It Happened to Me: There Is A Clueless White Writerperson on XOJane And I'm Suddenly Feeling Very Uncomfortable With It
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Photo: Yoga Sole Brooklyn |
Perhaps you have heard the furor about this piece over at XOJane, "It Happened to Me: There Are No Black People In My Yoga Classes and I'm Suddenly Feeling Very Uncomfortable With It" where the author painstakingly takes us through the stages of her newly envisioned grief in a magically delightful scenario of imagined racially based hate.
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January is always a predictable month on the Internet: it is inevitably jamdamnpacked with spillages of accidental racism from well-intentioned Whitepersons who have sworn to dole out new horribleness, new inventively offensive comments, and for the most part, whose cups of privileged cluelessness runneth muy over before February rolls around.
A few hours ago, as I tap-danced into my exceptionally fuckery-filled Facebook timeline, a fairly absentminded white woman put her good sense aside directly before my eyes. It appeared she had never pulled head from ass while browsing the Internet--she was Self-Victimizing around thoughtlessly, flossing her superiority, looking confused and painfully misinformed. Within the first few paragraphs of patronizing misdirected sympathy, I saw the attention-craving victim inside of her do a snowball, turning into rambling self-satisfier and then self-appointed hero. Before we made it into our first race-themed blunder she had stooped down atop her whiteness and privilege, head raised high into her own ass, proud and supremacist. She stayed there, self-aggrandizing, for the rest of the article.
I was drowning in front of her, I had no choice but to look straight at the enemy every time my head came up for air (roughly once a minute). I’ve seen people self-immolate or blow up on the internet many times, and it’s a sad thing, but as a person unable to turn away from a tragedy there’s nothing you can do about it. At that moment, though, I found it impossible to stop thinking thoughts of sudden and indefatigable lice about this woman. Even when I wasn’t positioned to stare directly at the enemy, I knew she was still staring directly at me. Over the course of the next five minutes, I watched as her need for a cause turned into temporary lunacy and then a quest for Emmy-winning white saviorhood starring Julia Roberts. I felt it all directed toward me and my body.
I was completely unable to focus on my being a human, instead feeling hyper-aware of my mahogany-hued uncrackable blackness, my enviably unfuckwitable sense of rhythm, my well-versedness in these unmistakable signs of proximity to "some bullshit" that I have been in close contact with way too many damn times. My chocolatey black boy body. Surely this attention-seeker was noticing all of these things and wishing she could be me for them, stereotyping me, resenting me—or so I imagined.
I thought about how even though The Internet comes from thousands of Al Gore-approved engineer hours, it’s been shamelessly co-opted by clueless patronizing wanksters as a country club for out of touch White men and women. I thought about my beloved sanity-based Internet that I’ve visited for years in my imagination, on which articles are very well-thought-out and often very rooted in things other than imagined victimhood and no one will try to put a deluge of oppression-seeking horribleness upon your spirit during a time in which I was a menace to south central while drinking your juice in the hood. They preach the gospel of colorblindness, that their style of being a privilege-oozing member of society is approachable for people who are not incestuous swampfolk, people who don't truly believe The Heist was actually better than Good Kid, those who walk upright, non-Beliebers, and human beings; that it is non-poisonous and humane. As such, the Internet is populated largely by faux activists, girls who cry out, "[Gods] of [Mount Victimhood], Hear My Cry", and broke Carrie Bradshaws, who are often all the same person, hey girl; there is a much higher ratio of those with the weakest of grips on reality to sanefolk than use of condoms should, in theory, result in, and you always see the articles freshly-published despite being marinated for a week in distatefulness and supremacy, from Evian-toting, Upper-West-Side yoga stereotypes who don't realize they have just described themselves.
I realized with horror that despite the colorblindness preached by the people who compose and publish things marinated in distastefulness and supremacy, despite their purported claims of lifelong humanbeingness, despite my attempts to surround myself with people who have grips on reality, words demonstrating firm footing on Planet LookingForExhaltationViaVictimization were bountiful and not very far between. And in the large and constantly rotating roster of Oppresionistas, I could only shake my head in disbelief that I was, unfortunately, much to my dismay, for all intensive purposes, despite beans not being capable of burning on the grill, face to face with "some bullshit."
Woe is me.

I backflipped away from that article and promptly broke down crying. The Internet, a beloved safe space that has helped me through many dark moments of boredom and sexlessness in over [none of your business] years of use, suddenly felt deeply suspect. Knowing fully well that five minutes of perhaps self-importantly believing myself to be the undeserving target of a racially charged foolishness is depressing, is absolutely not my own psychological projection, is a drop in the bucket of "some bullshit," is the tip of the iceberg in my climate change-affected Sea of Frustrations, I was shaken by it all the same.
The question is, of course, so much bigger than unbridled self-importance—it’s a question of enormous systemic failure. But just the same, I want to know—how can we browse the Internet in good conscience, when such mindlessness is afoot? How do we create a space that is accessible not just to everybody, but specifically to sanefolk? And while I recognize that there is an element of spectatorship to my experience with this quest for Emmy-nominated White Saviorhood starring Julia Roberts, it is precisely this feeling of not being able to avert tragedy, not knowing how to look away from the carnage in the comment sections, that mitigates the hope for change.
-Alexander Hardy
Follow me on Twitter: @chrisalexander_
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read the linked article. Yikes.
ReplyDeleteIt reminds me of a writers class I attended when the white instructor talked about a Native (Canadian) man walking around in her wealthy neighbourhood, and how she was with her daughter and felt very, very afraid that this man was there at all. A few hurried blocks later she saw a crow. She turned around and could no longer see the man and then suddenly realized that this might be a case of shamanic shape-shifting, and the man had really been there to awaken her spirit and send her a 'message.'
As she went on to explain her Google searches on the spiritual meanings of a crow, I decided that if ever possible, I would retire my whiteness entirely. It is just too embarrassing sometimes to listen to people.
The problem, after all of this time, is that white people, without taking the proper time to really study and listen and learn, default to an embarrassing assumption that anyone of colour has a yearning to be white. The ignorant white person believes this because it is much easier than the truth, which is that they would not wish to be brown or black.
When a white person finally learns that black and brown folks don't want/pine/ache to be white, it is a profound revelation, but a necessary one.
Anyhow. I appreciate your blog. I admire your writing style.
melissa
You are too awesome! I've been reading all your posts and I love the sarcasm and humor with which you approach these internet nut cases with. You have a new subscriber. Lol
ReplyDelete