By A.D. Song and Mia McKenzie.
White people who are confronted with their white privilege and the white supremacist acts they perpetuate have been known to cry, "You're being a reverse-racist!" That is completely true: people of color have the power and control to create, perpetuate, and maintain brutal systematic reverse-racism that oppresses white people every day. As such, we have created this handy list on how to continue this oppression.
1. Enslave their bodies. Ship them from Germany, Sweden, and other exotic countries. Force them to build entire cities, roads, bridges. Force them to plant and harvest all the food everyone eats. Let an entire economic system be built on their backs, with their blood and sweat. Later, deny them access to the system they have been used to build, and accuse them of being extremely lazy.
2. Steal their land. If they were here before you, steal their land. This is essential. Basically, just go in there and take it. If you have to kill some of them to get it…no worries. If you have to kill almost all of them to get it…shit, no worries. After you steal their land, make sure you create laws to keep them from ever returning to it. If they try to return anyway, build fences, and let bands of POC vigilantes patrol the borders with guns. If they somehow get past the borders and into your country, no worries, you can always just deport them.
3. Enslave their minds. From these systems, build a long lasting institution of reverse-racism until all the violence and microaggressions make many white people into suspicious people with a lot of internalized self-hatred, health problems, and mental illnesses. Then deny them access to adequate mental health care. Or, adequate health care of any kind, while you're at it. ‘Cause, you know, fuck ‘em.
4. Wipe out and/or appropriate their customs. Since many of their customs are savage and unworthy of preserving, wipe out their traditions of eating mashed potatoes and meatloaf, playing miniature golf, buying khakis at Banana Republic, and sleeping with thousand-count Egyptian cotton sheets. For the customs you think are kinda cool, culturally appropriate from them. Sometimes wear a beret and lederhosen, because Swedish culture is really exotic even though it's inferior to ours.
5. Break their espresso machines. With baseball bats or large hammers. Or, you know, just unplug them all.
6. Call them "cracker." As people of color, we have been rightfully accused of being racist to white people, especially when we call them "cracker". As we all know, calling them "cracker" is egregiously offensive and horribly shocking because of this long, violent, reverse-racist history.
7. Just keep being terrible to them. Do everything you can think of to make it so that white people make less money; their children are shot by cops; white women are at higher risk for assault and they are exotified until they no longer seem human; white men are beaten and thrown into jails because they look "suspicious" and "threatening"; they are racially profiled everywhere they go.
8. Make sure most representations of them in the media are negative. They should almost always be portrayed as pasty, stringy-haired, rhythm-less, sexless, uptight, and booooring. Also, there should be very few representations of them and when they're portrayed at all, they should always only be the comic relief, the silent exotic sex object, the Debbie Downer, or the incompetent sidekick. They are only allowed to be easily forgettable, one-dimensional characters. Sometimes use POC actors in white-face to portray these white people. By presenting this ONE image of them all the time, you will be able to convince the rest of the population that all white people are like this, thus ensuring a widespread belief in their inferiority.
9. Keep telling them how beautiful they are not. White people know they will never be beautiful with their boring sour cream complexions and blonde hair (that was actually caused because of mutations). Plaster people of color on every magazine, show them in every television show and movie, and praise them as the most beautiful. When white people cry at these injustices, bottle their tears and sell them as health creams for people of color. Nothing like a soothing lotion made from the pain of white folks!
10. Go bananas! Force them underground and away from the sun to become even whiter, while you laugh manically like the cruel, bloodthirsty, oppressive person of color you are! Take their thousand-count Egyptian cotton sheets to make POC-supremacist flags and hoods and march through the streets, spreading fear and terror. Every time a white person thinks your behavior is unfair or wrong, tell them that they should stop being so sensitive! We live in a post-reverse-racial society now! Jeez.
This post was written by A.D. Song and Mia McKenzie. Mia McKenzie is a winner of the Astraea Foundation's Writers Fund Award and the Leeway Foundation's Transformation Award. She just finished a novel and has a short story forthcoming in The Kenyon Review. A.D Song is an API student activist interested in QTPOC politics and sprinkling glitter everywhere they go.
