Get out of my inbox
If you’re reading this, it’s either because you’re a nosy bugger (🍿🍻), or because I’ve sent you this to explain why I can’t get back to you (🙏🏽🍃).
TLDR;
I don’t benefit from interacting with you.
We are not friends. You drain me when I’m already running on empty.
Many of your kind have done this to me. I’m not sticking around for this.
You don’t have to pretend you care about what I care about. It literally does not matter to me.
I’m trying to get real work done. If you’re serious about doing something real in service of actual decolonisation, send me a project proposal. Otherwise, please stop messaging me.
Please think harder before taking up someone else’s time, space and energy.
You might’ve done this before to many non-white or Global South folk, or perhaps I am the first one you’ve done this to.
You might not have meant any harm, or perhaps you truly felt entitled to access my perspectives, thoughts and time — simply because I seemed to tolerate and humour you, and it felt good to receive attention from someone like me. You are not even aware of the power dynamics that exist between us, or the support we are looking to build for our corner of the decolonial movement.
Most likely you simply are not able to put yourself in the shoes of others, because you’ve never had to do that, because there hasn’t been any need to. Most likely you have never been on the receiving end of the kind of verbal, physical and psychological abuse that are normal to folk like myself, born traumatised, ethnocided within a colonial world order that favours, nay, worships you.
Old white man in the Global North, my inbox is full of people just like you.
You think of yourself as unique, an original thinker with great intellect.
You think of yourself as interesting, a broad, vast mind with a global network, a fun person to converse and build value with.
You think of yourself as worldly, a learned perspective with a burgeoning curiosity asking compelling questions.
And yet, you are a carbon copy of twenty or thirty previous randoms who have, like you, magically appeared in my inbox.
I see you, despite the way you perceive yourself, as uninformed, insular and emotionally underdeveloped.
Old white man in the Global North, I don’t know you.
I am not responsible for you in any way, shape or form.
Yet you clearly feel entitled to my attention and validation, and assume that I would comply with your requests and support you in your interest areas as, it appears, some form of aid or charity, even though
- I do not offer those services
- I do not consent to providing those services
- I and my ancestors have already been aiding and assisting the Global North for centuries
Regardless, you take up my space because in your view, I absolutely must receive inherent value by interacting with someone as unique, interesting and worldly such as yourself.
Old white man in the Global North, I tolerate you not because of your “charm”, “wit” or “explorations”. I respond to you merely for one reason.
It is because I seek collaborators with the kind of power you could potentially hold within empire as it collapses.
Against solid advice.
I don’t blame you for succumbing to my immense ethereal beauty, magnetic personality and unparalleled intelligence. I am all too used to folk reacting to me with intense infatuation (mostly men) or violent jealousy (mostly women).
I am careful not to disclose my politicosexual orientation when I say that neither of these reactions interest me (“liberals hate her!”).
Old white man in the Global North, I don’t invoice you up front because I understand that to some extent, I will have to groom you into decolonial work.
This is work that I don’t owe you, and I certainly don’t owe me, but I do anyway in service of decolonisation.
It’s okay; somehow at the end of the month, I scrape something together to pay my rent and bills.
Wait, who’s really grooming whom?
The only information you need to arrive at an answer is the power dynamics between us. I may have captured your attention and secured a hold under your skin, but you hold privilege, influence and access far, far beyond my reach.
There always comes a day — sooner and sooner now — when I find the electric fencing that protects the stolen resources you call “property” you “own”.
I invite you to contribute your fair share, and you guiltlessly deliver your oft-repeated lines, “I’m no good here,” or, “my contributions would be too meagre,” or the deadender, “I don’t appreciate being thought of as a wallet”.
And yet you have all too recently bragged of your grand magnanimity and immense contributions in interest areas that (in)directly harm me or the worlds I care about.
Coloniser, this dance we dance…
It bores me to death.
Old white man in the Global North, your cognitive dissonance is truly astounding. It elicits fascination and disgust of such a scale that it never fails to impress.
The only thing that comes close is the extent of your candid assumption that I am too naive to understand what is happening.
I laugh and play dumb like the good exotic girl you prefer to think of me as.
I psychotically log your comments into my black book of retribution as a form of therapeutic journaling to regulate my own emotions, in a manner that folk like yourself will never understand.
Because society assigns you power over me, assuming the best of you, and the infantile cuteness of me.
Old white man in the Global North, I don’t know what you are capable of. You know henchmen in dark corners of redhanded impunity, and you offend easily.
Contrary to my suicidal nature, I’m not currently trying too hard to perish under stupid and avoidable circumstances.
That would be embarrassing to say the least.
It’s really not that hard for you to squash me and everything I have worked to construct into oblivion like a wandering scout ant. I know this without shadow of a doubt.
You could do it with your pinky and forget about me in the next nanosecond. It would take me years to rebuild amongst the rubble of my half-implemented ideas.
One text message, one email instruction…
Who knows how little effort it could take for you to destroy my attempts to build a life actually worth living.
Old white man in the Global North, when I draw boundaries or limit access well within my prerogative and rights, what happens next is no surprise.
You cry wolf, lashing out with DARVO.
Deny, attack, reverse victim & offender.
You claim that you came to me in a vulnerable state, and instead of helping you, I harmed you.
Old white man in the Global North, I’m not your mother nor your wife.
I understand all too well the desire, hatred and jealousy that lies just beneath the surface, directed towards the petite brown female slave who dares to not fulfil the white master’s fetishes.
The bitter violence that lies just beneath white entitlement.
A dangerous type of entitled coloniser, who curates Teflon public profiles, who would accuse me of not being “kind” or “inclusive”, who would threaten to sue me and/or harass me for years.
This is my experience, again and again.
Old white man in the Global North, if you don’t want to support or commit to the real work of decolonisation, then please, I beg you, leave me alone.
Now that you have arrived at the end of this piece, I can finally divulge that “Old white man in the Global North” is not the only privileged demographic draining my energy in this way.
The second most common demographic is the young Western-educated man in the Global South, who harasses me for mostly the same motives: attention and validation.
The main difference is that I am not too worried that an individual from the second demographic has any realistic capacity to destroy me.
