The Clapback Mailbag: The 10 Black Commandments

Our weekly response to readers' emails, comments, tweets and DMs includes a valuable lesson.

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Every Friday, we respond to some of our favorite emails, comments, tweets and DMs, but today I want to try something different.

Hello, my name is Michael Harriot, and I’m here to talk about the lucrative race-baiting industry.

I began my career as an amateur “race hustler” before deciding to turn pro. I was selected in the second round of the 2002 NBA draft and spent 14 years Nagging and Baiting Assholes® with the Carolina Critical Race Theorists, the Dallas DEIs and the Washington Woke Mob. As a four-time champion in the World Series of Playing the Race Card, I wanted to share with you the 10 most important lessons I’ve learned during my Hall of Fame career baiting racists.

I call it the 10 Black Commandments.

1. I am the Lord, your white God, which have brought thee out of the land of Africa, out of the house of bondage. Thou shalt have no other Gods before me.

2. Thou shalt not make unto thee any disparaging image of me.

3. Thou shalt not take the name of “white people” in vain; for white people will not hold you guiltless for taking their name in vain.

These first three commandments are illustrated in a single letter regarding our article on education savings accounts.

The Education Savings Scam: How Black Taxpayers Are Funding 'The New Segregation'

From: Kevin
Subject: A better way than divisive

Dear Michael,

I came across your article on ESAs which led me to some of your other work. I agree with a lot of your perspectives but I submit to you that attacking people because they are white is not the way to unite the country or change their minds. There are other ways to address poverty and education without being racially divisive.

I am a 72 year old retired principal from Georgia. I spent 32 years at [redacted]. We didn’t have any Black students. You would probably call a segregation academy but in my experience, most of the parents didn’t even know about the history of the school. 99% of the parents at my school only cared about their children getting a quality education. Boxing them into racial categories as “white people” does not change minds.

That’s why so many people have a problem with BLM. They would rather focus on the race than just fighting police brutality. As an educator, I taught my students to focus on the things we have in common. I think this is a better way of uniting people.

Just some advice from someone who knows.

Dear Kevin,

I understand why white people don’t like hearing the words “white people.” I have even workshopped a few alternative nicknames that best describe white people, including Mayo-Americans, Pastafarians and, my favorite, “Anti-Niggers” (It has a dual meaning if you think about it). However, I have a more important question about something that we’ve heard so often that we just assume that everyone believes it:

Why is talking about race divisive?

To be clear, I’m asking why white people consider race to be a divisive or uncomfortable topic. While there will always be Jason Whitlocks and Candace Owenses, broadly speaking, every other racial and ethnic group is perfectly fine discussing their culture, history and racial legacy. In fact, the default assumption that everyone feels like white people makes me uncomfortable.

Can you name any other social, political or economic problem that we treat this way? Are men who legislate women’s reproductive rights more crude than someone who uses the word “pussy”? Why is protesting the genocide of Palestinian children more obscene than spending taxpayer dollars to send bombs to Israel? Is funding a genocide an acceptable conversation if we call it “foreign aid?” How can someone comfortably vote against Medicaid but be outraged when an immigrant kills a white girl? And why is talking about race worse than all of these?

That question is rhetorical. I already know why.

The answer is “white people.”

If talking about race makes white people uncomfortable, imagine how uncomfortable racism makes us feel. I submit to you that conversations about race don’t make white people uneasy. The fact that they can’t control the narrative is what makes them uncomfortable. They would rather racism exist than address the white elephant in the room of every Caucasian house. Fortunately, I have a solution:

White people need to stop being so divisive.

Black people would stop protesting police brutality if police stopped brutalizing Black people. If there were no more wars, anti-war demonstrations would cease to exist. These social problems exist because WHITE PEOPLE aren’t willing to sacrifice their comfort to end them. But people like you would rather placate white sensibilities than make the world a better place.

The idea that “most of the parents” don’t know about the history of your school is wild to me. I can guarantee you that every Black child in your community knows why your school is all white. In your case, either you didn’t arm your students with the intellectual curiosity to ask why their school was all-white, or their parents, their community and you intentionally hid it from them. In either case, the world is dumber and more racist because of you. Even worse, apparently you seem to be comfortable with that fact.

You are not an educator, Kevin, you are a glorified pacifier.

