This isn’t easy. But it needs to be said. This is not going to be one of my lighter posts and you may be uncomfortable. I am sure that I will be uncomfortable writing it. But the irony of the country pausing to celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr’s birthday, of federal buildings being closed following the recent attempt by domestic White Supremacists terrorists to storm the Capitol of my federal government is a situation I cannot ignore. And as I am too scared of both the global pandemic surging as well as potential police and said-White Supremacists probable violent reactions to march in the streets, I’m picking up a [metaphorical] pen.

This post, to be frank, is for my moderate White friends. The ones who agree that racism is bad, but sometimes feel that they can say me, they’re not always radical, geeky, more likely to have a Kindle instead of a protest sign in her hand African American friend, that there must be better ways to seek social change than destroying property or disrupting bystanders by blocking streets, interrupting meals, speaking out in situations that you don’t feel warrant this level of examination.

We need desperately to talk.

I need you to pick a side. And I need you to be pretty damn public about it. I need you to loudly and openly proclaim, “I am listening and supporting the people who have for literally hundreds of years proclaimed that the system is broken and set up against them and I am willing to lend them my voice and the priveledgge that goes along with it. I will not nod in public and do nothing in private because I realize that those actions have led us to the situation we now find ourselves in now, where my POC friends are dying deaths via a thousand microaggressions and cuts. I stand with you, I will listen to you, and I will work on being an ally in those spaces that I participate in and that you cannot.”

Or, alternately, I need you to admit, “I think that you’re over-reacting. I think that open, systematic racism is a thing of the past and I think that you should be happy with that. I think that the various pieces written about how POC, especially Black people, are discriminated against are overblown and I am not willing to look at these pieces about how the systematic inequality that can be found almost everywhere affects people of a different hue than me: mentally, physically, emotionally, and financially. I choose to believe that the representations I see in media paint an accurate and complete picture and that, at their core, POC are Other and as such incomprehensible. I do not consider the past history of reluctance to say unpopular or uncomfortable things complicit in this, and I am not willing to make changes now.”

Consider my gauntlet dropped.

I am a six foot tall, plus-sized Black woman. I have shoulder length dreadlocs which are woven through with “shiny bits” (as I refer to them in my head) with respect to the traditions of the continent my ancestors were stolen from to openly display the wealth you have and the wealth you have yet to acquire. I am the daughter of two parents who worked hard to teach me the history and strength that is my ethnic/cultural background and made it so that I never once looked in the mirror and wished my Brown skin was anything but. I am the aunt of two gorgeous nieces who have sparkle and the biggest smiles and I am literally willing to murder someone if it meant that they never felt limited. Ridiculously, insanely confident women (and possibly men, who knows if I’ll have nephews someday) who never know what it is to have someone follow them around a store, check their ids multiple times during a credit/debit purchase while not doing the same for their White friends, never having someone dismiss their collegiate acceptance/accolades with affirmative action being the catalyst instead of them just being smart; that is my goal as an aunt. And to meet that goal, its time for me to take the gloves off.

Anger is nothing new to me. Anger has been my quiet companion since I was old enough to recognize that hot feeling under my ribs when I was a kid. Frustration that results in helpless tears behind closed doors or in the presence of people who I truly trust has been an uncontrollable result from about age twelve. At age ten, I understood that there was going to be a difference in malice and ignorance in the things that White people said to me and that it was gonna hurt like a barb either way, but that I would have to learn how to school my face and reactions to not make them feel uncomfortable.

I was born and raised in Detroit so I was born and raised fully in the knowledge, that to be Black and to be from a Black background, is considered a thing of pity. I had White friends come over to our gorgeous home off Livernois and Curtis and express surprise that there were nice neighborhoods and that the house next door had a flagpole with the American flag proudly flapping. (It is my mother’s personal mission to reclaim the American flag. She has it on face masks, on her car, and waving outside of my parents’ home in Arizona because, “conservatives don’t get to claim this as solely theirs. Our family has probably been here longer than most of them anyways.”) I went to the suburbs for MSVMA festivals and saw schools with classrooms full of computers and professionally run auditoriums. I travelled outside of my city every single time I needed to visit a Target/Meijer/Kroger/Best Buy because we knew that stores banked on the fact that Black folks will travel to shop if you close a store close to us while White folks will simply shop somewhere else when it is inconvenient or undesirable and the corporations therefore had no real motivation to move things into our neighborhoods or communities, or put stores where their property taxes would help our schools and cities.

I know this is difficult. Racism is often portrayed as blatant, rude, outspoken hostility. And do not be mistaken, that does still exist. There are parts of Michigan that I fear to tread and places that my Melanin-deficient friends talk about with great fondness that I’ve treated as essentially sun-down towns. (Places you don’t want to be Brown once the sun goes down, for my non-POC folk.) But I will admit, it has become harder and harder to allow that to be it when it comes to White folk who believe that they have genuine relationships with POC. I’m going to let you in on the worst-kept secret ever: someone can genuinely have friends, romantic partners, coworkers, and even kids of color and still hold some hurtfully racist views.

I’m sorry, but its no longer enough that you not be part of the crowd of White Supremacists marching through the streets chanting, “You will not replace us.” (BTW, we never dealt with that fully. I am here, telling you as an African American, that I was dissatisfied with the national response to that heinous act and that I altered how I acted around people accordingly.) You need to do the work where I literally cannot.

