If there is one thing white people have taught me, it’s that you cannot stand the truth in any of its forms.

White people, you have a motherfucking problem.

You lie too goddamn much. You teach your kids to lie too goddamn much. You tell your families to lie too goddamn much. All you fucking do is lie and lie and lie about lying to the point that you are killing everyone, including yourselves.

You lie at the highest levels, so much so that we expect it from our elected officials. Our presidents have told lies that resulted in the death of more than 50,000 American soldiers. You lie about civilian massacres. You lie about terrorist attacks against Black Americans. You lie about sex education and risk the health of your children. You lie about your friends’ qualifications to run national agencies, which results in unnecessary deaths. You lie about your experiences while reporting. You lie about American history. You lie about historical heroes. You lie about slavery. You lie and lie and lie on a massive scale and cover up the lies, protect the liars, rehire the liars, and elect the liars because *shrug* everybody lies.

You lie about the littlest things, like if you ate the last cookie. You lie to your spouse about their annoying habits. You lie to your kids about how to make babies. You lie to your neighbors about your debt. You lie to your boss about sleeping in. You lie to your co-workers about your weekend. You lie to your doctor about your body. You lie to everyone and say you are fine. And you lie to yourself about how wonderful and nice a human being you are.

You lie and lie and lie on a massive scale and cover up the lies, protect the liars, rehire the liars, and elect the liars because *shrug* everybody lies.
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But you aren’t nice. You wear a veneer of nice. You are a rotten tooth in the mouth of the world. Instead of taking care of yourself and preventing decay, you feed on the power of your whiteness like candy. When you start to smell, you use mouthwash and mints to hide it. When you start to visibly decay, you try to hide it with whitening gel. When you start to hurt, you take pain medication. When the pain becomes too great, you finally seek help — and that help is to numb yourself, pull out the nerve, then slap a crown on it so that no one can see your empty core. Instead they see a perfect veneer passing for a healthy tooth. But it is a tooth that feels no pain and only emulates the others.

In case you didn’t know, that ability to feel is called empathy. And as far as I can see, white America has none.

Or maybe you do. Maybe you have empathy, but it’s overshadowed by the centuries of stinky, infected rot left by your presidents, your congressmen, your police, your lawyers, your corporations, your lobbyists, your business leaders, your forefathers, and your motherland, all in the name of colonialism. Maybe you don’t know what empathy even feels like anymore.

Human rights violations are so interwoven with American history that you can no longer tell what’s right . . . if indeed you ever could.

You are a rotten tooth in the mouth of the world. Instead of taking care of yourself and preventing decay, you feed on the power of your whiteness like candy.
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I know, I know, not all white people. My husband is white. Except I wrote an entire fucking essay about how I needed to put his ass in check for his lack of empathy. Except that I spent years tuning him into what the fuck is going on with the huge swath of the population that doesn’t look like him. And I still deal with the empathy-less white people he’s brought into my life. Not often, because I love myself too much to deal with that weird combination of superficiality and toxicity that permeates white society and dictates their interactions, but still. They are in my life, kind of.

And at work? The fact that these people categorize murder by cop as politics makes me want to throw a goddamn table. “I don’t talk politics at work.” People were murdered and you liken it to the ego-stroking and ass-kissing office bullshit that I put up with for my check? Get the fuck outta here!

Seriously, get the fuck outta here.

Can you really not see the difference? Does this really not resonate with you? Does the constant replaying of the murder of Black people really not matter?

You don’t have to answer that. I already know. We aren’t human to you. We never have been.

But you won’t admit that because it means telling the truth. And if there is one thing white people have taught me, it’s that you cannot stand the truth in any of its forms.

I keep asking myself — when will they see the monster in the mirror? When will they see who they really are? What they do? How they destroy the world with their endless quest for power and the tireless subjugation of others to do it? When will they admit their fucking inability to see the humanity in difference?

