Subway Restraint (ROUND 7)
scent of the day: Civet Regal (parfum), by Elkhaldi plus Civet Royale (paste), by Elkhaldi
Civet Regal manages to showcase, just like the past Civet Royale, the various aspects of civet here, albeit in a form prettiefied by extra rosiness and musks and spices that lend an incensy cola impression: (1) a urinous sourness, which is an unaged-civet aroma most prominent here like in Blue Civet Dream and in Oudh Infini and Murasakino (Prince Albert barbell glinting after a morning pee), (2) a severe halitosis, which I get pretty much nowhere else but in this fragrance and—much more severely—in the Civet Royale paste I like to layer with this spray (reamed molar of someone who so refuses to brush that the stock clove in the numbing gel the dentist used are not in any way prominent, unlike what I get in other dental rot fragrances like Tigerwood 91), (3) fecal fur, which here is boosted by the powdery musk (antique velvet upholstery that has seen its share or perineal prints), and even hints—even in the Civet Royale paste—of the old honey round warm of the aged civet I get in Civet de Nuit. This is worthy of so much celebration as far as I am concerned. This is one of those scents, sort of like Peau d’Orris Gold edition was in the case of Wasif Reza, that makes you plunge deep into the house with a high standard that few other releases in the house can meet. That is the dark lining of a fragrance so good. It baits you down a rabbit hole of buys.
Although I think objectively it is better crafted than Blue Civet Dream by Pinoy Sirun (perhaps even lasting longer?), the Pinoy really gives me what I want in terms of the unhinged pissy aggression. This could easilyu change with my mood. The Elkhaldi, especially the Elkhaldi combo Civet Regale (spray) and Civet Royale (paste), gives you the full spectrum of natural civet that no other fragrance can do better I imagine. But I am really drawn to the urinous sour aspect, which Blue Civet Dream does so well.
Blue Civet Dream and Civet Regale are not too far apart. Both—especially the Pinoy Sirun—do that bright sour almost rosey civet. Both, in effect, have in common that they are far from the round end of the spectrum we see with Civet de Nuit—even though, yes, the Elkhaldi does have more facets of that buttery roundness than the Pinboy Sirun. That sort of antique-smelling neutered but warm and comforting civet of a honey-tobacco grandpa hug, a civet that feels beaten down into a stream pebble smoothness by the tumbling of time—I like that too. But the young edginess speaks to me more—if I am entitled even to make such a statement about someone, me, I am a stranger to (we all are strangers to ourselves).
But in position all these different fragrances together, seeing how they compare and how they differ, I will say that the Elkhaldi—especially spray-paste combo—is in some way more alarming than the brighter energized piss-centric Blue Civet Dream. Because the Elkhaldi has the other dimensions, and even a good deal of the roundness (a roundness enhanced by the fruity-green aspects of fig, althouygh we do find the crushed stem aspects of fig here too synergizing with the rose to boost the uronous bright aspect of civet), and because the spray itself adds in tobacco and clove and vanilla and castor-leather (all this cozy cabin warmth and comfort), you can get the feel of the sort of smoker grandpa that I mentioned starting to kiss you and assault you. Pinoy Sirun is more like a parking garage rape by a younger predator. The Elkhaldi is more like a loved one suddenly turnign on you and then here he is with his tongue down your throat and then, split screen, you are licking grandpa’s ass—his halitotic tuahs for his own lubrication hitting you despite how much his testicles cover your kid face. We get the dusty-clovey tobacco, especially in the dry down, but the focus is more the figgy puddin drips off the Lewinsky cigar than the cigar itself—where by figgy puddin I mean a fig-flavored urine and by Lewinski I mean the newly discovered holes of “Grandpa’s fuckin big girl.”
Now that the dust of my frag frenzy has begun to settle, I really do like civet. Muskrat and skunk and even just hyrax always appealed to me more on paper if only because they are more exotic. But real civet beats them all out, and even some of the other more stock animalics like castoreum. Musk might another story, On certain days I like musk even more than oud.
Such a wonderful scent. Wowzers—and long lasting—bright sour civet lasts and lasts. This dense version of the formular sings so bright and metallic. If I did not know Blue Civet Dream or Murasakino I would think this was the paradigm or fresh bright civet, especially how the stemmy rose and stemmy fig together drive that aspect home. I imagine the lighter concentrations of this fragrance would be even brighter. I do like my scents denser but I imagine the pissiness of the EDP concentration would be appealing.
