White culture isn’t good for anyone even white people, “ the words of my mixed race ghetto skola mama sailed through my ears when the sci-fi horror movie called Rachel Dolizol unfolded. As the white skinned daughter of a mixed race, disabled,, houseless, single mama I have always claimed my wite-skin privilege. I have named its infiltration powers and the ways this deeply racist, amerikkklan society stolen by settler colonizers who look like me have continued their legislative, education and institutional terror over everyone of color. I was taught early by my mama and our life of struggle that it was not only essential, but dire, that I use every ounce of my skin privilege so me and my family could survive as well as every other person in our same position.
The Sci Fi Movie called Rachel D.
So why was Rachel so afraid of her white-ness? Perhaps because it is so evil, and in her twisted, fairy-tale desiring mind she was empathing instead of owning. Owning is hard. It means you have to swallow the hard pill of perpetration. Everyday In everything you do and walk and see and be.. And yet what she might not have understood is this is the same confusion the saviors of NGO’s and non-profit industry workers and media producers, artists and actors who write, act, speak, create and profit off of poor people don't get. We don’t want your fake empathing,saving, story-telling and/ or helping, what we want is what you and your ancestors, stole from us and continue to steal from us so we can re-build, create, make and manifest ourselves.
Hussling skin privilege to survive
From early on I had to understand that our houseless family would rely on my skin privilege or not make it. I was told that every bit of my white-looking self would be exploited for our collective survival. From apartments to motels to broke-down cars to jobs to customers the implicit racialized perception of “goodness” my “honesty” held by this racist kkkapitalist society was used to hustle access for us. When we did get a little bit of blood-stained dollars together, I was sent out to rent an apartment or motel room in a k-mart suit with a rent starter kit, i.e. a story, i was a single 25 year old girl making 65,000 a year at a full-time job. It never failed. I would get the place. We would run little surveys just for fun. My mama would go out and try the same thing and get heavily questioned, rejected, or just plain not called back. And best believe because of our recent experience with the launching of Mama House by me and three other mamas of color from 2007-10 nothing has changed.
More and more Rachel’s to come
Sadly the Dolizol woman’s strange sci-fi theft of culture and identity, spray tans and hair weaves, will probably become more prevalent over the years as settler colonialist with fuzzy connections to gentry and colonial genocide begin to face their own positions of un-culture in an increasingly Black and Brown world. Not to mention when profit margins and “research” grants are discovered by "white-science" and kkkoporations when they figure out how to make robots and change DNA and morph faces and skin color.for all the confused white people of the not to distant future
The capitalist away nation fueled by akkkademia, wealth-hoarding, the lie of land ownership, angst, colonization and racism is evil and yet it could not continue without the complicit and explicit support by all the white people who continue to benefit.
Trans-racial to Trans-Poor'?
The so-called Trans-racial process or fronting of Dolizol reminds me of all the people i have met over the years who front like they are poor, wearing dirty clothes and not washing their under-arms and "squatting" when they have perfectly good homes with loving families across the country to return home to. But instead, like Rachel, they decide to "front" , take up meager space, say nothing about the people they are actively displacing and stay in urban cities suffering from serious displacement crises, often adding to the displacement and gentriFUKation of hundreds of poor and working class people and people of color from their homes and neighborhoods of generations.
These are the hard lessons us Poor white, Black, Brown & Indigenous, gentriFUKed, houseless, disabled, Bordered, colonized, and racialized poverty skolaz at POOR Magazine’s PeopleSkool base our entire body of work around. Beginning with Theatre of the POOR about our multiple stories of trauma, racism, criminalization, houselessness, false borders, poverty industry pimping, colonial land theft and ableism from all four corners of Mama Earth, we teach young people with race, class and formal education privilege how to un-pack their relationship to our oppression,. How unlike the thousands of messages and lessons taught in the capitalist away nation that clearly teaches the lie of individualistic success, motherism and independence which relies on our separation from our families and communities and cultures, the pathologizing, profiting, researching and pimping of our stories and our lives and the endless reign of white –supremacist planned land theft and colonization, conscious white people can activate and create real change with a model we poverty skolaz call Community Reparations. This concept teaches back peoples love and spirit and humility, which we all have and institutes a radical concept in capitalism called Inter-dependence.
Selfish Appropriation vs Active Reparations
These lessons of truth taught to the descendents of the original land stealers, current perpetrators of Mama Earth's destruction, academics and multiple poverty industry executives are nothing less than urgent. Forget the guilt, fear or selfish appropriation white people. As our insanely twisted corporate culture continues its drive towards hyper displacement, and destruction of mama earth, it is more important than ever for people to understand, confront and activate movement, change and reparations based in realness, not hyper-realness so we can all heal and actually repair our colonized souls..
To find out more about the upcoming session of PeopleSkool's Decolonization/DeGEntriFUKation & Community Reparations Seminars in August email deeandtiny@poormagazine.org