Throwback Thursday: The Black Person's Guide to Making White People Feel Safe

Are your white brothers and sisters feeling unsafe? Here's the solution.

(Envato/ContrabandCamp)

This post originally appeared in NegusWhoRead on November 2, 2016.

As this country transforms itself into the land of opportunity we like to call “post-racial America,” there are still Black people who—for some reason—insist on acting “Black.”

Apparently, this is wrong.

I am often scolded for talking about race or even saying the words #BlackLivesMatter, which turns white people off and ends the conversation. In the minds of people who say “Black people are not a monolith” (which technically makes them a monolith), we need to be more accommodating to white people. We should not address injustice by sitting during the national anthem, the advocates for white people say, because it turns people off. These people say we should create a safe space without making Caucasians feel white guilt.

Although I do not have the necessary gravitas to force the world to tack “too” at the end of #BlackLivesMatter to include and appease white people, I thought I’d share some alternative foolproof ways to make white people feel comfortable.

1. Stop Sounding So Black

Unfortunately, “talking Black” is a real thing.

Even if you use the King’s English and speak so properly that one can hear the commas and apostrophes dripping from your lips, most people can still listen to your voice on the phone and tell whether or not you are Black. No matter how educated you become, you cannot run from “sounding Black.” Cornel West sounds Black. Barack Obama sounds Black. Even Morgan Freeman’s impeccable, deep raspiness sounds like a mix between a newly emancipated slave and the voice Moses heard when he stood in front of the burning bush. (Y’all know God is Black, right?)

It is the unmistakable, intimidating bass that sits in the Black man’s throat that somehow mixes distinct masculinity with “you-know-I’ll-fuck-you-up-if-I-have-to.” Even though it seems inescapable, there are ways to adapt your voice when around your Caucasian counterparts that will alleviate the instinctive trepidation they feel when you say anything above a whisper.

First, you must take the bass out of your voice. If you don’t know how to do this, feel free to imitate Richard Pryor, Eddie Murphy or any Black comedian’s imitation of white people. Or just listen to how Kanye West talks around Kim Kardashian or on the set of Ellen DeGeneres’ show. Or visit any Fortune 500 company and notice how the voices of the Black men who work there get higher as you go from the mailroom to the top-floor, corner-office boardrooms. That subtle sopranification is the key to white comfort.

Also, you must remember to always show your teeth. It makes you enunciate whitely and shows that you aren’t one of those “hostile negroes.” Plus, seeing something white—even if it is just teeth—settles the white people’s willies. If showing teeth and going from a baritone to alto isn’t enough, feel free to overemphasize the “r’s” at the end of words. Even words that don’t have r’s at the end. This subtle change of dialect is known as “formal white.”

If you find this difficult to do, you may need a physical tool to constrict your windpipe and force your voice to an acceptable octave. That’s what bowties are for. They strangle the freedom out of your throat that white people perceive as aggression. Plus, depending on how you tie it, at certain angles it resembles a noose. Trust me, white people love educated niggas in bowties.

If you are a woman, sadly, the only thing you can do is whisper. A Black woman who speaks in a normal tone of voice is being “aggressive.” Also, don’t move your head or eyes when you talk. Rolling your neck or your eyes is considered “sassing” (which, for most of American history, has been as criminal as looking a white person in the eyes). And please, women, don’t raise your voice. That’ll make you “combative.” Also, you should know that in the white people’s thesaurus, “combative” means “bitch,” and a little-known white remedy for “bitch” involves a trash bag and a jail cell.

Arrest afadavit for Sandra Bland

2. “Get Small”

I’m sure you’ve read articles or seen nature shows that tell you “get big and be loud” if you’re attacked by a brown or black bear. Well, the opposite is true for Caucasian bears. (Unlike the other ursids who are identified by their color, the most violent species of bears are just “polar.”)

Men, be sure to slump your shoulders and make yourself as small as possible. White comfort is key to surviving in the dark wilderness called America, because according to a study published in the American Psychological Association’s Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, police officers and white women view Black boys as older and less innocent than white boys of the same age. This is why they think it reasonable that a 17-year-old boy with a pocketful of Skittles would attack a man 10 years older, 40 pounds heavier, carrying a loaded gun. It made 12-year-old Tamir Rice playing in a park look like a grown man. It made it seem reasonable when 6-foot-3-inch Darren Wilson called 6-foot-4-inch Mike Brown a “hulk.”

Black women should also be aware that their bodies make white women feel unsafe enough to make them tweet pictures of a fit Michelle Obama and call her an ape. Or refer to Serena Williams as … fuck it, I’m not going to honor those motherfuckers by reprinting it. You should just know that your three-dimensional bodies are a threat to people who buy jeans from Walmart.

One of the easiest ways to do this is to hide the roundness of your booties until it becomes acceptable. Or until a white girl can pay a plastic surgeon to appropriate it, say she has a “Black girl booty,” bag a “woke” rapper and get their own reality show. No, I’m not talking about Coco. No, I’m not talking about JLo. No, I’m not talking about Kim Kardashian. No, I’m not talking about Iggy Azalea. That would make white people uncomfortable.