As a single woman, one of the things that some of my matchmaking-minded friends ask is, “Are you open to dating guys who aren’t Black?” And I have to be honest, the older I get, the more difficult that question gets. Theoretically, yes. If you have a single male friend who is smart and tall and funny and liberal-minded, send him my way. But it gets so much more complicated than that if I actually want to settle down with him. Am I gonna show up for Thanksgiving and have to deal with a drunken great uncle who drops the n-word? Is his mother going to quietly assure me in the kitchen that she’s so happy I’m here because she knew just the nicest colored girl when she was younger and she honestly doesn’t see race? Is an ignorant cousin going to refer to the BLM protesters as “those thugs” before remembering that I’m at the table and either try to brush it off or get defensive? Is someone going to refer to President Trump with any type of praise and choose to disregard the offensive, damaging language and attitudes he overtly brought with him into the Oval Office in 2016?

These are questions that I rarely feel comfortable talking about with my White friends. But I too have to have uncomfortable conversations about social issues with people in my life who I’d rather not because I can’t let prejudice lightly lie because its uncomfortable. I’ve talked with people my parents’ ages about the importance of pronouns and the differences between gender and sexual identity. I’ve explained to grandparents why they can’t use the term “Orientals” to describe people. And I’ve straight up told elders, people who changed my diapers and sent me checks for significant moments in my life that what they’ve said was misogynistic or homophobic or just rude. It is uncomfortable and it makes the Midwesterner in my scream “Bad manners!” but it must be done.

Because the views openly expressed and not checked in private are views that are still held in public. Someone would NEVER tell me to my face that they think that straight hair is the only professional way to style tresses. But if they secretly think that my dreadlocs are unprofessional and decline to promote or hire me because of it, that racism got me all the same. The amount of times that I have been talking with my friends and joke about code-switching to get ahead and having them laughingly agree is us quietly bouldering each other up as we del with the non Eurocentric aspects of ourselves that we feel it necessary to suppress to succeed in certain areas. And that is never okay.

So let me explain why I’m writing this today, finishing a piece on the same day I started it, which I never do: Today is the day that the United States celebrates the birthday (but really the death) of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, a civil rights icon who’s legacy has been white-washed a disturbing amount. And less than two weeks ago, armed White Supremacists militias stormed the United States of America Capitol, egged on by President Donald Trump as he continued to falsely accuse the election of being rigged because he didn’t win, thanks in no small part to Black voters such as myself. I requested and mailed in my absentee ballot weeks before November 4th to not risk getting sick or caught up in any craziness, and it probably wasn’t counted the day of the election, but instead in the days after and helped turn Michigan blue after our shameful red switch in 2016.

I sit here, in 2021, and see that a disappointingly large population of people feel that my choosing to be safe and express a vote and opinion opposite to what they believe is somehow legally wrong and they want my vote discarded. And fine, the older I get the more stupid and gullible I realize people are. But there were so many elected officials who gave them credence. And I cannot tell you how upsetting that is.

My views on federal government are simple: I may not have voted for you. I may not like you. But I pay my taxes and you work for the public and as such, I am your boss. I will work to vote you out and subsequently have you replaced and someone who is in a different political party than myself should do the same. You do not get to work in federal government and feel like I didn’t vote for you so you don’t care about me. That’s not how this works.

There is a MLK quote that I see everywhere that I am having particular trouble with at the moment. “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” Well I must be honest, all the light I currently have is currently dedicated to keeping my own flame lit so that I can just function and exist and not curl up under the covers whenever possible. I am not currently willing to unconditionally love my neighbor. I am not willing to break bread and move past this and aim high despite them aiming low.

I do not want to be the bigger person. I am sick of being the bigger person. I am tired of rewriting casual barbs that people throw at me because they don’t know better. I know jack shit about hockey; as a result, I ask people about hockey so that I know what the hades is going on as well as just doing some basic googling. I am exhausted at continuously forgiving people for being surprised that I desire advancement and recognition because I too want better things. When I misgender someone, I apologize, use preferred pronouns and keep working on being better. I am sick of wearing bracelets in public so that I can shake them and not scare White people who are initially frightened of having someone like me in their space before they remember it is not solely theirs. God am I tired.

I know that the majority of people are outraged. I know that most logical, thinking people on both sides are upset and dismayed and appalled. I recognize that as a Black liberal, I am mostly in solely Black liberal spaces and am therefore in a kind of echo chamber, surrounding myself with the voices of people who think and look like me. (I no longer apologize for this. The majority of the world doesn’t look like me, the majority of the world won’t look out for me, and I am no longer apologetic for not putting myself in recreational spaces where I don’t feel heard, comforted, and safe.) But I do occasionally look out and I have to be honest, the moderate outrage is lacking. The justification, the downplaying, and the willingness to let this go is deeply upsetting. At no point, with any of the causes I support, do I believe that if we armed ourselves and broke into a government building with the express purpose of hurting people who do have different views would the result have been anything other than national condemnation on both sides. There would be no, “Well, sometimes these pro-choice activists can just feel super passionate about their cause.” No news anchor would argue, “If we look at the leader’s rhetoric, we can understand how the anti-prayer in school believers would think that this was the next step.”

I need more from my friends who consider themselves aware. I need more from White moderates who pretend that because there are flaws with both parties, neither side is clearly in the wrong. The time for being uncommitted has come to an end. You are either with us or against us. Stand next to me in the foxhole or tell me that I’m not welcome at your lunch counter. You clearly see color, yes it does have to be about race, and no I’m not being overly sensitive. I am no longer accepting the things that I cannot change, I have now moved on to abandoning the things that no longer make me feel comfortable.

Pick.