This Week's Opening Thought: July 17, 2023

This week's opening thought: I'm very explicit with sharing with other white people that I have six white friends. The few white people I consider good friends are around because they are invested in the lifelong work needed to be better people. They are actively anti-racist, humble, and can take being called in or out if they drop the ball without positing themselves as victims and turning on the tears. Real talk?

I only kick it with real ones.

Real ones don't view their relationships with melanated folx as some form of credibility for doing the bare minimum to not be "as" racist. Real ones don't collect melanated folx as a defense for being racist (see: I have a Black Friend). And real ones don't expect the Global Majority folx they know to defend their white supremacist, racist, and anti-Black rhetoric, beliefs, and behaviors when someone calls them in or out.

To the white people who know me in some capacity personally and expect me to protect or save them from getting checked: you want to swim out into the deep waters of white supremacy and anti-Blackness? You can go for it. But you best wear some floaties because I ain't David Hasselhoff. The only bay watching that's gonna happen is me sitting on the dock of the bay watching you sink. I don't care how long you've known me; I will never defend you when the thing you want me to protect you from is atoning for your hateful beliefs, actions, and rhetoric toward the melanated masses and my people. And if that is your expectation for our relationship?

Time to bone up on your breaststroke and butterfly.

And to the white people who know me offline: if you have to ask if you are one of the six? You aren't. And we're currently not accepting applications.

Image description: a four-panel meme. In the first panel, a white hand reaches out of an ocean, looking for help. Next to the hand is the caption, "White people I know hoping I'll defend them when they do or say something racist because they think we're close friends." The second panel shows a hand with a chocolate hue reaching toward the white hand. The third panel shows the chocolate-toned hand giving the white hand a high five. The chocolate-toned hand is captioned with the word "Me." The fourth panel shows the white hand sinking underwater with a few fingers still cracking the surface.

[Image description: a four-panel meme. In the first panel, a white hand reaches out of an ocean, looking for help. Next to the hand is the caption, "White people I know hoping I'll defend them when they do or say something racist because they think we're close friends." The second panel shows a hand with a chocolate hue reaching toward the white hand. The third panel shows the chocolate-toned hand giving the white hand a high five. The chocolate-toned hand is captioned with the word "Me." The fourth panel shows the white hand sinking underwater with a few fingers still cracking the surface.]

This Week's Opening Thought: July 3, 2023

This week's opening thought: It is wild to me how often people of pallor respond with vitriol toward melanated folx who don’t want to consort with them all the time or become their lifelong friends.

Who said I had to be your friend or anything outside of a surface-level colleague or neighbor, especially if I’m navigating life in ways that protect my mental, physical, and emotional well-being after a lifetime of lived and generational harm at the hands of white supremacy? Why are you not willing to digest and understand this?

Who said it was mandatory for me to be the Nigger Jim to your Huckleberry Finn?

Did I miss the memo?

And how are you mad that I’m exercising the right not to foster a close or intimate relationship with someone I don’t want a close or intimate relationship with? We teach children early on that they don’t have to be close friends or share themselves with everyone who “submits a request.” This doesn’t become null and void once you enter adulthood. Y'all know that, right?

Make it make sense.

Something inherently built into whiteness as a concept and societal construct of control leads many members of the unmelanated masses to seek to create a homegrown United Colors of Benetton advertisement for themselves. There is a mentality in white Western culture of treating the melanated masses like a curiosity, a collectible, a knick-knack. This mentality is unconscious and connected to the original roots of anti-Blackness, colonialism, and racism, primarily the belief that Black people, Indigenous people, melanated people, are property or inanimate objects and not human beings, and it is still a current and present danger to the Global Majority folx who are living and existing in white spaces. Because many white people don’t want to acknowledge or unpack this, there are way too many white people who seem to be less interested in building relationships with melanated folx centered on the lifelong work of breaking down the barriers and phobias embedded in the white supremacy and racism they have lived their life deeply enmeshed in, and more intent on collecting us like Pokemon. Many melanated people recognize this, so we do what we can to minimize placing ourselves in conversations and situations that allow the unmelanated masses to add the Blue-Eyes White Dragon they see before them to their Yu-Gi-Oh deck.

It’s 2023. After witnessing the intentional erasure of history, the repealing of rights and protections, and the year-by-year escalations in hate crimes in the United States, with all of these events mostly perpetrated by white bodies or those who long to appease white society, how can you consider yourself a “good” person and not understand that maybe your people and the power they wield is a persistent danger to Black, Brown, Indigenous communities, AAPI communities, and Global Majority folx in general? And that maybe we can’t be as close with you as you’d like to force us to be because your power, privilege, and positionality are potential trauma triggers? And that maybe you need to take the time and energy needed to build legitimate long-term trust and faith in any potential relationships with the melanated people you want in your life who do not have white supremacist ideology on their side? And that maybe the way you go about trying to “connect” with melanated folx is a little creepy, forced, and filled with a certain level of privilege and power that denotes you believe you deserve to have me as a part of your “collection” and that you don’t have to earn my friendship?

I don’t know.

I’m just spitballing here.

I just wanted to give you something to think about before you pulled out that Pokeball.

This Week's Opening Thought: June 12, 2023

This week's opening thought: Today is the 56th anniversary of the 1967 United States Supreme Court decision Loving v. Virginia, which struck down all anti-miscegenation laws remaining in sixteen U.S. states.

Today is also the seventh anniversary of the mass shooting at Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Florida, which led to the murder of 49 people.

A celebration and a somber observation.

Separate events steeped in generational trauma and hate crimes.

That's as U.S. American as apple pie.

This Week's Opening Thought: June 5, 2023

This week's opening thought: no job, organization, or industry will ever be worth sacrificing your soul and dignity.

I know there is some privilege that is embedded in that statement. You don't have to point it out. I see that sh-- in full color and the highest resolution. I know that sometimes you've gotta do what you've gotta do. I know that sometimes a job is a job, and you don't feel like you care enough to be tethered to it. And I also know what it feels like to work somewhere to make ends meet and the abuse and stripping of one's dignity that comes with it, no matter how untethered you try to be. I also have had well-paying jobs that looked great on the surface but killed my sense of self, creativity, curiosity, and joy. One such role a few years ago led to depression and almost led to an emotional breakdown.

Nothing is perfect. Every job, company, or industry is flawed. But I've found that If you can't work for an organization, or in a profession or industry, without compromising practically everything that makes you the unique and beautiful person you are or trading in your joy, creativity, and energy for a consistent pattern of personal and witnessed trauma, no amount of money, "perks," or benefits will make being there easier to swallow.

If you are doing work you want to devote your life to, it shouldn't be literally siphoning your life away.

Nothing is worth that price.