Why Are White People More Eager to Talk Down To Black Folk Then Support Them?
This is a Question I am Seriously Asking
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I refuse to apologize for being poor and for being Black when the reason I’m poor is that my teachers deliberately sabotaged me, and my genetics made me this way.
That sounds like an excuse doesn’t it? “My teachers sabotaged me,” but they did. When I was growing up, and even today it happens, that teachers find their passion in bullying students, rather than teaching them. Yeah, I’m one of those.
Lots of white folks claim to want to be allies, but then when we create items for them to buy to support us, they don’t want to pony up. “Cute hoodie but damn that price.” But you’ll spend $500 on a Beyonce ticket? There was a time her tickets were $75.00 and we thought that was too expensive, and yet here we are.
You don’t want to watch the videos of what happens to us at the hands of cops, but you’ll take your kids to slasher movies and listen to true crime podcasts, without any problem whatsoever. But if you can ignore it, then you don’t actually have to deal with it, and folks…we see you.
I am exhausted from telling you how exhausted I am. The word has now lost all fucking meaning. It means nothing to me anymore because as much as I sleep — and it’s a lot — there’s still not enough sleep in the world, to fill the hole created by the trauma of yet another Black death at the hands of people who are empowered to kill Black folk.
From Breonna Taylor to Ahmaud Arbery and Devonna Walker and Tyre Nichols it never ends. It just becomes different degrees of bad, but it’s all bad. So the next time that you say you want to be, or that you are an ally, please make sure you actually know what you’re asking.
Being an ally is more than just using Twitter to share a hashtag or two, and the struggle with this is that a lot of white folk are genuinely terrified of attending protests or active movement zones, because we’ve seen how bad they can get.
Let me ask you this though: How do you think people of color — specifically Black people feel when we know that the FBI itself, has gone out of its way to set up protestors by leaving piles of bricks near protest sights in an effort to incite violence?
Yes, I am tired, but mostly I am tired of the bullshit. If you don’t want to ally then don’t ally, but get the fuck out of the way for those that do want to support us so that we know what we’re up against, as Savannah Worley wrote in her article about preparing yourself to watch the videos, we need to know what we’re up against, and if you’re a fake ally, we need to know that too.
We need to know what we’re doing and who we’re doing it with to keep ourselves safe. This isn’t just about raising our voices on the line. Our hearts have been literally broken. They are murdering us because of the color of our skin and they’re doing it in the most violent and viciously abusive ways possible.
The truth is there’s no way to truly prepare for violence by cop, but before you even decide what you’re going to bring to a protest, you need to prepare yourself to make sure you’re ready to truly ally.
Reporters have lost eyes at protests — by cops, not protestors — so it’s important if you are going to say you’re an ally, you’re actually ready for what that means….Are you?
Sending all my love,
Devon J Hall, The Loud Mouth Brown Girl
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