Born in the Kill Box of White Supremacy
TW: Suicide/Death/Murder
I’ve thought about killing myself before. More than once. Sometimes to avoid this fuckery of a life but other times because I was convinced I was a burden on the people around me. I told myself that if I wasn’t here, I wouldn’t take up space or distract people from their lives. I would be one less thing they’d have to help care for and that it would be a blessing for them if I died.
Sometimes I think this with my spouse — that if I stop existing, his life would improve dramatically. He wouldn’t have to hear my angry rants against the injustice in the world. He wouldn’t have to hold me when I cry about the things I cannot change. He wouldn’t have to deal with the fact that I don’t fuck with his family at all. He could go forward and never think about the injustices that only affect him because of his proximity to me.
I see myself as a burden.
And I know how this happened. How I was conditioned to try to make myself small and stay out the way. How I was never supposed to be the squeaky wheel because when you are a Black womxn, being noticed comes with a price that shouldn’t exist. But white supremacist patriarchal capitalism put a dollar value on my existence and then made a world where nothing less than my death could pay it. My existence is tied to my ability and willingness to bear offspring, provide free labor, and be a footstool for every able-bodied, non-fat, male in my radius. I was born to be one of the least considered and one of the first sacrificed. Fighting that truth only makes it easier for people to do both.
“Do it for your country.”
“I’d rather die on my feet, than live on my knees.”
“The good of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”
These are just some of the sayings I’ve heard all my life, telling me that I should be willing to sacrifice my life for the benefit of others. That if I am not part of the machine then I am useless and unnecessary. We constantly hear debates about who deserves to live. We hear things like disability, poverty, and obesity being used to undermine our right to live. Blackness is pathologized. Femininity and sexual identity are weaponized. Non-cisgender identity is ostracized. Humanity is conditional and survival is reserved for those who fit the narrative. We are born to be the fodder of the ruthless, amoral, and powerful. When we fight, we are gaslit to hell and back. We’re told that we’re lazy, weak, inconvenient. Our role is always deemed secondary to whoever most embodies the patriarchal, capitalist, white supremacist ideal. We are the foundation that those at the top of the social hierarchy stand, spit, piss, and shit upon and the mess that social climbers seek to escape. We are the fuel they use to stay warm. We are the food they eat, the water they drink, and without us, they are nothing.
The goal has been to ensure we’re too distracted surviving to realize it, much less do anything about it.
And it works. Genocide is normal in amerikkka. Whiteness has justified the deaths of millions in its quest for dominion. The “greater good” is redefined each and every time the “elites” power is threatened and our bodies are human chess pieces waging war against each other to protect those who are advocating for our deaths before, during and after the war.
White supremacist capitalist patriarchy tells us who benefits in what ways and defines who carries that load. It defines who is protected and why. Everyone else is fuel for that “elite”. Every institution is a barrier to access basic human rights & teaches us who needs to die for white supremacist capitalist patriarchy to function. We learn this consciously & subconsciously and then bury that callousness and inhumanity in percentages to seem less cruel.
In case you haven’t noticed, every medication and medical procedure has an acceptable death rate. Every activity we do has an acceptable death rate. Environmental laws, industrial laws, workplace laws — all encode acceptable death rates. By our own admission, there is always a percentage of people that are acceptable to die. We are all guinea pigs in the medical-industrial complex and social science experiments for academia. Our deaths, while avoidable, are a small price to pay for “advancement”. At least, that’s what white supremacist patriarchal capitalism will have you believe. As long as those deaths are among people marginalized for being Black or poor or old, or disabled or fat or gay or trans or non-christian or any number of identifiers deemed unacceptable by whiteness, it’s okay. We are a small price to pay to maintain the lies of white supremacy.
You’ve been groomed to die for someone else’s benefit all your life and whiteness will not protect you because that’s the source of your demise. The fucked-up part is it doesn’t have to be this way. We can literally reshape how this works if we stop pretending that the status quo of cannibalizing our own is our only way to thrive.
But, as a collective, we’re followers. The institutions are saying that it’s okay for people to die, so the people start advocating for that death because this is the path towards future greatness. Our “leaders” tell us “ there are more important things than living”. White people are literally protesting to spread this disease, mostly because they believe they are protected by their whiteness. After the news came out that the majority of people dying from covid-19 at this time are Black people, the media started blaming us for our deaths. Fuck all the societal inequities that continue to harm us. Instead, the whiteness machine has again pathologized Blackness to ensure the false image of white supremacy remains intact.
The message that white people seem to keep denying is that unless they are among the “elite” they are just as expendable as Black people. They are being fucked over by the same systems. They are choosing to be fucked over by the same systems because they think it is a worthy sacrifice for white supremacist patriarchal capitalism. They think they can use this virus to solidify their power more. And while nobody necessarily wants to die, if it means their kids will continue to benefit from white supremacist patriarchal capitalism, they’ll do it because this lie is the fundamental core of their being.
The difference is that white people believe they have a choice in what happens to them when really, they are willing conspirators in their own demise while telling themselves that they are somehow above it all. Yet, here they are protesting for the right to risk their lives for a fucking haircut.
Genocide is a norm for whiteness. Genocide is the core of how imperialization and colonialism spread across the globe. The white supremacist patriarchal capitalist agenda is its natural evolution and it has a chokehold on the humans of this planet. We are dying under this ideology and will continue to do so as long as success and achievement are defined by cruelty, callousness, and horrific violence.
White people tell themselves they are civilized while splattered in the blood of their victims and building homes on their graves. They are an out of control death cult who pretends to be benevolent. They are monsters who have sold the lie that they embody the best of humanity while they cannibalize themselves and everyone around them. As another writer said, the cruelty is the point.
I was born in a kill box but I refuse to sacrifice myself at the altar of whiteness. Regardless of what I’ve been taught, it doesn’t have to be this way.
If you appreciate or learned from this essay, please feel free to compensate me by contributing to my Paypal or CashApp. You can contribute any amount you want at any time:
Paypal: https://www.paypal.me/TaLynnKel
Cash App: $TalynnKel
OR
Originally published at https://talynnkel.com on April 21, 2020.
