So how does it feel to be a walking basket case of all the symptoms of people who’ve been slaves — or exploited, hated ghetto ‘thugs,’ for 530 years? Many Black people apparently don’t know, because they have rarely noticed that’s what has been going on with me.
I have been really, really good at being a ‘White girl’ in this culture. I say ‘this’ culture, meaning within the American Black subculture, which is why I’ve survived here for 45 years. I’ve been really good at it because I’m an imposter playing a role to please the people around me, discouraged from being who I really am, or saying what I really think, except maybe one-on-one, behind closed doors. Like people were ashamed of me, or annoyed with me calling any kind of attention to myself.
I was desperate.
I am not very far from my grandmother’s psyche. She was bullied into pretending she was from the people who were exterminating us. Okay, Stop, Listen. I just said my shit was worse than yours. I just actually, right up in your face, told you that my shit was worse, when I’ve been White every day of my life enjoying a privilege that is better than anything you’ll ever get on the best day of your life (unless you go to Serbia). Yep, I am right in your face and saying that. Not over it yet? Or can we get back to why I was desperate?
Other than Jews, there were no White people here who made any damn sense to me. They were not speaking my language. I mean all the subtle things you never think about, but are influencing everything you do. Like how loud do you need to get to satisfy your need to speak? How emotional and confiding do you need to get to engage my attention? How much physical affection do you need expressed: a touch, a nudge, whatever? What do you like to talk about? Do you like talking about how you expect the world to treat you, and how you feel about that?
I can’t ever stop talking about that. I have to talk about it all the time because that’s how my daddy raised me. He was a Krajina Serb, the minority Serbs of Croatia (formerly), who didn’t know who he was, or what had been happening to us. He thought he was an American Bigot, a natural progression from a mid-century Croatian, what we were forced to pass for. And he raised me to contradict him. He raised me to be the opposite. What’s the opposite of a white bigot?
A Serb. Of course there was some confusion since it sounded like he was raising me to be a Black Militant. That started at about the age of eight, so I guess I had those first eight years to think I was just a little girl growing up and not a Black Militant. A little odd, but what was the alternative? Being what we hate? We have better sense than that. We had no idea what was going on, but we still had better sense than that.
People like us just innately feel that people who think they’re better than other people are disgusting. And that’s how we survived as long as we did, the only reason we’ve survived as long as we did, because we never let go of that thought. People who act like they’re better than other people are disgusting. (Don’t forget the italics.)
We’ve got a whole religion built around that concept — saints, legends, songs, culture. The average illiterate Serb peasant knew more about his history than the average Englishman at the turn of the last century. Then there’s the theology – what God wants us to be so that he will really love us. He wants us to think that people who think they’re better than other people are disgusting. Now that’s what I call a sophisticated slave religion. I had never been inside a Serbian church but that was still the most important edict in my life, Just second nature.
We have to keep talking about this shit. It’s a compulsion. A Serbian compulsion, inherent in our nature. Everybody notices it.
So Grandma was forced to pass for the equivalent of White in order to survive. When you all tell me that I am White, and must be White, or I’m not giving you enough respect, you are asking me to pass for White again. Do you understand what you’re asking of me, and how absolutely pit bull mad it makes me to see you being so utterly hypocritical?
Do you want me to show you some Serbian ghetto? We just went through 350 years as ghetto thugs. Do you understand what kind of issues those create? Like that issue of wondering if you’re going to be allowed to exist. We have a lot stronger reason to have a very very very negative expectation. As negative as you can get. Extinction. We don’t exist anymore.
Ever known an extinct person before? The entire ghetto culture of NYC, with all its incredible gifts, including everything that ever spun out from it on the planet, no longer exists. It has been liquidated or credited to something/someone else. Sure you’ve known someone who was extinct. Your NDN grandma. I got one of those too. (That’s who set my mom up with my dad.)
I am just a basket case of that whole universe of loss. Don’t you understand why it was so important that I love you all? For me to see how beautiful you all are means we could see why we’re so special, again. We had accepted every vile thing they said about us, and believed it to an extent that we were willing to surrender to them. And be happy with whatever crumbs we were thrown. And living with a self-esteem seriously in the red.
That was an eleven-year-old, illiterate, shoe-less orphan who made that decision to pass, fresh in from the fields. A stranger in a strange land. She had to sit quietly and accept being baptized as a Croatian so they would tolerate her. Did I say tolerate? Or did I say use? Then she had to sit quietly while Croatian fascists in the Old Country viciously slaughtered half of her family. And never say a word.
