For every Shabbat and every Yom Kippur, we all owe visibly Black women teshuvah and tzedakah. Myself included. Going forward, I’m gonna do the hard work of unpacking my own white adjacency and colorist privilege. My deepest apologies to the Black women I harmed yesterday.

I don’t offer the following as an excuse, but as an explanation. Yesterday I was literally trying to validate and comfort the Black people who were directly violated by Jessica Krug—her friends, colleagues, and comrades. I centered their hurt to our larger community’s detriment.

What we white adjacent Black folks need to remember is that our very proximity to whiteness is a social advantage. I personally have been able to escape the worst of lethal economic violence because of my connections to bourgeois white comrades. I benefit from white proximity.

Access to white friends and their economic resources has literally kept me off the streets and out of jail. It has saved me from malnutrition and early death. Yes, I have survived a lot of antiblack trauma. But white adjacency has helped me to not only survive racism but thrive.

I know what happens when Black women and non-binary people don’t have access to white folks’ resources and networks. Our morbidity, criminalization, and deprivation is greater. Our only support systems are Black family/kindred who are also struggling, usually Black women.

Now let me tell y’all my own story. Until the day my mother died, I lived at home with her. When she died, I was 25 and had just transferred from community college to university. In the last year of her life, our relationship went through a painful but necessary transition.

I started to rely less on Mom for support and more on my largely white/non-Black circle of fellow activists. Mom and I no longer had to split or fight over pennies to make sure we ate or caught the bus. Before, it was her and I. Now, it was me and my comrades, and my mom at home.

I grew up deeply isolated from any community networks except my mom, my siblings, my dad, and my extended genetic family. When I got into activism and later organizing, I suddenly had a community and networks. And I started to turn to them for material and emotional support.

My mother was as Black lumpenproletariat as a Black person gets in the USA. She was lifelong disabled, a high school dropout, an abuse survivor, and after she and Dad separated, a poor un(der)employed Black single mom. She was the burden of Black women personified.

When I linked up with the whitenormative activist community, I suddenly had access to material support, travel, leadership opportunities, validation of my existence. For the first time, I felt seen by society. And that caused a rift between Mom and me.

I will never forget having an horrible argument with Mom and then calling my white comrade to pick me up. Imagine a Black mother sitting on the couch dejected as her adult child leaves home with their white cis male friend to stay with him. I’ll never forget her face.

I can’t imagine how she felt. And the REASON I can never imagine or know her pain is that I am not from the same Black caste background as my mother. Even though I came from her womb, shared her ancestry and was raised directly by her—I CAN NEVER BE HER OR KNOW HER PAIN.

Let me say that again: I, YM Carrington, do not share the same caste background as my late African American mother Ethel B. Carrington. Because I am a white adjacent, bourgeois, Black person. My late mother was lumpenproletariat Black underclass to the core.

I was born into and spent the first eight years of my life in white American suburbia. Like Jessica Krug, white American suburbia is my cultural background. My late mother was born into a sharecropper’s family and lived in US public housing until she married my bourgeois father.

Krug’s deception has brought it all home for me. The Black American community has MULTIPLE caste levels and I’m in a mid-level caste because of my ethnicity, class character, appearance, and ancestry. My dad is just under me. My mother was near the bottom.