A few months ago I co-facilitated a workshop on challenging the narratives artists internalize around money, around having to starve for your art. The ultimate goal of the workshop was to leave the attendants feeling more confident about the worth of their work and equipped to be an advocate for fair compensation for it. In one exercise, we asked everyone to reflect on personal narratives as opposed to external, what we tell ourselves about money as opposed to what the world tells us.

I gave an example. Earlier this year, I was commissioned to write a few essays at industry standard rates. Those rates were higher than what I was accustomed to. I found myself writing and discarding essays, unconvinced that my work was worth the amount offered. That I could write anything worth that rate in two hours was incomprehensible to me. Because work was supposed to drag on, and money didn’t come unless you suffered for it. Or at least that’s what I’d been telling myself. I’d created a narrative that money was supposed to be a struggle, supposed to hurt, required exhaustion and indignity.

Money has been a struggle for me. My experience of adulthood thus far has been a parade of one financial crisis after another. I often feel like a character in one of those action thrillers where the entire plot is “Can she claw her way out of this impossible situation? SHE CAN! But what about THIS impossible situation?”

I am Jon Snow on a floe of ice beyond The Wall and my bills are an endless sea of White Walkers. Except I’m not really Jon Snow-ish. I’m a broke Black mother of two without a college degree trying to make it as a writer on the internet. Jon Snow always gets saved in the end. Twice in one crisis, someone comes to save him. To the pleasure of the audience, he has a network of allies and supporters who recognize his significance and want to look out for him. It’s not the same when you need to be saved from your own lacking. It’s not the same when it comes to money.

I am not a writer with the luxury of being ok while I wait for invoices to be fulfilled. As a result, I’ve had to ask for the support of my audience. I think people are largely displeased when I ask for money. Many pretend they don’t see the links at the end of my essays. I had a piece get 30,000 views last week, and only 5 or so people tipped me for it. Some people actively resent it, and unfollow me when I post my tipping links on social media. Some interrogate me. I’ve received emails and comments about how the tipping link muddies the integrity of my message.

That I should have needs, that I should have the audacity to ask my network to be accountable for those needs, feels somehow taboo, like crossing a boundary that says I should not need to be saved. The conditions of creating on the internet, and in the world at large, imply that my work should be an offering, a labor of love. The assumption on the internet is that the relationship between those creating intangible content and those who consume it should be nonreciprocal.

But isn’t that just another narrative that needs to be broken, to be unlearned? Isn’t that another way we reinforce systems where underserved artists don’t have the resources they need to create things, let alone exist comfortably in the world?

I’ve been dealing with a lot of shame around asking for money lately. Last week, when I was featured in Medium’s Words That Matter series, I took my PayPal link out of my bio. I felt like having my PayPal link up made me seem like less of a real writer. And when asking for help outside of Medium, I’ve tried to minimize the overwhelming stature of my need. I’ve tried to assure my followers that if I can get out of this quicksand, I won’t need to be airlifted out of a meadow of landmines a few weeks later. But can anyone guarantee that? That they won’t need help again? Is there a quota on how much help a person is entitled to before they become unworthy? Why am I imposing a quota on myself?

In America, there is an overwhelming ethos that we should be able to help ourselves. We respect those who help themselves. In turn, it’s very rare that we respect those who need the help of others. Those who need help are made to feel ashamed. I’ve wondered often in the last few months if needing the help of my audience to keep going has stunted me somehow. I’ve tried to quantify what being a writer lacking in resources, one who requires the redistribution of resources to stand on solid ground, has cost me in respect. And I wonder what that lack of respect might have cost me in terms of other resources, like opportunity, like being seen as valid by gatekeepers.

Still, I can’t let go of the notion that it doesn’t have to be this way. The times I’ve been paid fairly for doing work I enjoy have made it clear to me that it’s possible to get what I need from this world without feeling awful. I reject the narrative that money has to hurt. I reject the demand that I should be ashamed of my needs, that my needs make me somehow disingenuous. I hold faith that I can be a Jon Snow in my own little realm, that I can find my network of allies and supporters who believe in me and want to make sure I’m looked out for, who will do it gladly, and without condemnation.

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On January 1, a fault line was forming in the pit of me. For days, I could feel the ground stretching there, small tremors signaling something big soon. After four days and three pushes, I cracked open, and then there was Theo. Eight fast-breathing fragile pounds of him.

The liminal space that exists for weeks after giving birth is at once unique and universal. It’s lonesome and communal. Sleepy and vigilant. Mobilized and couch-bound. Tender. Tender like a kind and gentle touch, and tender like sensitive to that touch, like vulnerable, like the volatile pulp of a broken tooth.

The whole year has been that way for me. A balancing act between two kinds of tender. A struggle every day to find a way to be both. To be an angry wound in a threatening world and to be the designated kisser of boo-boos, a soft place to land for the people who depend on me.

