When Hate Is Great... and Validates

The scribe subscribes to the unsubscribed.

When Hate is Great It Validates

Pharaoh, Philistine, Prophet or Pharisee

As one might imagine, I regularly receive some rather interesting white supremacist comments and communications. Due to my stance on a number of crucial issues, and chiefly white supremacy (though an intellectual monolith I am not), I get called some very creative names. Some, not so much.

In the “not so much” category are indictments that I am a racist and an antisemite. To these I chuckle because the temerity to say such a thing to a Black Man in the United States is indicative of one of two pathologies: either that individual is a white supremacist or an illiterate imbecile no matter what they look like. For the sake of judicial economy, allow me to succinctly discredit the two indictments with brutal precision, then we may matriculate to the substantive.

I’ll be brief, relatively.

I can not look at a European Jew and determine they are Jewish anymore than I can tell if they are from Israel or Mississippi. If I pass by them in the grocery store, I am unable to exercise my “antisemitism” anymore than I could if I were anti-Catholic, or anti-Protestant, or anti-Lutheran, or anti-Muslim or anti-Atheist. I am unable to immediately conjure up and draw upon stereotypes by simply looking at them.

However, when that European Jew, Catholic, Protestant, Lutheran, Muslim or Atheist pollutes their puritanical gaze upon my personage, by my mere physical appearance, stereotypes are conjured. Stereotypes are drawn upon. Blind assessments are made and they are acted upon. Without a whisper and little more than a glance.

There are Black Jews from Eritrea, Sudan and Ethiopia that live in Israel. Guess what? They get treated, in Israel, just like people that look like me do here on The Island. When the “white” Jews in Israel dispense this peculiarly common behavior on those Black Jews (or BLEWS) are they guilty of antisemitism? Or, is it something else? And, what might that be?

Fancy that, and try not to get the blues.

I do not like what is being done in Palestine. In fact, it is breaking my heart. A heart broken not by the wanton butchery of two apartheid nations upon many that look like me, but by a world majority that is so apathetically intimidated that it allows it. I am nothing but a grain of sand, but whatever voice I do or do not have I will not be complicit in killing children. I will not be a coconspirator in killing children and I will not be a coward in defending them. I owe them and you do, too.

So, on the rocks with that antisemite horse manure and coin me a name for the shit that I live through day after day. The omnipresent insults. The omniscient institutionalized Amerikan apartheid specifically designed for, and against, me and those that look like me. The omnipotent microaggressions. Because there is no white, Jewish cop likely to shoot you in the back 18 times because you are a Jew (at least a white one).

That, is true, blue.

Connected to the aforementioned is the indictment of racism. Running the risk of oversimplifying matters, if I am walking down the street and you spit in my face and I react as I probably will, the offense is with you. Had you not committed such a gross and despicable act there would be no need for that upcoming appointment that you have with your dentist to get fitted for new dentures.

Until what has been done to me has been done to you, you have neither standing nor frame of reference. If I chain up a dog that I forced to come to where I reside, abuse it, hit it, kick it, starve it, humiliate it and show it hatred I might expect that when, and if, that dog ever gets loose I am going to have problems. And if that dog doesn’t chew my ass up that dog is retarded.

The Great White Hate

Three days ago, I received an “unsubscription” from a European-Amerikan male. When I received it, and I receive them fairly regularly, I knew exactly the article that sent him over the edge. I wrote it to do just that and deployed and employed ironclad facts.

Ergo, the unsubscription was not a surprise anymore than it was some seminal event. But what was quite intriguing is the narrative and language he used. Following is an exact transcription of the email notification. Obviously out of basic decency, I have redacted any identifying information about the gentleman.

Email: @mac.com
Prior status: Paid Subscriber
Reason: Requested by user
User feedback: I read a book about an attorney who lost his first case yet he had all the facts in his favor. After the trial one of the jurors said to him. Why did you make us hate you so.

This was, and is, deep. What this person is saying is: I hate you for telling me the truth, facts be damned. That is the ultimacy of white supremacy: I control the narrative, I control the language of which that narrative is pursuant. My supremacy in that regard allows me to determine what facts I choose to acknowledge and those which I choose to ignore, or even loathe.

More specifically and bluntly he was saying “I like you when you lie to me and feed into my illusion but don’t dare tell me the truth…Nigger. And if you dare do it, you’d better do it in a way that agrees with me.” Ergo my previously mentioned assertion that this is representative of the conduct of either a white supremacist, or an illiterate imbecile. A craven one at that, lacking the intellectual prowess and honesty that I possess.

That’s got to leave a mark, mark.

Validation

Of the countless unflattering messages and such that I receive, this one is the one of which I am proudest. This is the one that validates why I write, why I think, why I exist. It lets me know that I am on point and my mission is righteous. I have actually had the message framed and it hangs in my study. Forevermore, it shall and I want to thank that gentleman as it is he that gives me meaning.

The Aggressive, Angry, Confrontational and Unapologetic Reckoning

Calling a Black writer “angry” has a long, damaging history in media and culture. It’s a label too often used to dismiss or discredit Black voices—especially when they speak uncomfortable truths or confront power with force and clarity. Likewise, describing someone as “unapologetic” can, in this context, reinforce stereotypes that paint assertiveness in Black writers as inherently confrontational or aggressive—something not equally applied to white counterparts making the same points. Anger, in response to injustice, is not only justified it is sane. To suggest otherwise is to gaslight centuries of systemic oppression, dispossession, and exploitation.

I will not apologize for truth-telling anymore than my nemesis will for telling lies. Lies based upon empty fables and myths enforced by violence and oppression. I will not apologize for being blunt. I will not apologize for writing in a voice that doesn't filter righteous indignation through the lens of palatability for a white audience. If anything, America owes Black people an apology—and more than that, actual repair.

My “anger” is neither the issue nor fascination, here. What is the issue and fascination is why more people are not angry. Why aren’t the privileged, the comfortable, the benefactors of injustice angrier about what is being done in their name or on their watch? How dare anyone say that I am “too angry.” I am not angry enough for what I and others have had to endure and for what continues, structurally, to this day.

If my unsubsciber had described a white dissident writer (say, Noam Chomsky, Chris Hedges, or Hunter S. Thompson) using those same words—unapologetic, angry, aggressive, confrontational, raw—it would be taken as a badge of honor. But when applied to a Black author, that same language lands differently, loaded with a legacy of racialized framing. That’s a problem. That is the problem.

There can be no resistance, let alone true reform without acknowledgement of the truth unchained from respectability. I represent Black intellectual resistance. I do not perform “anger,” I perform clarity even when it makes the comfortable squirm. To pathologize that as anger is to fall into a trap long set by the very systems which I expose. What I offer and proffer is not fury, it is a roadmap to sociopolitical sanity.

The fury comes later.