DEAR WHITE SUPREMACIST WHITE WOMEN
Please stop supporting Donald Trump. Please stop acting on retrograde ideas. Please stop calling the police. Please stop being reactionary in defense of your white privilege. Please stop being fearful of anyone who looks different than you: Black or Brown or Chinese or Indian or Syrian or Muslim in a headscarf, or…or….
I have a few suggestions for you if you cannot control your retro white heart and mind:
Start thinking that people of color belong wherever they are — and they are not pushing you out of your neighborhood, or anywhere, for that matter. That they are not stealing, or planning to take anything that is not theirs, or that is yours. Start thinking about how you are the interloper.
To the woman at Yale who when she saw a Black woman, Lolade Siyonbola,
sleeping in the commons room and thought this unusual my first thought is, why? She could have first checked to see that Lolade was ok, and that she intended to be asleep. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2018/05/10/a-black-yale-student-fell-asleep-in-her-dorms-common-room-a-white-student-called-police/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.9668463ad7fbAfter all, she might have been working on a project with a deadline and needed someone to wake her up. If not and she meant to be napping, you could have just minded your own business. It is just an outrage that you called the police, but even more than calling the police — why in the world would you assume she did not belong where she was? The only thing you could have been thinking, and acting on was that you thought she did not belong where she was — that she had no right to be there.
By the way, my first rule is to never call the police — especially when nothing harmful is happening, other than your thoughts. There are usually 10 other things that should be done before the police are called. And even then —
Sarah Braasch, the white woman who called the police called them because she is a white racist. Positions she has taken bespeak her sense of a false equivalence in issues like hate speech and other understandings of race/ism in America. There is no equivalence when it comes to the rapacious abuse of chattel slavery or white supremacy. There are not two sides to these stories. In the instance at Yale, Sarah does not get to do what she did. There is no acceptable explanation.
The continual exposure of white supremacists in their daily accusations and actions creates a hyper sensualized and extremist moment. So in these explicitly racist moments, and their continual exposure — from Starbucks to the Waffle House to the Air B and B, etc. it leaves no middle ground. White supremacists are destabilized in this realm. They are hostile and enervated. So it is time for anti-racist white people to speak up, intervene, and be bellicose.
As I said there is no middle ground. There is no safe place. Silence is absolutely on the side of white supremacists. So this is not a time for avoidance or liberalism by white anti-racists. Liberal discourse is absolutely not enough in these radically extremist racist times — where Black and brown people are being surveiled and abused and killed in every aspect of their daily lives. Conversation and sensitivity training is hardly enough. It is time for more to happen.
White supremacists are sure that the people of color hate them because they would hate themselves knowing the outrageousness of what they do. If you are anti racist you have no need to fear people of color, or anyone for that matter. So — white supremacists fear that people of color will take their power and punish them the way they punish. But I think this is not true.
In the world that is coming — hopefully — where white supremacy no longer defines the lives of people of color and white people alike in terms of power and privilege people of color will use imaginative ways of being, as they already must do. They know what oppression and racism feels like. They know how it destroys the fabric of life so instead hope to rearrange the world. But for a white person to believe this, they cannot be a white supremacist.
So, there are not two sides, or two choices. The only choice for white people is to mobilize against white supremacy. Please.