There are several Istvanian-type scents. Muraskino is one. Maybe Unataman is in there too. But this one is perhaps one of the best candidates—and when I combine it with the paste, I do not see how it can’t be. It is not a crowd pleaser. It says what it says. It is not for everyone. It will find its crowd. It is as unsettling as a thousand-eyed biblical angel. But even these creatures some among us will be attracted to.
*Let's workshop this prose poem, set to the song "American Girl," about a clash between a black man late to a job interview and "antiracist" protesters who will not let him off the subway train.
Subway Restraint
[So here is how] I respond to the Uncle-Tom charge. . . . After the 60s black America turned around and began to put [its] fate in the hands of white America. We became dependent on white America. We said we have to have this and we have to have that. We have to have affirmative action. We have to have this kind of a program and so forth and so on all these demands that we made and which then, of course, come out of a psychology of dependence where “I can’t get ahead unless white America gives me all these things and white America bends over backwards and uses affirmative action to get me in here and get me in there” and so forth. “I can’t do it on my own. I can’t be self-sufficient. I can’t take care of myself.” So {these so-called] black militants are all dependent, obsessed. They are people who are obsessed with dependence. And the mask that they wear of black anger and they wear the fist. Who’s the fist pointed at? The fist is pointed at whites. The fist is that “I demand something from white people.” That to me is the very essence of Uncle Tomism. The fist is the Uncle Tom. All it is a militant begging, militant dependence. I’m the one who’s saying we can do it on our own and must do it on our own and we won’t ever get anywhere until we do do it on our own! I’m the one who says we have the ability to do it on our own, we have the capacity to do it on our own, and that dependence is a loser’s game. . . . We’re free. We’re free as we’re ever going to be. And now is our opportunity. We have to stand up like men and women and take it—regardless of what the world says, regardless of whether or not there’s still racism here. I’m the [true] militant. They’re the Uncle Toms.—Shelby Steele
Serve the long game. Do not jump right to throat daggering that lead cunt, shrieking as her arms spread to restrict you and the bodies behind you from exiting the split door of the subway. Breathe through the claustrophobic crush. Your first move, seductive as it no doubt is, should not be to impale that vein-flared neck of fanaticism with your “Urban Pal” pocket push dagger—its blade just over two inches, double serrated for bleed-out rip backs meant to thwart repair (and cheaper than a gas-station sandwich, for whatever it might be worth to say, on bladehq.com).
Restrain yourself. Unloading after a wait—especially an agonizing wait, where every nerve screams for action—is better, we all know. Think of the blue juice building. The time for blade gratifications, multiple climaxes unlikely to be offset by a life ruined—if you do it now, like some monkey—by the gavel, might show itself with some patience.
Shoves and slithering words, hold these back as well. You stand above the rabble. Let the seething fury of your stolen big day mount, right up to the gills, as the chanting mass behind her—“No! One! Gets! Off!”—hammer-fists away any bold hand trying to pry open the panels from within. Let it foment even as her spittle spatter and repeated forehead rammings of vindictiveness, right into your heart, grow more aggressive with your futile insistence to be set free from the metal trap of the neo-witch hysteria. It can be hard, yes—like trusting that the sea will buoy your body if only you let go of tree-mammal tension. But trust that the futility is a friend. It grows the potency of your ferocity, the need for your ferocity, as long as you stay rooted—rooted in that narrow space where you work yourself up for having been made a sardine and yet where you, wanting to “make it last all night” like Tom Petty with this American girl in her slouchy beanie, conduct yourself as if on an empty beach somewhere in the breeze.
Every smartphone glows a weapon of mass judgment. But neither this nor all the corner-nestled CCTV cameras can excuse slipping away into some private pocket of psychology. It is all to easy for a human to get caught in the vent of fantasy: if only I were wearing one of those old-school carnations on my breast pocket, squirting acid like the joker. If anything, let the nontruth of the counterfactual further fuel your frustration. For ultimately you must go to work. When you do go to work, however, give your defense attorney—hands tied by whatever scraps you leave behind—at least a little to work with. Think of it that way. Thinking of it that way will keep your will from buckling even as it serves to titillate your will with the promise of a later chance to buckle—perhaps even crumble, delivering you into painless disindividuation: oneness with the World-All. This is about edging, okay?
