by Jamilah Lemieux | January 2017
I don’t know that I serve my own mental health needs by putting my body on the line to feign solidarity with women who by and large didn’t have my back prior to November. I’ve never felt any thing remotely resembling sisterhood with White women. That lack of sisterhood haunted me at times during the 2016 election season. As Election Day approached and Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton emerged as the frontrunner, I waited to feel something. Some sort of connection between her and me, some sort of emotion tied to the likelihood that a person who shares my gender expression would be the “leader of the free world.” It never came. However, the absence of that sisterhood never felt more real for me than it did when I learned that 53 percent of White female voters cast a ballot for a man whose bigotry was, perhaps, his greatest selling point. I never expected that White women by-and-large would favor Clinton over Donald Trump because she promised criminal justice reform or would do more to protect the rights of people of color than her opponent. But I did believe that Trump’s incredibly public misogyny—manifested in attacks on women’s looks, a boast about “pussy” grabbing and promises to prosecute people who seek abortions—would have made him less than favorable. Silly me to expect self-preservation to take priority over racism, I suppose.
TAGS: [Individual Change] [2010’s] [Accountability] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Privilege] [White Fragility/Tears] [Politics]
by Ashleigh Shackelford | November 2015
This Black Girl Attitude phenomenon lies within the idea that Black girls, women, and femmes are inherently angry, bitter, unrelenting, and a threat to functioning institutions and spaces. In understanding that this is how I’m seen, I do not intentionally align my presentation, navigation, or performance as a Black girl in a way that embodies the opposite of the stereotypes codified upon my existence within white supremacist patriarchy. Black girls are scripted as angry, bitter, ungrateful, savage beings that are denied the ability to be seen as dimensional or nuanced. So when a Black girl like me is walking around, existing, not forcing myself to assimilate to this politicized idea of ‘approachability,’ I am in direct affirmation of society’s idea of black femininity’s abrasive nature.
TAGS: [Individual Change] [2010’s] [Microaggressions] [White Culture] [Systemic Racism] [Implicit Racism] [Implicit Bias] [Accountability] [White Supremacy]
by Elle Dowd | January 2018
“White people love niceness, but we fail to see that our ideas about polite society are not very nice at all. They serve instead to preserve a system that is criminalizing people of color and dehumanizing white people with our callous indifference. They act to protect institutions built on killing the bodies of people of color to the detriment of our own souls. We say we value niceness, but what we really value is being in charge of what that looks like and when it’s appropriate, by our own standards. We value control.
TAGS: [Individual Change] [2010’s] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Privilege] [“All Lives Matter”] [Systemic Racism] [Black Lives Matter] [Accountability]
by Damon Young | August 2017
Polite white people—specifically, polite white people who call for decorum instead of disruption when attempting to battle and defeat bias and hate—aren’t as paradoxical as tits on a bull. But they’re just as useless. They provide no value, they move no needles, they carry no weight (metaphysically and literally) and they ultimately just get in the way. They’re humanity’s tourists: the 54-mile-per-hour drivers in the left lane refusing to get the {} out of the way so others can pass. And if you get enough of them in one place, they cause accidents. Unfortunately, they’re every{}where. They’re on Facebook threads and sitting behind you at work. They’re your neighbors and (sometimes) your family members.
TAGS: [Individual Change] [2010’s] [White Blindness]
*Paywall Alert
by Kevin Shird | September 2017
In his 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote, “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice.” That’s as true today as it was then. The silence of white moderates who won’t speak up when faced with extreme racism exacerbates the problems we have today. White moderates have become comfortable with their lives and don’t want to “rock the boat” or make too much noise. To white moderates, I say that your silence is aiding and abetting their agenda and your moral leadership is needed now more than ever.
TAGS: [Individual Change] [2010’s] [White Culture] [Accountability]
by Dustin Dwyer | March 2015
“The number one most effective adaptation of racism over time,” DiAngelo says, “is the good/bad binary, this idea that a racist is a bad person and a good person is not racist. And so it’s about individuals who are either good or bad or who either do or don’t engage.” One of the side effects is that many white people come to believe that if they just don’t talk about or think about race, then they are not racist.
TAGS: [Individual Change] [2010’s] [White Fragility/Tears] [Systemic Racism] [Accountability]
