White people can be committed to genuine social justice if blacksplainers stop making it so hard to be allies.
I’ve been learning a lot about the relative whiteness—or not—of the United States this year.
I’m working on a multicultural-focused sales campaign and before I call smaller regional U.S. companies, I check first to see how diverse their community is. If they say they’re not interested, I’ll have a good idea why.
I'm getting a feel for how pervasive the U.S.’s dandelion-seed demographic diversity is, clumpy in some areas, more homogenous in others. It can be crazy-making if you look too closely. A small town like Humble, Texas is far more diverse than I would have guessed, or maybe heavily white, depending on how you look at it. One could argue it’s almost equal parts black, white, and Hispanic, or perhaps white as fuck, with White (Hispanic) at 30.6%, White (Non-Hispanic) at 23.6%, Black at 31.3%, mixed+ (Hispanic) and Other (Hispanic), the rest.
White is white except when it’s not?
What the hell is a ‘White (Hispanic)’ anyway? If Hispanic is a category, and white is a category, then how are you white if you’re Hispanic, or vice versa?
What, because you ‘pass’? Is Ted Cruz not a White Hispanic because he looks suspiciously arroz con maiz-ish? Or does he have to ‘identify’ as white? That won’t work, being white is one of the few identities you don’t get to assume, because you don’t decide if you’re white. Others do, like it or not.
Other communities are a massive old-school typo correction fluid spill: South Beach/Florida, Madison/Maine, Presquille/Lousiana and Terre du Lac/Missouri.
Rhode Island, our smallest state, is super-pervasively multicultural, not just ethnically but LGBTQ-wise too: Ayuh, wicked good! But on the othah hand, the uppah New England states, ya cahn’t get theah from heah, ayuh, they’re a blizzahd of white people - Vuhmont, Maine and New Hampshah ah all at 92%-ish white. If it weren’t for all the mountains, you could go blind driving through any of these states on a bright summah’s day.
We do love our human constructs, don’t we?
Progressives argue race is a ‘human construct’; the biology of racial differences only existing because we buggered off from Africa.
White people seem like we’re the Lord God Kings and Queens of the Universe because, from the North American perspective, we clearly dominate. Until about 2044 anyway.
But we’re fast-tracking to a more multicoloured state of the disunion. Some white people are happily moving aside, while others get a sharp elbow, to make room for more seats at the table, which looks decidedly less Norman Rockwell-ish than decades past.
I mean, when three black women are bringing down the most powerful white man in America, it gets grating when certain voices in the ‘antiracist’ movement, clearly steeped in critical social justice theory’s obsession with privilege, slavery and white supremacy, carry on as though we’re still the Masters of the Universe, cracking the whip over Uncle Tom.
“I will not be bullied,” said New York Attorney General Letitia James. “And so Mr. Trump is no longer here. The Donald Trump show is over.”
When she’s done with him, and she’s put up with some hellacious abuse, racism and threats against her and her family, Fulton County District Prosecutor Fani Willis is waiting in Georgia to follow up on a baker’s dozen of felony counts connected to Trump’s conspiracies to steal the 2020 election. Thank Ms. Willis for that awesome, historical, already iconic mug shot meme bait no white man ordered. After that, Judge Tanya Chutkan is waiting for Trump in D.C. for the special counsel’s election case against him.
It’s gotta be killing the half-senile ex-businessman that black women now hold so much power over him, after putting up with former old white lady Nancy Pelosi pwning him for four years.
White power ain’t what it used to be, no, not even after Charlottesville.
Black Antiracists ‘Splain Things To Me
Some black activists love to blacksplain whiteness, white privilege and white supremacy. I may never understand fully what their lives are like, since I’m not on the receiving end of genuine systemic racism and, occasionally, real white supremacy, but they don’t acknowledge they can't know what our lives are like, either. They miss the ultimate intersectionality: The individual.
Intersectionality explores the layers of oppression and marginalization people suffer - e.g., white women are oppressed by gender, black women are oppressed by gender and race, gay black women are oppressed by gender, race, and heteronormativity, etc. Take this cumulative song far enough - and the progressive left can always be counted on to ride the oppression train over the earth’s edge - and you’re left with the intersectionality of the lone stranger.
