Hello Medium, long time no see. Like, really long time no see. I think it has been years since I regularly blogged or shared my writing on this platform. And I promise, it isn’t you (well, maybe not you the reader, definitely Medium as a platform though), it is me.

I always struggled with really finding the right platform for my personal writing or blogging. I’ve jumped platform to platform since the Livejournal and Xanga days (yes I have been doing this for that long, bless). I still don’t know if Substack will be the right platform either, but for now that is where I will be migrating to and hopefully return back to writing consistently.

Thanks to everyone who has taken the time to read and support my work on this platform, it has meant a lot! I will continue to cross post and try to connect with people on here where it makes sense to, otherwise I hope you’ll join me over at my new Substack! For now it is free for all to read, but I might do some paywall pieces in the future. I try my best to keep my writing open and free for access reasons, but paid subscribers are appreciated and help make it a bit more sustainable for me, the eternal freelancer.

Also, if you have any questions, comments or professional inquiries, feel free to reach out via email which is listed on my bio on here.

Here’s an excerpt from my first Substack post:

The muggy late-spring-early-afternoon air is hugging at my neck like a desperate and beautiful drunk friend. This is not helped by my insistence on reheating deep dish pizza in the oven, like a damn fool. Rain clouds loom back and forth threatening yet indecisive just like that beautiful affectionate drunk you wish would just get in the car back to her place so you can tuck her in with a glass of water and some pain reliever peacefully, but her eyes shine with mischief like she may just have other plans and she is absolutely faster than you. Everything seems so fast yet so slow…like a Friday night waiting on a damn car that’s supposed to pick you and your drunk friend up. I don’t really know why I am holding onto this metaphor. I’m leaving it alone now.

Point is I’m in a strange, liminal space as of late-personally, politically, age-wise, socially, everything. I go through phases where it feels like I’m headed in a more solid direction with it all, but then it all shifts and I’m back to trying to figuring it all out again. Still recovering from organizing and writing burn out from my twenties and trying to find the “right” place to “plug in” and express myself as a woman in her post-post-post punk phase my early thirties, in a new work field, a new city and in publishing again without coming off like a total hack, or becoming a Canva-slides “activist” more focused on brand deals and avoiding upsetting liberals and companies than any dedicated community work.

Read the rest at my Substack:

Welcome to my girlblog

Within a recent New York times piece of the white liberal thought strain that white US policy is actually an aberration to democracy and reflective of other peoples or styles of governance, namely the dreaded communists, it plucked the latest rise of anti-CRT legislation from the American Pie it was baked in and put it within the context of Eastern European instead, calling it the acts of a totalitarian government. Throughout the piece, parallels to post-Soviet Eastern European memory laws with different states’ attempts at suppressing the way the true history of the United States is told were made.

But if this repressive legislative movement born from a classic right wing moral panic happened in the United States and keeps on happening in the United States over time, repeatedly, over and over, with millions in the population joyously, uncritically agreeing with their own violent, white version of the events, is it really an aberration from democracy? Or is it just the true bent and result of American governance and institutional policy?

Any protest with a significant radical contingent will eventually echo with the resounding call and response of “Tell me what democracy looks like!” “This is what democracy looks like!”

I had a friend who would practically spit in disdain whenever he heard that slogan chanted at protests. He on principle hated the idea that acts of autonomous people-centered take over of the state and private elite commons in protest of oppression, worker exploitation, gentrification, policing, hegemony, colonialism, patriarchy, corporate greed, whatever the issue at hand, was a display of democracy. He believed it was in fact a protest of democracy, being that it was under democracy, directly because of it, that these ills we were protesting manifested.

Often being or becoming the ring leader of actions and protests I attended I would sometimes chant along, but mostly I stayed quiet, as I ultimately agreed with my friend. I had no desire to reclaim democracy or to pretend my organizing and my participation in protest was democratic. It was meant to challenge the order of democracy, something I’d almost exclusively known to be violent.

But my friend and I found that we were generally in the minority. This idea that protest and the challenging of the political status quo is actually a faithful adherence to its democratic intent and structure is the reactionary framing abundant in these political moments and bursts of uprisings.

“This isn’t cancel culture, it is freedom of speech!”

“Protest isn’t Anti-American, it is as American as Apple Pie!”

Our social media and news feeds get filled with these pithy slogans and headlines that can be summed up simply as “Gotcha, Conservatives!” one-liners. To many the most impressive way to counter right wing criticism that says we are anti-American is to say that we are in fact the true embodiment of Americanness, that not only is Being The Most American American a universal superior ideological goal and moral standing ground but one we on the left inhabit best, actually.

A blatant admittance from conservatives that challenging oppression or demanding truth about colonial harms means you are anti-American does not lead many to then interrogate if this Americanness is something that requires unquestioned continuance and preserving. It instead leads them to go “No actually YOU’RE the real anti-Americans!” in a weak back and forth that neither liberals nor the left has ideologically ever won.

In the center and liberal circles, it is said the democracy of the United States models the intent and future of a progressive and inclusive democracy because it in part borrows from an Indigenous structure of governance from the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.

More to the political right, in line with early settler doctrines and frameworks like Terra Nullius, it is argued that democracy is the superior system of governance because it is a Western European system, devoid of the antiquated, less sophisticated, or tribal shortcomings of other world systems of governance.

However, there is common agreement that US democracy is the thing, the goal and superior to other systems of governance. The disagreement and argument of the nation remains solely in what is a proper display of said democracy, whether in allegiance to its roots or to its progress forward, and what is an aberration to it, an insult to its past or to who we are as a nation today.

But the true proof of their efficacy has to be in what democracies have produced and historically been to various peoples, not what some perhaps believed they were philosophically fashioned to do or model.

The Roman Republic, from which the United States greatly takes its political form and influence from, had a hierarchical structure including a class strata which dictated everything from voting rights to marriage between classes. It offered little to no representational voice given to the lower classes. Ancient Greece as well was divided into a hierarchy of four separate classes. Despite being a direct democracy, only literate men who owned land could vote. Whatever of the rest was potentially gleaned from the Haudenosaunee if at all was done through a corrupt white settler lens.

The rule of “for the people, by the people” was not actually foundational to the hierarchical, imperial societies modern Western democracy bases itself off. And this top down structure has followed democracy wherever it has gone, so much so that to many, slavery and hierarchy of these systems seem inevitable to all human systems of self-governance and coexistence. And so, the rule of a white, slave and land-owning Christian male majority under the romantic guise of equitable mass representation was maintained throughout the formation of this country. At times when there was a minority that it served the nation to recognize, like white slave owners, legislation was put into place to protect their rights, though we know the protection of people from the “tyranny of the majority” is not consistently applied.

