As a Black woman who doesn’t give a shit, I’ve noticed an alarming trend lately among my co-workers— even among random white ladies on the street. Every so often, they look at me with these over-bright eyes— their eyes kinda remind me of my Gram’s eyes when the preacher is good at church, or the choir gets rollin— these white ladies trap me with their rabid, pious eyes, and they say: “Mary Lou, how are you?” And they might even clasp their corpse-colored fingers over my arm and pull me toward them. Their eyes spin and wheel inside their faces like a Tom and Jerry cartoon— hypnotized. “I haven’t seen you in so long! You wanna have dinner sometime?”

Some of these ladies are people who spoke five words to me before the pandemic. But now they see me in the hallway or the kitchen— even from over the partition at my desk— and their hypno-eyes wheel and spin, and they pull their lips back from wolfish grins. 

As if I am meat. Protein with which to nourish their white-guilt-ridden souls.

At first, I took this crazed look of hunger— this feverish expression of desire— to be nothing more than some leftover mania caused by the pandemic. Lock people in separate pens long enough, cover 3/4ths of their face any time they step in public, and barrage them with messages of doom every time they touch their remote, phone, or computer, and a few fragile souls are liable to snap, I’m sure. So the first couple of times, these well-dressed ladies from middle management stared me down in the hallway near the bathroom; I just attributed it to the same instinct that makes us all squint when we smile now.

Maybe this was part of their mask ritual. Arch and wiggle the brows. Crunch your crow’s feet. Squint through your lashes. 

But I grew slightly alarmed when they began to stop me— these Tesla-driving, pearl-wearing, middle-aged white ladies who never spoke five words to me before the pandemic.

I could hear my Mama saying, just like an angel on my shoulder: “Now, Mary Lou, don’t be lookin so uncomfortable. Mrs. Stevens asks you to read because you’re good at it.”

And I would talk with the Tesla-driving managers beneath a pall of awkwardness because I never saw them single anyone else out like that.

Even the young kids who work with me reviewing and collecting files— never paid me much more than a friendly mind before, but now they stop to chat. They have loud conversations about social justice and things like that, two cubicles over, and all the time, they’ll glance over their shoulders at me— these pale-moon faces with paper-white expressions and those hypno-eyes— just like they’re performing a trick, and they want me to applaud.

One girl who sat kitty-corner from me for a while loved to shop and tell everyone about what she bought. And one time, as if maybe she thought we were judging her, she shrugged her shoulders and lifted the corners of her permanently lemon-puckered lips and said: “I know I buy too much. I spend way more than I should, but I got these—” she taps her suede shoes together— “from a Black-owned business.” And her feverish eyes move to me. “I’m all about supporting that. Any time I travel with Paul, we try to find those sorts of places, you know.” Her feverish eyes bore into me.

As if I am supposed to give her a sticker. Puppy want a biscuit? That’s a good girl.

Thank goodness she didn’t stay in our section long. I found her as tasteful as someone genuflecting to their statue of the Virgin every time she walked past me.

When the masks finally came off, and I could see the hungry-wolf grins that went along with the hypno-eyes, I knew I was in trouble.

Let me tell you a few things about myself. A few things to clue you in on the strange new world in which I found myself. My name is Mary Lou Fletcher. I live in a small city in upstate New York where the cows in the surrounding county outnumber the people in town. The minority population of my city is almost non-existent— not because we’re some sorta sundown town (in fact, we’re very proud of our abolitionist connections) but just because in the great course of American history and the migration of the Jim-Crow-oppressed Southern Black family, we were not an appealing destination. You can sum up our dearth of minorities in one word: Economics.

My family and I— my own two kids and husband included—make up about twenty percent of the minority population total. That’s total minorities and not just Black folk.

Some would say this puts us at a significant disadvantage regarding our culture. Some would also say it puts us at greater risk as far as racism is concerned, and yeah, I remember remarks from girlfriends’ grandmothers that, thinking back now, were not strictly kosher. And there are a few old-timers at Maisie’s Diner I wouldn’t get within ten feet of, but other than that, I’ve lived a pretty sheltered life in the bosom of abolitionist upstate New York.

If my mama ever encountered ill will when she and my father came here, she never spoke of it to me. In fact, my mama is the one who gave me my two superpowers in life— superpowers she felt she never had but I secretly think she wished for. She gave me a plain, old-fashioned white lady’s name and taught me how to read and speak correctly. I might understand better English than half the people in my office. Everyone asks me to proof their documents, and when money gets tight, or I get bored, I tutor kids.

Now, in some ways, I am lucky to have grown up where I did so that acquiring this second superpower was possible. I read Thomas Sowell and John McWorter. I’m not foolish. Nobody minds you “talkin white” when you’re the only black kid in your class.

