We solicited off-the-cuff, unedited written reflections on race and racism in the insane garbage year of 2020 and into the present. We invited reflections on fragility, vanity, shame, the imposition on women of color to educate white women, the ineffectuality of talking about whiteness without direct action on behalf of people of color, the election, the attack on the Capitol, Covid, something annoying that happened, something you wish would happen, hope, care, joy, solidarity. Even Lana. Here are those reflections.

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White vanity tells me Black folx must be so tired in light of *gestures at the state of the world*. 

It fails to register that I have been tired. Since before Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis. Since I realized they’ve been slaughtering us with impunity long before we had televised coverage. 

When 4 Black people were found hanged in the span of 3 weeks last summer, my white friends called it unAmerican, wrung their hands and said you must be so tired. Lynching Black folx is as American as apple pie; if we are tired, it’s epigenetic.

Yet white folx don’t know this? They saw their friends at the capitol riot and thought that was the line. Not police brutality, not racism in the Western medical industrial complex. They didn’t see those because they didn’t have to.

2020 forced white folx to account for themselves and these days, they are exhausted. On the other hand, I’m living for watching them answer to BIPOC voters. I am dancing on the vandalized statues of their racist ancestors. I am eating their comeuppance with a scalloped spoon, and they think I am tired right alongside them. This is magical thinking. This is white vanity.

Jabulile Mickle-Molefe

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This past summer I reread Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence in preparation for an essay I was writing to mark its centennial. I’m still thinking about it eight months later. In the novel, white women’s innocence expresses itself not as the chance effect of non-exposure, but rather as a deliberate, even aggressive choice to circumscribe one’s knowledge of the world by fastidiously rejecting everything threatening or troublesome. Of course, this “invincible innocence” is not really innocence at all, at least as the term is conventionally understood: it’s a practiced, privileged, and selective ignorance. “[S]he had died thinking the world a good place, full of loving and harmonious households like her own,” writes Wharton about one of the novel’s primary characters. 

As it currently exists, I do not think this world is especially good, but I want to think so, and fiercely. In these moments—on Inauguration Day, for example—my own white fragility, born of a coddled white upbringing, fastens me with a seductive gaze and urges me to let things go, just this once. Wouldn’t it be easier to believe that those who do not specifically persecute me are decent people, more or less? To believe that I can live ethically by picking and choosing my progressivism like Whole Foods produce? 

I’m not an especially resilient person, and I have the sort of puppyish disposition that’s inclined to cling to hero narratives. But the hero narratives that have always brought me such satisfaction? Those are convenient myths. And the satisfaction? That was nothing more than the flush innocence of complicity.

Rachel Vorona Cote

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I notice that I've developed this extreme emotional regulation when in professional settings. I don't react—and as a professor, I would like to react more quickly than I do when something problematic happens in the classroom, but the shutoff switch is not easy to flip back, and in the professional situations beyond my classroom in which I experience anti-Indigeneity, I often find that everything will be better for me when I don't react. Meanwhile, in what I believe is a related phenomenon, my tachycardia at any adrenaline-raising stimulus makes me feel like I am days away from a heart attack. Anyway. I've written about the settler colonial fixation with permanence, and how settlers changed the landscape of Seattle to stop the natural seasonal flooding. Whiteness looks for the endpoint to responsibility, the perfect apology script, the definitive guide to anti-racism, the ideal land acknowledgment.

Elissa Washuta 

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At their worst, “In this house we believe” lawn signs confirm the ability to believe in science and non-white Americans having the same supposed civil rights—but not schools, houses, neighborhoods, health care—as white Americans in historically redlined neighborhoods like Oakland’s Upper Rockridge. 

I see the signs while climbing the steep public, pedestrian hillside staircases up overlooking Lake Temescal. This is my pandemic physical education class, my lungs expanding the higher I climb.

At the top of one staircase is a wooden placard with an excerpt of national youth poet laureate Amanda Gorman’s popular inauguration poem “The Hill We Climb” behind faux glass. The gesture’s nice, a casual intellectual flex to proverbially stop and smell the stanzas. A week later, a different excerpt. Maybe neighbors meet here weekly to discuss their favorite lines. And why this poem? Is this the homeowner’s equivalent of an “In this home we believe” or a Black Lives Matter sign?

I think about which monuments we make or buy to not just align, but publicly catwalk our political beliefs when conveniently en masse, stupefying the complexity of dismantling systemic racism and white supremacy for the endorphin equivalent of a social media like. 