No nation or structure of governance is perfect. There will always be flaws and prejudices of a nation will inevitably seep into them if not checked for. But when a nation was built on a foundation of slavery, genocide, land grabbing, colonization, imperialism, Western hegemony and hierarchy and continues in that very tradition, it is not a matter of a system being merely flawed in a human way or at times inconsistent, but a matter of the system being structured to render these very specific results intentionally.

Given that, it makes no sense to try to lay blame for the hard fought fruits of Democracy’s deliberate labors on vague, othered system of “totalitarianism,” invoking Nazis, Soviets and Eastern European “Memory Laws” outside of their proper context and relationship to blame and scapegoat for what white liberals deem unseemly, uncharacteristic or atypical aspects of their settler world. This idea that the consistent violent, dogmatic and exclusive results of very common and intentional occurrences, practices and structures of Western Democracy is actually indicative of a separate system is deeply ignorant, naïve and unhelpful at its most innocent, but an act of deep-seated white national delusion and historical revisionism largely.

This democracy is built on the history of its white Christian victors, its disease carrying settler pilgrims and pioneers, its boarding and residential school creators, its white slave owners, slave catchers and lynch mobs. This democracy consistently deals with deadly ultra right wing political movements and waves every decade, fed and bred by the normal ultra conservatism of the country in lull years. This democracy kills Black people with impunity. In this democracy, anti-abortion movements born as a reaction to the growing population and political threat of newly freed African Americans and race-mixing dictates the reproductive rights of all. In this democracy temperatures rise and infrastructures neglected by bloated, protected private entities fall apart as impending climate catastrophe looms, started by those very same private corporate entities, most of whom got and sustained their riches over centuries from colonial spoils. That is democracy. That is what it looks like.

So why is the white liberal memory of it so different from its reality?

To cry out and say “These displays are not representative of our democracy” doesn’t actually combat right wing moral panics over “Cancel culture” or “CRT in K-12 schools”. It whitewashes legacies of revisionism and erases the manner of the allotment of power, authority, freedom and self-rule in the United States. It works to assure an equally brainwashed liberal readership that their fabricated ideas of what America truly is and stands for are correct. Nothing less, nothing more.

It is the setting up of a hypocritical ideological trap that falsely posits democracy has always had a set of egalitarian, inclusive, progressive or justice-minded morals and standards that in reality it never once in its life or existence has had. The far right Christian Conservatives who believe US democracy is kept by the firm and unscrupulous upholding of their authority and values, by the exclusion of undesirable people and values, by the controlling of narrative, are correct.

This is in fact what democracy has looked like.

We cannot then historically root the chronic results of this democracy, of United States revisionism in the form of anti-CRT legislation, in Eastern European Memory Laws. Parallels may exist, but the projects and legacies of the United States to dictate truth as written by the powerful predate those memory laws and very likely inform them instead of the other way around. And just because there are parallels doesn’t mean you can outsource the blame for an American tradition to communism any time it challenges your idea of what you think democracy should be despite it showing you what it is daily.

The real historical ancestor of anti-CRT protests and legislation lies in history of anti-bussing organizing of the 70s, which included rallies and organizing against new text books that included “information related to the history, culture, and perspectives of minorities.”

The Florida Board of Education ruling banning Critical Race Theory in schools claimed “Instruction on the required topics must be factual and objective and may not suppress or distort significant historical events, such as the Holocaust, and may not define American history as something other than the creation of a new nation based largely on universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence.” The New York Times article linking this legislation to Memory Laws in Eastern Europe named this does a disservice as you cannot truly talk about The Holocaust without talking about race and power, without talking about how the Nazis were informed on their genocidal policy by the United States’.

While this assertion is true, this style of teaching the Holocaust is not new. As a self-taught Holocaust scholar of sorts as a child, the differences between the narratives of the Jewish victims and survivors of the Holocaust vs what I was taught in schools across Western Michigan was glaring. The American exceptionalization of the Holocaust outside of its context of centuries of antisemitism in Europe and the United States, genocidal German colonial policy in its African colonies and the influence United States’ own policies and genocidal practices against Black and Indigenous people had on the Holocaust has been the status quo for decades in the United States. How it manifests in specific anti-CRT law in Florida at this moment, and how it is specifically weaponized against the telling of Black and Indigenous history, only speaks to the latest manifestation of this exceptionalism, not the beginning of a new trend.

Whatever genuine criticisms exists of communism not enshrined in propaganda that one has, it has absolutely nothing to do with the ills and inherent violences of democracy here. I have no deep troubling need to fancast its Founding Fathers to be something they never were. I believe truly and wholeheartedly that if they were here today they’d agree with incoming legislation to police and ban anti-racist knowledge and speech that challenges the fabric of the conservative white Christian patriarchal society they wished to establish. Their concepts of freedom always had its confines, their dreams for progress, its limits, political participation, its exclusions, imagination for the future, their abrupt wake up calls.

This perverse need to look elsewhere to make comparisons, to act as if when righty behaved or when desirable political and governmental traits and attributes globally are modeled, even retroactively in the past, one can attribute all the good to white Christian democracy, and when democracy acts poorly, no it didn’t, it was actually communism, is in and of itself revisionist and ahistorical. It is a shining example of American Exceptionalism.

At the end of the day one must understand the discord exists because there is an innate dissonance between goodness and the United States from inception to today. In the face of so much historical and modern tragedy and oppression, including the beginning of the country’s own reckoning with its genocidal boarding school system, it seems a poor and mocking thing to endeavor to ideologically whitewash democracy instead of fessing up its harm. You have to choose whether you want democracy or whether you want truth and liberation. But the very tragic and desperate attempt at the rehabilitation of “democracy” should be foregone as something of use to reckoning with the reality of its history.

Today is MLK Jr. day, and it is likely by now you have already seen these words of his in emails and across your social media feed at least a dozen times:

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”

Martin Luther King Jr.

This quote comes from a sermon called “Loving Your Enemies” that MLK jr. gave at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama in 1957. An entire eleven years before he was murdered by the United States government with support from many of its white citizens. It’s one of his quote most fetishized and taken outside of a larger context of body of work, outside of an increasing radicalizing politic that Dr. King would come to especially near the end of his life.

The quote, and the whitewashing industrial complex and disinfo campaign around it, is so indicative of the gaslighting, colonial, white violence of the Christianity that was first forced on my ancestors and pushed on us over the centuries. They told us “Do not join together and avenge yourselves with the sword, with revolution, but love your oppressors. In fact, we will call your advocacy for yourself and your uprising ‘hate’ and teach you to see your own liberation as a dark, despicable thing.” They made us “love” those who hated us the most and never once over centuries showed us any measure of kindness or hint of ceasing in their never ending violence, and to hate the one thing that is actually the most radical act of self-love, our liberation from their shackles.

