SONG OF THE DAY: Whitey on the Moon

Relating more to Gil Scott-Heron’s lyrics here than the whiteys on the moon, I look forward to a day where our racial analysis in America starts to parse whiteness away from its monolithic cultural superior status, and we can start to see the shades of grey inside the whiteness. While capital letter Whitey has gone to the moon, there’s still a lot of lower case whiteys stuck here on the flat earth, pretending they gonna get a ride on the spaceship. In fact, that whole demographic of lower case whiteys has been capital W (for win) Whitey’s bread and butter since way back in the day. And I don’t say that to absolve poor whites from the dastardly acts and inherent benefit to being white in this society; I say it so that the capital W Whitey can lose their foot soldiers and literal cannon fodder. Even as a white male, at least as the type of white male I am, I can say without a hint of feeling bad, fuck Whitey.

There used to be this journal called Race Traitor, which talked about how the best way culturally-identified white people could dismantle the systemic power of whiteness is to betray that shit. We done got so woke these days, we might have gone back to sleep partially, and you might have an online rabble rouser jump in your shit for trying to do that. But honestly, in all my experiences in life, if you carry yourself in the real world with integrity and don’t be a self-important asshole, most folks gonna end up trusting you to be doing right. Internet moves too fast for real world processing though, and also clouds all truth with multiple fogs of misinformation, so rather than being like “yeah fuck whitey on the moon!” you’d have people arguing that ultimately Whitey getting to the moon was the most important cultural achievement in human history, or that there was no moon landing, or that actually the Annunaki landed on the moon four centuries ago, or I don’t know a million different things. But ultimately the point of this song is this dude’s sister got medical bills out the ass from living in sub-standard conditions, and they going broke just trying to live, while capital W Whitey done not flown all the way to the goddamned moon. That shouldn’t feel like a big W for win necessarily, if you’re leaving behind the majority of humanity to make historical etchmarks for the economic minority.