Warning: This story contains the graphic deaths of two professors who were ambushed by a violent gang of facts.
I learned everything I know about Caucasian death rituals from TV. I know they can only have their funerals outside at the gravesite, usually during a light downpour so that everyone has an umbrella. I don’t think they have poundcake or airbrushed oversized tees of the dearly departed’s face in the clouds. Do white people say “rest in power”? I’m pretty sure their aunts don’t faint, drape themselves over the casket and say, “Take me lawd!” And, I’ve never heard white people remark on how well the people at the funeral home preserved the body by explaining that “Chad looks just like himself!”
But if I wanted to find out, I can just attend the funerals of Dr. James Lindsay and Dr. Peter Boghossian, who were lured into a deathtrap only to be killed when host Marc Lamont Hill beheaded them on Monday night’s episode of Black News Tonight.
Lindsay and Boghossian are college professors who have turned whitesplaining into an academic field called Grievance Studies. Basically, they propose that social justice is just a bunch of whining from people who don’t want to be held accountable for their lack of agency, unlike our white brethren who are coasting off a quarter of a millennium of privilege and convulse into conniptions at the very mention of this country’s racist past.
While the Black News Channel is relatively new, the outlet’s approach to covering the news was to hire people who actually know things. Their prime-time lineup includes Yodit Tewolde, a former prosecutor-turned-defense attorney; longtime New York Times columnist Charles Blow; and Marc Lamont Hill, all of whom have actually worked extensively in the social justice arena.
So when Lindsay and Boghossian began whitemanning using polysyllabic words to explain why all the negroes are wrong, they had no idea that Hill was a practitioner of the ancient African tradition of knowing what the fuck he’s talking about. The pair filibustered through two segments while Hill patiently allowed them to say the things they made up. When they were done, Hill surprised Pinky and No-Brain with why they would not be able to take over the world with their pseudo-intellectual tripe.
“Of course, we’re running out of time but I’m going to respond just so people don’t think I don’t have a response,” Hill said, before launching into an explanation that Critical Race Theory is only related to Critical Theory in the way that bullshitting is related to having someone slap the shit out of you; it’s not the same shit. They may have known that Hill was the author of six books and holds a Ph.D. in the subject on which they speculated, but they were unaware that Hill also holds the position that can only be described by the things he is not.
He is not one of their lil’ friends. He is not Boo Boo the fool. And, most importantly, if they thought they were going to overwhelm someone with their white-centric Critical Racist Theory, they should have known:
Marc Lamont Hill is not the one.
Bewildered, Lindsay could only respond by saying: “You actually know a lot about this.”
Wow, imagine.
Y’all wanna see a dead body?
Let’s pause for prayer:
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the caucastic dis of a mediocre white man to think I can just say whatever I want.
Amen.
Some people know things. Some people say things.
While the Venn diagram of thing-knowers and thing-sayers often intersect, people who don’t know shit are often bamboozled by people who use big words to say stuff about a particular subject as if they know what they’re talking about.
This is how auto mechanics separate you from your hard-earned dollars by explaining how your catalytic converter needs an overhaul when all you actually need is a $3 battery cable. It’s how “holistic healers” convince you that their proprietary blend of acai berries and organic black seed oil makes you sweat out the toxins that produce stomach fat (it’s all about antioxidants). And, of course, it’s how conservatives make their fellow whites believe racial inequality isn’t caused by slavery, Jim Crow and the slew of well-documented disparities in every structural institution in American society.
The truth, according to white people, is that America is not a racist country. To them, racial inequality is not the compound interest of white supremacy. It’s that Black people don’t want to put in the work. After two-and-a-half centuries of forced labor that filled the overflowing coffers of white America, Black people just spontaneously misplaced their work ethic and stopped taking responsibility for their actions.
Oh, white people are able to say things about racism. Even if it makes no sense, it sounds great to people who don’t know shit about racism. People who prefer Fox News, NASCAR and Nextdoor threads find comfort and absolution in rants about bootstrap-pulling, unwed mothers and Black men’s failure to properly belt their oversized pants.
The idea that Black people have created an entire academic curriculum to make themselves victims is a product of the white imagination. White people can wax philosophical about why they think Black people are wrong, but they can never explain the logic behind their asinine suggestions.
Perhaps the most persistently caucastic notion in the history of whiteness is that everyone from W.E.B. Du Bois to Malcolm X to Martin Luther King Jr. to Ida B. Wells to James Baldwin to Ta-Nehisi Coates have individually created a hegemony of Black victimization in the hopes that white America will give us something in exchange for four centuries of oppression.
What do we win from “playing the victim”? Sympathy? Reparations? Pity?
If there is anything Black people know, it is that white America has never, ever given a microscopic fraction of a fuck about us. Not slaveowners. Not the terrorists during Reconstruction. Not the upholders of Jim Crow. Not the segregationists who spat in our children’s faces. Not the vote suppressors. Not the white liberals. Not the conservatives. Not the patriots or the apostates or the Christians or the atheist or the Republicans or the Democrats or a single white who benefits from the supremacy of whiteness. Any white person who disagrees is actually proving my point.
Or maybe I am wrong.
Maybe, we’ve been making this stuff up. Maybe all the smartest Black people who ever lived are not as smart as these two mustard-eaters who went on television and got punched in the mouth by facts. You can even watch the unedited bodycam footage of their slaying.
May they rest in power.