whiteness

A recent tweet from Ellen DeGeneres has got the whole world talking for all the wrong reasons.

No black man, woman, or gender non-conforming person is safe from the terrorism of police brutality and racist white people’s actions against us, let alone our most vulnerable citizens, our children.

As much as you want to believe people are all the same, we don’t have the luxury of being seen as the “default” in the same way white, straight, cis people often are. We don’t have the luxury of dismissing our painful history and systemic issues for the sake of everyone getting along, because we’re still in the middle of them.

It all started with a text from my roomie, Kori: "I am manifesting lying out, and getting some sun on my cooch."

It is a very difficult and dangerous job, and it does require officers to have the ability to make good split second decisions. None of that should mean that it’s OK to be incompetent, or that we should all rush to justify, ignore, or excuse incompetence, racism, ableism, and the inappropriate use of force.

It’s easy for folks in America to get angry but it’s incredibly difficult to get them to stay angry. To transfer anger to hope. And to participate in transformation. Then to start all over again with the next hashtag.

Men of Color, especially Black men, have historically been coded as animalistic abusers and r*pists when it comes to white women. This stems from the idea that Men of Color literally want to steal and sully the belongings of white men. In turn, it becomes the “duty” of white men to protect white women — not because they truly care about white women, but because white women are the property of white men.

CNN hosted a heated debate between host Marc Lamont Hill and retired NYPD detective Harry Houck in which Houck ran up a list of statistics to back his allegation: “Black people are more prone to criminality.” But according to recent studies there are a multitude of factors which lead to black people being arrested and shot by police, and “more prone to criminality” isn't one of them.