You could hear them howling in the night, little cub was frightened. His mother said ‘you are a lion my son, you musn’t be afraid. For one day all the beasts will bow to you, you will be King. All the stags will bow, all the wolves will bow, the bears in the north, and the foxes in the south. All the birds in the sky and beasts in the seas. They will all come to you little lion, to rest a crown upon your head.’ The cub said ‘will I be fierce and strong like my father?’ ‘Yes’, said his Mother, ‘you will be fierce and strong, just like your father’
Dear White Baby,
Welcome to the world! I hope you’re enjoying it so far? It seems like you’ve already gotten a bunch of rather entitled misinformation shoved into your head. Yes baby, you are white, and while I don’t hate you for this, you are very lucky because of it.
Did you know that black babies are WAY more likely to die within the first year? It is SO BAD it is being called an epidemic by some and intiatives have been started to reach out to black mothers at risk.
You don’t suffer the risk of being considered an anchor baby, a mere tool used by evil brown whores to take your mommy and daddy’s hard-earned money. You don’t have to worry about your parents being deported, or even YOU being deported, despite never having even been to your parents’ homeland before in your life! And risks to your future education due to you being undocumented, pfft, never going to be a problem! You won’t have to worry about people mocking your parents’ accents, questioning their legal status even if they are legal. Chances are, regardless of legal status, those brown women, like my mother, will be your caretakers and house cleaners, so be sure to burp with disgust in their general direction when you see them! Have fun on your family trip to the Caribbean, by the way. I’ve never been since the family couldn’t afford it, but it is just the homeland so whatever. no big deal. We shoulda just worked harder. You on the other hand deserve the vacation!
Before Latina women were your mules though, it was black women who cared for you like their own while your parents kept them as slaves, raped them and their daughters, lynced their husbands and sons, and desecrated and undermined their communities and identities for hundreds of years. Your mothers STILL make a profit off their suffering and servitude to you, as should you in the future. Remember fondly your mammy, white baby!
Your mothers don’t have to fight forced, racialized eugenics, sterilazation, and slanderous attacks on their reproductive rights like women of color do. You don’t have Conservatives using you as anti-choice tokens like black babies do, or stealing you from your homes to collect government money or assimilte you to white culture like Indigenous babies are.
You will never be suffering disfiguration from drone attacks on your home by American soldiers.
You will never be misplaced, a refugee, an expat. You will never know war, suffering, or famine. You will never be murdered for buying orange juice or skittles while being black, you will never die of overwork and exhaustion in fields, you will never be executed then buried nameless under a school where you were forcibly brought to ne extracted of your identity. Those are fates for babies of color, not you.
I was a baby when I was taught I was inferior, that I should be ashamed of what I saw in the mirror, of the language I spoke, of where I came from. I was a baby when I learned I was hated and to hate myself. You see, many babies never got the chance, to be loved and given their humanity, because your society deemed them ugly and wrong from the get-go.
But never mind that white baby. Just rest your little head. These are only nightmares you can wake up from, stories far flung and removed from your reality, unsavory things you hear about in the news and can turn off. Sleep tight, now. Goodnight, baby.