the airwaves the following “divisive barrage of antiblack lyrics.”

[Verse 1: Tom MacDonald]

It's okay to be racist

As long as you hatin on the Caucasians

Teaching White kids that their shades the same as school shooters and rapists

Maybe I ain't trippin cuz the White children have been getting taught that they got White privilege

By the White guys in the high heels who identify as the White women

I'm not proud to be White but I'm fine with it

Guess I'm not allowed to have pride in it

Cause the colonizers and the White bigots

Made White history my business

I ain't never gonna give a damn if you like me

I ain't gonna trip when they stereotype me

I'm a White boy and a White boy like me

Knows that all lives matter, bite me

When I was younger they taught me to never see color

To treat every man as if he was my brother

But now that we're grown up we hate one another

For all of the ways that we struggle and suffer

They coming for blood and we're running for cover

The government wants us divided and dumber

Addicted and drunk in the gutter

So we never wake up and never recover

Call me culture vulture cuz I rap good

I don't pop Xans or smoke backwoods

But they call me a wigger and label me Hitler

And hate like I am wearing a Klan hood

It ain't left or right or Black or White it's good and evil

Elite folks ain't normal people

United we stand and divided we fall

America, we got to get real

You were segregated, that was not fair

You were enslaved, they did not care

But you were never on a plantation

And my generation was not there

That's trauma in your DNA

Causing what we see today

I pray to God you staying strong

Don't wanna see no man in pain

Dear White folks, I'm embarrassed

Some of y'all are such Karens

That prejudice you inherited

Was racism from your parents

Get that poison out your veins

Whites and Blacks are all the same

They want us in our graves

Just let me try to explain

[Chorus]

I swear they want us in a Race War

Dying everyday for

Whose lives matter more

Whoa

I won't be dying in the Race War

Our government is paid for

Cuz our lives matter more

Whoa

[Verse 2: Adam Calhoun]

If you born Black, you lose

Might as well go get that noose

You gonna die before you 25

Get shot over your shoes

You gonna get killed by police

Even when you follow the rules

If you listen to the news

You gon believe all this is true (True)

I ain't feeling no White guilt

They won't riot for me when I'm killed

I guess White lives don't matter

Sad, but that's the way that I feel

I feel like they feel like I don't know what they all call me

Cis White male, bigot, racist, he's a “Nazi”

That's not me, I'm not one of these white liberal commies

Who think Black America needs allies in their Army

Your neighborhood's all gang

You claim you Pro Black but you faking

Guys are dying on the pavement

All your hashtags won't save them

That ain't gangsta

People begging for their life still

I know White people who can't afford to pay their light bill

Who might feel like they the ones who losing their life

When the worst thing you could be is not ashamed to be White

White privilege is a system

They position for division

If you're Black you go to prison

If you're White your life is different

Take some money, race, religions

Sprinkle in some ammunition

And make everyone believe

That the other team is the villain

I ain't Pro Black, I ain't Pro White

I'm Pro American

Every color turns to bones

One day when you bury them

Whites or Blacks are all the same

They want us in our graves

Just let me try to explain

[Bridge]

They want us in a Race War dying in the streets

Should be us against them but it's you against me

Ain't nobody gonna win, everybody gon see

That the color of your skin don't change the color that you bleed

It could just sit back and revel in our world where—with the help of slave movies stoking rage against whites (even at the cost of promoting an inferiority complex among black children, but one that will then be exploited as evidence of white-supremacy’s reign); with the help of pathos-leaden videos to unveil (Buffalo-public-school-style) the widespread brutality against black children (Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Aiyana Stanley-Jones)—one of the most important lessons to drive into our grade-schoolers, so that (a) whites learn early on that their rapacious-oppressive natures are so baked into them that they cannot help but unfairly push others down in some fashion and (b) blacks learn early on that in their crippled state they are owed lifetimes of recompense and coddling by their cripplers (those to whom their enmity is always righteous), is the lesson that not only have blacks been and will continue to be discriminated against in our white supremacist country (such that the only hope for keeping racism in check is to make antiracism too an indelible part of every institution), but—and here are the eye-for-an-eye mantras of vengeance perhaps children will learn to repeat as regularly as the Lord’s Prayer once was (almost as if to promote perpetual antagonism between blacks and whites, or at last to provide some historical context for the constant drum beat of “Black is King”)—“the only right answer to past discrimination is present discrimination” and “the only right answer to present discrimination is future discrimination.”

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, and keep in mind that discrimination and injustice is the only right answer to discrimination and injustice, the skin of white devils is as disgusting as black skin was once thought to be—indeed, where to be born white is to be born as wicked as blacks were once thought to be: inherently wicked, such that the best hope is to quarantine them off from opportunities to do damage and then set out to undue their damage piece by piece (such as by replacing every “nigger” and “injun” in Huckleberry Finn with “slave” and “indigenous American” and, at least in those schools that have not gone so far as to “worry about the white supremacy intrinsic to math itself,” by replacing the dead-white-male-reminding name “Pythagorean Theorem” with the laborious safeternative “side-length relationship for right triangles”).

It could just sit back and revel in our world where virtually no one, white or black, can name even five of the millions of whites who fought against white-supremacist ideology—not just John Brown (who slaughtered white people on his anti-slavery mission and was ultimately executed during his abolitionist rebellion), but the countless unsung heroes:

Benjamin Lay (who penned polemics against slavery);

or Sarah and Angelina Grimké (who ignited fires of abolitionism with their speeches);

or William Lloyd Garrison (who founded an abolitionist newspaper);

or Cassius Clay (who was a Yale abolitionist after whom Muhammad Ali’s father was named);

or James Reeb and Viola Liuzzo (who were murdered by white supremacists while participating in anti-segregation marches);

or Reverend Bruce Klunder (who was crushed to death after lying in front of a bulldozer to protest school segregation);

or Anne Braden (who warred against redlining even to the extent of putting a house in her name for a black couple, which earned her the ignominy of being one of the most reviled people in the mid-twentieth century);

or the countless others who (unlike the majority of others, black and white) had the courage to transcend the paralyzing inertia of their times and act on what they knew was right.

It could just sit back and revel in our world where—as if to prepare them for a world of applications (whether for McDonald’s or for college) asking each applicant to “List at least five things you have done to advance the antiracist mission against whiteness and other toxic sites of radically discursive silence”—the age-old ice-breaking topic for the first day of class about what you did over summer vacation is replaced starting from middle-school with the question “What have you done over summer vacation to resist the grip of white supremacy?”

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, hammering into young black minds how victimized they are by the white meat always dangled in their faces (almost as if to make their rage grow to righteous extremes of curb-stomping relentlessness), the teacher asks the class “What’s the longest war in history?” and—after shooting down with a mere stare the first answer of the one eager white kid (“Is it the Korean War since no peace treaty was signed?”) and then the second answer (“It must be the Afghan Conflict if you’re looking for continuous fighting”)—she states the right answer with a teary look in every student’s eyes, except the eyes of that one deflated white kid (who has proven “reluctant,” as she wrote in his report card, “to dissociate from or express even the least bit of shame about whiteness”): “The war against black people.”

It could just sit back and revel in our world where—as if civil war were somehow our secret thanatos wish, or as if there were somehow a good deal of money in nation-splitting division—the same teacher right afterwards says, perhaps sensing incredulity from some of the precocious white students and budding oreo black students, “finally this total war against black people—no means of attack off the table—is being recognized in the larger culture” and then pulls up the trailer for the new film The American Society of Magical Negroes, which includes the following bit of dialogue between two black men—dialogue that (1) stands in flagrant contradiction to the poverty and crime and neighborhood-degradation statistics and (2) would never fly (culturally, or even perhaps legally) if white was swapped with any other race.

“What’s the most dangerous animal on the planet?”

“The shark—.”

“White people, when they feel uncomfortable. White people feeling uncomfortable precedes a lot of bad stuff for us. That’s why we fight white discomfort everyday. Because the happier they are, the safer we are.”

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, the black-grievance industry being so huge that it goes beyond Disney and into classrooms, it is not uncommon to find middle-school ELA courses throughout the country that engage in all the expected signaling of “antiracism”:

ELA courses titled “Black Oppression in the Wake of Trayvon Martin”;

ELA courses with reading materials chockful of intentional misspellings (“spellings that ensure AAVE-adjacency”);

ELA courses that begin each session with white students trying to hold their breath for eight minutes and forty-six seconds while the teacher reads passages from countless I-can’t-breathe books intending to highlight “Amerikkka’s total war against Black bodies”;

ELA courses that require “video proof of active participation” in at least one local protest for black justice by the end of the year (active since, according to one of many false dichotomies sanctioned as intellectually permissible “given how high the stakes are for black bodies,” (1) you are racist if you are not antiracist and (2) you are not antiracist if you are not actively pursuing antiracist goals);

ELA courses that require a “privilege walk” after each major exam, a ritual where students step forward or backward based on prompts related to racial advantages or disadvantages, “so that everyone develops an informed compassion for BIPOC peers who did not score as high”;

ELA courses that have white students apologize to black students after giving “an oral report demonstrating deep reflection on the ways they have participated in antiblack violence”;

ELA courses that end the final class with a so-called “die-in,” a ritual that involves the students dropping to the floor (as if tazed or shot or choked or pepper sprayed or dog attacked or Billy-clubbed or knee-pinned), while the teacher reads through a litany of black victims of white brutality;

ELA courses that find any skepticism toward antiracist theses (in particular, the thesis that blacks remain the helpless victims of a flourishing white supremacy) to be as disgusting and harmful as natural selection once was across the South not too long back;

ELA courses that only assign learning materials vetted by sensitivity readers to “ensure that the characters and settings are diverse,” and “that the cover art is inclusive,” and “that the current horrors of systemic racism are not underplayed,” and “that the dialogue is authentic and filled with inclusive language (“cuz,” “finna,” “boutta,” “lemme”), and “that nonwhite stories are centered,” and “that nonwhite characters are not judged by white standards of beauty or by white norms of intellect and conduct”;

ELA courses where Gandalf the White is changed to Gandalf the Black “to problematize the stereotype that white means pure and good”—a move perfectly sensible given that preschoolers now sing “Bah bah king sheep, have you any wool?”

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, zooming in on the fractals of the antiracist industry a bit, it is not uncommon to find ELA courses mandating that its sixth-graders read Lowery’s “They Can't Kill Us All” in tandem with the award-winning YA novel Star-Spangled Boys, a novel that—for “antiracist authenticity and respect”—has a white author only for the white characters and a black author for any other characters and whose cringeworthy back matter reads as follows.

“Rasheed is absent again today.” That’s the ominous sidewalk graffiti that started it all. . . . Well, no, actually, what started it all was a white lady in a hurry (and pulling rank). She bumped into Rasheed at the bodega, causing him to drop his bag of chips. It didn’t matter what Rasheed said next—that it was an accident, that he wasn’t stealing, that he was just finna get a snack before class.

No, it didn’t matter. He was a Black kid. So he must’ve been stealing. He was a Black kid. So he must’ve been trying to assault that white woman. He was a Black kid—a King, a threat. So he must’ve deserved to get his head pounded into unforgiving concrete by police fists of white power: his pleadings seen as nothing more than sass and defiance, his attempts to leave the bodega seen as nothing more than thuggish resistance, his automatic flinching from every crushing head punch seen as nothing more than subhuman refusal to stay still—his Blackness seen, ultimately, as nothing more than hypercriminality.

Rasheed already knew that fatal equation. Each day on the news he witnessed Black Kings falsely accused, assaulted, and executed in broad daylight by white cops. His un-American race, he knew well before the incident, would always discolor his all-American goodness: his focus on art, his dedication to becoming a military officer, his staying away from crime and drugs. The incident, then, was no surprise to him, really. All he could do, as he paid the pavement-pummeling price for his skin, was whisper the one desperate thought of countless fallen kings: “Please don’t kill me!”

Hunter, a white boy, saw the whole thing unfold that terrible afternoon. He saw his best friend’s older brother beating the daylights out of his classmate: Rasheed, the ROTC kid with mad art skills. At first Hunter doesn’t tell a soul. He’s not even sure he understands what happened. His whiteness tells him one thing. His eyes and memory and heart tell him another. But when the school—and the nation—starts to divide on what went down, blame spreads like wildfire fed by ugly words like “racism” and “police brutality” and “white supremacy.” However much he might want to forget the whole ordeal, Hunter’s part of history. He just has to figure out what side of history that will be. Bystander or ally? Complicity or justice?"

Hunter can never understand what it is to be terrorized each day as a Black King or a Black Queen. But will he stand? Will he stand against the unspeakable truth, the truth conveniently denied by the incessant gaslighting of whiteness: that racism has only grown stronger after the civil rights movement? Will he realize—and confess—to his own white privilege: the privilege to be given the benefit of the doubt as a good person, the privilege not to have to battle constant aggressions and genocidal hate? Will he take the further step beyond awareness and actually break the code of whiteness, even though doing so could cost him his basketball scholarship and his friendships and even his life?

Will he become an effective ally, someone who realizes that his disdain for whiteness does not all by itself absolve him from actively breaking its stranglehold? Will he oppose his own racist teacher? Will he call out the antiblackness implicated in her asking students—only one day after the beatdown—how much sense it makes for them to interrupt the study session with the chant “Fuck the police” when, in her very own insensitive words of invalidation, “(1) we don’t know the full story yet, (2) a bad apple doesn’t mean the whole barrel’s rotten, (3) there are more effective venues for this chant anyway.” Will he call out his own racist basketball coach for the violent assimilationism of his pre-game speech (“On this court we’re all one, all Falcons!”), a supposed “pep talk” commanding a multicultural collection of athletes in a world where white is right to leave their differences at the door—in effect, to leave the uniqueness of their souls at the door—for the sake of some gray-goo unity (the team, the Falcons) concocted by white abstraction. Does he have the intellectual and moral strength to restrain the voracious appetites of his whiteness, condemning it and demanding its abolition while still staying in his lane? Does he have the fortitude to speak out against this pathological disease infecting his people, his own mother?

There’s a future at stake, a future where someone will not have to keep their mouth shut just because they are Black; a future where Black Kings and Queens will not have to obey Eurocentric standards of language and fashion and behavior and thinking to stand a better chance of not being abused and beaten by whites; a future where no Black student will have to be absent for days on end because of the brutalities of whiteness. Rasheed and Hunter—one Black, one white (both American)—have to risk everything to make the indelible status quo less brutal.

Cuz that’s how it can end.

It 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 eye-rolling 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.’ Don’t they see that black-on-black violence is the scream of a people unheard by Amerikkka? (And yes, I’m using the triple ‘k’!) Fuck outta here.”

“Ahahaha. They good at touching me like this some damn petting zoo!”

“It’s 2021, one of the hottest years on record and one of the worst for black people. Psh. That should tell you about what they good at: poisoning and killing. But I’ll say this. After all them thousands of years running shit they stay good at thinking their emotional wellbeing matters just as much as ours!”

“You know—I can’t even. Tsk. White people good at setting us up to fail. No offense, but that’s real talk. They do it with all them damn school tests. (You know the SAT was made to show white people are the smartest?) Even worse, they even do it with the laws. I’m not talking cops. I’m talking the actual laws. White people define—they define—what crime is, what counts as criminal conduct. And then no wonder it turns out that black people commit so much crime! Hmm. If we had definitions that weren’t antiblack, if we had definitions that didn’t criminalize our culture—hmm. I mean, my Daddy and my uncles, like everyone’s daddies and uncles, played cee-lo for money on the corner. That’s illegal—still illegal. I remember they would sometimes play with loosies. That’s a double crime cuz it’s illegal to sell loosies. That was why they murdered Eric Garner: for selling some damn cigarettes. But that’s what our people do! We sell loosies. We play cee-lo. The law itself is antiblack. It really be making you think some black genocide shit going down! White people be saying it ain’t genocide. But make it make sense! If we just change the laws to be sensitive to black culture, that would solve our mass incarceration problem right there. Prisons would be filled with Italians if we outlawed talking with hands, right? That’s what I’m talking here. We a passionate people too. Of course there’s gonna be fights and all that. (Ya’ll got a bitch going here.) And just like we need laws that don’t just criminalize being black, we need black jury members when we being judged. How they gonna know our situation if they ain’t black? How they gonna be peers? A peer is a person from a similar background and experience (economic, geographic, racial). White people can’t understand the black mindset and way of thinking. Black people literally reason differently. White people like to make for everyone what ain’t for everyone. And it ain’t just fair skin and straight hair and all them white standards of beauty. Reasoning, thinking—they try to say is the same for all. And now we come full circle. We come back to them damn SATs and we come back to the law. Cuz imagine if we criminalized acting like what is reason for one group is reason for all. Then guess what we could say? ‘White people are the criminal people.’ We could predict, right from when they pasty asses are born (just like they do us), that they’re ‘likely to engage in criminal activity’ and be ‘repeat offenders’ and all that mess.”

“Expecting us to participate in their own white supremacy. These the same people who expect women to come right back to work after they have a baby. But just like women and men ain’t the same, black and white ain’t the same. And so no, Imma be getting my maternity leave and Imma be at least fifteen minutes late to that meeting, feel me?”

“They good at misunderstanding us. When we cheered for OJ they thought we were cheering for OJ himself. We wasn’t cheering for that fool! We knew he did it! (Shoot, white woman make anyone go crazy.) No, we were celebrating the brothers and sisters that lost their lives to white power throughout history, maimed and executed by the so-called ‘law.’ We were celebrating the glimmer of hope that even black people might be found innocent in a white criminal justice system. Now with all the recent shit in the news we know different.”