Three weeks ago, Theo began to walk. It seemed to come with ease and out of thin air, like it just hadn’t occurred to him before, and that once it did, it was settled. I almost missed it. We were at an indoor play space when it happened, and I had initially wanted to stay behind, to have my husband handle them there. I wanted to stay behind because I didn’t want to be touched that day. I had decided that my lap was an off-limits space, that my arms could do no holding. I became extremely defensive of my body; I felt like any and all sensation might be too much to take.

I’d spent the weekend engaging the sexual assault–laden news cycle, and at the end of it all, I was consumed by a palpable anger. I could feel fury sit front and center in my chest like a dense metal ball. I was infected by it, inflamed, a tender nerve. And the only way I could think to protect myself from further damage was to shut down completely. No intake. No output. Isolation.

It was tenderness, a deep and persistent aching, that told my husband that I no longer wanted to go with him and the boys. And it was tenderness, a soft urge to nurture, that put my coat on when my two-year-old looked back through the open doorway and called out, “Mommy comin’?”

Whatever filters that have sustained me by sifting have been busted at the seams this year. The levies of my mind have broken. Now everything comes barreling through before I get the opportunity to determine what I can and cannot take. What fills me and depletes me. What makes the day difficult and what makes it worth it. My watchman has abandoned his post. My gates are wide open or sealed now. Everything comes waltzing through or everything must be shut out entirely.

There is no way to be available to my children and closed to the world. My children are of this world, and so I must take the world in, too. That means there is no way to be open to my sons without being open to pain, without being exposed, vulnerable to damage.

And so, as tender as I felt, as pulsing the pain beneath the bruise, I went with them to the indoor playground. I got Theo’s first steps on film. I was there to receive his first victorious collapse, to lift him up after his first inevitable tumble. This is not to highlight the fact that I put my desire for solitude aside (all moms need rest), but that I pried myself open for my sons despite an urge to be closed.

In a relentless era of dropping shoes, of bolted doors, of compartmentalized minds, don’t I owe it to my sons (and myself) to be a wide-open field? To be a place of peace with no limits but the warm weight of the sky? To raise these Black boys in the world that I want for them (in spite of the world that we’re in), I must embody that world, become it, and surround them in it. I am tasked with conjuring a safe haven in an unsafe climate.

When I became a mother, I learned a secret that all parents know. I became acutely aware that there’s a third way to deal with a threat, beyond fighting, beyond fleeing. It’s a method for intangible monsters, unknowable enemies, inevitable risks. It’s to find a way to learn to live beside them. To coexist with an awareness of doom. To be a gazelle lapping up water amid lions. To be open to attack in order to be open to what nourishes.

That’s what it is to be tender. To be foolish and brave. Staunch and saccharine. The year 2017 taught me that all good and certain things are impermanent, that comfort is not security, that all mechanisms can crash, that abundance might just mean a larger chasm left in its wake. But every day, I wake up tender anyway. I wake up soft and sick with worry. I wake up swelling with a love shrouded in inescapable aching.

I am a mother of Black boys in Trump’s dystopian America. We went and picked out a Christmas tree anyway. We trimmed and watered it, adorned it in lights and baubles. On the wall we hung stockings monogrammed with our respective first initials. My husband lifted our son to the treetop to place a glittering star. “I can feel myself making a memory,” I said, while inhaling the scent of the branches. I embraced the tender moment. I let it in.

What It Is to Be Tender was originally published in Words That Matter on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In eighth grade we went to visit my friend’s extended family in North Jersey. We were thirteen. It was a good day. On the ride back my friend and her dad got into an argument. He started to yell at her and she put her headphones in, ignoring him. He didn’t like that. He needed her to be made small. He pressed his foot down on the gas and accelerated up to 90, 100, 120, higher. I kept checking, but she didn’t even flinch. 15 minutes like this maybe, on the highway. Driving right up on death’s ass and switching lanes. Teaching a lesson. Who not to upset.

I once loved a boy who punched walls. Lifted furniture and dropped it. Slammed doors so hard the room shook. He called it diffusing. I called it a warning. Once he made me mad and I threw my phone at a tree, wanting badly to watch it dissolve. It took me three tries to crack it, and it still rang when he called later that night. I answered. I didn’t want him to be mad at me.

Another boy I loved had a silent anger. He surrounded himself in an impenetrable plexiglass contempt. And I became a muffled voice. Muted.

Last year, I made a man on the street mad by saying “no, thank you.” He followed me into and through two stores. I walked three blocks past my house in a snowstorm to avoid him knowing my address.

My ex-boyfriend would threaten to destroy himself when he got angry at me. If I didn’t stay on the phone he was going to drink bleach he said. I stayed on the phone.

I became a broken record in the company of men. Are you mad at me? Are you mad at me? Are you mad at me? Are you sure?

