Thread by @abbysyarns, White Supremacy: A ThreadSo when I was a kid I mostly lived [...]

White Supremacy: A Thread

So when I was a kid I mostly lived in Chinchero, which at the time was kind of a cold, barren place without things like plumbing, electricity in most of the town, and so forth. It was a nowhere, nothing, unappreciated place in those days.

Once in a while my parents would get me and my sister going and we'd head to Ollantaytambo to visit some expatriate gringos they knew, who ran a small hotel at the train station on the line to Machu Picchu and, in those days, beyond.

In the beginning, we would walk -- 3-4 hours -- because there wasn't much in the way of a road and there weren't cars that traversed what there was.

We would cross the pampa descending from 13,000 feet above sea level and head into the Sacred Valley of the Incas.

As we'd descend, the air would get thicker and less chilling and everything would turn greener and lusher and there'd be more flowers and fruit trees and by the time we'd get to Ollantaytambo, it was a full-blown tropical paradise, AND there were even bathrooms.

Martha was the girl around my age whose Indigenous Peruvian family lived at the train station, in close company with all those expats, some of whom were there full time and still are today, and some of whom were more transient. There weren't a lot of gringos in this area then.

Anyway, the kids, all the kids, would always run around playing and doing stuff together. And I'll never forget that this one time, one of the not-there-permanently gringa moms hollered out the door that it was lunchtime.

So we all went running over for lunch --

that mom's kids, me, my little sister, the other gringo kids, Martha and her younger siblings.

And the gringa mom said "Oh, I'm sorry, Martha, you kids have to go to your own house for lunch."

We all sort of looked at each other, baffled, and Martha -- who was 10 years old?

Well, she schooled her face to be as unreadable as she could make it, while the gringa mom looked on and smiled at the several assembled white kids and waited for Martha to get her siblings and go.

I felt hot, then cold, with shame.

This wasn't how MY parents did things, and

it's not how any Quechua family did things.

You always share your food. Always. ALWAYS. You would never not share your food. Sometimes in the hard years in Chinchero all we had was the roughest subsistence fare but you never let someone else be hungry. Never.

Martha never had so much as a tangerine, and didn't share it with all the other kids, even if that meant she only got one little section for herself. She never had a piece of bread, and didn't break it into pieces for all the other kids, gringos included.

And that's how it was everywhere in Quechua communities. You would never have a situation where there was food and you didn't make it go around for everyone.

Even today, 40 years later, that's how it is in remote Quechua communities, and in the ones embedded in modernity.

It took me years to understand what was going on that day when all I knew was that I was watching a kid my age and who I played with and who had always shared her food with me, gathering her siblings and leaving while a white mom smiled about it all.

It took me years to understand that's white supremacy. That's the conditioning. Me, and the other gringo kids, we were supposed to learn how to look Martha and her siblings in the eye while our culture denied their basic humanity, refused them a seat at the table.

I wish I could tell you that in that moment, I dramatically refused that lunch. But the truth is, in that moment, I didn't know what to do and I followed the path of least resistance, and I went inside, sat at a table, and pushed it around on my plate with a fork, haunted...

by the way Martha's face changed from laughing, giggling, shared boisterousness to quiet, impassive, and ashamed, as she had to try to explain what was going on to her younger siblings.

And here's the thing. Are you ready?

When you're white or white passing, you see that happen to the faces of your racially marginalized friends all the time. But you've probably been conditioned and programmed to ignore it, and they've been conditioned not to let you see the real face to begin with.

White supremacy isn't putting on KKK robes and going to a lynching.

White supremacy is thinking it's a reasonable boundary to tell the little brown kids there's not enough food for them, to their faces, while you feed the little white kids.

And I get it, I really do: it hurts to realize you're part of that. It stings. That's how it felt for me when I was sitting inside with that gringo lunch on my plate knowing that people who'd never let me go hungry weren't allowed in. I felt like a bad person.

And that's the thing. I didn't just FEEL like a bad person. I WAS a bad person. It didn't matter if I meant to be or not. It didn't matter if I was just going with the flow.

It also didn't matter, truly, how I felt about it -- because it wasn't even ABOUT me.

That was just one of thousands of such experiences, you know? And every single one, I had choices, choices someone who was Black or brown did not. And yes, those choices have consequences. I watched my gringo peers make those choices too, some easily, some less so.

And in the long run, very very VERY FEW of those gringo peers would make the choices that meant having to acknowledge that just going with the flow when you didn't mean to be a bad person still made you a bad person.

Nobody wants to look at themselves and see a villain.

So... white supremacy tells you that you aren't. It's that simple. And it's that alluring. And with time and practice you get better at not seeing the harm you're -- WE'RE -- doing, even when we don't mean any harm.

But we have choices. We always have choices.

And when the choices we make are to go along to get along, to turn a blind eye, to go inside and eat the gringo lunch and forget about Martha taking her siblings away in shame, when we say "Can't we just get back to talking about knitting? I don't come here for racial stuff,"

then we are, in fact, white supremacists. We are literally practicing white supremacy.

There are a million structures and systems aimed at making it so we don't make the other choices. It's hard to break out of them. It's all kinds of weird bonus difficulty for women, and...

...that's why it matters so much what we decide, every time we're making these choices.

But I want you to know it's worth it. And it will be more worth it, over generations.

Fuck that gringo lunch.

And here's the good news: the past ~45 years here in Peru have brought a lot of progress and there's definitely hope for the future.

Which means there can be where YOU are, too.

You just have to make the decent choices. And you know what they are. You really do.

I'm fortunate that decades later, Martha agreed to work with me and we do so every day, as chosen family, and we're surviving this pandemonium together and, yeah, usually we make way more food so there's always enough to go around even if there are surprise guests.

One more thing: the number of such incidents Martha encountered are so large as to make any single one insignificant in the larger trend.

It's not that there has to be one incident so shocking that it can't be tolerated and now nobody does and then it's all fixed.

Instead...

...it's all about never being that mom who has enough food for all the white kids but not the brown ones; about being a white kid who rejects the exclusionary lunch; about not learning how to turn a blind eye to the people who don't have the choices you do.

Also, that gringa mom? If she were around to read this she'd probably say she felt personally attacked by this thread and then cry about it so that everyone would have to comfort her and forget she literally refused to feed children in front of her.

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