I am exhausted.
I am exhausted by the daily and continual miasma of racism filling up rooms and buildings and minds and infecting all within, and well-meaning microaggressions that every Black person immediately notices, but to which most white people are utterly oblivious.
The constant casual statements, word choices, and pervasive policies that show an underlying, internalized white-centric lens, and that continually offhandedly toss salt onto our unhealing wounds.
And every time one is blithely uttered in front of me, I have to decide if I am going to say something to defend my space, my people, the next Black person this person is going to encounter, or if I just grit my teeth behind a non-threatening smile so the white person can continue their pleasant day.
When I have to explain the basics of inequity and how it relates in a modern day, white-centric, ex-slave-owning country, it exhausts me.
When I hear how a company made their employees remove Black Lives Matter signs from their own bulletin boards over their desks, it exhausts me.
When you describe someone as “a beautiful Black man…” when that isn’t relevant to your story, you exhaust me.
When I hear you describe a Black person as “articulate,” you exhaust me.
When I hear you say “I don’t see color” when that is precisely the definition of racial privilege, you exhaust me.
When I hear someone react to the achievements of a successful Black person with pleasant surprise, like when my mother was told by her college professor “You’re one of the good Blacks!,” it exhausts me.
When you make any excuses for why someone who happens to be from another non-English and nonwhite country is offered anything that is disparate to the white English-speaker’s experience, you exhaust me.
When I watch a white person in a position of power pull out an invisible cape of comfortable privilege to obscure the imperceptible “whites only” signs with a winking sleight of hand, it exhausts me.
Every time I have to decide if this time…. This time I am going to pull back the curtain to show a pathetic little man desperately pushing buttons and flipping switches as he tries to obscure the malevolence of deliberate disenfranchisement, it exhausts me.
Every time a white person in a position of power decides that the level of repair that they are willing to perform for their own participation in systemic racism is enough, regardless of the level of repair required, I am exhausted to tears of frustration and rage.
Every time I am put in a position where I have to either endure micro- and macroaggressions or else take on the onerous responsibility of opening someone’s eyes for them, I am exhausted to my very core.
White people have to do better. You have to do better.
White people created this problem, and white people actively and insidiously conspired to continue and perpetuate it throughout every generation from those who enslaved Black people until those reading this today. These microaggressions and actions of unity aligned with maintaining a dominant white culture that marginalizes and condescends (and secretly despises) others are often unconsciously learned, but always a choice. And they always exhaust the Black people around you.
Because while you may have the luxury of glibly and blindly trampling over the reality of systemic racism and historical trauma stemming from racial inequity without acknowledgement or insight, I assure you that Black people see it, hear it, instantly recognize it, and suffer from your shrugging ignorance of what you say and do.
I and other Black people should not be doing the heavy lifting to educate white people about their own daily participation in the role of maintaining the imbalance of power. White people have benefited from Black people doing the heavy lifting for 400 years. It is time you lifted your own burdens.
“Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since it is then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge.” — Audre Lorde
Tolley M. Jones lives in Easthampton.