I used to panic when I thought that men were mad at me, but now I go to war. Fill a room with myself. Will the ground not to tremble. I cackle in the face of their chest-pounding roars. Because I have cowered in the face of too many men’s anger. Followed by the letter the syllabus of the lessons they tried to teach me. I live now by the rubric that my friend had mastered at thirteen. I don’t flinch in the face of their manufactured danger. Because angry men think that making bold women shrink will detract from how small they are. They think their anger is god when their tantrums are a whisper in the void. A void as gargantuan as me.

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My husband used to sigh a lot. He’d do it even when nothing was wrong. Sighs punctuated his sentences. He’d plop down with them, rise from his seat with them. He never noticed himself doing it, but I did. It became a point of contention in our house. Each time he sighed was like nails on the chalkboard of my soul — I felt a visceral need to get to the source of it.

“What’s wrong?” I’d always ask, immediately stressed.

“Huh?”

I would try to get him to assign the sigh a cause and he would assert that it was meaningless and to ignore it. I could never let it go, though. Because his sighs felt like soft accusations, made worse by the fact that I could not resolve an unspecified slight. His sighs signaled discontent, and I have been groomed by society to believe that his discontent is unwaveringly my responsibility. And so somewhere buried beyond my ability to transcend, every sigh felt like a declaration that I was disappointing him. And for many women, an accusation of being disappointing, no matter how soft, always feels like a threat of disposability.

My husband is not the only male in my life that I am afraid to disappoint. When I am out running errands, I will go blocks out of my way to avoid walking past a park in order to circumnavigate my son’s wailing disappointment at not getting to play. When I am overstimulated and exhausted and don’t want to be touched, I let him force his way into my lap so he won’t feel spurned. When my 10 month old screams and squirms out of my husband’s arms demanding that I be the one to console him, I oblige his cries for me despite wanting to split the nurturing role. On some level, I am afraid that even my sons will dispose of me if I disappoint them. I am afraid that my boys will grow into men who won’t forgive me for my needs.

These fears are not irrational. There are very real implications in disappointing those privileged over oneself, and for Black women doubly so. Black women who disappoint societal standards are swiftly condemned, and often face severe repercussions. Black wives who prioritize personal needs are blamed for their husband’s transgressions. Black mothers who prioritize personal needs are seen as failing at the role. Black women who deviate from or reject the route of marriage and/or children are blamed for everything perceived to be wrong with “the Black community.” To be an LGBTQ Black woman is to be always in danger for not being what cishet men expect of them. And disappointed white women’s requests for the manager have cost many Black women their livelihood.

Women, in general, are conditioned to hinge our value and self worth in how well we can please others, what we can provide for them, how well we take care of them — because our safety, our social status, our success in the world depends on it. We are even inundated with the message that our ability to please translates to some kind of power. Our culture says that women can control the world by wielding pleasure like a weapon. Songs and films and novels all uphold the archetype of the temptress using feminine wiles to manipulate men into fulfilling her wants and needs. But what happens when that woman can’t please anymore? What happens when her needs clash with her ability to perform? And how powerful are you if your power is stripped when you become undesirable, unliked?

How many unlikable men maintain their power? How many women?

And so when men express displeasure, many of us compensate. We remain on high alert for potential problems. We become so good at deterring disappointment, we anticipate needs before they have to be vocalized. We tidy messes before the messes are even made. Even this fixation is a disappointment to many men. Women are deemed neurotic, anxious, and uptight by men who only get to consider themselves easygoing because they’ve never reconciled their nature with the ways women shield them from discomfort. There are men kept so warm within the worlds women create that they forget that it’s winter, forget that generating warmth requires energy.

The other day after a very long day with my kids I mustered the energy to clean. On my hands and knees I picked up tiny pieces of hot pink play-dough, dozens of scattered toys. My son came behind me and undid it all within minutes. Something shifted in me.

“You saw that mommy went through all that effort to keep the house clean, right?”

“Yes, Mommy, Mickey Mouse,” he said, his eyes on the tv. He wasn’t listening.

I got up and turned it off, and told him to pick up his toys. He threw himself to the ground in a tantrum, and I let him lay there until he was done. I decided his disappointment was his own problem to resolve.

The way to prevent raising sons who would dispose of me for disappointing them is not to never disappoint them. It’s to teach them to be comfortable with their own disappointment. To allow myself some humanity and make them responsible for navigating their feelings. I am doing myself, them, and other women a disservice in not doing so. In a world where men feel entitled to women’s bodies, time, and labor — it’s imperative to teach them otherwise. That requires a little disappointment on their end.

It is necessary to walk my son by the park and say “not now,” once in a while. It is necessary to stop apologizing to male strangers for having to endure my expression of disinterest. I have to stop obsessing when my husband sighs, when my sons tantrum, when I can’t perform.