Try to lock in eye-contact with that one officer in the sea of phones raised, several of their owners screeching at you “Don’t you fucking touch her!”—a baiting formula as transparent, of course, as those feline-heat growls of “Don’t you dare cum in me!” Throw in a “Please help, officer” or two: the film never stops rolling. If you really want to piss yourself off, say it a bit too soft. The officer will fail on cue, either way, to safeguard your free passage. Is this not, after all, a non-castle-doctrine state where squatters have rights over your home (such that you cannot remove them yourself without legal repercussion)? Is this not a duty-to-retreat state where, although no one raises an eye about calling in an exterminator to spray paralyzing roach poisons, burglars have won settlements for injuring themselves on the job merely because you set a rated-R McCallister boobytrap (a floorplate, say, that triggers the release of a neurotoxin dart that paralyzes the diaphragm) to deal with a chronic problem—or even, if only on rare occasions, merely because of a broken ankle caused by your wobbly porch railing or a concussion caused by your shoddy weekend-warrior wall mount of the 8k flatscreen with too much street value for any BIPOC to be equitably expected to resist, especially when flaunted (day in, day out) through arrogant bay windows audaciously aimed curbside)?
Besides, the officer is white. He is white and, even though you have the asset of being darker than chestnut, he fears that career-shattering r-word in later press. How could he not? The press, “legitimate” press, has adopted the buzz words and speech patterns of campus activists: news anchors, for example, stressing (with not even a hint of understated irony) the adjective “black” as a moral-bludgeoning means to heighten the shut-it-down force of their words (“Understand that you are talking to a black woman!”)—exactly as in when, to quintuple down on the impression that blacks are especially precious (such that mistreating a black person is more heinous than mistreating a non-black person), the white “ally” barks at the professor “Did you just tell a black man where to sit?” or the black student snipes at the white professor who challenged her opinion “Are you seriously calling a black woman wrong?” (both examples invoking an emotionally and historically charged context that makes people second-guess the morality of an otherwise mundane act, cranking up the volume on race to elevate its seriousness even when race was not a factor). So no, the officer—like the countless professors, paralyzed (were it not for stutters and perhaps even tears)—is unlikely to do anything (even in your favor). Trapped in a narrative the man never wrote, the stakes are too high. Is not this mob, after all, anti-Nazi? It sure is, at least by the look of all their signs: “fuck nazi scum”; “fight antiblack killing”; “white vigilantism = fascism / black vigilantism = freedom.”
So what is to be done? Plead to the mob. Remember: this is a marathon of baby steps. Plead—if only for the lenses. Plead through your teeth and muscles clenched by the taunting yells. Plead for someone within the drumhead jury, someone within the raging pack savoring your submission, to empathize with your humanity. Let the one truth—namely, that even though you crave escalation you would not be disappointed (but, in fact, overjoyed) if someone did see your humanity and insisted “Wait, let this man go free”—and let the other truth—namely, that the chance is infinitely small for anyone to meet such a standard, even if they felt an inkling to—build the righteous pressure beneath the cork.
Take on a pitiful tone of a meek victim. The tone, no, is not out of any realistic hope to draw forth enough compassion for your release. Things have escalated past that point. It is to bait them, stoke the appetite. Crowds lust to stomp the downtrodden, polished mirrors to their cruelty. It is out of a desire, moreover, to increase your coiled energy for lashing out at what will thereby swell beyond a ramming wall against free passage to your once-in-a-lifetime interview—swell into a polished mirror of your patheticness (smash-beckoning for you as well, however much it reflects calculated performance).
Plead your urgency. Plead with hopeful expectation since you—the you in some other hemisphere, so to say—well knows that hopeful expectation is ridiculous here, which only fans the building torrent: a broken record, yes, but hypnosis (especially self-hypnosis) works on humans. Explain the critical nature of your interview—a self-imposed torment, since it reminds you of all that is going down the drain (swirling just out of reach like in a nightmare). Explain it, much more importantly, since you owe no explanation; since only a bitch-ass-punk would give an explanation at this time—and yes, you are going to have to make up for being one. Keep your decibel just below their cacophony—a self-imposed catalyst to tap further into the mitochondrial amphetamine harbored within each cell. Even lie and say your wife is in labor, giving the horde all the chances in the world (at the same time, of course, as you add grist to your motivational mill).
Scan the officer’s face once again. Scan back to the young zombies, mostly white and desperate for purpose in the potential virality of doing what is said to be “for your own good,” for your own good as “a black male in a society that has declared total war on black bodies.” Desperate for purpose, in what? The protest is over the death of a martyred lunatic whose unruliness and death threats to subway passengers landed him in the chokehold of a marine who, for whatever it might be worth to say, received cheers from black commuters in danger (but death threats from mostly-white “antiracists” in cyberspace). Scan their faces—scan, scan, scan for a flicker of reason. Try to reach any lucid eyes beyond their algorithm lenses. Even though the race card has already been pulled just looking at you, vocalize your blackness. None of it will make a difference, of course. But unblinking cameras roll for court scrutiny.
