I don’t know why I keep on engaging with people on Twitter, but I do.
This time, it was a tweet about how white people are too scared to say they don’t care about black lives matter.
…at first, I was like, scared where? It’s all over Twitter, and then I remembered that Twitter is hardly indicative of real life. We’re all sharing stories on Twitter and they’re getting thousands of likes and retweets, but there are millions of people around us offline who probably feel how the tweeter does.
According to them, ‘a lot of people feel this way’.
GOOD!
Chances are the vast majority don’t give a shit. They’re out and about pretending to be nice. Overcompensating. Telling us how great we are. Stroking our egos.
Newsflash – it’s usually obvious within a conversation. Some white people will do their best to bring up race somehow and either double down on how much they love something (usually, our hair) or make a questionable comment and qualify it by saying that another imaginary black person thought it was okay/funny.
Or, they will use microaggressions –
brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioural, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative prejudicial slights and insults toward any group, particularly culturally marginalized groups.
Microaggressions will have you scratching your head. Just off the top off my head, I’ve been told that I look ‘softer’ and ‘more approachable’ with my natural hair, that black women in weaves look like they want to ‘fight’. Someone told a black woman I know that she looked like a drag queen (but that was okay because they LOVED drag queens).
It’s always very obvious when someone has a problem.
They don’t like us and they don’t care. WE BEEN KNEW! They’re not fooling anyone – they might as well live their truth.
All black people are asking for is equality. Not to be liked. White people don’t even need to care. They just need to deal. We’re here, we’re not going anywhere and one day, we will be treated with the fairness and respect we deserve.
In a way, being too scared not to say something is kind of privileged in itself, right? They’re only scared because it’ll make them look like selfish, racist people (which, I guess some of them are?).
In terms of things to be scared of – that’s a pretty good break.
supernatural snark 