The Clapback Mailbag: Everything White People Know About White People Is Wrong
A special response to emails, DMs, messages and comments from our readers
ChatGPT, Grok and even Alexa ain’t got shit on “Call Mikey.”
I grew up in an era where “Google” was a word that described how I stared out of the window when a white person rang the doorbell and my mama wasn’t home, and “AI” was the nickname for a famous NBA player with braids, tattoos and a mean crossover dribble.
Because I read a lot of books, encyclopedias and even dictionaries, whenever a family member, neighbor or even a random dude at the barbershop needed the answer to a question or wanted to know an obscure fact, they would call my mom’s house. When I was in college, I had a side hustle writing papers for students. Although I had never worked as a subject for a photographer or participated in a fashion show …
Technically, “Call Mikey” was the first large language model search engine.
I settled important debates in the Black community, such as: "Was Philip Banks the wealthiest Black man on TV or was it George Jefferson?” (Jefferson had more money because Philip eventually left the law firm and became a judge. However, neither was richer than Dominique Deveraux). For some, Call Mikey was a resource that prevented them from being scammed by shadetree mechanics (“I know you don’t have a Cadillac, Aunt Joyce. He’s trying to say you need a ‘catalytic converter.’”). Enterprising amateur historians used it as a fact checker (The 40th president of the United States was born on Feb. 6, 1911. At the time, most homes didn’t have radios, and on March 10, 1913, he would have been too young to read a newspaper. I don’t remember from when I was 2 years old, but it’s not impossible. Technically, Loud Larry is right: Ronald Reagan is old enough to remember Harriet Tubman).
Unfortunately, the public IPO for Call Mikey never garnered much interest from venture capitalists, and I was forced to pursue other business startups, such as the original Spotify (custom CDs with songs I illegally downloaded from Napster) and the prototype for YouTube (transferring home movies and VCR tapes to DVD). Under intense pressure from my friend Double O, I eventually revealed the highly classified trade secret to Call Mikey’s uncannily accurate algorithm:
“I don’t know.”
Like many people—even the smartest person on the planet (either Donald Trump or Greg Carr)—I don’t know a lot about most things. But, as I discovered during the heyday of Call Mikey, people rarely remember when you respond to a question with: “I have no idea.” My clients never held idk against me because, in most cases, they wanted the answer to a question that they didn’t know either! In fact, the easiest way to make someone think you’re always right is to never be wrong. And the easiest way to never be wrong is to only talk about shit you know.
Not only was Call Mikey based on this guiding principle, but it’s also the fundamental precept behind ContrabandCamp. It’s why we ask attorney and journalist Elie Mystal to write about law and justice. It’s why we ask Brooke Obie to review movies; she’s an award-winning filmmaker, critic and entertainment journalist, and author. David Love isn’t a random journalist; he’s a journalism professor who teaches Media Ethics and the Law, Gender, Race and Class in the Media and Journalism and Social Issues at the Rutgers School of Communication and Information.
We don’t do the Clapback Mailbag every week because white people don’t know shit; we do this because they are so eager to tell people what they think they know.
But this week is different.
Even before we published our piece on Jillian Michaels’ comments on slavery, our inbox was inundated with emails, comments and DMs from readers.
From: Jesse
You know what we’re waiting for, right?
From: Tara
Can’t wait for you to set that Jillian Michaels lady straight. I know ContrabandCamp gonna be 🔥🔥🔥🔥
From: Matthew
People like Harriot go through their lives pretending not to understand the most basic stuff. Whites like whites. Whites like whiteness. Whites don't like people who hate them for the (perceived or otherwise) crimes of their ancestors. This is not evil, or insane, or stupid. It is the behavior of any sane self-protective animal.
The notion that whites need to self-abnegate, in the way they did when social media broke for the "marginalized" (i.e., between the dawn of the smartphone and the dawn of Elon X), is one of those happy-place wishful-thinking beliefs that no longer comports with reality. Human beings should behave *in their own best interest.* The notion that whites should abandon power because their metaphorical great-grandpappies were bad guys is childish, frivolous, should no longer be treated as a serious idea.
From: Champ
You seen this?
Dear everyone,
To me, this entire controversy has nothing to do with slavery, “Black degeneracy” or even Jillian Michaels. If you had told me last week that Jillian Michaels or President Trump believed misconceptions, wrong information or just racist shit about slavery, American history or even Black people, it would have been as shocking as tuning in to a show about losing weight and discovering it was just people being told to exercise and eat healthier.
Jillian Michaels is not a smart person. Donald Trump doesn’t know things. But, in my opinion, this entire controversy shows how little white people know about white people.
They might know personal things about their grandpappy, their siblings or their next-door neighbors. But, because they suffer from what I call “the privilege of individuality,” they know very little about themselves. That’s why they don’t like being referred to as “white people,” because they view themselves as individuals, not part of a uniquely American collective of migrants with trans-European heritage called “white people.”
