Gabrielle Douglas

You know what we as white people never have to worry about? Having our ethnicity and nationality separated so that the masses can feel more comfortable about a person or situation. Gabrielle Douglas took Olympic Gold in gymnastics, the first black girl to do so to boot. Oops, I just said she was black didn’t I? No, you see, she’s AMERICAN. Why do people have to talk about race about this stuff? I get it, you “don’t see color” and she “could be purple or green and I wouldn’t care!” Well first off, in doing that you are robbing a group of people of a moment. Whether you’re doing this on purpose or not, through your insistence of separating Gabby’s skin color from her being American, you are taking a part of somebody else’s history away.

You may find this hard to believe white people, but everybody in this damn country has history and is a part of the history of this country. American history does not begin and end with white people. And I’m not talking about slavery, Jim Crow etc, minorities have histories that have nothing to do with white people at all and when you try to tell a minority that their new hero’s ethnicity doesn’t matter and what’s important is that they’re American, you are spitting in their faces. Being “color blind” to minorities is a myth. The very fact you claim to be color blind is proof that you are not, that term would not fucking exist. You are not making those people feel more accepted, you are stealing from them.

This is an example of something you might say to a minority to make them comfortable with you:

It doesn’t matter if you’re black, yellow, blue, green, whatever! I don’t see color! I just see a human being, an American!

Here’s a variation of what said minority hears when you say that:

Don’t worry about your skin color, your heritage or your culture, I am willing to look past all of that so that we can be happy Americans together! USA! USA! USA!

I am in no way saying that you are being malicious or cruel. More often than not, you think this is a good thing that you are saying. You think you’re putting that minority member at ease and that they are accepted. But as you can see from that rough translation up there, there is so much more to being an American minority than the color of their skin. We’re talking history, both good AND bad. We’re talking culture, heritage, day to day experiences that differ from yours. You are speaking from a place of privilege and that is a very difficult concept to come to terms with. It’s not your fault! It’s really not. But it’s the truth. We all show white privilege be it through thought, word or deed and many of us do it without realizing or intending anything bad to come of it.

But face facts, you don’t want to treat a whole ethnic group as a monolith? Then don’t say you “don’t see color” because you’re telling that person that the set notions you have of their people are not important to you. In a fiercely nationalistic country made up almost entirely of immigrants, how would that make you feel? I can’t tell you how many times people hear my English accent and would tell me “I’m Irish” when they’re clearly from South Philly. Do I tell them that I accept their white Americanness and that their ancestry doesn’t matter to me? It’s the same thing. 

White America get to show all of its heritage and variety and wonderful history. (white) America fought wars, wrote the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, developed great infrastructures across this huge land. Their families hail from a myriad of different places; England, Ireland, Germany, Holland and so on and so forth. Non-white America gets put in a box with a series of characteristics carefully written on the outside with the instructions that they apply to everybody in that box. THEN you’re going to tell that person that you don’t care about the very qualities ascribed to them on the box in which you yourself have placed them?

Gabrielle Douglas is black AND an American. Neither of those elements of who she is diminish the other. The best part is? You’re not even scratching the surface of who this person is, a person shaped by her experiences as black, as American, as a young woman, so much. Hopefully we learn more and she can become an even more amazing role model. Let her make those decisions and choices based on the sum of her life experiences, don’t try and take those away from her.

Satire Is Hard

Hey folks. Sorry for the lack of posts on here recently. It turns out that making satire out of white people’s views and reactions to race and racial issues is really hard sometimes. As the cultural debacle that is the Trayvon Martin case rages on not to mention the continued attacks on the President for foolishly not being white, everything I have tried to write just turned into straight, serious rage. You hear that from everyone, and rightly so, but as a white Brit living in America I don’t feel like I bring anything new to this debate.

I know a couple of really cool people are following this tumblr now and I appreciate you doing so, I just wanted it to be known that I have not gotten bored and abandoned this thing. I just have had difficulty finding anything but anger and sadness in all of this hate and racism I read about pretty much every single day, the lack of empathy, the blame being put onto the victims of crime, the mistrust and hatred placed upon a community just trying to come together and support one another in what has been an extremely painful and eye opening experience for them.

I will be back soon, thank you for reading and stay safe.

It’s All About Us

Hey white people!

If the recent Trayvon Martin shooting and fallout have shown us anything, it is that a lot of minorities in this country feel threatened, and fearful that they are profiled and and stereotyped negatively and generally are not given the same treatment as their white counterparts.

How does that make you feel as a white person? Guilty perhaps? Angry? You know why? Because it’s all about us. Afterall, white people are the ones being racist, right? We’re the ones oppressing and discriminating, profiling and judging. So why do they have to talk about themselves all the time? Minorities should know that every time they make accusations of racism they are accusing every white person alive of being racist.