No white person can understand the ‘black experience’, and neither can any given black person fully understand or appreciate the unique experience of any other black person, who came to where they are not just by skin color but also by different birth, families, education, immigration, personal tragedies and experiences, religious upbringing or not, neighborhoods lived in, class, economics, playmates, friends, cliques, dates, adult relationships, decisions, life choices, health, hopes and dreams.
We really all are, ultimately, individual snowflakes. And if we can’t literally comprehend living another person’s experience, we are all human beings, our default brains differing less than our melanin levels, and, apart from psychopaths, largely skewed towards empathy and understanding for others. Even babies as young as six months show an ability to empathize with another being victimized or suffering distress. A Parenting Science article notes that ‘babies prefer underdogs and do-gooders’ which I find tremendously heartening: The real value of social justice may be ‘baked into’ our brains at birth, hopefully not to be destroyed later by toxic ideologies and idiot compassion.
Suffering, marginalization, bullying, discrimination, and tragedy are human experiences we all share. I can feel kinship, as a white woman, with a black man who keeps losing jobs to suspiciously less-qualified white men, since I was looking for a job a few years ago at a time when anyone over fifty was considered hopelessly over-the-hill for any position in information technology.
Biological discrimination sucks regardless of whatever reason the Automatic Trash System is shit-canning your resume.
White people are not, regardless of what ‘woke’ huckstervists claim, automatic supremacist oppressors by dint of birth. ‘White supremacy’ is real, a consciously-adopted belief that white-skinners are given dominion over all the earth by God, as evidenced by the fact that Adam was white.
You have to agree to the belief.
When black activists tell us we’re unconsciously oppressing black people, even if we’re not actively doing it by choice, and there’s no way we can ever stop because we’re as hopelessly enmeshed in the white supremacist network as flies in a web, it makes many wonder what’s the point of getting a street gang together armed with broomsticks to tear the damn thing down.
Why bother trying to change anything? Why shouldn’t white people just throw up our hands, say fuck it, and leave for the gender reveal barbecue and marshmallow roast?
The Color Of Money
Not everyone believes in the eternity of white supremacy, or black helplessness.
I can even make a case for being more oppressed than Ibram X. Kendi, but it’s as stupid an argument as that I am oppressing black people simply by existing.
The most powerful color privilege isn’t found in your skin; it’s the green in your bank statement showing how many zeroes following a whole number exist in your balance.
I’m not sure what Kendi’s net worth is but I can honestly swear I’ve never earned $20,000 an hour for a virtual presentation on anything.
And Kendi doesn’t even have to know much to make that kind of scratch; he just has to trash talk white people in a way that would get a white person talking about black people cancelled the hell off Elon’s X Twitter.
I guarantee you Kendi’s words have far more pull than mine. I may be whiter than he but his bank account is a lot greener. He has clout and influence I don’t, despite being black. Despite having ancestors owned and abused by others. Despite not being part of an alleged racial supremacy secret off-Davos enclave.
Of course, by dint of his penis, he is still part of The Patriarchy (dun-dun DUNNNN!) So he does oppress me too, without even knowing it, I guess!
Ain’t nobody got time for that!
I have no patience with racism. I have no use for Trumpers, and I have no truck with whiny powerful black people teaching other black people to give up on the system, or burn it down, or most of all, to embody the problem they claim they want to solve.
I especially circumvent racists who demonize others as irreparably evil because of our skin color.
I can ponder genuine justice, and join with those black activists who believe, as I do, that the oppressed must take charge of their own lives, and develop themselves without expecting the Dominant Group (white people, or men) to hand everything to them.
Shelby Steele made that point over and over again in his classic work The Content Of Our Character: Black people must continue to fight for social justice, but it’s up to them to develop themselves; white people can’t do that for them.
That’s how I feel about Da Patriarchy, which occupies very little space in my brain. The Patriarchy, and white supremacy, have only as much power as we allow them to have.
That’s why my website is Grow Some Labia and not Why Men Suck. Because it’s time for all of us to take back our power and join together to make the world a better place than the small minds of extremism and bigotry can conceive.
As Sweet Brown famously uttered in her viral YouTube video, “Ain’t nobody got time for that!”
I heartily concur. We’ve got real work to do. Disempowered whiners, get out of the way!
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