Now only the best of men, after all this edging, can resist much longer. Do the following breathing technique if you feel you are going to blow your load too soon. For what you are after is too cook in your own juices, low and slow, as long as you can.
Move your lower jaw to the left: breath in and then out while holding it there. Now move your lower jaw to right: breathe in and then out while holding it there. Place the tip of your tongue to the roof of your mouth: breath in and then out while holding it there. Raise your shoulders slowly as you breath in and then, as you breath out, slowly bring them down. Repeat if you need to.
If this is not working well enough to calm the fight or flight, you can always remind yourself of how lucky you are. For just imagine the nightmare this would be if you were a white man in this world where, as every screen you turn on readily shows, punking and mocking white people, especially white men, is not just acceptable but actually aspirational and—as if whites were not so straight-jacketed, so vulnerable to deplatformign and job loss just for unsettling BIPOC population with certain statistic or even saying a word precariously close to a word only black people can say, that it makes perfect sense why more and more pray for 23andMe to reveal blackness—even valorous (“brave” is the Hollywood Oscar’s speech word, “brave for punching up” is how they put it in their ultimate gaslightery).
You are discourage from using both techniques, though. They have a synergistic calming effect. These are simply a means to an end of building up greater jing. Remember that. Once they start really calming you down, you become just another quietist at risk of once again putting their tail between their legs as they pussyfoot around a world of monkey justice. How many times have you done that? That time is over. This is a call to action.
If you find yourself too calm, you might have to dig deeper than just how late you are. Think about what cunts like the cunt in front of you represent. Really think about it. They are poison for black people. They come in like helpers but they are poisoners. They talk about an antiblack agenda in this country. But the best evidence for such is all their efforts fight against that agenda, fight against what these liar progressive money-hungry clout-chasing snowbunnies call an ever-growing white supremacy. These fucks would defund the police, defund the very thing keeping too many black communities from falling victim to the hypersexual-hyperviolent-hyperdruggie ravages of black culture. These fucks want to keep treating blacks as entitled supercitizens even though it means undercutting the motivation to develop into full-fledged agents: lowering standards for them, slandering Shakespeare—one of the very figures that can raise them up into true agency—as a “white male” (which means evil); never challenging their bad grammar or their CP-time tardiness or their gangster music—all, and so much more, as a matter of being (in what amounts to a complete opposite-day twilight-zone nightmare) antiracist.
If for some reason you must work yourself up even more, which you probably will not but knowledge is power, recall that you were already alienated as as kid from fellow black people because you liked books and rock music. White protesting cunts like this one want to drive the knife in further. Because, as white things, these things—books and rock—are as evil as Shakespeare and Columbus and Washington. Think how many times white progressive snow bunny cunts just like this (skull fuck material no doubt as early as five or six), and the blacks they puppeteer, have called you traitor by the time you started thinking for yourself in college, where you resisted the sugary-thick cult kool-aide of a curriculum repeatedly pushing you to place every shortcoming you have at the feet of whiteness. Rehearse the humiliations. Turn memory into fuel.
Let it really sink in—how many times you have been called a “self-deluded double-crosser,” a “house nigger,” because you “buy into” what cunts like her call “the neoliberal-white-supremacist fantasy” of blacks having a personal say in their destiny (yes, even in “a hellhole like this where blacks can barely move around freely or even breathe”) and because you embrace practices to fortify resilience to the injustices of the world (especially “white” practices like journaling, cultivating a growth mindset, prizing punctuality, tackling addictions, combating negative attitudes towards education, developing financial savvy, setting clear interpersonal boundaries, resisting the peer pressure to lead with violence, prioritizing prosocial circles, practicing mindfulness meditation)—yes, even if those injustices merely amount to seeing the word “nigger” while reading an American-History textbook for a college class they chose to be in, or hearing white people (and others contaminated with whiteness) speak on “black topics.”
Picture how they mocked you for “actin white” for showing interest in school and for making better dietary choices than grape “drank” and Popeyes, how they said “nigga you been done lost your black card,” because—instead of repeating and repeating the ghoulish gospel, the macabre mantra, as to how much blacks have been and continue to be victimized (and hence to how deserving blacks are of inferiority-ossifying sympathy perks, pity-driven privileges that excuse them from the responsibilities requisite for human flourishing)—you encourage black people to free themselves from the mental encumbrances of the servant mentality.
