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Only someone so comfortably ensconced in privilege that they need to find ways to fabricate closeness to death to feel alive would leave their bed and blankets and house and clothes and city and the tens of thousands of years of civilization devoted to finding more efficient ways to protect us from the elements in the dead of winter to belly flop into a billion gallons of toxic ice.
I never feel more alive and closer to death than when I am pondering ways for whiteness to ruin my life.
encountering a white person intentionally oblivious to how being white in America is like being free to take an open-book exam on the same lesson materials that we weren’t even allowed to study for?
stepping back and interrogating exactly when, why, and how white supremacy and patriarchy converged to construct the feelings you’ve internalized and the acts sprung from them, and then reckoning with what you need to do to rectify that.
I just existed as a convenient proxy for all black people. Which, I surmised, was likely the case for most uses of nigger.
For many black American families, the dogged and grim pursuit of upward mobility—of the American dream being actualized instead of aspirational—cultivates a dynamic where performative mobility replaces actual mobility.
White supremacy is so gargantuan and mundane that sometimes its existence and its proficiency can’t be measured, addressed, or even seen without a stark change in perspective. It isn’t like gravity. It is gravity. It is a ceaseless pressure intended to keep blackness ground-bound and sick.
It’s just that blackness in America meant that setbacks, like my parents getting their car stolen in 1990, were tsunamis. It meant that there were and would always be environmental factors they needed to overcome. It meant a permanent cushionlessness where tripping and falling left broken bones instead of bumps and bruises.
If you maybe wanted to be seen as so straight, so manly, so masculine that you gave no shits about gay men, you’d perform tolerance and enlightenment with ironic homophobia. If you maybe wanted to be seen as so straight, so manly, and so masculine that your heterosexuality was too pure to risk a homosexual contagion, you performed hatred, adopting a rigid and unceasing animus toward gay men that you didn’t quite understand or maybe didn’t even really believe. But you did it because other people did it and told you that you were supposed to do it and that company was safer than what you feared
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If you’re just black, America adds a decade of age, a vat of sass, and a coating of Kevlar to your skin because of course niggers don’t feel any pain. If you’re poor and black, America acts like you emerge from the womb twenty-seven years old, with four kids, five predicate felonies, and a lit Newport already between your lips. White people get to be babies. And they get to still be babies when they’re adults. Poor black people are born Avon Barksdale.
And then maybe this white person would be so impressed by our diction and our behavioral deodorant that they’d tell other white people. And then the message that “blacks have finally turned a new leaf” would spread through whiteness like a virus or a really jolly casserole. And then racism: solved!
America has done such a number on us (and me) that I allowed myself to entertain this concept, that it was somehow our fault when white people were audacious and bold enough to use a word created by them, used against us, repurposed by us, and now forbidden to them. This conceit was furious enough to temporarily blind me, preventing me from recognizing the truth.
We alone possess nigga’s license, and the decision of whether to incorporate it in our language remains exclusive to us. I use nigga because I can. And, more importantly, because they can’t. I enjoy maintaining the exclusionary rights to it and using it freely and intentionally while they covet that liberty and trip over themselves while attempting to reckon with it.
That perpetual sense of boundless possession, of never having to seriously entertain the concept of no, of never feeling unwelcome, that urges them to act as if consequences are a thought exercise and ramifications are a hypothesis, coursed through me as the reality of the blackness of the president-elect—my black-ass president-elect—permeated the atmosphere. For the first two hours following the election of Barack Obama, I knew how it felt to be a white American. And you couldn’t tell my black ass nothin’.
This is one of the things that rape culture does. It places the wants and feelings and desires and fears of men on a pedestal, where the thoughts of men are the only thoughts worthy of consideration, and the thoughts of women are only to be considered if men are kind enough to grant them some space, and we construct our interactions on that imbalance.
None of these women were bound to me by blood or through sex. They’d just extended me the same empathy I denied them when I wrote that their sexual assaults might have been their fault, and I needed (and still need to) earn it.
We can be prejudiced, but actual racism is bias plus power
I am aware that white people are also susceptible to addiction. But they’re not as susceptible. Their world isn’t as stress-inducing. The myriad things to get addicted to aren’t as easily found where they live, aren’t as prominently advertised, and the resources to overcome those sicknesses aren’t as hard to find. And when addiction does cripple white communities, as it has with the opioid epidemic, they don’t get America’s fire and fury, as black neighborhoods devastated by crack did. They get pillows and twenty-three-minute-long Nightline profiles.
James Marion Sims, colloquially known as the “father of modern gynecology.” Sims is most famous for inventing the speculum and finding a cure for vesicovaginal fistula—landmark discoveries he made after hundreds of experiments on purchased and borrowed black female slaves. And since Sims either believed black women were unable to experience pain or just didn’t give a fuck about it, local anesthesia was never used. He ripped these women open—gashing their vaginas like old newspapers torn and twisted to light charcoal grills—and this motherfucker has monuments.
In April of 2018, the New York Times published an extensive feature on black maternal mortality, revealing that black women are four times more likely to die from childbirth and other pregnancy-related causes than white women are. Four times.
Trump’s win provided no grand epiphanies for me. Perhaps I underestimated the appeal of the preservation of white privilege and white supremacy, but the idea that racism is an essential and inextricable part of America’s identity is not particularly novel.
It’s just too fucking much to always have to be angry and alert. To always have to be ready and willing to challenge whiteness. To always have a perfectly pithy tweet or a thousand-word screed ready in response to the next Trayvon Martin, the newest Sandra Bland, and the latest Eric Garner, and to feel all the same feelings again. And again. And again. I just wanted a fucking break.
Just another week. Just another day. Just another election. Just another president. Just another Thursday. Whiteness in America exists and thrives in that just another space, where things will always be fine. Things will always be all right. Things will always work out.
she might eventually ask, “How?” How can she be whoever and whatever she wants to be if there’s a hulking and devious five-hundred-year-old force constructed specifically to prevent her from doing that?
“I don’t know,” I will tell my daughter if she asks me how it’s possible to be all of the things I’ve told her she can be if America is all the things I’ve told her it can be. “I don’t know how it happens. I don’t know how it’s possible. I don’t possess the level of intelligence necessary to understand how both those things can exist at the same time. But I know it happens, Zoe. I know it’s possible. I know you can and will be those things I said you can be.”
