Urgent Message to Fellow White Women

Let us workshop this self-flagellating message of preemptive racial McCarthyism from one white woman, a professor in a sanctuary city near you, to white women all across our white supremacist country

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Urgent Message to Fellow White Women

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 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 people 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. 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 song. And look at me! Who am I to enumerate them. Should I even be allowed, given the temptation in my heart to steal black pain? But one song I hear loud it 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 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.

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.

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