I think about clapping for nurses, playing music on balconies—sonic solidarity meets therapeutic release—and how those acts, like these lawn signs, fade overtime. I debate the number of times young people and their poetry have been used by people of means to prove the worthiness of supporting a literary nonprofit - and whether this homeowner is a donor. 

I think about the number of steps I had to climb to read an excerpt of this or any poem, and the odd thankfulness of having already read Gorman’s—her viral video performance crossing physical borders—and how this sign creates a private effect, like visiting an art gallery. 

Or is this just one resident’s way of surviving—encouraging others to read her words, challenging something about their daily, elevated walk.

José Vadi

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Ten days after I delivered my first baby last spring, George Floyd was murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis named Derek Chauvin. With his last breath, he called for his mother, who had died two years earlier—her name as a prayer, or an invocation, or his greeting as he crossed a threshold to be with her again. I could not watch the video because I was still in shock from being ripped open and handed a baby. But reading Floyd's last words unnumbed me. His call for his mother made me realize the rarity of being mothered once we reach adulthood. We had failed him, by suppressing voters for years, but funding the police, by punishing Blackness. By not listening or caring for him the way his mother had. His mother had loved him when his country did not.

 Mama, he cried.

When I was in the midst of an excruciating labor just days earlier, the thought of my mother powered me through until I became one myself. Mothers, in my experience, are comfort, witnesses, and caretakers. All the things America is not, nor has ever been to the millions of Black Americans we have killed since our nation was established on their very bodies. Motherhood at its best is an act of selfless making, an observation, an affirmation. Mothering is an active verb and a tireless verb. May our anti-racist work continue until our own last breaths, and may we embody what George Floyd invoked. May we be mothers to each other, to ourselves, to those who have no mothers, no country, to love them back.

Ellen O’Connell Whittet

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Perhaps the most illuminating thing I have to say about whiteness is that I don't want to say anything about whiteness! I'd love to stop centering it in our conversations, particularly the ones that proclaim to be about diversity.

Larissa Pham

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Lana del Rey is just one white woman, in a long line of white women, who don’t know how good they are at the art of misdirection. Don’t know why it comes so naturally. As a white woman myself, I know an RA when I see one, in this college campus of white supremacy.

Instead of talking about herself, her work—Lana points us toward the pole dancing of Doja Cat, the scintillating Cardi B, and still other female singers of color. Whatabout Nicki Minaj, Whatabout Kehlani. That whataboutism, made popular (first) by Russian fascists and more recently favored by FOX NEWS, distracts us from a more serious claim: her interest in “the kind of woman who says no but men hear yes.” That is, that her project is tied to cruelty (re: Maggie Nelson). If not rape, rape adjacent. While these women drink from a Nalgene bottle under the desk, Lana thinks she’s swigging from a flask. The risk she takes in creating art about this fragile, victimized woman, and in the first person no less, is that people will (mis)interpret her songs as permission.

I first understood the power of (mis)direction after the murder of Michael Brown in my hometown of St. Louis, MO. Instead of the tragic circumstances of his death, I saw the news/my boss/whoever in my city pointing toward Michael’s grades, his behavior in school. To avoid a conversation around police brutality. When I watched on TV as the QuikTrip burned in Ferguson, I was directed to a conversation about property damage. Naively, I would entertain them, until I saw their truer intentions. The misdirection was meant to exhaust me. If I entertained them, I’d been fooled. If I ignored them, I’m ignoring the problem.

Eventually, though, the misdirection refracts. When she says, “Whatabout them?” I just hear her whine, “Whatabout me?” Again she tries to dangle this set of keys above my eye line, but I don’t look up. I’m too tired.

Lizzy Petersen

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I reserve a cubby to house the angst of talented, semi-sad white women artists.  These are women artists I want to befriend because they can do things I can't. I cosplay LDR cosplaying JKO with A$AP Rocky cosplaying JFK.  

It happens a lot that the cubby gets too full.

When I saw the discourse on LDR, I didn't blink. I did not care. Sympathy is useless in this timeline. It did nothing for Breonna Taylor. On Jan. 18th, LDR posted a photo of MLK and CSK in a loving embrace. I wondered what the next cosplay would be. Apologies. Chemtrails.

I still love her raspy voice, lashes and lined lips. It's painful this love. I've been oversexualized since I was like 10. So has Cardi B and Meg Thee Stallion and so what they do by exploiting the appetite for thighs and legs across shiny poles is a type of sorcery. And it's an art we can all learn from. This is where LDR tripped up. Just imagine if her outcry had been admiration. Fake feminism demands that we turn blades on each other. Radical feminism would give LDR the grace to praise the very women who twerk rather than tremble.

