atchka:

grrspit:

lisawithabee: kennygmz: yea p much Why do white people ask questions like this? Whenever I get this question, or the thematically similar “Do you hate white people” I just answer with “yes”. Because that’s the only answer they want to hear.

In context, it makes sense. To a lot of white people, being black IS bad. You can see this evident when a white person tells a black person that they’re “one of the good ones.”

Whites allow for nuances in character for their own race. Rarely are white people grouped into “good” and “bad” categories. You can be a white person who is mostly good, then makes a terrible, terrible decision, but your lifetime of goodness mitigates that bad decision. In other words, white people accept that other white people are complicated and people are the sum of their choices, not merely a reflection of a “good” or “bad” moment.

But Whites LOVE to categorize Blacks as “good” and “bad.” You just have to look at the coverage of Trayvon Martin to see that the fact that he was arrested for smoking pot clearly put him in the “bad” camp right away. After that, Martin’s death was framed as him being the “bad” guy and Zimmerman was helpless but to defend himself.

So, when white people ask “I’m white. Does that make me bad?” what they are REALLY saying is, “I’m white. Are you going to hold me to same simplistic, binary judgement system I hold you to?”