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willingly exposing yourself to frostbite, hypothermia, and the trillion-year-half-life Mon Valley isotopes floating downstream is about as “that’s some white-people shit” as “that’s some white-people shit” gets. 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.
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?
blackness doesn’t just find space but conjures beauty in a country specifically constructed to crush them.
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.
blackness in America meant that setbacks, like my parents getting their car stolen in 1990, were tsunamis.
It was just easier to lie and be the person I assumed I was expected to be instead of admitting I wasn’t.
What mattered more than his résumé and his studiousness and his swag was the fact that this nigga had a chance. And not a “chance” the way Jesse did in 1988. But a real actual chance that enough of these white motherfuckers would treat him like a white motherfucker for him to win. Which is all we wanted. A nigga with a chance. Someone who might possibly maybe potentially actually win. I could’ve, in all honesty, given two fucks about his politics. Once I discovered he (A) was black and (B) had a black-ass wife and (C) could win, then as long as this nigga wasn’t Strom Thurmond in beigeface, I
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the fatigue I possessed from either rooting for the Washington Generals or being asked to support the least racist racist and hope they wouldn’t be racist-racist when elected had congealed.
For the first two hours following the election of Barack Obama, I knew how it felt to be a white American.
This is why rape culture is a misnomer, because culture doesn’t go far enough. It’s not just a culture, it’s an atmosphere. It’s not just an atmosphere, it’s an amniotic fluid that soaks and brines and feeds and shapes us.
She shares my general philosophy about white people, which exists as a repetitious vacillation between bemusement, annoyance, fury, and pity, and is a vital core value for any appropriately aware black person to possess.
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.
And I can’t discern if this parasitic relationship was typical—if sons take from their mothers because that’s just what we do—or if our relationship was unnaturally pathogenic. I think about how neither of those options is good.
Black women have grace too. But grace is just another way of praising them for being strong for everyone else while also juggling and then ignoring the urge to firebomb the entire fucking planet.
Nowhere that I can have a moment of respite—a house party, a family reunion, a conversation with a friend at a bar or in my car or in a house I own—without knowing that relatively safe and superficially black space is enveloped by whiteness.
so cognizant of our prolonged state of houselessness. Of being othered.
all the negotiating and navigating it requires to exist while black and relatively sane.
Although the thuds and claps of thunder sometimes induce tension in me, I no longer duck under tables and dive into coat closets when I hear a storm approaching. I have matured. I am brave. I am a functional fraidy cat.
And she will also know that her grade of blackness cannot be determined by how quickly she takes to Spades, how easily she learns to Wobble, or how interested she is in rap music. She will know that there’s no such thing as grades of blackness. She will know that she was born black, and there’s nothing she can do to not be black, and that if she chooses to do or be a thing—anything—that thing is officially “black enough” by virtue of her deciding to do or be it.
the man who was elected president in 2016 was anointed because of whiteness’s urgent desire to preserve its supremacy and be elevated above the nigger, even if that elevation is self-destructive.
