Druski’s Heroism (ROUND 1)
SCENT OF THE DAY: Murasakino, by Aton
This sometimes gets compared to Royal Barn. This is much louder in a fresh pissy civet direction whereas the Areej is much more of a green murk rounded into a vintage style. Murasakino probably speaks to me more. I realize that I am a big civet fanboy /. This belongs much more in the family of Civet Regale and Blue Civet Dream—two of my favorite civet frags.
Tremendous, unbelievable top twenty, chype with Teatro Alla Scalla bombastic—Teatro all scala in the undeniably masculine form / Loud blinding civet opening with civet-reinforcing flowers / you see that the cumin is the big culprit of the animalic vibe but then, just as you think that Prin (and even Corticiatto with his Aziyade) has got this guy’s number, the blindness from the initial cloud clears and you see the civet is roaring / This is aggressive. / it is funny that Ramsey finds this less aggressive than Prin, but what is challenging will differ based on the person—because this vies with Homa and Arsalan for the most stomach churning of what I own /Murasakino gets soapy-floral in dry down nice transition from crazy animalic to classic masculine /
murasakino comes off like Prin meets Areej / Not only one of my top openings with its pissy sour animalics, but also one of my fav drydowns: super macho ashy tobacco dry down). this was the scent I was wearing the day I had to bring my cat Fille to the hospital for her heart failure—and so today (like every time I bring her back for a checkup) I had to wear it—only I made sure to spray hours in advance! / I always say, in the ironic way in which you call a big beefy bruiser guy “tiny,” her signature scent is Teatro alla Scala. But now I must say that this is even a better signature for her even though it naturally reminds me most of my Grandpa Jack. /Murasakino—very aggressive (unlike Ensar and Bortnikoff elegance): again, it is like Prin meets Areej / the result: hyper masculine with Teatro Alla Scalla bombast / right up there with Chandrahas by Kashti.
Let’s workshop this piece about a blonde slut, looking like a belle straight from the plantation, using widowhood to block the effort of a beautiful Black king to speak truth to power!
Druski’s Heroism
Blacks are allowed to do whiteface whereas whites are not allowed to do blackface. You take issue with that. Mr. Big Shot finds it unfair. Only in an ahistorical vacuum, however, would it be unfair. You see inconsistency. But that inconsistency dissolves once you factor in the endless oppression of Black people at the hands of whites. For equity demands, in light of that stark asymmetry between supreme oppressor and supreme oppressed, that Black people be held to different standards and play by different rules than white people
In an ideal world, Trevor, that should suffice to set you straight. That should suffice, in other words, to let you know that the double standard of which you speak, if we are even to call it that, is an expression of justice rather than of monkey-desire for power. Unfortunately i sense in you—i mean, it’s pretty obvious, isn’t it?—what sociologists and critical whiteness scholars now know to be “white rage.” That means, on the one hand, i must say so much more. White rage—just like its flip-side-of-the-coin inverse: white fragility—is, on the other hand, one of the biggest blocks for my words of allyship ever breaking through. You see my tough position?
i’m not trying to sound defeatist or like i lack all hope for you. But believe me when i say: you would have to learn and unlearn too much—more than we could cover here. i mean, just think about it. The FBI, Nike, Disney—they host entire reeducation retreats for exactly the issues that keep cropping up on your page (to say nothing of your problematic DMs to me). Universities around the country run diversity workshops on “How to Be Less white” and “How to Prevent whiteness from Causing Harm in Private and Public Spaces.” These are, at bare minimum, two-week modules—and, even here, stopping at a mere two weeks almost always indicates a recalcitrant institution more so concerned with covering as opposed to dismantling the antiblackness endemic to the West (and everywhere its white tentacles extend, which is everywhere). You can’t expect me to do all that in one Facebook comment.
Here goes anyway. As i climb the slippery rungs of the white-identity ladder (moving hopefully one day, if i shut up for long enough to let Black voices lead my life, beyond white traitor and into full-on white abolitionist), the least i can do is try. i hope when you find peace you will return to these words here—and yes, maybe one day go on an immersive reeducation retreat for yourself.