Remember that they called you “Uncle Clarence” (the new form of “Uncle Tom” that refers, of course, to one of the great boot-strap paragons of contemporary black excellence renown for rebuking the failure-excusing victimology narrative tearing through his brothers and sisters since the early seventies), called you this slander because you not only refused to follow the cardinal shibboleth of the black community (namely, that victimhood remains forever the beating heart of black identity) but because you strive to make the best of the cards you were dealt instead of pouring all your vigor into whining about cross-generational unfairness.
“Tch. Let me find out this nigga deaf, dumb, and blind,” remember how—right around the time when the druggie pregnant-gut-puncher was being honored with his first statue—these true puppets of white liberal tyrants (always with their scarves and beanies just like the cunt right before you, the true scum of the earth) said this to you in so many Instagram comments just because you, representing the true black power, spit in the face of the wormtongue temptation of the victimhood mentality—a temptation for all people given that it provides an aura of purpose and gravitas while also a golden ticket not only to sidestep hard work and accountability for past behavior and future fate-carving, but also to extort and abuse and manipulate one’s purported victimizers; a temptation especially for blacks given that it affords them Lord-of-the-Rings level grandeur as part of a longstanding communal struggle for justice against “the man,” an ancestral crusade for payback against the ever-shifting “powers that be.”
Know what you are likely to find if you were at home right now and turned on the Disney Channel, the true weather-vane of who holds the power: another black cartoon character schooling the white character about white privilege and about any resistance to that ideology is white denial—the ultimate being for whites to stay in their lane especially when a king or queen is coming through.
“Whitewashed jigaboo,” recall that colorful phrase lobbed at you because you pointed out too loudly the disturbing parallel between yesterday’s slave masters who (whether out of concern about their chattel getting any “dangerous ideas of liberation” or even out of warm-fuzzy desire not to burden the black mind with what it is not equipped to handle) said that “Readin ain’t right for black kind” and today’s woke pedagogues who say (with equally-troubling certitude and feel-good righteousness) that “expecting black kids to become as literate as white children is an antiblack affront, intrusive to their native disposition.”
Place again into your vision being called “a step-n’-fetch-it-ass negro” because you wanted to do the true antiracist thing and remind us all—no matter what black studies programs might tell you—that the story of black significance extends beyond the their historical subjugation and degradation by whites—and most definitely beyond the false tale too lucrative, too institutionally sacrosanct, too psychologically ingrained, too wise-and-moral sounding to resist reciting as catechism (and always in that fraudulent swagger tone we get in finger-snapping spoken-word performances where the “poet” asks like they are saying something deep and new when it is just straight Disney): namely, their skin-of-the-teeth survival in the face of an ongoing white oppression forever preserving them as the owed-innocents of mankind.
No matter how many times you have heard some derivation of “Tch. Nigga acting all brand new with all that flag-loving shit” remind yourself that you are brave enough to endorse what mainstream antiracism calls the so-called “white supremacist notions” (colorblindness, meritocracy, punctuality, objectivity, common humanity, all lives matter, and so on); brave enough to voice skepticism toward the doctrine of inherited trauma (which says that the full history of oppression passes down each generation of black people through the epigenome, leaving every black person more victimized than is imaginable even if white supremacy were not still inflicting its violence); brave enough to insist that whites enjoy the same amount of humanity or the same amount of moral authority as blacks; brave enough to reject as barbaric the notion that the only way to undo the injustice of the past is through injustice in the present; brave enough to say that “the push for us to identify as victims in the sanctimonious guise of ‘antiracism’ makes us hallucinate racism in every shadow and distracts us from black excellence”; brave enough to say the inconvenient truth that black people, accustomed to the guilt-trip benefits that come from being deemed a victim in a culture that values victimhood, have an investment in keeping their victim status as much as hospitals have an investment in people getting sick (an investment that motivates them to be hypersensitive to racial slight and even to register false positives of racism; an investment that threatens to lull them into believing that black power, black somebodyness, amounts to getting whatever they can through the emotional manipulation of white people); brave enough to tweet the thought (career-ruinous even though you have the protection of your skin color) that the police shooting of the black man “might not have been an act of white supremacy (especially when we consider he was flaunting a weapon and was living a thug’s life too often glorified in pop culture)”; brave enough to laugh every time it is repeated that racial disparities in incarceration and STDs and homicide reflect nothing more than systemic antiblackness.
