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.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg has become a beloved feminist icon. Immortalized in numerous viral tweets and memes, she is endearingly referred to as “Notorious RBG” and a real-life “superhero,” Ginsburg has recently been the focus of the documentary RBG and the film On the Basis of Sex, released in May and December of 2018, respectively. Both are glowing portrayals of Ginsburg’s early career in the 1970s as a sex discrimination litigator.

During this period, Ginsburg co-founded the Women’s Rights Project at the ACLU and brought or participated in over three hundred sex discrimination cases and almost every major Supreme Court case on sex discrimination. This period in her career has made her so valorized that few understand the actual details of these cases and the sex discrimination legal standards that she left us with today.

The truth is that through the hundreds of sex discrimination cases that she litigated, Ginsburg systematically targeted and destroyed any and all affirmative action and public programs that favored women. Through her seminal cases such as Frontiero v. Richardson (1973) and Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld (1975)—some of her most famous “feminist” legal wins—Ginsburg left us with a legal standard that makes it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for federal, state, and local government entities; universities; and private institutions to create preferential policies for women.

Why would Ginsburg—who has become beloved for her viral feminist quotes—have devoted her pre-Supreme Court litigation career to destroying the preferential and affirmative action programs for women? White feminism.

Ginsburg ruthlessly litigated based on a white feminist legal theory called “anti-classification” theory, also known as “sameness feminism,” “sex-blindness,” or “anti-stereotyping” theory. Similar to the concept of color-blindness, sex-blindness is the belief that there should be no differentiation based on sex, even affirmative action and preferential policies. These white feminists, including Ginsburg, theorized that beneficial policies that differentiated on the basis of gender stereotyped women as weaker than men. Thus, they opposed these policies as sexist. It was an easy theory for white women to embrace, as sexism was often the only form of discrimination they faced, so the eradication of preferential sex treatment meant the eradication of their problems.

Ginsburg’s legal legacy is one that, against all reason, is predicated upon the inherently racist and classist belief that women should not receive any preferential treatment, at the devastating expense of the most vulnerable populations within the category of women who needed these preferential policies—poor, queer, and non-white women. Although it may not have been Ginsburg’s explicit intent to harm the most marginalized of women, part of the insidiousness of white feminism is that it convinces its believers that the white woman’s experience is the universal experience for all women, and that all women aspire to the social position of white men. In the end, it is not the intent, but the devastating impact that matters.

Ginsburg left us with a legal standard that makes it extremely difficult, if not impossible...to create preferential policies for women.
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Propelled by this sex-blindness theory, despite intense criticism by non-white women legal theorists, Ginsburg’s supposedly shining period in the 1970s as a litigator for the ACLU was in actuality a period during which she strategically litigated hundreds of cases that targeted and destroyed any policy that benefited women over men.

In Craig v. Boren (1976)—one of her most high profile “feminist” wins that launched her to fame—Ginsburg argued before the Supreme Court on behalf of her male plaintiff that an Oklahoma statute that required men to be older to buy beer than women was sex discrimination against men, and thus unconstitutional. The Supreme Court ruled in her favor. In Weinberger v. Wiesenfeld (1975), Ginsburg represented a white male widower before the Supreme Court and argued that Social Security regulations that permitted female widows but not male widowers to collect special benefits while caring for minor children was reverse sex discrimination. The court agreed, and she got the preferential Social Security regulation towards women abolished.

In Califano v. Goldfarb (1977), Ginsburg represented yet another white male plaintiff, arguing that the Social Security Act’s allotment of greater survivor’s benefits to female widows than male widowers was unconstitutional. In her oral argument before the Supreme Court, Ginsburg explained why sex discrimination against men should be regarded the same as sex discrimination against women: “[A]lmost every discrimination against males operates against females, as well…. I don’t know of any line that doesn’t work as a two-edged sword, doesn’t hurt both sexes.”