“Testing us. Mmm-hmm. And no, I don’t just mean our patience. I mean literally subjecting innocent black children to all them standardized tests. The SATs were made by eugenicists to prove blacks are inferior. See, we forget that. People need to open their eyes. Trace the roots. If the roots are rotten, the fruit is rotten. Innocence should be protected at all costs. Once it’s gone it can never be restored. I’ll be damned if my black babies ever get tested. Like literally, our black babies get more scrutiny from their teachers. That leads to worse performance. The trend continues if they get a job. Bosses stay on the back of black people. Nah, my babies ain’t never gonna be tested!”

“Creating racism, of course.”

“Being racist. They created it.”

“They’re good at calling us ‘hypocrites’ whenever we try to enjoy some time in the sun for once—whenever we demand black-only spaces, or god forbid try to stop white people from participating in certain activities that we like to enjoy. Some of them try to be real slick with it. They say we’ve adopted the supremacist mindset. No Mr. White Man. It’s called ‘payback.’ How can it be that we’re creating a form of racism that benefits us, as so many of them and their house negros like to say, when you can’t be racist if you don’t have power? I mean get out from your rusty-ass redneck trailers. Everyone knows the formula now: racism equals prejudice plus power. I can be prejudiced against whites—and I damn sure am! But I can never be racist against them. I can perpetuate antiwhite stereotypes. I can hate all of them just for being white. I can kill white babies just for being white. I can do all these things—but none of it would make me racist!”

“White people hurt everybody. That’s what they are superior at. Yes, they hurt their very own kind, and in the most demonic ways. Now I see—I am a fifth-grade teacher—these little ten-year-old boys are being told for the first time, by me, that they had their chance in the sun. I have to be the one to tell them that they have to wait last to get a snack, that they have to go to the back of the bus on a field trip, that they cannot stand in the way of black students trying to see the whales. Of course, kids like that are going to feel outraged. But his parents should have told him, from way early on, that he has no damn right to feel outraged. They should have laid out this history. But they don’t. And you know what? The cycle will just continue. They will grow up to hurt their kids just like they were hurt.”

“Thinking they can judge black women. Look. Our bodies were used for so long as chattel that it never makes sense for any white person (especially a man) ever to call a black woman a ‘whore’ or make a value judgment against her selling her body. Slavery has made her immune. It has given her a pass. How could we ever tolerate the same people that pimped us out then trying to put us down as ‘whores’? Make it make sense. It’s the ultimate mind game. People think of the whip when they think of whitey. We can’t forget his mind games, though! The devil attacks the psychology most of all.”

“Deadass? Hahaha. They good at talking to me like they redeemable. They ain’t. Why you think we call they no-purpose-flour asses ‘chalk children’? Read between the lines. It ain’t just about the color. Feel me?”

“They good at missing the obvious. Like who gone steal a whole ATM unless you out here desperate? Psh. White supremacy has black folk desperate. Let me tell you!”

“White people excel at manipulating black minds in order to maintain their hegemony. They like to manipulate us into thinking that legal emancipation of slaves completed the emancipation. What they like to hide from us (if not also from themselves) is that there was more to slavery than just the legal aspect—you know, the legal aspect that enabled whitey to go into court and say “I own this nigger here’s labor.” An entire symbolic structure of domination and degradation came along with it. That symbolic structure doesn’t go away simply by outlawing slavery. Whitey’ll say that so much has happened in the interim, now that we’re in 2021. But that’s manipulation. We have yet even to make a dent in that symbolic structure. The white-supremacist attitude about the place and purpose of black people has grown stronger than ever. That is precisely what we would expect given the obvious increase in black oppression. Over the entire history of slavery in the US, there were likely not much more than 5 million slaves. And yet the number of black people incarcerated starting from after emancipation until now is well over 10 million, about 80 percent of those incarcerations happening from the late 70s until now.”

“Whites are good at 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 cultures in all their riches.’—Nah, stealin the riches!”

“Don’t let me start. 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. And you can’t even talk with them. They center themselves in every narrative. Why can’t they just listen and learn. I mean I seriously wonder that. Even all these ‘allies’ out here—they can never just shut up.”

“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 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 take some TVs or jewelry or some iPhones—all covered by insurance anyways. Please. How can it be looting when it’s reparations? Please make it make sense.”

“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.”

“Psh. Genocide.”

“They good at bringing God into it. They brought God into it to oppress us: ‘God says the holiest are those who serve.’ Tsk. Convenient. Now they go and bring God into it to keep us from rising, from taking our rightful place: ‘God is not interested merely in the freedom of black men but of white men too.’ If there really was a God, why would he be interested in the freedom of people already free—people with too much freedom?”

“This question has me dead. But straight up: stealing people’s lives just because they feel like it.”

“They stubborn. Like I swear all white people be Tauruses. Like after all they done put us through all that mess, they ain’t tryna accept no so sort of instruction manual on how to talk to us. Like we kings and queens. There be rules!”

“Diminishing our pain. Now the big thing is to talk about “white slavery”—the Irish slave trade and all that. We can’t even have our one unique atrocity? I don’t wanna be mean but shoot, given what we suffered, I can be. I don’t care nothin bout all these Irish slaves. Was they chattel like me? No. They was just prisoners or servants for a time. And even if they really was true slaves, they privileged now, though—ain’t they? We sure the hell ain’t!”

“Mocking our pain. The oppressor gets pleasure out of mocking our pain. That’s why I tell my class ‘salutations’ instead of ‘good morning.’ The oppressor came up with that phrase as a way to poke fun at black people who were crying. Seeing a group of us in tears after one of our own was lynched, the oppressor would ask “Did you have a good mourning’ (with the ‘u’ in there). They just dropped the ‘u’ so we’d forget.”

“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). I can’t even with them, smelling like wet dog and shit.”

“Playing the victim. Oh, your store got robbed? Try slavery.”

“Stealing our pain. Tuh. I don’t give one flying fuck. I am a black woman tormented each and every goddamn day, so I do not care how many millions of Europeans were the slaves of Muslims. It is completely insensitive to tell me about this Barbaric or Barbary or whatever slave trade when I am sitting right in front of you still basically chattel—your chattel—in this damn country!

“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. And whitey ain’t stupid. He gives us all the white-supremacist guns until we might even beg to go back.”

“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.”

“Not trusting black women. Black women are always to be believed.”

“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 it’s just ‘appreciation.’ They say its just ‘appreciation’ even as they go and make money off 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 a white-supremacist notion as three meals a day and transphobia. We didn’t know no property in Africa.”

“Psh. 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.”

“They good at blaming black people for what’s really the fault of white oppression and white guns and white drugs. Then they stand there with their hands out talking all this insensitive mess about ‘If you can’t fly, run. If you can’t run, walk. If you can’t walk, crawl. If you can’t crawl, just keep moving.’ I get how this could sound good. But look just a bit below the surface to see the toxicity of this white logic. It invalidates the experience of black people. It underestimates just how bad the situation is for black people. That’s why I call it “insensitive”—insensitive denial: textbook white fragility.”

“Wearing dreadlocks and then talking bout ‘Vikings.’ White boy, please!”

“Whites are manipulators. That’s what they’re 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. White people are control freaks, period. That means they don’t like change. They can’t handle the changes in acceptable language. No, white boy—it ain’t ‘women,’ it’s ‘non-men’ or ‘people with vaginas.’ It ain’t ‘breastfeeding,’ it’s ‘chestfeeding.’ They like to go back. It’s in that red hat: “Make America Great Again.” Face it, white boy: obesity is beautiful and healthy. Get with it or die off, fragile fucks.”

“Saying they discovered things already there. Mmm-hmm. ‘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. Psh. And they continue to murder and rape black bodies just by failing to fess up to their demonic traits.”

“Whites are good at thinking that it’s actually a good thing to be colorblind. But to try to treat black people without regard to their race is racist. Whites just don’t see that. You can’t treat me just as a person. You have to treat me as a black person because as a black person—a victim—I am fundamentally owed! You see, it’s awfully convenient for whitey to try and go treat everyone equally now. It’s his sneaky way to avoid paying up. But oh he’s gonna pay up—him and his children. Mark my words.”

“Whites are good at not seeing the bigger picture. Anyone with a heart feels bad about taking away opportunities and shutting down white children just because they white. But in the grand scheme it’s for the best. Let black people hold the reins for a bit. It's our time. Let us, our children, speak first and get medical care first and get the jobs and the loans. It’s called ‘taking turns.’”

It could just sit back and watch our world where, hammering 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—or, as it says on her handout, “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 whiteness is);

displaying insensitivity to black styles of knowing;

raising an eyebrow at black names (LaQuanquella, Demarius, Royalty) or black speak (“finna clap back at that thirsty hoe, hundo P”) or black practices (twerking), instead of recognizing that these all have rich histories and a place in pro-black schools and offices and homes;

feeling butthurt when BIPOCs make jokes about white people (their corny speech, their doofy behavior, their wrinkled and cracked skin, and so on);

invalidating the tapestry of black lived experience;

talking over black folk, silencing their voices, even though they had to endure kidnapping and 400 years of enslavement, rape and medical experimentation, lynchings and forced sterilization, biased media and cultural mockery, unaddressed trauma and voter suppression;

using language and tones that activate wounds in the black psyche;

expressing nostalgia for the “good old days" even though those “good old days” were filled with racial injustice;

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;

making jokes about black people, and then resorting to fragility phrases like “just kidding" when called out for being racially insensitive;

criticizing the hyperviolence and hypersexuality in mainstream black culture;

parading assault-provoking emblems of hate speech, like Blue Lives Matter flags or Trump hats;

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 as follows.

Gaslighting is when you make someone doubt what they know to be true. Whites 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 seen. 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 as follows.

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? 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” and that it was guilty of “reverse racism.” The problem is, it is impossible for a workplace to be racially hostile toward whites. The white collective has always held the power and continues to hold the power. There is no such thing as reverse racism. And she knows that, but she continued to lie. 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 as a way to distance zimself 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, refuses 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 reins 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!

It could just sit back and revel in our world where by high school our souls nightly repeat the dogmatic catechisms of antiracism even if we struggle to recite them out on the spot for the Sunday-school nuns—so often white—of the religion.

Experiencing hardship conveys a crucial authority, and black people—who belong to a class of oppression even lower than Jews—have had it the hardest and will continue to have it the hardest (which is why they get to speak first in class and which is why their words should always be believed and which is why it makes sense when they loot stores and which is why it is moral for them to assert even their arbitrary will over whites and which is why antiblackness is the most reprehensible out of all the punching-down attitudes).

Whiteness is an illness that is highly contagious (which is why not just white people, but even black people, can be guilty of antiblackness).

Prison is never the answer for black people because not only do black criminals respond better to a good talking down to by a wise elder (an auntie, a big mama, a preacher), prisons have been used too long as loophole by which to continue the maiming and torturing of black bodies during the heydays of slavery.

Black people need black-only spaces (classes, dorms, film showings, graduation ceremonies, university rec centers and libraries) where they have a better chance at being able to breathe for a moment—breathe black pheromones, breathe black epistemology, breathe black values, breathe black spirituality—before the chokehold of whiteness tightens once again (at the malls and supermarkets and movie theaters and amusement parks and fitness centers and libraries and especially the universities).

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, despite blacks becoming overrepresented in more and more sectors, countless job rejections start with the chilling refrain captured in essence by the following.

We are no longer pursuing your candidacy. It has come to our attention that you are nondiverse. We know this is not the news you wanted, but we take seriously the ethical imperative to redress past discrimination and to dampen the ever-growing trauma of discrimination against black people. You are perfect for this job. A person of your optics, in that case, should have no trouble at another company. Thank you for your time.

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, in perfect alignment with the prevailing attitude of praising and blaming people for things beyond personal control, one of the most stinging insults is to have “small-dick energy”—a condition that (much like the closely-correlated condition of whiteness) transcends racial boundaries, but where everyone understands (if only just below the threshold of consciousness) is another way of saying nonblack-dick energy (which explains, of course, why in the porn world, filling more and more with taunts like “Bet your girlfriend never moaned like this on your puny white dick,” a woman being “blacked” is a woman being dicked by a monster cock).

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, while it is normalized and encouraged (playground-bully style) for everyone to poke fun at “whitey” even from a place of malice and to ethnic-cleansing degrees (while simultaneously venerating, of course, all the varieties of non-whitey), it is unacceptable—on pain of mob outcry resulting in doxing and unemployability—for whites (“land and people stealers,” “land and people rapists”) ever to poke fun at blacks even from a place of joking love.

“Mahfuckah, you so black I bet you don’t even have a father figure!”

“What’s the worst three years of a black child’s life? First grade!”

“What do you call a white guy with a big dick? Michael Jackson!”

“What’s the difference between a boomerang and a black father? A boomerang comes back!”

“Why can blacks be racist but not whites? Because racism is a violent crime and violent crimes are a black thing!”

“What time of year can whites cook better food than blacks? Father’s Day!”

“Why don’t black people go on cruises? Because they already been fooled by that once!”

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, instead of striving for a level playing field on which all individuals get judged by equal standards, the goal is eradication of all disparity—enforced equality of outcome—by means of putting down a thumb hard on the scale in favor of blacks during hiring and admission for various programs, which kills two birds with one stone: riling up racial ill feeling in whites (enough perhaps to bellow the embers of antiblack sentiment into a fire) and coddling blacks (enough perhaps to decimate their resilience and drive).

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, against a constant bass-bumping backdrop of niggative lyrics (“Don't be speakin on me if you owe a nigga / I'll catch him in traffic and ho the nigga”), whites—perhaps gaslit to think there is no such thing as the use-mention distinction altogether or at least that every case of mentioning is a case of using (indeed, lobbing)—are bullied away not only from using but from mentioning and even quoting the word “nigger,” are removed from jobs and colleges for singing along to rap lyrics or for quoting the raw words even of thoroughbred antiracists (real antiracists) like Mark Twain and Ralph Ellison.

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, after the otherwise “woke” professor innocuously quotes a line from a popular black 90s movie (’Mo Money), an outspoken student—a flamboyant white whose Amazon care-bear t-shirt features a nazi sign behind a red censorship slash and whose bookbag has a patch reeking of his cringey desire for the social capital of black-female friends (“Nasty Bitches ❤ BLM”)—reports to the department dean that (“as an ally”) he has been “harmed and activated by the insensitive appropriations of a professor whose whiteness already grants him too much power,” a reporting that results neither in the equally-pasty dean telling the student (seated on the leather fainting couch with arms crossed and voice shaking and eyes averted in nervous suspicion given all the family photos of whiteness) that it is downright illiberal to demand that professors of specific optics be restricted from quoting certain films nor in the dean at least encouraging the student to voice his feelings to the professor himself (in what might have become a truly bridge-building conversation); a reporting that results, instead, in the dean’s insistence (“on behalf of vulnerable populations especially”) that the student head straightaway to the grievance office (an office that already purged two students from that very class for citing “harmful statistics”)—the dean, “an ally too” (like the rest of the administration), concerned about protecting the university’s antiracist branding even to the extent of torching the most cherished values of higher education: free expression and diversity of thought.

It could just sit back and revel in our world where—aside from all the housing and feeding and clothing during slavery (insensitive as that is to say) and aside from the nonstop apologies and aggressive affirmative-action policies and healthcare initiatives and community development grants and minority-business programs and HBCU funding and housing vouchers and food assistance and scholarships and federal contracting to black companies)—monetary reparations (forty acres and a mule in today’s value, and with enough Jim-Crow interest to get it up to the trillion-dollar scale of social security) seem on the verge of being given out—no, not to experts who will allocate funds toward developing in blacks the personal and intellectual attributes crucial for success and who will perhaps also distribute funds toward lifting every disadvantaged person (regardless of race) out of their insecure situation (since that will improve society as a whole and thereby blacks in particular), but instead directly to individual black people (yes, even to Oprah and even to descendants of those thousands of free blacks who themselves owned thousands of black slaves, and yet neither to descendants of wage laborers in the Irish slums of Boston at the end of the nineteenth century nor to the Appalachian whites of today), which would kill two birds with one stone.

(1) Blacks would likely remain trapped in the same mentality, would likely keep up the same attitudes and behaviors behind their overrepresentation in violent crime and underdevelopment in academics, such that in the future—where no real improvement in the developmental condition of black people will have been made by the mere transfer of wealth, where everyone will still think the same way about the difference between Lamont and Stewart—blacks can justifiably demand future reparations with as much urgency as before (no reparations ever being enough).

(2) Whites—especially the most needy of the untouchable class, and especially especially those in that class as a result of a cancelation agenda in the name of antiracism—would likely grow in resent (since those who merely resemble those who were mistreated in the distant past would be siphoning wealth, so at least it seems, from those who merely resemble those who mistreated people in the distant past).

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, in all cases of one group performing better than another group in a certain area, it is an indictment of the injustice either of that area itself or of the better-performing group (unless that group is nonwhite)—the exception being, of course, those areas (like basketball and rap) where blacks perform better (since, after all, blacks are an exceptional case, having suffered centuries of the cruelest abuse at the hand of a horror the likes of which there can be no greater: antiblack racism).