If I want to make myself comfortable in my own life, I have to decide to not be deterred by the disappointment of others. Not doing so means being chronically disappointed in myself. I am teaching myself to let people down for my own sake, no matter their power. Because power over myself is the only power not contingent on others. Power over myself can’t be taken away, only relinquished.

An so be it if an unwillingness to relinquish that power renders me unlikable. Black women are almost always disliked when they put themselves first. If that’s who I have to be to move through the world like I own the right to exist, then it’s who I will be. I’ll be proud to leave disappointed legions in my wake.

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The Case For Disappointing Men was originally published in Athena Talks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How many ways can one body be ransacked? Almost immediately after the delivery of my second child the doctor said she was a little concerned about my bleeding. She said there was another way, but that this way was quicker. She placed an unfurled fist and half of a forearm inside me and swiped out a handful of clots.

It feels like that months later when the baby grows teeth and starts biting my chest while he nurses. It feels like that years before when I’m hugging my knees at the foot of a fuckboy’s driveway — suddenly sober, suddenly alert, and really, really wanting to go home. It feels like that this morning when I awaken sweating from a nightmare that seems instead like an uprooted memory. Familiar. Crawling. Gutted. All wrong. Askew.

How do you know what is true? How do you know that what you’re experiencing is the real thing, that it counts? Sometimes when I’m in pain I have a hard time believing myself about the severity. Sometimes when I’m in crisis I say it out loud and feel like I’m being hyperbolic. Sometimes I don’t comprehend the full scope of what has happened to me until I see the weight of my words landing in someone’s facial expression. A worried brow and a mouth agape.

Imagine what dismissal does. What a scoff can do.

When I was in first grade I had this best friend from school. Her little brother was in poor health. When I was over her house he would toddle over and stroke my arm or pet my thigh or rub my back. I would always cringe. His mom saw my discomfort once and said, “I’m sorry, this is just how he comforts himself.” From then on I’d cringe only on the inside when he touched me. On the outside, I’d feign welcoming smiles. So many small ways we learn what our bodies are for. Who they belong to.

Am I/Are we communal property?

As a kid I’d go to sleepovers and have a great time. But in the morning, before breakfast, I’d get this knot in my gut, a nauseous longing to be in my own space. Homesickness in a literal sense. As an adult I sometimes get that feeling inside my own skin, like I can’t find sanctuary in this body, like my spirit’s not computing with the vessel. Like dipping out of it is the only way to feel safe.

I try hard to remember when I began backing away from my body, even at the risk of regretting it. I rummage around in my own head for the key. I think maybe if I can pull myself into myself, I can take some of my power back. Climb into the cockpit. Steer the ship. But I don’t know what it was that did it. There are a million small things. Some big things. More coming. All of it is enough to make a person the person that I am.

Earlier today I saw some person I don’t know admit to raping someone in a comment thread on Facebook. They were rattling off a list of things their angry ex could expose about them before she got a chance to. It was supposed to be a “gotcha” moment.

I took a short story class once and we learned about listing as a rhetorical device. My professor said that when listing, a writer must take caution not to mindlessly equate the inconsequential with the important. She asserted that we must make sure that everything in our list is of the same value, holds the same weight. The stranger listed the rape with other things she might use to embarrass them. Things like sexual kinks, things like chat rooms they frequent.

Oh. Ok.

Every time I’ve gone to the emergency room I’ve felt guilty. Like nothing I’m dealing with is as bad as anybody else’s problems. Like I am the inconsequential thing in the list of people in the waiting room. Sometimes, more than I want the doctors to say that nothing’s wrong with me, I want them to say that I have the least harmful cause of my symptoms. Because then I am still right about how it feels.

I am fragmented. Assault has split me from myself. My life’s mission will be to make it back home to me. To figure out how to be with myself. To listen to myself, to believe myself about the severity of it all.

What is it like for everybody who hurt me? Do they have to try to forget like I try to remember? Do they remember? Is it a skeleton in their closet that doesn’t even haunt them? When they open their closet door and everything comes tumbling out like in an old cartoon — does the skeleton come drifting out as lightly as the beach ball, the t-shirt, the kite?

I tried watching Black-ish last night like I often do, but last week I read the details about what Anthony Anderson did to a woman. I couldn’t stop looking at his hands and feeling sick. I couldn’t stop searching his face for some sign of torment.

“How does he get to have this?” I said out loud.

How does he get to have a life where the bad parts don’t have to be a part of him?

And what pieces of the woman can’t connect again?

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On Thursday, as we were leaving the home of some friends, I instructed my two year old to say goodbye. He acknowledged them one by one. “Bye, Azola. See you soon, Azola. See you later, Azola.” My friends have a two year old named Azola. They also have their own names, but in my child’s mind they are one entity, derivative of and in service to Azola.

My husband and I got married very quickly. There were just weeks between when I met his mother and the day she became my mother-in-law. I remember avoiding calling her any name at all to circumvent the sin of misnaming her. And as time went on, it became a question stranger and more awkward to ask: “What do I call you? How do you want to be named?”

