racism & feelings
An anonymous person called me a nigger cunt yesterday and told me to kill myself. In all caps. I stared at it for a few seconds and then deleted it. What else is there to do? There were a couple more. I’m sure by the same person. I deleted those too.
It’s amazing how much a black woman’s anger and perceptible disillusionment (in other words, my feelings) can anger racists in such an undermining sort of way that they feel the need to be so upfront in their attacks. A white person don’t wanna know that I don’t need whites to feel good. I don’t want whites to make me feel good. I don’t care for white people’s approval and respect. They ain’t ready.
That ruins everything.
White supremacy needs blacks to be emotionally dependent on whites, to only filter their emotions through the eyes of whites. I am supposed to be Mammy, you is smart, you is intelligent…forgetting all about me. You didn’t mean to step on my neck, so we’re still cool people.
Blackness is the shadow to whiteness, that inflates whites and allows them to feel bigger and smarter than me. Cutting the cord takes away the mirror. Suddenly, they find themselves standing beside their equal. In every way. I have my own feelings, separate from how I’ve been taught to feel. I have my own inner life, that is divorced from white supremacy. And now I’m a threat.
A black woman’s feelings upset the whole construction of racism. The reason racism works is because the black person is dehumanized and that process strips him or her of an internal existence. An internal existence consists of feelings.
I quickly figured out that I confused white people when I would openly show my unadulterated feelings. I am not supposed to feel. Thomas Jefferson wrote a long time ago, in the Notes on the State of Virginia, that unlike whites, blacks did not think. We were like animals, instinctual only. No inner life. The reason why caricatures still thrive today, is because this ideology has been perpetuated to modern time.
That’s why my writing is so transparent. My posts sound exactly like I’m talking to someone. I don’t attempt to demonstrate anything less than what I’m fully thinking, in my posts.
I’ve been angry. I am a little angry right now. I am getting a lot of flack for being angry. And all of this has made me realize, that I’mma be angry whenever I feel like it.
White people are cool when they lie and use stereotypes to make a black woman angry. But it absolutely terrifies them when they encounter a black women who is so in tune with her feelings, with her anger, that it is impossible to circumvent or caricature it. You can’t reduce me to a stereotype.
But you can call me a nigger cunt. A nigger bitch. You can get me thinking of my mother ancestors hanging from trees and being raped by white men and being stripped of her man and their children. And you can get me to sink in the heaviness of those ancestral memories for a moment.
But you really can’t reduce me to a thing. To a Strong Black Women or an Angry Black Woman. I have feelings too.
Ya’ll ain’t ready. But that’s cool, because I’m ready. Been ready to be seen as a human since I was born.
Cosign!
(via karnythia)
