The Caudacity
no Google, I actually meant caudacity
You read that right, Google didn’t, I do indeed mean “caudacity.”
“The Caudacity.”
Much like #MasculinitySoFragile, I wasn’t the only one who thought of the idea. However, unlike #MasculinitySoFragile, it’s not like I came up with it without realizing someone else did first. With caudacity — sometimes also called caucasity — I was just another person stumbled upon it on my timeline and who popularized it. The caudacity, as newly defined by Urban Dictionary, is:
“Caucasian” + “Audacity”; The audacity of white people, persons, or privilege
This white girl had the caudacity to show up to this party with cornrows and beads in her hair.
Witnessing, experiencing, and avoiding caudacity is a daily experience. Whether I try to avoid it or not, I often end up debating with a white person about once a week. I have had to become a master of quantitative statistics and world history, and even then that won’t convince the well-intentioned benevolent racist. Given this reality, it is rarely worth writing about. However, I chronicle this story in detail to point out the Black folks, non-Black people of color, and white folks a few things I highlighted in my thread on twitter:
- caudacity knows no bounds
- caudacity has no rules (whiteness is moving the goal posts)
- caudacity is ahistorical violence, hate, and willful ignorance
Practical examples of caudacity include:
- telling anyone (Black folks, migrants, “ethnic whites”) to go “home” to their own country when this country was founded by immigrants
- tone policing the way the Black people violently and non-violently protest when this country was founded on violent revolutions, genocide, and imperialism
- creating racial stereotypes like the “welfare queen” when those who benefit the most from social services are poor white people
- perpetuating outdated beliefs about affirmative action as if white women were not the primary beneficiaries in the U.S.
- consuming Black cultural products and Black pain — such as the 24 hour news cycle of Black-folks-turned-hashtags — but carrying a deep dislike, distrust, and disdain for Black people themselves
- burning down Black Wall Street in Tulsa, OK, yet wondering why Black folks do not have intergenerational wealth
- celebrating white “dreadlocks,” “afros,” and “cornrows” on white-passing folks while simultaneously upholding racist workplace and school dress code policies that punish us for our own dreadlocks, afros, and cornrows.
- everything that happened with Sam White and the Daily Dot.
- taking offense to this piece, the tweets that inspired it, or these facts as if primary source documents and the Internet aren’t resources you can use to factcheck.
I could go on. But I’ll stop for now. Below you’ll find the backstory behind one of my most recent cases of caudaciousness, if you’re interested.
john aravosis originally ‘wanted to expose the racism of trump and his supporters’. Cool, let’s do that. Let’s all call out donald trump and his followers for their white supremacy. However reposting a photo of a lynched Black man is not the best way to go about it. At least, not without harming some Black folk in the process. I clearly had an issue with this and called him out:
John went on to defend his use of shock tactics, skipping over my critique that his tactics ignore the feelings of Black folks. I made it clear that he was committing further violence by reposting this photo. I simply wanted him to acknowledge that he was prioritizing the conscientization of white folks over the very real intergenerational trauma of viewing your ancestors lynched in postcards from the 1800s and videos from the 20o0s. He never acknowledged this (again, this is all public if you’d like to look for it). For some reason I thought I could reason with this white man until a friend showed me a previous tweet from him:
In addition to his anti-Black rhetoric, a friend also linked me to transphobic tweets full of strawman arguments. Yet when I called him out on this tweet with a “wow,” he took it as me mocking his attack. He went on to talk about the violence I was inciting against him. Search on twitter under “@anthoknees @aravosis” and you’ll find that this is infact, untrue.
My run in with John Aravosis was laughable until it was not. I was going to let it go, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the caucasity. What started as a joke of a hashtag for me (#TheCaucasity) made me really think about the gravity of the situation. Only a white man would be so audacious as to repost a photo of a lynched Black man, demand an apology, and then write about it on his own website as if he was the one harmed.
And generally I am not one to read the comments section, however it is curious that one of the readers of his website even calls him out on it:
Now, I know many of my friends may ask me: “why are you so obsessed with whiteness?” In short, it’s because I spent so much of my life apologizing for it and the damage it has done to the life of myself and others. Additionally, I wouldn’t care if true equity existed. But when I think of how ashy I used to be, I remember that I have to keep writing to stay alive and to remind others that this is a constant battle for which lying down is not an option.
Questions, comments, suggestions or love? Leave them here on medium or hit me up on Twitter (@anthoknees).
