Let's workshop this piece about a middle-school ELA educational video where black hipsters, in a collage of normalized bigotry, answer the question “What, if anything, are white people superior at?”
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. 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 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! If not—well, 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 the OJ verdict 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. 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 their standardized tests. The SATs were explicitly developed by eugenicists to prove blacks are inferior. 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.”
“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 are even slick enough to say that we have adopted the supremacist mindset of racist white people. 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 do all these things—things which black kings and queens should do. How else are we going to right past wrongs? But none of it would make me racist!”
“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’? It’s the ultimate mind game. People think of the whip when they think of whitey. We can’t forget his mind games! The devil attacks the psychology most of all.”
“Deadass? Hahaha. They good at talking to me like they redeemable.”
“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.”
“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.”
“They like to say convenient things, things convenient for them. ‘Let’s stop paying attention to race.’ ‘Let’s stop saying that blacks can only win if whites lose.’ ‘Let’s stop thinking of black people as nothing more than victims of oppression.’ ‘Let’s stop painting blacks as so helpless and pathetic that the only way they can have a voice is to suppress the voices of privilege.’ White folks just itchin’ for a way to stop paying us our due! We’re owed. We’re owed and they have the nerve to be outraged when we loot some TVs or jewelry or some iPhones all covered by insurance anyways. Please.”
“Doing the sneakiest things to make blacks feel inferior. I mean, why they have to make the small piano keys black?”
“White men are superior at being school shooters and serial killers. Tell me I’m lying.”
“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.”
“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, for example, 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.”
“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.”
“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.”
“We need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”—Kafka (against the safe-space cancel culture pushed by anti-art bullies, left and right)
