This Week's Opening Thought: January 9, 2023
TW: mentions of systemic racism, generational trauma, and sexual assault.
This week’s opening thought, which I’m sure is going to have some folx looking at me some kind of way: when I see melanated people pledging their allegiance to white supremacy and happily upholding white supremacist ideologies, I can’t help but find myself sitting in an emotional gumbo.
I think about the ongoing harm they cause to their families, communities, and people who look like them and are grappling with similar generational and societal experiences and trauma akin to their own.
I think about how horrible it must feel, how much self-hatred or hatred of their heritage and culture one must harbor in their melanated body to pledge their life and identity to uphold white supremacist ideals and systems. Was the generational and societal trauma so heavy that they couldn’t carry it anymore?
I think about the thoughts of desperate self-preservation that must come from willingly enabling and supporting people and systems who have historically murdered, maimed, sexually assaulted, enslaved, colonized, and oppressed your people with the hope that at least you’ll be safe.
I think about what mentally, emotionally, and physically happens to these melanated people when they realize they aren’t guaranteed safety and acceptance for subservience. I think about what happens to them when they recognize how the whiteness they’ve aligned themselves with views them: as an end to a means, expendable, disposable once they get what they want from them. I can’t imagine how much trauma these folx are carrying, how much they blame themselves for not being good enough when they are used, disposed of, or offered up as sacrificial lambs.
I empathize with them. I care for them.
And I grapple with that empathy and care while fighting the urge to judge and discard them.
It can be both, and it is both because humans are messy and complicated creatures.
I want better for them. I want to be there for them when whiteness smites them because it will smite them at some point. It always does. I want to help them up when the inevitable occurs, and they fall because no one should face their melanated mortality and the fallout of their choices alone, even when their choices have harmed their people. And they will undoubtedly be alone because walking the path of preserving whiteness as a melanated person is a lonely road. But real talk?
I’ll be damned if I sometimes don’t think about extending my hand to help them when they fall and then moving it before they can grab it for help, leaving them to fall on their ass again.
I believe that you reap what you sow. But I also can’t walk away from my people, even if they walk away from me and mine. It’s probably a combination of my codependence and empathy stopping me from walking away from them like Peter Parker walking away from his Spidey suit in the dumpster. But I cannot and will not be their judge and jury. I will not kick them while they’re down. It’s hard not to want to judge them, to shun them. I understand why melanated folx would want to. We don’t owe dangerous and harmful people anything, including melanated people who harm melanated communities. But I can’t judge them.
I’m sure they’re doing more than enough judging of themselves for the both of us.
When I see my people, melanated people, go the route of sympathizing and supporting their oppressors, I hope they don’t irreparably harm their families and communities and eventually realize their missteps and atone. I wish them healing, and I hope they can process their trauma and self-hatred. And I hope when they fall, when whiteness has used and discarded them, the fall doesn’t literally or figuratively kill them and leave them with nothing and no one.
No one deserves to die alone.
Emotional gumbo.
