...

“Lighten Up” by Ronald Wimberly

She’s known for her “blue eyes-brown eyes experiment” where she divides a group of volunteers from the blues and the browns. The minute the people walk in, the blue-eyes know they’re not welcomed. She makes them wait in a separate room, gives them shitty chairs, bad food, and shows them less respect. And (obviously) it causes all sorts of discomfort and rage, but that’s precisely her point. It doesn’t help that most blue-eyed volunteers happen to be white as well. Sometimes they get the message, sometimes they don’t and leave, sometimes crying or screaming. And Jane Elliott says that’s exactly what minorities want to do everyday of their lives, but they simply cannot do.

Protesters kneel for eight minutes on the neck of Edward Colston’s toppled statue, Bristol, UK

Speeches take place on the plinth where it used to stand

The statue was later thrown into the harbour

Cishet white men:

While Black experiences with racism and anti-Blackness are used as analogies/metaphors and narratives to shape the experiences of non-Black people while erasing Black people’s experiences and humanity (as I discussed in White People Using Blackness and Anti-Black Racism Analogies For Their Experiences Is NOT Intersectionality), these experiences past and present are indicative of our lives, our history, our deaths. A reality. Not an anecdote to lead into something else. 

Michael Brown’s execution and all of these extrajudicial executions are indicative of violence that never was truly “past” as it is always present. And it is a REALITY—not a metaphor—with a human cost in Black mental and physical health, in Black safety, in Black bodies. 

Below are the links mentioned in the tweets that I sent above: Black Women Were Lynched Too, Consuming Black Death, Family of Michael Brown, Teenager Shot to Death By Ferguson Police, Talks About His Life.

And look, I am disinterested in White supremacist sociopaths, anti-Black non-Black people of colour or unfortunately some Black people who have internalized racism and believe that the politics of respectability can protect us to now throw out the violent lie, derailment and misnomer (“Black on Black crime” is a misnomer and epistemic violence) that Black people “don’t care about intraracial crime.” This is a VIOLENT type of derailment and is dehumanization. When every race has intraracial crime yet only Black people are deemed to “not care” despite evidence to contrary and then civilian crime is juxtaposed to extrajudicial executions as modern lynchings and State violence? The false equalization is not solely epistemic violence; it is a direct attack on the mental health and well-being of Black people. Save it. (And notably, this derailment only addresses violence between cishet Black men; never a mention about any other Black people cared about or not.)

Black life is valuable in it of itself. Not solely as a trope for consumption with erasure and a demand that we feel gleeful about the erasure to prove “solidarity.” Anti-Blackness and misogynoir are not “progressive.” Michael Brown’s life MATTERED…FULL STOP.

Peace to every Black victim and family of this violence. (My own family is one of them, by the way.)

white people: