Oppression, Privilege Complacency and Community: Whiteness
This is the first of five pieces looking at how the personal and the political come together in our “diverse” communities. They provide specialized insight into the hard truths that marginalized identities face while encountering oppression in the most intimate settings. Whether it be race, sexuality, disability, gender or class, these interactions are difficult. They are real, raw and usually, never easy. So the question is how do you overcome oppression when it is lying next to you in bed?

I was born surrounded by whiteness. Let’s be real, I was born in Minot North Dakota, of course I was born surrounded by whiteness. Everything around me was white and, as I grew up, the whiteness around me blinded me from what it truly was, oppression. That’s what so powerful about systemic racism, once it becomes a norm it takes a lot for you to unlearn it and I was really good at playing into the system. But, like most people of color, you learn the hard way that you can never win at a system that was not built for you to succeed.
It took me 20 years to love my blackness and I am still attempting to untie myself from the constraints of whiteness. I bought into the exploitation of my own body through benevolent racist comments like “the only way you are getting into college is through your running so focus on that,” to the point that I attempted suicide after I got injured my senior year of high school. I thought acting stereotypical would be my buy in to popular circles and get me girls. Can you even imagine that adorable face in the above picture trying to act hard? Yeah, me neither. But before all of that I began loving whiteness in my white friendships, my white relationships, even my white idols and, up until now, I never questioned a thing.

So this epiphany brought upon a question that I have struggled with since May. I wrote this article countless times in my head trying to capture the pain, frustration and overwhelming exhaustion that encompassed white relationships for me. I took to Twitter and Facebook to figure out why whiteness and the relationships with white people that we have are so hard. I knew it was going to be emotionally taxing, I prepared for the worst but I was not ready to feel the interconnected burden that white relationships have on people of color at every level. My inbox began flooding with white rage and guilt that I was not capable of dealing with alone. Then I realized the pattern of my past and everything started falling into place. I picked up the themes that seemed to continually come up and tried to mend the well deserved wounds that I gave to whiteness. I realized I was on to something that we never talk about because who has the emotional energy to explain their humanity in this way to a friend/partner/coworker/etc?

What I found were four indisputable truths that are shared by many people of color while encountering white relationships. As much as I want to be able to define them in a neat succinct format, it is much easier to elaborate on the four most powerful comments that I identified with. If you want to look at more you can check out my public Facebook post here.
“Having to defend my perspective as a black person living in this world when they question the validity of a comment I make. Then after I back up my argument with a long, drawn out explanation, they resort to calling my behavior as overly sensitive or perpetuating the problem by focusing too narrowly.” -Anonymous
The biggest tactic of oppression is rewriting history by silencing the voices that worked so hard to move us forward. The whitewashing of Martin Luther King Jr. is the first act of manipulation I see when defending my perspective as a person of color. Every white person who does not understand why #BlackLivesMatter exists or thinks the revolution happened because of peaceful protesting will throw a King quote at me or ask for factual evidence about my experience or tell me I am overreacting because it would happen to them too. When discussing relationships I have an amazing example. I remember this like it was yesterday because of the way that it dropped a wall in between me and my, still, best friend. I had a really really really hard time after Philando Castille’s murder and that whole day I was extremely messed up. I came home to the place I was living at and I was visibly distraught. I am horrible at asking for help but all, literally all, of my housemates knew why I was angry. They also were mostly white. I had to reach out for comfort on Twitter and cry into my phone that night. I still believe to this day they never thought once to support me or ask what was wrong. That was the last time I expected a white person to ever validate my experience.

