cracker repellent (pup goes bark)

i remember every time a cracker's told me to be quiet. my body remembers. the cold rests on my shoulder and cuts diagonal into my chest and leeches into my stomach and drains down my legs. i don't want to be around you. you have cameras for eyes. there's a judge in your heart that only sees content for "tone."

and i have no idea what constitutes "tone" for you other than volume, vulnerability, "ill-manner," "incivility," and, let's face it, non-whiteness. when i refuse to be your token, you refuse to be respectful, earnest, or interested. you seem so [...], and i want to be there for that soft part of you, but i know i'm not safe in your room. to be truthful, i hate sharing my life with crackers (like you) that just itch for reasons to pull the plug of siblinghood (or decency) the moment i brush against your quiet, servile, ashamed, deeply white sensibilities too hard.

and i'm more gutted by you than the people you stand with. i at least hoped we were friends. but i saw you looking down the entire time. so i knew. my body knew. i can't help but hope, sometimes. maybe i'll get better at not doing that. we'll see. you were just so callous and unaware of the dimensions you didn't already care about! and so confident, too!!

and i see the world of difference between you and a real friend, someone who holds me and sits with me and listens to me and actually levels with what i feel. when they tell me i'm wrong, they know i am. they see the mistakes where they are, and they don't just take stabs through the fog of a half-formed perception of me. i don't know what it is. maybe it's the fact that they actually have a relationship with me, that they really do care about me, or that they care enough to look close at my body and the ways it moves and really understand where it slips up, but they really do get it.

they usually relate these mistakes to me gently, because they love me in a particularly soft kind of way, but i don't want to write only within this particular kind of soft paradigm. because that isn't the only kind of epistemically-just love people can have or nurture.

because, yeah, i've got work to do when it comes to staying solutions-focused in contentious settings, especially when i'm in Guard Dog: Attack! mode, but there's a world of difference between that and being needlessly cruel, or loveless, or wrong. and, yeah, i know. in one breath, that might sound like debate girl nonsense, but sit with me for a second.

being right about something necessitates at least some kind of love, right? to see something attentively enough to track, pin down, and extrapolate is surely a lot of effort to put into something you don't love, i think. an impossible amount of effort, even. and calling out bad behaviour (especially when someone's calling that out loudly) should never be something we discourage. attentive engagement, even when it comes with strong feelings (and especially when it does...), is how we avoid apathy and carelessness and politely-enshrined arrogance. that, too, is love. and, frankly, the connection between shutting down loudness (because it makes you uncomfortable, not because it's wrong) and anti-blackness goes without saying. 

and, just to situate what i'm saying, i'm not black, but i am darker-skinned. and i know the ways i have to move through spaces and advocate differently because of that fact. my experiences being dark (and loud, and queer) couldn't possibly be disconnected from blackness, even though they obviously aren't the same. so, with that said...

choosing to openly shut me down when i'm saying things you (apparently) somewhat agree with, and saying nothing when others do things that are wrong politely, or distantly, because i did it without "tact" (which i read as inseparable from me not adhering to white manner) is fucked up. full stop. and i'm writing about it here, far away from you, because i didn't have the words to say this then, nor do i particularly trust that you'd engage with this fairly. and, anyway, i'm being vulnerable. so. crackers beware. the way you acted is certainly what i'd call loveless.

and i wish you respected me enough to share even half the good faith you extended to others, but whatever. can't help that. you look down too much at me to do that, anyway. 

otherwise, i'm excited to work more on a solutions-focused approach in the midst of hard emotions, because i think it'll be a useful skill to learn. thanks for telling me about it, [...] ^v^ (i love you!!). and i'm also excited to keep being loud and vulnerable and cutting and anti-fragile, because i need myself and everyone to reckon with a love that is caustic, loud, vulnerable, and clumsy. thanks to literally every incredible feminist of colour that's taught me how to sit with those parts of myself and love them. i will not be white for anyone, and you shouldn't be white for yourself, either. join me in growing out our hair, being imperfect publicly, and being loud as shit at all times.

thanks for your attention!! >w< & WATCH PARIS IS BURNING!!!