The list is endless. In case after case, Ginsburg executed a strategic plan to target and destroy any and all preferential public or private policy that favored women over men. According to “Ruth Bader Ginsburg ‘s Equal Protection Clause: 1970-80” by Wendy Webster Williams, a final tally of Ginsburg’s cases revealed that 4 to 1, Ginsburg represented male (likely mostly white) plaintiffs over female plaintiffs. Ginsburg systematically litigated cases that were nearly identical in pattern to advance her agenda. She represented white male plaintiffs, alleged that a law or policy that gave preference to women was reverse sex discrimination against her male plaintiff, and claimed that this differentiation on the basis of sex was thus unconstitutional. She did this with the explicit goal of decimating preferential policies towards women, because she, as a white woman, held the white feminist belief that any distinction drawn between men and women—even in the form of affirmative action—meant that (white) women could never be seen as equal to (white) men.

Interestingly, On the Basis of Sex even chronicles Ginsburg as she litigates one of her male plaintiff cases to destroy a preferential program for women. In the trailer, Felicity Jones, acting as Ginsburg, proclaims, “If the law differentiates on the basis of sex, then how are men and women ever supposed to be equal. . . This is sex based discrimination against a man.” The film portrays Ginsburg as a heroine as she proclaims that men can be victims of reverse sex discrimination.

The impact of the hundreds of cases that she litigated is devastating. The legal standard that she created, called “intermediate scrutiny,” requires courts to review any law or policy that classifies on the basis of sex, even benign ones that preference women, with heightened scrutiny and an inherent belief that any classification, even ones used to benefit women, are invidious and harmful. Intermediate scrutiny is an extremely difficult burden for affirmative action and preferential policies to survive. Thus, Ginsburg, through the cases that she brought during the height of her supposed feminist career, not only eliminated existing preferential policies for women, she largely destroyed the possibility of future beneficial policies to women.

Numerous high-profile cases after the 1970s were brought and continue to be brought to take advantage of the intermediate scrutiny standard Ginsburg instated. These cases were brought in order to destroy programs beneficial to women. For example, in Miss. U. for Women v Hogan (1982), the Supreme Court, based on the heightened legal standard of scrutiny that Ginsburg set, ruled that the nursing school’s affirmative action admissions policy for women was unconstitutional and forced it to accept men as well. In JEB v Alabama (1994), the Supreme Court, based on the standard that Ginsburg set, ruled that women can not strike male jurors based on their gender, because this was supposedly sex discrimination against men.

The impact of the hundreds of cases that she litigated is devastating.
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How many universities, government agencies, employers, and public and private institutions have and continue to refrain from creating preferential policies to preferentially admit, hire, or provide more resources to women? How many women out there, especially marginalized women, would have benefitted from preferential policies throughout their lives? Across all public and private entities, across all industries, the ability to create preferential policies to benefit women has been forever restricted by Ginsburg.

The issue is that, while privileged white women like Ginsburg were eager to destroy preferential policies for women for the mere symbolism of being considered equal to white men—the poor, queer, and non-white women who desperately need these programs far more than white women were left stranded.  According to “Feminist Disagreement (Comparatively Recast)” in the 2008 Harvard Journal of Law & Gender, white women legal theorists like Ginsburg believed that men could be victims of reverse sexism, and that the pinnacle of equality for women was not radically revamping of the structure of sex discrimination, but instead aspiring to be considered equal to white men. Ginsburg shaped the case law in a way in which affirmative action programs for women are all but eviscerated—all because privileged white women like Ginsburg chafed at the idea of being considered different from men and being given “special” treatment.

Ginsburg’s strategy of destroying existing and future potential preferential policies for women has been rightly criticized by legal theorists. Radical legal feminist and Professor of Law Catharine A. MacKinnon wrote in Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law regarding Ginsburg’s “feminist” litigation, “[M]uch of what has passed for feminism in law has been the attempt to get for men what little has been reserved for women.” Professor Judith Baer in Advocate on the Court: Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the Limits of Formal Equality, in Rehnquist Justice: Understanding the Court Dynamic wrote on Ginsburg’s sex discrimination cases, “So far men have been the primary beneficiaries of the new sexual equality doctrine. Ruth Ginsburg has given no indication that this outcome troubles her.”