“It’s hard sharing space with white people because white people don’t recognize how much whiteness influence is or impacts the way they are taught to be in community. White folks don’t know how their whiteness has impacted the way that they are taught to be a friend, a partner, a co-worker, Etc.” -Jameelah Jones (@sunnydaejones)
I feel like this is a sitcom that I live in daily. I am currently typing this portion in a gentrified coffee shop listening to the baristas complain about crime in the area and I have rolled my eyes twice. I do not get the luxury to have these visceral reactions in front of my white friends. This summer, for example, I worked in an office with a lot of queer white people. It was safe until it was not, in a lot of different ways, but I can pinpoint the exact moment I realized racism was present in the space. A coworker was listening to me have a conversation with two other white coworkers about the difference between race and ethnicity (it is one of my favorite talking topics to be honest) and he said nothing until the very end. Then he states “Well Isaac, I think it is pretty racist that you do not believe reverse racism doesn’t exist” and I was shook. The other black and brown people in the room whipped around and had a whole telepathic moment of rage. I was so overwhelmed with trying to control my emotions I started singing the ABCs to myself because everything in my body was telling me to go off.
This person thought he was being funny because whiteness allows reverse racism to be funny. Whiteness allows reverse racism to be a joke made by a white person to a person of color followed by white guilt when the white person is accosted by angry black voices. Plus the anger is not warranted because whiteness tells you the anger is not necessary because it was just a joke. A joke in a white society that was micro-aggressive even if this person would have been my best friend. Which brings me to my final point. Every single one of my white friends have been micro-aggressive to me. Even the ones who have actively worked their best not to. It is an expectation that never fails and usually never addressed with the person. It just adds a layer to the wall that I build for my safety.
“The way they stare at you…or feel the need to overly affirm the things you say and do. Like are you doing and saying these things because you really believe what you’re speaking or is it to quell my doubt in these interactions. Are you trying to prove it to me or yourself?” -Morgan Fountain
I feel like this a version of gaslighting that whiteness formulated as allyship and I hate it. The way that a white person will bring up an example of their other friend of color when I talk about my experience with police brutality or when they mention a quote from Barack Obama to back up my statement on institutional racism, I have a list. I think the most infuriating thing about this is that it feels like you are slowly being tokenized by a person you care about. I have had a multitude of conversations with people of color close to me who feel idolized by white people because of the work they are doing when caping for us is not the answer. I am a human, the magical negro trope is overused and exhausting. I make mistakes and I have so much learning that I must do outside of my own experience. It happens once a day where I feel obligated to uplift white guilt or play into white fragility because my love for a person outweighs my emotional burden of living in whiteness. I can never be fully honest with my white friends because I am constantly concerned that they will run away from me. I just do not want a bullseye on my back due to my blackness! I even tried to make an excuse while typing this because of where I position myself at as an educator but that does not matter, I am not your personal melanin google!
I am not a tool for validation for you. I am not an answer book to the questions that confuse you about a community you do not belong to. I am not a reference point that you use to make yourself marketable in a specific space. I am not immune to ignorance and you should know this at this point if you are truly my friend/partner.

“Because even when they “get it”, they don’t REALLY get it.” -@maiipower
This point is the hardest for me to deal with because it is the one that I deal with the most now that I tend to be in more social justice based spaces. I like to illustrate this point by telling stories about classroom interactions or when I realize I am being tokenized by my white best friends/friends/acquaintances/random people I meet. I had a professor once save me from four years of academic hell during my undergraduate days. They were my favorite professor turned advisor and I Stan’d them so hard. This professor could do no wrong and they ate up anything I said in class. They probably wrote the most profound letters of recommendation for me too! I owe them so much but this one day they fixed their mouth to ask me “Can I say the word?” One of my close friends at the time, who was sitting right next to me, picked up on what she was putting down way faster then I did. I just kept repeating “what word?” while my friend, who is a person of color, kept repeating no over and over again. The thing that snapped me out of my utter shock was when a Becky from across the room said “just say it” and this professor said “ni-.” I never have said no so forcefully in my life. This person, one of the people I admired most in the academy, who was the social activism shoulders I stand on really tried it. They were white and, to this day, did not get it.
Also, do not introduce me to problematic white people. This is my biggest pet peeve. Most of my “woke” friends who are white always end up introducing me to a white person I end up wanting to fight by the end of the night. I love meeting new people, I am so good at new people but I am tired of code switching to keep the peace when whiteness gets to run rampant. Debrief your white friends before you try and introduce me to them and repeat the debrief three times for blind dates (I still do not know how I did not throw my drink in his face after he asked me if eating me out tasted like chicken).
This is not the end of the world for interracial co-inhabitance and if you somehow came to that conclusion, you missed the point. A shared camaraderie between POCs over whiteness should not cause white folkx to give up on all their POC friends but do the complete opposite. Reach out, try harder and love the best way you can. It can be wrong but, in my twenty three years of living, I learned that trauma can not be avoided. I may complain about the way whiteness complicates my life but I would rather be in charge of choosing the path of least resistance with good white friends/partners/co-workers/etc. This is not the end but, possibly, a better beginning.
-I
As I mentioned before, you can access the complied list of white relationship “difficulties” here.
Also thank you to everyone who contributed to the list, you have my unconditional gratitude for existing even when it is hard.
If you like what you read please comment and like. If you wanna discuss the topic all handles on social media are @alltimeisaac. If you trying to pay a brotha click here or here! Got ideas you wanna collab on? Hit me up and we will see what we can come up with. Love, peace and cocoa butter based hair grease.
