On Chet, Sheryl, and Not Addressing Elephants Trampling Us So Y'all Can Maintain White Comfort

TW: brief mentions of sexual harassment, assault, misgendering

You want to know one of my many white supremacist workplace culture pet peeves?

When everyone on the team or in a small company gets "reprimanded" or "coached" for something that one person has said or done. And we all know who did or said the thing but we all have to pay for it more than the people doing and saying the harmful and hateful things.

I loathe being in a meeting and a supervisor wants to stress the importance of respecting people's pronouns when we all know Sheryl is the one person on the team who gleefully misgenders people and disrespects pronouns.

I abhor everyone on the team having to take the online sexual harassment training for the umpteenth time this year because, for some reason, serial sexual harasser Chet is never fully held accountable for being scum that most of us have filed complaints about until it's way too late and he physically assaults someone.

The white supremacist workplace culture's right to comfort and fear of open conflict nonsense ensures that harmful people maintain status and employment instead of being shown the door.

Making all of us redo trainings or sit through group-wide "coaching sessions" that should be meant for Chet and Sheryl alone to make it clear to them that their words or actions have consequences ensures that Sheryl and Chet will continue doing harm and keeping the toxicity of your workplace nice and elevated.

But you know, let's prioritize that comfort, civility, and collegiality until the inevitable lawsuits come, right?

This Week's Opening Thought: October 13, 2025

This week’s opening thought - a personally hand-drawn bit of energy for a country still celebrating a national holiday based on white supremacy, colonialism, racism, and revisionist history.

Today is Indigenous Peoples’ Day. Period. Don’t be comin’ ’round here tryin’ to shout the praises of the mediocre male of pallor who “discovered America” because, and I cannot stress this enough, you can’t discover something that was already inhabited and thriving before your colonizin’ nonsense touched its soil!

Geezus.

It’s ridiculous that we’re still discussing how we should all accept the whitewashing and gaslighting of colonialism, oppression, and murder, especially around topics we all have the facts on and have had said facts at our disposal for countless decades.

Do better.


[Image description: A middle finger surrounded by a simple wreath of roses. A banner saying “Fuck Columbus” can be seen below the hand extending the middle finger.]

Image description: A middle finger surrounded by a simple wreath of roses. A banner saying “Fuck Columbus” can be seen below the hand extending the middle finger.

This Week's Opening Thought: September 29, 2025

This week's opening thought: For those not in the know, I live in "war ravaged" Portland, Oregon. You know, that place y'all's president said was on fire, overrun with violence, and 5 minutes away from devolving into Mad Max Fury Road levels of dystopia.

I was at the farmer's market Saturday morning in "war ravaged" Portland and y'all's president was right! There's just SO much danger here, y'all! Like, how am I supposed to fight these great prices on winter squash without y'all's president's help to keep me safe from getting produce right from the farmers themselves?!

Geezus christ.

If you believe that Portland is a fiery hellscape wrought with danger and violence, I've got some lakefront property in the Nevada desert to sell you for $1 a yard.

Portland has seen sizable decreases in homicides and shootings this year, down by 52% and 33% respectively from last year's numbers. Robberies and aggravated assaults? Also down. These numbers reflect one of the steepest declines among major U.S. cities surveyed regarding crime data.

So, am I scared? Do I need y'all's president to come and save me?

Hell no.

I'm not scared of folx struggling with homelessness, mental health, and addictions. Those folx need help, support, and resources, because all of those issues often stem from poverty, a lack of privilege, generational and societal trauma, and a capitalist white supremacist culture.

I'm not scared of crime in a metropolitan city. I grew up in Detroit, Michigan in the 80s and 90s. It's gonna take a lot more than the crime that Portland does struggle with to put fear in my heart regarding walking around and living in this city. And that crime? Also often stems from poverty, a lack of privilege, generational and societal trauma, and a capitalist white supremacist culture.

So no, I'm not scared living in a city where I can walk freely around downtown Portland and damn near every neighborhood I go and encounter dozens of people with clipboards seeking signatures for causes they champion before finding myself facing a potentially dangerous encounter with someone who needs our society to care about and help them.

Y'all's president could be helping Portland and countless cities across this country with funding for addiction services and addressing our ever-increasing local and national homeless crisis, but nope. He'd rather send in the National Guard to basically beat up folx with addictions, homeless folx, folx in crisis, and people peacefully protesting the inhumanity of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

His goal is to make non-dangerous places supremely dangerous for everyone living and working here to feed his narrative that "liberal cities" and "antifa" are a danger to the "[U.S.] American way of life" and harm and kill folx who protest and oppose him.

