Dear Woke White People:
You have seen #blaxit on your various social media timelines already because you are woke, and friends like me are part of the reason that you are.
To be extra clear, #blaxit doesn’t mean we are leaving this version of the country we built for free and/or 30 cents on the dollar, along with all other people of color, many women, and the First Nations who survived genocide in their original version of it.
#Blaxit means “we are OUT.” You’ve got this. And I say that not colloquially, as in, “I have every confidence you can handle this,” but literally, as in “this now is your responsibility.” We aren’t leading the charge anymore, you aren’t helping us with “our” problem anymore, you are neither ally nor accomplice in “our” fight. This is now exclusively YOUR fight, with your people, about your culture and how it is destroying OUR country.
What this means is the days of battling theoretically in witty blogs are over. Looking on sadly as hate crimes happen and letting us know you don’t agree will not be valued or praised. Anything other than actively taking on your people and stopping this is not a good use of your time. Clear your schedule. You have a lot of people to take on. And, as you already know, because you are woke, they are not good listeners. They are filled with rage. They are erratic and violent. They have no accountability. Good luck. Literally. We will be cheering you on from our own space of accountability, which now will be defined as protecting and advancing our own in the midst of yet more nonsense your people now have created in the name of preserving privilege for the mediocre.
Before you get started, please be sure to (re)read Your Friends And Relatives Did This — Now What Can You Do? to wrap your brain around the enormity of the task ahead, particularly without our help, our guidance, our organization and our tireless strength. And know you are not being abandoned; you are just being kicked out of the nest to fly into the dragon’s den because the only ones with the inside track to change the hate in this country are you. We get it. You do, too, because you are woke.
Now, since I know each of the marginalized and terrorized groups in our country has their own specific experience of the journey, I will just drop right here that I am speaking for at least some when I add #Hispaxit/#Latinxit #APaxit #Muslimaxit, #LGBTAxit, etc. This comes solely from my Facebook feed, which is dinging like a Vegas slot machine in the ‘70s, in part in response to the endless posts from white friends who apparently still are crying, in bed, unable to go to work or otherwise immobilized by having lost an election and discovering that the American hate we keep telling you about and posting extremely disturbing videos of actually is real.
So I’ll cut this intro short so you can get to gettin’, as we often say around you, because you are woke, but now you will be too busy fixing your people and their mess to hang out with us as we continue working on getting our voting rights back, withstanding supremacist attacks, securing choice for women, etc. Don’t worry, we’ve still got that.
You go get that HATE.
To support your work, I have prepped a primer, of sorts, of arguments and counter-arguments you surely will encounter, and I pass this torch to you because I will not have this conversation one more time. Now, you are woke, so you may already know and use these approaches, but keep it handy when you “go get your people” (which is code that you also know, because you are woke). Go for the lowest hanging fruit first, the ones who aren’t actively painting swastikas, beating up brown children, snatching hijabs off of women’s heads or otherwise holding true to 300+ years of consistently evil behavior.
And with that, here are some points of conversation that might help you begin to take the lead in navigating and eliminating the hateful, violent mentality and activities that we, the institutionally oppressed, have nevertheless powerfully and consistently risen above these many centuries:
- This is not the “worst division we’ve ever seen in America.” For back up in this conversation, load an album on your phone with images of slavery, the Zoot Suit riots, lynchings (be sure to include multiple ethnic groups and gays), integration efforts, ERA protests, etc.
- Just because it’s the first time you’ve seen hate doesn’t mean it has suddenly surged. Your personal awareness of something does not herald its dawn. It signals only how deeply protected in a bubble of denial you have been. Hate didn’t recently “come back” or “surge.” It became visible TO YOU. Social media happened. You now simply are being inundated with the same deluge of hate and evil the rest of us have been living with our entire lives. And this version is infinitely better than even 20 years ago. Someone saying something mean to you on Facebook is not worse than, equal to or even in the realm of redlining, voter intimidation or Jim Crow. Remember every single time you told a marginalized person that they were being “hypersensitive,” “you don’t know that’s why they did that!,” “why is everything about race/gender/homophobia with you?,” “that was 200 years ago!,” “I had nothing to do with that!,” “You only got in because of Affirmative Action,” “if you just had complied, nothing would have happened,” the list goes on and on. If you know their names, call and say how sorry you are. Don’t just feel bad. Call them. Experience accountability for being complicit in this mess and survive feeling bad. Then get to work.
- President Obama did not cure OR cause racism in America. He transcended it and tackled it at a level no president since Johnson has done. Explain the Justice Department investigations alone. Each time you want to decry that President Obama didn’t do enough about hate, first write down the list of everything YOU have done to address hate. Then compare it to his. Then get to work on adding the first thing to your list.
- If you voted for Trump, you voted for hate. You may or not be filled with hate yourself. Or you may not have dug in that deep. But you didn’t vote for policy difference, or against Hillary, or against the machine, or for the environment, or in protest for Bernie, or against corruption or any other euphemistic concept you tell yourself. And even if you think you did, I would like to think if Hitler had a great healthcare plan but also planned to murder all of the gays, Jews and people of color in Europe, you would not vote for him based on personal politics either. Correction. I would have liked to have thought that a week ago. Since Tuesday, I now fully understand how “good” people let Hitler rise. They were not good. They were passive and self-interested. They were thinking of what was safe and comfortable for their current way of life, their job, their social life, their psyches. And when evil marched and killed, I now can surmise they cried a lot and stayed in bed and repeatedly said how bad they felt for those being murdered. And they did nothing. Except for the Resistance, of course. They were woke.