Honestly, I wouldn’t care if so many white people didn’t have so much fucking power. But y’all do, and your consistent abuse of that power has destroyed countless lives and continues to do so. From your rapist sons, to your murdering daughters, you continue to destroy everything you touch.

But I have hope for you.

My hope is that one day, enough of you will stop lying to yourselves and heal. That one day you will stop lying to yourself and admit that you are an empty shell, existing on the continued pain of others as you beg, borrow, and steal from EVERYONE else to feel relevant.

One day you will stop killing everyone who doesn’t fit your image.

One day you will stop attacking anyone who questions your decayed foundation.

One day you will actually love instead of trying to destroy people who live, love, and somehow thrive despite your oppression.

From your rapist sons, to your murdering daughters, you continue to destroy everything you touch.
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In these times of tragedy, we talk about Black healing. It’s a necessary conversation about something we have a lot of practice doing. Hundreds of years worth, actually.

What we need is white accountability. Are you strong enough to do it?

I’ll wait.

By Amber Nicole Brooks

After a seven-year relationship, I still remember that my ex-lover, while in bed one green morning, boasted about his French toast making skills and promised to make me some incredible French toast at a later date. This sounded wonderful, caring.

Our exclusivity was not yet established, and considering that the other man I’d been sleeping with at the time had transitioned from walking me to my car in the morning, to asking me to leave early in the morning, to asking me to not stay the night, the French toast was a balefire of promise. Little daydreams like this chimera of a breakfast lent a buoyancy and endurance to our time together.

The French toast never happened.

What does a writer do when she can’t let go of the French toast? When the French toast has become an irrational encumbrance to clear thought, an albatross of sorts? When she must then consult those that have come before, the sages and oracles or at least the bawdy confessors?

She reads books.

The AWP book fair this year in Minneapolis sated many of my vague yearnings. Booths upon booths of books created a gluttonous display, a sort of melancholy Christmas, a kind of trick-or-treating unbridled except by the size of my luggage. On a white background I saw the enormous word LOVE, so big only two letters fit on each line:

LO,
VE.

The serif font was in a liminal color: perhaps poppy, orange-red, pink-orange, pink, or salmon? In a much smaller font followed: “and Lies.”

Clancy Martin, in his book Love and Lies: An Essay on Truthfulness, Deceit, and the Growth and Care of Erotic Love, gives an overview of some philosophical perspectives on deceit and truth. In The Republic, Plato endorses the paternalistic idea of the “noble lie.” In contrast, Kant says it is always wrong to lie, because there is nothing worse we can do than prevent a person from exercising her morality. To act morally is to act freely, which means one’s choices must be free, based on reasons that have been arrived at freely (not through deception or coercion).

Bonhoeffer posits the idea of the “living truth,” acknowledging we often mean something different than we say, that the living truth we impart may be more important than the literal truth that cannot be fully known. Buddhism encourages right speech, which does not necessarily equate to total honesty. Right speech is skillful speech, where avoiding or mitigating harm may take precedence over naked honesty. Confucianism holds the virtues of harmony and filial piety above literal truth telling.

I promise it was not only the French toast, but once I felt deceived, I felt driven to make meaning of my past, of the promises, of the negotiations, to answer questions of why and how. These philosophers provide some constructive names for things.

Once you have cohabitation and tangled finances, it seems silly to say, “Hey, I’m really hurt you never made me French toast.” Or does it?

Perhaps Bonhoeffer would say the intention to make the French toast imparted a living truth, the emotion felt in the moment. The idea of the French toast — however ambitious — could not be faulted, nor could the man be faulted for this act of sincere imagination.

The problem began when the idea of the French toast also became an act of imagination for me. In my creative process it became a thing that I assigned meaning and value. I will admit that the object here is a trifle, but the concept is not.

We all take things — words, promises, desires, gestures, silences — and assign them meaning and value in our imaginations. We create meaning where there is none. We create meaning to create stories of us. We create meaning to create new dreams.