First, white people have ALL the power and privilege—gobs on top of gobs of it. You know me and you know where i come from. But i’ll stop you right there. Yes, i’m one of the first in my family to go to school: several are literally illiterate, not just functionally illiterate. And yes, i’m one of the first to have owned property. (i say “have” because i did give it away in my shame of ownership of stolen land. But that is another whole can of worms.) What you don’t get when you point to my family, what you don’t get when you point to all the statistics on white despair and downward trajectory of white people, is that even inbred Appalachian whites could have the world on a silver platter at any moment they choose. They just need to roll out of bed. That is white privilege. Only laziness, spoiled laziness, stops them. Any white—child or adult, rich or poor, woke or blind—would hang himself if he had to spend one day in the life of western culture’s number one target: Black kings and queens. (And regarding one of your other posts, you honestly can’t fathom—in light of this—why white authors aren’t allowed to write Black characters? You honestly wonder why i would call for the US to follow the too-little-too-late measures that the UK seems to be on the cusp of adopting as a norm: calling the police on any white author who dares to think he can understand Black pain?)
Second, white supremacy has only grown. When we think of white supremacy we think of gruesome ornaments dangling scarred from castration trees like warlock fruit, hard-R whites—trouser waistbands hoisted well above their belly buttons—cheesing in ear-to-ear self-satisfaction for the big-flash foldout camera as if posing next to the prize catch. But do not let—never let—its invisibility compared to lynching eras fool you. White supremacy rages wilder than ever. It has simply gotten really good at hiding. And that makes it easy to forget. Remember: the greatest trick the devil ever pulled is convincing the world he didn’t exist. Beautiful Black—. Always capitalize it, buddy. Beautiful Black kings and queens can’t even leave their home without fear! It’s open season on the Black body!
You see, then: no white can do blackface without punching down. A white doing blackface is punching down in the most brutal ways. It’s like me slapping a paraplegic trans girl, all cartilage and drooling in her wheelchair. No, it’s like me giving her a one-two right down the pike before i teabag her non-patched eye and then proceed to dump ketchup on her head just like scum whites did to those brave Blacks who broke lines of segregation to eat at whites-only diners. We don’t laugh at that. (Or do we, Trevor? Probably best not to answer.) We—moral people—laugh, though, when this brave girl—a real girl, by the way (allowed to play in any sport she wants)—is willing to speak up against such a bully. Would we call HER a “bully”? No. The teabagger is the bully. In case you need it spelled out for you, Druski is the paraplegic kid. Erika is the sicko bully. Her white skin is an insult as it is, something to apologize for—and really apologize for: down on the knees in teary shame, kowtowing down before Black people as if they were Mecca. But to my knowledge she has not once committed to allyship or said one “Sorry” for all her skin stands for. That matters. A wise king once said, after all, “If you’re not antiracist, you’re racist.”
i’m speaking now to what little Grinch heart remains inside of Trevor! What you see as double-standard, as injustice, is in truth payback. It is a setting right of the scales. This is why no white man could ever call a Black king “boy” whereas Black kings are allowed, and even encouraged with teary applause, to do so. This is why any literary editor, AI or human, will insist you capitalize the “B” in “Black” but never do so for the “W” in “White”—unless, of course, we’re talking some Elon Musk klan magazine or one of the pieces of alt-right trash you must be reading. This is why an all-Black panel of news anchors is—despite your lying white eyes—diverse. You, Trevor, see Orwell—gaslighting and abuse—where those on the right side of history see never-good-enough recompense.
You get it now, Trevor—T-Dog? i watched your responses here on this post over several days. i’ve been literally in tears. And i’m still literally shaking. What else do you want to add? Do you want to misgender my own child? When will your torments stop?
i speak for a lot of good people who care for you, who want to see you do better. But you see an intervention as an assault. You read the very phrase “Do better” as an ideological cudgel against white people instead of words meant to encourage white people to be less toxic. We will not stand for you participating in the kicking of a people perpetually downed. We see through your lame aikido. As if you were the one on the side of Blacks, you say it’s demoralizing for the Black spirit and ruinous to Black agency to keep repeating and repeating what you call the “why-bother hypnosis of today’s Democratic party”: the truism that Black people are perpetual victims of Amerikkka. We see through such revisionism just as we see through your white-tongue audacity when you stress, as if it mattered, that this bully bitch Erika is a “widow.” A white woman in Amerikkka, the exact blonde look of the southern belle who has cried rape too many times so she could swirl her clit as she watches from her plantation window the lynching born of her lies—is she supposed to receive pity points for that? (You are not even using the term “widow” right anyway. Just as no black person could ever be racist since racism requires not just bigotry but power, no white woman can be a widow since widowhood requires not just death of her husband but her lack of power).