Ginsburg’s disturbing legal history evinces a greater truth—middle and upper class white women like Ginsburg are able to advance to the upper echelons of society and obtain the privileges of white men that they desperately seek. According to Professor of Law Yxta Maya Murray in “A Jurisprudence of Nonviolence,” the white women who advanced this sex-blindness theory aspired to be thought of as equal to white men and attain the social and economic privileges of white men, which upper class white women eventually did—perhaps with little thought to the enormous harm that they enacted upon poor women and women of color, who faced other forms of violence and discrimination that would keep them from achieving equality with white men.

In her seminal article “Race and Essentialism in Feminist Legal Theory,” Professor of Law at UC Davis School of Law Angela P. Harris wrote, “[I]n feminist legal theory, as in the dominant culture, it is mostly white, straight, and socioeconomically privileged people who claim to speak for all of us. Not surprisingly, the story they tell about ‘women,’ despite its claim to universality, seems to black women to be peculiar to women who are white, straight, and socioeconomically privileged…”

For decades, non-white women legal theorists have strongly criticized Ginsburg for gutting legally sanctioned affirmative action for women, and for her complete obsession with white women attaining the status of white men that has wreaked immeasurable harm on poor women and women of color. Black critical race feminist legal theorists such as Angela P. Harris, Kimberle Crenshaw, Dorothy Roberts, and Angela Onwuachi-Willig have long critiqued the brand of white liberal feminism that Ginsburg advanced as class-privileged, inherently racist, and harmful towards non-white, non-straight women.

Yet, few outside of the insular world of legal academia know of these critiques. The public continues to fawn over Ginsburg as our generation’s feminist icon as the poor, queer, and non-white women that were inevitably sacrificed by her white feminist ideals remain vulnerable targets of violence. Some of that is because most people aren’t reading through all her legal decisions, and the summaries, on their face, sound good. But perhaps the reason why these critiques remain obscure in the eyes of the public—while Ginsburg’s star continues to rise—is because the world is more than willing to love violent white women who throw non-white women, poor women, and queer women under the bus.

Ginsburg has become an enormous cultural icon, yet her brand of feminism is only beneficial to one type of woman—class-privileged white women. For the millions of queer, poor, and non-white women out there who have had preferential university admissions, healthcare, and public benefit programs inevitably snatched from them by Ginsburg and white feminist litigators’ work, we cannot afford to continue valorizing this brand of feminism. We do not have the privilege of being rich and white. We do not have the privilege of having our entire political orientation rest upon aspiring to be granted the same privileges of white men. We live at the crossroads of race, class, and gender violence. Who actually benefits from Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s legacy? Certainly not us.

My good old dog is at my feet in a gray dog bed; he’s injured his back chasing a squirrel. We both forget that he’s fourteen. I give him cannabis dog treats to help the pain, and carry him down the back steps so he can go to the bathroom. Now he’s looking at me with his big, button eyes, glazed over. I barely know how to help.

My students recently did a presentation on Childish Gambino’s “This is America” this week. One of my brightest stopped, mid-sentence, looking at the still of Donald Glover holding an assault weapon.

“I’d be remiss if I didn’t also mention that we just had another mass shooting,” she said quietly. She is talking about Pittsburg, which, at the time of this class, had only happened a few days prior. We were still recovering from Kavanaugh (they’d been learning about moral reasoning, and we’d used the Supreme Court Justice position as an opportunity to explore ethics).

I opened a bright pink box of donuts. “Please eat,” I said to them, my palms open. They each took a donut gingerly, and I felt my heart riotous in my chest.

Let me backup a minute.

