I was just out walking my dog when a woman on my block — not Karen, but Karen-ing — flicked her cigarette butt into a sewer grate and decided this was the day to initiate a conversation with me. A white woman once told me that the concept of a “Karen” was sexist. She did not specify to whom the alternative — silence,
surveillance, unspoken managerial control — was supposed to be fairer.
A Relationship Built Entirely on Silence
Here is the history, briefly, because the history is the argument. For months I walked past this woman while I walked my dog, Watson — not the dog in question today, a distinction that matters only because everything here turns out to matter. She stared. I said hello. She said hello back. This continued until, one day, I forgot to say “hello,” and she said nothing either. I made a decision in that silence: I would not initiate again. Call it the new status quo, or the restoration of the old one — the record doesn’t show a difference. I walked past her after that looking straight ahead, feeling her eyes on me the whole way, in total silence, for a length of time best measured in seasons rather than weeks.
I would cave sometimes. I’d say hello to relieve the awkwardness, and she always said it back — but the obligation was mine to carry every time. That’s not a friendship. That’s an arrangement where one party performs the labor of pleasantness and the other party reserves the right to withhold it.
The obligation of neighborly-ness was always on me. That’s not a relationship. That’s a maintenance contract I never agreed to.
The Day the Silence Became a Directive
Months passed, in weird silence again. Until today the staring was different — more intense, more clearly building toward something. So I said hello first, which is its own small surrender, and she used the opening to tell me the bushes weren’t made for my dog. I didn’t stop walking. I changed my demeanor and said “sure,” which is the sound a person makes when they’ve decided not to give you the argument you’re fishing for.
There was no “hi.” No “would you mind.” She skipped the entire genre of neighborly request and went straight to management. Not a conversation between two people who live on the same street — a performance review.
To be clear: I understand the bushes. She owns a house. My dog does not understand property lines, and if she’d made a habit of it, fine, that’s a reasonable complaint from anyone. But this wasn’t a habit, and the complaint didn’t arrive as a complaint. It arrived as an instruction, issued by someone who had spent months rehearsing the right to issue it in silence.
What the Silence Was Actually Doing
I live in Hamilton, Ontario, which is densely populated by white people, which is to say that someone like me lives deeply inside a lot of people’s imaginations even before I’ve said a word to them. A lot of people have the privilege of experiencing themselves as not having a race — which is essentially what whiteness is: the condition of being unmarked, the default the rest of the map gets measured against. So when I show up in the frame of someone’s neighborhood, I become available for a kind of unchecked objectification — not hostility exactly, just management, the assumption that I am a condition to be handled rather than a person to be addressed.
This isn’t unique to strangers. I’ve had it from acquaintances, friends, even other people of color — white supremacy is a hell of a drug, it’s your average all-ages club night. Everyone’s welcome. Homeowners protecting their property from the imagined wrath of my micro-bullie, peeing all over their precious city.
Capitalism doesn’t need to convince you of anything. It just needs enough small, deniable machines running in the background, every day, until the conclusion feels like it was yours.
Capitalism maintains itself the way Deleuze and Guattari described it¹ — not as an ideology you’re talked into but as a set of machines, plugged into desire directly, running constantly and mostly invisibly. It doesn’t need your belief. It needs your wanting. You are made to want inclusion inside a system whose coherence depends on someone remaining outside of it, and that production runs you schizophrenic in the process — split between the self capitalism needs you to perform and the self that keeps noticing the split. Whiteness, race — these are social constructs, not biological realities, which doesn’t make them powerless. It makes them efficient. They’re words that obscure the actual process of racism rather than describing it plainly. This process is practiced every day, consciously and unconsciously, through coercion machines like police, courts, and housing policy, and through smaller machines too: microaggressions, hair touching, a woman who has spent months deciding whether to speak to you and finally does, about your dog and her piss bushes.
The Therapist Was Good. The Framework Wasn’t Built for Me
I went to therapy, much like every man of my generation loves doing /s, and it genuinely helped. But one of the things I brought in was the anxiety of simply going outside in my own neighborhood. What I didn’t know at the time was that this was my distrust of white spaces — and that got pathologized. I’m not interested in dragging my psychotherapist; she was good at her job. She was also a white woman working from a model that treats mental health as an effect purely of the individual mind.² It’s a catch-all, and for people outside the system it can miss the mark entirely, because it has no account for structural phenomena acting on the minds of people living under a system that demands objectivity from everyone except itself.
You Don’t Act Black
Here’s the part therapy couldn’t touch: this hasn’t made me more myself. My subjectivity keeps getting read as a threat. The system — and white people inside the system especially — needs to see itself reflected back. Whiteness is the benefit of not having a race, and for that non-condition to feel real, it requires an antithesis. That’s the job. That’s what the category of “blackness” is for.
I used to get angry when people told me I wasn’t Black, that I didn’t “act” Black — usually right after hearing me talk, apparently too well for the category. Growing means accumulating information about your own situation, and that can be liberating and isolating in the same motion. After reading Racecraft,³ it clicked. If Blackness were a real, biological property rather than a way of objectifying a group of people through pigmentation, you couldn’t act it. You either are or you aren’t. That’s the whole tell.
You never hear anyone say, “You know, you don’t act paralyzed.”
Double Consciousness
I was googling the word “race” a year or so ago, and I came across a message board on a site titled “Why are black people obsessed with race?” The site was Stormfront.
This is the reality marginalized people have to live with in this imperialist state, more and more every day: the lived experience of watching a piece of the machinery that goes out of its way to exploit you at worst, or actively exclude you at best. You have to build a self inside that contradiction — a self equally aware of the lie while also, in some way, still serving it. What W.E.B. Du Bois called “double consciousness.”⁴ And if you’re not careful, that doubleness will gaslight you from the inside.
A self equally aware of the lie, while also serving it. That’s not a personality trait. That’s what the system requires you to become to survive it.
I’ve chosen to understand the system — to understand why people serve it even when it works against them — because I don’t want to lose myself the way a lot of older Black people sadly had to. I choose to understand, so I can move forward when some woman on my block wants me to become inhuman over a bush.
Michael Brooks put it best:⁵ hard on systems, soft on people.
Footnotes
¹ Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Their argument that capitalism operates through “desiring-machines” rather than ideology proper — it doesn’t need subjects to believe in it, only to want through it — and that this constant deterritorialization of desire produces schizophrenia not as a clinical accident but as capitalism’s structural byproduct.
² Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), the dominant contemporary talk-therapy model. CBT locates distress in an individual’s thought patterns and behaviors, which makes it powerful for symptom management and structurally blind to distress that originates outside the individual — in policy, policing, or the daily maintenance of racial hierarchy.
³ Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life. The Fieldses’ term for the process that manufactures race through everyday practice — structurally parallel to witchcraft, a belief system that produces the very reality it claims only to describe.
⁴ W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk. Du Bois’s term for the split self-consciousness of Black Americans, forced to see themselves both through their own eyes and through the eyes of a white world that regards them with contempt — a structurally produced doubleness, not a personal failure of identity.
⁵ Michael Brooks, host of The Michael Brooks Show. Brooks’s formulation for a political orientation that directs critique at structures and institutions rather than treating individuals as the site of moral failure — distinct from both liberal moralism and reactionary scapegoating.