Loud Mouth Brown Girl

With everything happening in America, I think it’s time that Canadians take a serious look at mental health issues affecting people who are living in marginalized communities.

It wasn’t that long ago that Indigenous children were being ripped from their homes, experiencing the worst the world has to offer, only to end up dead or lost.

It wasn’t that long ago that Black children were enslaved and forced to give birth to the children of their rapists and kidnappers.

It wasn’t that long ago that people with mental health issues and disabilities were locked up and away until they died.

We have a long way to go, in the name of progress, and if America today is proving anything, it’s that capitalism is not going to get us where we claim we want to go.

Right now white women in America are getting their digital hands slapped when they say shit like “Say Her Name” for a white woman, but won’t bother saying it for any of the thousands of Black women killed by police, which is what the phrase was invented for.

Right now, white women are more angry at me for pointing out the hypocrisy of pretending to care when it affects you, but doing nothing to stop it after ten million warnings.

Like, at the end of the day, I wasn’t a Harris fan either, but I’m Canadian, not American, so what I say doesn’t bloody well matter, but the point is, y’all had a choice, and you chose this thinking that somehow white women would be protected.

I stopped writing on Medium because I was getting thousands of people telling me that my views on the laziness of white comfort, and complacency of white power, were making it difficult to digest my “Very valid view points…but.”

No buts. White supremacy keeps you lazy, complacent, and ignorant. It forces you to feed on everything around you and when there’s nothing left to feed it, when it becomes your turn, THEN you cry fowl? My darling, you might be a white supremacist.

Often times when we say to white people, (in bloody particular,), “You made me feel x, y, and or z,” your immidiate response isn’t to do any of the following:

• Stop
• Hear what is being said
• Understand that it’s not a critisism, it’s a cry for help
• Digest
• Respond

Instead you switch immidiately to rage, and then you wonder why so many of us are tired of you claiming to be the victim. I fully get it, I understand that many of you were not taught to prioritize boundaries.

Many of you were taught you can do and say whatever you want, and that there won’t be consequences for you, because you are white. I know this, because I was raised with your kind and this is precisely what those kids were taught.

My hair was lit on fire.

I was raped at school.

I was sexually assaulted at school by more than one teacher.

I was sexually assaulted by a Priest, who belonged to a church connected to my school.

Every single time these things happened, “I” was punished for coming forward, instead of the white people who did these things, being punished for doing them.

In this world, the comfort of white women is often prioritized over literally everything else in the entire world.

And the problem isn’t even that white comfort is a priority, that’s fine, it’s the way you react when we tell you your comfort is kills us.

When we point the finger at white supremacy, which is more often than not, the weapon used to cause us harm. we’re told “It’s not the time.”

When we point out that people who are or were rich and famous who have passed on, were also super problematic we’re told “It’s not the time…let the family grieve.” Baby why are you grieving white supremacists?

I don’t care how much good someone does if their ultimate goal is to cause harm. I don’t care how much money someone spends to market themselves as a good person, if it means in private, people are being hurt and harmed by those same “Heros”.

And before you tell me that women can’t be abusive, my 8th grade high school gym teacher sexually assaulted me. I’ve never talked about that before, there’s an added shame when the abuse comes from a woman.

We’re taught to believe that white women are community builders, that they care about children more than anyone else, but through experience we learn that nothing could be further from the truth.

Some of the most harmful, “I want to end this pain,” experiences, came at the hands of white women who wanted to uplift the patriarchy while stepping on me, because stepping on me got them the attention they wanted.

Black women have been suffering at the hands of police for centuries. Whether it was them as individuals attacking Black women, or the people that Black women have loved, white women have been drinking our tears for centuries.

Now when powerful, American, Canadian, Black women say “enough” you scream victim, and what’s worse is people are paying you to attack Black women, while you accuse those same women you’re attacking, of being a part of some “Content Creation Cabal.” Like make the math make sense, because it fucking doesn’t.

