This is why I identify as black. White people tend to like me a lot. What they expect me to do is disassociate from my blackness. I’m technically biracial and sometimes I can appear ambiguous. Basically they hope I’m like Candace Owens. I have dignity now though so that’s not going to happen.

I was adopted and raised by Anglophiles. So they aren’t even so much American white which is where most racism stems from. They are “ancestors came over from England with gentry surnames” white. Probably the nicest and least racist people you will ever meet. Simply put they don’t believe in several races. Which is the only true path to anti racism.

They don’t actually know they are Anglophiles. In fact, I didn’t know there was anything strange about my upbringing until I graduated high school. You mean your grandparents don’t have a sword and shield from the 1600s above their fireplace displayed in their dining room?

I’ve heard people online talk about speaking a particular way around white people. I don’t relate to that. My voice is my voice and societal expectations or the discomfort of others is not going to change eighteen years of socialization.I don’t feel the need to change how I was socialized since that would be nearly impossible.

Socialization takes place when you are a child. But just because I definitely give off confusing social cues to people doesn’t mean I’m brain dead. I don’t want to pretend to be intelligent and well read( like Candace Owens) when I’m really just regurgitating what white people have told me to think. I actually research and read about every subject imaginable. That’s what annoys me about black people who just regurgitate what some white people tell them. You ask them about James Baldwin and they have no idea who you are talking about.

I was guilty in my teen years of being like Candace Owens because I attended a predominately white private school through elementary and high school. I said disgusting and shameful things about black people. Not because my family fostered that at all. It’s very important to note that I do not think all white people are racist. I’m fully aware Europe exists and I would say it’s much lower there now.

But what happened to me was unfortunate because though I really was raised in an insulated utopia of sorts. American racism still got in. Though my family showed me nothing but love and caring unfortunately many white Americans are just not like them. I recognized in my social interactions with other white Americans that my blackness put a target on my back and that is a lot of stress to thrust onto a child. Once I realized the level of terror I must have been feeling to cause me to hate and disparage people just like me. I realized that African Americans were definitely not the problem in this equation.

Whenever I see black people online who sound or talk like Candace Owens I just want to buy them a kindle subscription. I’m not insulting her intrinsic intelligence. I’m insulting her for not using it.

I was very young when I held similar views to her just barely out of high school and it embarrasses me to seen grown adults acting like that. But I also remember how scared I felt sitting in a classroom with a student nicknamed Adolf with a shaved head who wore combat boots around our nice private school. A few of the high school boys (the most popular and influential ones) made jokes out of doing Nazi salutes and were never reprimanded. I think at that age I knew that I wanted to be liked by them rather than possibly suffer any persecution from them. If you can imagine by that age I had had enough. You can only expect a human to stand up to that for so long by that age I had fifteen years under my belt.

I was in a 98% white classroom and none of the students seemed to have a problem with what they were doing. So as a teenager I read the room and tried to out racist the racists. Keep in mind I had no black relatives or even friends at that point. I felt no consequences or guilt on a consistent basis from knowing any black people around me. Which is what most white people experience all over this nation. They don’t have to feel bad because they barely ever have to look a black person in the eye.

Anyway I shared my personal experience because when you look in Candace Owens eyes you see trauma. Have you ever noticed the detached blank stare she gives at all times?

The stare of racist trauma and the eyes of the liberated.

Then couple that with what we know about her bringing a racial discrimination suit in her teen years. I want for people like Candace Owens to get mentally free. To liberate their minds and souls from the cage of American white supremacist terrorism. But they can only do it themselves. You can’t give revelation and catharsis to someone.