White ladies, I have some bad news.

I love you.

(That is not the bad news. I just want to say it first, because I do love you.)

You raised me. You are most of the ladies I spend time with. You are all of the ladies that I am related to. You are most of the ladies that I learned with, and work with. You are the ladies who licked a hankie and wiped my face before the pastor of the parish came around to our table. You are the ladies who taught me how to cook the things your husbands and sons loved to eat. You are the ladies who showed me to tuck a pair of pads and a bottle of ibuprofen into my purse, always (always! don’t forget). You are the ladies who smoothed your hands down my hair while I fell asleep in your lap. You are lovely ladies, but

White ladies,

We are part of the problem.

It’s hard to understand.

We’re busy. We do a lot. We maintain our homes and reputations, and the homes and reputations of husbands and fathers.

We’re not trying to be mean to anyone.

Ladies, I know this gnawing feeling that you’re feeling right now. And it might mean a few different things. It might mean

Why don’t they just calm down? Being so angry doesn’t help anything.

Or it might mean

Why can’t they see the problem? Why can’t anyone help?

Or it might be

Jesus will fix this, if they’ll just let Him. Jesus, let them.

Or it might be the thing that we feel so often as white ladies,

Why can’t I make this nice?

And then,

Why the *fuck* can’t I make this nice?

This is why I love you, white ladies, for your talent at Making Things Nice. Give a white lady a stack of magazines, and she will fan them out across the coffee table at perfect, neat intervals. Give a white lady a waiting room and a toddler, and she will invent a game to make him smile. Give a white lady a guest list and $50, and she will put something genteel and breezy together. Everyone will have a glass of punch, at least, and there will be cookies. Did someone forget a birthday? They throw together a party in an hour.

White ladies, we can make things nice.

And this is our strength. And this is our curse.

We make things nice for the oppressor, white ladies. We make it easy for the white men to do what they do when they are not doing

what they should do,

white ladies.

This pinch and twist we feel at the pit of our stomachs with all this #BlackLivesMatter, this is the pinch and twist of our own hearts and souls.

It goes something like this.

We learn from an early age that you compromise. You give to get. You want love? You know what the boys want. You want approval? Play nice and keep your knees together in your Easter dress, and study hard and get As but don’t brag. And for god’s sake don’t be Too Much. Don’t laugh too loud, don’t talk too much, don’t want too much.

Be nice, white girl.

NICE.

We’re not loud and led by our passions like them.

The code is sewn into everything we wear, everything that we do.

And when we get older, the compromise is a little stranger.

Maybe we marry a racist, and even though it makes us cringe when he uses a slur, we set our smile on our face and make it nice. The excuses work so well:

He was raised in the country.

He was raised poor and white.

He is just now learning about tolerance and progressive causes.

His grandparents taught him, and they came from a different time.

Right?

White ladies, we make these compromises every day. Uncle so-and-so who can’t get through Thanksgiving without a racial slur or two. Do we call him out? No. He listens to Rush. He’s not going to change. We might even fake a laugh when he tells his jokes.

Keep the peace. Make it nice.

Grandpa what’s-his-name, he is the patriarch of the whole family. He is the reason your parents have a house. He is the reason you have your chin, and your nose, and your college degree. Grandpa won’t give up his 1960s values, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Give grandpa a hug.

Don’t you love grandpa?

Of course you do.

Your boss. Your pastor. Your husband’s friends.

Not all white men, surely not. Maybe not even most of them. But some of them.

Men you love.

Isn’t he a good man? Isn’t he a man of principle? He says what he means, and there’s honor in that, right? Even if the things he says after five beers chill your blood and make the seven-layer dip in the pit of your stomach turn to stone, isn’t there honor in that? Isn’t there honor in him? Don’t you kind of love his swaggering bluster, 85% of the time? Our country has always had racists. How will starting a fight with him tonight change that?

It won’t. Keep the peace. Make it nice.

Recently my brother has been examining our family tree, and sent off for an analysis of his DNA. There were smatterings of this European thing and that, and not a touch of any other continent, but you know what there was, that he found in the census and the byzantine databases and the scanned newspapers?

A real, live slaveholder, like the real kind with the big white house with the wraparound porch, and it wasn’t that long ago at all, white ladies, and it turns out the money didn’t dry up until really late, and it turns out the very same money indirectly funded things as recent as my very own teeth, my braces and retainers and jaw-reshaping in 1987 and the fact that I have a nice, bright white smile right now, the reason why, when I shake someone’s hand in a job interview and flash a smile, my Eleanor Roosevelt face looks a little less buck-toothed than that esteemed lady’s did, and maybe the reason why, when I smile, people smile back, and give me jobs, and

The reason your stomach keeps twisting, my lady friend, the reason you still can’t sit still,

Is because to examine the things that white men do to black men, it means examining the things that white men do to us. It means examining the things that we have allowed. The battles and wars won by our attrition. It means seeing the whole picture. It means looking at what we have gained in our compromises, how we have benefited from turning a blind eye, the good-wife eye, the good-woman-blind-eye. It means looking at the shaky parchment walls of our own houses, looking at the stone foundation of our plantation houses, laid by silent brown hands, remembering those times we cry by ourselves, biting a washcloth from the dryer to keep it quiet, folding clothes at 11:30pm after a long day of work, exhausted and sick of him and his imperious bullshit and the constant rambling political crap that ignores reality but trying to make it all nice, trying to keep it all nice, things that can’t be smoothed over with home goods from Target, things that can’t be monogrammed into submission, things that Olan Mills can’t take a nice portrait of with enough matte-print copies for the in-laws, too, things that can’t be brushed out and straightened with a flat iron until they flow golden and honey-scented around our shoulders.

Nothing for Pinterest.

Things that can’t be spread out on the coffee table at just. the right. intervals.

If we admit these things? If we talk back to Grandpa and the racist in bed beside us?

It ruins everything. The rocks on which we build our lives, white privilege on which we build our lives,

Everything will break.

White ladies, maybe it is time for everything to break.