If You Give a White Boy A Bop
I might just feel something again (and also are you ready to vote?)
I am burdened by that which has been. The memes for Kamala Harris beg us to do otherwise, and I have resisted this invitation successfully until two days ago. A woman standing in my family’s kitchen told me her husband shouldn’t be made to feel guilty because he is White. He didn’t do anything to get this power. He didn’t hurt anyone.
And this is the point, I thought. He has an opportunity to recognize what his place in America gives him and how he can lend that power to people like his wife and his neighbors. No one is trapped or condemned by the social categorization of whiteness. There is always, for anyone, the moment to slip out and see the whole race story as a carefully constructed illusion. I think she understood. She will vote for a man who makes me want to throw my kitten heels at the wall. That whole conversation made me want to cry. I had let myself forget how little we actually think of each other. The lack of trust. The fragile bonds between me and everyone else just fray with each “Election of our lifetime.”
How do we hope, when we know full well what we do to capable, thinking women who dare to create, lead, and work in public? When there are crises abroad we want her to deal with now that just aren’t budging? When it makes financial sense to wipe a whole group out? When I do the math and the same people are subtracted every time?
How do I hope when meaner, crueler, and lesser men stride into American power so easily? When you get the job over and over again because you’re a White Dude with money? Talk about race impacting hiring practices. I have heard five hundred times already how we are just not ready for a woman, for a Black woman, for anyone really who isn’t a White dude with a smug-looking and tall wife.
Clicking on Taylor Swift’s The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived and baking shortbread while clutching my resolve to not get excited, to not hope, to not believe we can do it, and to loop in my head ways this administration still won’t stop participating in terror, feels safer.
I believe, yes, that all of us together can come together and upright this ship. We’ve been trying. We’ve been failing. We’ve won, shakily. I believe deep down, that all the meaning we make of our melanin can disintegrate when we love each other and respect that our lives matter.
But I keep seeing the kind of images that White Supremacy in this country has been so good at selling. I see the man with his arm raised to execute Sonya. I see the boys in their suits waving the flags on a platform that would strip this democracy for parts. I see the reckless posts, the crass language, and the foul AI images these boys make to scare women of color into going back to where they dragged us from.
I feel unsettled, seeing someone being so openly hated and disparaged for being mixed and being female. And then the last knife, the one with my God’s name on it. The way they dare to bless their destruction with the cross. Wouldn’t you rather be colonized by Christians? the man in the PragerU email asks me.
No, I think to myself. The heaven for the men deemed “white” in America has led to hell for everyone else. This kind of thing we were told would die with time, and we’d stuff the misogyny and the racism right in with the wrinkly men in their caskets.
But when I stare at Skaski, the kind but firm 26-year-old gamer who has video after video of young boys screaming, threatening, and verbally sexually harassing with some racial slurs thrown in, I think it lives. I see the young men at Ole Miss with their monkey noises. I think of the women of color defending the worst things their men say. The men die and the systems live on in their sons and grandsons and the women that say nothing to them.
But I crumbled this week under the most unlikeliest of images. And I know it doesn’t change everything. But it changed something in me for a second, which is all you need to press on.
The video had everything it needed to go viral and it did. A young white boy in a light blue shirt with his KAMALA poster and his perfectly, ethnically ambiguous friend, dancing to THE Kendrick Lamar track that I fully admit I haven’t listened to.
A woman I enjoy following because she is a Black businesswoman who homesteads and homeschools her children on forty acres in Montana shared it, dubbing him Connor.
And I cried! He is not Connor. Or Brad. Or any of the stereotypical white boy names the internet gave him.
He is Parker, whose dad died when he was a kid and the union his dad belonged to saved him from hundreds of thousands of medical debt. He was a kid who ate food and survived on government benefits the party he was cheering for secured. I cried over Parker Short, the thin young White boy from Georgia, who knew the words. And the words not to say, respectfully declining to say the N-word with the soft a at the end (He knows his blood and ancestors didn’t pay for that word).
But best of all, he is just an ordinary guy. And I needed that day to see an ordinary guy care. I needed an imperfect, status quo mixed Black woman to be backed for a second by white dudes who collectively donated 4 million dollars to her. I needed to see all the white ladies come together and crash Zoom. And I needed to see the sisters and brothers who started it all years back tell us how we were going to figure it out.
I have and will keep the media I put out nonpartisan in that I do not believe one party or these existing parties have the power to save us or do justice well. Our war machines take Blue and Red votes and turn them all into Green money. I fully know the difference between voting for the fast avalanche and the slow avalanche. But I also don’t use my media to prop up or defend parties that use racism, sexism, and White Supremacist groups to win elections. I think throwing my arms across the passenger seat before the crash still matters.
As we head into this election season, I am looking out for more Parkers who connect their experiences and pain to their neighbors and try to move the needle forward to make it easier for other people to breathe.
I hope for more of those moments, where what we are working towards seems so much greater than what we seek to leave behind. I hope you carry that in your heart because I guess it is true that it’s a matter of life and death for someone every election. Let’s add to the hope that everyone shall not just sit under their own vine and fig tree, but that we will shimmy together under bigger and bigger tents where we all fit and not be afraid.
I am such a sucker for America, even when I know better.
I am convinced of God so easily, my faith sparked by baby ducklings and fat-fisted toddlers waving at me and the hand on my back at Bible study. Guilty as charged.
Looking for proof of us, for proof of life amid the mess we have inherited, is what I see when we share videos like this and sign each other up to vote. And maybe, the past doesn’t only burden us but unburdens us in that those who came before also only had a shred of imperfect hope for a world yet to come. I keep writing about the white dudes who stepped in front of bullets for black women and the priests who held Protestant black women who protested not to decenter Black work, but to remember that it is not us in our groups that will carry the burden. It is shared, by far more people than we can remember.
As the Southern Poverty Law Center reminds us, we’ve got NOW. Make your plan to vote today here.
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