Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor

by Layla F. Saad

For example, when white people use AAVE, they are perceived as more woke or cool. When Black people use AAVE, they are seen as ghetto and less educated.

Cultural appropriation is collecting the parts of Blackness and Brownness that appeal to whiteness while discarding actual Black and Brown people. Lastly, cultural appropriation rewrites history with whiteness at the center.

During this second week, we faced the ugly beast of how white supremacy manifests through the myth of color blindness and the racism of anti-Blackness, stereotypes, and cultural appropriation.

White supremacy, therefore, is not a simple litmus test of whom you vote for or what relationships you have with BIPOC, but rather, it is a set of subtle behaviors, thoughts, and beliefs, often unconscious, that when put together make up a really scary jigsaw puzzle.

They define allyship as “an active, consistent, and challenging practice of unlearning and reevaluating, in which a person of privilege seeks to work in solidarity with a marginalized group.

Allyship is not self-defined—our work and our efforts must be recognized by the people we seek to ally ourselves with.”

The first thing to understand is that allyship is not an identity but a practice.

white silence, white apathy is not neutral.

White apathy lacks aggression, but it is deadly in its passivity. Through detachment and indifference to racial harm, white apathy says, “It’s really sad that this is happening, but it’s not my problem.”

White apathy is the choice to stay in the warm and safe comfort of white supremacy and the privileges it affords.

White Privilege The privilege of whiteness means not having to deal with white supremacy if one chooses not to.

White apathy is like a warm blanket that says, “This is too hard. Let’s go back to sleep.”

White silence and white apathy go hand in hand, feeding into each other.

Exceptionalism gives you a false sense of pride that is really white apathy in disguise.

Apathy here says, “I wish racism was not a reality, but BIPOC kind of bring it upon themselves because of who they are.” This kind of justification is bred from white superiority.

•Using the excuses of laziness, tiredness, fear, boredom, numbness, or perfectionism, turning away from the news,

•Doing very little antiracism work and therefore not understanding just how urgent this work is.

•Using your high sensitivity, high introversion, or mental health and personal issues to opt out of doing the work,

•Not taking personal responsibility for your own antiracism education

•Minimizing the effects of racism

•Being outspoken on issues not related to racism but silent on issues that affect BIPOC.

•Using the excuse that because you did not create white supremacy, it is not your job to work on dismantling it.

•Using the excuse that because the process of dismantling white supremacy is so overwhelming, with many parts out of your individual control, there is no point in even trying because it will not make an impact big enough to matter anyway.

Politicians who use the fear of “the other” to stoke up support are tapping into this fear of losing privilege.

White supremacy is telling you not to fight for what is right, not to involve yourself with the dismantling of a system that benefits you, because if you do, you will lose everything that makes you who you think you are—a person who has been conditioned to believe you are superior to people of other races.

It made me realize how white is seen as “normal” and nonwhite is seen as “other.”

This is an example of white centering—the idea that when a creation features mainly white people, it is for everyone, but if it features mainly BIPOC, it is only relevant to BIPOC.

White centering is the centering of white people, white values, white norms, and white feelings over everything and everyone else.

Under white supremacy, whiteness is centered as the norm. Everyone else is seen as marginal.

Self-centering is a natural thing that we all do as individual human beings. Our egos make us see things from a self-centered view: How is this important to me as an individual? However, white centering is a collective ego that asks the question how is this important to us white people? White centering dismisses all other narratives as less important,

•The overrepresentation of people with white privilege and white-centered narratives in movies, art, books, and other creative arenas.

•The overrepresentation of people with white privilege in positions of leadership and success.

•White fe...

•White saviorism

•Tone policing, as it asks BIPOC to speak in tones that are considered acceptable to those with white privilege.

•In antiracism work, the focus on how antiracism work makes people with white privilege feel over how racism makes BIPOC feel. White apathy is a form of white centering, as it is more focused on how tiring and overwhelming antiracism is for people with white privilege over how harmful and abusive racism is to BIPOC.

•The response of #AllLivesMatter or #BlueLivesMatter to #BlackLivesMatter, not understanding that the social justice movement would not have to exist if all lives were treated as if they mattered equally.

it is almost impossible to see the everyday racism that marginalizes and erases BIPOC through white centering. White centering is so normal that it barely registers as something that needs to be interrupted or disrupted,

Decentering whiteness means learning to stop upholding whiteness as the norm and instead learning to live and operate in a more inclusive way.

Enough that they could say they were trying but not enough to come anywhere near to real diversity and inclusion.

to satisfy the “look” of diversity without doing the deeper work needed for true inclusivity and representation.

Tokenism is defined as “the practice of making only a perfunctory or symbolic effort to do a particular thing, especially by recruiting a small number of people from underrepresented groups in order to give the appearance of sexual or racial equality within a workforce.”

In an effort to fix the problem of underrepresentation, organizations use tokenism as a handy Band-Aid to fix a problem that has much deeper roots.

But proximity to and even intimacy with BIPOC does not erase white privilege, unconscious bias, or complicity in the system of white supremacy.

Brand Tokenism When a predominantly white organization or event engages a few token BIPOC or uses BIPOC cultural elements to give the visual effect of diversity without being actually committed to inclusion or antiracism in practice or policy.

Storytelling Tokenism When BIPOC characters are used on-screen to give the visual look of diversity or to supplement the main white characters.

Emotional Labor Tokenism When a person or group of people with white privilege or a predominantly white organization places the burden on token BIPOC to carry the emotional labor of discussing and working on all matters related to racism, thus reducing them simply to their race.

Relational Tokenism When a person with white privilege uses their proximity to and relationships with BIPOC as proof that they are not racist:

In all cases of tokenism, BIPOC are used as token props to prove one’s nonracism. It goes without saying that this is dehumanizing because it strips away BIPOC’s humanity and treats them as “get out of racism free cards” that can be whipped out at any time.

Tokenism of BIPOC is a white supremacist act because it still places BIPOC as objects that can be used to further a white person’s or organization’s agenda, and it protects people with white privilege from having to do the work of disrupting white dominance.