So today I will honor the quote for what it is in its context, and while I may disagree with what it meant in 1957, I also know there’s more to it. That it is not a holistic look into neither the politic nor spirituality of MLK Jr. especially in the years that came since. And even if we were to still disagree, which I can do easily while yet respecting his work and true legacy, I will not let white cooption further stoke unrest and division in our rich legacies of resistance. I take something to heart from this quote today that I’ll share with you that I feel is yet inspired by MLK Jr.’s vigilant, present and tireless love.

Today I will not eschew love or talk down this quote for how it mischaracterizes love. I will not let wretched colonizers who do not know the first thing about love take it from me and turn me upon myself and my potential for love. Instead I will talk dearly about the revolutionary love I know and wish to feed.

May my love be a light like an inescapable fire that burns and torches all oppression, hegemony and violence like tinder, the undoing and destruction of which feeding and creating a rich fertile soil from which to grow more love anew.

May my love be a comforting igniting flame in the hearts of all the downtrodden and forgotten, the erased and maligned, may it be a whisper to light it up, fight, go, go! I love you, dearly, and I strive for our victory in the struggle against our upheaval.

May my love be hateful, scornful, painful and anathema to all enemies of the people! Maybe it bring them only suffering and devastation! Maybe it be endlessly disagreeble to sanitization and cooption, a recipe to disaster from those who wish to capture or use the light to their own greedy, nullifying ends.

I shirk the freezing darkness of obedience, patriotism, imperialism, capitalism, patriarchy, supremacy, middling tolerance and acceptance, empty liberal equality, deadly assimilation, hollow words of “love” from the rotting mouths of power. They know nothing of love, so deep in the darkness, they hate and scorn the warm of our fires. My love burns and rips through the darkness!

The warmth of our liberation is their enemy! The collective fires of our love a bitter medicine to their coldness, so white and pale from having avoided the sun for so long.

May my fire through all my years and even when I am tired, even when it has at times burned me out, even after I am gone, never extinguish, forever tended to and carried by the next generations as it was carried by those before me. May every day I find rest and reprieve to carry or sit by the fire how best I can at any given time. May I always keep watch and add another ember to the fire, growing and stoking the light to immeasurable heights!

This is my love, generational and wizened, exacting and sure, energizing and gentle, enduring and inextinguishable, insatiable and hungering, bountiful and generative, comforting and cruel, all at once. This, this light, we deserve this light. It is a powerful love. And it will drive out the darkness.

May the fires of this love be a light and make a way to a brighter free future.

Having finished reading Junot Diaz’s piece about his rape as a child and the years of sexual, romantic and relationship trauma and toxic patriarchal behavior that followed, I am left with a lot of conflicting thoughts and emotions.

I applaud that he’s opening up about and owning to some really deep, dark trauma on a significantly large and visible international platform as a Black Caribbean man from the oldest African diaspora. This is no small feat. As a fellow Afro-Dominican, even as someone who has not been the victim of rape but has survived other types of physical abuse and sexual assault, his narrative was still really relatable, raw, honest and compelling.

And yet, many Black women in online spaces I’m in have pointed out, it is hard to hear him dissect and discuss the harm he then went on to cause towards the nameless Black and Brown women he dated on his journey of dealing with the effects and aftermath of his assault, reduced to objects that are mere footnotes in his journey, operating as tools to animate and move him forward at a time when he needed life and love and couldn’t make such decisions for himself, mere testaments, lessons of what his messed up behavior lost him.

It leads me to ask what were Diaz’s ex partners surviving and going through both in that relationship and as just their own autonomous beings with their own histories and past? What was it like? How have they healed and moved forward, if they have? Did their families and friends know why their relationships with Diaz ended so abruptly and poorly, or is his piece a rude wake up to the kind of harm the women stomached and bore with in silence? What were they feeling and thinking then? What are they feeling and thinking now?

But none of that is the focal point because it’s Diaz’s narrative, not theirs, even if they’re featured prominently in it. Even what he put them through isn’t about them, but him ruining relationships with people who treated him well, showed him how to have sex and made him feel good and loved despite his trauma and that he liked very much for it.

I get that Diaz was discussing how his experiences manifested and were destructive in his life and he’s trying to be transparent and effacing, not self-aggrandizing, about his behaviors. Part of me feels like even naming any of this is an asshole move, like I’m dissecting or questioning someone’s really vulnerable and hard-won #MeToo narrative just because it isn’t perfect. It feels kind of bullshit to be someone who always demands men do more to step up and be upfront about their behavior, feelings and experiences then become critical when one finally does in such a sincere and powerful way.

But then I remember there’s a reason for that reticence-Black and Brown women, trans and queer included, in families, friendships and relationships with traumatized and fucked up men, are always having to be mules, footnotes and the main beneficiaries of violence and bullshit in their journey and trajectories. We’re scaffolding, light, stage and financial support for men’s show of suffering, pain, loss and darkness, then realization, learning, healing and growth, if they’re even on such a path. And our emotions are constantly dismissed and diminished throughout, and taught that we’re the ones in the wrong if we push them towards accountability or healing, or cry out when hurt by their trauma-informed actions.

Struggle love-complacency, loyalty, faithfulness and a “no snitching, nagging or being too demanding and difficult” philosophy no matter what is happening-is a value stressed upon Black and Brown women regardless of sexuality, especially in relationships with men. We then will either be the person closest to someone with a deep, dark secret or set of experiences that wreaks havoc in all aspects of our lives and relationship, or one of a few or the only person to know the truth, which is its own immense burden. We’re expected to protect men from the world, their memories, their own behaviors and its consequences, and suffer whatever for their sake. Our trauma, mental illnesses, struggles, issues and desires be damned. They’re not even considered. We’re not extended that much humanity.

Speaking to that, are we to assume he only dated women with no personal histories of romantic, emotional, domestic, and/or sexual trauma and abuse and thus were clean slates not triggered or impacted by his own behavior and trauma? Realistically, the chances of that are slim. He related that they were all of color, so there’s already that colonial inter-generational trauma aspect that Diaz is known to talk about that has definitely impacted them, along with the impact that living under a white patriarchy has on women of color.

I was involved with a white man like how Diaz describes himself. Brilliant, observant, intelligent and introspective but deeply traumatized, mentally-ill and distorted by that trauma. He was patriarchal, detached, callous, mean, destructive, alcoholic, toxic, cold and intentionally out of touch with his experiences and emotions and those of others’. He was capable of consideration, empathy and kindness, but it cost him too much and felt too intimate. He punished himself and any person who got close to him, and that generally meant the women he slept with or dated, as those were the only people he’d ever bother to get close to. A white atheist with interest in LaVeyan satanism (the libertarians of the occult), he considered himself a metaphorical island of a man who didn’t need anyone or anything aside from himself and whiskey. I quickly came to understand that he was both afraid of letting people in and risking them seeing parts of himself he worked hard to keep hidden, and of being accountable and beholden to those around him if he did decide to form relationships with them and enter social and relational contracts that couldn’t be so easily broken like his own commitments to himself could be.

