Let's workshop this prose poem where a black person screams, against the hobbling and humiliating tide of the so-called “antiracist movement,” "PLEASE STOP HELPING US!"
Please Stop ‘Helping’ Us
Stop denying the rampant undereducation and unchecked violence gnawing at the roots of the black community (a cheap way to feel virtuous, to feel that you are thwarting the antiblack stereotypes that your hollow denial only serves to fertilize);
stop blaming these problems—in those moments when you do not deny them, in those spaces where it is safe to acknowledge them—on “the oppressive chokehold of white supremacy” (a blaming that siphons away what little sense of agency we have, a blaming that sends us charging like bulls at red capes in pursuit of cures—fruitless, too often toxic—for what is but a mirage of oppression);
stop defunding police—one of these toxic cures that, as so many black mothers will say through their teary wails, has proven bloody to blacks—based on the fabricated crisis of systemic brutality against black skin, an anti-black vendetta in uniform;
stop mocking the luminous ideals of the European enlightenment—objectivity and scientific inquiry, rationality and skepticism, diligence and hard work, foresight and planning, self-reliance and personal responsibility—as “whitewashed virtues,” as “hallmarks of whiteness” (that contagious evil of all evils);
stop “dismantling” math and classical music programs—sturdy ladders to physical and intellectual flourishing—under the pretense of their being inimical to black styles of knowing, designed—as just one of the many tricks of white-supremacist psychological warfare—to humiliate black youth while making whites feel superior (yes, even if it comes at the price of making them feel inferior to Asians);
stop insisting that kindness and punctuality and hard work (especially in so-called “white domains”) are neither aspirational nor achievable for us;
stop patronizing us (patronizing us with such a fervor that one cannot help but think that you have grown as dependent on us remaining in the nest of stagnation as we have grown dependent on that nest);
stop placating us (with soft words and softer expectations), as if such a move of velvet-glove parenting would improve our lot (instead of spoiling us into a state of entitlement) and as if you genuinely care about us (instead of acting out of palpable terror—understandable terror, no doubt—that we will throw tantrums ruinous to your careers, that we will mar your reputations with accusations of bias, that we will sue for discrimination);
stop incentivizing us to sing about the horrors of our past and about the overblown—and often made up—horrors of our present more so than about our achievements and about our role-models who rose above adversity, shattering the narrative of black victimology (a narrative that liens your pockets, even despite the entitled complaints and spoiled cancelations and opportunistic lawsuits it draws out of us);
stop hiring—hiring and hiring, to Kafkaesque extremes—“right-think”-mandating bureaucrats, thought police eager (in their Orwellian “commitment to diversity and inclusion”) to sanitize discourse and silence dissent and purge any voice from spaces—yes, even college classrooms—that might “unsettle” black people (the most vulnerable category in the intersectionality matrix);
stop hiring—hiring and hiring, to Kafkaesque extremes—university deans, administrative censors, who demand watered-down curricula of “trigger-free safety” so that no black person feels offended and so that the university—reduced to a funding-anxious cheerleader of political fads—does not seem to be targeting blacks with bad grades the way cops are said to with guns (a disservice to all students, especially those that the echo-chamber diet of pablum is purported to protect);
stop acting as if the desecration and eradication of great-books courses is an effective way to fight white supremacy (given that these universally-uplifting pillars of literature are, after all, penned predominantly by dead whites);
stop condemning “western civ” for its “unbearable whiteness” (when its Goethes and Shakespeares and Bachs and Einsteins and Lockes and Rousseaus lift us all, when its science and medical technologies protect us all, when its enlightenment ideals and emancipatory norms rocket humans toward Sagan stars and shelter the most vulnerable and supress the might-makes-right laws of the jungle and enshrine core rights—civil rights, women’s rights, rights to free expression, right not to be raped by one’s husband, right to trial by jury, right not to be enslaved—for everyone, regardless of race color or creed);
stop presupposing that our children are unable to behave in class (since it “it’s in their nature to dance and clap and be a bit raucous, in which case it would be just as racially terrorizing to them as holding up blue-eyed blondes as the pinnacle of beauty”);
stop refusing to correct how our children pronounce words (on “antiracist” grounds that doing so “will make them look down on their families, who—already facing too much racist persecution in Amerikkka—do not need white-supremacist violence spreading from their own treasonous children”);
stop spreading that agency-crippling and handout-entitling gospel that blacks have as little chance for success as they have human standing in this “white supremacist nation hooked on the sadism of grinding black bodies into a compact obsidian upon which it can build its monstrous skyscrapers”;
stop thinking that you are “fighting the man,” “dismantling the white hegemony,” through support of black music that—drowning out any divergent soundtrack—glamorizes destructive norms and behaviors (thuggery and whorishness and drug abuse);
stop judging us according to subminimal standards and expectations as if we were eternal underlings, spoiling standards and expectations that would keep any change-fearing creature—especially with a maximize-calories-in and minimize-calories-out evolutionary history—plantation dependent and horizon stifled (such that the question “What must I do to love and care for myself?” becomes more and more difficult to see as different from the question “What must I do to keep getting these kept-person benefits?”);
stop stoking a moral hysteria about white supremacy on the hunt—now with greater strength and invisibility than ever before—for blacks as if it were open season (a moral hysteria, as bogus as the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, that has now spread beyond the graduate seminars of some insular college department no one takes seriously into corporate boardrooms and even elementary-school classrooms);
stop baiting whites—the heavily-armed majority population—with lies that they (even their Appalachian forms) have it so much better, with demonizing characterizations (like that their “contagious disease of whiteness drives them, starting from infancy, to subjugate black bodies”), with mockery now fashionable enough that “white” itself has become a pejorative freely scattered on primetime television, and with equity-driven counter-discrimination—discrimination supposed to be no biggie for “creatures of such extreme unearned privilege”—that makes them bitter and reasonably suspicious about how far their merit can get them.
“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).
