SMH at white people mourning and moaning about Portland, a historically and currently racist city in a state that was pretty much developed as a center of white supremacy and separateness, in a country built on the attempted genocide and ethnocide of its Original People and the people enslaved to replace them.

White denial is astounding! “Stronger than dirt” or any known adhesive; longer lasting than Willie Wonka’s gobstopper; 100,000,000,000 times deeper than the Mariana Trench; more destructive than whatever killed off the dinosaurs.

Diagnosis is the first step towards treatment and healing. Denial doesn’t just prevent that process, it actively destroys its host and everything around it. It kills us all: soul, body, earth. Whiteness isn’t merely about your melanin levels, it’s a political choice that has real world ramifications. As with denial, help is available to those who seek it.

So wake up- it’s late and even Scotty canna hold ‘er any longer.

“I historically know much more about you than you will ever be able to dare to imagine about me. I did not invent you. I did not write ‘Gone With The Wind.’ You invented me. And you live with that invention. I don’t. I had to know what you REALLY think about me. You act it out every hour of every day what you REALLY think about me. Every institution in this country is based on what you think about me. There’s not a single institution that you have invented that’s not a racist institution. Not one. From the church to the unions. To say nothing of the insurance companies, to say nothing of the way you think you run the world. I know what you think about me. You don’t know… You don’t WANT to know… what I think about you.”

~ James Baldwin, in a 1987 CBS Interview