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October 5, 2018 - January 4, 2020
be emotionally honest about how fucked up this world
“Anger,” she said, “is an appropriate response to racist attitudes.” #AudreLordeTaughtMe
White rage and white fear are reactions to perceptions among white people that their power might be slipping away.
Until the election of Donald Trump, very few Americans, beyond political scientists and analysts, paid attention to the fact that white women have a long history of voting predominantly for Republican candidates in presidential elections.
White people don’t share. They take over. They colonize.
Often, in the polling data that shaped the Trump campaign, white Americans cited the 1950s as America’s best decade. And perhaps the Leave It To Beaver years were really great—if you were white!
Black women are the least likely of any demographic (Latina and Asian women, white, Black, Latino, and Asian men) to receive responses to their dating profiles. This cultural and intimate hatred of Black women is a feminist issue, one that all feminists, Black and non-Black alike, should care about.
The obsession with curtailing reproductive freedom in this country is about forcing white women to be hyperproductive in service of reproducing a white Republic.
The anti-Blackness at the heart of white fear is predicated on a misrecognition of the humanity of Black people.
Donald Trump deftly used the narrative of national belonging to make some groups, namely white male voters (across class lines), feel visible, heard, and affirmed.
I once read that the root of all anger is fear, particularly a fear of those things we cannot control.
Skyrocketing childcare costs continue to disadvantage Black families, particularly in households like mine, headed by a single breadwinner mother. According to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, 60.9 percent of all Black families are headed by a single mother who is the breadwinner for the family. Another 20 percent of Black households rely on a married mother as the breadwinner.
When you felt anxious, you were supposed to speak back to your fears, reminding them that fear does not come from a divine place.
The U.S. Senate currently has three Black senators. That’s the most it’s ever had, and we are nearly two decades into the twenty-first century. In 2013, the median net wealth for white families was over $141,000. For Black families, it was $11,000. According to a joint study by the Institute for Policy Studies and the Corporation for Enterprise Development, it would take Black people 228 years to catch up to the amount of net wealth that white people currently possess. White people fear a fantastical rise of racial power that they have made damn-near structurally impossible for Black people to
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White fear of Black people is not limited to white Americans. It is rooted in the ideology of white supremacy, a virus that infects us all.
Curiosity is often the first casualty of the politics of fear. Sometimes the things we fear most are our questions. More specifically, we fear the questions to which we don’t have answers.
When we are afraid, we stop asking questions and start seeking short-term solutions.
If we cannot or will not ask questions, then we are far, far from the path to freedom.
Haven’t white folks learned that Black folks know them far better than they know themselves? Our survival is predicated on our willingness to study you, your impulses, your hard expressions, your laughter (and whether it reaches your eyes), your gifts, and your lies. Black survival means being endlessly obsessed with figuring out the depths to which white folks will fall to maintain a position of dominance.
Southern booty-shake music, the kind of stuff you can twerk to, is the place where I find the most productive synergy between the sacred and the profane, the place where I feel the most bodily freedom to let all my emotions—particularly the uncomfortable ones like anger and fear—hang out and find free expression.
When Beyoncé tells all the fly chicks to get in formation, she is asking us to get our shit together so we can do the work that needs to be done.
gives us a portrait of a Black woman reckoning with her rage, in both its intimate and its structural dimensions.
My love for books had taken me miles and miles away.
what was wrong with being a woman who preferred the company of her own thoughts much of the time?
At what point is it fair to ask men to act like grown human beings?
It’s not that white folks are less screwed up than we are. It’s that they have far more chances to get it right. White people have more access to marriage and partnership because they have more access to absolutely everything else: jobs, housing, safety, and wealth. In my small town, white girls started getting married right out of college. By the time I came home for the ten-year reunion, more of my white classmates were married than not. For my Black women classmates, the situation was exactly the opposite. In the ensuing years, many of these same white girls have gotten divorced.
Recognition is a human need, and there is something fundamentally violent about a world that denies Black women recognition on a regular basis.
Any man who treats women as ornamental clearly believes that outward decoration will hide inner deficiency. They have therapists for that.
We have to figure out how to commit to the fierce pursuit of joy with one another.
Lots of men have feminist rhetoric down, but many of them haven’t done the emotional work of showing up for a woman with dreams and visions of her own.
My mother believed in old-school parenting, which meant she didn’t believe it was her job to entertain me.
Somehow, we both moved along the trajectories that my town seems to set up for Black girls. Either you become an exceptional achiever, or you settle into a life of low-wage work and children. Exceptionalism or struggle should not be the only pathways available to Black people.
The trap and the burden of being exceptional is that your entire identity is wrapped up in being the only one.
Rage is great at helping us to destroy things. That’s why people are so afraid of it.
Joy arises from an internal clarity about our purpose.
May your rage be a force for good.
What you build is infinitely more important than what you tear down. When the struggle feels unwinnable, may you never forget this one thing:
