Lisa Arrastia

I Caint

Like Shange, no apostrophe.

The price the white American paid for his ticket was to become white-: and, in the main, nothing more than that, or, as he was to insist, nothing less. This incredibly limited not to say dimwitted ambition has choked many a human being to death here: and this, I contend, is because the white American has never accepted the real reasons for his journey. I know very well that my ancestors had no desire to come to this place: but neither did the ancestors of the people who became white and who require of my captivity a song. They require of me a song less to celebrate my captivity than to justify their own.

— James Baldwin, 1985

WAYS IN

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Now the work responds to what stands in the way of love cultural practices in schools and especially the academy. It speaks more to what feels like death by a million slices to the Black-Brown body. It speaks to the newer, liberal ways of whiteness — and by this I mean beyond neoliberalism. It’s like neoliberalism on 143 gigawatts of electricity. The pressure has built and now I just gotta be real about how whiteness operates as a cultural practice, an anti-love pedagogy in too many sites, every site. In the embrace of CARE SYLLABUS, I focus on the academy because I need to turn on their heads notions of “inclusion,” “belonging,” and “diversity.” I signal here an "anti-diversity” position. That’s in another chapter. Here, within the CARE SYLLABUS is just the beginning.

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It's like we livin' in the same buildin' but split into two floors . . .
Screaming "All Lives Matter"
Is a protest to my protest, what kind of shit is that?
And that's one war you'll never win . . .
It's hard to elevate when this country's ran by whites
Judging me by my skin color and my blackness . . .

You think you know everything but you don't . . .

Fuck, I'm exhausted . . .
I'm tired of the systematic racism bullshit
All you do is false shit, this the shit that I'm forced with
And you 'on't know shit about my people, that's what bothers you . . .

I know there's a disconnect between your culture and mine

All you care about is money and power . . .
Hatred all in your brain, it slowly start to convince you
And you teach it to your children until the cycle continue

You know I make a lot of sense but you just can't admit it . . .
You don't know what it's like to be in a frying pot
You don't know what it's like to mind your business

You worry 'bout your life, so you take mine
I love you but I fuckin' hate you at the same time . . .
I wish we could trade shoes or we could change lives . . .

Can't erase the scars with a bandage . . .

— Joyner Lucas, 2017

I am the anti-diverse. You made “diversity” your noun, your adjective, your verb, your person, your place, and your thing for your schools, your colleges, your universities, your businesses. This diversity of yours, this equity and inclusion you tout, it’s a diversion, a white innovation because you have been unable to defeat difference. We welcome diversity, equity, and inclusion is your seemingly benevolent hail to Come belong to you. Your equity will be a quality of fairness and impartiality of your design to which I either adapt or within wither. 

Often, schools, like the one I attended for 12 years on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, makes a gesture toward inclusion, one peddled in a separate Equity and Inclusion statement:

We believe that learning happens best within a diverse community, and our student body reflects this.

A statement like this often abuts a “sweet” photo in which a beautiful dark skin Black is embosomed, included by a white on each side. And she looks happy. So did I in high school. But I wasn’t.

Sometimes the white school is more brazen, putting right on up inside its mission and values an “Inclusive Community: committed to creating a campus climate and culture of mutual respect that represents and honors diversity in our society.” Next to it, too, is a photo of a student in a hijab walking masked next to a student in a rainbow flag t-shirt. Diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging. Check. Kudos to the white schools. 

When the white school includes beware. Every inclusive act is part of a coalition of exclusionary cultural practices of which whiteness won’t let go, it won’t relinquish the notion of inclusion because to insert us inside of them is a form of white, liberal self-reproduction. So it won’t relinquish its hold on its own conception of diversity, equity, and inclusion. It can’t.

The exclusion that diversity services in insidious ways and simultaneously excludes is pretty remarkable work when looked at objectively. And yet, because the Black, the Brown, the Queer, the Transgender, the different know whiteness so well because it has told us what we are, constructed us as an aberration of them, none of white choreography inveigle us. Whiteness be the real sucker. It dupes itself into believing we’re convinced of its false generosity.

Whiteness assumes that those whom it has minoritized desire inclusion into their cultural practices; their capital project; their definitions of professionalism, speech, agenda-making, agenda-speak, meeting protocols, subcommittee protocols, decision-making; their humor; what they deem not to be humorous or deem to be too smart — read, too uppity — too good, not good enough. Most important is how they perform whiteness as a cultural pedagogy now that the pandemic forced all of us deeper into electronic, seemingly socially disconnected spaces.

