The world is on fire but I’ve been sick and need to address #AmyCooper. Many have focused on the interpersonal interaction but few have looked at it from a systemic level. Not many white folx have acknowledged that Amy Cooper acted exactly like whiteness wanted her to. Thread

I’ve seen many chastise Amy Cooper, a singular white person, for her actions and her words, isolating her as a bad person and racist. But by pointing a finger solely at her, we miss how she has been intentionally shaped by whiteness (like the rest of us) to uphold the system. 2/

I’ve seen a lot of fingers pointed at her, but few fingers pointing directly back at the rest of us white people. Because unless we are actively fighting back against racism at the personal, interpersonal, institutional, and systemic levels, we are all Amy Coopers. 3/

White people have spent all of history watching other white people be hurtful, damaging, or lethal to Black people at the interpersonal level, but have absolved ourselves by saying, “I’d never do that.” Are you sure? Whiteness wants us to do it. Whiteness trains us to do it. 4/

If we haven’t worked hard at the personal level, to unlearn whitewashed history, to become more proximate to the lived experiences of Black people, to continually examine our own biases, why do we believe, in a moment of fear we wouldn’t be Amy Cooper? 5/

And if we are not considering the ways that systemic whiteness has worked on Amy Cooper, is it safe to assume that we are not considering the ways that systemic whiteness has worked on us? 6/

Let’s talk about fear. I’ve seen many posts talking about her “irrational fear,” but 40+ years of whiteness made her fear completely rational to her. This isn’t about perception. She, like all white people, has been indoctrinated to fear Black men. Naming it is the first step 7/

Whether television, film, media, or books, Black men have historically been depicted as something to fear. In this moment, when Christian Cooper stood calmly, at a considerable distance (remember that she approached him), whiteness conditioned her to believe her fear was real. 8/

Did you hear the terror in her voice? Go back and listen. She was obviously the most aggressive person in that interaction, so why such fear? That fear was historical. White people have been convinced—for hundreds of years—that the fear of Black men is rational and warranted. 9/

And that historical conditioning comes with a historical solution. To eradicate the fear white people must eradicate the thing causing the fear. So she called the police. But this time, there was a modern twist: video evidence. History didn’t prepare her for that. 10/

Think about how the terror in her voice is contradicted by the video evidence. But think about how other white people who might have heard her voice—and without video context—would have sympathized with her. How could someone be that fearful if there wasn’t a real threat? 11/

Whiteness wasn’t telling her to act scared, whiteness made her actually and viscerally afraid—there is a deep psychological difference. And it's these subconscious manifestations of whiteness we must root out in our own psyche in order to understand how to face them 12/

I don’t say this to excuse her actions. She was at fault. But you can’t uncondition yourself from years of indoctrination in the moment. The work has to happen long before. The personal work we do—or don’t do—will shape our interpersonal exchanges, for better or for worse. 13/

Had the dispatcher been able to hear her clearly, Christian Cooper could have been another George Floyd. When I heard the fear in her voice, I immediately thought of Carolyn Bryant, the white woman whose words resulted in the lynching of Emmett Till. 14/

Had Christian Cooper been arrested and taken to trial, how would a jury interpret her voice, which sounded as if he was chasing her with a weapon, rather than quietly standing 15 feet away? Without his video, whiteness easily constructs an anti-Black narrative. 15/

So what work have we done to prepare for the moment whiteness wants us to uphold whiteness? This is a call to white people because these are OUR words and actions. Until we know how to identify, examine, and change them, we will uphold the status quo of white supremacy. 16/

If we want to eradicate the fear we must eradicate the thing causing the fear. And the thing causing the fear is not Black people, it’s how whiteness wants us to react to Black people. So to eradicate the fear we must eradicate whiteness. 17/

I’ve heard people say this is MAGA behavior. I’ve heard that she's a Democrat. News flash: Political leanings are irrelevant. Every white liberal should know they are just as susceptible as anyone else to the indoctrination of the white supremist system in which we live. 18/

If you vote democrat, you can be racist. If you hate Trump, you can be racist. If white people aren’t fighting the system, we are complicit in it. We must interrogate what we’re actively doing to not only to prevent another #AmyCooper, but to avoid being one ourselves. 19/END