Yep, we were a little messed up behind that. So that’s what it will be like, IF it ever gets to that here, again. Those are the kinds of survivors you can expect.
You know how Jewish guys are always talking about all the phases that people surviving a holocaust go through? That was always just so sexy to me. It totally got to the heart of where I live. It was what resonated beyond anything I’d ever heard. Oh, what was that? I was just playing the same role to you, you were playing for your daddy? And I just happened to know exactly what to do to get everything to turn out right? Now how could I have done such a thing? I was just a shiksa. You don’t trust shiksa. Or was I really a woman who had been dealing with exactly that for 500 years and knew how to keep it together? That was my job.
There we go again, that blaring message that I was being pressured to pass for ‘white,’ (shiksa = white girl) to let someone play games to suit their own head, that negated me. They’d been pressuring us to pass for centuries. Do you have any idea what kind of torment that is? Or is that something you agonize over every day?
You all were not being Jewish or men of color to me. The way I process it, y’all were being Croatian, pressuring me to pass for Croatian (White). You know, those people who were exterminating us in our ghetto. That elaborate shit where they have this entire infrastructure developed for mass killing you, while taking as much pleasure in it as they possibly can.
This is when everybody in the county is getting lynched the same day, though not really lynched because that takes too much manpower and time. Plus it’s too humane. 
Between WW! and WWII they figured out it’s gotta be something like slitting 1,200 throats a day, with a specially-designed ergonomic knife. You know track them down to school and do them in an orderly way, right in the school room. A rate of production, I mean destruction, like that. And that’s happening in every county, in every state in the country. The same day. 
All that they have to do is win the next election, and they can do whatever they want to you. They’ll get everybody convinced that you’re attacking them. Oh, that’s right, they already are.
Things are more dire than you think they are. Seriously. They’re getting ready. We just went through this shit. Look at the record. The way they did us. How easy it is to get it to work. Especially when you got the US military / diplomatic / surveillance structure at your disposal. They’re grand masters at getting away with this shit while making it look like they’re humanitarians. They’re doing you a favor dismantling your country and putting Neo-Nazi fascists at your throat. They’re the ones who were behind the scenes, doing us this last go round. The ones who finished us off.
All you have to do is surf forums filled with Croatian trolls and you’ll find out how they stereotype us. They call us lazy, over-sexed gangsters. Yep, they hate us exactly the same way they hate you. Why do you think I relate so much? And I worry so much?
So that’s what you’re getting in bed with when you decide to play me for a White woman. You’ve got that nasty spectre standing over you. Gloating. He’s won. The Devil has won.
Really? You don’t mind being in that company? I’m sorry, but I’m just programmed to think that people who behave like they’re better than other people are disgusting. And it took them 350 years to keep us from thinking that, and they had to eradicate us from the face of the earth to get us to stop.
That’s right. I’m an extinct person. Take a moment to think that through. Maybe you need to have that quiet time-out again while we recover from me saying to you, right up in your face, that our shit is worse. It is. You DO NOT WANT to compete with this. You do not want them using the baby for a football, I mean a good long kick. Did you hear that thwack?
You do not want them cremating grandma alive, with her trying to scramble out of her deathbed in total terror and agony. You don’t want to compete with this. You just need to be grateful that it hasn’t happened to you. Yet.
That can always change. But you don’t want to know about any of that from me because you need to be able to feel that your shit is worse than mine. And that was my function in life for 40 years. Allowing you all to be more important than me. I was looking for somebody to take my ghetto ass in, and that’s the best deal I could get.
But you’re not better than me. There isn’t a single thing that’s special about you all, and inspiring, and admirable and amazing that we don’t have going on in spades. And yes, I did use that word. Get over it. I told you I was ghetto.
We really are very good at thinking about all this. And surviving. My family was culturally genocided 100 years ago while the rest were being physically genocided. AND WE’RE BACK. IT’S A MIRACLE!!! And I hit the ground running because I spent my whole life here incubating that mind. That beautiful Serbian mind that the world needs so badly.
No regrets. Who can regret a miracle?
And it wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for y’all.
Y’all saved me.
And that’s how I really feel.
And if you turn around and say something nasty and disrespectful about my dead, I will delete your comment and pray for you. So don’t even bother, unless you think you need the prayers.
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