With a seemingly insignificant yet emblematic example, let me focus here on what one might think is nominal in the sphere of racism, gendered notions, and oppression. Let me focus on the email in a time of a global crisis for capital. Allow me to show the exceptional ways of the passive aggressive talents of the white liberal, in particular, and whiteness in general.

Parenthetical note: turning canonical writing on its head, We in this text are not you, that is, the universal We is not the white.

What the white does (and that which they think We believe) is secret in the email. This digital tool of supposed communication is the white’s mantilla — very see-through, indeed. We know better, and the white, too, is conscious of its subliminally-rife messages; their lack of email replies; their subterfuge within the Cc (and the useful not really hidden BCC).

We can almost see their Minnesota-nice smile while they tell you by email, You don’t know what you’re talking about, when ya do. The white believes We will continue to play in their offensive strikes of white office cultural practices. Feigned as surreptitious by the white, it knows that We know what it’s doing. This is a familiar game of subterfuge for them. But it’s not entertainment for us.

Look y’all, We been round the white for too many centuries not to know what dey doin, and that must be scary as fuck for the white. I think dey frightened, but not necessarily of our darkness. 

They are afraid of the heart of this darkness. We are what Conrad described as “the other world,” the obverse of their world when, in fact, we aren’t the conflict, the antithesis, the aberration of their world. We are, most alarmingly so, the facts. We are their history, their truth. They can’t rub their eyes or shake dey head and be rid of what We will always represent. It must be terrifying to think you rule a land in which, as Julius Lester once told me, We “know them better than they know themselves.”

During the pandemic, email has become the academic department’s sanctified white space. In it, attempts are made to silence Us through exclusionary and passive aggressive semantics and maneuvers like Bcc and lack-of-Cc contrivance. The assaults and the silence of no replies are perpetrated most egregiously in digital spaces. Through purposeful, insolent statements made on the cyber-page of an email, the white perpetuates its acts of elimination in august company.

Trapped inside this make-believe inclusionary space when I never wanted to belong to them.

I am, We are in a racial war the white has waged; it works like a drone double-tap strike. The email, an RPAS (Remotely Piloted Aircraft System), is dropped by the white pilot. Launched as a Personality Strike, it is “a drone strike targeting a particular individual based on their identity.” Sometimes, the email serves as a Reaper Drone, a drone that is “both a ‘hunter-killer’ … an intelligence-gathering platform. It can fly for hours on end, orbiting far above the battlefield hoovering up information … It can also take out targets with Hellfire … or … guided bombs.” [1]

The White email is on the weaker end of say, the “PATRIOT launching station [which is] an important part of the [White] Army’s air defense. [2] The PATRIOT missile system can launch advanced-technology ammunition that is capable of neutralizing multiple air targets.

Let’s say in this hotly contested departmental academic zone of diversity, equity, and inclusion, the white pilot excludes the Black from an email of which the Black should be a part — indeed, every member of the white’s august company visibly sees the excision and is smart enough to know of the preclusion that will result. But, they must say, Fuck it. You see, the first white who launches the email drone laces it with just enough impudence and sardonicism to compel the second white, the one with the most authority, to perform the liberal act of inclusion. And I mean an I-just-read-Kendi-DiAngelo-feel-guilty-have-maybe-two-Black-“friends” kind of inclusionary performance. 

So the first white, master-full at structuring a gambit ensures that their impertinence is just equivocal enough — but not really — to ignite in the second white, the liberal in power, to take what they believe to be a three-point shot. I know that if you are white, this may be a confusing peregrination, but just stay with me for a minute. To help you, let me ask you to listen to this seemingly convoluted but very clear stratagem of whiteness from your own point of subjectivity.

Although what I am explaining is painfully clear for the Black and the Brown. I think I can help you, the befuddled white. Maybe you’re a white man who works amongst a majority of queer women. How are your notions of masculinity challenged as gender becomes something more fluid and less able to regulate like it used to be, or like you thought it always was, when it never was.

Or maybe you’re a white woman who works with men, doesn’t even need to be a majority of men, just enough masculine-aligned men who make your words their words and thereby your ideas theirs and are rewarded for it. Sometimes you can even hear their passive aggression in written communications or through Hollywood Zoom squares where interruption of someone’s speech, even for the white, is now acceptable. And so you’re talked over repeatedly by a man or they don’t see your little yellow emoji hand raised or they just told you No when you know the answer should be Yes because you know, and they know, that you know what you’re talking about and doing.

