Stolen Support

Right up front, I am going to issue a STRONG warning to stay in your lane. As a white woman especially, your focus should entirely on your role in how removing resources, security, and most importantly parental support from Black and brown families brings harm and violence to them. This extends out much farther than immediate familial or relational ties. Since this topic is extremely sensitive, if I see any white commentary veering away from white complicity, it will be shut down immediately.

Also this.

The Black woman who wrote this sent it privately. That IS indeed a commentary and critique on our space in regards to the safety she feels and the support, or rather lack of support, she expects to get. This should also be a deep part of your grappling.

This is why I have long held that the focus on Black women as Ground Zero for the liberatory fight is valid. Lessening, mitigating, and moving toward obliterating violence and oppression from Black women will indeed affect other oppressive axes; the converse has not shown to be the case.

Indeed the opposite. The primacy given to white women and their proximity to both whiteness and *selected* parts of Blackness hurts and erases Black women.

_____’s message
“As a black woman, while I hate to do this in a public place I’m going to add that a huge part of this oppression is not just emotional, political, and social but is also economic.

Black men and white women conspire (maybe not consciously, and still) to extricate resources from the black community. They leave women and their children alone to fend for themselves and then judge the women for not being good enough at being everything to everyone.

Then, when Black men die [they] leave the profit of their labor to white women, they leave the inheritance of their families to white women.

Black men who align themselves with white women remove themselves, their leadership and guidance and their resources from the black community and then suggest that Black women should be capable of doing all the things it takes to maintain that community in their own.

And they do this once they are educated and beginning to amass some small or large amount of wealth.

Their adjacency to that whiteness gives them benefits via connections and information that Black women never get.

And Black children left behind don’t have educated and successful men to look up to because they’ve left.

This reinforces [colorism] in the way that mixed children benefit from the presence of their fathers but [the same does] not [hold for] mixed darker skinned children, [who} are more likely to grow up in poverty.

It’s a rabbit hole. Because then white women feel like black women should give them non racist cookies because their dating black men.”


5 responses to “Stolen Support”

  1. Lace Watkins Avatar
    Lace Watkins

    Adventures in missing the point.

    Quietly:re-read.

  2. Jenny Avatar
    Jenny

    Surely by publishing this you are just affirming the stereotyping of black men that you and your FB ‘cult members’ claim to hate so much? In your ‘rant’ the white woman is the villain of the piece, taking away the support from the families of her partner. What does it say about the feckless black man who walks away from his wife/partner and abandons his children at the merest flutter of blond eyelashes?

    Too often black men are portrayed as lazy, irresponsible, unconcerned fathers whose children’s transgressions are blamed on a lack of suitable role models. You are suggesting here that in reality, these black fathers are somehow the helpless victims, dragged away from their responsibilities by white women with some super-powers.

  3. Christin Spoolstra Avatar
    Christin Spoolstra

    Returning after reading and reflecting. I do need to deal with the economic and social consequences of my marriage, especially now that we’re pregnant with our first. I’m joining Ibram Kendi’s talk on his new book tomorrow which I think will be vital as we learn to be parents. The reality for us is that wherever we choose to live is going to have consequences that negatively affect him, our child, and their community. If we stay here, I hold a job that should be done by someone from here. If we go, we are removing my partner from his community and creating a void for our future child. Ignoring these realities because we’re in love and are good partners does not make them go ahead. These are realities that must be wrestled with and through which I must be constantly listening.

    There are daily decisions I can be making to take these realities in stride. Instead of ordering that ‘taste from home’ (usually owned by other foreigners), we can be eating from local establishments. I can ensure that my social time does not include only other white women. I can be doubling down in my language studies to increase the quality of my own communication as well as the likelihood we create that environment in our family. Since I work in education mostly related to the public schools here, that was always something in the back of my mind: If we were to have a child, where would they go to school? Will have to be the public schools, which scares me, but they could use more parental advocates.

    These will be lifelong choices. And when I don’t consider the seriousness and the implications, I’m showing my racism.

  4. Christin Spoolstra Avatar
    Christin Spoolstra

    I’m reminded of conversations we’ve had about enforced scarcity and white supremacy being a zero sum structure. I am complicit in economic and social structures that lure white adjacency with profit. The result is that poc are even more deeply harmed by a community divide designed by white folk. I’ve seen these narratives used against women of color and really need to accept my own role in creating and perpetrating that narrative. I am struggling with this post as my partner is a non-black poc. Posting now and will return after reading the other comments. (cross posted)

  5. rebecca mcclinton Avatar
    rebecca mcclinton

    (cross posted) Thank you, deeply, to the author for her willingness to share. One area of depletion of resources that comes to my mind related to Black women is through parenting. I am a foster parent. Often a lack of resources is what leads to a parent losing custody of their children, determined by a (usually) white evaluator to be ‘neglect’. There is a long long history in the foster/adoption system of use of power in this way. Often it’s white people (often women in the form of teachers, therapists etc) making the calls to CPS to report possible neglect before seeking to understand the situation. Instead of using money and resources to help the parent be the parent they want to be but can’t due to systemic racism and poverty, they (in my state) give the parent about a year to accomplish an unfathomable list of tasks (stable housing, complete a litany of treatments and interventions which are a full time job, have a means to support their kids and many more) and otherwise lose custody of their child to be adopted to other (most typically white, christian) parent(s) who then (typically) vilify the biological parent. The foster parent gets paid/makes money off of this process and displacement. I do see some systems working to make changes and put more resourcing into the bio families and address racism within the systme in other ways, but not at nearly a comprehensive or rapid enough rate. My praxis as a foster parent is to work to build relationship with the bio family and to use resources paid to me towards successful child and family outcomes within their own systems, not mine.

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