youre racist but thats none of my business

I can halt the entitlement they feel towards me and I’ll start that by stopping the conversation. I don’t have a huge amount of power to change the way the world works, but I can set boundaries. “So I’m no longer talking to white people about race. “I cannot continue to emotionally exhaust myself trying to get this message across, while also toeing a very precarious line that tries not to implicate any one white person in their role of perpetuating structural racism, lest they character-assassinate me. It stems from white people’s never-questioned entitlement, I suppose. It must be a strange life, always having permission to speak and feeling indignant when you’re finally asked to listen. The options are: speak your truth and face the reprisals, or bite your tongue and get ahead in life. It’s truly a lifetime of self-censorship that people of colour have to live. “Amid every conversation about Nice White People feeling silenced by conversations about race, there is a sort of ironic and glaring lack of understanding or empathy for those of us who have been visibly marked out as different for our entire lives, and live the consequences. Trying to engage with them and navigate their racism is not worth that. It’s also likely that their white friends will rally round them, rewrite history and make lies the truth. It’s very likely that they’ll then paint me as a bully or an abuser. As the hackles rise and the defiance grows, I have to tread incredibly carefully, because if I express frustration, anger or exasperation at their refusal to understand, they will tap into their presubscribed racist tropes about angry black people who are a threat to them and their safety. “Not to mention that entering into conversation with defiant white people is a frankly dangerous task for me. Worse still is the white person who might be willing to entertain the possibility of said racism, but who thinks we enter this conversation as equals. I can’t have a conversation with them about the details of a problem if they don’t even recognise that the problem exists. “I can no longer have this conversation, because we’re often coming at it from completely different places.

Who really wants to be alerted to a structural system that benefits them at the expense of others? So I can’t talk to white people about race any more because of the consequent denials, awkward cartwheels and mental acrobatics that they display when this is brought to their attention. “I’ve written before about this white denial being the ubiquitous politics of race that operates on its inherent invisibility. All the while he stared obliviously, completely confused by this pain, at best trivialising it, at worst ridiculing it. Watching The Color of Fear by Lee Mun Wah, I saw people of colour break down in tears as they struggled to convince a defiant white man that his words were enforcing and perpetuating a white racist standard on them. It’s not really surprising, because they’ve never known what it means to embrace a person of colour as a true equal, with thoughts and feelings that are as valid as their own. The words hit a barrier of denial and they don’t get any further. It’s like something happens to the words as they leave our mouths and reach their ears. Even if they can hear you, they’re not really listening. “The journey towards understanding structural racism still requires people of colour to prioritise white feelings. Their throats open up as they try to interrupt, itching to talk over you but not to really listen, because they need to let you know that you’ve got it wrong. Their mouths start twitching as they get defensive. Their eyes glaze over in boredom or widen in indignation. “They’ve never had to think about what it means, in power terms, to be white, so any time they’re vaguely reminded of this fact, they interpret it as an affront.

Youre racist but thats none of my business