There’s also the contingent of white people who are always giving evil white people the benefit of the doubt. They spend their energy making excuses for such people lest they be painted with the same brush I guess. For a group of people who love to tell themselves they’re such rugged individualists, they refuse to acknowledge how much of themselves they see in each other’s faces. They stubbornly refuse to understand that some white people are simply malicious.

And the ones that aren’t too busy being “nice” are too easily cowed by the malicious ones. Too afraid of confrontation, too comfortable to break the peace, to polite to want to make a scene. Respectability politics works just as badly for them as badly as it works on us. Their inability to be impolite, or uncivil makes white women vulnerable to harm, makes them complacent and meek in the face of malice towards other people, and barely able to defend themselves from harm. Black and Brown people have never had the luxury of complacency.