I am the mother of two boys. Two beautiful young men who were born as beautiful babies full of endless possibility. It w

A few weeks later I received another email from a different sender. The message, with slight wording differences, was essentially the same. This white man was going to kill himself and I was to blame. A few days later I got a similar message via Twitter messenger. A few days after that, another email.

I have received many violent emails from white men over the years, but I sat with this one for a while. I tried to process what I was reading and tried to figure out what I should or could do about it. In the end, I placed it in the same folder as all the death and rape threats.

These men wanted me to know that they were miserable, they felt screwed over, and they felt demonized. They wanted me to know that the only option available to address white male patriarchy was either to maintain the status quo that was making us all miserable, or death. They wanted me to know that they were not capable of growth or change and that any attempts to bring about that growth or change would end them.

We do not get to speak for people whose ancestors we silenced. We get to listen. We get to stop hogging the space. We aren’t giving anyone space, because the space was never ours to take and it is stolen. So if anything we are belatedly giving it back. We need to be uncomfortable. I am writing this essay in praise of discomfort because discomfort is where we need to be. For years, for decades, for centuries if you looked like me you got to live in a world that was very specifically designed to make you comfortable. (The fact that you, individually, didn’t achieve it doesn’t mean it didn’t exist. It means you couldn’t score from third on a double.)

Most of us do not spend a lot of time thinking about the huge, complex systems that keep our technologically dependent society running. And with very good reason. It takes a certain amount of faith and belief — in ourselves, in capitalism, in the digital platforms that mediate our interactions with it, and in the infrastructures that support all of the above — in order to wake up and get through every day. But eating breakfast, pulling on our business-casual Zoom-appropriate shirts — all those mundane acts are made possible by an almost unfathomably complex, algorithmically calibrated, partly automated, and partly sweatshop-labor-dependent global supply chain.

The future will bring white men with solutions. We cannot seem to help ourselves. It’s what we do. Like colonizers with smallpox blankets we will show up looking to solve the problem we created, but to our own benefit. We hope to profit from the disease and the cure. Some of the white folks helping to pull down racist statues thought they were clearing space for statues of themselves. The truth is that I hope we are done idolizing individuals. Individuals will always let you down.

The email continued, describing how he was going to kill himself (with a Glock that he kept at home) and reiterating that it would be my fault. He then ended with a racist tirade, calling me a “worthless monkey bitch.”

This is America working as designed. The caste system that was designed not just by America, but in order to create America. White on top. Black on bottom. A caste system that was systematically enforced, first by slavery, then by Jim Crow, the Klan, redlining, restrictive covenants, police departments, every headline referring to the death of George Floyd rather than the murder of George Floyd, and finally our government itself, which is currently, as I write this, attempting a coup by throwing out votes in the majority-Black cities of Detroit, Atlanta, and Philadelphia. (The crime is in the attempt, not the success.) America is so addicted to its racism that most conversations, even and especially white liberals’ conversations, about healing still revolve around pardoning Trump and finding common ground with his base, which is like treating a bullet wound by polishing the gun.

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ight circumstances, it’s possible that he might cheat on me one day. I don’t think anyone is completely immune. Not to say that I think he’s that type of person at all. He is very honorable and knows how much my first marriage hurt me. I don’t believe he would ever cause me intentional suffering.

There will be a role for people who look like me, but it’ll be a role that we’re very unaccustomed to: listening rather than speaking, giving before we take. It’ll be as part of a community, and if we’re lucky we’ll have as much chance to succeed as anyone else in that community. And the community’s welfare will be the most important barometer to success. If we’re lucky people will treat us better than we’ve treated them.

Now is a great time to ask the people who made those pronouncements what their next step is. It is a great time to hold ourselves accountable. It will make us uncomfortable. Let it.

As the threats of suicide piled up, I began to see a coordinated campaign to harass me, and as disturbing as it was, it was also sadly fascinating in what it revealed. These men were trying to terrorize me with what they saw as the only logical conclusion to my anti-racist, feminist work: the mass suicide of white men. They wanted me to know that they saw my work to end violent misogyny and white supremacy, and they saw that it was a threat, not only to their norms and their status but to their very lives.

There are currently over 17 million shipping containers in circulation globally, and at any given time, about 5 or 6 million shipping containers cross the sea. The U.S. alone imports over 20 million shipping containers’ worth of products a year. While it’s common to talk about iPhones and high-end sneakers when we talk about imports from China and Asia, the truth is the vast majority of those containers are stuffed which much more mundane goods: socks, umbrellas, pencils, paper, packing materials, bedsheets, fruit, car parts, frozen food, pharmaceuticals — the endless inventory of physical items that make our modern lives possible.

You can turn your shame and discomfort into rage, as so many Trump voters did, or you can own it. You can claim it, because it’s yours. And in so doing, you can keep from passing it on to the next generation. You can be a better ancestor than the ones you got. You can be a better ancestor than the ones I got.

In the summer of 2020, part of America took to the streets. Spearheaded by Black Lives Matter, who in the middle of a pandemic, managed to organize millions of people safely so they were masked and socially distanced in cities and towns around the country. They were met by violence workers as well. In the wake of these protests, companies and organizations and corporations posted pronouncements in support of Black Lives Matter. Some promising donations, some promising to change their own cultures, some promising both. Some telling you how woke they were. Some letting you know they would’ve voted for Obama a third time. (Beware, some of them think they just did.) And while we could spend forever debating how many of those pronouncements were cynical (more than zero), and how many were genuine (less than a hundred percent), for our purposes the important part is that they did it, and they did it publicly. Which, in the business, is what we call a receipt.