Walking the racist trope rope

I won’t reshare the post that your president posted on Truth Social late last week because by now you’ve seen it several times. I won’t reshare it because it’s too painful to continue to witness.

Much like the snuff films that were circulating depicting murder and execution in real time. Displaying the multiple heinous ways Black people are murdered by police, this is one of those things that sets off alarm bells within my spirit. It’s not just that he put the faces of two beloved Black people on the bodies of apes. It’s that he knows exactly what he’s doing. He knows the history of that imagery. He knows what it is meant to activate. He knows what it gives license for.

Because that’s what racism does when it comes from the highest office in the land: it doesn’t just harm. It authorizes. It gives permission for other people who otherwise wouldn’t feel like they had permission to do those things. He gives permission for anybody, anywhere, at any time to be weaponized. That’s the problem with racism. It’s not only the violence. It’s the contagion.

And the part that makes me sick is that I know this pattern in my bones. Since my first experience with racism being called a nigger by the little white boy who’s mother was the baby sitter of my best friend who was also white, I have been conditioned to figure out ways to stomach it. Microaggression, macroaggression—I have a process to digest it. I don’t actually have a real process to thwart it, but I’m trying to teach my daughter how to deflect these moments. And I hate that I have to. Because it doesn’t matter what social media I open— that image is right there, as a reminder that all that I’ve endured, the names I’ve been called since I was five years old, are all still there.

I dont even allow my daughter to imitate monkeys. We dont normalize any correlation between her personhood and primates. When she was really little one of her friends gave her a monkey as a birthday present. I threw it in the trash. I dont allow the chocolate metaphor either. I once had to correct her preschool teacher who was teaching children racial difference through that book that labels everyone as an ice cream flavor. Bullshit. I told her that she knows good and well that years from now no-one will be calling Billy peach flavored but that chocolate label will stick with my child for the rest of her life. I dont play that shit.

But this post isn’t only about the two people he targeted. It’s also about the rest of us. It’s about reminding Black people—reminding Black women especially—that the “progress” we’ve made is conditional. And yes hes doing it the most third grade bully who is covering up his own inadequacies way but if Im honest it doesn't matter how much I know its more about his inadequacies than my truth. It doesnt negate the harm. Understanding the abuser has never made the victim safer.

It also must be noted that the president posted that heinous image in the same week that his wife’s film premiered. And I don’t think that timing is random. I reposted yesterday an amazing quote from Dr. Stacy Patton’s essay that really breaks down why that film made any box office at all. Y’all should read it. It’s on point about white women and how they are dependent on the patriarchy—and how their survival is relative to their ability to adjust to the violence inherent in the patriarchy. White male patriarchy, that is.

Last week, I took my time to watch the Michelle Obama documentary Becoming, again, and I found it to be delightful, moving, and clarifying. I also found it to be reflective. It reflected the generation that inherited the risk that many Black people took when they moved from the South to the North—and turned that risk into one of the most impactful generational forces that Black people have produced.

That’s how amazing Black people are. You take the necessity of having to leave everything you know behind to ensure your children are safe and those children take that energy and turn it into genius. And then their children take that energy and turn it into more genius. And that’s how you get to the brilliance of Michelle Obama, Stacey Abrams, Kamala Harris.

It’s more than just the will to survive. It’s the generational push that says our survival must provide the foundation for the next generation. And that same drive is what I see reflected in my family, what many of us are reflected in. That little Black girl from the South Side was always going to be the wife of the President. And not in some Usha Vance way where you can see the bewilderment in her eyes, screaming “how did I get here!!!”. That she now overstands that what she felt but ignored on their first date and perhaps thought she could change or redirect that rotten, entitled, chode energy into something good. After all he comes from humble stock. Remember, she stayed with him after he fucked the couch y’all. But I digress. Nah, I talking about the reflection that is revealed in the most brilliant way that says: my ancestors dreamed this moment of genius so that it could exist through me.

That’s who Michelle Obama is. And that’s also what I believe is triggering that heinous behavior from your president. Because he knows it too.

I haven’t watched the video he shared. I just saw the image. But I did notice that the image placeholder. That image puts her out front and bigger than Barack Obama, as if to say that she’s the bigger primate. And there’s something to that. I don’t know what it is, but that’s the first thing I noticed when I saw it.

And what makes it even more disturbing is that y’all keep pretending this is just “free speech,” when this country already has laws for harassment, intimidation, stalking, and threats—especially when that behavior is meant to terrorize someone, destabilize them, or incite other people to pile on. We know what it is when it’s happening to our children at school. We know what it is when it’s happening in the workplace. We know what it is when it’s happening online. But when it’s coming from the President of the United States, suddenly people want to act like it’s just a joke. But it’s more insidious than that. It intends that we continue to prepare another generation to survive in a world that normalizes this behavior.

And it can come from anyone, any place, any time because everyone has been granted permission to enact the same violence. And it doens’t matter if the victim or the perpetrator is 5 months old or 105 years old. That image was sent meant to harm all of us at once. It’s what propels a grown man to kidnap a 5 year old child from school and use him a bait to lure his father out of the only home the child has known and kidnap them both to a detention center in Texas. It is what sends another into a church to terrorize its members by handcuffing a 60 year old Black woman in her choir robe and leading her out of the church because she missed an immigration court date. And it’s the randomness that makes it more terroristic.

Bare with me y’all but you know when Neo first was learning how to become Neo in The Matrix, and it’s about the same time that he begins to understand what those three Agents could do. They could take over anybody’s body. And all of a sudden, a bystander is weaponized against you. That’s what this is. That’s what that post is. It’s a take-over and a permission slip rolled into one.

In other words: this kind of racist degradation is not only disgusting. It is intentional harm. And it spreads.

Last week I responded to a post by sharing a story about something that happened to me at an airport last year. I was with a group of Black women and we were celebrating the end of a retreat. And this white man walked over and farted at us and walked away laughing. In that way that white people do things like that—where they share those kinds of things. They reveal their basest selves. They willingly show the worst side of themselves to you.

I’ve had white men do that to me my whole life. Share their basest sides. And you learn. You’re conditioned to figure out where to put it, even if you don’t accept it even after you tell them the fuck off. You still have to deal with the aftermath. And the aftermath still requires you to do something with it.

So when the President of the United States posts racist imagery, it’s not just a post. It’s a flare. It’s a dog whistle. It’s a permission slip. It’s the top of the food chain telling everyone else: go ahead.