okay first of all, i'm in LOVE with him

second of all, being an adorable bird geek doesn't change the fact that white women are trained from childhood to find Black men inherently more threatening than white men, no matter what they look like, and that takes WORK to unravel https://twitter.com/JoshuaPotash/status/1265338098256424973

also, like

i worry about discourse which grants the fundamental premise that Black men all belong to either the Threatening or Non-Threatening category and that racist lady's only real sin was that she put him in the wrong column

like, the point isn't that this Black man, specifically, isn't scary

the point is that she openly lied to the cops with the SPECIFIC goal of causing him harm

he could be nine feet tall with swords for hands and a t-shirt that says "i'm a murderer" and it still wouldn't matter

i just

i don't know

i don't want every Black man to feel like he has to offer objective proof that white women shouldn't be afraid of him in order for it to be wrong when he's the target of an attack

i feel really fucked up about that

like tbh white women maybe take a fraction of the energy you're spending to roast this one awful lady and use it to unpack, like .... okay, if you're walking alone at night and a man is walking towards you, do you feel less scared if he's white

like, this might be in you, too

because I don't think I'm the only white woman who absorbed that from somewhere and has had to spend a lot of time picking it apart to be like, okay, where did that come from, did someone TEACH me that, did i just ABSORB it, was it just THERE, and how do i dig it out

this is why it's a collective responsibility that belongs to all of us, even if you're like "well i would never call in a hit on a someone" okay but like every white woman who believes this learned it from other white women teaching her that Black men are inherently to be feared

i just worry that women like that trigger our sense of superiority and not the kind of really dark and ugly self-examination that actually roots out the problem and makes the world better

lest white men think they are being let off the hook here, the thinking for YOU guys to do is about the internalized messages many of you were raised with which led this woman to believe that she would be entirely free from blame if the cops who arrived to "rescue" her were white

white masculinity asserting itself by protecting white femininity from the threat of black masculinity is a WHOLE THING as deeply entrenched as white women clutching their purses tighter when they walk past a black man on the street

none of us individually are exempt from this

anyway, maybe before you get your jollies laughing at how shitty Karens are, take a minute to think through how a white kid grows up to become a violent racist white cop and where those messages of toxic white supremacist masculinity are also embedded in you and need rooting out

i just worry sometimes that when there's a really easy, obvious villain, it just lets all the rest of us relax and feel great about ourselves instead of asking any of the important questions

and i include myself in this too

this is communal work

it's just all very "I saw Goody Karen with the cell phone" and sometimes I wonder who that helps

/rant