When I brought it up to my husband, he told me that in his culture, parents take on the name of their firstborn. His mother, upon delivering him unto the world, was called Mama Femi. The mother of Femi. Her name became derivative of his existence.

My son has this toy microphone my Nana got for him after seeing him rap into the round end of a spoon. He likes to press the microphone into the faces of those in the room with a singular command.

“State ya name,” he says, expectantly.

“My name is MOMMY,” I recite, with the cadence of someone about to freestyle. But he whisks the mic away, always. Mommy is all he needs to know about who I am.

I answer to the role itself, my identity swallowed up by the eternal task at hand.

Last weekend I went to the emergency room, alone, late at night. It was the first time I had been without my kids since a date night in July. It was the first time I had been without any other person at all since I gave birth in January. And while an invisible string connected me to my two kids at home, I was hyper aware of how no one else could see that tether. I could not lean on motherhood to identify myself. In that space I was a woman with no definitions, no edges, no outline. I was an anonymous somebody with unkempt hair, mystery stains on her shirt, sleepless circles beneath her eyes, dirty fingernails.

I found myself alluding to my children in the quick conversations about my symptoms.

“Well I was taking my son out of the bath and when I walked by the mirror I noticed _____.” But the doctors didn’t care about the bath or my son. The patient was me, the name on my wristband was not Mommy.

But I am so tangled up in my children, I forget how to be without them.

In March I was on a panel about self care, and before the panel began, I passed the baby to my husband and attempted to introduce myself to another panelist. Without the cuteness of my newborn as an icebreaker, I found myself tongue-tied, unable to maintain a conversation. I couldn’t remember what I used to say to people before I only talked about my children. I saw in her face that I was not making sense. I felt panicked and incoherent. Vulnerable. Small.

E told me last week that her mother once shared that she was pregnant as often as she was because it was the only time she felt sane in her twenties. E said that there’s something powerful to being able to fulfill that kind of need in society. That maybe that was the point for some of us. To exist solely so that others can exist.

“I am starting to wonder if that’s who I am,” she said.

At first I bristled, but then I wondered, too. Isn’t that how I’d been living? My investment in mothering has gotten to the point where I have no identity outside of it, no clear cut sense of myself beyond the straightforward borders of motherhood.

Like at the park yesterday afternoon, when exhaustion came crashing down on me. I felt the familiar words “I’m tired,” beginning to form in my mouth, but I swallowed them. Because when I played out the rest of the conversation in my head, I recognized that it wouldn’t follow the framework it often does. When I say that I’m tired, people instinctually ask “Ah, long night with the kids?” And I say, “Yup, the little one’s teething,” or “Yup, can you believe he’s almost three and still won’t sleep through the night?”

But the kids had slept soundly the night before. They didn’t rise until 9am. And when they woke, my husband put them in the bath, made them breakfast, put on cartoons. I slept until 11AM. I was tired because of something harder to pin down, something deep inside of me was tired, something I didn’t want to talk about, something that had to do with who I am and have been long before motherhood kept me up at night.

And sitting on the park bench wrestling with the ability to express a basic declaration of how I felt, I began to confront a question I’ve been circling since I became pregnant:

Has motherhood swallowed me whole or have I been burying myself in it?

There’s a comforting quality to fulfilling a role. There’s a lure to a predetermined course. A fast track out of the work of learning to be who you are. There are endless resources on how a mother should conduct herself. I can research how to best react to any given scenario. Motherhood is a me I can master. A pre-packaged purpose. When I move through the world as a mother I am a comprehensive statement.

But if I don’t don the mask of motherhood, I am only more questions. I require a closer look. I am something to be figured out, a riddle, a puzzle. A problem I fear will dissatisfy me when it’s solved. So I run from myself, busy myself to get away from myself, bounce myself off of others to distort myself, cloak the visage of motherhood over my blankness, cover the question mark.

My husband and I talk a lot about what we will do when our children are grown. We say our 40s will make up for what we’ve sacrificed of our 20s. We say that we’ll travel, stay up late, sleep in, thrust ourselves into all the creative work we’re neglecting now. But if I continue down this road, when the tether is snipped and the children have grown and moved on, will there be anything left of myself to return to? Or will I be faced with the same questions in a much larger void, searching in a black hole the size of a galaxy for relics of myself?

Even now, I battle the impulse to close this with reflections on my duty to show my children a woman sure of herself, to not stunt them with my clinging, to teach them independence by modeling independence. But this essay is not about my children, it’s about me. If I am to explore the unknown corners of who I am, I will do it for myself. I am a cause noble enough for self indulgence. I will sit alone in uncomfortable rooms, unsure of myself as I learn to be certain. I will get to know myself for the sole purpose of making myself known. If that means fumbling through painful interaction, searching through the deep space of me for something to say, I will don my brightest blankness and cringe my way through it.

