I’m classy but a cuss a little. Sometimes a lot. And it often spills over into my writing. The kind of shit that gets censored on my professional Facebook page.
So when I co-authored this profanity-free piece about equity with my friend and badass-hijab wearing-mama of 6-trauma surgeon colleague Dr. Qaali Hussein in July, I seized the opportunity to amplify it on Facebook. One might imagine the risk of sending a piece about equity to all adult Facebook accounts in the U.S. Turns out the post didn’t perform very well with my $10 investment over 5 days. Only reached 430 people, of whom only 9 bothered to click on the link. Oh well.
But one of those people my post reached decided to message me. I can’t locate the chat now (maybe they deleted it?), but it started with a simple demand: “Stop your Marxist agenda!”
Ordinarily, I would ignore such nonsense, but for some reason on that day I thought, “OK, I’ll bite.”
I politely asked the anonymous female troll from North Caroline (of course they would be in my birth state) to explain to me how my agenda was Marxist along with their definition of “Marxism.” At first I was curious, really just looking for a laugh, but then I genuinely wanted to understand where this person was coming from.
Basically, she went on to explain that my fight for equity was equivalent to wanting to take everything everyone had earned and redistribute to everyone. They offered to scrape together a few of their dollars to pay reparations to me, the DOCTOR. Yes, in all caps, repeatedly.
When I asked if she truly believed all wealth in this country was fairly earned and why she repeatedly wrote DOCTOR in all caps, she responded with something to the effect of she hoped I knew how lucky I was so why was I complaining about equity when there were some Yankees in her family who were abolitionists, some White people who didn’t own slaves, and some Black people who did own slaves, blah, blah, blah, and have I taken the time to listen to FOX News pundits and Tim Scott and no, they weren’t interested in reading anything like Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste but truly believed love is the answer and offered some videos I should check out, then thanked me for the pleasant exchange but that we should agree to disagree. And then blocked me.
So what started as a laugh ended with me feeling a grave sense of hopelessness that we shall never overcome our fucked up past and very similarly fucked up present because some people refuse to acknowledge anything outside of what jibes with their existing mindset. And damn near everybody else just turns away and avoids political conversations at Thanksgiving dinners.
I was reminded of this exchange when I recently received a response to a comment I made on Medium.
I wrote:
The rich have convinced White people that they will lose something, when in truth they will likely benefit too. Nobody is coming for poor and middle class White people.
To which an anonymous troll responded:
“What will white people lose? What benefit is there to being convinced of a white supremacy that doesn’t exist? You are a doctor of some variety, right? How did whitey hold you back? Tell me the most racist thing that’s ever happened to you. Let’s leave out red herrings like micro aggressions and other passive aggressive examples. Black people kill themselves at a rate of one an hour and white supremacy is the biggest threat? Your doctorate expertise may very well be indoctrination from race peddlers and not actually education.”
Whew, chyle, that’s a lot of inconsistency, untruths, and downright stupidity there to unpack, but I will focus on the piece that suggests that I’ve “made it” so why am I complaining? That if I haven’t been personally been on the receiving end of the most atrocious acts of racism, then why am I complaining? That the day to day bullshit I am subjected to because I was born in a Black female body, does not amount to enough to justify my complaining.
I did not respond to this troll, because what for? Just like the first troll, I will never convince this one of anything that they choose to ignore and invalidate. I am writing here because it underscores the sheer selfishness that underlies all of this. The why should I care when I’m doing just fine?
So to be clear:
As a Black woman, I know that I am at the bottom of this fucked up racial caste system that Whiteness (and misogyny) created. From this vantage point, I see all the pain that racist inequity created. So, when people wonder or have the audacity to ask out loud, “Why is she so angry?!” This is why, Bitch. I feel it.
I call out all the racist bullshit at every opportunity my modest platform allows because I can. I must. For everyone who looks like me but doesn’t have any platform at all. And even though I do not believe any of this will change substantially in my lifetime, or fuck it, probably not even in Earth’s lifetime, I WILL NEVER SHUT UP as long as I live and breathe. Agreeing to disagree is not an option.
Because, as the late, great Zora Neale Hurston said: If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.