I'm Judging You: The Do-Better Manual

by Luvvie Ajayi Jones

Why are people terrible? In a world where we are more connected to each other than ever, with endless access to information at our fingertips, too many of us seem to have missed the message on how to behave.

“If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” Prolific writer Toni Morrison once said that.

Humans are flawed beings. Some flaws are mere wrinkles, some are cracks, and some are the Grand Canyon.

Oh, people. We’re the worst.

Let’s be honest, toddlers are the worst. Those tiny humans are needy and they want your constant attention and then they need your help doing everything. They are so lazy. Then they have the nerve to cry and throw tantrums and be ungrateful. And you just want to ask them, “What have you done for me lately?” You don’t want to negotiate with tiny terrorists, but you’re in Target and they wanted that ball really bad and you don’t want them to fall out in aisle 20 and make everyone look at you funny, so they win. Those mini-villains win every single time.

Toddlers are just short, mean teenagers. The only real difference is that toddlers are still cute, so we can deal with them better. That cuteness is the reason we get all attached to them in spite of their shenanigans, so by the time they grow up, we feel all responsible for them and whatnot. It’s really a conspiracy.

My love motto is that my relationship should push me to be a better person. My partner should encourage me, challenge me, seduce me, and build me. I will aim to do the same.

Our foundation is cracked, and I’m not living in a shaky house. Leave if you can no longer be secure in what you’ve built. Fake forgiving-and-forgetting is pointless if you will always resent that person, or hold it over their head.

We’re doing all of these things because we live in a world that has dropped a metric ton of pressure on us to be beautiful and made the definition of that beauty incredibly narrow and impressively unreachable. I am judging us for our shallowness, our impossible beauty standards, and our desperation to reach them.

Society has failed people to the point where they feel they cannot like themselves in the skin they were born in.

What I am against is cosmetic procedures (not medical necessities) that change what we look like to the point where we need new identification. That is what makes me frown.

Would it kill labels and retailers to make clothes for women of all shapes and sizes? The afterthought of “curvy” collections at most retailers is insulting; the lines lack inspiration and fit. Style does not have to go on vacation just because designers need to use more material and a modicum of tailoring skill.

Every piece of my identity is important to me and has absolutely played a role in who and where I am today. My life has been made easier by many of these things, and made harder by several others. Of course, my own hard work has gotten me here, too, but I have not had as many obstacles thrown in my way in the race of life as others have.

There are seven billion of us on this earth, and we are all different. But one thing is clear: humans excel at using our differences as excuses to act like assholes and torment one another. It is highly unfortunate that we use these innate, integral, and often uncontrollable things to mistreat others. We have created rigid, yet often invisible, systems that keep some people at the top, on the backs of others at the bottom, based on their identity markers. And we refuse to fix these systems of inequality because being at the top of the food chain is the place to be, so who would want to lose those perks? The air up there is so nice, who cares about those in the gutter?

When your empire grows out of soil fertilized with the blood of a people, it must sustain its power with their continued bloodshed. The United States of America was built on the backs of Black and brown people, and it still stands on our necks.

The red stripes on the flag are really the blood of Black and brown people, and many centuries after the country’s creation, these stains still have not faded. The history of this country is like Grimm’s Fully Fucked-up Tales of Prejudice.

And let’s pause here to say that racism in America is stupid as hell. Racism and prejudice anywhere is dumber than wearing a wool bathing suit in the ocean. It always makes no fucking sense, but it’s especially absurd here. The United States of America is a country founded on the labor and literal bodies of Black and brown people who were minding their own business when white folks came forth to kill and exploit them. This is a place that was “discovered” by a dude who didn’t know how to read a map, so he just showed up on some shore, thought he was in India, and then proceeded to plant a flag there, like, “TA-DA.” No, sir, no. What Christopher Columbus’s goofass needed was a compass and a clue for being so aggressively mediocre, but that dude has a federal holiday in his honor. He showed up on someone else’s property and claimed it as his because he didn’t know what it was. This country started off all the way wrong and continued in the same fashion.

So not only did you steal someone else’s home and then kill them when they showed you kindness, you went elsewhere and did some more stealing, this time of actual people, and forced them to come to your STOLEN HOUSE to do your work for you. What the fuck, white people? I mean really, what in the ever-loving fuck?

My point is that the United States does not have a legitimate history of integrity and fairness. It’s been run by villains that make Disney’s look like saints. Racism is not a byproduct as much as it’s the foundational stock in the American soup.

Racism doesn’t just look like people in white hoods who are on lawns burning crosses and churches, yelling out “nigger,” and rocking blackface on Halloween for laughs. In fact, the idea that this cartoonish bigotry is what racism looks like is why some people think it is all gone and we have nothing to worry about.

It will not be comfortable to speak up, but if allies do not confront those closest to them, how do we progress?

Unfortunately, it’s this idea that Black people are inherently violent and destructive that has been killing us for a long time. Mistaken ideas, entrenched in racism, are literally killing Black people.

The media has been the spokesperson for oppression since forever. It is the mouthpiece of prejudice, and it has easy access to us all, telling the stories, framing the narratives, and highlighting only what serves the larger prerogative.

Black people actually have to PROVE their humanity, instead of having it accepted as a given. Even in death, they won’t let your soul rest without smearing it with dirt.

Black trauma is never given space to heal because we have to make sure the white people who hurt us don’t feel too bad about it. Even as victims, we’re told to care about the feelings of those who harm us.

When Black people bring up slavery and we are told to “get over it,” I want to kick every trash can in a ten-mile radius. How can we get over something that still hangs over our heads? No, we can’t “get over slavery.” Are Jewish people over the Holocaust? They have a right to never be, and that took fewer lives than the enslavement of Black people in America. We certainly have the right to still be mad about how much damage slavery and its continued legacy has done. You broke up families. You branded us like cattle. You killed us when we dared to want freedom. You considered us worth three-fifths of a person. You didn’t want us to know how to read because you realized it’d arm us with knowledge.

The most glaring aspect of white privilege is that when someone is described neutrally—without indicating color or ethnicity—more often than not, people will assume that the person is white. THAT assumption indicates an uncomfortable truth: in our society, whiteness determines humanity.

Furthermore, eschewing our cultural differences doesn’t make America or anyplace a salad bowl. It erases our history and the very relevant events of the past that have led to our present situations. It dishonors our ancestors and the work they’ve done. And it lets people off the hook for centuries of race-based denigration and injustice. So saying you don’t see race is saying you have nothing to fix.

I’m not saying they ought not to show the forests in Africa and the people who wear fig leaves and nothing else. Their lives are valid and their stories should be told. However, it should not be the only aspect of the Motherland that is depicted. Methinks these portrayals are ridiculous, misleading, and counterproductive when they are used to define the continent. Have you ever seen a special about the continent that was about city life?

It is a weird combination of appreciation, fetishization, and contempt. We’re interesting and modern when our cultural markers are being co-opted but we are barbaric when it comes to how our stories are being told.

Feeling like you have to go by an alias so the world doesn’t butcher your beautiful real name sucks.

We have learned phonetic rules of other tongues while ignoring the fact that a lot of African names still follow English pronunciation rules. By doing this, we’re telling people that their African names are too difficult and not worth learning how to say correctly. We tell them their culture is a nuisance to our Western tongues and we force people to either abandon their real monikers or be faced with people who are annoyed at having to make an effort. It’s disrespectful.

Fourteen percent of the world’s population can be found there. The entire United States, China, and India can fit comfortably in the continent with room left over. Africa is north, south, east, and west. Three oceans touch its borders. Africa is amazing. I mean, come on. Science has traced the first humans back to the continent, and civilization is thought to have begun there. The place is rich with oil, diamonds, and jollof rice. It is not a monolith, and it is not solely populated by helpless people who need to be pulled from the depths of misery. There are feasts and famines. There are prosperity and poverty. There are democracies and dictatorships. The continent is much greater than the sum of its single parts.

Rape culture makes it easy for people who are abusive to injure women and makes it hard for women to feel safe. I am judging people who don’t recognize that this is another system of oppression that we live in and that it should be taken seriously. I am endlessly side-eying people who are not trying to be a part of the solution, because they don’t even want to acknowledge that there is a problem. Women feel vulnerable, and we have more than enough reason to.

People rush to discredit survivors and protect perpetrators because it’s easier to deny that something happened than to deal with the fact that there are predators in our midst.

In spite of the fact that less than 5 percent of rape allegations are found to be false, we still cast doubt on the woman who dares to assert that she was violated.

It is the belief that your gender should not determine your access to opportunities, nor should it mean you have fewer rights. For me, being a feminist means believing that women, and everyone, really, have the right to live life on their own terms, and that is why I define myself as such. When we strip it down to its bare definition, everyone should be a feminist.

Feminism might not have started any wars, but it has been cruel by not equally prioritizing—and in some cases actually working against—the issues of women of color, and women who are not heterosexual, and basically any woman who isn’t straight and white. It has upheld a system of white supremacy by primarily serving that group, and it has made others invisible in its battles and on its front lines. It might not be the reason for World War III, but it is culpable and complicit in how some women are still marginalized and struggling while others are uplifted as the ideal of womanhood. I understand why some women of color have deep issues with it and refuse to identify as feminists. Feminism hasn’t started any wars, but its battles are mostly fought by self-righteous white women who don’t even realize that their work often only benefits people like them. When the big F has not cared about your unique issues, has not fought the extra layers of oppression that nonwhite, nonstraight women face, and has undermined your own efforts at seeking equality and freedom, you are probably in no rush to put yourself under its unwelcoming umbrella. I am a feminist in spite of all this, but many of my friends identify as womanists, understandably. Like Alice Walker said: “Womanist is to feminist as purple is to lavender.”

