Oppression: A White Person’s Guide

Dearest Karen and Chet,

This is why America can’t have nice things, Karen and Chet.

I understand that the last few months have been incredibly tough for you, Karen and Chet. When Chet started growing out his beard, he never thought it would mean that his wife would never want to kiss him. Karen hasn’t been able to go to the nail salon in months. Neither of you has been able to see the latest Peter Davidson movie in theaters, because for some reason white people think he’s entertaining. You’ve spent more time with your family than you ever had before, and you’re starting to realize you’re not even sure you like your children. (It’s okay, they’re realizing the same thing.) You want to get out. You want to break free. And it doesn’t seem fair that you have to be locked up inside all day.

And masks? Masks suck. It keeps fogging up your glasses, Chet. Karen, you’ve had to smell your hot breath after your tuna fish on white bread sandwiches. They’re digging into your ears and leaving marks on the bridge of your nose.

And don’t even get me started on hand sanitizer. For months you couldn’t find it, and now your local supermarket is full of the stuff. It all smells bad, it makes your hands dry, and everyone keeps telling you that it doesn’t even do as good a job of cleaning your hands as soap does.

You’re spent, guys. I get it. So I understand why you’re tempted to just want all this shit to end. It doesn’t seem fair that your entire life has been put on pause by circumstances beyond your control. Chet attended a re-opening rally and was thrilled to find an entire group of other white men who felt the same way. Karen has written a very tersely worded e-mail to her supervisor over the unfair policy that states she must wear a mask even if she’s alone in her office.

White people lasted three months being oppressed.

Welcome to the last 400+ years for black people and people of color. Sucks, doesn’t it?

To be clear, Karen and Chet, you’re not actually being oppressed. You’re being politely asked to comply with a group of rules that, if such actions are taken, could potentially limit exposure to COVID-19, sickness, and perhaps even death. Many states in this great union are so terrified of white rage that they have insisted that mask usage isn’t necessary, even though mounting evidence has suggested the use of face masks has actually helped to flatten the curve in some areas.

Likewise, white people who have seen their lives halted financially also are feeling oppressed by the government forcing them to be unemployed, either figuratively or literally. It was this alleged “economic insecurity” that led to armed protests across the country, including angry white men and women literally storming the state capital in Michigan to threaten lawmakers while being armed.

But nah fam; you’re still not being oppressed.

Oppression, at it’s core, is about a privileged few exhorting dominance of the less fortunate many, to maintain that power at any and all cost. Being asked to wear a mask or to wash your damn hands or to stay at home so you can’t either get or transmit a deadly disease is no more oppression than “being required to have car insurance” or “accepting Pete Davidson is just going to be in more movies as they desperately try to make him a thing” is.

White people can’t handle anything that roughly approximates actual oppression, because they’ve been the oppressors so long that minor inconveniences feel like oppression. When Karen can’t return a shirt she bought from Lululemon because she took off the tag and there’s deodorant stains and it smells curiously of Bath and Body Works Strawberry Shortcake Fine Fragrance Mist and Corona Light, she’s going to take it as an insult and appeal that shit all the way up to the district manager. It’s not because she knows she’s wrong and she doesn’t care; it’s because telling any white woman “no, you can’t do this thing” is an affront because white women are second only to white men at being constantly told “yes, you can do the thing you know is wrong”.

No white person can handle being told “no” or “you can’t do that”, because society, by and large, bends to their will and desire. Case in point; the country wide lifting of stay-at-home orders, at the behest of Mango Mussolini Donald Trump and Republican governors across the country, though Democratic states certainly are doing the same. The vast majority of Americans were okay with stay-at-home orders and mask wearing; only a certain subset of white people turned mask-wearing into code for “snowflake liberals” and stay-at-home orders as an affront to their freedoms. And like clockwork, with white people gathering…whatever the opposite of “en mass” is (en minor?) federal, state and local governments sped up their plans to re-open the country.

The net result of the moves? At least from a preliminary standpoint, 22 states are beginning to see surges in cases that can’t be explained away with more testing.

The truth, Karen and Chet, was that if America was ever going to beat COVID-19, lockdown orders probably should have been more restrictive, and mask wearing more strictly enforced. America still doesn’t have anything roughly approximating a good plan for case isolation. And now that businesses have spent time and money re-opening and re-hiring people, instituting new lockdowns seems unlikely to work as well as it did the last time.

But no; Chet’s neighbor Doug has a “DON’T TREAD ON ME” flag, bumper sticker, keychain and hat, and while he mows his lawn, secure in the fact that Chet will never ask for his lawnmower back because they’re “friends”, he demands to be allowed to go back to his desk job at the cubicle farm, even though he’s been allowed to telecommute and is still making money.

Real oppression comes when one group acts unilaterally without thinking for the well-being of everyone else, and the world trips all over itself to conform to their desires. Real oppression is cops standing idly by when white protesters angrily storm the capital threatening violence and are armed to the teeth, but peaceful protesters opposing police brutality are dispersed with tear gas and flash bangs.

Real, actual oppression is having a national anthem whose second verse can’t be sung because it has references to slavery, and the back-up national anthem was written by an avowed racist. Real, actual oppression is a constant, overwhelming presence, that can’t be easily avoided by asking to talk to the manager.

It’s not being told you can’t do something; it’s knowing you can’t do something without being told. It’s not being able to talk to the police without referring to the officer as “sir” and/or “ma’am”. It’s having to smile at a white person in order for them to not regard you as a threat. It’s voluntarily crossing the street to not scare white people, it’s code-switching at work so you don’t look like “one of those people”, it’s being called a pussy because you wear a mask and don’t want your family to get ill, it’s having it suggested that a highly contagious disease that can and will kill people across all nationalities is only a problem for black people.

Oppression is repeatedly reporting a powerful white woman for discrimination, and the corporation for which she works repeatedly bending over backwards to keep her in power, even as that white woman tells a prominent black woman that she should be lucky because she “could be picking cotton”, and only getting placed on administrative leave after years of offenses. Oh, and that white woman heads a department dedicated to diversity.

Karen, you work in HR, and you know what I’m talking about. You try to ignore it, Karen, but face it; your job isn’t to protect employees and victims of discrimination. It’s to protect the company.

That is oppression; an unrelenting torrent of bullshit circumstances that are set to discourage you, undermine you, and grind you under foot.

Wearing a mask and staying at home could save you. Oppression can, will, and does kill people.

So maybe, just maybe, you can hold on and not go to happy hour at Applebee’s for a few more weeks. Maybe it’s not the time to head back to the movie theater. Maybe you should just chill; masks are getting more comfy now, and Pete Davidson’s…(Christ, does he have two fucking movies and a Netflix special, what in the literal actual fuck)…uhh, his movies are readily available for you to watch inside. Your kids aren’t actually terrible. All things considered, Karen and Chet, you’re healthy, relatively well off, and not really inconvenienced.

Being a person of color in the United States of America is a never ending inconvenience.

Sincerely,

Your black friend.