White People Refuse to Fix Their Shit
I spent the afternoon thinking about the Walmart shooting in El Paso only to wake up to a shooting in Ohio.
I need to go grocery shopping. It’s never been a task I enjoyed but for the past few years, I’ve become more and more cautious about leaving the house. I’ve seen it happening. I currently have a gig where I can work from home most of the time, and when I think about going into the office, I wonder about its lax security. I think really hard about the shirts I wear out the house, wondering if it’s going to invite unwanted conversation or violence from the white people around me. I have developed an aversion to going out and it’s an aversion that grows as I watch whiteness, an identity that never evolved past violence, continues to devolve into open and brutal violence against everyone that undermines its perception of being the best and only human beings on the planet.
The psychological impact of being subjected to white people’s constant gaslighting meant to frustrate and belittle everyone who challenges their self-perception is beyond ridiculous. Our entire media supports this goofy ass “lone wolf” “mentally ill” narrative that absolves whiteness of the monsters it creates and for whom it makes excuses. Daily there are parents, teachers, police, judges, and politicians making excuse after excuse for the casual disregard they and their kids and the white people around them have for anyone that doesn’t fit into their categories of humanity…They routinely absorb and disregard the humanity of anyone not white while protecting their violent and terrible friends/relatives/neighbors/children because of their whiteness. Violent monstrosities they accept and release upon the world, hoping they restrict their horror to the sub-humans they think deserve it for being different.
Every day we are shocked to learn the sheer depths of depravity hidden by manicured lawns and khaki and polo garbed families, people pretending to be humane as they copy the image of respectability to imprint on their fetid psyches, a culture that has rotted beyond saving hundreds of years ago. Today we live among putrid shells of people with few even capable of recognizing the foulness of who they are and even less capable of doing the bare minimum about changing it. I live with it in my home and question myself regularly on why. Because it’s easy? Because it’s nice having someone who will try to care for me even while he is insists on ignoring the violence that festers inside him. . When we talked about the shooting and the anxiety it creates, his response was “We can’t live our lives in fear,” and I was so disgusted by this nothing statement that I told him he was mentally lazy and he lost some respect for saying that fucking ridiculous “do nothing” statement.
We’ve known for a very long time that white people don’t think they are the problem. White women are convinced they are kind and gentle souls deserving elevation and protection in all situations. Their feelings are the only priority and they will use every manipulative tactic to ensure that. White men believe they are entitled to everything and the world should bend to accommodate their will and will react violently when they are confronted with the reality that this is a lie. I watch my S.O. drive and he complains that other drivers aren’t accommodating his desire to move freely through the world without interruption and for years I’ve said “you need to fucking adapt and learn to maneuver without thinking you’re the center of everyone’s universe. You’re the asshole here..” And for years he’s continued to be a selfish, shitty driver because he refuses to adjust his thinking.
His shitty driving attitude is just another manifestation of his white male identity. It is one that I have been unable to make a dent in because he doesn’t think it’s a problem. It’s a behavior I have seen in all forms of oppression — the intent on centering oneself. The refusal to consider others, to acknowledge that your perspective isn’t the only perspective. That multiple truths exist simultaneously and that the oppressive truths exist at the will of white supremacist patriarchal capitalism. It is an ugly characteristic that is bred and nurtured, one that anyone with a hope of gaining power will co-sign on in any number of ways. And the denial of its existence enables people to continue being monsters who refuse to acknowledge who and what they are, even on a small scale. And it’s scary.
Now that we’ve had 251 white male mass shootings in 215 days, I find myself stuck in a feedback loop of avoidance, acceptance, and irreverence. My fear of regret has changed. I spent the last three years working towards bigger dreams because I don’t know when the end is coming but I believe it’s going to be a lot sooner than I anticipated. This country is a violent shitshow that has sown it’s shit all over the world because there can be no co-existing. There can be no cooperation. There is only violent conquering and subjugation and none of us have escaped that.
We live in the light of whiteness and it is a light that masks the horror of who and what they are. They have created the narrative that lightness is right but we are living in the real of that lie. There are only blood and bodies in this light, cruelty and maliciousness. A foulness so pungent that we pretend it’s manageable to want to live another day.
I made the decision to build the things I want to see, to do what I can to bring beauty and truth into this glowing pit of corpses and lies. None of us asked to be born into this but we make the best of it that we can. The daily reality I live with is that tomorrow isn’t promised and this violence is the result of hundreds of years of brutality and lies…and it’s going to continue escalating. Create the pockets of joy that you can and try to make this shitshow better for yourself and others…and do it without using the tools of the master’s house because those were made to hurt you, not heal you.
Originally published at https://talynnkel.com on August 4, 2019.