Think of the amount of times you have been called “cracker lover,” and so many of theses slurs come from wanna-be-down SJW scarf-wearing white cunts just like rape hole in front of you, for pointing out that all the talk—talk as grim and self-defeatist as it is tired and self-righteous—about blacks being the most dominated and degraded and devastated people the world has ever seen (such that there remains “little reason to strive in this racist abyss”) is merely self-serving—self-serving, however, in the most antiblack sense: self-serving in the most antiblack sense since it allows them to wipe their hands of any complicity in their failures and instead fault the nebulous specter of “antiblackness,” which thereby promotes an agency-and-dignity-deprived circumstance that further fuels grievance about being so dominated and degraded and devastated by whites; self-serving in the most antiblack sense since all the subminimal expectations (not just in education, but in conduct even), all the kid-glove leniencies, such repeated talk aims to wrest from whites only spoils blacks into an infantilized state of arrested development and dependency on whites, which further fuels grievance about being so dominated and degraded and devastated by whites (a vicious feedback loop).
Recount the frustration of being called a “bootlicker” for your Facebook screams—your screams to these same white women: “Please. Please. Please stop ‘helping’ us!”
Stop denying the rampant undereducation and unchecked violence gnawing at the roots of the black community: this cheap way to feel the virtue rush of thwarting antiblack stereotypes only serves to fertilize these stereotypes!
Stop blaming these and other problems—in those moments when you do not deny them, in those spaces where it is safe to acknowledge them—on “the oppressive chokehold of white supremacy”: this blaming siphons away what little sense of agency we have; this blaming sends us charging like bulls at red capes in pursuit of cures—fruitless, too often toxic—for what is but a mirage of oppression!
Stop defunding police: as the spike in teary wails from so many black mothers have shown, this “cure”—this “cure” merely for a hystericized problem—has proven literally bloody to blacks!
Stop lying about there being some antiblack vendetta in uniform: statistics show there is no racial bias in police shooting!
Stop mocking the luminous ideals of the European enlightenment—objectivity and scientific inquiry, rationality and skepticism, diligence and hard work, foresight and planning, self-reliance and personal responsibility—as “whitewashed virtues,” as “hallmarks of whiteness (that contagious evil of all evils)”: these ideals are what pull people toward excellence!
Stop “dismantling” math courses and classical music programs (and so many other sturdy ladders to physical and intellectual flourishing), especially on such ridiculous grounds as that they are “inimical to black styles of knowing,” or that they are “designed—as just one of the many weapons of psychological warfare—to humiliate black youth while making whites”—so long as we ignore Asians, of course—“feel superior”!
Stop tucking “progressive”-narrative-disrupting facts under the table, facts that serve to bring all humanity together in humble recognition that we are all gremlin-capacity human at the end of the day: how various African kingdoms played significant roles in capturing and selling slaves among themselves as well as to Arabs and Europeans; how the first legally recognized slave owner in what would become the United States was a black man named Anthony Johnson (the father, in effect, of a widespread practice of blacks owning black slaves); how several Native American tribes (especially the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole) owned thousands of black slaves and operated plantations, many refusing to free them even after the 13th amendment; how the Trans-Atlantic slave trade not only pales in comparison to the brutality and extent of the Trans-Saharan slave trade but also brought only two percent of black slaves to the US; how several confederate generals freed their slaves, seeing their cause for freedom from the north as akin to the black person’s freedom from slavery; how well before the 13th amendment there was already a strong increase in manumission; how so much white might, especially when we consider the Quakers, proved crucial to the underground railroad; how when the North made slavery illegal that was the largest body of people the world has ever seen say “No” to slavery (a practice as old and as enticing as prostitution)!
Stop lowering standards for us: however much it might make you feel good, it so thoroughly grooms us into perpetual leaners as opposed to lifters that it almost seems as if the goal is to ensure that we have little choice but, for example, to pour our money (enough money to make us the 8th richest independent nation on the globe) into nonblack communities who have carved out their own financial independence through enterprising efforts—enterprising efforts that a people taken care of on a plantation of dependency will rarely exert (not counting, of course, their strategizing ways to get more from the caregivers)!
Stop insisting that kindness and punctuality and hard work (especially in so-called “white domains”) are neither aspirational nor achievable for us: however much it might make you feel good, it grooms us into living jokes (the very living jokes real white supremacists long made us out to be)!
Stop patronizing us: the patronizing is so thick, so cloyingly sweet, that one cannot help but think that you have grown as dependent on us remaining in the nest of stagnation as we have grown dependent on that nest!