This man never liked to talk about his past experiences or even his life before his family moved to the United States (he was an immigrant who came at around the age of 10) and he hardly told me anything personal, much less about a traumatic part of his past. He’d sometimes tell me little things here and there, especially if he had been drinking, and I’d realize and notice some details based in my own experiences. However, mostly, all I got was that men don’t get like this, men don’t become vulnerable or expose the parts of themselves that hurt, you’re asking too much and we’re not even that close, you’re asking too much because you’re desperate. At night he’d text me affectionately and send me poems then spend his days dismissing his messages, mocking that I imagined to derive any meaning or feeling fro them, gas-lighting and ignoring me. His drinking, already bad, worsened, and he had an occasional recreational opiate problem as well. His trauma and meanness triggered easily, and would in turn trigger mine.

It goes without saying that that dynamic didn’t last for long nor was it in any way, shape or form healthy, and how it ended is its own story. But I realized a lot about how it is like to be an Afro-Latina survivor of domestic and emotional violence and abuse and be in relationships with men like that. How much time he spent hiding, gas-lighting, dismissing and yet extracting from me emotionally, socially, intellectually, sexually, and pushing me away at the same time.

The white guy is a writer (though he always doubted his talent). I always dreaded he’d grow out if his self-doubt and pull exactly what Diaz did. He’d come out with his new life and his partner that he could be healthier with than he every could be with me and tell his story of triumph and growth, centering only himself and perhaps his new partner and how much better it was now and only quickly mention the women and relationships he maimed along the way. I’d be a footnote in his grand tale of misery, darkness and pain breaking into the light of self-realization, love, healing and growth. A corpse on the shadowy road of his tortured journey.

Diaz’s #MeToo coming out is yet in many ways the breaking of a barrier and presumptions about what the typical victim and survivorhood looks like and challenging the the white cis straight womanhood mold. It is necessary and valid and something I don’t want to discount. But I can’t help but feel bitter on behalf of his nameless exes, especially as I see myself in them. When you are involved with damaged men, you’re expected to put away your own trauma and carry them. And when they get rid of you, you’re supposed to internalize why they did and just disappear. Watching men like that walk into the light, beyond you or to better relationships wherein they are making strides in their healing or at least learning not to act like total and complete fucking monsters, and get praise for it, hurts. At best it seems in some ways like a Pyrrhic victory, at worse it’s just them mining the ways they hurt you for all its worth for their benefit.

I’m not saying that a person can’t be on a journey or make strides in their healing unless they’re open and accountable to every single person they’ve ever hurt. But after realizing and honoring the harm and hurt that happened to you is not your fault and going through that healing process, accountability for actions and behavior that are your responsibility is often a terrifying and yet important part of the next one, interconnected to the last. Men have the startling ability of specifically hurting every woman around them while they’re hurt or learning to be better, then spinning their own tale to very conveniently save them face and keep the ball in their court all throughout and skip accountability. They don’t lose as much or get as low as women of color survivors do. They aren’t honest about what it was like for us to be around or with them because they aren’t willing to share the spotlight and look bad.

We deserve more complexity in these narratives. As corny and played out as the phrase is, it is true that hurt people hurt people. One can both be a survivor and a perpetuator of harm, especially if their trauma compacts with patriarchy. I would love for more attention, gratitude, credit, agency and space be given to those women who helped or loved or were hurt by those hurt men along their way, especially Black women. We deserve it.

Last week, the panel discussion “Who Tells The Story: Unpacking Conversations Around Race and Art” at Fountain Street Church featured local artists and previous ArtPrize contestants, including spoken word artist Ericka Thompson (Kyd Kane), photographer Monroe O’Bryant, and Sofía Ramírez Hernández, who won the 2-D Juried category last year. The discussion was moderated by Steffanie Rosalez, curator of Cultura Collective, a collective space for artists of color that has participated in the last two seasons of ArtPrize. The panel, including the moderator, are all people I know. The conversation was a more intentional attempt at having a conversation around art and race by actually having the whole space only feature voices of color.

Rosalez was charming and honest; she and the panelists got along well. They vibed and the discussion flowed easily, listening to one another instead of waiting to just speak next and engaging each other’s thoughts and points, with conversations segueing seamlessly into following questions.

One question was about what they’re tired of being asked. “What can we do?” was one, and—I kid you not—that was still asked at the end during the Q&A. Other topics included white assumptions, microaggressions and upset they have to face when presenting and discussing their unavoidably political and real work, and a frank discussion about the avoidant, bullying, and covert nature of “West Michigan Nice” racism. The Q&A, always my least favorite part of events like this, despite it opening up with Literally The Worst Question of All Time, was quick, short, and painless. No white person spoke in the space, which was a refreshing change of pace.

While both myself and friends I spoke with appreciated the panel conversation (like the discussion about the avoidant, bullying and covert nature of “West Michigan Nice” racism) and felt the panelists had good things to say, we felt the way that we always had after other panels: it was too simple. It was lacking something.

Still about white people

Here’s what was lacking: both the panelists and the audience were throttled, held back by that very invisible yet ever-present dominant force that was meant to be challenged.

Even while trying to intentionally demystify, name and resist it, they were all kept to a standard focus: the white gaze.

The panelists still mainly talked about experiences with whiteness: white questions, white perception, white consumption, white engagement, and how they floundered or flourished under or despite it.

At one point, when the conversation went to discuss the often talked about point of discomfort, as in “these conversations about race will make you uncomfortable.” Every time that question of the assumed discomfort is asked, I think: Who’s the “you” that’s uncomfortable?

It certainly isn’t me, as this is my daily life and experience. I mean, white supremacy is, beyond uncomfortable, inherently jarring and dehumanizing, but that is why I feel ease in navigating it and urgency to dismantle it. It has been a constant since the time I was born and even before my birth. Given that, who cares if white people are uncomfortable just talking about it? It isn’t about their discomfort as a white person, and if discomfort is all a person are feeling, they should count themselves lucky. The rest of us out here are dealing with much worse in these spaces, and the world at large, than discomfort.

It was there in that focus of the white gaze that I realized that, as an Afro-Latina woman, I wasn’t the intended audience for this conversation. At least, I’m not sure I was meant to be the audience. The stories are about communities of color by artists of color, but they weren’t talking to me for most of the time as opposed to some of shared experiences under white supremacy.

These experiences are of value and always worth naming of course, and still important to talk about and still give you reflections and perspectives on artists of colors and communities of color themselves. Beyond that, I’m always here to really fight and challenge whiteness‚ though saying “you have privilege” is far from challenging.

