Queenie

by Candice Carty-Williams

I knew Darcy hadn’t meant it, and she was only guilty of it this one time, but I wished that well-meaning white liberals would think before they said things that they thought were perfectly innocent.

Don’t get me wrong, I love a well-meaning white liberal; but it’s a lot. I remember having to turn my phone off when Breanna Taylor and George Floyd were murdered by the police, and suddenly Black lives finally mattered and all the well-meaning white liberals who had my number would message me asking me how they could be better, how they could do better, what they could read, if this thing they said to me three years ago was racist, etc etc etc. What Queenie is articulating is that while the things that well-meaning white liberals say, and the questions that they ask, are harmless, there is a toll on us, the Black people that they’re talking to. It is often emotionally expensive to have to educate the people in our lives when it comes to the experiences that we have to live.