4. Thou shalt not pacify white people.

5. Remember Black history and keep it holy.

6. Thou shalt not covet their opinion, nor their acceptance, nor anything that is their whiteness.

As the following two letters show, these three commandments are very important:

From: Dominique
Subject: HelpKarmelo

https://www.givesendgo.com/HelpKarmelo

Here is the next hustle for niggers like you. Proof that you and black culture are dogshit.

From: Karl
Subject: Here’s some Black AF history for you

You know this but you can’t say it because it would stop your hustle. Since you call yourself a historian, I stumbled across this quote from one of your great African AmericansBooker T. Washington.

There is a class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs-partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.

Dear Karl and Dominique:

My cousin Metia is in Seattle, caring for my niece’s children while my niece is on assignment with the Army. Last Sunday, she took the kids on an Easter Egg hunt, so I volunteered to give them some tips.

“The first thing you have to do is think like an Easter bunny,” I explained. “Think to yourself: ‘If I was a rabbit and I was pregnant with the Holy Ghost, where would I want to go into labor? That's where the good Easter eggs are.”

They giggled. Metia called me “stupid.” But I reminded them that I am the authority on the subject since no one in my family celebrates Easter.

I never felt bad about never receiving an Easter basket because most Easter candies are trash. Peeps taste like cotton candy had sex with fabric softener and then raised the baby on a Sunny D-based diet. And whoever came up with Cadbury eggs should be arrested for terrorism. Was someone sitting at home thinking: "I want some chocolate, but I want it to be too big a bite, but if I manage to bite it, I want it to ejaculate Pepto Bismol in my mouth?" I can't say much about circus peanuts because the woman who gave birth to me just happened to love circus peanuts. Yes, my mom actually bought circus peanuts …

FROM THE STORE!

She actually walked into a place of business that offered various candies and treats and handed over her hard-earned cash in exchange for Teletubby dookie. Sometimes, when I talk to my mother, I kinda hope that she will tell me that there was a period in her life where the Russian mafia threatened to kill me, and the only way she could save me was to eat a bag of circus peanuts, and the mobsters saw her eating the circus peanuts and said: "This woman is a savage! We gotta leave her son alone! There's no telling what she'd do to us if she'll eat VOLUNTARILY eat circus peanuts." And she had to periodically eat them every now and then, just in case the mob was watching.

That's probably why she never let me go on an Easter egg hunt. The mob. That's the only thing that made sense. Plus, that scenario is MUCH more logical than what she told me:

"Nah, I just like circus peanuts."

When I attended college, my fraternity hosted an Easter egg hunt at a nearby community center. All we had to do was make a few Easter baskets and hide them early on the Saturday morning before Easter. I was supposed to buy the Easter eggs and drop them off that Friday night. But when I went to the store, I couldn't find any easter eggs. I asked where they were, but they looked at me as if I were crazy. Apparently, it's hard to find Easter eggs the day before Easter. I should have known.

I called my frat brother, who told me that he found some, but he needed help putting the baskets together. When I arrived, there were bowls and pots everywhere. As he’s giving me directions, he absentmindedly reaches into a bowl, pulls out a purple egg, and bites into it. I didn't say anything, but he could tell something was wrong. There must have been tears in my eyes because I couldn't hide it. It was one of the most disappointing moments of my entire life.

Man … let me take a deep breath because, as I’m writing this, it is all coming back to me. OK, I'm ready to tell you: All my life ...

I mean ALL of my life …

The entire muthafucking WHOLE time ...

I thought Easter eggs were made of candy!

I can't tell you WHAT kind of candy I thought they were (Honestly, I think I thought they were oversized jelly beans), but everything about Easter is candy! It's basically Jesus Halloween! How was I supposed to know that the holiday’s biggest symbol is just an undeviled egg dipped in Magic Marker juice? I didn't say anything. I just let my grief wash over me until it slowly turned to anger, then confusion.

That's disrespectful to the Risen Christ.

Anyway, I never told anyone about it. Unlike most people, I realized learning something new doesn’t necessarily mean that no one else knew about it.

For instance, every Black person who has ever said something about racism has heard that quote from Booker T. Washington. Along with Thomas Sowell and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “content of their character, not the color of their skin,” excerpt, that quote from Booker T. Washington is one of white people’s favorite hidden treasures. When white people discover it, they really think they’ve uncovered a sweet, delicious prize.