So in many ways, I thank the good Lord he surrounded me with cows and a dearth of economic opportunities. Maybe that’s selfish, but oh well.

I’m just me, Mary Lou, and I can only work with the hand that’s dealt me. I’m not so vain or insulated to think that my white name and white words haven’t helped me get to where I’ve gotten in this depressed rural economy, but I’ll tell you the truth. I never even thought of my name as a white lady’s name or my tongue as the white man’s tongue before two years ago.

Prior to two years ago, I was just Mary Lou, and that was just how I talked.

It makes me sad that the doom of 2020 made me a little crazy, too.

But anyways, when the masks were finally lifted, and the wolfish grins were revealed, I knew the old world and the old Mary Lou— who was just Mary Lou— were dead.

Now.

Now, I am the office’s resident Black Lady. The sole diverse face sitting in the mandatory HR diversity meetings. And those Tesla-driving, Democrat-voting white ladies from middle management had been given a new mission in life— one commissioned by other rich white ladies wracked by white-guilt and trapped too long in their monochrome worlds, tapping away at their laptops and stewing about the unfairness of Capitalism…

Absolution. Confession. Personal reparations.

I was a juicy hunk of dark meat, and these ladies were starving like religious acolytes who’d fasted too long.

And the worst part of this sudden realization, this alarming trend that was about to invade my life, is that now— because! of my cow-heavy community— there weren’t many other options for these rich, white ladies to work out the doctrines of their piety. It was either me or— my daughter?

Heaven help the rich, white lady who tries that!

___

Anyways, the alarming new reality bearing down on me is that I had become— almost overnight!— a political creature, whether I wanted to be or not. And believe me; I did not want to be. After the masks came off and those hungry-wolf grins greeted me as I stumbled toward the bathroom (especially when all the millennials in my office began genuflecting toward me like I was Mother Theresa), I was no longer my own person. I now belonged to all of them— those Tesla-driving, Subaru-owning, Democrat-voting righteous people. I was their Pet. Their icon. Both tormentor and Savoir. Their absolution and their condemnation.

And it fucking sucks.

I wanted to chop nuts two weeks into my awakening to this saga. Karate chop. All their nuts.

If I heard one more person refer— sotto voice— to the march they attended over the weekend in the nearest college town— or (Lord, the sanctimony!) that they’d gone to Albany when COVID danger was at its peak, but justice for Black Lives was more important that Black Lives killed by coronavirus— I was gonna show them the ire of a Black Lady Who Talks White.

And those HR trainings… All those driveling white eyes turning to me as they pronounced whichever manifestation of whiteness they were most guilty of and for which they repented, and “Mother Theresa, please forgive us.”

They all make me sweat. Since I am, in fact, insulated in my job— so insulated I don’t get my own HR meeting. I guess these things are preferably segregated. But I still wonder: Do Black people enjoy this? Watching adults grovel because of real or imagined sins? Listening to them list all the reasons they believe they are better than you or were born with more opportunity than you simply because of their skin color?

It might be a power trip for some people, but it makes me feel queasy. Especially when some poor, bookish girls say: “I’m gonna read more diverse authors. I never realized how colonized my bookshelves are.” It breaks my heart to think of that mousy-haired girl going home and chucking her Jane Austen into the trash.

Honey! Who gives a shit what you read?

Do Black people enjoy this— being segregated by the white Tesla-driving, college-educated, Democrat-voting crowd AGAIN. So— a few college-educated, Democrat-voting, famous Black people go along with them? So what?

All I can tell you is that two years ago, I considered myself in true MLK fashion, just Mary Lou, and now everywhere I turn— coworkers, TV shows, the radio, signs in the grocery store— I am reminded that I am that wild, oppressed creature known as a Black Person. Or, in their parlance: A Person of Color.

POC

In short, I have been elevated and degraded simultaneously and in the name of helping me.

What would help me the most is for them all to disappear. Any of them with so much as a B.A. behind their name. If you reduce me to mere initials, a mere token creature to assuage your demons about being “better off” than others, then I’ll have nothing to do with your so-called Enlightenment. Count me out. Thanks. No help needed here.

And if you think their attitudes toward those more disadvantaged than they happen to be are what’s changing, you can just think again! For instance, we hired a new clerk shortly after they called me back to the office from working at home. She came in wearing the I-wanna-drive-a-Tesla-someday attire that all aspiring Tesla-driving white ladies wear— smooth, cream-colored blouses, the monochrome wardrobe of rich-lady drab, not a hair out of place in her perfect chignon. She’s the kind of lady who works because she should and not in the money sense. No, her husband has plenty of that. She works because it’s what educated white ladies with husbands of a certain salary do because they’re good feminists, and they wear their slippers in the kitchen.

No bare feet here, please!

