You’re playing monopoly with a hyena.

When it bites you and shits on the board,

saying it’s not your turn doesn’t really work.

Bill Maher, Real Time with Bill Maher, May 3, 2019

They don’t love me; they can’t afford to do so. Instead, folks like me are tolerated up to a point. Until there comes a time their patience wears thin.

But all is abuzz!

Something is unraveling because the face is red, and there’s a struggle going on to preserve what is already known and acknowledged as factual and untarnished by the likes of any black woman. No!

If there is wrong here, be it known, it’s not the interloper. Never. Even while I’m looking at that face and thinking: There’s blood on your hands! Millions upon millions!

And the facial expression says, that can’t be! Even if I didn’t say a word aloud.

Okay! But no! No!

And the anger comes, and the face turns as red as the blood I see flowing in the street surrounding Michael Brown’s body. Or is that little Tamir Rice? Jordan Edwards? Laquan McDonald?

Today is better, isn’t?

And I, for the longest, subjected to being compared to her sons, middle-aged white men, should respond without thought about the impact of white privilege as a result of that monumental structural foundation that was slavery. Just respond as if all is equal, for in her mind, it is and it isn’t. Ultimately, she must sees herself on the top rung of the racial ladder, an inheritance of her familial and formal education.

And what about the policies and laws? Who rises and who remains at heel?

You’re telling me something I don’t know much about.

She doesn’t know, so please don’t treat her meanly.

But so much mean-spirited thinking, ubiquitous, encircles black people. To not know. To refuse to know. A form of thinking no less that isn’t freedom—but instead deliberate and cruel.

Well, I don’t notice your color.

Twice!

There’s nothing wrong with my color, with my skin color. I’m black.

I think, maybe I should stop. Just stop.

...colored people…

What?

I’ve known colored people…

I’m not colored! I’m not colored.

Is it “black” now?

Yes. Has been for a while!

Angry. She’s angrier than at the start of this entanglement.

I’m angry. I stay calm.

She wants me to be the black she sees in her mind. Not so bright. Inferior. A “minority” beholding to the goodness of white America where there’s only the racism of those white supremacist in the South.

This is, after all, Wisconsin!

And then the killer: I don’t know how to help you.

Twice. No less.

She is the mother, the patriarchy, the voice of authority. I don’t know how to help you, your kind, so you will be lost. Forever! Anyone but her, the dreaded one!

No, you don’t know! I’m not asking you to help me! I know what I’m about and what I need to do. How would you know to help me? But I’m the black woman—and, of course, she assume this is about me seeking her advice about the Struggle that is the Life of a black woman because white women like her refuses to take on the role of anything but the damsel in distress. Forever fearful of difference. Always the damsel needing the protection of the patriarchy and powerful. Always the damsel kept far removed from the reality of racial injustice?

I seek silence, and in silence, I think and listen—but no longer to her.

And her silence acknowledges how much she accepts that status quo when it comes to deep seated myths about racial superiority: This one isn’t any good at all! Dangerous!

And the red of her face is screaming…

…I’m hearing James Baldwin: Don’t cooperate!

“Non cooperation!”

However comfortable a thought it might be, it didn’t begin with Trumpism. White supremacy has a long history in America; and as William Faulkner would say, it has nothing to do with love. Before “America” there was white supremacy in the world brought to Turtle Island, creating an upheaval in the order of the world as the Indigenous people knew it. But what did that matter to a conquering people who saw opportunities just as they are attuned to recognizing and snatching opportunities by any means necessary.

Trump unifies the core of America’s boldest ideologues for whom, to make a stance against their perception of a rampant mutation in the human gene pool, is to follow in the footsteps of their Masters, the Nazis, who initiated pogroms designed to eradicate the Jewish people from Europe’s landscape. Today, in the 21^st Century, America, as it practiced for hundreds of years, is still engaged in pogroms to eliminate from what many perceive to be a white country any infestation of the criminal, the rapists, and the freeloader. It doesn’t take a psychologist however, to see right through this projection of the Self onto others.

Removing Trump isn’t at all a deep and a thorough cleansing of patterns of thought that becomes the grand illusion of the deliberately ignorant. Unless the opposition denounces the illusion of superiority of any kind.

“When you try to slaughter a people and leave them with nothing to lose, you’ve created someone with nothing left to lose,” Baldwin once told a Berkeley audience.

We, however, have our children. Our future, he added. We have love.

After all, there’s a reason no one wants our children educated. There’s a reason no one wants our children educated! They would be dangerously in love with non cooperation! Under their watch, the educational industry, which is currently sustained because it is more important than our children, would be dismantled and transformed to educate humanity to love itself as a species among species. A part of nature, and, therefore superior to no other form of life.

So we’ll have to engage in “non cooperation” as if our future depended on it! And it will! Our children will depend upon a new way of thinking because, as Baldwin reminds us, the “machinery is vast, ruthless, cunning and thinks of nothing” but itself—if it isn’t thinking of ways to eliminate black Americans.

As for presidents and ambassadors—what do they know? They don’t know anything about the world because “they don’t know me.”

“If you couldn’t deal with me father, how you’re going to deal with the people on the streets of Tehran?”

To leave our children, our future, to those who overall hate and desire to destroy black lives, is to remain in an entanglement with the deliberately ignorant; and, as Baldwin asks, “how do you expect a people who can’t educate their own children to educate anybody else?”

Non cooperation.

This is love!

And “this will be contested.” Of course. Baldwin: We must start somewhere!

Non cooperation will look like...

“Think about it.”

“Maybe, begin with the schools?”

Educate!

No one will do it for you!

All is abuzz!