Only White Men Get to Have Bad Days — and Only Folks of Color Pay for Them
A White man’s bad day is never victimless. A White man’s bad day is terror.
Update 6/7/22: Level has a new home. You can read this article and other new articles by visiting LEVELMAN.com.
Last Wednesday, Captain Jay Baker of the Cherokee Sheriff’s department in Cherokee County, Georgia, stood in front of reporters to explain why Robert Aaron Long had killed eight people — six of them Asian women. “He was pretty much fed up,” Baker said, “and kind of at [the] end of his rope, and yesterday was a really bad day for him and this is what he did.”
Really. Bad. Day.
Given the fact that Baker himself once released racist anti-Asian merch, his implicit sympathizing with a mass murderer wasn’t even off-brand. Still, you don’t have to be that blatant of a racist to have your first instinct be to defend Whiteness no matter how heinous one acts. Chalking Long’s actions up to a “bad day” was violence by another name — a reminder that only White men are allowed to have bad days, while the rest of us are left to survive the consequences.
Marginalized people exist in an endless time loop of bad days. White supremacy is just a series of things we have to overcome in perpetuity. And…