But it’s all that we ever talk about. Our conversations are always specifically catered to white audiences with the assumption that they are A) New at this and thus aren’t familiar with concepts and experiences we are naming both because the are white and haven’t done any research or scholarship into the matter, or B) Constantly hurt and really sensitive and uncomfortable when it comes to these subjects.

“How hard is to to be a creative or artist of color and only be able to talk about white people?” Just as hard as only even being asked that question and seen and understood through that myopic lens. We are constantly defined by how whiteness misunderstands and falsely defines us, tries to limit us, interrogates us. This is how it has limited us historically and how it continues to limit us now. In trying to name that limitation we are still limited by it.

White people telling our stories

The reason why so many white artists feel entitled to tell our stories is that they don’t really see a barrier or difference between art, artist, and audience or subject, creator, and consumer when it appeals to them. They often just see the art or values/politics/questions/sentiments communicated in them as extension of themselves, only revealed or named by someone else, or something they can don and use to their benefit.

Artists easily superimpose themselves, fetishize our plight, and feel they need to embody the position that we are in, whether for themselves or allegedly for our sake (the artist white savior, also a phenomena discussed on the panel). It is such a colonial imposition needed to take over the entire world, take from others only to turn around and tell everyone they should be grateful for it. It is very unconscious, but in conversations it easily becomes apparent if you know what you’re looking for.

I don’t share these concerns in particular to attack the panelists, but to continue to lay out how I see these situations and spaces structured and reveal the burdens we have. I yet lay full responsibility and charge for these conditions and environments on the racist, dominant society we live in and talk about. Even those from the margins perpetuate and uphold it, especially at the detriment of those with even less power and position than ourselves, and this is still tantamount for us to grapple with and name.

Often we say the issue with the comments artists and creatives of color get regarding their work from white people and audiences is ignorance and lack of exposure, ameliorated by education and proximity to people of color. Like a zoo, if you will. But at the belly of a lot of invasive, disrespectful, defensive, and outright bigoted questions is entitlement and assumption of one’s position as of innate value in a space.

Shifting our intended audience

It ultimately isn’t for me to say or dictate for others how they move or create spaces, and many people are still in different processes as far as really unpacking and seeing the kind of nonsense we constantly go through in white spaces in a white world. However, it is something I always think about in the work I do and create, and find myself choosing to be intentionally antagonistic to those with power and increasingly less willing to translate or dampen my message for them, or even think of them as an audience member or consumer of my work at all, even if I am still going to discuss white supremacy, colonialism, patiarchy, etc.

There needs to be a disturbance in the assumptions made around audience. It’s time to let go of the idea that the target audience is the white audience, regardless if they might be the numerically dominant demographic. You look at spaces differently (as empty or full of color even if teeming with bodies), your art and vision differently as well, when you start thinking that way.

Once we make that shift, we can then also start looking and discussing ourselves and our art as independent of white gaze and audiences as well. We can then ask if the art actually good, is the artist creating good work, does it perpetuate harm or falsehoods especially against other marginalized in groups, like queer folks and women of color (as many spoken word artists in this city absolutely do)? Is the art bad or poorly executed, even if the politics and expression of self are valid (not every piece about police brutality is “powerful” and “good”)?

What responsibilities do we have as storytellers and creators—to our own communities and to ourselves—to rise above the low and limited bar that is whiteness and truly unveil some compelling and powerful stories?

One question that both my friends and I had: What does it mean if more artists, including ones of color not from the community, and especially ones that are not Black, engage and participate in a competition that quickens the economic displacement of African Americans in the city?

Who are these stories for, anyway?

For whom are we telling what stories, and where? To challenge who tells the story for whom, we also have to challenge who the story is for and what spaces there are happening in.

There’s power and merit in telling stories or showing art that does not explain itself to white people or folks outside of that racial or cultural group. There’s power in work that is prohibitive for viewers who don’t speak the language or know the culture or make some attempts to go beyond the 101, that just isn’t meant for them to consume and understand on their terms.

An artistic and cultural revival piece that perfectly embodies this ideal of resistant storytelling that I have been returning to in conversations is a performance installation/practice/anti-colonial revival piece by Anishinaabekwe Maani Oak. Oak is an Anishinaabe woman revitalizing traditional hand stitch tattoo methods in occupied Mohawk land T(k)aronto in so-called Canada.

In the video, she explains the multiple meanings and uses of the red willow barrier part of her installation, hung up around her tattoo performance space.

“It’s…meant to form a sort of barrier to the tattooing ceremony because so often a lot of our tattoo knowledge was kept in galleries and museums and academics texts and really barred from our communities, so what we’re trying to do with this is kind of bar it and bar this healing process from you guys, from the viewer and from the audience that is non-Indigenous,“ she says. “That’s really what the process is about as well: trying to reclaim space and reclaim land.”

Oak directly challenges this predisposed Western assumption that the consumer, the viewer, the audience member—very specifically the settler or non-Indigenous—is important, tantamount, sacred, and central to her work. Instead she names that historically they have been a dangerous and colonial force, one that people need healing and protection from as opposed to lending them access to. Her work challenges the idea that to grow from racism we must “share” (again, one that a people historically very prone to helping themselves to other people’s things will be happy to perpetuate no matter how damaging and false) and also challenged the idea that if she is not willing to entertain and uplift that colonial gaze and share with it that she then should not create.

This conversation about autonomy, sovereignty, knowledge (and conversation) stealing, and keeping and the arts and art spaces is one that communities of color, often engaged in different fights to reclaim and repatriate cultural items, works, art, pieces from colonial Western institutions like museums, are constantly embroiled in.

Frankly, the assumption that the arts are this free-for-all space for anyone to do whatever is a false and a dangerous one. Rosalez opened up the panel naming this sentiment, and a sentiment that is rooted in a entitled colonial history. To really uproot and change that trajectory and history, we have to shift who we orient ourselves to. We need to think more creatively about the questions and conversations and work that can be made when we center ourselves.

Briana Urena-Ravelo is an GR-based writer, poet, organizer, activist and lapsed creative. You can find her on Medium and Twitter.

Who are the stories for: De-centering the white gaze in conversations about art and race was originally published in culturedGR on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

There was this article I read on Medium yesterday about the corruption, political genocides and suppression that occurred when South Korea was first becoming the developed nation as we know it now in the 50s-70s (which of course the US had a hand in). The takeaway was that the “progress” of advanced, allegedly democratic capitalist first world nations always come at a cost, always hide well an oppressive, darker, more deadly underbelly and face.

Among developed nations with that same trajectory and having been meddled with by the United States, SK isn’t at all unique in this narrative, but there are unique aspects to how that manifests in the country and culture, namely in regards to the Kpop industry & suicide.