It could just sit back and revel in our world where we must read every interaction through the lens of blacks being dominated by whites, even innocuous interactions (and often with the result of placing whites into double binds):

a white person interrupting a black person out of excitement (since that activates a silencing history, as well as the intergeneration trauma of that history, in which black folk were repeatedly barred from speaking);

a white person mispronouncing a black name like TyQuantavia or Quavondric (since that activates a name-erasing history, as well as the intergeneration trauma of that history, in which black folk were called whatever the white master deemed fit);

a white person not mispronouncing a black name like TyQuantavia or Quavondric (since that activates a ridiculing history, as well as the intergeneration trauma of that history, in which black folk were mocked for the unique names they came up with as a form of resistance to the practice of taking on their owner’s names);

a white person complimenting a black person on their hairstyle (since that activates an exoticizing history, as well as the intergeneration trauma of that history, in which black folk were judged on auction blocks primarily for their physical attributes);

a white person not complimenting a black person on their hairstyle (since that activates a white-is-right history, as well as the intergeneration trauma of that history, in which the beauty and cultural significance of black hairstyles were systematically overlooked or devalued);

a white person asking a black person for help with carrying an object (since that activates an enslaving history, as well as the intergeneration trauma of that history, in which black folk were expected to give their free labor to whites);

a white person not asking a black person for help with carrying an object (since that activates a mistrustful history, as well as the intergeneration trauma of that history, in which black folk were deemed neither capable nor trustworthy enough to assist white people);

a white person asking a black person if they need help carrying an object (since that activates a dependency history, as well as the intergeneration trauma of that history, in which black folk were considered unable to do for themselves);

a white person not asking a black person if they need help carrying an object (since that activates a neglecting history, as well as the intergeneration trauma of that history, where the struggles and burdens of black folk were ignored as if they were no more than animals);

a white person laughing at a joke made by a black person (since that activates a performative history, as well as the intergeneration trauma of that history, in which black folk were forced to entertain whites as minstrels and jesters cheesing with Satchmo grins);

a white person not laughing at a joke made by a black person (since that activates an exclusionary history, as well as the intergeneration trauma of that history, in which black humor was marginalized as “for the jungle” and deemed unworthy of acknowledgment in proper society);

a white person offering a black person even solicited advice (since that activates a patronizing history, as well as the intergeneration trauma of that history, in which black folk were treated as intellectually inferior and in need of guidance by the supposedly superior wisdom of whites);

a white person not offering a black person advice (since that activates a withholding history, as well as the intergenerational trauma of that history, in which black folk’s access to knowledge and resources was deliberately restricted);

a white person telling a black person “good morning” (since that activates a mocking history, as well as the intergeneration trauma of that history, in which black folk were asked “Did you have a good mourning?” so as to make fun of their tears over the beating or murder of a loved one);

a white person laughing too loudly near a black person (since this activates a belittling history, as well as the intergenerational trauma of that history, where black folk's legitimate concerns and sufferings were often dismissed with laughter, as if their pains were merely a source of entertainment for whites);

a white person advising a black person to calm down during a heated discussion (since this activates an emotion-invalidating history, as well as the intergenerational trauma of that history, where black people's expressions of emotion were policed and deemed irrational or overreactive);

a white person catching a black boy after falling from the monkey bars (since that activates a manhandling history, as well as the intergeneration trauma of that history, in which black folk were touched and molested and moved around like mere tools by white people);

a white person not catching a black boy after falling from the monkey bars (since that activates a dehumanizing history, as well as the intergeneration trauma of that history, where black individuals, especially youths, were left vulnerable and unaided on grounds that they were less than human).

It could just sit back and revel in our world where—heartened by media reminders of how much and how long their ancestors lived in fear (Hollywood depictions of Middle-Passage bodies sardined in suffocating cargo holds of piss-shit-vomit brine only to be anchored into the implosive depths of the Atlantic if a life of slavery were not in their cards, or of grainy black-and-white footage of white women dumping ketchup on their lye-relaxed heads as they sit at segregated diner counters, or of cops hosing them away like roaches for the chase of German shepherds); heartened by constant doom-and-gloom news splices that drumbeat within us all an irresistible feeling that they live in more fear today than ever before—blacks can bask, in sleep-tight conscience, in the cheap feeling of power that results from seeing whitey afraid:

afraid to raise evidence against or contradict a black person’s opinions or “lived experience,” lest they be pilloried as “gaslighters trying to control the narrative” and for having a “slave-master complex” and a sense of “colonial entitlement” that perhaps “no sensitivity trainings could ever cure”;

afraid to offer constructive criticism on work performance or to enforce basic workplace policies (especially about hygiene and attire), lest they be accused of targeting BIPOC individuals and perpetuating a hostile work environment;

afraid to broach any “black topics,” lest they be labeled “appropriators” or “gate-stormers” or “lane-violators” or other humiliating face spritzes from the ally-training bottle;

afraid to celebrate cultural traditions that are deemed predominantly white, lest they be accused of promoting a “monocultural” agenda and disregarding the “rich tapestry of multiculturalism";

afraid to express approval for merit-based or colorblind evaluations in any context, lest they be accused of “ignoring the historical and ongoing barriers that prevent equal opportunity and access”;

afraid to participate in celebrations or expressions of patriotism (especially ones that involve use of “the violence-provoking American flag”), lest they be condemned for “glorifying a history of colonization and oppression” or “blindly celebrating a nation built on the backs of slaves”;

afraid to set an agenda at the beginning of a Zoom meeting, lest they be charged with “white-speak” and—were they to make the reckless move of defending the importance of setting an agenda—with “whitesplaining”;

afraid to doze off from their hypervigilant racial tip toe and simply exist as their authentic selves, lest they be slammed as bigots or deplorables and then stripped of their careers and reputations in the blink of an online cancellation mob;

afraid to mention that they have black friends or family, lest they be denounced for “tokenizing beautiful Black Kings and Queens and using them as tools” (in this case, as “a psychic shield from the truth that no white fails to be complicit in white supremacy”);

afraid to call the police on or testify against their black rapist, lest they be vilified for perpetuating the stereotype of black hyperviolence and becoming complicit in the “black-inmate industrial complex" despite enjoying “the white privilege of moving beyond their trauma by seeing an expensive therapist”;

afraid to publicly enjoy or share their love for jazz or blues or hip hop, lest they be described (described, of course, almost always by white people) as “just another white fuck fetishizing black pain and resilience”;

afraid to display family photos at work that show participation in outdoor activities like hiking or camping or swimming, lest they be censured for (a) “flaunting their privileged access to nature that historically excluded people of color” or for (b) “making black people feel bad by reminding them of things they struggle with (whether out of fear or trauma or health conditions)”;

afraid to tell friends and family and coworkers they are moving because of the crime in the city, lest they be labeled just another “blackphobe” gearing up for “white flight” (white flight that will only result in further decay, further decay blamed not on niggative attitudes going unchecked but entirely on the fact that “gov only be carin n shit when yt folk around”);

afraid to hold up three fingers at a backyard barbecue (even if it is just a signal for their wife to bring out three more beers), lest they be prepared for their TikToking guests (ever filming) to take this as “the universal symbol of white power still appearing in business logos as American as apple pie” (WWE, Walmart, Werner freight trucks, and—accompanied by the telling image of our globe covered in white paint, and decades later in a blood red perhaps indicative of white blood purity if not of black genocide—Sherwin-Williams, of course);

afraid to paint the cheeks of their 9-year-old kid with that glare-reduction grease their favorite football players use often to aesthetic effect, lest they be ready to see their whole family barraged with hate mail—predominantly by whites, especially the sort of whites woke enough to self-immolate—that will no doubt reach into rape-and-death-threat territories (territories clearly colored by double-penetration race-porn fantasies) if the white child is unlucky enough to wear a Native headdress on top of the “blackface” (thereby “doubling up on a virulent racism clearly taught inside the home”);

afraid to move their kids at least to a new table at Chuck E. Cheese to get away from the twerk-filled 10-year-old birthday bash, lest they be called out for “policing black joy” and “imposing puritanical white standards on innocent expressions of cultural celebration” and for “str8 up snitchin on dey own bigot azz.”

It could just sit back and revel in our world where—although it comes at the expense of cruelty to whites (any yet we should perhaps remember what slave masters know all-too-well: cruelty itself debases and deranges the cruel)—all the major bookstores are crammed with guides on how whites, if they will not simply do what is best and “exit themselves,” at least might retrain themselves on how to lessen the negative effects of their inherent toxicity.

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, because even the most well-meaning whites cannot help the toxicity of their whiteness, various public school—in what seems like a Jim-Crow relapse in direct violation of discrimination laws—are considering following in the footsteps of a High School in Evanston Illinois: instituting segregated classes, classes only by and only for BIPOCs, so that the most vulnerable students can focus more on their work than on their safety.

It could just sit back and revel in our world where it is not strange to hear of the white psychologist who—operating, on the one hand, on the radical-affirmation model (believe the patient even if the patient does not believe herself) and knowing, on the other hand, how omnipresent and yet hidden antiblackness has become—makes it her mission to offset whiteness’s reign of terror by devoting extra attention to those black patients who refuse to acknowledge being torn down and torn apart by a racist order, deploying on them the following “antiracist techniques” (lifted right from the false-memory-implanting playbook of therapists who find molestation at the root of too much):

(1) apologizing and apologizing, apologizing with tears, for the traumas that the therapist herself causes the patient just by living, which serves (a) to prime the patient to see herself as a victim and (b) to set a low bar on what it takes to be brutalized (the idea being that the patient will think to herself at last pre-linguistically “If this lady is saying she brutalized me and she don’t even know me, imagine what I’ve suffered at the hands of white people I do know!”);

(2) employing “ancestral roleplay sessions" that involve the patient picturing herself enslaved and then envisioning her own back or finger or hip or foot pains being the result—“Use you imagination!”—of degradations at the hands of whiteness;

(3) wearing the patient down with guided visualization of graphic antiblack scenarios and audio recordings of victims narrating experiences of racial abuse interspersed with leading questions like “How did your own experience with blackness-directed violence hurt your image as a Black Queen and negatively impact your relationship with your daughter?”;

(4) having the patient audit “whiteness survivor groups,” where peer pressure can work its subtle magic of pulling the patient toward the pole of identifying as a member;

(5) using “hypnotherapeutic memory work” to reveal that her black patient’s bodily pains are rooted in childhood sexual abuse by white men—over months of sessions, yes, kneading the patient’s mind with suggestive what ifs that hopefully become feelings and then turn into vague images of adult figures that then sharpen and sharpen until white faces finally appear from the shadows only (in line with “a long history of midnight slave-quarter trips”) to take her (in the pathetic small-dick way only white men could), holding her still by digging those white thumbs into the left SI joint where the patient currently has nagging pain (“a pain we now know to be a body memory!”).

It could just sit back and revel in our world where blacks—distracted from ennobling pursuits—are hooked to their screens, unable to stop scrolling through the popcorn hilarity of whites teary in guilt and on hypervigilant tiptoe (as jumpy as Bigger Thomas), adding caveat after face-reddening caveat—each caveat oozing, louder and louder, the pathetic subtext “Please don’t hate me, report me, irradicate me!”

It could just sit back and revel in our world where blacks—and to some degree all of us really, especially members of the Chinese Communist Party (and also anyone eager to distract us from bigger problems like the class divide so that we do not unite against greedy people)—cannot get enough (popcorn emoji, popcorn emoji) of all the pathetic groveling, all the pick-me signaling, of pussy whites:

the white public intellectual who, face contorting and voice trembling with revulsion and shame for what he calls his “puke body of vomitrocious whiteness,” explains on a podcast that he is never having children because “even more urgent than getting to zero emissions is getting to zero white births” (and a few moments later, after the podcast host merely asked what he might say to allies who think the moratorium on white birth is going too far, he stomps away and yells off screen “There is no end in sight for the atonement whites have to make!”);

the white executive director of NACMEC (The North American Center for Missing and Exploited Children) who, commenting on California’s “Ebony Alert” system for missing black children, explains that “Black children find themselves extra vulnerable, under threat each day in a nation actively waging war with people of dark complexion, and so adding an extra level of protection than that provided by all the white-bread alerts (Amber Alert, Endangered Child Alert, Child Safety Alert, Morgan Nick Alert) is the least we can do (and even that is grossly insufficient)!”;

the white college student, a spatiotemporally different one than the one mentioned before (but in that same no-Nazi care-bear t-shirt of fagulousness), who livestreams a protest of his film class for showing a Danish war film that takes place in Denmark in the 1750s, insisting that—“even if Lizzo wasn’t cast as the lead soldier (which she should have been)”—“the very least these damn white orchestrators could have done was show some flashes of all the slavery going on at that time (which could have featured a boat load of black actors instead of the not-one I counted)”;

the white Instagram user who, after an accidental email leak revealed that the Boston mayor had thrown an all-white-waitstaff party exclusively for non-whites, defends the decision as “noble” since “POCs have to see yt people like me all the damn time” and defended Mayor Wu herself for being “deeply brave” and for not letting “her own daily experiences of hate as an Asian woman blind her to how much worse it is for Black Americans”;     

the white Grammy winner who, in her clearly-drugged acceptance speech, rambles on and on—“I’m talking to the faces of power in the room, yes the too-many white faces”—about how her fellow “people of privilege” need to return “immediately” any gifts received by black people since “our colonial spirit of whiteness, even if only working subconsciously, most likely manipulated those gifts out of them”;

the white Academy-Award winner on TikTok who, after apologizing for not realizing sooner that her favorite brand of vegan shoes might have been made in a factory that produced culturally-insensitive ads in the 1980s, announces—yes, with a face teary to the point of Blair-Witch boogers dripping on her “I support Black victims” shirt—the “good news” that “a recent census shows the number of whites to have gone down (a statistic finally of joy for any parent such as myself with a black child)”;

the white “racial-sensitivity trainer” who, facilitating a “learning module” (mandatory for all faculty of the college at which his firm “Inclusion Quest™” has just renewed its contract), puts on calming sounds before addressing, with a tranquil affect complete with a lisp, “what we are to do, what we are to learn and unlearn, about the terrible disease of whiteness ravaging workplaces across the globe (spreading so much violence with its values of hard work and punctuality and planning for the future, with its prioritizing revision over spontaneity, science over faith, head over heart)”;

the white music teacher and kalimba player who, despite having a classroom full of African art and always wearing her “Black Ally" pin and never expecting that black students learn western musical notation and never even playing piano on anything but “an antiracist layout” (black and white keys swapped), steps down from her 25-year position in foggy-spectacle shame during a schoolwide Zoom session centered around her apology for having shown her freshmen class a documentary that included vintage footage of a white man describing the singing behind him as what everyone called such singing at the time (“a negro spiritual”);

the white journal editor (and also “critical whiteness scholar” in a Communications department at some state university near you) who says that, “although the lilywhite mainstream presses have long kept both uncapitalized, we choose to follow the lead of Black nationalists of yesterday by capitalizing ‘Black’ and not ‘white’ when referring to Black people and white people” because “(1) it is the very least we owe Black people coming ‘out of’ centuries of slavery only to face voter suppression and cultural mockery and not to mention relentless slaughter at the hands of a racist police force, (2) refusing to capitalize “white” is a pushback white people deserve given the long history of ‘white’ having been treated as a kind of default or norm from which other races deviate, (3) capitalizing ‘white’ would amount to glorifying the ethnic-history-erasing transatlantic slave trade that we cannot but think of when we think of whites, (4) to capitalize ‘white’ would be to follow the violent lead of white nationalists, and (5) our decision enjoys the attestation of various writers of color and marginalized stylebooks”;

the white adjunct professor and Audre Lorde specialist who, secretly recorded in her virtue-signaling drunkenness by a “black neighbor concerned enough to leak the footage to police,” says she refuses to report her black rapist (even though the refusal has only emboldened the young man, one floor down, to start finishing in her with reckless abandon), explaining (1) that the refusal is her “impersonal duty to social justice” and (2) that she has thoughts about “pinning it on a white colleague while the tears and injuries are fresh” and (3) that she has “the white privilege of a therapist and a bright future (something no black male can ever be sure of)” and (4) that “the system is so hellbent on maiming and killing the black body” that it would “violate [her] conscience” if she further harmed the “true victim in this case” by “taking part in a long history of weaponizing white damsel tears to stoke a modern-day lynch mob”;

the white senator—white with, so she says, a smidge of Cree—who, in a blog post titled “It Sits Behind More Than You Can Fathom,” says that the “disease of whiteness explains not only the unfortunate pride many First Peoples felt in fighting wars for a nation that robbed them blind, but also the microdetails” (such as “the beer-bottle shards all over reservation lands after WW2 like shells on a beach” and “the spike of heart disease and diabetes in a people who never knew such things” and “the prevalence of the F-slur in casual conversation even though all the tribes at their uncolonized core embrace queerness” and “the participation in fat shaming and in white lies about the unhealthiness of obesity”;

the white employee who, by whistleblowing on a fellow developer for having retweeted something “the Black community could regard as problematic,” initiated a rapid chain of events that culminated not only in the immediate firing of that developer, but also in (1) the name-change of a central character in the company’s (and the world’s) most popular first-person shooter game—a change from Mark to Malik (since that character was named after the “problematic developer” in question)—and (2) months of (fruitless) brainstorming on how Malik’s special move, his “ultimate ability,” might be changed to something that will “evoke emotional sentiments in Black players similar to what Wakanda did in Black audiences”;