I don’t begin or end at mothering. It’s just something that I do now. It’s a part of me that bloomed from the vast valleys that I am. I am 25 and learning to sit in those valleys for the first time. Not to pull weeds or anticipate storms or sigh at the towering height of the surrounding mountains. I sit alone in the overflowing emptiness and inhale.

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“Remember that time you called me a nigger?”

I type it, and then quickly take it back. My cursor blinks, the text block blank, my hands positioned tensely on the home keys.

“Remember that time you called me the N-word and got mad that I got mad about it?”

I erase it again.

He couldn’t remember. A person who remembered wouldn’t post a status like the one I contemplate commenting on, right? It says he disavows white supremacy. It says it’s unfortunate that it’s even necessary for him to say it. I check the comments.

“Anyone who knows you knows you don’t support white supremacists. Anyone who assumes you’re culpable based on your skin color is actually the racist.”

Spoken with the conviction of someone who’s never experienced racism.

This always happens when race relations take center stage in America (through police shootings or torch-wielding mobs). I sit back and watch as the white folks on my feed perform mental gymnastics to answer an identifying question:

“Who are the real racists?”

Opinions differ according to scope and scenario, but general consensus decrees that the real racists are one of the following:

• People who openly declare that they hate marginalized races, or
• People who call out racist people who don’t want to believe that they’re racist.

The white people posing the question are never the real racists. Racists are bad and they are good. White supremacists are niche and they are normal. And yet.

“Remember that time you called me a nigger? It was casual. We were in bed. You said it with a smile. You even laughed a little.”

That’s how racism is most often delivered — by hand. Not by fire or nightstick or the bumper of a car, but by friends. Lovers. Co-workers. Classmates. Bank tellers. Doctors. Judges. A woman at the grocery store who feels entitled enough to your bodies to stroke your breastfeeding baby’s cheek. A teacher who suggests you plagiarized based on your “unlikely” eloquence. A friend mimicking Black-voice to test your allegiances. A real estate agent who says the neighborhood gets “sketchy” three blocks up (where the Black people are). But none of them believe the word “racist” applies to them. Any racism they willingly admit to is a temporary condition, a fluke in their otherwise goodness, like lying without being a liar, something to be swept under the rug.

Despite the the countless studies insisting grim realities for Black Americans—from job prospects, to housing discrimination, to unethical health care practices—a February poll suggests that only 49 percent of white Americans believe Black people face a lot of discrimination. In a March poll, only 39 percent believed that prejudice was a “very serious” problem in America.

This comes in stark contrast to the influx of those decrying racism on social media. It implies that the majority of white Americans don’t perceive racism to be a complex combination of systemic oppression and interpersonal prejudices — but rather an indication of whether or not a person feels they are “good” or “nice” to minorities. To them, being called racist is a value judgement, one that’s most appropriate for the accused and a few chosen character witnesses to assess.

When so many white Americans struggle to discern what racism is at all, I struggle to imagine their capacity to sincerely condemn white supremacy. I question their commitment. How can they eradicate something they can’t recognize in their own reflections? This firm denial of blatant complicity is evidence enough to me of an investment in white supremacy that they’re unwilling to relinquish. Until those of them disavowing archetypal bigots condemn their own implicit bias and support of the systems in place, I can only consider them insidious allies to one another.

Because they’re inextricably linked. They exist in service to each other. While the right hand of white supremacy fights with fire, the left sentences Black people to death by 1,000 paper cuts. Death by disbelief. Death by denial. Death by deflection. They create conditions in which extremists thrive, like the moisture to the alt-right’s toxic mold. White America insists it keeps a clean home, when a 400-year infestation says otherwise. And until they’re willing to reconcile their own participation, white supremacy is here to stay.

They say we’re playing victims. Like this is theatre. Like we’re characters, roles, archetypes, actors. Like victim is easier than offender. Like America allows anyone who looks like us to be blameless.

They say we’re pulling the race card. Like we can flash it for access to some elite club of suffering. Like pain is a hot commodity. Like trauma is a delicacy. Like we can fill our tanks on that shit. Like we haven’t been running, for centuries, on empty.

They say to be grateful and stop complaining. Like they gave us what we have out of kindness. Like half free isn’t half bound. Like half life isn’t one foot in the grave. Like half safe is any real sense of security. Like our resilience renders them unaccountable.

They say there are many sides. Like we’re doing something to them by hurting. Like a Black boy on the pavement is a talking point. Like there are two sides to burying a child. Like we’re not grieving. Like we’re not aching for our kids that have to live in this world. Like we’re not aching for our elders that have to die in this world. Like there’s a wrong way to try to survive this.