Too often feminists are fighting for women to live in a way that mirrors their own lives. As in, if you’re in middle America in middle management, you want other women to have your life. You’re not Muslim? You fight for women to not have to cover their heads as they worship. The assumption that women in hijabs are less enlightened or empowered than those rocking daisy dukes is arrogant at best. Feminism should fight for all women to have the right to live as they choose, not for all women to live the same exact lives like we’re all in some sort of Sims game.

Yet even with all these glaring issues, white women have claimed themselves the authority on feminism, and that is insulting. When feminism fights for the concerns of white women and not all women, it implies that white women epitomize femininity, which offends me.

We are not fighting for sameness in life. We’re fighting for equality. We are fighting for choice.

Way too many people have come to think of feminism as the belief system of hating or emasculating men. Misandry is not feminism, and if an eye for an eye makes the world go blind, we will all need service dogs if we try to fight hate with more hate. Wanting equal rights for women is not synonymous with wanting fewer rights for men, just like me having the option of ordering a salad doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to order red meat. The fight for equality on any front does not equate to the oppression of the oppressors. Thinking that feminism’s critiques of the patriarchy are somehow threatening to men as a whole is exactly why it is necessary. Feminism exists to level the playing field, because things are anything but fair, because patriarchy (and racism) permeates every part of our existence, and everyone who isn’t a straight white man suffers for it.

Why do people care who someone else loves or sleeps with as long as all are consenting adults? The way some people take homosexuality as a personal affront will never cease to amaze me. The way hateful shrews carry on and on about gay people, you’d think there’s some secret Make Everyone Gay Council that runs into every house where straights reside just to transform their curtains into rainbow satin. Some people are so chafed about it that you’d think they were being forced to have sex with someone they don’t want to in their own home as a result of the existence of gay people.

The idea that a large group of people being romantically attracted to someone of the same gender goes against nature is not only presumptuous but hella offensive. You’re telling countless people that their feelings are abnormal, so you’re basically thinking they’re perverse. This idea usually comes with the addition that man and woman is the only true couple because their combination keeps humanity going. No, a same-sex couple cannot conceive with each other, but procreation is not the only point of marriage and couplehood. If that’s the case, should a man or woman who has fertility issues be barred from marrying? Should older people (who are past birthing age) be shut down from saying “I do?” What about people who do not want children by choice? Did they waste marriage-license ink? Besides, you know what isn’t from nature? High-fructose corn syrup, and we clearly don’t care about that as we sip all our sodas and whatnot.

The book of Leviticus considers seventy-six things to be sins, including eating shellfish and pork. Nothing will come between me and my shrimp and lobster. I don’t eat bacon, but I bet some of you would rather risk the fires of hell than to stop eating that pork. Swine ain’t mine, but it is listed in the same chapter where gay ain’t the way. However, many people who argue against homosexuality citing this won’t give up their pig chew. Let me find out that there are levels to this abomination thing.

If we want to use the Good Book to justify hate, and Jesus preached love, at what point do we stop to reconcile that major discrepancy? It just doesn’t line up.

Stop hiding behind children, because they come out pure, and we teach them hate.

Anti-LGBTQ beliefs are not just a nuisance; they are deadly. Until we deal with them, talk about them, and commit ourselves to no longer excusing them, we will continue to endorse the deaths of people who dare to feel love that cannot be placed in the boy-girl, man-woman, or gender binary box.

People in the LGBTQ community are not the only ones who lose because of homophobia. We all suffer for it, because society’s greatest skill is othering people and oppressing them, and one type of bigotry only perpetuates the presence of other kinds. Accepting homophobia in society says that it is okay for hate to fly freely. It also tells a large proportion of the population that they are not good enough to exist without disapproval, disdain, and even violence. It hollers to the abyss that who you love can make you unworthy of love, and that’s heartbreaking. We gotta get our shit together, man.

I am a person of faith, and it is an important part of my life. However, being a person of faith has not stopped me from being critical of religion. I am in it and I am of it, but I side-eye it from time to time. Why? Because religion has been one of the most powerful and often detrimental institutions in our world, and its abuse has been responsible for much of the hurt we experience. This is why I must judge us, for using religion as a tool of mass control, discrimination, oppression, and hate-mongering for so long.