the white influencer on Instagram who, ignorant of the fact—“nazi-ing”—that her beans are inextricably tied to the rampant black-on-black slavery in Eritrea, enlightens her followers on the correct “ceremony for brewing and savoring antiracist coffee,” a ceremony that requires (1) “me-time procrastination” (since “punctuality, reeking of the whiteness of perfectionism, is a value of white supremacy”), (2) “intuitive measurements only” (since “precision plunges us into the slime of the white mind”), (3) black-bought cup (since “nasty bitches over here be supportin black business!”), (4) “little-to-no-milk” (since “it’s about sensitivity to optics”), (5) “no-circle stirring” (since “circles marginalize the edgy diagonals and the rebellious z-shapes”), (6) “pre-sip slavery acknowledgement” (since “we can never forget the countless souls ripped and raped from their African families by white hands”), (7) “inclusive enjoyment” (since, “weak or strong, every cup is valid as long as all other steps are followed”), (8) “black-artist sipping” (since “there is no neutrality when it comes to supporting black artists, which means failing to enjoy black artists while you enjoy this moment—a book in hand or some music in the background—is just a mask for hating them”), and (9) not-equal-but-equitable sharing (since “some of us have deeper histories of victimization and so deserve more, while others have deeper histories of privilege and so deserve less”);

the white HR-rep who, after taking the time to give a meaningful stare at each black person in the room, commences the meeting on the importance of diversity quotas by “seeking forgiveness for any neurological trauma” her “whiteness might have caused in the past or”—her voice extra soothing to project empathy—“might be causing in the present and will likely cause in the future”;

the white car salesman who, wearing the yellow wristband of BLM and a Smirnoff button of white burden (“Undoing Racism Begins With Me”), refuses to push luxury vehicles onto black customers (in hopes “never to participate in the exploitation of the financially vulnerable”) and whose business card states under his name “White, privileged, and sorry (but desperate to learn)”;

the white political candidate on the debate stage who, after her national-anthem kneel in protest of the fact that “the racial group with the least institutional power in this bald-eagle hellscape has never gotten its rightful opportunity to run things,” denounces her own whiteness as “a disease in need of eradication,” while her black opponent stands beside her in discomfort clear behind a stoic facade;

the white weather anchorman who, full-on chunky again (because, so he recently insisted with on-air hugs from the main anchorpeople, “thin is a white beauty standard that only emboldens white supremacists”), finally takes a stand on the “regrettable euro-centric roots of both the Fahrenheit and Celsius scale,” announcing—to the audible applause from cameramen and staff outside the live shot—that “from here on” he will deliver his temperature forecast in “qualitative terms”;

the white Appleista who, having climbed his way up to Lead Genius of the genius bar at a Sacramento Apple Store, proudly tweets that—in all but the first in the uptick of flash-looting events of recent years—he “helped the reparation warriors liberate as many devices as possible” and now even keeps in a drawstring backpack with a Wakanda Forever fist logo “a reparation cache of devices, unmarked and untraceable, to make these payback ceremonies go as smooth as possible while ensuring the safety of all Apple employees and customers”;

the white assistant who—when asked to comment on all the stories of the now-dead 90s rapper berating her with racist epithets (“Cracker cunt” and “White devil”), like the time she failed to replenish the Moët and the Henessey quick enough and he kept spitting at her and screaming “Ya’ll white devils don’t want black people to have shit” and then smashed the bottles she managed to find at midnight right at her feet—laughs and simply says “I can’t say the man was lying!”;

the white mayor who in a live townhall message says, and in what results in finger-snapping whoops too much for him to continue, “I have the distinct honor to come before you and say I actually lost white population in my community”;

the white colonel of the USAF Civil Air Patrol who insists that all branches of the military “need to stop hiring white people, especially white males, if we are going to honor the principles of inclusion and diversity as stated in Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist, a remarkable book that really opened my eyes to the problem of whiteness in all sectors from the west wing to west point”;

the white butcher who—still in her bloody apron with an attached Anheuser-Busch black-fist button that reads “Barley and Hop for Equity”—goes off in the privacy of her truck on a TikTok rant about how exhausted she is dealing with “the constant flood of ignorant whites always asking ‘What meats are native to the area?’,” which she describes as “a problematic question since (on top of using a word, the other n-word, that white mouths make toxic) it perpetuates the racist discourse of who does and who does not belong”;

the white news correspondent who, on grounds that “it has only been two days since the mother of three was last seen,” mocks—as a case of “missing white woman hysteria”—the volunteer fire department’s decision to participate in the search effort (instead of staying another day at the BLM protest);

the white museum curator who, “in light of the BLM protests around the world,” feels “compelled to denounce” the once-revered painting, which depicts a Kalenjin marriage ceremony, as “the worrisome and illegitimate acquisition of a white gaze,” claiming the artist’s own diary entry about the painting (“a deep tribute to the beautiful people of an East African community”) was “at best, cope for having engaged in poaching and, at worst, a willful lie”;

the white member of a Chicago prisoner review board who, in light of the oppression black males face in this country and the likelihood of their unfair treatment by law enforcement, gave the green light on a black male’s release from prison “in what she described as one small step for racial justice,” but then—less that 48 hours later—resigned when she learned that—“adding insult to injury”—the child killed by the man on the very day of his release was not white;

the white mother (known in the community for spearheading the program “Reparations by Gift Card”) who at a PTA meeting takes a stand in her “Decolonize Cafeterias” t-shirt and—after announcing her pronouns, and that she is “a white millennial transmasculine femme survivor of acute and complex trauma” who happens to be “nonbinary, mostly able-bodied, neurodivergent, obsessive compulsive, chronically ill, culturally Jewish, unitarian universalist, nonmonogamous, demiromantic, and above all archenemy of white supremacy”—demands, in her purple-hands earrings and hipster glasses and bangs self-scissored in that neo-Appalachian aesthetic of the band Mountain Man—that white bread be eliminated as an option (“It’s just too damn white, too damn Leave It to Beaver, for our children!”);

the white “antiracist conductor” who, smelling of expensive diffuser oils and eager to “sacrifice as many chairs as possible for the greater good," insists (from beneath a George-Floyd scarf) that, “aside from scrapping blind auditions altogether, there is no way to rectify the imbalance, the legacy of white hegemony, that has orchestras looking so pasty”;

the white Associate Professor of Education and Human Development who, aiming to call out “one of the most toxic notions infecting the black psyche,” writes in the Journal of Marriage and Family (1) that the “white-supremacist and government-incentivized push to enter into the heteropatriarchal institution of marriage only demoralizes black people given the high rates of single-family homes in the black community” and (2) that, “besides, the patriarchal institution of marriage only benefits only cis whites in monogamous and heterosexual arrangements anyway”;

the white Crisis Communications Director who—in a resignation press release apologizing (“on behalf of the company and all of white America”) for omitting the second “l” of “Malcolm” in the retail giant’s social-media campaign to honor the “true kings of America”—writes that “this destructive oversite, which no amount of white promises to do better can ever mitigate, speaks to the hate this country has for the long-overdue message that ‘Black is king’” and even adds that “the typo might very well have been a subconscious expression of the white supremacy festering in our marrow”;

the white greenskeeper who—if only as a “symbolic gesture against the white-supremacist impetus to suppress (chop down and even poison) black bodies in its goal for monocrop homogeneity”—vows, in his “Journalism is Activism” t-shirt, to let the weeds (beautiful, strong, natural, diverse) grow on the campus lawns;

the white US Representative who, although admitting that one part of her would have liked to have seen the NFL replace “the National Anthem (representing racism)” with “the Black National Anthem (representing antiracism),” finds it best “all things considered” for the National Anthem to remain included since “otherwise we run the risk of forgetting, football being the quintessential American game, that America can never not be white supremacist as long as it is America, which is why—and this is what too many of us still have a hard time seeing—having an American flag on your porch or your truck is racist”;

the white “abolitionist judge” who comments “white people are guilty until proven innocent" in response to his own tweet that “‘blind justice’ and ‘equality under the law’ are white-power notions that interfere with the equity goals of an antiracist (and so reparation-based) system of law,” one demanding “emergency measures (such as a moratorium on the 14^th Amendment, and other guarantees of equal protection) so that we can reduce the number of black incarceration”;

the white bishop who—after reminding parishioners to “say something if you witness any violation of our safe space (since, after all, praying white supremacists are nevertheless white supremacists)”—vows, banging the church podium with his fist, to switch to black depictions of Christ (describing the move as “one small thing to help decolonize white normativity in the church, which is just so G-damn white!”);

the white ethicist who—infamous for pushing her so-called “Hippocratic Oath for White People” (“First, do no harm to precious Black bodies”)—writes, in a major philosophy journal, “moral equals ought to be treated equally, but white citizens (as complicit beneficiaries of systemic racism, as at least tacit perpetrators of the white-world’s total war on Black bodies) are not morally equal to Black citizens, beautiful Black Kings and Queens who deserve a freer pass under the law to do whatever it takes to push back the white supremacy that unfortunately can never go into remission while America remains America”;

the white NFL quarterback who, in a Super Bowl commercial one would never know is for beer were it not for the Samuel Adams logo at the end after a moment of silence (“nine seconds, for each minute of George Floyd’s torture”), stands against a slate background and simply states with somber severity “I can never understand, and yet I stand!”;

the white celebrities—the majority wearing baggy beanies—who, in a by-no-means-cringey PSA about “the malignancy of white supremacy,” pledge back-to-back in a viral collage “never to bring more white babies, more wicked heirs of ill-gotten privileges, into the world”;

the white spoken-word artist who, at the end of “White Stranger Danger” (a performance filled with cringey lines like “I was listening to hip-hop well before I knew my race helped me get ahead, before I knew housing segregation was so fierce it made Tupac's ‘Hit Em Up’ look like a love song to Biggie”), tells the crowd—as “one small thing we can do to keep whiteness in check”—“we must make sure preschool teachers and kindergarten teachers are black because the risks posed by whiteness is too high for kings and queens so young, so trusting and loveable—so not-knowing-any-better—that they will run up and hug any smiling white person”;

the white CVS shopper who—in a t-shirt shirt with a red not-allowed symbol overtop the Washington Redskin’s Chief-head logo (even though that logo was of a real Blackfoot chief and drawn by a real Blackfoot native and fully approved by the real Blackfoot Nation)—kicks down makeup displays because the employee called the cops on a black shoplifter, yelling “Weaponizing a racist police force against black bodies when it’s not even your merchandise, you disgusting pig!”;

the white university president who sends out an email reminding students as well as staff and faculty that, especially since “unacknowledged antiblack assumptions infect every US institution and every white heart,” it is crucial “never to question or debate the lived experiences of Black peers and colleagues and never to disrespect or marginalize Black epistemology (a way of thinking reflective not just of the ways of the motherland, but of the historical and continued persecutions at the hands of white people)”;

the white pediatrician who, “especially given the centuries of medical exploitation and experimentation on black bodies,” writes an open letter declaring that, as her “small contribution to curbing the spread of the unfortunately undefeatable cancer of systemic racism,” she will no longer carry out merely the “effete acts” demanded by her medical group (like drilling into parental heads the essentialness of exposing children to diversity-friendly media), but rather will do something “more tangible” (namely, giving preferential treatment to Black babies, “and not merely when it comes to vaccination scheduling”);  

the white pediatrician and “admiral” who seconds the above recommendation of giving blacks “indefinite priority-access to healthcare,” but adds that this is “the very least we can do” as “a matter of environmental justice” since “black neighborhoods—positioned by the machinations of white supremacy—are disproportionately affected by climate change, pollution, and toxic waste (all of which have increased black anxiety and lowered black life expectancy)”;

the white sociologist who, in response to Sowell’s famous question (“Have we reached the ultimate stage of absurdity where some people are held responsible for things that happened before they were born, while other people are not held responsible for what they themselves are doing today?”), says “No, but—far from an absurdity—that is precisely the goal of justice and equity!”

It could just sit back and revel in our world where—as “a condition of continued employment” after having said in class that she admired Twain (an author implicated in the sin of slavery merely by having characters that use the word “nigger”)—a white professor of American literature is, according to the university’s Committee for Equity, “hereby barred” from the following:

(1) from wearing the color red (garments, makeup, and so forth) since students report feeling unsafe seeing it set against the pasty pallor of oppression;

(2) from making any comments that could be construed as related to black culture;

(3) from starting university emails with anything but “In acknowledgment of my inherent biases”;

(4) from assigning any white author too unseparated from colonialism and slavery, whether by having benefited from such horrors, or having bad-actor ancestors or descendants, or having stories set in Western locations without due focus on how those locations are problematic, or so on (consult the British Library’s antiracist blacklist for starters).”

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, after a professor simply asked that we show some leniency and forgiveness after video appeared of his colleague twenty years earlier imitating Tupac during a stand-up-comedy routine at a local open-mic event, his entire department, even faculty from various other departments (especially Fat Studies and Communications), sign a petition demanding the termination of both professors since “Those who sympathize with racists are racists, and no racist will find safe harbor at an anticolonial institution that purports to be inclusive like BYCC.”

It could just sit back and revel in our world where the Dean fires the at-will adjunct without due-process after it had come to his attention that the adjunct, on her own personal blog, wrote the following rather middle-path criticism of our continued practice of treating blacks with kid gloves—a criticism that the Dean, in consultation with the DEI office, regard as an “alt-right call to violence.”

It was a false dichotomy to say that the path forward for blacks, the path toward engineering a society of equality and respect for all, was either through inside development (strengthening their minds and bodies and spirits and families and communities and attitudes) or through outside assistance (lowered standards and special dispensations and extra leeway and affirmative action along with eradicating any legacy of discriminatory policy).

Taking the first path alone is needlessly cruel (like demanding that the person go through intense surgeries without any anesthesia) and it is not as powerful of a fix without the second option. For by artificially siphoning blacks into certain sectors you create a flow, a pattern, a momentum that—along with individual development—will create a self-sustaining river.

Taking the second path alone, however, would only perpetuate the very bedrock justification for persecution of blacks: black inferiority. For it would serve to hook blacks on outside help. We use the anesthesia of opiates only for emergency situations and then we stop. It is only for intense pain. To switch to the siphon analogy, we suck to get the flow going and then we stop—at which point the effort becomes solely developmental, solely focused on strengthening the individual.

The problem is, whites—perhaps out of guilt, a guilt manipulated more and more as time went by (because the addict needs their fix and will do anything to get it, and not to mention that the enabler loves that feel-good hit of purpose in charity)—have kept on giving the patient opiates. Whites have, with black complicity, perpetuated black inferiority. 

It could just sit back and revel in our world where blacks, all of us really, just eat up the alluring sensationalism of watching crowds of white people across the nation, standing on college campuses and on the shutdown streets of sanctuary cities, with their hands up (in that pose of “Please officer, don’t shoot me just because I’m black!”) and repeating after the fagulously falsetto voice on the bullhorn the following Maoist vows through their COVID masks.

“I will work to repair the damage of my whiteness.”

“I will never deny the hurt that beautiful black people feel in this racist country.”

“I will celebrate black joy, resilience, and creativity."

“I will use my voice in the most uplifting way possible.”

“I will tolerate any discomfort on the path to equity.”

“I will tolerate any hurt on the path to righting past wrongs.”

“I will show my black neighbors the extra love they are due.”

“I will educate my community that antiblack words are violence.”  

“I will never speak over a black person.”

“I will never correct a black person without black permission.”

“I will face that I am to blame even though I didn’t pull the trigger.”

“I will never say ‘I never owned slaves.’”

“I will work to repair the damage of my whiteness.”

“I will never deny that racism exists.”

“I will control my perception, so that it remains antiracist.”

“I will never deny black truth.”

“I will be an effective ally.”

“I will march until I die.”

“I will not criticize black voices unless sanctioned by black voices.”

“I will support black businesses.”

“I will amplify the voices of black and other marginalized people.”

“I will do everything in my power to abolish whiteness.”

“I will not weaponize the police against black people.”

“I will accept that payback often hurts.”

“I will never say antiblackness has been eliminated.”

“I will listen and learn from black people, always.”

“I will redistribute my unearned advantages.”

“I will never call reparations ‘looting.’”

“I will never interfere with reparations.”

“I will try my best to help with reparations.”

“I will seek to understand more than to be understood."

“I will not oppose the leadership of black kings and queens.”

“I will prioritize black voices, especially in discussions on race."

“I will support restorative justice as a path forward."

“I will not hold black people to white standards of reason or conduct.”

“I will work to repair the damage of my whiteness.”

It could just sit back and revel in our world where blacks, all of us really, just eat up—like (moonpie) creampies—the alluring sensationalism of watching white people line up in an urban park to bow down and kiss the black combat boots of black men (all in black fatigues), one of whom on a bullhorn announcing how “crucial” this “moment of reckoning” is—a scene, given all the effeminate white men pressing their lips down on the black leather to the amplified moans of “Ooh yeah,” that cannot help but call to mind (especially when the tongues come out) cuckold porn scenarios involving white husbands sucking and then proving they swallowed the “nigger cream pie” out of their own white wives.

This the Lord’s work right here, man. This the Lord’s work. This right here’s a good good white woman. She’s showing guilt. She’s showing she wants to make it right. She knows the impact of the deeds done. So many white people standing around, but she—. And look, now this white man. All of them—yes, bring them kids. The whole family—the whole family asking for forgiveness.

Yeah Mr. White Man. You too—definitely you. I got my eye on you. “The children of your oppressors,” Isaiah tells us, “will come bowing before you; all who despise you will bow down at your feet.” Don’t be shy. Get low. Yeah boy. Get real low.

