Know Your Worth

In 2016, I wrote my first ever viral social media post. It was a Facebook post calling out Charlottesville's liberal core, which was congratulating itself over the hostile reception it was giving Richard Spencer, the KKK, and other White Supremacist organizations that were organizing marches in the city under the cover of feeling they had a friend in the White House. I was calling them out because, as much as I always appreciate hostility toward card-carrying Nazis, the town needed to contend with the fact that Black people are a lot less than "safe" in progressive neighborhoods. To wit: I couldn't count the number of times I'd deliver food to a neighborhood full of "Coexist" bumper stickers and find myself getting flagged by the cops that someone had clearly called on my Black ass from their homes, thinking I didn't belong there. The first media outlets to reach out to me were conservative ones - I remember WMAL being the very first - and they were practically foaming at the mouth to get a Black person on tape complaining about liberal racism. I could have turned that into a whole career. White folks will pay DEARLY to be absolved of White guilt... so my message to the person I'm responding to in this video is: if you're gonna sell out and auction yourself off, that's fine... but at least have enough self-respect to demand market rates.