To Black people, it is a boiled egg. Not only have we heard Washington’s words a million times, we also understand why white people love that quote. We understand what the people who weaponize them want:

They want Black people to shut the fuck up.

When Booker T. Washington wrote those words, he was talking about two intellectual giants — Ida B. Wells and W.E.B. Du Bois. He was talking about how they called him out for not supporting voting rights and anti-lynching laws.

“Mr. Washington says in substance: Give me money to educate the Negro and when he is taught how to work, he will not commit the crime for which lynching is done,” Wells wrote. “Mr. Washington knows when he says this that lynching is not invoked to punish crime but color, and not even industrial education will change that. Again, he sets up the dogma that when the race becomes taxpayers, producers of something the white man wants, landowners, business, etc., the Anglo-Saxon will forget all about color and respect that race's manhood.”

They would not shut the fuck up.

Booker T. Washington wasn’t an opp; he just believed that white people were more likely to embrace him if he wasn’t so antagonistic. He was right. In 1901, he became the first Black man to dine at the White House — an honor Ida B. Wells or Du Bois never received.

Or maybe it didn’t work.

As amenable and compromising as Washington was, a Black man consuming food in the White House set the white world on fire. South Carolina Senator Ben Tillman proclaimed, "The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they will learn their place again."

By the time Washington left D.C., a group of angry white men had hired an assassin to kill him. A few weeks later, a poem about Washington’s visit went viral in newspapers across the country.

Here’s proof that Karl and white culture are dogshit.

I asked Metia if she was going to let the kids eat their Easter eggs. “Hell no!” she said. “If I let those kids eat all that sugar, they will drive me crazy.”

“Wait, Metia,” I said with all seriousness. “You know that Easter eggs aren’t made of candy, right?”

“Stop lying, Mikey,” she said. “You mean they’re doing all that shit for boiled eggs?”

But I did not laugh at my cousin.

After all, there are white people who believe I care what they think about race.

7. Thou shalt not bear false witness against white people.

8. But not all white people.

9. Love thy white neighbors as thyself.

From Maggie S
Subject: Black Art and the Phenomenon of White Discomfort

Hi Michael

I've just discovered substack, and you, in the past few weeks... life is busy lately, but today I'm starting my week of 'staycation' due to public schools' Winter Break here in [redacted]

So, finally a moment to reach out to say thank you, and, "yeahh!" from a white 61 yo (cis)woman, for all of your exciting ContraBand project, but mostly tapping into the recent Beyonc'e and the Kendrick articles.

I live here now in the ridiculous stupid-perfect-happy liberal bubble of Western MA, where all the white ppl are too nice to be offended by Kendrick's show, but mostly "have no idea what that was all about and couldn't understand any of the lyrics anyhow."

But I lived, and loved, 13 years in Baltimore -- from 1985 thru 1999 -- straight out of college from small town PA -- as a "volunteer" at first, running a youth center (with mostly white kids in the old steel neighborhoods of East Bmore) and then ... long story ... living with my guy of the time, at 24th and Guilford for more than 10 years in a vibrant and complex and rough and alive and by far mostly Black community and continuing to work in youth development and social activism.

A formative memory, I rode my bike home after work, about 5 miles, through familiar streets, the day that OJ was acquitted, feeling something that I never could have understood if I hadn't lived there.

So when I read your writings about white ppl getting upset about various cultural and artistic events -- I resonate. Argh this maybe sounds dumb and like I'm being That White Person Who Gets It. I guess I am being that person?

But wish I could convey some depth from practiced observation and committed alliance (many of those years in Bmore learning from and working with and weaving webs with anti-racism trainers & organizers, now dear old friends at Advancing Racial Justice in Baltimore — Baltimore Racial Justice Action )

-- so like, here's a thing: in W-MA, I have learned this subtlety, that when one white person is describing (to another white person) someone like a teacher, or a plumber, or a kid they met, or the lady at the grocery store, they might invariably say: "xyz blah blah, and she's great."

And godda** after 20 years here it's predictable and jaw dropping and consistent: it means "She's Black." This little code word here in perfect and caring and progressive and profoundly queer and feminist WMA.

This is a thing you likely wouldn't know about bc nobody is ever going to say this to you. But it's a thing I know about being white in a white bubble but having those 13 years inside me.