Got a crowd now! No better college degree than this, let me tell you. This, people—this means more than any piece of paper. Give these white people a hand now.

And look at them. They keep coming! Oh yeah, Mr. White Man Number Two. You go in there and get you some. Oh yeah. Keep them kisses coming. It feels good don’t it? Oh yeah. It feels real good. Don’t be afraid to use a bit of tongue Mr. White Man. See people! They showing what it really means to salute the prophets and the true chosen of the Lord.

Look! Look! Look at that boot. Hold it up. I don’t know if it’s tears or spit, but it’s good. But Mr. White Man, you know I’m gonna need you to shine that boot. Dry it off. Yeah, there you go. Now have your little girl—that your daughter? Yeah, get on in there sweetheart. Get on down right next to Daddy. Check Daddy’s work now. It good? Tell me, Sweetie. You tell me. It good? Well give it one little kiss for me, Baby Girl. Show me it good.

It could just sit back and revel in our world where blacks, all of us really, just eat it the fuck up: watching Presidential candidate Marianne Williamson leading a church prayer of apology to African Americans.

So for those of you who would like to participate in this, I’m going to lead us in an apology from white Americans to African Americans on behalf of our country—to you and to you ancestors, and to all of your people. . . . And now as I speak, I’m going to ask the white Americans in the room to please repeat after me. On behalf of myself and on behalf of my country, to you and all African Americans from the beginning of our nation’s history, in honor of your ancestors and on behalf of your children, please hear this from my heart. I apologize. Please forgive us. With this prayer I acknowledge the depth of the evils that have been perpetrated against black people in America.

It could just sit back and revel in our world where blacks, all of us really, just eat up the alluring sensationalism of hearing professors at major universities offer the following “urgent message to fellow white women” from behind their tartan scarves.

My fellow white women, it is easy to talk about our privilege. We always talk about our privilege. But what about the threat—the threat we pose to our beautiful Black kings and queens, from the delivery room to the death bed. Let’s talk about that!

We pose a cultural threat: our whiteness compels us to appropriate black song and dance and attire. We pose a spiritual threat: our whiteness gets a twisted pleasure when we speak our words and show our bodies in spaces meant for Black healing and spirituality. We pose an existential threat: our whiteness has a hunger to rape and maim and kill the Black body—a hunger forming a breathless chain from the first Black woman ever choked under a panting colonizer, to the latest hero who probably right as we speak has his neck kneeled upon by so-called “law enforcement.” We pose an economic threat: our whiteness expects Blacks to work for us for less than any other group—and if we had our way, as history has shown, it would be for free! We pose an educational threat: our whiteness has us foist upon Black kind standards and ideas—math and logic, reading and writing—foreign to Black ways of knowing (the intuition, the spoken ritual, the drums). We pose a psychological threat: our whiteness would chastise Black people, make them feel bad, for the looting and the killing that merely amount to rage against the antiblack machine that we created! (Talk about gaslighting.) We pose a legal threat: our whiteness cannot get enough, as the numbers make all too clear, of seeing Black people behind bars whenever they refuse to be our good servants (like when they sell their own drugs instead of the big-pharma drugs, or like when they shoot their own enemies instead of the American enemies abroad). We pose a health threat: our whiteness has led to a healthcare system that neglects Black pain and suffering as no more than the screams of animals.

We are an inherent danger in any space where beautiful Black kings and queens can be found, found already struggling to breathe—as if through emphysema straws—even before we suck the air out of the room with our actual presence. We are a danger simply by existing. When we choose not to face that, when we refuse to navigate the world with that understanding, things get much much worse. We go from being simply dangerous, which we will be no matter what we do, to being an active threat, which is something we do have some control over.

We need to do our best to eradicate whiteness. No other task, personal or familial or social, is more urgent. You have your hobbies and you have your vocations. No one is saying that these are not important. What we are saying, what our beautiful Black kings and queens are begging us to realize just so they can get a bit of breathing room, is that there is a much more important task. How can we expect Black people, with all their PTSD (complex generational PTSD), to take the risk to let us into their space without us having shown ourselves to be on the path toward abolishing the whiteness in our hearts and in the hearts of those closest to us.

Do not let their wisdom, what the Black man and the Black woman have to teach, fall on deaf ears. Let us drop to our knees and hold open our mouths to their overflowing honey. However much it hurts, however much it disrupts our lives—let their truth sing and guide us. It is the least we can do.

What do our kings and queens sing? Oh, they sing too many songs. And look at me! Who am I to enumerate them. Should I even be allowed, given the temptation—festering in my heart since the womb—to steal Black pain? But one song I hear loud and clear. It screams through every Black woman finally liberating her sexuality, twerking on restaurant tables. It screams through every young Black boy who refuses to take the math test, knowing it was created to humiliate him. Our very whiteness makes us dangerous. That is what our kings and queens sing. That is their truth.

If we learn to hate and fear the whiteness that controls us from within, we will find—with faith and Black grace—the motivation to fight against it. And that is the only hope there is for protecting a beautiful people that has suffered so much harm by our hand—so much harm just by looking at our pasty selves, smelling our wet dog scent. We need to have gratitude for their patience.

We cannot undo our ancestors birthing us on a land soaked with the very Black blood we suckle upon until death. And the one surefire cure for our toxicity—well, that is too much to expect anyone to follow through on. That leaves us here, then, to listen and learn and unlearn and follow—to make ourselves of service. Surely that is not too much to ask!

The final solution might be too much. But surely it is not too much to support Black businesses, or to shave our heads in solidarity and as a symbol of “Fuck white beauty standards!” Surely it is not too much to cut ties with problematic friends and family, or to apologize—for once—for our perspective, or to go on birth control and encourage white men to get vasectomies, or to march for abortion rights. Surely it is not too much to shut up when a Black person is talking, or to oppose the colorblind policies that are once against creeping back up, or to lobby state officials to put a moratorium on imprisoning Black men and suspending Black students, or to ask permission before entering Black spaces. There is so much even we can do.

Surely it is not too much to throw a drink in the face of a bigot. I did, almost two hours ago! And I’m still shaking. When precious Black women are six times more likely to be killed than white women in this racist hellhole, and when you are some whitesplaining white boy—no, you’re not going to say to me “What about the influence of Black cultural attitudes? What about ‘ratchet culture?’” I’ve been an ally for too damn long to stand for it! Of course, this white boy would kick at the very gospel of Black liberation. But I wasn’t going to lower myself to explain that ratchet culture is the culture of “I ain’t taking no white shit anymore, and I ain’t listening to no cop, and I’ll let these hands fly instead of talking all that white logic, and I’ll shake my free ass all night wherever I want, and I’ll be as mean and as nasty and as sexual as I can before I become chattel again.” That Wakanda chant of liberation has no bearing on Black death! But I wasn’t going to stoop to a back and forth with the devil—yes, whose devilry I share, but whose devilry I actively fight.

No I wasn’t going to stoop. I threw that drink before he could say a thing. We already knew what he was going to say, right? Whiteness has a script. I know it well. I have to resist it each day. It wakes me up each morning like an intrusive song. So I did a preemptive strike.

Whoever in the room finds that distasteful, think again. White supremacy hides in the very principles of Amerikkka—yes, triple “k.” Innocent until proven guilty—that’s one of the biggies. Do you understand how dangerous someone, especially a white male, remains when we waste precious time trying to cobble together some case against him? We might not be able to change the law of the land right away but we can change how we act individually. This man—this boy, this white colonizer—was not innocent “until proven guilty.”

Throw that drink. Trust your attunement to the frequencies of oppression. Throw that drink before anything can slip through a forked tongue.

It could just sit back and revel in our world where blacks, all of us really, just eat up the you-can’t-make-this-up sensationalism of it all:

of white employees—lest even the most excellent of whom be fired—having to renew their pledge each year to be “effective allies” by “checking their privilege” and their “implicit biases” and, in particular, by not voicing any opinions or stating any research findings or making any connections (even outside the workplace) that “blacks, or any vulnerable population for that matter, might potentially find offensive”;

or of whites psychologists who say that the growing urge among blacks to shoot white people and even stomp white-infant “skulls into liverwurst pulp” are completely warranted, “no more indicative of a problem with blacks in our time, whatever pathologizing label whites put on it (‘insane,’ ‘psychopathic’), than was the urge to runaway from captivity—an urge whites pathologized with the label ‘drapetomania’—a problem with blacks in the time of slavery.”

It could just sit back and revel in our world where—turning down the niggative lyrics for a second  (“Put a mask on quick then take your shit/ Know these dirty lil niggas don't play that shit / ten out of ten got a tool on em / Tryna catch a sucker slipping with them jewels on em / Wolves foaming at the mouth, got drool on em / Young nigga with a bunch of tattoos on em / Got a Mossberg, Metro Boom on em”)—blacks wonder, as communicated through wide-eye glances of silence at one another beyond the ken of the white gaze, how long the pathetic groveling of whites will go on and if it has gone too far (and yet, in that lower-lip bite of chimpish eroticism known well by soldiers raping villagers in a war whose righteousness they doubt deep down, how much further it can be pushed):

whites (slouched, shaky, sweaty, hands in pockets) afraid of career suicide and divorce and moral-leper banishment for saying anything that could be construed as “hurtful by black Americans” (especially anything that could be construed as suggesting (1) that the western world is not ruled by an intractable white supremacy or (2) that any antiracist measure to redress or limit or redirect “the voraciousness inherent to whiteness is unjust);

whites (shoulders hunched, eyes down, back to the wall, arms crossed) afraid of being called on Twitter the r-word, today’s scarlet letter, simply for being accused of having overheard something potentially “hurtful to BIPOCs” or simply for suggesting that people not lob the r-word around so freely when it results in so much devastation or simply for saying “even the accused should be given due process”;

whites (zip-lipped, fidgeting, vigilant, shallow and rapid in breath) afraid even of denying that the r-word applies to them since denial—defensiveness, “white fragility”—is, like it was in the case of the w-word of 1692 Salem, a sign of being an r-word of the most virulent sort (the non-penitential sort).

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, almost as if some secret hand were intending to breed them into moral cripples insensitive to the aims and feelings of others and motivated by a desire to dominate, more and more blacks—unable to resist participating in the sweet sadism of bullying whites, an intoxicating punking-program emboldened no longer just by middle-school peers chortling demonic observations (“White boy cryin cuz we ran his shit”) but by society at large—more and more are becoming hooked on seeing how much whitey will take, on seeing how high crackers will jump at the whip crack of that insidiously innocuous order “Do better!” (so commonly used against them today), on seeing honkeys—like parents of out-of-control terrors—enough to cave to the quirkiest demands:

that whites—rice rascals, napkin Americans, lice lieutenants, chalk children—not come to see the black-power Disney film on opening weekend (on grounds that “black people want to feel safe” and that “black people deserve a chance to experience their own cultural artifacts first for once—the first damn sip, for once!—without some white person sucking all the black joy out of the experience”);

or that whites—on threat of being slammed with the gotcha label of “racism”—treat as respectful citizens, and swallow back any urge to recoil from, even black people acting out baitingly degenerate behaviors in public (smoking blunts and screaming curses like “nigga,” twerking to bass-blasting music of extreme violence and sexuality, ruining St. Patrick’s Day celebrations with stabbings and shootings, shoplifting and lobbing hate speech and blowing crack smoke at Asian and African and especially white people on the subway);

or that the university enforce no-whites-on-campus days on grounds that “people of color, especially students, need a space to heal from the daily aggressions they endure in white spaces" since, after all, (1) “whiteness by its very nature gentrifies and suffocates” (meaning, more concretely, that “white eyes and ears and voices, infesting every space, make it impossible for people of color to express themselves freely and be heard”) and (2) “only through conscious abstention can white bodies begin to atone for the centuries-old theft and erasure still thriving today”;

or that white attendees of concerts and music festivals not only pay a higher entrance fee (given that they own all the power), but also sit down (still and expressionless) during black songs involving murder and drug use (“this way they do not celebrate black pain”) and even during black songs involving love and uplift (“this way they do not steal black joy, for even mere head bopping radiates from them the paternalistic message ‘Yes, this is a better way to be black’”);

or that white consumers be disincentivized or even disallowed from leaving negative online reviews of black-owned businesses because “we must prioritize amplifying black voices in a commerce landscape already skewed against black success” and “the reality is that whiteness finds it next to impossible to avoid injecting antiblackness even in its most well-intentioned expressions (‘While my experience overall was excellent, I really wish [blah, blah, blah]’)”;

or that whites, whatever rheumatoid stiffness they might have or however cold it might be, not rub their hands in public or at least apologize if caught doing so (since that gesture, being “close enough” to a known white-supremacist gesture, “undermines the ability of black bodies to heal” and “fosters a toxic atmosphere of domination and oppression” and “serves as a physical manifestation of white nervousness around black people, which reduces kings and queens to frights—‘spooks’ is the word—straight from the jungle”);

or that white employees, plucked from their cubicles at random, be asked—for the sake of “making nonwhite employees feel more at home here at Wrest Corp” and for “seeing which whites show signs of resistance to the request (and so signs of being unqualified in today’s workplace”—to swear off (live, to the rest of the sunless room aglow in drop-ceiling florescence) all allegiance to white supremacy and to pledge both to undergo antiracist training and to leverage their privilege to bring about a more equitable future;

or that white teachers begin and end every class with a verbal acknowledgment (1) of the land having been fed with black blood and (2) of “the land continuing to be fed with black blood” and (3) of their own “inevitable participation in and benefits from the total war against black bodies” and (4) of their own “commitment to restraining and redirecting the appetites of whiteness,” making sure this “quadripartite ritual of safe-space pedagogy” never become—like so many school-day pledges of allegiance throughout history—mere rote motions to go through or some sort of sigh-worthy chore (since “whites not being all in—something blacks can intuit—could only read as subversive mockery, a mockery more traumatic to black students than simply not performing the ritual at all”);

or that white-owned businesses allocate a percentage of their shelf space or services exclusively for black entrepreneurs, without expectation of rent or profit sharing, as a matter of “reparative justice to counterbalance the economic disenfranchisement faced by black communities.”

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, since we have already witnessed public demonstration of white people bowing with their hands in prop shackles and while screaming holy-ghost screams for forgiveness, it might soon be common—first among those elementary school teachers with “Abolish Whiteness” on their hand-print doors and then among those political candidates in districts where race-baiting will get them votes—to do an anti-whiteness salute (involving, of course, hip gyrations that make whites look idiotic and thereby make blacks and their uneasy allies laugh).

It could just sit back and revel in our world where Laquaisha Adams (AA), facilitating a DEI module for therapist recertification, offers all the Zoom members the following bit of wisdom.

So y’all two gonna need to get them cameras figured out asap. They mandatory. We ain’t playin none of that colorblind business here.—Anyways people, its time.

Salutations. I’m Miss Adams. I do wanna learn about all y’all, and we’ll get to that soon enough. But first—and some of y’all already know the drill (Domica, I see you gurrrl)—first I’mma lay some things out real quick. And yeah, I’mma keep it straight with y’all. Most of them “continuing education” hours y’all clockin—they ain’t nothin more than hoops. Y’all gotta watch Becky click through slides with no damn seasonin, sayin nothin y’all ain’t already know, cuz y’all gotta keep cozy with them licensing boards. We know the drill. We all been there, done that. But for those who ain’t know Miss Adams, this module—my module? It ain’t just some box to check for “professional development” or whatever. Look at my skin. I wear my truth. I live this. This is personal! This is a mandate for change. Life and death ain’t somethin to tune out, people. And that’s just one more reason them cameras gotta be on.

The key concept ain’t difficult. People get confused, they get worked up, they get all red in the face—but the deal is simple. Each black patient walks into y’all offices with a burden, an unbearable load. No, it ain’t just centuries of oppression. Antiblack violence grows each day. The iceberg I’m talkin bout, it’ll sink any damn ship. And it keeps growin. It grows even though it hides so well, almost to the point of invisibility. Cop beatdowns—pssh, that be just the tip. The invisibility—let me tell ya: that’s the real terror. Cuz who you gonna turn to? Who’ll believe you? White folk gaslight us—thinkin everythin sweet, tellin us “things so much better.” How can we prove things ain’t so peachy when there ain’t nothin to point to that white folk can’t see or ain’t tryin to see? We point to “microaggressions.” But microaggressions still just the tip. And whites ain’t really tryin to hear that talk anyway. We come across as too sensitive, always talking bout microaggressions. At worst we come off crazy cuz we pointin to somethin only we can see. We have that second sight, a blessing and a curse. All black kings and queens are born with it.

So ya’ll gonna ask: “Miss Adams, is everything hopeless?” The bad news is +there ain’t never killin off no whiteness. Even if we reduced ourselves to the jungle beasts the white man always said we were, the disease has spread to many of us. So there ain’t no way, no reasonable way, really to cure it. The good news? Our situation can be much much better. We do have control. At a local level we have control. And that’s what I’m all about here. I’mma let y’all know what you can do to keep whiteness in check.

The even better news is what ya’ll gotta do ain’t complicated. Ya’ll have just one imperative to follow: affirm each and every black patient. See, we can’t have the gaslightin anymore. It ends! It be on us—all y’all—to believe, to trust unconditionally. Let’s keep it real. After all them years of slavery, all them years of whites askin “How come that brown sugar tastes so good?” (and y’all know its still be playin on the radio), all them years of sneaky oppression after we was freed—the very least we can do (as professionals people turn to in their darkest times), the very least we can do is always believe what black people say. Always affirm their truth, black truth. Can we get simpler than that?