When I took this teaching job, I was shown a tiny black box, hidden in each classroom. “If there’s a shooter,” the Office Manager of my department said to me, somewhat cheerily, “just push this button and say ‘everything is just fine.’ That way, they don’t think you’re reporting them, and shoot you.”

I think about the fact that the dashboard of my car still shows mileage in kilometers because I don’t know how to reset it. How I threaten to throw my perfectly good printer out the window on a weekly basis because I don’t know how to unjam paper. My own inability to follow simple directions is something I’m largely OK with, except in my profession, where I’m expected to know how to fend off an armed person determined to kill me.

In a few weeks, I’m traveling to Tucson to teach a Gender Empowerment and Allyship workshop for community members, K12 educators, and parents. I’ve rightfully gotten a lot of pushback about this because even though I’m grayscale genderqueer and a femme who does trauma awareness and transcompetency in education, I’m still pretty comfortable with pronouns that define me as cis.

I get it. The pushback, I mean. And…

I believe that we’re living in a time where we’re redefining what cohesion and solidarity look like. A time when allyship and the work of allies needs to step up and utilize the privileges and resources that we have in order to center and hold up the most vulnerable and marginalized in our communities.

My own inability to follow simple directions is something I’m largely OK with, except in my profession, where I’m expected to know how to fend off an armed person determined to kill me.
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I know that we (my community, educators, activists) have had many discussions about how to center trans and genderqueer narratives without placing the burden of education on said folks, and I feel grateful that this workshop is an opportunity to begin that work. I recognize that this is an evolving process, one that must remain living and porous in order to consistently identify and meet the needs of those who have been pushed even further into the margins by the very real dangers of our political landscape.

I feel honored and excited to be invited to participate in this larger conversation and skillshare. Excited and honored to be just one small piece of this event, which is made up, aside from myself, of locals. I feel excited to be using the education and privilege that I have to help dismantle the problematic systems that keep our most vulnerable community members disempowered. Excited to see how allyship and solidarity can manifest when we have these intergenerational, interdisciplinary, inter-pedagogical conversations.

I’m having these conversations the day the news about the shooting comes through. I’m on the phone with a trans high school principal in Arizona, talking about listening to the most vulnerable members of our community, when Kavanaugh is sworn into the Supreme Court.

See? Every time we start to make a path to healing, another massive disruption happens in our country that derails us. It’s hard to know how to build houses in ceaseless earthquakes.

I like to say, and say it often, that teaching and writing and reading and staying engaged are the answer, and I believe that — I do. And yet it’s difficult to figure out what to teach, what to write, what to read, what to engage with. Sometimes, I feel like I’m merely teaching my students skills for harm reduction: how to not be manipulated by the media. How to be kind to other people. How to take no shit, but do no harm. To be thoughtful.

Then I remember bell hooks and about how syllabi and pedagogy are inherently colonialist, so I also think a good deal about how to make the classroom less of a white, feminized space. And also how to throw my body into the fire if I need to.

It’s hard to know how to build houses in ceaseless earthquakes.
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Is that allyship? Is that taking autonomy? Am I in the right to do this? Knowing about being or not being in the “right” requires understanding one’s own position, which means understanding one’s self. Which, for me, as a person with CPTSD and chronic pain and a smorgasboard of intersecting marginalized identities, means carving time out for therapies.

Is allyship privileged?

“Yes and no” is the answer and has been the answer to all of life’s most complicated questions. Every day I teach my students that many truths can exist alongside one another, that there isn’t really a “right” answer to anything—only an evolving attempt at an answer. Allyship itself, as a concept, isn’t privileged; allyship comes from a place of deep love, compassion, and empathy, which are all traits even people being actively attacked can feel and foster.

But the way self care, as an industry, has been created as a “mindfulness culture” (inside capitalism, inside the United States, specifically)—that is particularly privileged. To have access to therapy, to the education necessary to not only be hired to stand in front of rooms of people for pay, but to also even know that allyship is urgently necessary. After all, it’s a term we use largely in circles that are, if not entirely academic, often radical, activist, or informed by collective consciousness—and in order to have access to that information, that terminology, you still need to have certain resources.

