Dear White People,
In case you haven’t noticed, POC haven’t been exactly having a good time for centuries now. Sure, we’ve made great music, art, literature. Sure, everything we do is trendy. Sure, the cultures we come from are “inspiring” and “close to the earth”, and make you want to appropriate them nonstop. But that doesn’t mean we’re having a good time. In fact, we’re having quite the shitty time. While our men clear your yards, our women clean your houses. Barely any of us sit at the table of liberty and justice for all. Instead, we have reservations at “Occupy Doggy Bowl”, lapping up the moldy seconds and scraps you don’t want. When we fight for the right to have our cake, you secretly fill it with broken glass but give it a very nice icing. Sometimes it becomes very hard to survive on ethnic pride, because we’re often sharpening our knives of pride in case a White Supremacist attack is on the way (it usually is), and our oysters of pleasure are typically harvested from rivers stained red with the blood of our ancestors for the sake of “a more perfect Union” and the “national honor” which upholds the “peculiar institution” of the lives you live on “our home and native land” taken from the hands of people who did not ask for “first contact”.
This is the reality we live. Everyday. Whereas you may fear not being able to afford that $300 a plate cruelty-free feast at some swanky hotel for the “benefit” of “starving African children” that your White governments systematically destroyed by taking the continent’s people and sifting them around like toys, we fear our children will be grabbed from their cars and shot down in the street for “fitting the description”. And they are. We did not ask for any of this. But you’ve made it clear you’re the Head Bitches In Charge, so why not just sit back and let you do your dirty work without taking action? Without writing or letting our justifiable anger be felt? Because our ancestors didn’t suffer for nothing. Justice will come swiftly and surely. And by remaining silent, we shame them. By remaining silent, we are giving White Supremacy permission to do its dirty work and even tempt many of us over to its tactics with glasses of wine laced in the blood of our own people.
So perhaps this is why whenever we are talking about things relating to our ethnic experiences, you believe we are spreading hate and anger? Because too many of you have been bred to believe that any and all things outside of the box of Whiteness are tools of conspiracy and sedition, even up to the hair on top of our heads. But, why? Why should you be afraid of us? What have we done except fight against the forces which seek to take our livelihoods away, and seem to be ever on the rise? Aye, there’s the rub. You believe there are no forces. That our experiences are fabrications. That White people are systematically disenfranchised by the institution which is made to look like them in every way. This is a falsehood.
When we are speaking about things relating to our people, don’t equate it with hatred or anger. We are just talking. How people talk. Humans can only take so much. Anger is natural and normal. However, rather than taking the time to learn something from what we have to say, you jump to the defense, because you know it’s threatening preconceived notions about POC-ness you have picked up from this supremacist culture we now dwell in. Because it’s placing a clamp around the neck of Whiteness, and the clamp has no key or bolts to be undone. The clamp just stays where it is, forever expending pressure until you learn, or until the skin breaks and blood of confusion runs everywhere and the muscles tear against the serrated metal.
When you say things like, “I don’t see race”, you are flaunting your privilege. If someone is living in a certain ethnic experience that comes along with how they look, they are living in it, every single day. If you don’t see that, or respect that because you don’t consider their ethnic culture to be important to you for mentioning, then that’s nothing short of scandalous. There’s nothing wrong with recognizing someone’s ethnic background. It is just a big part of people’s identities as gender, religion, culture, nationality, politics, philosophy, etc. Saying that “I don’t see you as xyz, I just see a person” is in effect saying, “your ethnic identity takes away from your personhood”. That’s called erasure. Don’t practice it.
Please. Learn. Love. Read. Grow. Share. I want to see people’s hearts and minds and souls evolving, not stagnating. Ashé.
(via note-a-bear)