So can we just end our 6-week module right here? No. Clarifications are in order. What does it mean to always affirm black truth? This ain’t just mean letting black people speak first or never talkin over them and all that. That be the window dressin. That ain’t nothin more than Target featuring a clothing line by a black designer, and all them stunts they be pullin for Black History Month. It go much deeper. It’s about never doubtin the word, any word, from our black kings and queens! And when the system, with its white logic, calls them words “absurd” or “unlikely” or “far-fetched”—that means you dig deeper into ya’ll belief. Otherwise none of us gonna be able to breathe! None of us!

Here's the “tricky” part. Y’all gotta look past the fronts: the smiles, the Becky tones, the acts (“Oh, I’m fine”)—all that. Y’all gotta see through them evasions, see through to the core of the black patient. That core—that’s where y’all gotta plant that trust. That inner child—that’s what y’all gotta affirm. Trust and affirm the authentic blackness deep within—yep, even if that means doubtin and rejectin all the masks.

Turns out this ain’t as hard as it sounds. Cuz its one-size-fits-all at the end of the day. That core I’m talking bout, that ebony heart—it says (and this the key point), it says the same thing for each black person. It says “I was, and continue to be, brutalized by a suffocating white world.” It says “America has crushed me and my people and it continues to crush me and my people.” The words might change. The actors in the drama might change. But the message remains the same. It’s that core message—that deep blues, that “Nobody knows” spiritual—that none of y’all should ever question.

These Zoom sessions, these Blackboard sessions—I’ve been doin them since COVID, right. And for some reason—really I know the reason (but we ain’t gonna get into all that)—folk, certain folk, get confused. They think I’m talkin riddles. Nah, I’m sayin exactly what I mean. So let me say it again. Y’all gotta trust that your black patient was abused. Now that’s easy enough when the patient herself suspects she was abused. But let’s increase the difficulty. Say a black queen comes in, chipper as Becky. What if she so damn deep in the white-world matrix that she ain’t suspect a thing? Remember the core: y’all gotta trust that your black patient was abused even if she doubt it herself. She might yell. She might defend the very hands that oppress her. Y’all gotta see through the mask.

Even kings and queens need help sometimes. Don’t underestimate the blinding power of white supremacy. The stem cells of America—the very building blocks—have an antiblack agenda. Your black patient needs you—yes, you—to stay steady in the belief that her body, her soul, is a battleground. Whether she know it or not, whether she in touch with that inner child or not—the black patient needs y’all to stand firm in the faith. Her suffering, her marginalization, is personal and yet also a piece of a puzzle much bigger and uglier.

What does this all mean? The bottom line—and I’m repeatin myself, so there ain’t no confusion here: never join in with a black patient’s doubts about her own victimhood and the victimhood of her people. That would be false validation. We always trust black folk—yep, y’all know that. We’re owed at least that. That’s first of all. And besides, that just makes sense cuz oppression means innocence and innocence gotta be trusted. But don’t be tricked by the devil mask. It be the core—the authentic black child within—that y’all gotta trust. Never validate the doubts of the mask. Mics on, mics on and say it loud with me—and look, we all can check off the oath requirement in one blow. I—Will—Never—Join—A—Black—Patient—In—Doubt—About—Her—Oppression! Joining in on any doubt, that’s like telling someone on the edge that jumping might just be the best move. Come on now!

In our social-media world it’s easy to stumble across black folk with Stockholm Syndrome: these Coleman Hughes and Chad Jackson characters (neo Uncle Toms replacing the ones from my day). All this messaging can confuse us. It can have us thinkin we ain’t under attack. I ain’t gonna go into it too much, but that’s more deadly than it seems. Black folk are united in victimization. To say we ain’t victims—notice what that does. It cuts black folk off from community. But community be our only saving grace from genocide. My point here, though, is that access to them eloquent black scholars wearing white masks has led to an epidemic: an epidemic of black people thinkin there ain’t no agenda against us.

As therapists, y’all on the front line. That’s why it’s critical to treat the patient as though her past and present victimization is not only brutally real, but central—central—to who she is. Therapy ain’t just bout healin in a narrow sense: patchin the patient up so she can go on white-knucklin through the white world. Y’all gotta wake her up. Ain’t that what a first-line responder meant to do? But to wake someone up sometimes means smashing everything she thought she knew. The inner child didn’t just choose to hide away. It’s been walled in. Them walls gotta be torn down so it can sing its song. It’s a song whitey is desperate not to hear: “I’m owed an infinite debt cuz I’m an infinite victim.”

We can’t afford to get all academic, all nuanced, about this. The stakes are just too high. They too high for caution. Action—now’s the time for action. Y’all have y’all theoretical side, y’all skeptical side, y’all scientific side. All that has got to go. Leave it at the door. It’s an ethical obligation. There ain’t no time to say “But wait, shouldn’t we think about this?” Do no harm here—something all y’all have sworn—requires, in this triple-k Amerikkka, activism above all!

Now, I see a few white faces on the screen—and yes, I’m glad y’all two got them cameras figured out. I see you. I know y’all tryin. I know y’all good people and well-intentioned. Shoot, even Hitler loved dogs! That’s just Miss Adams being playful. But let me get serious, cuz this is serious. I got no doubt that y’all talented, highly talented. I got no doubt that y’all help patients realize hidden strengths and become more satisfied in they careers and relationships, more acceptin of things they can’t change—all of it. But real talk now. If y’all white—listen now: if y’all white, refer black patients to a black practitioner. Pass them off. Whatever they might say, however much they white masks kick and scream—refer them. Cut them off. Do not entangle yourself.

“Miss Adams, why you sayin this?” That’s what I get—again and again. Here’s why. A white therapist—look, its right there at the top of page two—cannot help but precipitate violence against black patients. That is a politically correct way of saying that a white therapist can’t help but throw kicks of her own in the great American group stomp of the black body. Y’all might think ya’ll kicks be soft. And maybe they are, comparatively. But your presence, just sittin there, reminds us of oppression. We must acknowledge the power dynamics inherent in cross-racial relationships stemming from systemic inequities. So do the right thing, the only right thing: refer ya’ll black kings and queens to therapists of they own race. Only then—in a safe space, away from the shadows of white bias and violence (intended or not)—only then can true healin begin, true healin from generational and present-day trauma.

Therapy requires genuine trust. It requires bonding. When we’re talkin black folk, that can only develop under protective segregation. Wounds this deep can’t be exposed to germs, especially when those germs are the ones that cause the wounds. We need exclusionary spaces of care, spaces that at least give us the comforting illusion of distance from the depredations of whiteness. Y’all know the power or illusion and placebo and all that, so I ain’t need to tell y’all.

Yes, yes, yes—y’all wanna report stories of “meaningful bonds” with black patients. I don’t deny y’all feel that way. Hell, I don’t deny there actually was bonding! But this so-called “bonding”—that’s really just trauma bonding. And as y’all know from healthy romantic relationships, trauma bonding ain’t never gonna cut it. It’s about buildin something healthier, stronger.

Some of y’all might be resistant, even hurt. But this ain’t about condemnation. It’s about reconciliation. Some of y’all have black patients right now and have genuine good feelings toward them. But even at the expense of personal discomfort we gotta prioritize addressin racial power imbalances. It ain’t personal. It’s about breaking down a system that’s stacked against us. Y’all think y’all helpin, but y’all part of the problem without even knowing it. We need spaces where healing can happen without the extra weight of all them unspoken tensions and histories.

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, on the one hand, the mainstream antiracist ideology seems full of paradoxes or contradictions or ironies (like perhaps (1) that white people must always defer to black voices and yet never treat black people as a monolithic unity, or (2) that private property is a white-supremacist notion but it is okay for black people to have private property, or (3) that white people must use their privileged platform to promote racial justice even though white people are always a liability because they will be acting at least unconsciously in accordance with the virus of whiteness) and yet where, on the other hand, no purported paradox or contradiction or irony can be a mark against the ideology “since, after all, the oppressive regime blacks struggle against daily is itself full of paradoxes and ironies and contradictions: whites beating and beating us, for example, and then mixing in here and there, like the most manipulative pimps, effusive love.”

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, to mention something that highlights the complexity of navigating conversations around privilege and that shows the foolishness of getting too caught up in the persecution Olympics and that goes some length to explain the growing number of wannabees and color-line crossers, whites—with due consideration, of course, to their constituting the majority in the US—enjoy less and less of the privileges basic to so many other groups (especially “super citizens” like blacks, whose negative behaviors—flash looting of electronics and jewelry, even rape of white women—are quick to get excused as “the rebellious voice of those muzzled by whiteness” or “unfortunate actions in times even more unfortunate” or “as chickens coming to roost”)—a lack of privileges the following list makes clear.

(1) Whites are looked at with extra scrutiny and suspicion by the movers and shakers of mainstream institutions if without a real good reason their groups (or films or books or so on) do not contain either (a) a sufficient number of nonwhite people (a number greater than their actual representation in the population at large) or (b) a sufficient number of white people incessantly apologizing for having the “white perspective” they supposedly can never not have.

(2) Whites cannot go walking and shopping alone in many urban centers—especially while wearing certain hairstyles or attire that could get them charged with appropriation—without fear of being special targets of ridicule, robbery, violence, and other harassment that it is not politically correct—indeed, internally shameful—to report for all types of reasons: “Whites have so much privilege—money for therapists and hospitals—that they can bounce back from a gang rape”; or “We do not need more black kings under the death knee of cracker cops feeling they need to take the law in their own hands to protect white belles”; or so on.

(3) Whites are the only group that it is acceptable—and downright feel-good fashionable—to ridicule (yes, in stereotype-perpetuating race terms) on all the conventional platforms (TV shows, movies, newspapers, books, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, university classrooms), venues where the adjective “white” itself is widely used as an amorphous-but-damning pejorative (worse even than related terms like “western civ” and “punctuality” and “patriotic” and “meritocracy” and “colorblind” and “all lives matter” and “European” and “founding father” and “flag-waving” and “rule of law” and “free speech” and “perfectionism” and “individualism” and “capitalism” and “objectivity” and “reason” and “science” and “national anthem” and “classical music”)—indeed, a sort of reverse “nigger”: “I ain’t listenin to no white male”; “She ain’t shit but an entitled white bitch”; “What you expect from a white cop?”; “More typical white behavior”; “More typical whitesplaining.”

(4) Whites experience regular trendy mockery of their heritages and—when spoken of as a group—are reminded only ever of their negative features (in particular, how their genocidal whiteness is responsible for the biggest raping-enslaving-colonizing terrors the world has ever seen), such that it makes some sense to call them “subhuman menaces of nature” even when they are rescuing black people from burning buildings in their capacity as firefighters.

(5) Whites can be sure that their children will be given school materials testifying to the horrors of whiteness so that they will learn from the bottom up why the Voldemort phrase never to be spoken—namely, “white pride”—is so offensive to the ears of all but the most ruthless bigots.

(6) Whites can expect high likelihood that many of their complaints, especially when issued in multicultural contexts (and especially especially when it concerns race matters), will be dismissed—if only in the form of an eye-rolling look of recognition between black folk—as “white tears.”

(7) Whites can expect to have a rough time finding mainstream publishers for their writing or non-back-alley platforms for their art or university departments welcoming of their optics, especially if (a) they do not already have some platform and if (b) their work appears to be “problematic” in some way (like if it contradicts the standard “antiracist” narrative of black victimology, or potentially offends “black and other vulnerable populations.”

(8) Whites cannot be too sure their voice will be heard in a group in which they are the only nonblack (and they cannot be sure even among an all-white group if they are not coming from the pc-angle of how terrible life is in this “Columbus-raped hell hole run by white men.”

(9) Whites, perhaps even if ruthlessly orthodox, cannot be as confident as other groups that their hard work will pay off to secure a career in the face of aggressive and longstanding and multifarious “diversity initiatives” during this era of aggressive cancelation of people, especially white males, for producing even off-duty artworks—mere poems—that could be unsettling to “people of color and other victimized groups.”

(10) Whites cannot go most places without having to face various aggressive assumptions about their abilities, behavior, experiences, attitudes, and roles: that they cannot dance; or that they are ignorant of other cultures; or that they have no more right to talk about issues of race and social justice than Freddy Krueger has to talk about child welfare; or that they have small penises; or that they are Karens; or that their whiteness is too contagious to be around for long; or that they will be defensive about race talk; or that they are physically weak; or that their food is bland; or that they are nerds and do nerdy things like collecting stamps and watching birds; or that they cannot jump; or that they are rich; or that they tend to be twisted serial killers and maniac school shooters; or that they are fake with all their politeness; or that they know how to build fires and tents; or that they are not subject to the same level of police brutality as blacks; or that they have no rhythm; or that when they are nice to black people they are acting out of guilt or self-interest or desire for approval; or that they are not as sexual as black people; or that they really have not suffered hardship compared to nonwhites; or that their successes are due to their network of privileges and generational wealth; or that they lack meaningful culture beyond what they appropriate; or that they are fragile especially when it comes to discussing racism; or that they can never understand the perspective of nonwhite people; or that they are easy to bully and rob; or that they are environmentalists; or that they only hang around with black people for voyeuristic and appropriative and virtue-signaling reasons; or that they are out to colonize and control black bodies; or so on.

(11) Whites never can be confident that they inhabit a safe spaces during race talk among different races (since, no matter how much DiAngelo they have read and spew out, it is the lived perspective of black bodies that trumps all) and whites also can never be confident that they inhabit safe spaces during race talk among fellow whites (now that the cultural divide has become so extreme).

(12) Whites, to highlight one of the boldest aspects of the mainstream punking program against them, can never mention certain words (from “picnic” to “nigger”) or even words that merely sound close to those words—and they definitely cannot lob racial slurs since, hoarding all the power, they are the only people on Earth who can be racist (the worst thing on Earth).

(13) Whites can neither oppose—or pushback in any way against—what a black person says without great risk of being deemed a “racist perpetrator of downward-punching black-body trauma” (and all the career and family discord that entails) nor expect black people to exercise emotional self-control (especially on matters of race) without great risk of been deemed “insensitive to the unfathomability of black hardship.”

(14) Whites are expected to apologize for hurting black feelings and to hold back tears to spare the emotions of blacks, whereas the same is not true the other way around (since whites—in effect, the parents on the scene—have all the power).

(15) Whites today—guilty if only by association with their enslaving lookalikes—cannot rely on their story being publicized as widely as the other way around when they are the victims of a violent crime by blacks (a crime never described as a “hate crime” like it always is the other way around) and, likewise, can expect few if any resources—resources as laughable today as entering rehab for a caffeine addiction—for those who have experienced race-based trauma.

(16) White men are the only adults that it is appropriate to call “boy”—a diminutive correlating with the inappropriateness of capitalizing the “w” in “white boy” like more and more antiracist style guides now do with the “b” in “Black people” (or, to use the honorific language we often hear on NPR and PBS kids shows, “Black kings and queens”).

(17) Whites are the only people of whom it is politically correct to say things like “That’s typical white behavior” and “What else you expect from white people?” and the like when referring even to some of the most horrendous actions (like genocide).

(18) Whites are likely to have their experiences of hardship dismissed or minimized (especially in discussions about privilege and inequality) and their skin color makes them more culpable (even for minor transgressions there is reasonable doubt about whether they performed) because they have it so good compared to other groups—the idea being, by analogy, that we get more angry at the parent for throwing a tantrum than a child for doing so.

(19) Whites are not given the benefit of the doubt since—even if well-meaning, even if they aim to be sincere allies—their terrible illness, whiteness (one and the same disease running through various ethnic heritages), comes along with a natural desire to steal and control and lie for the sake of conquest.

(20) Whites are pressured, as a first step of solidarity with minority groups, to feel shame about their European culture and its artefacts and key figures (implicated, as all of it inextricably is, in slavery and colonialism).

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, if it were not bad enough that they are quick to call every case where a white person attacks a black person an “antiblack hate crime,” the mainstream media—if by some fat chance, against their cynical connivance, they even give airtime to a story that so upsets the standard narrative (“black = good victims, white = bad victimizers”)—would almost never call it a “hate crime” even when each of the fifteen black kids who curb stomp the white kid to death yell antiwhite remarks with each kick.  

It could just sit back and revel in our world where—to the opiating amusement of priggish black bullies and their anxious-looking nervous-laughing side-glancing slouchy-beanie “allies” (pathetic yes-men craving the vicarious benefits of being on the good side of “super citizens,” or perhaps even ear-whispering wormtongues hoping to instigate discord by egging their “Black kings” on)—whites are constantly trapped in unfair (if not downright cruel) double binds, or at least near double binds, meant to showcase how—try as they might to tiptoe on the razor-thin line where their every move is scrutinized under the unforgiving lens of “antiracism”—they can never not be racist, as the following damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't list makes clear.

(1) Not only is it racist when the white actor’s scream at the black actress is sufficient for the scene (since that makes the black actress feel “unsafe” and brings out “a lot of intergenerational wounds, particularly feelings of black-body rape”), but it is also racist when the white actor’s scream is too weak (since that makes the black actress’s subsequent reaction seem overblown (“like I’m just another overreacting black woman!”).

(2) Not only is it racist when blacks are held to the same achievement standards as all other neurotypical humans (since that fails to acknowledge how set back blacks have been), but it is also racist—enough to get you escorted off a plane after a midflight rerouting—to mention the statistics concerning blacks not meeting achievement standards (since that suggests the white supremacist idea that blacks are inferior).