Kpop was always such a weird choice of fandom for me because it is the epitome of that bullshit hyper-capitalist consumerist facade slapped over a load of exploitation, suffering, extortion, abuse and oppression. It has to be noted that the industry is first and foremost an economic one that has done wonders for damn near every industry in Korea, tourism & tech, especially smart phones (Samsung IN EVERY VIDEO AND KDRAMA) being probably the most notable, explicitly at the expense of humans in the industry and fandom. The music, art, dance and performance are secondary at best, even if for thousands in the industry that’s the focus, what brought them there & why they do what they do. This reality drives the way the industry is structured and views its art and artists, as secondary commodities meant to reach the bottom line through performance, advertising and keeping to expectations so as to keep fans more than roped in, fucking obsessed, and outside advertising gigs rolling in. So, those commodities must avoid doing anything that might tarnish the facade & get in the way of that bottom line.

Knowing this, I & lots of my friends in the fandom were known for being atypical and rather irreverent fans who challenged these norms. We always talked social crit & politics, tried to listen to the thoughts & narratives of every day Koreans on the industry & its impact culturally, were vocally critical of saesang fans & the industry’s enabling of them by sucking them dry of energy and resources and forcing idols to be open books who catered their fans’ every whim and built their lives around their desires. I never bought any official merch or joined any fanclubs, refrained from engaging in or sharing certain invasive or disrespectful gossip or images, refused to spend the hundreds of dollars I didn’t have anyways for US concerts when artists I liked started coming to the states with more frequency as Kpop’s popularity rose. Most importantly, I tried to get to know and respect who the real people beneath the idol were, what their lives are outside of Kpop, their loves, motivations, desires, wants, dreams, goals and personalities. In short, I did as much fangirling for free and without feeding the machine, with somewhat of a conscience and with care and consideration of the people creating the art & entertainment that I loved, until, given how much I was learning about how awful it all really was, I just couldn’t.

So I wasn’t in the fandom anymore when the news about the death by suicide of Kim Jonghyun of SHINee came earlier this week. And for that I felt immensely guilty.

SHINee had been my first and main kpop group I followed in the fandom, and Jonghyun was my first ever Kpop bias. There was a point in my life where I knew absolutely everything there was to know about the group and the members. I felt like I had thus vanished selfishly the moment the artists I loved and had once consumed so much of my energy and time, who I otherwise tried to really see as people, weren’t churning out the exact music I had wanted from them. Yet I tried to remind myself I dropped that shit for reasons beyond simple superficial consumer whims.

I started to lose interest in the direction that the artists I liked were going for realistic reasons. First off, I was already too old when I got into Kpop at 20 and was only getting older as the target demographic of the music stayed largely the same and the ages of the artists debuting also stayed the same (AKA much too young for me to be consuming in the strangely sexual and fan-servicing way they are marketed even when they’re underage). The fandom was a dumpster fire that only got worse & even at its best, was a time-suck nonetheless that slowly became less of an interest and a priority as my ACTUAL LIFE started taking off. Frankly, trying to keep up was hard. I got into Kpop when I was unemployed, aimless, anxious and deeply depressed living at my parents’ house. And wouldn’t you know, dedicating hours a day to listen to songs and watch new music videos, teasers, appearances and shows, keep up with news and gossip, blog and generate jokes and analysis and content, fight defensive protective-of-their-bias-and-the-industry stans, livestream content from a different time zone & keep up with everything is a bit unsustainable when you start having a social life & full-time work and realizing lots of that actually starting to contribute to your shit mental health when it used to be an escape from it. This industry greatly exploits its fans as well.

And of course, the industry and culture itself just became much too atrocious and indefensible, especially for how it lacked consideration for the mental and physical well-being of its artists and the social contexts we all exists in. I spent my years trying to fangirl while discussing and learning about exploitation, labor violations, consumerism and capitalism, body shaming and fatphobia, colorism, mental health shame and stigma, fetishization, cultural appropriation and anti-Blackness, sexism, forced prostitution and rape culture, Korean politics and military involvement of the US, etc in the industry and fandom to little avail. I couldn’t make excuses for it anymore. I was too old and knew too much of it was fucked up for me to pretend like it was ethical to continue to support.

Sometimes, I’d peek back into that shining glittering fantasy & my jaw dropped. I looked and the landscape I once knew so well had changed so much so quickly, I didn’t recognize it at all. Each time a new batch of rookies debuted I was worried & mad as opposed to happy. Newbies are put under immense pressure to succeed among all the other new groups and tried-and-true established ones. What’s more, them starting their careers means they were at the beginning of grueling, underpaying (you’d be surprised given how much money idols generate how comparatively little of that they actually keep, most of their money comes from doing solo ads, shows, appearances, kdramas etc ASIDE from being music idols 24/7, so you can easily have groups with more popular members who make way more than the others) slave contracts with their company that often last 7–10 years, even despite pressure both in Korea & internationally & I believe legislation passing to prevent that. And older groups feel the pressure to compete with the new, younger, hipper kids (which is of course hardest on women, as kids debut as young as 13 or 14, and we all know how the world prefers women, as virginal, unwrinkled, unmarried, underage or barely legal, all hard to keep to the older you get), both keep to what their OG fans know & love while trying new things to stay on top, remain relevant & appealing as they age and all that comes with it-animosities and bitterness, exhaustion, desires to be more autonomous and independent artistically and in their personal and social lives-mounts.

Many of us non-saesang fans, especially older foreign fans, like to think we aren’t part of that pressure, that we are better than others, more supportive, with less expectations, less demanding or exacting, less fucking weird, but that’s just not true. All we are to our faves is judgement, impossibly tough expectations and pressure. Millions of millions of people all with the same potential to be disappointed.

Sure, lots of idols love & appreciate us, or at least the say they do. But let’s be real, at best we’re probably both the best and worst things about their job, & for many we’re just the latter. More often than we’d like to admit we just fucking suck. We’re demanding, obsessive and invasive, even if we try hard not to be, and those are the non-stalking/assaulting/suicidal/homicidal fans (yes you read that right. Saesang are fucking terrifying). And even if we aren’t that bad, there’s dozens of fans who are for each one that can keep it casual and not do shit like melt down if their bias was caught within a one mile radius of a attractive person of another gender or yell their OTP fan theories at anyone who will listen. We’re part of what makes our biases’, faves’, oppas’ and eunnies’ lives & careers so fucking difficult. And Jonghyun struggled with this.

To be sure, Jonghyun first and foremost had severe depression. He was vocal about his mental health struggles. Aside from the impact trauma might have had on this, that isn’t the individual fault of anyone, that’s brain-wiring, experiences and chemistry. He was getting treatment, but he still suffered and struggled for years. But more and more is coming out to reveal the inability of those around him to truly see how deep the problem was and how the pressure of fans and the industry were a big part of what caused him so much deep and abiding sadness, unrest and stress along with cultural stigma and pressure. Knowing this, we can’t just chalk it up to just brain wiring, if we ever could regardless. It wasn’t just that Jonghyun “lost” a struggle, it’s that outside forces added to it and didn’t help him when he was down. We failed him. Yet all that is happening is that the industry and fandom are taking his death as a loss in the family as opposed to something that was aided and abetted by them collectively and could have been prevented, likely, by any number of structural and cultural changes to the ruthless churn of their ways and public expectations, mores and demand.