I’m just saying …

3. Change Your Hair

Here’s the key to white hair acceptability: Make your hair look white. Straighten it. Put it in a demure cut and voila! Dreadlocks are not acceptable because locs have an invisible chemical that makes white women daydream of being deep dicked by a negro as he pulls her hair. Similarly, women with natural hair give white women a subtle case of the bubbleguts. If Black women don’t care about appropriating Eurocentric ideals of beauty, then they might soon stop caring about European ideas, and that’s where our whole society falls apart.

Black men should also shave their facial hair if they don’t want white people to feel safe. I believe there is a verse in Second Matthew that says “never trust a nigga with no facial hair …”

Or maybe that was Patrice O’Neal.

4. Change Your Clothes

Your wardrobe should only consist of Dockers, boat shoes and polos.

No hoodies—even if it is raining outside, and you just want to wear a sweatshirt with a hat on it. No sagging jeans—even if you are carrying a skateboard. No sneakers, jerseys or baseball caps—even if you are on a baseball team. No white T-shirts. No skirts that show off your butt. No religious headdress. No cultural wraps. In fact, no hood shit at all. Until white people co-opt and monetize a trend by calling it “urban,” all Black fashion is considered “ghetto.”

If you are a woman who is not built like a cardboard cutout of a white woman, anything that shows off your figure is verboten (Black women don’t even have “figures;” they have “bodies”). Leggings are not appropriate, but yoga pants are perfectly fine. Sneakers are fine as long as they are dirty and white as your critics.

However, you should feel free to wear anything from the “unapologetically white” collection, including flip-flops, Uggs, denim jackets, low-rise jeans and anything by Lululemon.

You can always wear booty shorts (as long as you have no booty).

5. Don’t be “Divisive”

If you’re Black, Hispanic, Asian or just live in a house with a seasoning cabinet, you probably feel comfortable talking about history, ethnicity and individual cultural differences. Unfortunately, doing what every other demographic in America does is considered “divisive” when white people are around.

When talking to white people, don’t ever bring up the words “white people.” People of no color prefer being called “soccer moms,” “patriot,” or, preferably, “boss.” In fact, if you want a real boss patriot to feel welcome, pretend you don’t see color. Sure, placing white people’s feelings above your own comfort is technically the definition of white supremacy, but you can’t be concerned with technicalities when white people feel “unsafe.”

Stop being so divisive.

6. Stop Remembering

Talking about history could also trigger an attack of the heebie jeebies.

The memories of slavery, Reconstruction, the lynching epidemic, the Jim Crow era, the Civil Rights Movement and anything their ancestors (by “ancestors,” I mean white people “their kind” up until 40-50 years ago) is a constant source of Caucasian consternation. Everything that happened before Obama cured racism is irrelevant, as disposable as an empty flour sack.

Do not refer to yourself as “Black.” Call yourself an “African American,” but never mention the Africans who brought flour to America and picked the material for the sacks. That may incite residual reminiscences of when they kicked Emmett Till in the face until it looked like a flour sack. Or when they beat Rodney King until his face looked like a flour sack. Or when they shot Laquan McDonald like his body was a flour sack.

You know what? Forget about flour and sacks.

7. Don’t Act White

The biggest key to making white people feel safe is to never ever ever ever act like they do.

If you stare at the white people walking through your neighborhood the same way they watched you when you sauntered through their cul-de-sac, they might feel unsafe. They are allowed a leisurely early morning jog; a negro running through the hood is probably fleeing. If you drive slowly, you’re probably a burglar who’s casing the community. If you drive fast, you might get stopped for speeding.

Since white people arrived on this continent, they have committed the vast majority of kidnappings, rapes, thefts, beatings, genocides, mass murders, lynchings and other atrocities, but you are considered violent. They have spat on Black kids integrating schools and torched Black homes that integrated their segregated communities. They use more drugs, own more guns and commit more hate crimes. But somehow, Black communities are dangerous, drug-ridden cesspools of violence.

8. Put It All Together

So far, this entire guide has focused on the things Black people do that make white people feel unsafe, which might make you wonder: What can Black people do to make white people feel safe?

In any given year, 99.99% of Black people do not commit crimes. Enslaved people risked their lives to learn how to read. Freedmen built their own schools and colleges that rival the institutions founded by America’s richest aristocrats. and regular Black people subjected their children to violence for a chance at equal education. In the face of segregation, redlining and housing discrimination, we managed to build our own communities.

Yet, researchers, young white people, older white people, white people who think they’re not racist and the enlightened Trump supporters believe Black people are lazier and less intelligent. Police officers, judges, teachers and ordinary white people are more likely to treat Black people as criminals. And regardless of a community’s poverty disorder or the actual crime rate, white people base their perception of neighborhood safety solely on how many Black people they see.

“[O]ur results suggest that whites (and Latinos) systematically overestimate the extent to which percentage black and neighborhood crime rates are associated; this association persists even when official crime rates are controlled,” reads a report in the American Journal of Psychology. “[T]he distorted perceptions induced by stereotypes may be an important source of racial discrimination in many areas of life other than neighborhood selection.”

According to history, data and peer-reviewed research, there is only one way for Black people to make white people feel safe.

Stop existing.