- Feeling strongly that something is true doesn’t make it a fact. The next step after a strong feeling is to research it to either validate it or adjust it to align with actual fact. You are not allowed to feel something and state it and have it be received and respected as a truth unless you are talking to your mother, who, for some, will love you anyway. That option is off the table from now on. You must hold yourself to the highest possible standard of intellectual thought and discourse when you are discussing issues that actually cost other people, and not you, their lives. And when other people state things as truth, you do not have the option to speak over them, yell them down, curse at them, speak to them contemptuously or otherwise attempt to invalidate things you have no knowledge of. And you do not have the option to demand they provide evidence for you. Put down your mint julep, pick up the phone and do your own research. Because if you don’t know for a literal fact that something isn’t true, the only reason you are yelling at someone is because you don’t think it is their place to contradict you and your bottomless, unfettered ignorance.
- There has never been a meritocracy in the United States. Each time they tell you they supported Trump so “lazy” people wouldn’t be able to live off of their hard work, explain that they descend from and still live in a world that is artificially constructed to prevent them ever having to compete against qualified candidates. Women, gays and people of color were legally blocked from entering, remaining and/or advancing in the workforce, education and housing up until the the ‘70s, and it remains informally in place. And that was after enslaved humans physically built the wealth of the nation for white people and other white people’s immigrant ancestors rioted against letting POC compete against them in the workforce and unions. So, no, they did not have what they have due to hard work and rolled up sleeves. They got it from being on the winning side of a gamed system. As examples of what happens in an unrestricted system of competition, point them to POTUS, Tiger Woods, Neil deGrasse Tyson and the Williams sisters.
- White privilege is real. They will immediately come back with, “Where’s my bag of privilege money?” Fire up your calculator app here. First, ask them what they earn a week. If they are male, calculate at least 21% of that amount. Here’s how. Let white male salary be “x.” White male privilege reward = 52(x — .79x). But that’s only versus white women. You can tally it up state by state to be very specific about their prize money. For instance, if they live in Louisiana, their bonus money for not being a Latina = 52(x — .5x). Next, ask how many times they’ve been stopped by the police and not ticketed. Multiply that number by $35-$146 for the range of privilege reward money in the state of California. If their family did not have to pay for their funeral after their most recent traffic stop, add $7500 they got to keep in the rural South, which is the low end of that range. Then add up just those three. If they would like to continue, add their “cash back” bonus based on what they paid to finance their car, buy or rent their home in their neighborhood or, as we recently learned, to take an Uber or a Lyft.
- There is no such thing as “political correctness.” Political correctness is just a politically correct term for “I don’t want people I think I’m better than to be able to challenge my racist/sexist/xenophobic/homophobic behavior and be validated in doing it.” This closely aligns with the desire to “make America great again.”
- There’s no crying in civil rights. Search Google at will, you will not find a picture of a civil rights leader, a suffragette of ANY color, Harriet Tubman, Nelson Mandela or any other social warrior weeping and taking to fainting couches because they lost any part of any battle. If people have kind hearts but are culturally incapacitated, snatch the sheets off of them, take away their social media access, and walk, bike or drive them to a place where people need actual help. Show them that one scene in “Gone with the Wind” where Scarlett eats the carrot. Let them know that is the only part of the movie where people of color don’t put it on mute and roll their eyes at the crazy.
- Being called a racist/sexist/etc. is not the worst thing that could happen to you. And it might be true. Members of marginalized communities are regularly called far worse names, with physical, professional and psychological consequences. And yet we survive and often thrive. Except for “the Blacks” and “the Latinos” who live on that one block Trump keeps talking about.
- You are, as a point of fact, the least informed person in this dialogue. Don’t fill in the blanks for oppressed people about what they “really” think, “really” mean or “don’t understand.” It is you who does not understand. It is you who has no life experience in this space. It is you who has never read an academic paper, taken a course or otherwise formally educated yourself about this. It is you who, in fact, has yelled and cursed over, denied or white-splained the existence of hate completely away, to the people who live it, in order to retain your personal and spiritual comfort. You are not the authority in this conversation, and you are not to be deferred to or carefully handled. You are to get the heck up, educate and change yourself, then go change your culture. YOU.
- Your greatest contribution in the battle against hate is not to help, understand, donate to or protect oppressed people. IT IS TO PERSONALLY AND COLLECTIVELY STOP YOUR OWN PEOPLE FROM BEING VIOLENT, HATEFUL AND EVIL. If you have extra time and energy during or after that task, thanks for joining us in the other stuff.
- Turkey needs seasoning. Salt and pepper are not seasoning. I say this because many of these conversations are about to happen over the holidays. You will need sustenance to counter the crazy and remain calm and resolute and righteous.
We “others” have done all we can do in the name of a greater good that includes your recalcitrant, non-evolving, hate-filled people. I’m taking a vacation from engaging with hate and tripling down on engaging with helping my people thrive. But hate still has to be vanquished. And to paraphrase Geronimo Johnson’s flawless summary, white people invented this mess. And only you can clean up. Expand to include gender, sexuality and religion accordingly because the same group of folks has to fix this.
It’s your turn.
#Blaxit
p.s. if this post angers, offends or otherwise triggers you, know that you are not “woke,” and it is not intended for your consumption.
p.p.s If you are not sure if you are “woke,” read Kenevan McConnon’s All My Rowdy Friends Are Racist, Bigoted Assholes. That is what Day 1 of Being Woke looks like. If that happened to you more than a year ago, this article is for you. If you are in that diary explaining to him why he should see the other side of things, that his friends are still good people, etc., you are not woke.
p.p.p.s. I will respond in comments in the matter-of-fact, assume-you-already-know-this manner in which I would speak to anyone who is woke.