Anyways, this lady— she’s good at her job. Enviously so. She’s got that butter-sweet customer phone voice, and she sits right behind me, so sometimes I find myself marveling at how good she makes me feel as she cools the jets of whatever irate customer has been patched through to her. She’s sweet as a peach to me, too. Sweet as a peach to everybody, but there are moments when that sweetness slips down like a mask, and you realize what you’ve got is Mrs. Buttersworth rather than Grade A New York Maple.

One day, she was relating to us how she used to know this minor local celebrity— a minor league hockey player from a nearby college town.

Suddenly that mask slipped down, and her Mrs. Buttersworth-face gleamed at us with maniacal delight.

“Oh, he was a real piece of work—” this obviously white, obviously straight, obviously macho-man hockey player— “he just thought he was buttered biscuits, and he swaggered like it everywhere he went. God. I would have hated to be married to him… And all this macho crap because he was a third-string hockey player on a third-string team. Well, let me tell you. I knew his wife, and when the hockey mirage was over, he went right back to the nickel mines in Minnesota. I bet that took him down a few pegs right there! God! I would have loved to see it.”

The spark in her eye told us she was indeed picturing it, and the picture was of some bottom-dwelling gremlin picking away with an ax. 

Because the worst thing that can befall that Yehti-like monster, the straight, white, American, non-college-educated male, is to work with his hands. Maybe in her world, dirt on the hands is equivalent to being dirt. I really wanted to ask her what she thought of my parents or husband. But it would have been a futile exercise.

Oh, no! No! They did an excellent job! They really MADE something of themselves. After all, what else were they supposed to do because… you know… White Privilege.

As if all the success and all the failures of a Person of Color could never possibly be their own doing or their own failing. Nope. There’s always some shadowy white hand or some shadowy white phenomenon pulling the marionette strings of us People of Color.

The arrogance.

___

More than anything, though, all this hubbub about race— all this inescapable wailing of victimhood and blame— just makes me feel dirty. I can’t even watch the TV anymore without wondering if the black news anchor got to where she is because she’s good or because some overwrought white executive gave her the job like a pity crumb. And if she makes a mistake— Lord!— I hold my breath and shut my eyes.

I don’t like living in a world where I always doubt people. Or where I’m always noticing someone’s skin. It makes me feel cheap and backward and gives me serious Jim Crow vibes. But these kids— at the office— act like this is the beginning of the new Enlightenment, like the fact that they notice that some black people have it bad in this country makes them (white college-educated country kid) a better person. This I do not understand. It’s not as if, in noticing particular black communities have it so bad, they go to those communities and volunteer or tutor kids or whatever. Oh no. These kids from my office— they buy travel mugs that say: Black Lives Matter. And they shop at Black-owned businesses, and they drink craft beer at breweries that fly the BLM flag, and they get the power fist tattooed into their arm sleeves. And they attend their marches and wave their flags and buy their ACAB bumper stickers. And WHAT, I wanna ask them, does any of this do for Black Lives?

If you ask them, they reply with this incomprehensible diatribe that has more to do with “Death to Capitalism” than any practical bearing on the state of inner-city youth trapped in government-subsidized poverty. They have little or no comprehension that the same law which stalks them is the same law that feeds them.

These children think they own me the most because they are the most fanatical in this new civic religion. The young man who works to my right is perhaps the worst example of this because he suffers from the most toxic of male traits: Being a Pompous Ass. But he’s an Enlightened, feminist, Prius-driving Pompous Ass, so he gets a pass from the Toxic Masculinity Crowd.

Now, if you can imagine him for a moment, he’s the sort of rotund, bearded little fellow who probably got told at one point in his life that he looks like a hobbit. He is also the sort of fellow who believes this to be a compliment. (Again, I say Pompous Ass.)

But my little hobbit friend opened my eyes to the absolute vacuum cavity we are graduating our students with these days. It’s trickled out in comments here and there. The usual cliches of the latte-sipping, Prius-driving, shame-is-a-bad-thing crowd. To these pearls of wisdom, he expects me to bow— or pat him on the head; I’m not sure which. Every time he levels one of these social justice nostrums on my I-don’t-give-a-shit-ears, he turns his over-bright hobbit eyes my way until I’m forced to smile or something. Like I’m supposed to be his cheerleader.

Rah! Rah! You’re doing so much for People of Color because you think racism is systemic. Now tell me what that means without using the police or redlining in your explanation. Go!

Actually, don’t go because then I’ll have to hear more of your college-speak, and college-speak makes my brain shrink.

___

So the thing is, my hobbit friend comes in one morning walking his hobbit walk and sipping his latte through a paper straw, and the new girl he’s been training gushes a confession that she was two minutes late clocking in this morning. He reassures her that this employer is an Enlightened Employer and not a slave master of yore, and they don’t care about two minutes. She’ll be just fine.