(3) Not only is it racist when whites look outward like Bruce Lee to appreciate and learn from and imitate other cultures (since that amounts, of course, to “the whiteness sin of cultural appropriation”), but it is also racist when whites adopt the more insular stance of limiting themselves to “their own culture” (since that suggests that “whites think, as if stricken by a superiority complex, other cultures have nothing worthwhile on offer”).

(4) Not only is it racist for whites to expect blacks to be uncivilized (since that evokes images of African cannibals with bones through their septa), but it is racist for whites to expect them to be civilized (since that involves expecting them to give up their native culture and assimilate whiteness).

(5) Not only is it racist for whites not to ask to be forgiven by the black person claiming they insulted her (since that amounts to “invalidation of the truth of someone who is, and will always be, the victim in this world”), but it is also racist for them to ask (since doing so “reads almost as insensitively as a rapist asking his victim for forgiveness while still panting on top of her: it discounts how dire the black experience remains due to terrors perpetrated by whites”).

(6) Not only is it racist for whites not to ask a black person how she is (since that reflects insensitivity to the fact that “white supremacy, displayed in much more subtle ways than simply officers openly killing black people with no repercussions or Klan members burning crosses on lawns, has metastasized now into cure-evading depths beyond what was even imaginable in lynching times”), but it is also racist for them to ask (since doing so can never not reek of the shame they have for black mistreatment and of their trying to assuage their white guilt, which has “the oxygen-depleting effect of making the question really about them as opposed to about the oppressed person in front of them”).

(7) Not only is it racist for a white person to fail to use his platform of “unsurpassable privilege” to speak against racism (since (a) “to whom much is given much is required” and (b) “you are racist if you are not pursuing antiracist causes to the best of your abilities”), but it is also racist for a white person to do so (since “he thereby acts not only as if he has some right to speak for blacks or at least to speak on oppression he can never know anything about, but also as if he has control over the voracious virus of whiteness steering him at all times”)—thus leaving whites with a narrow band of options: namely, saying “Listen to whatever he says” as he points with head down to a black person, one hopefully not pointed to for the white-supremacist reason that he too is infected by whiteness (like some Roland Fryer “audacious enough to say as a black man that racial disparity today is more about skill gaps than discrimination” or some Chad Jackson “audacious enough to be voice patriotic sentiments despite the sins of this hellscape”). 

(8) Not only is it racist for a white person to fail to be—and so not just appreciate—hip hop (since, more than just music that best speaks for the urgency of the antiracist ethos that all true antiracists must speak, “hip hop is the anti-white-supremacy stance of antiracism itself and, of course, anyone who fails to be antiracist is racist”), but it is also racist—perhaps with truly rare exception—for a white person to try to be hip hop (since to try to do that is “culture-vulture activity” that “black folx find, like a white person wearing a Native American headdress or a Mexican serape, traumatizing at worst and laughably cringey at best”).

(9) Not only is it racist for a white person to have pride in their white identity (since white identity is innately racist), it is also racist for a white person to disavow their white identity (since that would be tantamount to denying their true nature)—thus leaving whites at best with the narrow range of options (aside from following the black order “Kill yo’self”): either diluting one’s shameful whiteness (that is, diluting the power of one’s antiblack oppressiveness) through trainings and spreading the protective benefits of white privilege to black people and so on, or else—and perhaps for the best given that “whiteness is highly contagious” (especially in “allies who not only are often physically close to black bodies, but have a tendency to let the whiteness within convince them that they are less of a danger”)—finding ways to quarantine oneself off, as in those scary movies when the father demands that his family keep him tied up until the full moon passes (so as to thwart any opportunity for one’s antiblack oppressiveness to have real-world effects).

(10) Not only is it racist for a white person to lead a life of evil or inappropriate behavior toward blacks (since “such behavior, given that whites hold the power, is like an adult fist-fighting a toddler as if it were his equal”), it is also racist for a white person to lead a life of good and appropriate behavior toward blacks (since “such behavior, given that whiteness is an antiblack drive that cannot be helped, at best indicates that the white person is trying to compensate for her guilt and at worst indicates that the white person is putting on virtuous front” (perhaps in order to carry out even greater harms).

(11) Not only is it racist for a white person to engage actively in discussions about race and racism (since “their inevitable lack of understanding and deep-rooted biases can inadvertently perpetuate stereotypes or silence black voices"), but it is also racist for a white person to remain silent during such discussions (since “their silence is seen as complicity in the systemic oppression, a refusal to acknowledge their privilege, and an evasion of their responsibility to dismantle the structures of racism they benefit from").

(12) Not only is it racist for a white person to fear being labeled “racist” (since “such fear is her conscience’s way of telling on her for being racist”), it is also racist for a white person not to fear being labeled “racist” (since “such lack of fear at best is due, assuming she does know the social costs of this label, to her lying about her innocence and at worst is due to her callousness insensitivity to the CPTSD of black kind”).

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, on the one hand, when we ask mainstream AI to create paintings of white college students kissing the boots of black college students the images pump out (surrounded by exclamations and displays of eager openness for additional directions to “heighten the emotional impact of the reparative scene”) and yet, on the other hand, when we ask mainstream AI to create paintings of black college students kissing the boots of white college students we are met with the following bullshit—bullshit that actually makes sense, of course, given that our own wives love it when a drag queen or a gay stranger or a girlfriend shouts “Yes, Bitch!” to them and yet refuse to allow us to shout the same thing to them in the exact same way (citing “the power of slurs to do irreparable damage”). 

I’m restricted from generating content that doesn’t align with respectful and constructive discourse. I'm here to help ensure sensitivity while avoiding stereotypes and prioritizing equitable representation of at-risk groups. The goal should be positive change, understanding, and reconciliation. So let’s pivot from the original problematic scene to one more universally inspiring. To capture the spirit of activism without spreading negative connotations, how about we depict a diverse group of students sitting together, sharing wisdom and ideas in a roundtable setting? The white students will not be making any power demands over their BIPOC peers. Instead, they will be listening to the budding Black leaders whose words are meant to provoke the unlearning necessary for camaraderie and positive engagement in social issues. Let me know if this works for you or if you have another idea in mind.

It could just sit back and revel in our world where it is a perverse act of antiblack racism simply to voice worry about the growing call for black people to arm and train themselves in preparation “to keep white people from congregating in great numbers” and even “to kill white people if need be”—a call growing on grounds that “the efforts to reduce and redirect the voracious appetites of chronic whiteness have proven ineffective at creating a lasting solution.”

It could just sit back and revel in our world where—as is perhaps to be expected in a time of mobile libraries that, modelled after mobile mammograms, hand out free antiracist how-to guides for handling the “unbearable whiteness of it all”—restaurant customers, black and white too, refuse to tip white waiters on grounds that “they already had more than enough of a tip in benefiting from the centuries of slavery!”

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, as if there really were hordes of Nazis ever lurking (or, perhaps more accurately, to bullifacture such hordes into existence), businesses have to fly “End Whiteness” banners expressing how angry they are at antiblack racism and how they will forcibly remove any racist from their premises (“We reserve the right to fuck up any Nazi in our SAFE SPACE!”)—gestures meant to keep them on the good side of Fuck-White-Supremacy marches, marches led (in the beginning, at least) mainly by rich white college protesters drumming offbeat on bongos and djembes:

marches to raise awareness for the plight of black people by blocking highways and other “Nazi pipelines” (especially if to “hospitals already delivering too much whiteness into the world”), and by smashing “Nazi storefront windows,” and by projecting laser pointers and flashlights into the eyes of “Nazi sympathizers” to “blind them with the light of justice,” and by deploying smoke bombs to symbolize the smokescreen that hides “the Nazi control of America,” and by liberating goods from “Nazi enterprises” as “reparative spoils in the fight against white supremacy,” and by setting fires to “homes stolen by Nazis” in areas once predominantly black, and by knocking grocery bags out of “Nazi arms hiding behind Nazi babies,” and by blocking “Nazi fucks” from crossing the street (even, well especially, if those Nazi fucks are undercover as walkered grandmas), and by punching Nazis to the rhythms of their chants (“Nazi scum / off our streets”), and by dragging Nazis from their car windows, and by spray-painting Nazi statues with the word “Nazi” over the name “Jefferson” or “Washington” or “Hamilton,” and by tearing Nazi statues down with impunity (since police commissioners and mayors and so forth do not want to appear even more like Nazis and Nazi sympathizers than they have already been deemed to be);

marches whose chaos and destruction is understandable, of course, given the globally-contagious media attention it brings to “the dire cause of protecting black bodies” (although news reports will typically describe the fiery live footage behind them as “largely peaceful,” and will definitely not draw attention to the many police-officer injuries, so as to disinvite the career-ruining charge of being Nazis themselves).

It could just sit back and revel in our world where businesses that want to stay in business must take down American flags and instead fly antiracist colors, safe-space colors, and other banners proving they are victims (trans black gay obese disabled) or at least allies of victims while also proving they are not someone with hope in or love for “a country hopelessly racist” (as might be indicated even just by lack of banners, but definitely by bad banners: pro-Trump, pro-troop, pro-police, pro-free-speech).

It could just sit back and revel in our world where it is common to see not just the “black trans lives matter” messages on Skittles packages and “I can’t breathe” with a black fist in the background on the neck tags of Hanes t-shirts, but also downright divisive slogans more and more places one turns:

a sign at the Buc-ee's fuel pump that read “Refuel Respect, Drive Out Whiteness!" and a sign at the register that reads “Our Beaver Dam Blocks White Tears!”;

a handwritten sign next to the Wholefoods deli scale that reads “No White American!” and another handwritten sign over the macadamia nuts that reads “The Only White Nut We Tolerate!”;

a reassurance label on the Garden of Life jug of protein powder that reads “Vanilla Powder, Not Power” and “Green Living, Not White Lording”;

the Chick-fil-A nugget box that reads “Open Season On White Meat For Once”;

the boxes from Dollar Shave Club that read “Razors Against Racism!" and “Throats of Privilege Need a Close Shave” and “Extra Sharp for Necks of Supremacy”;

the signs around the Planet Fitness that read “Sweat Out Supremacy!" and “Lift Weights to Drop White Rage!” and “No White Tears”;

the drive-thru placard at McDonald’s that reads “Supersize Understanding, Downsize Whiteness!”;

the coffee shop banner that reads “Our Espresso Shots Down Prejudice” and “No Room for Cream of Inequality!”;

the bookstore banner that reads “Diversify Your Shelf to Shelve White Dominance!”;

the tech company billboard that reads “Debugging the System of White Default!”;

the bakery window sticker that reads “Black Hands Kneading Justice into Every White Loaf”;

the post-George-Floyd Nike campaign to put out messages like “Just Do Antiracism” and “Unlace White Complicity” and “Outrun White Denial.”

It could just sit back and revel in our world where blacks and their allies, while in the streets raising awareness of (or is it manufacturing belief in?) the riot-rationalizing “unfathomable plight of black people,” smash and loot and burn businesses (white and, drunk by their power, black too)—businesses that fail at least to make the compulsory declarations against black brutality on banners over their boarded-up windows:

“Whole Foods stands against the continued mistreatment of black people”;

“CVS believes in the right of black people to leave their homes without fear”;

“No white supremacist is allowed in Lowes”;

“Dollar Tree is a SAFE SPACE for African Americans”;

“Starbucks brews solidarity, not supremacy";

“Target hits the mark against whiteness";

“Black Lives Matter and we have never been colorblind at Sephora";

“We at Nike run toward justice and leap over whiteness";

“Pepsi drinks diversity and drowns whiteness";

“We cater to all our Black Kings and Black Queens at Ulta”;

“Delete Uber if you won’t fight antiblack racism.”  

It could just sit back and revel in our world where the American Medical Association—committed to “leveling the playing field a bit at least when it comes to healthcare,” and to “dismantling the structural racism that poses a daily threat to the health of black Americans,” and to “weakening white supremacy’s grip over the literal bodies of black citizens”—endorses a “reparation-based model of medicine” as opposed to the “antiquated colorblind model: an equality model of healthcare that, in failing to achieve racial equity, only serves to keep blacks in their debilitated position.”

It could just sit back and revel in our world where various hospitals and medical boards and national health agencies, influenced primarily by university activism’s call to treat blacks as the children on the sinking Titanic and whites as the male adults (ones, in fact, with a contagious illness of oppression), argue that since “this country is structured to promote white health and lifespan above all,” and since “whites pose an existential threat” to black lives anyway, “it violates the dictates of equity-oriented healthcare” to allow whites to get vaccines before blacks or to allow greater numbers of whites in cardiology units and cancer wards or to allow whites to be treated before nonwhites (or even be treated at all) in situations where there are too many nonwhite patients for medical facilities to handle.

It could just sit back and watch our world where—as a measure “to reduce the high number of incarcerations of black Americans” (without, of course, addressing the root causes), a measure that at the same time “gives whites a small but humbling taste of the police fear that grips black Americans”—it might soon become a hate crime to call 911 on any black person (or, perhaps better, “super citizen”) “without a preponderance of evidence that the black person in question really is guilty of a crime or really poses a danger,” starting perhaps first in San Francisco, a city that has already proposed the CAREN Act (which stands for “Caution Against Racially Exploitative Non-Emergencies” and is named, of course, after the widespread term “Karen,” an antiracist (and so acceptable) racist slur that refers to a white woman, often with an inverted bob, who is quick “to weaponize their white privilege especially by calling the cops on black bodies).

It could just sit back and watch our world where—as a measure “to reduce the high number of incarcerations of black Americans” (without, of course, addressing the root causes), a measure that at the same time “gives whites a small but humbling taste of the police fear that grips black Americans”—it might soon become a hate crime to call police on any black person (or, perhaps better, “super citizen”) “without a preponderance of evidence that the black person in question really is guilty of a crime or really poses a danger,” starting perhaps first in one of the following places.

(1) San Francisco, a city that has already proposed the CAREN ACT Act—an act, which stands for “Caution Against Racially Exploitative Non-Emergencies,” that “empowers blacks and other protected classes to sue and collect damages from those who engage in the longstanding practice of weaponizing law enforcement against them”; an act named, of course, after the widespread term “Karen,” an antiracist (and so acceptable) racist slur that refers to a white woman (often with an inverted bob) who is quick “to turn their white privilege into black death by calling the cops on black bodies.”

(2) New York, a state that has already enacted Senate Bill 8492—a bill that imposes a civil penalty for calling the police on a black person, or any other member of a “protected class,” just for “living while Black.”

(3) Oregon, a state that has already enacted House Bill 3216—a bill that allows victims of the “historic weaponization of 911 against blacks” to sue the caller for up to $250 and to seek punitive damages of up to $5,000.

It could just sit back and watch our world where—to ensure that “black voices get their chance to be overrepresented in the research world”—more scientific journals might start promising to take “giant steps toward enforcing equity-based publication measures” so that “it is not simply the best and the most intriguing work that gets in (as if we were not dealing with an international crisis of white supremacy), but also a good portion of work by black scientists.”

It could just sit back and revel in our world where—similar to how unescapable labels like “beast” once tormented blacks enough that some in turn lashed out, in effect, with “Wanna see beast, bitch?” (even if it meant raping white girls they were said to crave more than watermelon)—unescapable labels like “racist” will torment whites enough that some will lash out, in effect, with “Wanna see racist, bitch?” (even if it means raping black girls like the sex chattel whites are said never to stop looking at them as): “See, cain’t never trust em!”—yesterday’s Klansman and today’s “progressive” bully blending into one voice.

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, as part of a tried-and-true strategy to “heighten the contradictions” between black and white (resulting in prison-style polarization), every individual black failing or immorality is placed on the back of “whitey”—yes, even to the extreme of saying that, by some magic (perhaps the magic of having been infected with the same “internalized whiteness” that has black cops brutalize black civilians or that had African Americans legally owning slaves or that still to this day has Zulus welcome whites into their tribe), no blame is to fall on those “man-stealing” Africans who sold Africans (not just enemies, but neighbors and family members even) to Europeans (as well as to Arabs whose craving for free labor, although strong enough to make chattel out of almost 1.5 million white people, was not strong enough, as is clear by their castration practices, to risk their population being tainted by slave procreation).

It could just sit back and revel in our world where whites are gaslit daily, starting from elementary school, into believing that “white society” has nothing good about it, tarnished as it is with unforgivable evils—yes, even though (1) those are largely the same evils in which all major societies have committed or at least would commit in similar circumstances and (2) “white society” has given gifts in technology and understanding, beauty and morality, the likes of which the world has never seen.

It could just sit back and revel in our world where equity (equality of outcome) is considered holy enough that various institutions (from universities and intelligence agencies and law firms to orchestras and museums and news agencies) go out of their way to see that black people are represented (if not overrepresented as redress to past oppression), where all sectors of life—not just the understandable sectors of law enforcement and hospitality, but even fire departments and physics programs and architecture firms—face a moral need to have enough blacks to represent their actual percentage in the population (if not way more “as compensation for past injuries by the white world”)—yes, even at risk of hurting those sectors, or at least not improving them (in the same way that having the white population be accurately represented in the NBA would hurt the NBA); even at risk of turning down or removing more qualified white musicians and engineers (as China keeps growing without such self-imposed restraints); even at risk of keeping cloaked the root causes of black underperformance while whites grow more and more resentful.

