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Let’s pause for prayer:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the caucastic dis of a mediocre white man to think I can just say whatever I want. 

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Amen.


Some people know things. Some people say things.

While the Venn diagram of thing-knowers and thing-sayers often intersect, people who don’t know shit are often bamboozled by people who use big words to say stuff about a particular subject as if they know what they’re talking about.

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This is how auto mechanics separate you from your hard-earned dollars by explaining how your catalytic converter needs an overhaul when all you actually need is a $3 battery cable. It’s how “holistic healers” convince you that their proprietary blend of acai berries and organic black seed oil makes you sweat out the toxins that produce stomach fat (it’s all about antioxidants). And, of course, it’s how conservatives make their fellow whites believe racial inequality isn’t caused by slavery, Jim Crow and the slew of well-documented disparities in every structural institution in American society.

The truth, according to white people, is that America is not a racist country. To them, racial inequality is not the compound interest of white supremacy. It’s that Black people don’t want to put in the work. After two-and-a-half centuries of forced labor that filled the overflowing coffers of white America, Black people just spontaneously misplaced their work ethic and stopped taking responsibility for their actions.

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Oh, white people are able to say things about racism. Even if it makes no sense, it sounds great to people who don’t know shit about racism. People who prefer Fox News, NASCAR and Nextdoor threads find comfort and absolution in rants about bootstrap-pulling, unwed mothers and Black men’s failure to properly belt their oversized pants.

The idea that Black people have created an entire academic curriculum to make themselves victims is a product of the white imagination. White people can wax philosophical about why they think Black people are wrong, but they can never explain the logic behind their asinine suggestions.

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Perhaps the most persistently caucastic notion in the history of whiteness is that everyone from W.E.B. Du Bois to Malcolm X to Martin Luther King Jr. to Ida B. Wells to James Baldwin to Ta-Nehisi Coates have individually created a hegemony of Black victimization in the hopes that white America will give us something in exchange for four centuries of oppression.

What do we win from “playing the victim”? Sympathy? Reparations? Pity?

If there is anything Black people know, it is that white America has never, ever given a microscopic fraction of a fuck about us. Not slaveowners. Not the terrorists during Reconstruction. Not the upholders of Jim Crow. Not the segregationists who spat in our children’s faces. Not the vote suppressors. Not the white liberals. Not the conservatives. Not the patriots or the apostates or the Christians or the atheist or the Republicans or the Democrats or a single white who benefits from the supremacy of whiteness. Any white person who disagrees is actually proving my point.

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Or maybe I am wrong.

Maybe, we’ve been making this stuff up. Maybe all the smartest Black people who ever lived are not as smart as these two mustard-eaters who went on television and got punched in the mouth by facts. You can even watch the unedited bodycam footage of their slaying.

May they rest in power.