On Adriana Smith, Anti-Blackness, Experimentation, and Disregard for Black Uteruses and Black Women

Trigger warning: Descriptions of anti-Black woman hate and harm, anti-Blackness, and reproductive trauma.

Adriana Smith and her family should've never had to endure this horrible and traumatic public experiment in postmortem childbirth.

What Georgia did to Adriana Smith would never happen to a person of pallor with a uterus. And there's nobody out there that can tell me otherwise, because trying to deny this fact is an openly raised middle finger to the history of the mistreatment and bodily harm done to Black women and Black bodies for centuries on stolen land.

Even in a country that is on the fast track to remove reproductive rights and body choice from every person with a uterus and jail people for making personal choices that have nothing to do with the state, there is no way this would've been allowed to happen if Adriana Smith were a person of pallor. The news would've been running stories every damn day. Reproductive rights lawyers would've been coming out of the woodwork. But that didn't happen, did it?

And we all know why.

So instead of people of pallor and pallor-led legal aid organizations with power and positionality who claim they care about reproductive rights partnering with Adriana's family to fight for her rights, as they would with any cis woman of pallor with a uterus (because, let's be real, that's about all they would stand up for), last Friday, Georgia performed a C-section on a Black woman who was declared brain-dead in February and forced to be on a ventilator to conceive a child because, you know, laws and sh**.

And now, this 1-pound, 13-ounce child whose deceased mother was kept on a ventilator, unable to provide the nutrients needed to fully nurture his growth and development, is now fighting for his life in the neonatal intensive care unit because, you know, laws and sh**.

Cis women of pallor love quoting The Handmaid's Tale to describe the level of danger people with uteruses are in while openly choosing not to sit with the undeniable fact that Black women and Black bodies have always been subject to centuries of Handmaid's Tale-level sh** at the hands of people of pallor since colonizers forced Black bodies into chattel slavery.

Adriana deserved better.

Her child deserved better.

Black women deserve better.

This Week's Opening Thought: June 9, 2025

This week’s opening thought: A gaggle of y’all are out here raging mad at Sesame Street and Ms. Rachel.

Sesame Street.

And Ms. Rachel.

And why are you raging mad?

Sesame Street and Ms. Rachel are modeling empathy, compassion, and humanity, which I hope you want your children, their primary audience, mind you, to understand and embrace.

But I guess a lot of y’all would rather pass hateful views and rhetoric on to your children in their formative years with the hopes of creating a bunch of future nazis and lynching parties who have no understanding of how beautiful and uplifting it is to be a loving and compassionate human being.

I know a whole lot of y’all gave up on pretending that you’re “on the right side of history” many moons ago, but damn, man. Gangbangin’ on Elmo and threatening the life of Ms. Rachel?

What side of history - Hell, of anything - is that?

What a bunch of dangerous and hateful lil’ weirdos y’all are.

On Saving Those Not Worthy of Your Save

It's the year of someone's Lord 2025 and a whole bunch of y'all are still out here trying to "get through to" hateful, willfully ignorant bigots, hoping to convert them.

Oh, Bro, Broseph, Bro-ham.

Oh, Sister, Sis, Ma'am.

Oh, my friend, my compadre, my peoples.

Y'all gotta stop with the tryin' to save these people.

To paraphrase light-skinned Jermaine, they don't wanna be saved.

People are defending Diddy and Tory Lanez out here, and trying to shame and ridicule those they've harmed. You can't save anybody that deeply enmeshed in that level of misogynoir.

There's a whole bunch of [redacted] people mad that Black folx are happy about the Nottaway Plantation roasting 'til the meat fell off the bone who have the audacity to call it a historical landmark and say tasteless nonsense like, "How would you feel if Auschwitz burned down like this?" You think you're gonna save someone who spews something so simultaneously anti-Black and anti-semetic that it'll make your head spin off of your neck?

There are millions of people who have spent the last 12 years voting for this current administration, knowing damn well what they were backing. Many of them are gleeful about the harm y'all's president and his Dollar General Batman villains are doing to communities across this country, including their own communities. You can't save somebody whose hatred for others is so powerful that they're willing to fall on their own sword multiple times to justify their hatred.

The past 12+ years in this country have made it clear - explicitly clear - that it's time to leave some people behind. If you haven't pivoted already, consider this your notice to turn around and walk away from hateful people and their unflinching toxicity. Focus your energies on the folx in your life and community that need support, because those are the folx who deserve your help and care.

Everybody ain't worth savin', regardless of their relation or degrees of separation from you and yours.

Hate doesn't deserve so much of your love.

This Week's Opening Thought: May 12, 2025

This week's opening thought: Two things that I can always rely on with people of pallor is that 1) they will always say/do the quiet part out loud, and 2) they will make up any narrative they can to "protect" their own.

Melanated refugees seeking asylum for safety reasons? Nope. Y'all's president placed an indefinite suspension on refugee resettlement in the U.S. because he insists that they're "eating the dogs and cats" or MS-13 or flooding in from the insane asylums and mental institutions and harming *cough* white *cough* U.S. Americans. Not true, but when has that stopped people of pallor in power?

So, no refugees are currently welcome in the U.S....except for select refugees of pallor, of course. Case in point: a plane full of fragile-ass pale South Afrikaners, descended from Dutch people who subjugated, enslaved, harmed, oppressed, and killed Black South Africans for a damn generation, landed in D.C. today and received a warm welcome.

Now you might be asking yourself, "Are they in danger?" followed by "Why are they getting an exemption when so many people in need aren't?" And, on the surface, that's a solid pair of questions. But if you're asking yourself those questions, you're likely a person of pallor who has somehow missed how white supremacy works, especially when people of pallor are scared that their power is slipping away in an ever-changing populace that ain't playin' their colonizer games anymore.

According to y'all's president, these South Afrikaners are "victims of unjust racial discrimination." Mind you, the average household of pallor in South Africa owns 20 times the wealth of the average Black household, according to the Review of Political Economy, an international academic journal, but they are definitely "victims of unjust racial discrimination." You see, South Africa passed a land law earlier this year that aims to make it easier for the state to expropriate land in the public interest. Although no land has been seized by South Africa's government, the South Afrikaners are freaking out and in pure victim mode, mainly because they "own" a whole lot of stolen land they've "inherited" from their crappy ancestors, people who had no right to it in the first place. Hence y'all's president, likely at the prompting of Elon Musk but also because he sees dollar signs and pallor-derived generational wealth, making a large, concerted effort to resettle wealthy South Afrikaners in the United States.

So let's take a moment to break this down, shall we?

Black South Africans who have a right to their land are the villains because they want to take steps to expropriate their land. Not all of it, mind you, but probably enough to take care of Black South Africans and narrow the wealth and ownership gaps. And these dusty South Afrikaners are "resilient", "victims," and "oppressed."

It's enough to make you want to take a damn nap.

Pallor "protecting" pallor.

So predictable and weak.

On Tyre Nichols, Policing, and Policing While Black

TW: Police brutality, murder, anti-Blackness.

The Tyre Nichols verdict shows you how policing systems, police officers, and laws surrounding accountability in white supremacist countries ensure the safety of police officers from accountability for doing heinous things, skin color be damned.

To be Black and willingly complicit in systems of harm and inequity that oppress Black people is to make a choice on the kind of Black person you want to be.

Blackness ain't a monolith.

But policing sure as hell is.