Facebook Publication Date: 11/3/2020 22:11
REQUIRED READING
COMMENTS ONLY
NORMS APPLY
NO REACTS
(Note: ignore the link at the bottom of the page and carried over from my personal page and it’s annoying. Don’t get distracted by it read what I wrote below. Thank you.)
This is from my personal page. I have been doing my best to manage my slosh here at lace on race, because I want to stay on brand, and I do not want to do anything to erode or contradict what I have been extorting you all to do. I was going to sanitize this analysis but I feel that I cannot. You need to hear the full force of it unfiltered and unvarnished and confront it. The only thing I would add here is a special shout-out to the 9800 of you who are ostensibly here at lace on Race but have done absolutely nothing since you’ve been here. I’m speaking specifically to lurkers and Spectators. How do you expect the needle if you never get on the field? It is exactly that level of reticent and apathy that is coloring the electoral map right now. Who you are in this space is who you are, and if you are spectating here you are spectating out in your off flying lives and that is exactly why nothing fundamentally has changed since 2016. We need to do better. Let this be your Clarion and wake up call. I want not one emoji. This is required reading comments only. New Norms apply. This is the most important thing I’ve written all night.
Read every word, confronted hard. Comment with intention. I am vulnerable and raw right now and I need you all to stand with me and hold me well.
It will be incredibly hard for black people to look white people in the eye with anything less than utter contempt in the coming days. White people, do not dare get offended. Do not dare insist on the solidarity you did not display. Regardless of outcome, this result is damning.
And I better not see one response that even hints at ‘not all white people’. We are not doing this tonight. Own this.
If there is any question that we need to keep walking and that the work that we do here is vital it is this election result. And that 9800 of you that have done nothing so far need to step it up tonight. No excuses no exceptions.
—–
*God help me. NO REACTS. COMMENTS ONLY.*
(Edit: I cannot believe that people are using likes and hearts and emojis after I *specifically said* comnents only.
This is the same disrespect in a smaller scale that white people have shown us tonight in this election. Stop it.)
Lace on The Race
Lace on Race
The electoral map is slowly being colored in, and here is how I think it will go down in my early analysis.
I do think Biden will win in a squeaker.
It will hardly be a mandate, which is what is needed to get this country jump-started.
That’s unfortunate.
It is absolutely laid at the feet of white people.
White people absolutely lied at polls, and even those who voted for Biden did painfully little to move the needle over the last four years so that electoral shifts could actually have happened.
This electoral map looks depressingly like the same one that we saw in 2016.
There was no collective Damascus Road Moment for white America.
And if Biden does win, which I do think is likely, white people will be all over themselves clapping themselves on the back, congratulating themselves and saying we did it!
Oh, hell no.
No you didn’t.
Once again you are standing on the backs of people who did the heavy lifting for you.
And right now I am fucking furious.
I can’t post this on to Lace on Race , because I’m going to have to go back into that space and be measured, and mind my slosh bucket.
I cannot indulge in unbridled self-expression there.
But I can here.
And I am so fucking angry all of you who didn’t listen to us in 2016 oh, and who dragged your feet, and only got a sense of urgency when your Starbucks window got broken.
The people who Trump has systematically harmed over the last four years deserve better than white people gave them today.
And it will be hard to look them in the eye without utter contempt.
Since I don’t know how any individual white person pulled the lever or filled in the bubbles bubble, I have to assume, like four years ago that fully 50% of white people that I encounter voted to have me subjugated and even killed.
And I’m going to have to live with that regardless of the eventual outcome.
And so will my brothers and sisters.
And that is absolutely laid on the feet of white people.
Y’all should have done so much better than you did.
You had four years to get it right.
I have talked for 4 years about white ambivalence and ambiguity and about the dissonance in creating a world that you say you want when you are still married to and inculcated in and benefiting from whiteness.
And people have patted me on the head and said that I talk about it too much.
Not to mention those who dare call me friend, but who never supported the work that I have been doing for the last four years now, who think themselves above it, or that they already know everything, who look at me top down and condescendingly decide I have nothing to offer them. And they re not doing the work anywhere else either, not in durable ways.
*And it shows*.
And let’s not forget the more than 1,000 followers of my personal page basically treat it at me like an entertainment space with absolutely no accountability and no impetus to actually move the needle. Treating racial Justice and those of us who fight on behalf of it like broken down players on a football field. I am livid. I disabled those followers that are nothing more than lurkers because I felt exploited a year ago. I feel more than exploited now. I feel violated.
And that’s pretty much every single white person that I know; I can count on the fingers of two hands how many people have truly walked with me in service to racial Justice in the last 4 years who dare call themselves my friends. Hear that.
I have lost Untold friends over this.
I have seen people dump me in favor of their racist friends and families and boyfriends and girlfriends, and say at the end of the day it doesn’t matter.
Which is saying I don’t matter.
This is the culmination of the pain that I have endured for 4 years even as I have done my damnedest to move the needle.
Regardless of the election outcome this is a reckoning that everybody is going to have to deal with.
And first and foremost those of you who call yourselves my friends need to deal with me.
Ears to hear.
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