Is allyship privileged? ‘Yes and no’ is the answer and has been the answer to all of life’s most complicated questions.
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This has been my year of teaching out of a suitcase. Of traveling across the country and showing up in classrooms and bookstores and living rooms, poetry centers and bars and cafeterias. Of re-thinking the framework of how education *really* works, and where it gets to live. Of putting down the pedagogical framework for de-constructing the very slight differences between “novice” and “expert”.

Not only because of what is happening in the world, the political landscape. But because it’s become alarmingly clear that our institutions—which produce the results they are intended to—are failing the majority of our most vulnerable friends and community members. They’re failing us, too.

Keep evolving your attempt at an answer.

“I tell my kids, if you have self-control, you have everything,” says Melanie, the innkeeper at our B&B in Fairbanks, Alaska. “It applies to any situation, whether it’s with a wild animal, a school bully, me and their dad. Self-control… it will serve them well anywhere.”

A few days later, my husband and I are sitting in the Denali National Park Visitors’ Center, watching a wildlife safety video. Home to grizzly bears, moose, and caribou, among other creatures, the park is one of the few places remaining in the U.S. where humans are intruders—and need to behave accordingly.

We like to hike, but we’ve never encountered anything larger than deer in the wild, so we’ve been leaning toward exploring Denali behind the protective steel and glass of our rental car. But just in case we feel like wimps once we’re out in the forest, we decide to watch the video so we can make a last-minute call. The trails are open year-round, after all; we can always stoke our bravery later.

Four guides narrate the 30-minute video, structured as a list of do’s and don’ts. The tips for bears in particular are enlightening:

• Minimize surprises—make noise to announce your presence
• Suppress any scents so you don’t attract bears—no fragrances, all food in bear-proof packs
• Stay vigilant: When stopping, choose sites with good visibility. Have everyone in your group face a slightly different direction, so you can see anything approaching
• Bears are curious, and their behavior is contextual; you never want to provoke or set precedent (e.g., don’t keep food in or near your tent—then they’ll think tents equal food)
• Keep bear spray close—you don’t want to be fumbling for it in a crucial moment. Make sure you know how to use it before you head out
• If you do come upon a bear and it spots you, don’t run! (That could trigger the bear’s predatory chase drive.) Back away if possible, but don’t turn your back on the bear. If you can’t retreat, stand your ground and put your arms over your head to look as large as possible
• If the bear attacks, lie in the fetal position, cover your head and neck

As the video wrapped up all the different ways hikers and campers could get in trouble, one of the youthful park rangers offered a final thought: “Don’t be afraid to go out and explore!”

Despite this encouragement, we ultimately opted to stick to our original plan. We drove to Mile 30 and back on Denali’s main road on two consecutive days: the first in afternoon sunshine, the second in morning mist and light rain. On both occasions, the weather revealed different shades of the mountains and valleys, and a variety of animals came out to greet us: bald eagles, caribou, and yes—two grizzly bears. The afternoon bear sidled down the mountain and crossed the road, less than 30 feet from our car; the morning bear stayed up on the hillside, munching on the brush. We snapped a few pictures, the gargantuan beasts transformed into mere specks on our smartphone cameras. We continued on our way, enclosed and safe.

But something about the situation rattled me, and it took me a few days to understand just what exactly it was.

I acknowledged that when I go hiking at home in New England, I am seeking out silence, as well as the opportunity to clear my mind. The recommendations for Denali—being loud and constantly on high alert—seemed in direct opposition to what I’ve always pursued when I hit the trail. I hike to relax, and this type of endeavor was vigilant — maybe even tense.

In fact, I thought, if I wanted to be constantly on the lookout and poised for a potential attack, I’d just stay home and continue my usual, “commuting on public transportation” and “woman walking alone in the city,” routines.

