You Built it. You Broke it. You Fix it.

A not so gentle nudge to my white friends and colleagues to do the work yourself.

I’ve been stewing on this post for a while, not quite sure what to do with my anger and frustration with progressive white folx during this political season. If you are white and have sensed that some of your friends of color have been a little distant, you may not be imagining it.

I, for one, have been less inclined to engage in conversations instigated by white folks over the past six months, especially over the past few weeks. To be blunt, there seems to be a panic in your voices around the election and looming Project 2025 that is manifesting itself in the centering of whiteness and privilege. Yes, what is looming is terrible, but this existential crisis about survival, self-preservation, and the future of life has been experienced by communities of color and the poor daily and for generations. Hello Manifest Destiny. So you'll have to pardon us if we are not rising to the level of freaking-the-hell-out, getting in line, and joining team excitement which you hope us to.

While the threats to our culture may feel new to many, at a life level, there is an unveiling and revealing of systems of evil and oppression that many of us have known to be true for generations. What you feel is that the system may finally be coming for you, either in actuality or the entire experiment is falling apart and you’ll do anything to ensure that the one that has served you survives. You see, for some of us, time after time, election after election, in exchange for saving the current political lesser evil, we are promised change and transformation. And time after time, election after election, those promises are broken. We continue to fund systems of violence and militarism over healthcare and education, we reinforce the insulation and protection of those with wealth and expand the criminalization and dehumanization of those trapped in poverty, and we expand our death-dealing by blatantly villainizing and scapegoating difference.

For me, how many progressive white folks have responded to Gaza and Palestine has been the final unveiling of where people stand. Sure, folks may want to toss the “you can’t be a one-issue voter,” but that only further reveals the privileged nature of our politics and our ability to intellectualize the genocide of a people: our siblings, my friends, and our fellow humans. How people have responded or not responded to Gaza has been a sobering and saddening realization of the extent to which so many will justify the annihilation of an oppressed and occupied people — a people of color. When you see many pro-Palestinian actions and campaigns populated by Black and brown bodies, it is telling. We have noticed who is silent in body and voice, and there are consequences. Receipts have been kept, and presumptive progressive political loyalties and alliances are cracking.

No, I am not perfect in this. I lament that my privilege may have let these ideological gymnastics slide with #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, and other “issues,” but like others before, no more. It’s just too much to fall for once again. I, for one, am exhausted by it. Not exhausted by the fight for justice in general and the call to engage with communities of my choosing, but by having to again respond to calls to go to war for a system of wealth and whiteness that only leaves in its wake the lives and hopes of those who do not benefit from any victories achieved.

When I look at who is plastered across the right-wing rallies and places of power, these are your people. These folks have been permitted to speak the deathly rhetoric they have always felt and have been allowed to flourish in a system of dehumanizing conflict that determines one’s worth. When so much of the violence is directed their way, why should folks of color answer the call one more time to be the point of the spear, the tipping point, or responsible at all? Rejecting white supremacy, if you take that seriously beyond the protest banner or yard sign, rejects the idea that those who have been a victim of the system of oppression should be the ones responsible for fixing the system that has oppressed them.

So, what you may be feeling from some of us is disinterest in your demands and outright resistance to the assumptions upon which they are built. For generations, communities of color and the poor have carried the water, literally and figuratively, of white political power structures on the battlefield and the ballot box. Some would say, “But we need your voices!” “We need your presence!” but what we mostly hear these days is, “We need your vote.” You are hearing now that many of us are no longer willing to be taken for granted. That assumptive support, allegiance, and participation is coming to an end. Empty promises and pretty prose will not be enough, nor will guilt trips, shame casting, or catastrophizing. No matter how neatly wrapped your invitations for conversation may be, too often, they reek of “You don’t know what is good for you, so let me tell you what you should do.” You may be guilty if you felt this at any point during your reading. Starting this conversation with a predestined destination is not a conversation of mutual inquiry but repackaged colonialism.

If you think this post is about sinking into hopelessness, encouraging apathy, calling for abdication, or voting in a particular way, it is not. It is simply one human's reflections on the rejection of an unsustainable political system and a notification that communities are imagining a way forward that takes seriously the flourishing of all our souls. Do not make the mistake of believing that we are sitting idly by and that the work is not being done; we are not and it is. The work is just not being done in the way, the places, or the pace that you and your platforms may demand of us. As we have done for generations: from the fields to the factories, from the cities to the country, and from the kitchens to the community centers, we are caring for one another, feeding one another, funding one another, and building a future for flourishing while doing a dangerous dance with a system built to devour.

For those white folks who already get this, you know who you are. You have never overtly claimed “ally” because we let you know you are one. You have de-centered whiteness in your tactics, refused the entitlement to the free labor and intellect of oppressed peoples, and have done the work on yourself and your community so you can honestly move through the world with a sweet, sweet posture of solidarity.

Thank you, and please keep at it.

For the rest of you, save the shame, guilt, and fear tactics for people who may be truly feeling “the struggle” for the first time because these tactics will not move the many of us who have the struggle embedded in our DNA. I, for one, will not sacrifice my soul to save a system that was not built for my ancestors, me, or my descendants.

And at the end of the day, if the outcome you hope for does not come to fruition, don’t you dare blame us.

This system was always built for you.
You built it.
You broke it.
You fix it.