I feel like I can’t talk about race ever, because I’m surrounded by white people. Honestly, fuck my school for that reason. I would be tragic, if I wasn’t aware that the matrix is real and white. So I am not tragic, but I’m tragically playing a game in the matrix – getting a stem degree. I don’t even feel like playing anymore, but I’m so close to beating the game, it would be a waste to quit.
So anyway, here is me. I live an uncomfortable narrative, running around the ivory tower of academia. In this space, I’m not brown enough to be a token, and I’m not white enough to fit in to begin with.
So then what’s with white people wanting so badly to be observed being antiracist? I don’t think racist words are the worst thing in the world. To start, I think racist actions are much worse. Let me find out that the people giving me annoyed looks just for sharing their sidewalk are the same people preaching to save DEI. It’s confusing times.
A white woman is sitting there telling me how much she knows about Black history (telling me things I already know) and suggesting authors and antiracist books to me…but she doesn’t even know me well enough to know I minored in African-American studies. She’s making me uncomfortable, like she thinks she’s educating me. Maybe she thinks she’s proving to me she’s not racist. My minor in Africa-American history saved my life and helped me realize that maybe I’m not inherently worthless, that sometimes even people who love you see your race before your humanity. So forgive me, but that white woman made me uncomfortable…like she won a contest I didn’t know was happening. She didn’t want to relate or listen; she wanted to educate me, either about her not-racism or about race. And either way, that’s a problem in my head.
I see a problem when a white person is trying to create a dynamic where they educate someone browner than them about race issues. No matter how much “effort” they make to study race, no matter all the fancy words they know and trending history they learn, they will not understand race as deeply as someone browner than they are. Education will always be a privilege, so having more of it does not make you better or bigger than anyone else, especially when education itself has race and gender dynamics.
Inherent dynamics just exist sometimes. Men will never fully understand gender issues, and white people will never fully understand race issues. Whiteness and maleness will always benefit from the system that was designed just for them. In the extreme case, this is why consent is nonexistent in relationships between enslaved people and masters.
So who built this society? The answer shows who benefits from the society.
The white woman’s best friend came to America for college. The friend is an Asian woman who grew up in Asia, so her Asian-ness is appreciated. She can provide culture for the white vultures looking to prove something. I feel a mix of rage and jealousy. She is ignorant about being Asian-American and she reaps every benefit I don’t. She acts like she understands race issues, she leads all the diversity positions…but if she really understood the dynamics of American racism, she wouldn’t be offended by me, she would empathize with me. I wanted to be friends, but she made me feel not white or Asian enough to be her friend…the gag is, white people treat me like I’m browner than her, but Asian people treat me whiter. I’m tainted according to both worlds. In America, her skincolor, her dialect, her assimilation into being the palatable Asian-American that Americans want..it all benefits her.
I was raised on Black and Latin cultures, because I’m brown and proud from the south. The Asian woman’s assimilation efforts lead her to appropriate my mannerisms and accent for convenience and aesthetic, but she can’t copy my raising. Nobody respects that part of me. My persona and culture are not an act, so I can’t turn it off, and I get punished for that. I’m the wrong kind of Asian. Too watered down to be culturally beneficial, too culturally southern to be palatable for whites. But she’s the right kind of Asian. How am I supposed to handle that? You see how the white culture puts us against each other? At the end of the day now, I feel overseer vibes from her, so I lack trust anyway. I don’t blame her, but…white people like how white she is, and honestly, so did the culture she grew up in. We don’t relate.
For sanity, grounding, and a sense of self and stability, I channel: Kimberle Crenshaw. Nikole Hannah-Jones. Angela Johnson. Malcolm X. N.K. Jemisin. Whoopi Goldberg. Megg the Stallion. Kid Cudi. Dave Chapelle. Katt Williams. Spike Lee.
(Reader, does it make you feel something, the fact that I am not Black but my idols are? Why though? What if I were Black, and said I was channeling Samuel Adams, or Albert Einstein, or Madonna, or Susan B. Anthony. You might simply ignore the fact that these people had racist ideologies and say their impact and status transcends race – that there are no ‘analogs’ to these people in other races. But my Black references are much more deserving of inter-racial idolization than the white ones. Our world was once a dynamic of Black people forced to work for white masters, and now it’s a dynamic of white privilege and supremacy which bears a world where white people are more immoral by default. That dynamic holds true because of white people’s colonization of the world, and the skin-colored coating they attached to every judgement. It is what it is. The white ancestors thought they were investing in the success of their descendants, but it backfired, and now there is resentment for white supremacy. Dear white people, it’s still a better hand than the one dealt to Black Americans born into slavery. Whiteness has also crept into being a state of mind, instigated by white people when they started attaching behavior to race, and claiming colonization for their own skin color. I’m not white, because white people never treated me white. My white grandmother talked about my brown skin every time she saw me. I see people’s expressions, the way people look at me and my white husband, and when you are mixed, you are not white. Ask Homer Plessy.)
So anyways, if I sound mad, it’s because I kind of am. All the noise from these white people sounds like tinnitus. Why do they take everything so personally, and expect non-white people to maintain an open mind about white ethics and morality? I can’t help but feel like all white people have an essence of immorality, born from the privilege they grow up on. It doesn’t change how I act or feel about individual people, but when a white person does or says something offensive, I am not surprised because of this inherent feeling I have.
I also feel like I’m not allowed to say that without offending white people, and that makes it clear I am not accepted as white. Aren’t people generally allowed to talk shit about their own race? When Dave Chapelle played a crackhead and said the n word, weren’t there white people laughing? Because it’s okay when people attack their own monolith right…oh wait but white people can’t even do that to themselves. It’s a secret that they’re all racist, so when a white comedian makes a joke about how racist all white people are, there’s an air of discomfort that I recognize as fear of being found out.
This is how my facet of the Earth’s crystal looks. It’s real.