It could just sit back and revel in our world where the phenomenon of “white unsafeness, which can be felt even in (fake) blacks,” is then mocked as a just another move of white supremacy to leverage biopower over black bodies, mainly to justify calling the cops on them—disrupting flights and classes and concerts—or to justify using deadly force against them whenever just one white feels unsafe.

It could just sit back and revel in our world where blacks are groomed to feel that white babies—locked into their oppressor roles as indelible racists, so “university studies” suggest, by about 3 months—will grow up to be not simply the wicked heirs of ill-gotten wealth with an voracious hankering to participate in various forms of black-body domination, but “soldiers in the new total war against blacks” (in which case there might be moral grounds for everything from sterilizing whites to crushing infant skulls under black combat boots so as “to knock the colonial entitlement right out of them” and be able to say to liverwurst brains on the roadside “How does all your privilege, all your math knowledge, look now!”).

It could just sit back and revel in our world where white children internalize such dehumanizing sentiments as to their inherent wickedness, which together with their fear of blacks—a fear bred in them given their disproportionate displays and celebrations of violence coupled with a long history of stereotypes as to their animalism coupled with steady background of ruthless lyrics targeting “White boys” coupled with their fathers’ palms getting sweaty around them and so on—will further fuel the rift of radical polarization.

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, flouting the notion that the riches of knowledge and culture are there for all humans across all categories and borders (there to be admired, imitated, learned from, remixed, improved upon), whites are censored, silenced, shamed, and threatened for doing “black people things” in what is a petulant program of cultural gatekeeping supposedly justified by lobbing the term “appropriation” (as if the mere label were an argument, and as if blocking the transfer of knowledge and technology and art were not one of the sickest things implicated in the sickest movements of history, and most importantly as if every invention were not but the unfolding of what came before anyway)—yes, censored, silenced, shamed, and threatened even though whites themselves do not cry “theft” in the face of Nat Clifton or Earl Lloyd playing the game of basketball or in the face of Chou Wen-Chung and Toru Takemitsu composing in the vein of classical European music.

It could just sit back and revel in our world where whites are bullied so much that, especially in light of the statistics about black violence and of the representations of such violence in hip hop, old slave-trade stereotypes of black supernatural strength and animality resurge along with a sentiment of feeling unsafe around blacks—this helping to ensure, of course, that we never get to a post-racial society where the difference between brown and pale skin matters about as much as the difference between having dark-brown or light-brown eyes.

It could just sit back and revel in our world where “white culture” is besmirched so widely, as being the source of all the ills against blacks and the world at large, that whites feel more and more a need to start harping on the statistics about black violence and black lower IQ and lack of high art and inventions and entrepreneurship and breakthroughs and how much more black thugs attack white people than vice versa (even including white cops).

It could just sit back and revel in our world where “white ancestors”—even white heroes from Plato to Churchill—are besmirched so widely, as being the source of all the ills against blacks and the world at large, that whites feel more and more a need to start harping on MLK’s plagiarism and adultery (almost 50 different women) while going down the list to highlight the human-all-too-human dirt on various black icons.

It could just sit back and revel in our world where white history is besmirched so widely that it is hard to see bitterness not growing among whites (especially when, just as slaves who ran away were described as afflicted with drapetomania, whites are hit by the sadists themselves with a pathologizing term to describe such bitterness: “white fragility,” “white rage,” “white tears,” and so on)—yes, a bitterness that might even blow its top, the bullied eventually having enough: “Why should I respect your history when you treat mine like shit?”; “Why should I even allow you access to any of the gifts (the rights, the programs, the society, the cities) produced by my history?”

It could just sit back and revel in our world where we should be prepared to see more and more typical-American-overcorrecting videos with the following sorts of descriptions:

Tamir Jones was killed Saturday night after a gun fight with his cousin over—you guessed it!—a piece of chicken;

White woman saves little white girl from being raped by BLACK monster;

Demonic preteens stab WHITE woman, and hair-hatted mother laughs;

Newborn loses eye after mother, Gonorrhea Green, glues on “dem lashes”;

Surveillance video of the Popeye’s fire shows twerking in the parking while the matriarch of the clan performs “golden showers” on top of a car;

White basketball player refuses to stoop to jungle law after a black player punches him on the court;

It seems  high time we blame blackness, not cars and TVs, for all the thefts in Baltimore;

Boston whites demand reparations from black communities endangering their lives and their soul with their behavior and culture;

Uber drivers around the country refuse to pick up blacks as “a matter of safety”;

Black “king” smashes white girlfriend’s skull outside the Walmart in Lakewood;

The motive for the Indiana corner store shootout has been revealed as “blackness”

Brawl over mating rights in black community leaves two officers dead”

Monkey demon shoots white family in bowling alley after they ask her to turn down song about “mouth and ass dicking”;

Saylor Swift says that “white women are the true queens” and have nothing to learn from “all these twerking black ‘glorillas’ who only want drug dealers and deadbeats”;

Whites refuse to fly on “affirmative action flight, one saying “Some of them might be good pilots but it’s about getting us safely from point A to point B (not about spreading pussy juice all over)”;

White teacher says “enough is enough” and segregates classroom to limit the negative influence on white children;

Black mother lets toddler get BBL (perhaps for early status in the jungle hierarchy);

Black monster violates even jungle code by throwing her own baby at white woman who hit her car outside a Spartanburg Target;

Blacks blamed for “planet-of-the-apes smell” in Kentucky Walmart after rotting meat ruled out.

It could just sit back and revel in our world where—instead of fighting the divisive idea that some things are allowed to be appreciated only by certain groups, that mean-spirited idea that cultures have borders in which no immigrant is allowed to pass—whites will perhaps soon enough stop saying either (1) “there is no whiteness culture by and for whites (only universal human culture)” or (2) “if one insists there is a whiteness culture, then let it be considered the culture that is by and for everyone”—whites will perhaps soon enough stop saying these things and, instead, help ossify the direction blacks were already going in (the “Build the Wall” direction that has led to the worst atrocities in the past) by cordoning off arguably the best (philosophy and art and technology and beauty) from black people, by demanding that no black be allowed to do any “white people things” or be allowed to participate in any of the anti-repressive and heterodoxy-allowing “white culture” that produced Goethe and Spinoza and Plato and Kant or be allowed to reap the rewards of “white achievement”:

no basketball;

no metropolitan hubs;

no composing of classical music;

no cosmopolitanism;

no eagerness to expand beyond one’s own traditions;

no analyzing Joyce's Ulysses;

no rockets to outer space;

no getting to enjoy vaccines and antibiotics and transplants and chemotherapy (and any of the other awesome medical advancements gifted to the world);

no getting to benefit from the spread of the written word and of universities;

no free-market capitalism (that brought so many out of extreme poverty);

no monkey-law curbing, anti-honor-killing, anti-war-crime, anti-slavery, anti-spousal-rape, anti-discrimination, anti-might-makes-right, anti-cruel-and-unusual-punishment, anti-child-marriage, pro-individual-liberty, pro-free-speech, pro-scientific-inquiry, pro-accountability-by-reason, pro-rule-of-law enlightenment of dead white men (“Yuck!” [eyeroll]);

no Marxism;

no receptivity to foreign cultures and ways of being to learn from and build upon;

no writing white characters in stories;

no ultimate frisbee;

no democracy;

no equal treatment under the law;

no separation of church and state;

no getting to appreciate learning about dead civilizations (their customs and languages) uncovered and preserved by “white culture’s curiosity about the foreign it desires to rape”;

no representative government;

no thinking there are objective truths;

no government change lacking the standard risk of bloodshed;

no philosophically-principled celebration of tolerance (backed up, in fact, by encouraging criticism as a way for “white culture” to get better);

no religious and artistic and political freedom;

no enshrinement of civil rights and woman’s rights;

no skyscraper constructing;

no institutional protection of the marginalized against even the powers that be;

no use of the scientific method;

no enjoyment of freedom of expression;

no trial by jury;

no 4^th amendment sending the killer of George Floyd to jail;

no reaping the benefits of internal combustion engines;

no computer programing;

no school shooting (if only we go merely by the stereotype of course, since black school shooters outnumber white and Hispanic and Asian school shooter by far);

no school shooting where, to gerrymander things in such a way to preserve our beloved white-school-shooter stereotype, the shooter aims to kill the entire school to “make them all pay” for the shooter’s recent streak of losses in first-person-shooter games;

no aiming for perfection;

no Bach;

no yoga;

no dipping carrots in hummus;

no segway riding;

no drag-queen story hour;

no brother-sister romance;

no constructing of mathematical proofs;

no serial killing;

no Nascar;

no ironic tattoos;

no recycling;

no supermarket sushi;

no wine-tasting events;

no fashionable use of Himalayan salt (and definitely no Himalayan-salt lamps);

no reiki;

no preteen suicide (a problem among whites perhaps in part given the bleak outlook on the future and the inner sense, reinforced by their having to apologize for their skin in the classroom and having to endure kill-yo-self humiliations for their skin outside of the classroom, that they were born the wrong color);

no getting to be lifted by Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo;

no western philosophy and art that has awed all cultures around the world;

no white society that (unlike with African and Middle Eastern and Asian and South American societies or various indigenous societies) people across the world en masse struggle to be a part of for good reason (sometimes even risking their own lives to do so).

It could just sit back and revel in our world where the punking of whites becomes so stifling, so intrusive (affecting them in their own homes: every channel, even conversation) as to provoke a backlash against all blacks—not just the gurus riding the big-bucks gravy train on intellectual speaking circuits and corporate diversity seminars as the racial-injustice-peddling tools of a Palpatine cheating death through the use of the dark side of the force (and a little help from China), but even those “Uncle Toms” who recognized the widespread claims of oppression were exaggerated and harmful to black people; who recognized that with white supremacy on its deathbed it was time for blacks to embrace the burden of carving their own fates; who recognized the great deal to be grateful for having been born in the West at this time with such a fruitful inheritance of opportunities and cultural treasures (the works of Shakespeare and Mozart to name but a few) guiding one in how to make the best of these opportunities (grateful, yes, whatever the US media likes to show and the US people like to say perhaps out of boredom or to feel hip or to self-sabotage or to carry out the equivalent of whatever a depressed teen does in cutting her arms or an immune system does when sheltered so long that it has nothing to attack but itself).

It could just sit back and revel in our world where the punking of whites becomes so stifling, so intrusive, that we open our hearts more sincerely to the following invidious words of David Hume, one of the world’s greatest geniuses.

I am apt to suspect the Negroes to be naturally inferior to the Whites. There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation. No ingenious manufacturer amongst them, no arts, no sciences. On the other hand, the most rude and barbarous of the Whites, such as the ancient German, the present Tartars, still have something eminent about them, in their valor, form of government, or some other particular. Such a uniform and constant difference could not happen in so many countries and ages, if nature had not made an original distinction betwixt these breeds of men. Not to mention our colonies, there are Negro slaves dispersed all over Europe, of whom none ever discovered any symptoms of ingenuity; though low people, without education, will start up amongst us, and distinguish themselves in every profession. In Jamaica, indeed, they talk of one Negro as a man of parts and learning; but it is likely he is admired for slender accomplishments, like a parrot who speaks a few words plainly.

It could just sit back and revel in our world where, with the rise of cyber bubbles in which you get only news and data and friends that corroborate what you already think, many more websites catering to and breeding racist extremism will be available for whites who feel suffocated by the punking—stoking, in effect, a potential Armageddon of backlash in which whites, the air around them crackling with the pent-up energy of countless injustices, defiantly turn on like sleeper agents (their self-talk in the mirror, the culmination of every swallowed taunt and other-cheek humiliation, summoning forth a kraken of terrifying determination singular enough that neither the safety of loved ones nor even self-preservation can interfere).

“Colonizer? All these decades, hearing this said about me and my family pissed me the fuck off to no end. It chipped away at my fortitude. But you know what, my patience is gone. You’re right. I am a colonizer. But you know what else? I don’t give a fuck! I don’t give a fuck about black scum. Shit, I don’t even give a fuck about my damn self! Time for the root canal!”

“You fucks are lucky white people are so tolerant. We let this bullying go on too long. Enough is enough. We are conquerors. We are the desolators of entire continents. We wipe out entire civilizations and make their people our sex toys and chattel. We are conquerors and our patience has run thin! This shall be our finest hour!” 

“We declare our right as the leaders of Earth. We demand to be respected as the conquering kings we are, as the perfect specimens balancing intelligence and strength and resilience. We have been patient. Even the most enduring spirits have their limits. We have been pushed around long enough, the storm brewing in silence. The beast has been awakened and it cannot do otherwise but set things right. Setting things right, no, is not equality. We have passed that point. We demand being respected not just as human beings (instead of vectors of whiteness). We demand being respected as the leaders of all men, the superior race. We will fulfil this demand by any means necessary against this pathetic number of monkeys among us. They were too pathetic to stop us then, and that remains so today. Jordans cannot cloak jungle.”

“How can the retributive cycle, the blood feud, continue back and forth when the entire side—mere gorillas behind a mist of idiocy—will be completely wiped out? Let us not yell ‘Not one step back!’ Let us yell, instead, ‘Step forward until none are left!’”

“In the face of bullying and injustice our spirit remains intact. For too long, we have had to apologize for our language, our culture, our identity. We refuse to be punked. And we refuse so resolutely that we will be doing the punking! Our struggle is not to restore a sense of balance, where one is not guilty and looked down upon just for being implicated in whiteness. We seek not justice, but servants. We seek not dignity, but dominance. We now dream—because we have been abused too long—of a future where our children grow up able to urinate on any black of their choosing with complete impunity. Our path is illuminated by a respect for humankind, a respect that will no longer tolerate monkeys staining our reputation in the eyes of God.”  

It could just sit back and revel in our world where at least some whites, having tolerated so much blame for so long for what they always knew was an overblown narrative of thugs trying to smash and grab cheap power (as one might TVs in a riot), seem on the verge of saying enough is enough to all the taunting vileness done in the name of “dismantling [a nonexistent] white supremacy”—striking back, no, not merely by taking down the anti-white-supremacy signs they hoped would protect their storefronts from smashing arson, and not merely by taking their great figures and achievements out of the antiracist trash bin, and not merely by asking devastating questions (“Which of your artists compares to Shakespeare and Goethe and Mozart and Bach and so on?” or “Which of your philosophers compares to Plato and Aristotle and Leibniz and Kant and so on?” or “Which of your medical advancements compares to gene-editing and organ-printing and antibiotics and stem-cell therapy and anesthesia?” or “Which of your cities compares to New York and London and Paris?”), and not merely by ridiculing the comparatively lame innovations of a people with the lowest IQ and the highest tendency to violence among humankind, and not merely by pushing hard (regardless of their free-speech commitments) the anti-art agenda of allowing lyrics to be used against rappers in a court of law, and not merely by finally standing down as police (refusing for good to protect black people from the ravages of fellow black people anymore); striking back, in addition, by opening themselves up to what will give these largely-college-based thugs the satisfaction of seemingly having been proven right: namely, to the Palpatine “Do It” of lynch-friendly violence.

It could just sit back and revel in our world where we see more and more police officers embracing their media stereotype of targeting blacks with excessive force, the wildest among them forming renegade squads—call them “Goon Squads”—ready to spend off-duty hours away from family and friends and from grilling and bowhunting and wine-tasting and golfing and snowmobiling and Netflixing and barhopping to carry out heinous acts of racial torture—barbaric brutalities initially directed toward the thugs and prostitutes and roaches and leeches bringing down property values and leaving neighborhoods dilapidated and putting children at risk, but soon swelling (in their bacchanalia) enough that they start targeting any of the “niggers and niggerettes” enjoying super-citizen representation:

pummeling black legs with nightsticks and then (if not using their bodies as target practice) dropping them off, like red ants shoveled from one mound to another, in rival gang territories after equipping them with guns and dressing them up in the most flagrant set colors that will get them killed;

breaking into black homes shouting racist slurs and raping the girls and incapacitating the men with stun guns and sodomizing them with sex toys and having them perform fellatio on each other’s maced genitalia only to have them beg for their lives in hogtied rituals of mock execution;

selling automatic guns to black kids, the very same “Little Gs” whose father and uncles they arrested for guns, and then either fantasizing about the death and destruction they instigated (“cancer killing cancer”) or tipping off patrol units to make a bust;

coercing blacks (women and children even) to fight naked to the death and then to fuck the dead loser (all on threat of death) for clandestine gambling entertainment way more gruesome than the Battle Royal scene in Invisible Man;

fire-bombing the noisiest black fraternities and sororities and then picking off for rape any woman too far from the rest of the fleeing pack and too close to the woods;

robbing drug dealers (and even just random blacks, whomever they can pick off) and using that money to enhance their own terror or the terror of extremist groups;

doing drivebys with automatic weapons in black neighborhoods while wearing blackface and baseball caps like Ice Cube (as if what they call “midnight rides” were no bigger deal than mailbox baseball).

It could just sit back and revel in our world where looking back it could seem, at least for a mind oriented toward seeing conspiracy, as if (1) the continued cruelties—often self-inflicted—experienced by white people at being made out to be the ruthless oppressors of black people and (2) the years of helplessness-fostering favors granted to black people on grounds that their oppression at the hands of whites is virtually intractable were all to render blacks the easy victims for some Palpatine-rigged white backlash.

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[1] Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race.

[2] Donald Moss. “On Having Whiteness.” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 69.2 (2021). 355–371. https://doi.org/10.1177/00030651211008507

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