shout out to all the mother teresas out there

im sorry but amerikkkans are the absolute worst. we will preach righteous all the while DIRECTLY engaging in the perpetuation of the worst atrocities this world has ever seen. but because we feel like we a “step removed” from the slaughter, because we feel like going to work to fund the deaths of people far away that we cannot see, it absolves us of ANYTHING. gtfoh. it does not.

look at her up there, hella pure.

a few days ago, apparently i said something controversial on substack. probably not surprising since im always saying some wild shit but basically some thoughts on who gets to be part of the movement, who gets discarded, and what our heroes looked like before we made them saints. apparently stirred the pot. make your own conclusions. how tf u think malcolm was able to talk so well? 🤣 the best ppl i ever met, are doing life sentences.

so when i say a movement that wont engage the dope dealer, the gang member, the sex worker, the EX pimp, the incarcerated and decarcerated, isnt building anything real, im not handing out absolution. im naming a function. survival, expressing itself in whatever form the block or the cellblock offered at the time. u dont get to pick the one role in that list thats easiest to be disgusted by and act like your disgust settles anything about the rest.

the second i point that out, people want to talk about choice. “i don’t have a choice, i have to survive, i have to pay rent, i have to eat.” ok. i hear u. now apply that same grace to the dealer. the gang member. the pimp you wanna pretend fell out the sky a monster instead of getting built by something. because i guarantee u, if we sat down and mapped out the actual choice architecture, the actual walls closing in on a kid in west baltimore versus the actual walls closing in on a tax-paying adult in a blue state, you’d find the second person had a hell of a lot more room to maneuver and still chose the path of least resistance. survival is the alibi everybody reaches for, but apparently it’s only a valid alibi when the person reaching for it looks like u.

respectability has never stopped a bullet. “suit and tie or hoodied up, measured voice or fury, it has never once changed how this country decides what your life is worth.” (quoting myself) unless youre white of course. so when somebody tells me a movement needs to clean itself up first, needs to disavow whoever makes the room uncomfortable before the room will fight for anybody, i hear the same lie wearing a different uniform. the lie that says safety is something u earn by performing innocence correctly. it isnt. it never was.

when i went to palestine (im talking about palestine, i didnt go to tongue-fuck that nasty ass wall) when i was in palestine none of the people i met made any mention of how bad drug dealers, gang members and pimps are. u know what they said? my comrade talked about where our money goes, and why the fuck are we still funding the destruction of his people. he talked about the crimes some of yall holy motherfuckers have no problem being complicit in.

that 401k sitting there quietly growing very likely holds shares in lockheed, in raytheon, in whatever company built the thing that just leveled a block in gaza. nobody picked that stock. a fund manager did it automatically while u slept, and the money just sits there compounding off death without u ever lifting a finger. thats almost worse than the tax dollar, because at least the tax dollar required u to fill out a form.

even if I agreed that there are ethical differences between these actions, my agreement would still be based on my own subjective judgment, not an objective moral fact. my point is that people often fail to critically examine the contradictions in their own moral reasoning. many people go to work, pay taxes, and participate in systems they know damn well are funding the murder of children. they know these institutions contribute to immense suffering, they know their participation is the backbone of an ongoing genocide. yet they continue participating, because they’ve reasoned that their own survival requires it.

so where does that fall on the moral ladder? if someone does something harmful because they feel they must survive within a system that leaves them little choice, how should we evaluate that? the contradiction is that people are willing to extend moral understanding to themselves in these situations, but not to others. and often the burden falls upon the most marginalized.

i think the deeper problem is that the whole apparatus of moral judgment was never built to be applied evenly in the first place. “innocent” and “guilty” require a prior category called “the human”, a stable thing with rights, the presumption that its suffering matters and needs explaining. that category had to be built against something. it needed a position that absorbs the violence so everybody else’s innocence has somewhere to stand. that position is blackness. not blackness as one identity among many, but the structuring absence that lets the category of human cohere at all. thats why the phone reads as a gun in one hand and a phone in another. the object never changed. the hand did.

