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.