So yeah, somehow wanted to say something to you ... about this resonant article ... what jumps out for me as a white person is the just impossibly profound cultural illiteracy and blindness of the complainy white folks.

Something about "I only know what I didn't know, because I lived and learned how to know it, like in a super slow cooker -- it took so many years of being the only white person around -- but I can see the layers upon layers upon layers of what the white ppl i know just don't know, and have no way to know what they don't know." That's what happens inside my head when I read your article.

Another story, I met up with an old Bmore white friend (who actually took my job at a different youth development teen center when I left there bc of an intense cancer diagnosis) -- a few years back and it was during the BLM upsurges and the sequential, ongoing murders. We arrived separately from different directions and we hugged to say hi, and we didn't stop hugging, and then we wept and wept and wept and finally I said -- "you're almost the only person I don't have to explain it all to."

Something about: there are those of us who read your words with relish and with Respect and resonance.

And maybe this might spark another thought-train for your work and insights. There are so many ways to talk about how the deeply vast majority of white ppl just have NO CONCEPTION OF OTHERING / OTHERNESS. The what, cultural laziness? not to even mention the posturing and appropriation stuff... but the blinders!! the muscle of knowing-what-you-don't-know that doesnt' even exist. (like the invisibility of the Male Gaze that more ppl know about, but the White Gaze. the blinders. oh the blinders.)

Again, sorry if that sounds like some kind of pandering or proving myself. Really I just want to say we hear, and dig, you too, and can't wait for more.

with care in these troubled times,

~ Maggie S.

Congratulations Maggie,

This might be the whitest letter I’ve ever received!

First of all, telling me that you ride a bike five miles to work seems like a humblebrag. It had absolutely nothing to do with the story! Riding a bike five miles sounds like actually an entire day’s work! You know cars exist, right? But if I’m being honest, if I rode a bike five miles to work, every single story I told would begin with “When I was biking five miles to work…”

Also, your second paragraph makes you sound like someone who thinks they’re not racist but also wonders if thinking they’re not racist makes them sound like all the white people who sound like they’re not racist. And Maggie, I am fluent in Caucasian, so when you mentioned where you lived in a “vibrant” neighborhood Baltimore, I understand what you meant:

“I lived around Black people.”

I gotta be honest, I love when white people use those kinds of euphemisms because they’re kind of accurate. There’s nothing less vibrant than a white suburban neighborhood. But as a friend, I want you to understand what this letter makes you sound like:

You sound like a human being.

You sound like someone who is genuinely affected by injustice in your community, even when the victims don’t look like you. You sound like someone who is trying to learn things because you want to be a better person. You sound like someone who can embrace the past while understanding that you can still change the future. Maggie, you sound like you want the world to be a better place and you’re doing something about it.

But here’s the thing Maggie.

You should be proud of yourself — not for living in a “vibrant community” and weeping over Black lives or riding a bike to work. You should be proud of yourself for doing something that most people are not willing to do:

Admit they might have more to learn.

In my experience, the dumbest people have one thing in common with the most racist people:

They know they’re right.

Booker T. Washington became increasingly outspoken in his later years, even advocating for anti-lynching laws. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with circus peanuts, I just don’t like eating pumpkin-flavored foam. And I don’t think all white people are racist …

I think that America is racist.

We live in a country where white children can use taxpayer dollars to attend a school that was built on racism without having to consider its existence. They get to live in a world that considers them more educated, even though the students know less information about the world they live in. It’s a nation filled with people who are more comfortable with the word “nigger” than inequality.

They can bike 10 miles every day, but working to make their community a better place is too hard. They don’t feel a modicum of emotion when the people they pay to enforce the law murder Black people in cold blood. They don’t question why some neighborhoods are “vibrant” and why their neighbors are offended by a Black men reciting rhythmic American poetry.

But that is not my problem. I cannot concern myself with white people’s comfort. After all, I live in a country that was constitutionally constructed to ensure that white people would remain comfortable at my expense. I cannot change that by myself, Maggie. You can’t either. I will not spend a second of my time or a millimeter of my brain power trying to navigate white people’s sensibilities.

I have one job.

Maggie, if “he’s great” means “he’s Black” in Caucasian, then the 10th Black Commandment is the only one that matters.

10. Be great.

Thanks for coming to my TED Talk.