They say change doesn’t happen overnight. Like it wasn’t urgent four centuries ago. Like another generation of this can be granted in good faith. Like no end in sight is something we can sit with. Like we don’t have better things to do, fuller lives to live. Like we can wait. They say this over and over, like they didn’t say it last time, like we haven’t heard it all, like we asked them.

They say at least no one can deny it now. Like our churches are burning for attention. Like our bodies are riddled with bullets to rile them up when they watch the viral video. Like Black death is an exclamation point at the end of their argument. Like they kill us to confirm who they are, to categorize themselves by their reactions or nonreactions.

They say that this isn’t their America. Like it’s ever been anybody else’s. Like they can opt in and out of their legacy. Like their opinion isn’t propped up on our backs, their birthright not written in our blood. Like this isn’t the foundation of their founders. Like history is whatever helps them sleep at night.

They say that they’re not like the others, that they’re sorry on behalf of all white folks. Like that means that white folks are sorry. Like reparations are a comment on an article. Like we’re the ambassadors of our respective races. Like we can forgive them for it. Like the sentiment can keep us safe.

They say death to white supremacy. Like they don’t listen to hip hop ironically. Like they don’t affirm themselves by mocking us. Like they don’t feel entitled to what’s ours. Like they don’t call all our neighborhoods sketchy. Like they don’t wait to call the block up-and-coming ’til we’re mostly pushed out. Like they’ve reconciled their own participation.

They say that they hate being white. Like that’ll make them not white. Like self-deprecation is an offering. Like feeling guilty serves some higher purpose. Like we’re fighting to make them feel bad. Like all this is about their experience of it.

They say that now is the time to listen to us. Like it wasn’t before. Like it hasn’t always been.

So I say what I always say. What my ancestors said. What my peers do, too. I say that I’m angry. I say that I’m scared. I say that I’m tired. I say I want more. I say I’m a person. I say I’m unsafe. I say that I’m worried for my loved ones, for strangers, for myself. I cut through the noise for a second. I make them feel passionate enough to reply.

They try hard to summon something altering, but they say what I expect instead. And then, satisfied, they shut their laptops and let the world spin.

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Say What You Will was originally published in Extra Newsfeed on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We fight about money in my house. About not having enough. About whose fault it is. Some weekends our partnership devolves into fiscal logistics. How to get more. How to get by. How to merge incompatible ends, pull funds from thin air.

On the 31st like clockwork, tension builds for the next day’s dues, and stress-induced self-deprecation ensues full-force.

We deliver low blows to ourselves. We reduce ourselves to our earnest contributions. Our identities are tied up in it, these consecutive crises of wants and needs. As parents, as providers, as people with something to prove — we weigh our worth in many modules of productivity.

Because there’s shame attached to not-having. To needing. To asking. It’s a vulnerable position to not have the means to make a life. We equate silence surrounding struggle as the more dignified approach, or curated facades of decadence on social media. We get in the way of our own survival for fear of this potent shame. We provide unpaid propaganda for a system that’s failing us.

We fight about money in my house. Despite my husband’s 12 hour days. Despite me writing this with my lap and left arm full. We fight each other because fighting stigma is a loftier goal. Instead we scroll and berate ourselves for succumbing to sleep. Sleep is time that could be spent producing.

And there are a dozen others ways we could make it our fault. Our demand to raise our kids somewhere safe, despite knowing safety is above our paygrade. The articles I couldn’t write when depression swallowed me whole. The pizza we ordered when my husband’s feet were swollen from standing and mine from pre-eclampsia. The overdrafts. The luxury of letting ourselves forget our place.

I went to small claims court for a card I couldn’t fund, last week.

“You been here before?” asked a woman waiting on the bench.

“Nah, you?” I said.

“Yup, plenty,” she said. “Don’t know why, though. You can’t squeeze water from a stone.”

“True, so what do they do?” I asked.

“They just call you in the back to talk to the lawyers, tell them what’s goin’ on. Sometimes they be nice, but sometimes they be mean, like you doin’ it on purpose. I would pay it if I could,” she said, “but I cant.”

In my house we hardly say we can’t. We say “give me some time,” until we run out of it. We say “let me see what I can do,” like we can think our way out of a cycle. Can’t feels like a resignation, like accepting yourself where you are. And for debtors that’s a cardinal sin in this country. We’re supposed to keep working in circles that don’t touch what we’re up against.

Hearing the woman state so plainly what she couldn’t provide made me feel like a fool. I’m the type to pretend that a negative balance on payday will rise miraculously. I imagine myself a person with more, in the temporary position of nothing. I imagine that this is a pit stop on the path to my birthright. To abundance.

At the root of this belief is some part of my psyche rejecting the notion that I’m not entitled to survival. The dichotomy of worth says good people get to eat and bad ones don’t. I know that I’m worth a full fridge, a safe place to live, and the maintenance of my body. I’m worth not having to choose one over the other.