Then he turns his hobbit-bright eyes over the top of the partition between us and twinkles at me like he always does when leveling for my approval. 

“Time is a human construct, after all,” he says, taking a self-satisfied sip through his paper straw. He wiggles his eyebrows at me the way he does when he thinks he’s been clever. 

I am— after all— his Pet cheerleader.

I can’t help it. My stormcloud face flashes quickly and hot. “What’s that now?” I say, cocking my elbow out from my hip like every Mama does when she hears Stupid. I snap out my fake ghetto voice. 

He looks at me with his twinkling hobbit eyes, like a little dog bringing his master a bone. “Time. It’s a human construct.”

“Honey. I don’t talk college. Are you saying TIME is just something we… made up?”

“Of course. Think about it—” his woodchip-colored eyes twinkle with secret knowledge— “men set the clocks. Invented the calendar. Standardized time zones. Humans didn’t always care about time… It’s just a modern construct to keep us all in line… under the oppressive thumb of the time clock.”

He smiles at me. I imagine him wagging his tail. I frown.

“Construct is like construction, right? Like you build something? Create something?” You have to act dumb sometimes to protect the vanity of these kids.

He sticks out his lower lip, cocks his puppy-dog head, and nods. “In a very simple definition, more or less.”

“So you’re telling me it was human beings who caused the Big Bang— or it was a man who created the universe?”

Those hobbit-bright eyes dim, and a haze of red mottles his puppy cheeks. “Well— that’s— you know…”

“You’re telling me a human being set the earth to go around the sun or make it turn on its axis?”

“Well, no— but— that’s a very simple…”

“Because last time I checked a science book, that’s what gives us days and seasons— and yeah, maybe humans invented or interpreted the best way to mark that time, but honey, time is something I like to call ‘A Thing You Can’t Not Know.’ You were born with a sense of it, which you cannot get rid of. Even the animals are born with a sense of it. Else why do you think the bear goes to hibernate when he does, or why some animals are nocturnal, and others are not… This human construct stuff just sounds like hoighty-toighty, mumbo jumbo, Master of the Universe crap to me. Humans just aren’t that important or that powerful.”

“But that’s not what I was talking about,” his voice cuts my last words, and his hobbit-bright eyes have taken on the flinty point of the ferret. “The importance of time— the— the marking of time— the— like you say— that’s a human construct.”

“I’m not a scientist, but I believe they consider the ‘marking of time’ to be more of a discovery than an invention.”

“My point is not everyone cares about time the way we do.”

“The importance of time is influenced by culture. And you can witness the pros and cons that those cultures have cultivated in their societies worldwide. But time itself is not a ‘construct.’”

Those self-informed caterpillars wiggle above my friend’s unamused ferret eyes. “That isn’t what I meant. And I’m not sure you would understand if I explained so… Yeah. It’s kinda complicated.”

Isn’t that right? I raise one of my stormcloud eyebrows. “Honey. I’ve been alive long enough to know that ‘it’s kind of complicated’ is code word for ‘stupid’… I’ll leave you to decide whether that stupidity is yours or mine.”

My hobbit-looking friend undergoes a fascinating metamorphosis at this— I see a dizzy array of emotions flip through his eyes like slot machines running fast: indignance, confusion, anger, fear, alarm, and then hurt. His mouth grows small, a rosebud blooming backward, and he turns pink-faced from me.

After feeling horrible for a moment, I realize that he is not hurt by what I’ve said; he’s hurt because he has no way to retort… because… well, you know… White Privilege. This kid always retorts.

His anger at my old-fashioned stodginess is trumped by my Blackness and by the six or seven eyes focused on him now. Eyes that witnessed a Black woman take him, a white male, on— ghetto voice— and say, not in so many words: “Are you calling me stupid?”

In the vacuum of their attention, I realize the fake Tik Tok ghetto voice always grabs them because they believe that’s my voice. They believe that’s the genuine me. Not the loud-laughing, white-talking Mary Lou they’ve seen daily and run into in the grocery aisles after work. No, they believe this so-called, white-washed figure is just some sort of persona I put on to shield their delicate sensibilities— or at the very least, to shield the shadowy, white sensibilities of the Great Master, The System, whoever he is… They think I invent a skin just for them and shed it when I go home at night.

They have created an avatar for my avatar. They— in pledging to their Tesla-driving, Democrat-voting betters that they will see race, really see “those people”— they now see only that, and only in the frame they want to see me in. Not only do they own me as some totem essential to their deliverance, but who I really am doesn’t matter. Like all religious icons, I have become nothing more than a vessel for their pieties. What I believe and say and how I speak and think and vote and worship doesn’t matter because… well, you know… White Privilege.

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