How could you possibly think that I don't know this? There's a human being on the other side of this screen you know? You don't have to keep sermonising about mountains or acting like I don't understand the experiences of my own life.
Yes, black people realise that they're human. We realised when we were slaves, we realised when we were "separate but equal", we realised when the prosperity we built was burned to the ground in Tulsa.
White supremacy thrives in all of the subtle ways in which white people *don't* realise that we are human. James Baldwin was saying this 52 years ago!
https://youtu.be/WWwOi17WHpE?t=152 (The whole interview is fantastic but I linked straight to the relevant part here.)
I'm not trying to ease white people toward complacency, I'm trying to argue against this latest attempt to cast black people as something "other". To glamorise our struggle itself, instead of the end of it. This is simply a new, subtler form of complacency. And this time, some black people are complicit.
Today, black people ARE suffering. We ARE anger. We ARE protesting and looting. We ARE struggle. We ARE borrowed sermons about mountaintops. Films, books, articles, news, everything affirms this. As I said in the article, there's even a notion that our stories "aren't black enough to be real" if they don't portray this and only this aspect of who we are so that white people can gush and “performatively listen” and feel like the good guys for pitying us poor black folk.
But we don't struggle because we're Black, we struggle because we're humans who have been unjustly treated.
There's a sense that the spotlight should always be on our suffering. No. The spotlight should be on our humanity. The richness of it. The diversity of it. The ordinariness of it. I don't want my oppression fetishised and my bravery in dealing with it applauded. I don't want white people to "Own up to their whiteness" when that's basically code for, "do absolutely nothing while feeling like the hero of the story". I want my oppression (and let’s face it, the oppression of two people debating on Medium is extremely minor), and more importantly the oppression of everybody who looks like me, ended.
p.s. I can't go blue in the face. It's a feature, not a bug.
