James A. Baldwin would be 100 this August 2nd

While getting through the last hours of my work day yesterday, I was listening to a Baldwin speech from 1986. This is interesting because in 1986, I was 5 and just then starting school.

While rejuvenating my Blackness, he said something so poignant that I tweeted it:

When this is paralleled with the dystopian adventure that is the first 24 years of this new millennium, this could have been tweeted by Baldwin himself YESTERDAY!

What I find chilling is the militant adherence to history that is not true, and in turn is taught to be so! The reason DEI bothers (some) White people like it does is you don’t know who you are — and you consistently are confronted with whom you wish you were. The fact Gov. Kay Ivey signed into law the banning of DEI is high irony!

Like, you are aware you are a woman right? And aware affirmative action lends more in favor of White women anyway?! The joke is her.

As Baldwin said: “I am not the problem—your history is!”

DEI is not the problem.

The problem is racism— the Whiteness needs a n—- and the n—- can only be mediocre so much so that it is devoid of both personhood and humanity! Whiteness seeks to prove that none but it and those exist, and its mediocrity is standard.

Black people’s achievements are not the problem— the problem is the existence of the Black excellence itself despite the history from which it comes sponsored and enforced by those who practice whiteness.

Rather than doing better yourself— you want to stop anyone else from doing better than you —which stops EVERYONE from doing what they must do.

Racism is a contagion.