How do you stand it?
How do you stand knowing that you are standing on someone else's face? Life? Livelihood? Children? Chance? Choices? Humanity?
How do you not wake up every morning not wanting to chop your legs off at the knees and crawl from door to door asking forgiveness? Begging, pleading for redemption from your innate evil, and the harm done by those who resemble you?
How do you not hang your head in shame upon seeing or meeting those you know you destroy by just occupying the space you do?
How do you endlessly look down your nose and perceive people of a certain color, certain neighborhood, certain perceived 'place' in society and automatically grant yourself superior status, indeed, super-personhood? Whilst mentally, emotionally, socially, and in (currently) extreme cases literally shitting all over who they are, what they believe, what they think, what they do, what they look like, their perceptions of beauty and love and success and happiness and life lived joyously and well?
What's more, how do you do all of the above and volumes more, daily, hourly, momently, secondly, CONSCIOUSLY, then have the nerve to bristle and act offended, even innocent and wounded upon a) being called out on your racist, sexist, classicst, heteronormative, wholly uncompassionate, ugly, and awful actions and self and b) being called the mean, cold, uncaring, arrogant, senseless, vitriolic, unpleasant, killing, pillaging, savage, sick, rude, twisted piece of rotten shit BITCH that you are?
Where do you get off? Seriously? What magic mirror do you gaze into each morning that whimsically absolves you of all of your privilege? All of your lies? All of your hatred and bigotry and bloated, distorted, dead heart?
I have been all of the above and worse. I continue to have places in me that continue to be this. They deserve nothing short of erasure, burn-purging, demolition. I deserve nothing less.
YOU DESERVE NOTHING LESS.
If you are white, if you are wealthy in any way, if you are conservative in any way, if you are snobbish and elitist, if you are so far removed from the reality of the consequences of all of the above, you are due for a few good body checks to your self-esteem, to your livelihood, your self-image, your chances, your choices, your bullshit false super-uber-humanity.
No, you are not the benevolent savior. No, you are not the open-minded, benign friend of the disadvantaged. No, you are not exempt. We are all guilty. We are ALL RESPONSIBLE. Period. There's no getting around it, there's no getting away from it.
There's no getting away with it.
Our bill has come due. We can show up and pay, with some semblance of human dignity, some sense of withered justice, whatever may be left in our dried up decaying gaping holes where hearts and minds should be...
Or, we can run away yowling like the punk bitches we are, shirk our collective responsibility for the things WE HAVE DONE TO f*ck WITH THE WORLD AND OTHER HUMAN BEINGS, for bringing the whole species down to a point so low we are all asphyxiating, for killing our brothers and sisters and friends and husbands and wives and children and lovers and cousins and co-workers and perfect strangers, killing them with our words, with our guns, with our money, with our greed, with our power-craving, with our hate.
Own up or shut the f*ck up, white people. Or just step aside. Step aside and go live out the rest of your existence in hiding, away in your million-dollar homes, away in your posh apartments, amongst your own, tell YOURSELVES the lies you long to be true. At least then, you'll only be hurting yourselves.
Same for us middle-and working-class whites. No, we are not 'as oppressed as 'they' (whomever 'they' represents to you at the moment) are. We are not as disadvantaged or squeezed or strangled. We have our skin and our cultures' prizing and rewarding of it, no matter our class. No matter our social status. White trumps color every time, we all know it, so stop with your tired excuses about how it's okay for you to be a bigoted moron because you don't have any power, either. Bullshit. You, by virtue of being born the (non) color you are, have access to all kinds of power that others born to different colors do not. Stop lying to yourself. Stop making shit up. You know it.
I'm tired of hearing the latent and not-so latent bigotry. I'm tired of the winks and nods. I can't stand being subtly or overtly included in something I know is wrong, and you know is wrong. It's not right. It's not okay. It's not funny or cute or harmless. It's hate.
STOP IT.
It was too many things at once in one day that made me mad at everything.