This happens every single time some shit goes down with an idol. There are attempts at life, drug problems, self-medicating, breakdowns, personal life incidents (like idols daring to date or have personal struggles and lives), and industry and group tension and drama all the time in the Kpop world, and it is absorbed in a way that prevents any real accountability or reflection that might reveal the industry as unhealthy, caustic, and unsustainable. Idols are forced to keep these life things, called “scandals”, private, and if revealed, behave like they did something wrong. “Oh, sorry I was caught in a ‘scandal’ because you found out I smoke weed to help my anxiety and having sex because I’m a good-looking globe-trotting well-dressed 20 something year old, forgive me.” The opposite of that is when idols are guilty of doing or saying some really fucked up shit, it is again just seen as a minor slip up, a scandal, and we must just forget it and go back to loving and worshiping the idol and their group like nothing happened. That’s wild and unimaginable to many but it is really common in that industry. Idols don’t belong to themselves, they belong to their label, social perception, fans, and whomever else is hiring them at the moment. Their life and personal wants and desires must never get in the way.

I can’t say I ever really knew any of the idols I liked, especially the SHINee boys, despite how much of their life is put on display for us fans. But Jonghyun was known for being very open, loving and honest, really wanting to step it up beyond merely being a performer or idol and actually show his skill as a musician, artist, creator and performer. He was a light in that industry. Last night came upon a blog I wrote six years ago which was an analysis of an interview with Jonghyun in which, exasperated after reading all his words about how much he loves creating and writing and truly wants to be seen as an artist, I pondered when his breaking point with the industry would be. When he would finally get tired of being treated as a commodity instead of the crooning, guitar-playing, ballad-loving, crybaby softie with a sensual side artist he always was. I knew the time would come. He’d grab his things and go. I honestly awaited the day he’d get embroiled in what would later become legendary fight with infamous and evil SM Entertainment to end his contract and go solo. I never imagined it would actually look like him dying.

Ultimately no amount of blaming, feeling bad, analysis and theorizing will change what happened, bring Jonghyun back or take away the pain of his loss. But being honest as a former international kpop fan with a bit of insight and someone who tries to hold herself and the world accountable to one another is necessary to me at this moment so it isn’t merely absorbed into the industry and machine as another sad instance that will be forgotten soon enough. This is indicative of some deeper shit that many refuse to reckon with. If we all thought more critically and spoke frankly about these realities, we could really challenge the way the industry acts unethically towards all involved parties aside from its own bottom line and prevent further tragedies like this, and in some small ways bring honor to the life and sacrifice of Jonghyun & so many others in the industry.

Hunted, reviled, controlled.

Among people, I spent mere fleeting moments in places outside their deepest nightmares and fantasies.

Angry. Jezebel. Bitch. Whore.

A myth of Babylonian proportions. A character who bled the colors they painted her.

Goddess, mother, healer, fear.

I inhabited all plateaus, clouds, caves, gullies and hollows above and below but never at the level, not a second spent with them on earth. Though all else seemed within the realm of their horrid imagination, me as their equal yet escaped them.

And I reckoned with this, the phantasm of their pathology, the sickness of their entitlement, fears, anxieties, hungers, hopes, fever dreams that they infected me with. I tried to shake it, it pursued me even in my sleep.

I would play the role, then I would hate her, then I would love her again, but altogether I would beg for better odds, for a different outcome, for a voice, for another narrative, to be heard, to be seen, to be felt, to be held. I wrangled with that demon. I struggled with that ghost. I reeled at the isolation, anemic and thirsting from being rung for all my worth. I would rip parts of myself out and thrust it into the earth with hopes to grow a truer skin and a clearer voice and found I could not conjure a sufficient rhyme, reason, rhythm or form I both found adequately true to my self and with the ability to lull them into belief. I was only what they made of me. And I became lost in the maelstrom.

But with time I came to anchor myself and dig deeper into the darkness at the edge of what they twisted to their own ends, where they feared to tread and what was yet unfathomable to them, the depth that birthed me, into the ether of neither here nor there, sifting through black holes, listening to the echoes of centuries of loss and what they could tell me and what they wouldn’t dare, into the pit of my own past and our mutual despair.

Intertwining these recollections and poems and words and experiences I spun a self in secret, on a dark wooden loom, weaving an unadulterated and braver form and meaning, and she was terrifying, beautiful, glorious. Riddled with enchantment and power, with protection and grace, with heaviness and turmoil, with light and glory, with mania and sweetness.

And I carried her far, far away, into the proverbial refugee of those before me who ran from all that would chase, who wanted to extract their bodies of all the worth and work and leave the rotten husks to float in the Caribbean, scaling rocks, stony faces, ragged trees rooted firmly into earth, rolling hills, up, up, up, deeper into foggy mountains, the only place where she’d ever be safe. And made her a home fit for such a beast.

I will tell you same as I’ve told the rest, as I’ve myself-you cannot dominate or rule me. You cannot make a home of my form. You will not demand occupancy in my realm, you will not gain entrance. You will not have my energy, my body, you will not have my soul. No matter how much you want it, no matter how much you beg.

But you will hear me, you will see me, you will feel me, deep. To the bone, at your throat. Rattling, ragged, ricocheting across stone faces, like a growing unshakable sickness, like a deep thrusting urge, like an uncryable sob. Even if you don’t want it. Even if my voice and image compound and pursue and repeat like a siren, disorienting you, sucking you into its tide, over and over and over, building, mounting, drowning out reason, drowning out thought, pulling you further, further, down.

You wanted me, and by god, you’ll have her.

I will thunder and I will shake over these lands and you will not temper, quell, take or have me. You cannot stop me. You will not ever truly know me but you will know, be haunted by the fearsome unknowable, the abyss.

Your anger will not shake me and I shriek in frenzied laughter at your demands. I will not let your dissatisfaction, your desire, your greed, in all of its sugared fancy that I once trailed after, rot me.

I was never who you thought I was and I will never cease to be the creature you wish I wasn’t, of spitting meanness, of ancient bitterness, of power and rage unstoppable.

In the aftermath of last night’s Alabama Senate Race results, Black women are yet again being put last in line as beneficiaries to their own act of self-preservation and are instead being seen as everyone else’s salvation.

