Written By: Dr. Donna Oriowo

Even well after the wake of the verdict from Breonna Taylor’s murder, I am still left with the thought that white women remains the most dangerous to me. Not just because they don blackness like a costume for their own financial gain, but also because they are the trigger man, constantly aiming white men, who would kill us, at whatever target they seek.

We have already established for so many folk, Black culture does not require the presence of Black folk. We have seen that folk can wear blackness as a costume for a special day and that Black folk will come out in droves to support them while ignoring the history of their own erasure. But I don’t blame them. Many of us have not been educated to know why we should rage against the machine that seeks our demise. Many of us have been taught and groomed at the breast of white supremacy in such a way that we know ours is the duty to protect it at all costs, even to the detriment of our own bodies. We launch protests and burn buildings in the wake of white police officers that prefer to slaughter us before seeing us free. We name the white man as the enemy of progress who would kill us before they would see us free. This is a threat we know well. This is a well established threat. But white women continue, in so many ways, to get off scot free. We don’t recognize them wearing us as costumes as the ultimate form of bloodless violence. We give them excuses that they willingly take about being great admirers of blackness, of wanting to help us, of being sorry that they did it and took up space. We allow them to parrot our words back to us in their apology tours, while not recognizing that the problem is a lot more widespread than a few errant professors, who are wolves dressed as sheep. They were hardly a threat. We could see through their thinly veiled veneer. We can argue that they were in white institutions which don’t serve Black folk primarily. We can argue that they surrounded themselves with other Black folk who are not kinfolk. We can argue about the depth of their impact but it’s moot.

The point of this is to remind you that for me, a dark skinned Black woman with kinky hair, white women will always be the most dangerous threat. They are the ones who run nonprofits, the ones who hold their purses tighter, the ones who claim feminism as an armor against any other form of their own bigotry, no matter how atrocious. They are the thieves in the night who steal from you, and in the day time use their crocodile tears to point their white supremacist patriarchal gun at your head and shoot you in point blank range. They are the ones who would read this, think themselves enlightened, and feel exempt before they realized that they are among the most dangerous. The ones who have power and pretend they don’t, are as dangerous as a child wielding his father's gun. They can hurt others as well as themselves with one stray bullet thinking that they are not in dangerous territory because they would not be the true victim, they would only play victim.

White women voted for Trump who brought this plague. He whispered in their ears about making America great again and they listened because they remembered in their genes the power they wielded from the big house. We talk about slavery like white men were the sole beneficiaries - like white men didn’t own the land that white women’s slaves worked on. Like white women were not unnaturally cruel to the people who were said to be their property. Do you not see it in how white women’s hands reach out to touch your skin, your hair? When they ask you questions about how something got to be that way, hoping you are the genial negro enslaved person their ancestors taught them about? The happy smiling magical negro who was all too willing to do their bidding? Do you not see it in the way they ask how you got something, only to show up with some bastardized version of it in the not too distant future? Do you not see them smiling in your face at work, while talking behind your back about your “unprofessional” grooming? Do you not see how they oust you, rendering you to start anew in a new space only to have the same cycle of privilege, hate, and destruction continue? Do you not see how they kill you and wear your carcass? 

Tressie said that the function of beauty, of white supremacy, is to exclude Blackness. I humbly disagree. The function is to exclude Black PEOPLE, and to keep, appropriate, commodify, and bastardize Blackness. They have turned us into less than the sum of our parts which they wear as booty bumps, dirty locs, Blaccents, and degrees in African American studies. They are set to replace us, however they can, with the help of those who they would dub the magical exultant negro. The black-ish folk whose sole aim is to be told they are special by someone white because that is the only way they would know that they are. To be exceptional. An Uncle Ruckus. Never forget that to truly replace us and have their white feminism revolution— make America great again?-- we, Black women, have to die first. 

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