But the sky won’t part and rain my needs down on me for trying. And the universe doesn’t delegate wealth on a moral code. There are systems in place to keep people like us unstable — and shame is the sword with which our potential is clipped. Shame is how we reinforce hierarchies that don’t serve our goals.

We fight about money in my house, and then we retreat, always retreat. We remember we’re worth more to each other than what we owe to a stranger. And in all of life’s fixed and fluctuating can and cannot affords, we train ourselves to be unwavering about our own value. We teach ourselves tenderness where we’re told to be hard on ourselves. We work to divorce who we are from what we don’t have. Because what we do have is what this life is for.

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This time last year I was wrapping up what I considered to be a major milestone in my writing career. I had my first press pass, sat in my first media tent, and for four days of work, received my first payment consisting of four digits. I was giddy. My husband cooked a feast to celebrate. My nana offered the childcare she knew I couldn’t otherwise afford. And when I called my mom to tell her the news, I was eager to answer the question I so often dread from her:

“And what are they paying you?”

She always asks it, almost defensively, when I share work news. In moments of denial I’ve attributed it to a desire to undercut my joy. But if I’m honest with myself, she asks it in order to position herself as a buffer between me and my own willingness to be exploited.

As a Black woman freelance writer, exploitation often feels like part of my job description. I receive more requests for free labor than paid. When I’m paid I’m offered less than my peers are paid. On the first of every month I’m forced to reconcile with what I should (and don’t) have by industry standards and what I need to have to sustain a home.

But that month, for the first time since I started writing professionally, I was going to be able to pay rent in full — not just sprinkle $100 on top of my husband’s contributions. I was proud as hell. I announced it on Facebook. I felt real.

The last day of the assignment was overcast. It had been an oppressively sticky few days and the sky had finally burst on us the night before. The other two writers and I were over the outdoors and opted to finish at home. We shared an Uber.

“So what did y’all think of the experience?”

I asked, regarding the event itself.

They both responded with opinions on working with the company that commissioned us. Their comments weren’t outwardly negative, but they were nuanced. They spoke about their work as though it were a mutual exchange between them and the company — as though it was no extraordinary offer, no privilege to be there.

And it was in listening to two white women writers speak about the job as though it was something they could’ve accepted or rejected that I realized I was shortchanging myself, even in this instance where I was paid fairly.

I had treated it like an honor. Like a gift the company bestowed upon me. Like I was lowly and lucky to be chosen. Being paid at industry standard was so unheard of to me that I perceived it as cause for celebration and reason enough not to think critically about any other element of the experience. I added nothing to the the writers’ remarks, because I hadn’t considered expecting beyond what I felt was the blessing of reasonable pay.

I still believe in feeling gratitude for opportunities that don’t come every day. I was right to be excited to be there. But at the core of my enthusiasm was a misdirected feeling of validation. I felt that the amount they were paying me finally signaled that my work was worth something. Until then I had worked for free or for donations or for significantly less than I knew a publication could afford. I had begun to believe that the work I was doing wasn’t valuable. And that belief extinguished my ability to be discerning.

In the back of the Uber, I realized that that was the core difference between myself and the two white writers. They were able to discern. They were able to weigh the experience against the knowledge that they could’ve turned it down or pushed for more. They were able to approach commissions and business transactions as though the publisher was lucky to have them and not vice versa.

That’s the great disservice of unequal pay for Black women. We’re made to believe that what we offer is genuinely worth less. The most innovative, brilliant, resourceful, tactful, and creative people I know are Black women. We have had to own all of those traits just to survive. It’s that struggle which has acclimated us to exploitation in every arena of our lives.

Black women are put in the tough position of accepting less than we’re worth or accepting nothing at all. This weekend, as I was struggling to pull food and gas money from dust, an editor I hadn’t worked with (from a publication I had worked with), offered me 2/3 of what I’d been previously paid by them. I had to wonder if she knew that I knew what they could afford. I had to wonder why she felt I wasn’t entitled to that.

Because today is Black Women’s Equal Pay Day, because my horoscope said to demand my worth, because another Black woman writer encouraged me to advocate for myself, because this week has brought me to the brink of my limits: I rescinded the pitch. I chose dignity. I chose not to haggle my way up to my own minimum. But most weeks, I feel forced to make my minimum bottomless. To humble myself. Because most weeks, like this week, I have to pour all of my creativity into trying to scrape by financially.

Chronically and systemically earning less than we’re worth leaves Black women little to leverage. Negotiating and declining are privileges we often literally can’t afford. It renders many of us trapped in a cycle of settling. But Black women’s work is worth more than that, demands more than that.

I think about last summer’s experience often. I think about how I thought I was turning a corner in my career. How I believed that being validated by that publication might encourage other publications to see me as valuable. How I thought I had cracked some code and unlocked a new level where I would suddenly be seen as someone whose work is worth honestly investing in. How I reveled in what I deserved. But fair pay is not an experience to write home about. It’s just fair.

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