Flashback: Journal — 30 May 2020
I teach a lot about white supremacy. I teach a lot about freedom. I teach a lot about the united States. I teach a lot of White people that they are not special because they are White. I lay bare the foundations of this country, even as I sit on conquered and looted land among towers my grandmother’s grandfather built with lash scars across his back.
Tonight, this country is burning, and I wonder: is this the spike of heat before the fever of racism, the virus of supremacy, the hallucination of whiteness is purged and the body politic begins to heal?
Or is it the spark that lights a conflagration which sweeps indiscriminately across a sick body politic purging the land of invaded and invaders, of conquered and conquerors, of oppressed and oppressors, leaving us all burned with hatred and fear, suspicious of each other and mistrustful of any hand not our own?
I understand the fear of White people. (let me rephrase)
I mean, I understand White people’s fear.
To admit that they have an identity which is not “the norm”, but simply theirs and one of many means they too must examine how they function in a white supremacist patriarchal heteronormative community built on the oppression of so many other identities. It means they benefit and have privilege in those systems.
Systems which kill murder lynch Sandra Bland, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Ahmaud Arbery simply to function. It means White people benefit from whiteness at the expense of Black people, at the expense of Native peoples, at the expense of Latino/Latina/Latinx and Asian Americans.
That is a heavy burden, but it is theirs. And if they don’t want it, either they can admit their privilege and work daily to be anti-racist or they can deny, ignore, deflect, and continue to be part of the problem, making America great again by their silence.
The rich, White, cisgender men who wrote about freedom lied out loud when they affixed their names and their sacred honor. “All men” meant rich and White, as they enslaved Black, plundered Indigenous, exploited Asian and Mexican, and brainwashed poor White people into “us” and others by virtue of their whiteness. The lie has been stretched and torn, warped and bent, but it has not been undone.
Even today, a White man confident in his whiteness, arrived at a protest against uniformed murder, screaming “all lives matter” before pointing a crossbow at a Black protester. The White man in the The White House, America’s “first White President” according to Ta-Nahesi Coates, continues to pursue an agenda of white supremacy in the same way George Washington rotated the Black men and women he enslaved out of Philadelphia in order to maintain enslaving them.
If we are the nation we espouse to be, why does anyone need to protest for their rights?
Malcolm said if the Declaration and the Constitution were worth the paper they were written on, we wouldn’t have a race problem. This is not, nor has it ever been, the land of the free. It is not, nor has it ever been, great. A nation which gives lip service to freedom as law enforcement murders citizens; gives lip service to equality as Black, brown, Native, female, trans, and queer citizens continue to be oppressed under the color of law; gives lip service to democracy as oligarchs enshrine oppression in courts and in law, is a failure.
That I have to state Black Lives Matter, or that the statement is contested, says that in fact, Black lives do not matter in these united States.