It’s never too late, Trevor. That is why i speak my truth today, my tough love.
The thing people need to remember, and this will surely help you, is that whiteness is not just the external force of oppression behind every Black failure—every low test score, every school suspension, every punch to a pregnant gut (as Akinyele puts it: “♪ Imma put this fist through that navel / cuz I’ll be damned if this be the hand that rocks the cradle ♪”). No, it gets worse. Whiteness is a downright disease. Indeed, it is a disease more contagious than any other. If that could not be any more bleak, we’re talking something here for which there is no known cure.
i know what many will think at this point. But even the Goebbels extremes of a “Final Solution” will not work. Blacks, Mexicans, Indigenous peoples—anyone can get infected. When Black cops beat beautiful Black kings, what do you think is behind it? Internalized whiteness, the virus of all viruses—that’s what puppeteers the show. Why do you think there’s that black ICE agent everyone has been reposting? Get a clue! She would never do that on her own! White extermination, that means, cannot solve the problem. There would be no way to ensure the eradication of the sinister essence, whiteness itself, without wiping out all humans. (And even then issues remain. Recent research has indicated, for example, that whales—especially killer whales, which makes sense—have exhibited the level of perfectionism and logical thinking indicative of whiteness. And come on: we have artifacts of whiteness, the rovers of white ingenuity, on Mars at this point. Who knows? Some alien could see that and be pulled, just like the monolith in Kubrick’s Space Odyssey pulled oot-oot monkeys who lacked even huts, into scientific thinking and thereby ultimately into a whiteness of skyscraper toxicity. Whiteness is here to stay.
That goes into why the counterbalancing efforts of equity will never end. That’s something even many allies fail to get. There is no finish line. Whites will always have the power. And whiteness—waterborne, airborne, cyberborne, and so on—will always hold the reins of power. That is why the doing away of blind auditions, which you insist (in one of your other fucked-up posts) is regressive, is actually progressive. When classical music auditions are done behind a race-obscuring screen, for example, Black people—we’re talking kings and queens—are almost always not selected.
Don’t you see, Trevor? i know the question at this point is rhetorical. But i have to ask it if only that one day in the future the obvious answer will flip in your case (just as the magnetic poles of Earth will). Don’t you see? Beautiful BIPOC bodies, in this Western hell of incessant white terror (micro and macro), are just trying to carve out the smallest safe space they can manage. That is why we insist on Black-only graduations. That is why we insist whites and their rapey white gaze stay off campus for one damn day. That is why we insist whites stay away from opening weekend of Black Panther and other Black film. Black kings and queens just want a bit of breathing room, a little bubble for-them-by-them. They want something like the Juke Joint in the award-winning Sinners (2025), a film that gave me the final encouragement to write this out for you.
Not a plug, but i really do recommend that film. i recommend it to all whites struggling to see that they are a liability even in the rare case when they are not either overtly racist (the Klan members in the film) or culture vultures (the vampires in the film). For the one person with a trace of white blood allowed in the Juke Joint is precisely the one who allows the vampires to infiltrate. It’s not really a big spoiler since we see as much every goddamn day anyway.
i will close by saying that i know i can sound heated. This issue just means so much to me. i’m not writing to attack the person i know you can be: the whiteness abolitionist deep inside you. i just think you have been focusing too little on the larger context that shapes why people react so strongly. And i think you have been focusing too much on fairness in the abstract. i mean that itself—abstraction, the p’s and q’s of symbolic logic—is whiteness in nearly its purest form, its insidiously innocuous form. That’s what i want you to see—things like that. Feel me? i just hope you’ll consider that what to you sounds like a simple double standard (this whole ordeal around Druski and ugly Erika) can feel very different to people who see it through the lens of race and history.
i’m open to talking about it if you want a real conversation. But that will take time. i’m still literally shaking. These issues have been going on long enough. And now i have ICE stealing my neighbors like Whoville Christmas presents and Israel bombing cherished leaders like—well, like Israel. When will it end? When?
*“i” is intentionally lowercase because i’m a white body who needs every tear-down possible to do just a little something to right the scales. Neither you nor Erika get that. That’s the problem.
*i apologize if any BIPOC person has felt in any way that i spoke out of line. i am here to learn. i am simply trying to wake up a lost white soul. All faults are my own.
“We need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”—Kafka (against the safe-space cancel culture pushed by anti-art bullies, left and right)