It’s horrific that the situation ever got to the point of requiring an endlessly beleaguered, hated, ignored, attacked, and marginalized population to come yet again to help those who created this mess and refuse to help themselves, much less Black women, because they know they can depend on those very Black women to get shit done for them. And yet the seemingly overwhelming and positive acknowledgement of Black woman’s role in the outcome narrative is muddled by something more nefarious that requires naming.

It’s true that inevitably, because unlike white women, Black women are infinitely less selfish and cruel, we do tend move & act with everyone else in mind, with our community in mind, before we think of ourselves, if we ever do. There’s a reason why when Black women are free we’ll all be free, our feminism has been rooted in this inherently radical intersectional resistance that is often the spine for all resistance since 1492.

But that is a dynamic established during slavery that sees and socialized us as the help, that objectifies us and makes us secondary characters even in our own superhero movie, that burdens us with everything under white patriarchal supremacy but doesn’t see our pain or hurt under the violence and pressure, thus making everyone believe we are immune to it. We internalize it ourselves & play the role without blinking, especially in politically empowering moments like this where our capacity and strength through suffering shines though.

But the “strong Black woman” narrative is inextricable from that historic & current dehumanizing objectification and burdening of Black womanhood wherein we are relegated to subservient supportive roles and encouraged to forget ourselves and our bleeding, exploited for our work and labor but left with no support or salvation in return.

We must reject the painting of the Black Alabama women’s vote as this completely charitable & selfless act of caring and benevolence graciously bestowed upon everyone else by them, like they exist to act for everyone else and this vote was for others & not themselves.

It must be said loudly and clearly you’re welcome, but Black women aren’t your mammies who exist solely to suckle you, raise you, save America itself when America shows again and again how much it does not regard or care for Black women. We move and act with ourselves and their needs in mind, more so each day, and that’s a powerful thing.

In calling out the framing of this political act as one of Black motherly benevolence, we must instead see it as one of Black woman need, and address Black women’s needs. Black women have issues that concern and impact them more deeply than any other demographic in Alabama. Black Alabama women have unique economical, medical, political, emotional, social, etc needs. Doug Jones was the candidate who isn’t a pro-slavery pedophile so he was inevitably the better choice, but it’s likely he won’t actually do anything to address and support the Black women who got him his win. What are we doing to address this and meet their needs? What accountability are we demanding? What pressure are we putting on those who hurt Black women and go against their interests in Alabama outside of merely praising Black women for saving everyone else from themselves?

This inevitably leads us to discussing the framing of the other womanhood being named at this time, as the perpetual and inexhaustible agency & strength of Black womanhood does not exist outside of the perpetual victimhood narrative of white womanhood.

We cannot look at what happened in Alabama last night, Trump’s presidency win or any other bullshit white women have pulled throughout the centuries and continue to say white women “vote and act against their best interests”.

First off, that assumes their interest is a righteous allegiance to gender that is neutral and in the end also helps other women. Even if that was true, that they vote either for or against their gender, in truth, their gender isn’t neutral or inextricable from whiteness, so even when they do rely on their gender to lead them, it yet doesn’t achieve much for women living in other gender realities, especially racialized ones.

However, the bottom line is that white women’s true investment is in whiteness, and has been the whole time, and it does benefit them to do so. White women don’t vote with their white gender, they vote with their white race. And they do so to their net gain.

Too often we allow cis white women to hide behind their gender marginalization both forgetting that they’re still privileged for having the only other manifestation of gender outside of white manhood recognized by white supremacy in the first place and the fact that their whiteness rides so hard it obscures all else more often than not, even when they’re also marginalized in other ways aside from gender.

If anything, what they consistently communicate in their politic is that gender marginalization occasionally gets in the way of them fully accessing whiteness & that irritates them. Their struggles, historically and now, very specifically revolved around them striving for full access to whiteness and their willingness to oppress others to get it. White women hedge their bets on whiteness every single time so ultimately, when they pull nonsense like this, they do vote in their best interests. Always have, always will. To assume they’re engaging in their own victimhood is to erase how they participate and enact violence. It is to erase how more often than not they make themselves Black women’s enemies, willingly.

This in tandem with the mammy trope encourages a narrative wherein White women are women but Black women are mules. Where white women, even as they loudly, repetitively, actively make white supremacist decisions & choose their white supremacist allegiances, are yet the victims, and Black women are their saviors. And we still get treated horribly.

The performative “Trust Black women, Black women did that” bullshit doesn’t help anything if you don’t actually do it, if you don’t actually challenge misogynoir and cultural norms that see us as untrustworthy even as we’re supposed to wipe everyone’s asses. These statements don’t mean anything if it isn’t backed by a real, intentional moving of money, space resources and power towards Black women so we can dismantle the violent, predatory, sexually and racially antagonistic realities we exist in every day, both from outside our communities and within them as well.

I would love if for once Black womanhood was respected and loved for its beauty and power as related to itself, its experiences or other Black women as opposed to what benefit it has to others and how others perceive, demand or understand it achieved for them. I would love it if for once we saw Black womanhood for how it is violated and strive to protect it, to uplift our own efforts to protect ourselves.

Continuing to talk about Black womanhood in relation to everyone else and not actually center and uplift it is still perpetuating the misogynoir and white self-centeredness that got us here in the first place.

Please know, I don’t want to be your help or your salvation. I’m not trying to lead or guide you. I’m not trying to be your light, your spice, your flavor. I’m trying to do and be me in relation to my own self and experiences and extract that womanhood and my life from all your greedy, racist, patriarchal, institutionally violent nonsense.

I’d like it, for once, if a man wanted to be with me, for him to consider what elements he thinks would make us good for each other in equilibrium, as opposed to what aspects of me he thinks qualify me for continuing maternal stewardship of his childishness and arrested development (a thankless task, an impossible task).

Like he’s checking my back for strength. Like he’s searching for a mother.

I’d like it for once if he were to share what we have in common as opposed to what of my person he’d like to piecemeal consume and digest for himself, what he enjoys of me like I’m a thing to be picked apart for her guts and glory, what he thinks is justly suited for him and not what he is able and suited for, not thinking that while I might be a meal he’d hungrily enjoy he’s hardly a thing that could satiate even for an hour.

I’d like it for once for him reflect on what of me confuses, challenges or terrifies him as opposed to what gives him pleasure, comfort and solace, and interrogate why that is.

I’d like it for once for him to keep up instead of merely be out of his depth, then intimidated, then pretend he’s at the level. I’d like it for once for him to be honest and instead of smile and tell me he likes “how smart” I am say “how much smarter,” and sit with it.

I’d like it for once for him to think if he’s deserving as opposed to willing, and work to deserve a willingness out of me, too.

I’d like it for once for him really ask himself if he should profess at all, if I even want him in the same way he wants me, and if he actually wants the real me, and realize he’s making it all up in his head, and let me be rid of these these fantasymaker men and their ghost woman I have never seen, known or met.