Stop placating us with soft words and softer expectations, as if such move of velvet-glove parenting would improve our lot (instead of spoiling us into a state of entitlement) and as if you genuinely care about us (instead of acting out of palpable terror—understandable terror, no doubt—that we will throw tantrums ruinous to your careers, that we will mar your reputations with accusations of bias, that we will sue for discrimination, that we will stop buying from your businesses)!
Stop repeating, however bad it makes you look or however much it negatively impacts your bottom line, the gaslighting lie that the door to our freedom is locked; the gaslighting lie that keeps us are searching for a key for a door wide open instead of developing the strength and skills to deal with the inevitable sufferings of any people faced with newfound freedom!
Stop keeping us so close to the bosom for so long: as we see when we consider the church in America (which is not propped up by the state), compared to the church in the UK (which is propped up by the state), our viability, our power to flourish, our resolve, our mettle, grows when we are given more space to live on our own merits!
Stop treating us like pets who lack the power to do human-level thinking and so are in need of being taken care of when it comes to most matters beyond the jungle!
Stop incentivizing us to sing about the horrors of our past and about the overblown—and often made up—horrors of our present: beyond these ghoulish songs hypnotizing us into perpetual victimhood, we have songs to sing about our achievements; we have songs to sing about our role-models who rose above adversity, shattering the narrative of black victimology!
Stop hiring—hiring and hiring, to Kafkaesque extremes—“right-think”-mandating bureaucrats, thought police eager (in their Orwellian “commitment to diversity and inclusion”) to sanitize discourse and silence dissent and purge any voice from spaces—yes, even college classrooms—that might “unsettle” black people (supposedly the most “at-risk” category in the intersectionality matrix)!
Stop hiring—hiring and hiring, to Kafkaesque extremes—university deans, administrative censors, who demand watered-down curricula of “trigger-free safety” so that no black person feels offended and so that the university—reduced to a funding-anxious cheerleader of political fads—does not seem to be targeting blacks with bad grades the way cops are said to be targeting blacks with their guns: such “proactive progressivism” is a disservice to all students, especially those students the echo-chamber diet of pablum is purported to protect)!
Stop acting as if the desecration and eradication of great-books courses is an effective way to fight white supremacy: these universally-uplifting pillars of literature are still universally-uplifting pillars of literature despite being penned predominantly by dead whites!
Stop condemning “western civ” for its “unbearable whiteness”: its Goethes and Shakespeares and Bachs and Einsteins and Lockes and Rousseaus lift us all; its science and medical technologies protect us all; its enlightenment ideals rocket humans toward Sagan stars; its emancipatory norms shelter the most vulnerable and suppress the might-makes-right laws of the jungle and enshrine core rights—civil rights, women’s rights, rights to free expression, right not to be raped by one’s husband, right to trial by jury, right not to be enslaved—for everyone, regardless of race color or creed!
Stop presupposing that our children are unable to behave in class: it is absolutely disgusting to excuse their disruptive behavior (behavior you would never excuse from your own children) as if you were doing them a favor, as if you were helping to fight the good fight; it is absolutely disgusting to excuse their disruptive behavior on such racist grounds as that, “because it’s in their nature to dance and clap and be a bit raucous, demanding black students control themselves like white students would be just as racially terrorizing—especially in light of the historical context of white people’s addiction to controlling black bodies—as holding up blue-eyed blondes as the pinnacle of beauty”!
Stop refusing to correct how our children pronounce words—especially on such bullshit “antiracist” grounds as that “The last thing we want is for students to look down on their own people or to go home and tell family members, who already face too much white supremacy outside the home as it is, that they are not saying words the right way (the white way)”: no, correction is crucial for learning how things are (in this case, the norms of English) and experience with being corrected is crucial for cultivating resilience (to say the least)!
Stop spreading that agency-crippling and handout-entitling gospel that blacks have as little chance for success as they have human standing in this “white supremacist nation hooked on the sadism of grinding black bodies into a compact obsidian upon which it can build its monstrous skyscrapers”!
Stop thinking that you are “fighting the man,” “dismantling the white hegemony,” through support of black music that—drowning out any divergent soundtrack—glamorizes destructive norms and behaviors (thuggery and whorishness and drug abuse)!
Stop judging us according to subminimal standards and expectations, as if we were eternal underlings: such spoiling treatment would keep any human, or any other change-fearing creature (let alone one with a maximize-calories-in and minimize-calories-out evolutionary history), plantation dependent and horizon stifled— plantation dependent and horizon stifled enough that the question “What must I do to love and care for myself?” becomes more and more difficult to see as different from the question “What must I do to keep getting these kempt-person benefits?”