I’ve been on the internet since the internet existed, and I can honestly tell you, I’ve never seen Black women receive as much hatered, viterol, and abuse than they are getting today.

Women who are saying “No, I have a boundary stick to it,” are considered rude, and unworthy of the attention they get, because “Who the fuck does she think she is?”

Let me tell you:

She, was a little girl who came into the world filled with love, joy, sense, and kindness. She was built not to take on the world, but to be a part of it, to flow within it, so that others could see her, but not so that they could take advantage of her.

But she was caught. And beaten, raped, tortured, abused, branded, and lied upon for decades.

I don’t want any girl to experience rape, torture, or abuse in any form. Regardless of her color. The difference between some of the people who read my work, and myself however, is that you’re perfectly okay with what was done to me. Because it didn’t happen to you.

If your immidiate response is to think “They’re writing about me, so they must be angry at me,” you might want to stop before you get angry, and start thinking about the ways in which you uplift white supremacy. If you decide to comment before you do that, you’ve proven my point.

I am not saying every white person everywhere is evil. I know there are plenty of fine enough white people out there, but that doesn’t change the fact that the AVERAGE White person, is not going to put themselves in danger, to protect the collective.

Yesterday on Threads a white woman literally said and I quote “Now you know why we can’t step up and fight back. They’ll shoot us in the head.” And yet that same kind of mentality forces white people toa sk why Black, Brown, and Indigenous people aren’t stepping up to the plate.

Imagine me throwing a table, because that’s genuinely what I feel like doing right now.

I want to scream, yell, and whine about how unfair it is that I am treated with far more dispresect because I am Black, but not only that. I also want to scream, yell, and whine about the fact that I am not allowed to have big feelings, about really bad shit.

Someone recently said “If we were all collectively as outraged to Tamir Rice, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Daunte Wright, Tyre Nichols, Sonya Massey and Keith Porter’s murder as we currently are to Renee Good’s maybe we wouldn’t be in this fucking mess.”

Yeah, maybe. Maybe if back when Emmitt Till was wrongly accused, white people had stood up for him instead of battering him to death, perhaps we could have started a different cycle.

But we are here, and we have to deal with what is, looking back and saying “Shoulda coulda, woulda,” isn’t going to change what is.

Black people don’t want you to put aside your feelings about white death, we want you to understand that the reason we’re not freaking out every time a white person (in particular) happens to be killed by a cop, is because we already told you, that if you didn’t pay attention, this was going to happen.

Now we’re here. We were warned, and none of us, myself included, really thought it was going to get this bad. Especially because our ancestors fought fascism back so hard, the Genevia Convention was invented.

Godwin’s Law states that “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one“.

He goes on to state this is a way of shutting down conversation, but I would argue that the longer a discussion goes on, the more that we become comfortable naming the problem that we’re actually facing.

And I think that scares us. Everyone in the Western world knows the story of Anne Frank, but what about Aisha? The Palestinian Writer, what about Abdule, the Palestinian Journalist, what about Kema, and Ahmed, and all the men, women, and children of Sudan, whose stories go ignored, because they don’t matter enough to the world?

When is Black death going to make the same “It could be me” impact as white death?

To this day I have yet to forget the name Heather Heyer, a woman killed protecting Black people in Charlottesville North Carolina. A white woman who died, who was murdered, protecting Black people.

That’s a rarity, it shouldn’t be. It should be “This person is going to get hurt, I can do something.” But instead it’s “This person is going to get hurt, let me step back and film.”

When Derick Cheuvan, killed George Floyd, every single person who was there either stood back and watched him be murdered, or they filmed it. They were terrified, and today on Threads we see white women showing their whole ass as if their fear is new, unexpected, and never before felt.

The “It could be me,” fear is one that every single Black, Brown, and Indigenous people have lived with for centuries.

I’m sorry that people are dying. I am sorry that people are being murdered. I am not sorry that you’re realizing the government doesn’t care about you, anymore than it cares about the rest of us.

XoXo

Devon J Hall,

The Original Loud Mouth Brown Girl