The Aftermath of Writing on White Women’s Tears
In an age of recorded Amy Coopers and murderous police
Last November I wrote about an all too familiar experience I had with white women’s tears taking a room hostage during a Seminary conversation.
Although the piece rings true for thousands of readers, the Seminary’s reaction to my freedom of speech revealed a foul and churlish underbelly of evangelicalism that simply does not like when Black people aren’t smiling Jemimas and Bens that live to serve them.
In the end, I was hurt by the Seminary’s reaction, ill-asked questions, assumptions and deafening silence but here’s what went down.
When I published in November I felt a glimmer of validation from people knowing exactly what I was talking about when I brought up White women’s tears. They’d experienced the same thing in school at every level, in their break rooms at work, during meetings, in principals’ offices, in interviews, at dinner tables, and between roommates and partners. It seemed only a phenomenon to white women that their tears were historical ammunition for subliminal racism and manipulation.
However, the truth dimmed in comparison to how it made a niche Christian community feel and soon after publishing I was hushed into a clandestine meeting in a corner office of the Seminary building after work hours under the guise of “checking in”.
My hint of accomplishment soon sunk down in the Garvey’s mail ordered chair of a Dean’s office where my tact social observation was patted down to merely being inconsiderate for white feelings.
I was asked, or rather interrogated, if I intended to hurt their (beloved) white female students with my piece? If I considered the effect on the community? Now indirectly stating that whiteness and white feelings comprised the community. Did I run the article by my [white and male] academic advisor prior to publishing? If I had considered that? If not, would I consider doing so in the future?
Although everyone was an adult responsible for their own emotions, did I anticipate the hurt I could inflict? Questions that left me more puzzled were along the lines of: What did I mean by ‘asking me to take down my article was a form of censorship’? What did I mean by ‘sacred space and non-disclosure as mutually exclusive’? Soon I was told that “crocodile tears”, as a saying, was a form of judgement. Indirectly asked if I understood how it made Black women look mean or too Black for the White future theologians who were still learning and needed a Black guiding hand along the way. I answered questions like, ‘Did I understand that the article came off as pejorative?’ by saying that that experience for the white women in the room who may have felt judged was a but a sliver of my everyday.
I was hushed into a clandestine meeting in a corner office of the Seminary building after work hours under the guise of “checking in”
I was invited into a performative space of trust and understanding which really took shape as a generational divide and tit for tat of oppression.
I was advised on anecdotes of a time when Black people weren’t allowed to say what upset them but instead guided in love like white Jesus did. I was told that I should empathize with whiteness. That I should perform several unnecessary verbs such as teaching, waiting, educating, and understanding with whiteness lest my Blackness, right and true, honest and brazen, beloved all the same by God, scare whiteness away into a further corner of ignorance it might never escape.
The conversation went on to sound like a lost chapter of Huckleberry Finn and I continued to defend myself blow after blow although my body went hot. I still sat and explained that one may dub a conversation as a “safe space” but it does not prohibit a reporter from writing about it. That non-disclosure conversations require non-disclosure forms and signatures of compliance, all of which were absent. That I have been empathetic with white people my entire life.That “crocodile tears” is a very common expression. That I was tired of the same old same old.
Then I sat and thought about the white women who flooded offices and begged for a kleenex to the point that initiated that meeting. They who pushed their eyes and heads to the floor when I walked past them on campus or in a hallway. Who might stick BLM stickers to their laptops but grimaced as I entered a room.
I realized there was no winning this conversation but that I’d already won overall. They were so upset that I compared their tears to the dishonest outcries of the white women who got Emmett Till and George Stinney killed. Yet they used their tears and outcry in attempt to have me reprimanded, tarred and feathered, gaslighted, and bearing a stained memory of having to stand up, not for my feelings being hurt, but for telling the truth.
Somehow they stood against oppression and discrimination but when faced with the micro-aggressive way in which they could oppress and discriminate it was just too hard to handle. Instead of sitting with it, reading up on it, or educating themselves they ran to open offices and pointed fingers of blame and used their famed white woman aggression towards a Black woman who had the gall to say something that didn’t make them look like allies.
It seemed only a phenomenon to white women that their tears were historical ammunition for subliminal racism and manipulation.
Later I reflected on Jesus weeping not as a weapon but out of compassion and at the tragedy of sin while the tearful weaponry in November was still being used as artillery and proved my initial and overarching point.
Months later in the midst of a global pandemic, as the world read about the murder of Breonna Taylor, watched as Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd were murdered-while-Black, experienced protests, looting, and a broad expanse of BLM media, I found it terribly ironic to receive emails declaring solidarity and the ‘work against racial violence’ from the same seminary that attempted to admonish Black female me when I spoke on a very common instance of racial violence beneath their noses.
I told myself not to comment when emails came in touting equity. I said I shouldn’t note that it’s almost as if when a Black person dies, the mourning and repentance can begin but when they're only figuratively bleeding or struggling for breath after the emotional, social, or mental attack inflicted upon them, one can keep, defend, and apply force to the knee on their neck. Perhaps even adding a bible for extra pressure.
