I get why white people are responding that this piece is powerful. it’s making them contend with, think about how there can be *literal* familial connections between them and the Black folks whose oppression they contribute to.

however, I think there’s a way to tease out that connection without saying “confederate blood runs through my veins” or “I’m biologically mostly a white person but I’m not white” because feeding into this biologicalizing of race always always backfires!

we are in a moment where we’re not just asking white people to join us in anti-racism — we are demanding it.

using biologically essentialist rhetoric to make your point about why Black people are part of the fucked up legacy of the confederacy and have a say is.... a mess.

this is going to make white people probably start saying some dumb shit to every lightskinned Black person they see that they assume is product of colonial rape because they are only going to understand this as people who are the “visual” manifestation.

I recognize that my more immediate ties to whiteness via a white mother perhaps shapes how I engage with this piece. but my father is the product of the same South the author of that piece is. he has that same legacy and he’s not light skinned.

I am tied to that ancestral trauma because I am Black in a settler colonial nation that truly has not excised the ghost of the plantation. I am tied to it because it informs even voluntary interracial intimacy.

I am deeply, deeply bothered by the piece but I guess I can stop going off about it now because clearly folks are engaging with it differently.