Now, if you are white and queer, white and transgender, you are closest to being able to listen across difference to listen to understand me. Just imagine you are within the same in-person and virtual space. Breathe into it for a moment. Now y’all feel me, right? I know you do. But just like if I was reading this aloud to someone not like me, I might stay silent but inside I’d be like For real, gurrl.

Back to the power of the email for the white, especially the liberal white man.

He believes the Black will give him extra diversity points if he steps into the trap the first white has set. Yet, before the three-pointer is launched, We know that the first white gets an emotional boon to their social capital and especially to their own fraudulent lives living under whiteness thinking they were going to reap all its economic and political benefits. When, in reality, dey jus as human as the rest of us. Got red blood like the Black. Need to work 9-5 to stay alive. Treated like they’re second class because they are working class. In fact, they are pissed as fuck that they aren’t really white at all. Like Jimmy said to me in 1984, “Dahling, whiteness is a state of mind.” And this first white, they’re discovering it with a painful velocity in the face of the Black who advocates for anyone mistreated no matter their skin. 

Has a cisgender, Kendi-reading, white man deluded himself into believing in his own racial and gender virtuosity and munificence? To be honest, this Kendi totin white man has been assisted into his delusion by the Black being embarrassingly fulsome in her appreciation for “trying to understand” the Black.

My professor, mentor, friend told teachers in 1963, something published in the Saturday Evening Post that is enough to cause a looseness of the white’s bowels and is still true in 2022:

It is precisely those silent people whom white people see every day of their lives – I mean your porter and your maid, who never say anything more than “Yes Sir” and “No, Ma’am.” They will tell you it’s raining if that is what you want to hear, and they will tell you the sun is shining if that is what you want to hear. They really hate you – really hate you because in their eyes (and they’re right) you stand between them and life. . . It is the most sinister of the facts. 

Daunting and anxiety inducing discovery this must be, will be.

But he doesn’t know yet. Neither the Black nor the white will tell him. So he performs inclusion by using the hackneyed Cc, which is also used by the first white as an offensive and defensive tactical maneuver. Poor liberal white man doesn’t know you can’t use the master’s tools against the master.

So the next email in a thread so long that its writers are looking at potential nursing homes for themselves states, “I’ve included the Black because they are the . . .” insert here the level of authority of the Black. Alongside that, the liberal white man includes Blah, blah, the “team” with “team” in quotations as a seemingly furtive I got this wink to the Black.

Player #2 from Team Whiteness backs up, his team stands still watching. He leans, makes an attempt at a three-pointer on his own court. But he fouls! The three pointer was never going to be made from that distance from the Black hoop. The first white who originally denied access receives the passive aggressive benefit of “Now the nigger knows we do this shit in secret.” The white who performs the Cc act of what they must purport to be incorporation, gets to go to bed at night all happy with demselves sayin, “I been a good white today.” The second white knows not that We are left awake at night belly full with acid and pain. The first white falls asleep the minute they lie down feeling "Mission Accomplished.” 

Only sweet, treacle dreams of hostility, through indirect means; reveries of resentment meted out through intentional obstructive and uncooperative behavior.

So it is always their argument that what we might raise as issue, incorrect, arbitrary, intentionally impactful in a discriminatory act is always a question of interpretation. 

That is hegemony’s practice, yes, to make clear within their universe of nebulae, Well, it’s a question of interpretation. It most certainly is not. The Black and the Brown and the Queer, I could list on . . . we know this. We know it every time. We know it in every instance. And when we see it, We must decide, as whiteness relaxes, patting itself on its pock-marked back, Should I Stepin Fetchit this time? Should I yessuh, massah this time? Or, Should I come with it. Black for, “and then it’s on” because then I will use myself as white’s worst nigger nightmare in sound, speech, tone, love, ire, curriculum, pedagogy, methodology, aesthetic. Oh yes, I’ll come, We will come with all of it should we ever decide ain’t no half steppin, no mo steppin and fethcin. 

Instead, there will be a we that comes into the sun, beckons the beauty and warmth of the darkness, and bellows I WON’T. I CAINT. Not no mo.

"You can't awake me or even make me
Fear you, son, 'cause you can't do me none
So think about it if you're trying to go
When you want to step to me, I think you should know that
Reality, my secret technique
Because I always speak with mentality
I put my title in your face, dare you to base
And if you try and come get it, yo, I'ma show you who's with it.”

       — Big Daddy Kane

[1] The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, “Glossary of Drone Warfare,” accessed 3 March 2021, <https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/explainers/glossary-of-drone-warfare>.

[2] US Army, “Army Videos,” accessed 3 March 2021, https://www.goarmy.com/videos/play/patriot-launching-station-enhanced-operatormaintainer-14t.html.