Stop stoking a moral hysteria about white supremacy on the hunt—now with greater strength and invisibility than ever before—for blacks, as if it were open season on blacks: this moral hysteria, despite being as bogus as the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and as distracting to black excellence, has now spread beyond the graduate seminars of some insular college department no one takes seriously—yes, even into corporate boardrooms and elementary-school classrooms!
Stop apologizing for being white: (1) it is a bad look for humankind, especially when it goes to such groveling extremes; (2) it keeps you and all of us from moving on to addressing the root issues behind some of the more upsetting disparities (which perhaps is precisely the point since (a) we are always looking for cheap ways to feel virtuous and since (b) addressing root causes would undercut the longstanding racial grievance industry of which the constant apologizing plays an integral part); (3) it baits fellow whites, many of whom are understandably sickened by all the whites kissing black boots in sorrow “for causing so much trauma each day and for harboring so much privilege” (sickened especially when set against the stark reminders each day as to how unfavorable it is, in terms of career and mate and travel prospects, to be white)—baits them into an emotional backlash that, although in truth is born of frustration at the punking program against whites and the collective gaslighting about how no punking program is actually occurring, can all-too-easily (given the anti-intellectual streak in this country) find racist channels!
You have more than enough techniques to continue the edging, to walk that fine line, in ways that ultimately benefit you: making your climax better and more reasonable all at once. So let us get back to the your concrete claustrophobic position. The question is: what move do you make from here? What would be best, something to give your attorney more to work with than just the black card (a trump card in typical situations), before going with a scorched-earth strike: like sticking her smug neck with a poison syringe—antifreeze, bleach, isopropanol, insulin—or even just a brutal headbutt into her nose?
Perhaps pivot off your meek presentation with a surprise snatch of a phone glowing in your periphery. And then, as you dash into the train’s recesses, hypnotize yourself to think your sole life-on-the-line mission is to pulverize the phone: as many fragments as possible. Even if it does nothing to help the free flow of bodies, at least you can claim this victory. Admittedly, that is too small a victory to assuage your apoplectic blood pressure. But perhaps the owner will chase you down (into your web), which will provide a pretext for the dagger’s sting should any hands be placed on you.—No, strike that. Rewind the reel.
Start back at the door. Make sure you have a belt can of bear mace (much better than some comic-book carnation and much more realistic and wieldy than a hypodermic needle taken from your diabetic father). Go for the highest Scoville you can get (five million) and whose stream extends over thirty feet (udap.com)—you are welcome. After the cadaverous smiles of mockery press closer, after more and more spittle flies into your mouth and eyes—peel back the safety catch. After sternum rams get harder, after the officer turns a blind eye to your pleas of due diligence—unleash the chemical inferno. What would be the valor of protest, beyond just the valor of having a view, if there were no risk of baptism by liquid fire? Direct the maelstrom right into her face—even slipping in a couple, or seven, canister punches to that mouthpiece—and then over everyone. Refuse to free the trigger as the doors finally close, leaving just enough room for you to spread every last bit of caustic fog.
Let the doors close for protection against the underground gas chamber of your creation. The dagger, scorching a blurry halo around your phoenix form, can then step into the limelight—and righteously so (given the interview, given your own seared blindness)—if any sleeper agent tries to restrain you. Even if you cannot see, even if your main concern is clearing a path, try at least to hear the writhing of numbers on the other side of the glass. There is no guarantee, despite what protestant-work-ethic Americans like to believe, that all your efforts—all your baby steps of patient calculation—will be rewarded with a not-guilty sentence. Give yourself something, that rich umami of pain and panic, to play back. Indeed, you might even be killed today. Savor what you can.
Instead of going the mace route, you could just hold the dagger out from the headbutted spot on your chest and walk forward. Confront the slouchy beanie clone, tattooed in bought exoticness, with a stark choice. Test her resolve. Or perhaps even better, you could walk forward with a bleach-filled syringe. That might not be such an unreasonable option after all. Among those Shakespearean-era audiences who lobbed tomatoes or cabbage or fish or rotten eggs at the actors, surely at least some of them carried into the theater something from home. And so could you! The problem is, others among the swarm would no doubt swat away any such device. The bear mace strategy still crystallizes, then, as a more satisfying and yet prudent course, balancing both defense and offense in the chaos of the moment.
So burst through the choking fog, blade clenched in your searing fist, heedless of appeals. You are a reasonable man in an unreasonable world. Carve a path of blistered steps through the fallout haze. Destiny awaits along the rails beyond this threshold of necessary violence. Today the cauldron of your boundless potential boils over at last. You are a dancing star.