Conversely, for most of American history, Black people’s survival depended on analyzing, remembering and applying the lessons we learned from centuries of studying the collective peculiarities and habits of this self-manufactured class of people. We instilled it in our children and passed it down to our descendants. It’s partly why we are here. Although the phrases “stay woke” or “fuck around and find out” might have been appropriated, every Black person knows the ancient African-American adage that perfectly encapsulates this phenomenon:
“Black people know white people better than white people know white people.”
When it comes to the contents of the icebox that pumps refrigerated blood through Jillian Michaels’ arteries, it is impossible for anyone to know what’s in her heart. I suspect that’s where this white Jesus lives that I keep hearing about. But as a descendant of Black people who somehow managed to endure the most brutal, inhuman collection of people who ever existed on this planet, let me tell you what I know about white people:
White people weren’t always racist.
For most of human history, the term “race” didn’t exist. In the 1500s, when people wanted to differentiate between wines, they came up with names like cabernet and Mad Dog 20/20 to describe “a race of wines.” People who worked in the same occupation were different—some belonged to the “race of stone masons” while others belonged to the “farmer race.” Even when Enlightenment-era philosophers began categorizing species, they subdivided humans by geographic regions. In a 1684 article titled “Nouvelle division de la terre, par les différentes espèces ou races d’hommes qui l’habitant” (“A New Division of Earth by the Different Types of Races Who Inhabit It.”), Francois Bernier’s definition of white included “all of Europe,” Asians, Middle Easterners and even “a small part of Africa.” Although subsequent “scientists” ranked Caucasians as the top race, it was European immigrants in the American colonies who embedded the idea in their constitution.
Yes, slavery has existed since the beginning of time in almost every society, including America. But it was American whites who tied it to race. It was American whites who removed the concept of “indentured” from Black people’s servitude. It was American whites who legally reduced those servants to chattel. It was American whites who put it in the Constitution. It was American whites who passed the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850. It was American whites who passed Jim Crow laws. It was American whites who benefited and American whites who maintained it.
And no, the responsibility does not just lie with slave owners, KKK members and segregationists. No one would openly participate in a lynch mob or reinforce Jim Crow laws if they thought their neighbors, families and church members would look down on them. The presidents owned slaves and supported white supremacy. The Supreme Court literally said “no white man” had to respect Black people’s rights. It was the Executive Branch that was racist. The legislative branch enforced racism. The judicial branch approved it. Congress was complicit. White citizens upheld it.
It was white people.
Why didn’t one single school district in a Jim Crow state vote to desegregate? Who were the white people who tried to gather enough signatures to change their state constitution’s disenfranchisement laws? Why was the March on Washington 75% Black? The idea that 300,000 enslavers scattered across 33 states could keep 4 million Black people from escaping, revolting or just sitting down is one of the most astoundingly, ignorantly absurd notions in the history of the world.
It was white people.
Which brings me to reader Matthew and Elliptical Jillian, who both believe that Black people hate them. They are not alone. There are many white people who believe Black people have malice in their hearts for white people and believe that Black people are violent “degenerates.”
And this is why white people don’t know shit about white people.
If they believe that slavery wasn’t that bad, what reason would Black people have to hate them? If we hated you, why did you fight the bloodiest war in the history of this continent to keep us with you? If we were so violent, why did you leave us with your wives and daughters when you went to fight that war? Why did you let your infants suck from the teats of people who wanted to smash their skulls to bits? Why were your ancestors so irresponsible that they let violent degenerates raise their children and cook their food and sleep in their homes?
How could a majority-Black state like South Carolina have existed if the whites were outnumbered by these murderous thugs? Why has there never been a white racial massacre? Why aren’t Black people in majority-Black cities rising up to murder the whites? Where is the proof of anything that you said?
The answer is buried in Matthew’s comment:
Human beings should behave *in their own best interest.*
The notion that whites should abandon power…
This is both the essence and the delusion of whiteness. No one has asked white people to abandon power. Every Black person who has ever cast a ballot has voted mostly for white people. We fought disproportionately for your lives in every war this country has ever had. We raised every generation of your children and the food they ate.
Despite the lack of a significantly violent, anti-white Black movement in the history of this nation, when we try to tell you that the president is stripping away our rights and destroying our economy and erasing our history and ruining everything we built together, you won’t do shit.
Yet, you truly believe that white people “behave in their best interests.”
And that, my friend, is a thing I will never ever know.
Heard about Jillian whatever and just watched this for the first time.
Glad we see you for who you are. He'll be dead soon but we won't forget you sided with white supremacy.
I guess people get what relevance they can after their 15 minutes is gone.
NEXT!
My heart is filled. I am happy and sad after reading this, and am content with both spaces. That’s what truth does to/for me sometimes. Thank you.