But something about the situation rattled me, and it took me a few days to understand just what exactly it was.
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Suddenly I realized that those safety tips from the National Park Service video weren’t so different from what I learned in a self-defense class a few years back.

• Stay constantly alert! Don’t wear earbuds or talk on your phone. Know your surroundings at all times.
• When going out, look large: Practice safety in numbers
• Dress conservatively, watch how much skin you’re showing—you don’t want to trigger a prey drive
• Yell and make noise so others know you’re in trouble
• If you’re going to carry pepper spray, make sure you know how to use it. Otherwise it could be grabbed and used against you!

And it then hit me—do we regard men the same way we regard wild animals?

I thought of Mike Pence, who refuses to dine or be alone with any woman who isn’t his wife. Louis C.K.’s compulsions. School dress codes that make sure girls don’t distract boys. The string of assaults against women in my former Boston neighborhood — conducted over repeated years by the alleged same assailant — which terrorized residents so much that the local community center provided the aforementioned self-defense classes free of charge.

I thought of the flood of #MeToo stories, encompassing friends and strangers, famous men and everyday men. My own stories, my friends’ stories. In every case, the proprieties of respect and social mores fall away and the feral urges dominate the experience (and headlines). That sense of unpredictability, that succumbing to animal nature, sets the foundation for repeated indignities—and worse.

He can’t be controlled. You need to be smart. (You need to take that self-defense class!)

Boys will be boys—it’s in their nature.   

Don’t tempt him or be a tease—he can’t help it.

Do we regard men the same way we regard wild animals?
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We took a red eye home from Anchorage and promptly fell asleep. When we were somewhere over the Midwest, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford started her testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Jet-lagged and bleary-eyed, I watched a video recording of her opening statement later that evening. She was composed, with self control.

I watched Justice Kavanaugh, raging and roaring; Lindsay Graham, red-faced and sputtering; both as volatile as creatures disturbed in the wild. And I suppose they were—here was an interloper daring to call out how they roamed their habitat. In both her statement and replies, Dr. Ford refused to continue the narrative that they had no self control.

Of course, this narrative won’t go away quietly—cultural mores built over millennia don’t just course correct or even adapt immediately. Just this month, for example, the Atlantic gave Newt Gingrich a lengthy (and often bizarre) profile, opening the story with its subject stomping around in a zoo and featuring choice quotes comparing all of human nature to the animal kingdom. Photos show him grinning alongside menacing dinosaur skulls and petting giant turtles.

“It’s not viciousness, it’s natural,” he chides after the reporter pushes back. Later in the story, citing a 2016 speech Gingrich gave to the Heritage Foundation, our president is compared to (what else?) a grizzly bear—specifically, the ferocious bear in the movie The Revenant: “He will walk over, bite your face off, and sit on you.”

Here was an interloper daring to call out how they roamed their habitat.
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But for those of us who have never wielded power — who have never been regarded (or permitted to be regarded) as wild or ferocious — we know by default that there are other ways of moving through the world.

For those millions of us who have always been held to a higher standard — who have never had the privilege to unleash any “wild” tendencies — we know collectively what’s possible. That we all can do better. That the narrative of “nature dictates violence” has to stop. In short — that we all can exercise self control.  

Two days after we returned home, my husband and I drove up to Plum Island for a hike through the nature preserve. The sun was high and the salt marshes spread as far as the eye could see. It was quite a departure from Denali—mostly flat without a predator in sight.

But at a certain point, I got ahead of Andy on the boardwalk trail, and saw a solo man a few feet away. The wind rustled through the brush that flanked the narrow pathway. It was just him and me as we approached each other. He could be a bear, I thought, or he could be a crane.

And just like that, all senses were firing.

I took a deep breath. Self control, I thought, and hoped it would be enough.

I wondered if he had even an inkling of the same thought.