New dreams are pillars. Two things can happen to these pillars. One: They undergird our life-building, our identity-building — they hold us up. Two: Their hollowness is revealed when they crumble, as if from a quick act of black magic. The latter leads to, at best, regret for one’s imaginings. The latter often leads to cynicism.

After this relationship ended, I started thinking of all the little things I had believed, wanted to believe, that had created a cheerful picture of an exceptional partnership. It took a long time for me to realize how much of life could simply be talk, not truth. Fantasy and reverie, not reality. But, I had been in love.

I now believe love is largely an act of imagination, a creative process: of building meaning, imagining a relationship, and placing it into an abstract realm outside of any literal facts. It’s contemplation. It’s a bestowal of value, a bestowal of value so creatively woven from strands of daydreaming that it permeates all windows of the psyche. This is “true,” but again, it is not a literal truth, not a “fact.”

In my love, in my falling in love, a string of promises, beliefs, and ambitions wove together, to elevate the idea of our partnership in my imagination. This is to be in love. Martin’s book has helped me understand how good people deceive, and even how we can deceive ourselves — how we can create representations and narratives which are essentially lies, but somehow form our identity and become a type of truth. A bulk of this book emphasizes erotic love, specifically, because that’s where Martin’s personal stumbles and introspection focus — on his relationships.

My personal way of expressing this type of love is to be honest to a fault and make myself thoroughly vulnerable. I don’t understand how to hold back in relationships, how to deceive for a larger end design. I don’t know how to strategize. I don’t know how to not say “I love you,” if that’s what I feel. I don’t know how to be or seem like anything other than what I am. Martin would probably say that I am deceiving myself.

At the very least, I don’t know how to be super skeptical of the one I love. So, I listen and trust and weave odds and ends, creatively, into my imagined meaning. When I assessed my ex as a suitor, I made judgments about a lot of things. I then reflexively assigned each of these things meaning, value.

I asked if he had a car payment.

He said his car was paid off. This was a litmus test for me, a test of dependability. Short of asking for a credit report, knowing a man had paid off a car in three years was a pretty decent metric, and an overwhelming factor in my decision making. I attempted to apply this information rationally, to tell myself it would be safe to try and build a life together.

It was a lie. In truth, he had defaulted on the loan, and there was a lien on the car.

So, Bonhoeffer can claim the French toast as a romantic living truth, but I will be Kantian in this instance. I will hold fast to the idea that my freedom was taken from me with this initial deception. My ability to make decisions and act freely, to exercise my own morality, was taken from me. If I’d known the truth, I never would have asked him to move in with me, as once you get past all the mushy stuff like humor and charm and good sex, independence and dependability are at the top of my list for a partner.

Bonhoeffer gets breakfast, but Kant gets the Pontiac.

I want to ask my lover now: “Do you think we can be each other’s last romance?”

Yet, I want Bonhoeffer’s living truth, the truth of intention.

A rational, statistically-based response would be lacking romanticism, possibly hurtful. No one can tell the future, but in my imagination what we have, and what we can build, could be a last romance. However, it’s a risky idea, especially if one is inclined to be cautious and rational. It just doesn’t make sense to promise or predict such a thing.

But the imagination yearns. I’m tired of being cynical.

Maybe love is simply the absence of cynicism. At least, falling in love requires the absence of cynicism. People keep falling, in this way, despite the embitterment and rancor professed and possessed by various voices in our culture.

Martin remarks that vows of commitment are a paradoxical expression of freedom. Declaring a last romance is indeed such. It’s a deliberate choice, a willfulness to participate in the commitment — an expression of freedom. However, the commitment to create a new truth together is culturally perceived as a binding of freedom.

I don’t want to see my partnership, or even my other relationships that way — as a binding. I want to see all of my relationships as an expression of free choice, of intention.

So I can say to my current lover: Give me a living truth that will not unravel.