Thea Anderson

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The day-to-day racism that gets under my skin the most are white people—usually white women—who try to undermine my intelligence and accomplishments. Maybe the first time I encountered this was around the time I was five years old; I could already read but teachers and other kids refused to believe me. Somehow, I had memorized things. I couldn't be doing this advanced thing because well... most of my white peers weren't doing it. It's been a persistent thing that has impacted my ability to learn and feel comfortable in classroom environments: the algebra teacher who claimed my up and down ones looked like sevens and I would just learn how to write my numbers better; the literature instructor in college who refused to grade one of my essays because she was sure that I was just not capable of the writing in it—"if I just needed more time I could've asked her for it rather than asking for a friend's help on a paper and this time she would let it go;" the white professor in my MFA program who told me I just didn't have the ability to write longer fiction and I should consider switching to poetry, she just couldn't see how I could keep going; the white men in my MFA program who would write condescending letters to me about how I just didn't understand how point of view works. My Black friends have so many experiences like this where white people and people with greater proximity to whiteness—liberal, conservative, whatever—want to remind us: you are not as smart as us and anything that you get that feels like it's more, well, that's because you now have unfair advantages. 

The other experience most of my Black friends also have is our parents telling us: "you're going to have to work three times as hard to get half as much as the white people around you." My dad told me this multiple times when I was growing up. He told me it wasn't right. He told me it was unfortunately just how it is and he couldn't tell me it would ever go away. What he didn't prepare me for was what would happen when you get things—a job, the book, the attention—that white people would still find a way to remind you: you are not better than me. When my novel got coverage in The LA Times, a white woman reached out to me to ask how my last name could possibly be Giddings. The Giddings family came over on the Mayflower and I am a genealogy expert on the Giddings family! "Lady, your family probably owned mine. A white bookstagrammer tagged me in a post about my book comparing my writing ability to an undergraduate's—the language is so simple and why does everything have to be about race. She deleted the post before I could even think of what to do about this situation. I'm sure there are several reviews like this on any site where people can review my book. And that madness is explaining that "writers make choices based on the stories they're telling and maybe I chose this language because I knew I was writing a book that depended on readers feeling confused and carried away by circumstance." Whatever. The advice I've started giving younger Black writers one-on-one is when your book comes out, be prepared not just for career anxiety, but the micro and macro aggressions that your white publishers and white editors and white publicity people are not equipped to even consider as you have to put yourself out there over and over again.

Talking about these experiences with white women is another space where racism enters the conversation. Some are truly doing the bare minimum: they listen, they understand that these things are intensified by systemic anti-Black racism in the United States. That the biases Black women face are not equal to the biases that white women face. Regularly though, when white women hear Black women and POC having these conversations, they try to make it a generic "feminism" issue. It's a chance for them to talk about their book sales, their feelings, and their book would've really taken off if it hadn't been for the pandemic, and they talk and talk and talk, until everyone else's voices are pushed further to the side. The people doing this don't think—have probably never thought—about their simultaneous relationship to oppression and power. I don't feel comfortable talking about anywhere else in the world but in the United States, you are always living simultaneously as the oppressor and the oppressed. Sometimes, I think this is one of the biggest moral issues of being alive right now: how do you start the process of understanding that you will always be both of these things no matter who you are? How do we collectively start moving toward fluency in power dynamics?

Megan Giddings

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I am white but my dad’s not. That means since childhood everyone has asked me, “What are you?” I say, “Irish and Puerto Rican,” because I learned that’s the answer they want to explain how I look. That used to suffice, but now everyone wants me to make more sense of myself than that, to identify a certain way. To this, I say, “Live in the mystery.” For me, being mixed is a privilege. I am a physical example of complexity when people want to make identity easy and digestible, to make it a product. In me is an understanding of who I am that I have had to and continue to compose, because there are no easy answers. 

I don’t expect ease. Other people do, and they want to believe that because I take strong political stances even when writing about food, something people consistently depoliticize, that it has something to do with my identity. I refuse to give them that.

I am also now a gringo in Puerto Rico translating oppression and colonialism for others who have no clue what their United States has done on this land, continues to do. This is heavy and tiring, and makes me wish people walked through the world with more of the understanding that I have had to build, have been forced to build, by not being always already comprehensible to whiteness. Or maybe I just wish they would read a book.

The last year has taught me that too much has to be unlearned about white supremacy, colonialism, capitalism, and cishetero-patriarchy, and that I don’t think it can be done in some good-natured way. There is no Canva slideshow that will dissolve these systems. The reins must be seized somehow. There is no other way. Power is only given up by force. 

Alicia Kennedy