let’s stop coddling white feelings
we need to stop caring about “alienating” white folks
Dear Black folks,
Stop coddling white folks, their feelings, and their tears.
Treating anything white as if it was a harmless blessing has not gotten us anywhere, and despite what we have been taught, it won’t get us any further any time soon. Centering white feelings is an act of self sabotage that can only result in bad news for all parties involved. When we coddle white people, their feelings, and their interests, we put ours on the backseat. When we ignore our own needs to further the needs of the white folks who never really saw us as human, we are only doing harm to ourselves. Letting it slide for so long has created circumstances where we — Black folks — are called out of our name for vocalizing the violence inflicted upon us. Kiese Laymon says it better than I can when he writes that “Black churches taught us to forgive white people. We learned to shame ourselves.”
My life exponentially improved when I recognized that I’ve been tiptoeing around white feelings and apologizing for whiteness my whole life. Yours might, too.
Whiteness is a social construct created in opposition to Blackness, one that serves to protect the ruling class. We know whiteness is a social construct because it changes throughout cultures, time periods, and countries. Irish and Italian folks, for example, have only recently become white. In many (read: white supremacist) circles, Jewish folks are still not white, nor are Eastern Europeans. Whiteness is so taken for granted that one would think we were ludicrous if we suggested that Asian Indian folks are white, yet studying the case of Bhagat Singh Thind shows us how ridiculous the racial category of “whiteness” truly is.
We can talk about social science and ethnic studies theories, but we must also tap into our experiential and historical knowledge. My go-to example is Without Sanctuary, a whole book full of lynching postcards. The issue is that folks see that as “so long ago,” even though it wasn’t. A more recent example could be the mistreatment of Black people in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. But even that example draws detractors because we only see what we want to see. The hypocrisy of whiteness, however, is undeniable when we examine the unfair application of the law, the use of our bodies to feed the prison industrial complex, and the fact that people still kill us — on tape, no less — without any consequences.
The reality of our situation as Black folks is that we do not all have the luxury to tell those oppressing us to “fuck off.” There is a popular misconception that it is merely the white people in middle America and the poor white people who hate us. Don’t be fooled, the well meaning white woman was the one who voted in Donald Trump, and your non-Black person of color neighbor might be calling your mom a “nigger bitch” or a “wild animal.”
White folks and even some white-adjacent people of color are our bosses, our neighbors, our slave catchers (read: police), and sometimes even our family. It’s not as simple, which is why we often fall into a shucking and jiving routine that kills a tiny part of us each time we perform. We fall back on respectability politics. The politics of respectability are rooted in trying to survive, and survival within a profoundly anti-Black world is more than necessary. So, for those of us who cannot tell [FILL IN THE BLANK OF YOUR OPPRESSOR] to “fuck off” and to leave us alone because it “pushes away potential allies,” let me break something down for you.
If holding white people accountable for the harm they inflict “alienates” white people, then so be it. If calling out the harmful behaviors of anyone means that they’re gonna take their ball and go home, we probably don’t want to be playing with them in the first place.
If Becky the Snowbunny says “you’re really cute for a Black guy,” and you respond, “what do you mean for a Black guy,” and she gets defensive? That’s on Becky, not you. Becky might not understand implicit bias or interpersonal racism.
If Chad the Chill Ally keeps taking up too much space at rally that is a part of the Movement for Black Lives and he tells you “hey, I don’t deserve this, I don’t even have to help you,” then he ain’t a real one. Maybe he needs to learn to listen to hear, not listen to respond.
If a Bill the BernieBro tells you that “Bernie marched with MLKJ, so you have to support him,” you can straight up tell him to fuck off. Bill might not understand that he has a white savior complex.
In other words: white people need to start being accomplices and stop looking for damn ally cookies. We need to stop inviting white people to the cookout for simply wearing a #BlackLivesMatter shirt. The bar we set for white and non-Black people of color “allies” is so low that we pat them on the back and applaud them for not using the n-word, as if that is an achievement.
Everyone always asks me “what this means” for white people. What that means is doing the work, often silently. Did you know that a white man helped Bree Newsome scale the South Carolina flag pole? There’s a lot of ways that white people can help, they just have to stop taking up so much space when they do it, and we do not owe them kindness or trust.
White people do not live in our Black bodies and even when they are oppressed in some other way by ethnicity, gender, disability, or more, they still are not shot for sleeping in their car. There are a lot of things that one part of anyone’s identity can do to make them a target, but there ain’t much quite like Blackness in regards to limiting the music we can listen to in the churches of our own neighborhoods. This means that white folks can step up to help Black folks in whatever way they can (time, skills, money).
So if you, as someone working to live your Black-ass-life and/or dismantle interlocking systems of oppression, scare off white people? It’s not so bad, and you probably don’t need them. If pointing out the violence of whiteness makes someone white uncomfortable, they have some inner work to do. And it just might involve examining their white fragility. Why do we think they would be so bothered by a statement if it were completely false?
I firmly believe that Black Americans, as a group, do not owe respect, kindness, or forgiveness to anyone who seeks to do us harm. We’ve done that. It did not work. We keep doing it. It does not work.
Be that police officers or the descendents of those who hung us from trees with smiles on their faces, I want to limit any interaction with people who seek to harm me or my loved ones. And historically, white folks have always focused on self-preservation, often to the detriment of Japanese Americans, Jewish folks, Black folks, Indigenous folks, Chinese Americans, and a whole laundry list of more human life, plant life, and animal life. Capitalism in the west has been driven by whiteness, and it even harms white folks. If they are hellbent on self-preservation by any means necessary, then I think we might want to invest in self-preservation and self-determination — and that includes not babying violent, self-serving, and self-interested white people.
Recognizing that we are centering our abuser(s) is difficult. Choosing to stop centering our abuser(s) is liberating. Bottom line, white people are going to call us “ nigger” either way, so we might as well stand for what we believe in. And that’s the right to fucking live.
If you want more information and you have more time, feel free to check out my syllabus that may help you see how I came to understand why whiteness has never done us any good. Also, please click the heart below, as it helps others see this content. Finally, please consider tipping your writer (me) at paypal or cash.me. Be well.
