I read the same five people over and over again. But it’s Toni Morrison; Toni Cade Bambara is a huge influence... - Kaitlyn Greenidge

I write for Black women. If others enjoy as well, I am really happy that they connect to the work. But if I were to write a piece that everyone except Black women connected to, I would feel, on some level, that I’d failed.

I said, “The term white backlash frames those actions as inevitable and natural, as if order is being restored after Black liberation goes ‘too far.’ And while I agree that white backlash inevitably follows Black freedoms, I do not think there’s anything natural or blameless about it. What if the conversation instead was framed as ‘There’s something in the construction of whiteness that demands violent supremacy, when even the glimmer of another way of being comes through, and why is that?’“ So, I thought a lot about how I was taught about white backlash in history class growing up. I don’t even think we were allowed to attach the word “white” to it. I think it was just sort of like backlash in general. It’s often framed as sort of, “Well, what do you expect people to do? Like, this is sort of like a bridge too far.” And even for myself, I think I’ve internalized that.

We’re going on like year 250 of this argument that doesn’t seem to be true. A statistic that really struck me that I read a few years back was that the Obama administration is the only administration in like the last 40 years, I think, that didn’t have any felony convictions come out of anybody working in that administration. Unfortunately, that is a remarkable fact of American political life. So, even with a presidency, and Obama I’m not suggesting was like a wonderful, blameless president and did everything correct, but within the letter of the law, he sure did apparently. So, even in that instance of the Obamas so carefully curating their public persona and public approach for a white audience, for a white middle-class swing voter audience, and really catering to that audience in their policy, and general stance—even in that case of like the best “Good Negro” we could ever produce resulted in Trump. I just really want to push back on this idea that white backlash is somehow something that can be satiated or stopped in any sort of way, and that it’s more a function of the social construct of whiteness and what’s within that.