“Hello,” I said as we made eye contact.

“Beautiful day,” he said, and we continued our opposite ways.

Do you know what white supremacy is? It’s the doubt you have about your safety in predominantly Black neighborhoods. It’s that skepticism you feel when your doctor isn’t white. It’s the hesitation you have when you question a Black person’s abilities. It’s the surprise you have that a Black person is good at something . . . anything. It’s the devaluing you do when someone like me accomplishes something a white person cannot. It’s the excuses you make to explain why and how I outperformed white people.

If you are a person of color (POC) in this white supremacist society, you are taught to hate yourself before you know what hate is. You are trained to prioritize white people at all costs. Self-destructive behaviors, like silencing yourself, are normalized, while protective behaviors, like self-respect, are weaponized against you.

You spend your life being conditioned into thinking you are less than white people — less intelligent, less capable, less trustworthy. You learn that no matter what you do, you are a problem. You find ways to survive, muting and hiding yourself as much as possible. Accepting verbal abuse and ridicule for things out of your control. You suppress, suppress, suppress, and prove, prove, prove, until that is all you know. Or you lash out and find your completely understandable and protective behavior deemed illegal and regulated at the potential cost of your life.

You learn that approval is gained from self-deprecating behaviors. That diminishing yourself and those who look like you can provide growing returns. You learn that your proximity to whiteness, while painful, allows you access to things you’ve been taught to desire. Money. Status. Power. You learn that little pieces of your dignity, pride, and self-respect hold value on the white open market.

The thing that you don’t learn is that this is a form of self-abuse.

It is complicated navigating white spaces as a person of color. Your appearance plays a huge role in how much or little you will be accepted. The less you resemble a POC, the easier time you will have navigating whiteness. Provided you ritually sacrifice aspects of your identity for white acceptance, you will be allowed on the fringe of these groups. You learn to hear, see, and say no to Otherness, to embrace whiteness in all its false glory. You are told that if you are Black, you should renounce your Blackness. Remove all its trappings from your life. Embrace the light that is white Jesus, white pride, white supremacy, and know your true worth — as a footstool upon which whiteness rests. Learn your place and you shall be held high, a lord among peasants — the price being all that makes you . . . you.

So, you eat the apple, gain the access, and allow the insidious, sleeping protector of whiteness into your body, because survival requires it, success dictates it, and you, on some level, want it. It is, superficially, an easier path to walk. That protector, be it large or small, is poison to you, incompatible with who and what you are, ingesting you from the inside out. White supremacy is poison to all who touch it, and is currently engineering the global destruction of humanity through methods like global warming, continued consumption of fossil fuels, and unending genocide.

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You are told that if you are Black, you should renounce your Blackness.
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“Consume, consume, consume,” it chants, normalizing the cannibalization of others. Normalizing the cannibalization of self. Nestled inside you, aware, awake, guiding your every decision. Shadowing your every move. It is the echo chamber in your head, confusing your need to survive with the need to absorb and ingest the otherness of yourself and the otherness of others. Repackage yourself, your friends, your lovers. Soften your edges to appeal to more palates. Strip yourself of your history, individuality, nuance just enough to intrigue without overwhelming. Hide, dissect, and serve yourself to whiteness in small, manageable pieces. Exotify your experiences. Be that delicious tidbit that whiteness loves to devour. Let it absorb, reshape, and regurgitate an empty version of yourself to continue the work of white consumption in its stead.

You become, in part, the poison of whiteness, wolf in sheep’s clothing, infecting everyone you touch until they also become ever-consuming agents of destruction.

This is what whiteness is. This is what whiteness does. And when you defend those who promote it, when you rationalize their intentions, empathize with their motives, sympathize with their actions, defend their rhetoric, and support being open and understanding, you are its agent, corrupting from the inside out.

For white supremacy doesn’t embrace the humanity of all. It embraces the humanity of whiteness. All others are sustenance for its insatiable hunger for domination and control.