How can we bring our plight to the masses? By making sure that every conversation about race comes back to white people and how you are made to feel. We’re the majority of the population so doesn’t that make our opinions more important? This can be used in conjunction with the “It is YOU who is the racist” strategy we spoke together about last week. It is important that we are seen as the sympathetic ones so that we might best shift all attention towards us. The quite brilliant tactics of Operation White Womens’ Tears is integral to all of this, nothing is more sympathetic than that of a sobbing white woman so try to keep one on hand at all times. And preferably she should look as much like this as possible:

Also of great use to our cause is to make other peoples’ causes your cause too. Or rather, take their cause and helpfully redirect it so you may more effectively make it about white people. The recent Million Hoodies March was a fine example of this as those brave members of the Occupy movement took the bull by the horns to show everybody how much the protests of white people are for the benefit of everybody. Minorities have to know that we have been fighting “the system” for a long time and that with that in mind those racial issues minorities get so upset about will have to go on the back burner for now while we fight the big issues that affect white people the most. 

How can white people look get past oppressive power dynamics if minorities keep bringing them up?

I Am Rubber, You Are Glue

Hey white people!

As white people, we both know there’s nothing we hate more than being called a racist. I hate being called a racist even more than being called a honkey ass buster. This is post-racial America! Many of us voted for a black guy to be president so clearly if we were racist we wouldn’t have voted for them. But we get scary concepts we don’t understand thrown at us all the time like “institutionalized racism”  or “your Mr. T blackface Halloween costume was deeply offensive” or “stop touching my goddamn hair what is wrong with you?!” This makes us feel like a jerk and results in us taking that bad mood out on someone else, perhaps a colleague or a loved one, all because someone decided they were the Jerk Police and you fit their profile.

Well you know what? Children really are our future and we, as adults, could learn a lot from them. For example, Sean Hannity spoke recently that he was hanging out at a playground watching some children at play and he saw something amazing. Children have an incredible technique where when one child calls the other a name, the victim would turn to the name-caller and say to them “I beg to differ sir, it is in fact you who smells like farts.” Brilliant.

So if we feel like jerks because we’re told we’re saying something racially insensitive, well how about you are the racially insensitive jerk? You just made a white person feel bad, kinda sounds like a race-based attack you just made. A gentleman has black boot polish on his face and is yelling “you’ll never get me on no plane fool!” and someone states “I find that highly inappropriate” well guess what? You just had to make it all about race didn’t you, ya big jerk? Maybe YOU are the racist for thinking blackface is deeply insulting to black people, YOU are bringing up old stuff from history that nobody things about anymore making an innocent white person feel like a jerk in the process because of YOUR racial framing of the conversation.

Once you realize the potential in taking the bad reactions to your so-called “racially insensitive behavior” and making the accuser feel like a jerk that’s just feeling way uptight instead, it’s an incredibly liberating experience. Maybe tell that person that you have to watch what you say when they’re around, that way they’ll feel like such a jerk they’ll never raise this sort of issue with you again, thus making your place of work or social hangout spot a truly post-racial.

We are an enlightened and all-inclusive country who don’t want our fun spoiled by minorities getting their panties in a twist about historical stuff and not wanting to stop seeing color. Why can’t they understand that white people just want to realize the wonderful future promised to us by Star Trek: the Next Generation?

You see? Everybody on the bridge happily working together, not worrying about who made blanket statements about whose people. Except Worf of course but that’s different because he’s a Klingon and they are an angry, warrior race. And Data is an android so he’s very different to everybody else there of course. See? Star Trek: the Next Generation, they have a blind black guy in engineering and their captain was a French dude with an English accent. Lets make that happen America!

Slurs

Hey white people!

In this post-racial America we live in, there are a lot of race issues. We live in a world where we white Americans have been opened up to all sorts of unspeakable slander. Well no more I tell you! We cannot allow vulgar language and slurs to hurt us anymore, because when you call me a honkey ass buster you might as well be relieving yourself onto the gravesite of my great, great grandparents. Especially difficult to do because they were lost at sea. 

It is time for us to take the names used to disparage us and use them ourselves. Below is a list of words we must take back and liberate from those who would hurt the good name of white people everywhere:

honkey
cracker
peckerwood
ofay

blue eyed devil
whitey
Mister Charlie
redneck
pirate
cyborg
licorice salesman
godzilla
ferret wrangler
ostrich face
peanut sanitizer
Carnation Instant Milk
Princess Natasha
paraphernalia instructor
Batman
Cagooglieheehah
Tithead McGee
whining douchebag

Scream them at your fellow white friends! Wear them on t-shirts! Take their power away! 

You see that? That right there is good old fashioned American empowerment.