Portlanders: let's not give him what he wants.

Chill.

Have a beer.

And leave 'em to record themselves picking up trash, just like they're doing in D.C.

Taxpayer dollars at work.

This Week's Opening Thought: September 22, 2025

This week's opening thought: After this past weekend's full-on hate rally masquerading as a memorial service, and seeing the sea of people of pallor who showed up to "pay their respects" to a white supremacist bigot with tears in their eyes and a distortion of the purported "values of Christianity" in their hearts, I found myself once again playing my least favorite game: What Will It Take?

What Will It Take? focuses on me asking myself one question: what will it take for people of pallor to be uncomfortable enough to feel like "enough is enough" and stand up and fight for, well, everyone? Themselves, oppressed communities, targeted communities, everyone?

I've been playing this game for at least 30 years now, y'all.

What Will It Take?

Hell if I know.

After all my years on this planet, and decades of my own learning around the intersections of white supremacy and history, I honestly have no clue what it will take to get people of pallor to recognize how dangerous this country is for marginalized, targeted, and invisible communities and decide they're ready to fight.

I have no clue what it will take for people of pallor to collectively realize that white supremacy harms them, too, and that it's time to do more than show up to a "No Kings" rally.

And I'm flummoxed when it comes to understanding what it'll take for people of pallor to realize that we've been long past "talking it out," "finding a middle ground," choosing to "not get into political conversations," and well into dealing with an escalating level of danger that will eventually subjugate, eradicate, and oppress most if not all of us.

What Will It Take?

What will it take for y’all to fight?

I honestly don't know.

Y'all do always seem more than ready to fight and "stand up" against Black and Brown folx, melanated folx, trans folx, and queer folx for pointing out the harm, hate, or discrepancies in y'all's words and actions, though.

Huh.

Guess I know the answer to the question after all.

On Candace, Anti-Blackness, Self-Hatred, and Begging for the Hand of the Massa

What’s always wild to me about Black folx who are so stuck in anti-Blackness, self-hatred, and white supremacist ideology is that they spend their entire lives hoping, praying, that people of pallor will care about them and give them the head pats and validation that they so desperately yearn for, for the willingness to hate and help oppress their own people.

These Black folx never receive the recognition they believe they deserve from whiteness for participating in harming their own people, because they never fully comprehend that they are tools of the master, discarded by whiteness once they’ve served their purpose. They ultimately find themselves with nowhere to go, isolated from their own people, with no other person or societal institution of pallor interested in taking them in because they’ve been drained of their perceived usefulness and have burned every possible bridge to support and care they once had. When this happens, they, of course, try to crawl back to the Black collective, hoping we’ll forgive and forget. Suddenly, they’re “Black again,” trying to endear themselves to the Black collective, adopting or re-adopting AAVE. Suddenly, we’re their brothers and sisters again! They know how it feels to be “held down by the man!” So, after they “prove themselves” with a few phrases and colloquialisms, they believe Black folx should forgive them, let them come back in from the cold, and invite ‘em back to the cookout.

Instead, the Black collective ignores their asses and leaves ’em out there in the streets alone because they’ve proven they cannot be trusted to take care of Blackness - ours or even their own.

So, defeated, they crawl back to whiteness, living on the outskirts of white supremacy, hoping they’ll do or say the right thing that will once again get them the comfort of whiteness that they ultimately yearn for. They do things like cry and have an online, videotaped breakdown over not being invited to the memorial service of a white supremacist bigot that they buddied up to for years, even while said white supremacist bigot spent years openly and happily talking about how he believed Black women were “inferior” and “lacked the brain power” to do anything other than procreate. And after all that hootin’ and hollerin’ and carryin’ on?

They still find themselves with no invite, on the outside looking in, hoping that one day the master will let them back on the plantation or Black folx will let them back in out of pity.

That one day never comes.

What a wild existence.

Sh-- wouldn’t happen to me, though.

[Image description: A group of Black people laughing. Above them are the words, “The Black Collective’s reaction to Candace Owens being upset that she wasn’t invited to Charlie Kirk’s memorial service.”]

Image description: A group of Black people laughing. Above them are the words, “The Black Collective’s reaction to Candace Owens being upset that she wasn’t invited to Charlie Kirk’s memorial service.”