and the whole conception of purity yall keep reaching for, the righteousness, where do yall think that even comes from?? mother teresa. thats who. that’s the blueprint for sainthood yall absorbed without ever checking the receipts. that woman was actually a horrible fucking bitch. ran homes where people died on dirty mats with no painkillers while she flew off to get the best medical care money could buy for herself. took over a million dollars from a man who defrauded thousands of regular people out of their savings and then wrote the court asking for his clemency. praised a dictator who tortured and murdered his own people, and took his money too. preached that suffering was holy, that it brought people closer to god, while running facilities where suffering just sat there unrelieved because relieving it wasnt the point, the optics of her holding the suffering was the point. and they made her a saint for it. do yall know who your saints actually are? these are the people the whole concept of righteousness gets filtered through. not somebody who got clean. somebody who built an entire brand around proximity to the wretched while keeping her own hands soft as fuck.

as opposed to somebody like malcolm, who definitely lived grimy in his early years, hustling and locked up and written off by everybody who eventually praised him, found allah SWT, and changed the fucking world from the inside of a system that had already decided what he was. one of them sought no redemption at all and got canonized anyway. the other actually transformed in case yall wanna drag his early years out like its a gotcha. so i dont wanna hear none of that righteous shit. genocide been going on for years now. we are all guilty as fuck.

malcolm didnt learn to talk like that in a classroom. he learned it on a corner u’d have crossed the street to avoid, in a world that had already decided what he was before he ever opened his mouth.

and it doesnt stop at the saints we pick. that phone in your hand right now, the one u used to type your disgust at me, somebody mined the cobalt in that battery, very possibly a child, in a mineshaft in the congo that could collapse on him before lunch. that mineral moved through a supply chain built with enough distance between u and him that u never have to picture his face while u scroll. and a cell phone in a black woman’s hand gets read by police as a gun. that same phone in a white woman’s hand is just a phone. so the object itself carries two completely different relationships to violence depending on who’s holding it, and almost nobody holding it ever notices the whiplash. come the fuck on now.

so let me actually say what i think this comes down to, because i think people want this to be a fight about who’s allowed to feel disgusted and who isn’t, and its not that. its a fight about good faith.

good faith isnt a feeling. its a discipline. it means u dont get to hold two completely different standards in your two hands and act like u only ever had one. it means if u grant yourself the survival excuse, the “i didnt have a real choice,” the “the system left me no other way to eat,” then that excuse is now a principle, not a personal exemption, and a principle has to travel. it has to reach the dealer and the dope boy and the felon and the sex worker and that p-i-m-p the same way it reaches u when u clock in and fund a bomb. u dont get to keep the comfort of the excuse and strip it from everybody whose version of it makes u uncomfortable to look at. that’s not ethics. and we see thru it.

and this is also why the distortion isnt some unfortunate misunderstanding people keep falling into by accident. bad faith requires it. the whole structure depends on never quite looking directly at what i actually said, because looking directly at it means looking directly at the same standard applied to u, and that’s the one move bad faith can never survive. so instead of holding the contradiction and sitting with it, people flee into a version of me that’s easier to fight. they make me the defender of harm so they dont have to be the person who funds a genocide and still gets to sleep at night. its not that they misread my words. its that misreading my words is the only way their position stays standing. i never advocated for harm. i advocate for abolition.

here’s the actual ethical ground im standing on, and its not “im right because my side feels more radical.” its this: moral standing was never something u could earn through purity, because purity was never on the table for any of us, not for the dealer, not for the felon, not for the genocide-funder either, not even for the saint they handed a halo to while she let people die on dirty mats. everybody is implicated. the only real choice left after that fact is whether u face your own implication honestly or whether u spend your whole life building elaborate reasons why your implication doesnt count and everybody else’s does. that second option, the bad faith option, is the actual moral failure here. not selling, not surviving, not whatever box somebody checked to stay alive. the failure is refusing to extend to others the same grace u required for yourself, and calling that refusal righteousness.

im not asking anybody to forgive harm. im asking yall to stop pretending the line yall drew was ever about harm in the first place, instead of about who’s easiest to disown. hows about we end the cycle thats destroying us all.

.

.

.

.

shout out to all the mother teresas out there, yall can kiss my black ass.

Share