What to Do When Your Country F***ks Around and Finds Out

A guide for people who didn't make America great ... again

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More than a decade ago, just before the first election of Donald J. Trump, I launched an online platform and podcast network. It was a place where Black writers and others could share their unfiltered voices. In fact, it was essentially the predecessor of ContrabandCamp. One of my best friends even hosted a podcast on the accompanying podcast network …

Until he called me to tell me that he was going to have to cancel the show or change its title.

I was heartbroken. The show’s name was perfect. It was both a cultural reference and a thesis statement. In my opinion, he had stumbled across a title that exuded Blackness without even referring to race. I assumed he wanted to rename the project because it infringed on a previously existing copyright, but it was even worse than I imagined:

“We gotta change the name, Mike,” he said adamantly. “White people started using it.”

I hate ceding power to caucasity, so I eventually talked him into keeping it. But looking back, he was absolutely right. Not only did he perfectly anticipate what would happen to the phrase, but he also predicted what would happen when white people found out about the phrase that described his brainchild.

The StayWoke Show.

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Of all the treasures that white America has “borrowed” from Black culture, the colonization of Black adages, phrases and sayings is perhaps the most annoying.

To be clear, no one is offended when 15-year-old Ashleigh wonders “Why you be hatin’ on Taylor Swift.” I understand why she thinks it’s “a vibe.” I don’t even get upset when Dylan tells me not to “crash out, twin” because I’m “giving reverse racism.” Still, the appropriation of Black culture is like a thief that steals from your garbage can; you eventually get tired of someone rifling through your shit.

Perhaps the best example of this phenomenon is white America’s recent discovery of another age-old phrase:

“Fuck around and find out.”

While I freely admit that Black Americans did not create the idea of fucking around, hearing Black culture spill from the same lipless mouths that treat Black people like COVID-37 irks the part of my soul where I store pound cake recipes and lyrics to old negro spirituals. To be fair, the term was probably on its way out anyway. Like most parts of the culture that become mainstream, FAFO is a hand-me-down that has circulated through Black culture for so long, it has already finished college and raised its own children and grandchildren. It’s not even original. FAFO is essentially a light-skinned descendant of a phrase whose lineage includes:

• “I’m finna give you what you keep looking for.”

• “Don’t let your mouth write a check your ass can’t cash.”

• “Don’t start none, won’t be none,” and of course …

• “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.”

However, there is a reason why this particular use of the phrase “fuck around and find out” registers so high on the annoyance scale.

White people never “find out.”

Because I would never whitewash the past, I acknowledge the white ancestors at the vanguard of the fucking-around industry. But ever since “20 & Odd” Africans disembarked from the White Lion in 1619, finding out is a role that has been traditionally filled by Africans in America.

They fuck around; we find out.

I’m pretty sure Donnie McClurkin wrote a song about this. When the Europeans stole the land of indigenous natives, we found out who had to work the land. The founders fucked around and started a new country; we found out who had to build it. Nothing happened to the Confederate traitors who fucked around and started the bloodiest war in the history of this continent; we found out about a century of racial terrorism, second-class citizenship and Jim Crow. Whether it is getting government handouts after creating a great depression or getting their white supremacist wishes after trying to overturn the results of an election, it seems as if white America never finds out …

Until today.

As America inaugurates the president responsible for the greatest economic, political and social crises in the nation’s 248-year history, we also are embarking upon a historic test of the fuck around industrial complex’s immune system. Consequently, many Black people have taken the position of Ivan Drago …

I know it’s tempting to let white America go to hell in a MAGA hand basket (which is probably for sale on Trump’s website), but I know that’s not how y’all were raised. This has nothing to do with equanimity, racial unity, the fact that we built this country or the historic kindness of Black folks who keep saving this country from itself. Instead, we should remember another saying before it, too, is thrown atop the appropriation heap of African-American aphorisms.

When white America catches a cold, Black America gets the flu.

— Somebody’s grandmama

There is not a single affliction that will adversely affect MAGA America without ransacking our communities. Every single Black American reading this is a survivor of slavery, lynchings, disenfranchisement, segregation, education inequality and all the other shrapnel that this country lobbed at our communities. But just as surviving a bomb doesn’t mean you are bomb-proof, the fact that we endured those hardships didn’t make us stronger or more find-out resistant. It just means we didn’t die.

America wants us to die.

That’s the point of this whole thing.

The asinine “great replacement” they fear is absurd, but white supremacy is real. It’s the only reason you strip away reproductive care in a country where pregnant Black women are three times more likely to die than white expectant mothers. In a country that underfunds Black pre-K facilities, majority-Black school districts and historically Black colleges, ending affirmative action isn’t a hurdle; it’s a death sentence. There’s no other way to explain why you’d pass laws that caused a 72% increase in suicide attempts in transgender and nonbinary youth. It’s why you attack diversity, equity and inclusion but not legacy admissions, donor loopholes, educational redlining, hiring disparities, misinformation, online hate, right-wing militias, Christian nationalism, white supremacist extremists and people who storm Capitols. It is a scourge that killed during Trump’s previous presidency, and it will kill again.

I do not want us to die.

This article was originally going to be a funny-but-poignant piece about navigating a second Trump presidency, his confederacy of dunces and the ever-present threat that accompanies caucasity. It was going to include an itemized list of things we can do over the next four years to resist.

But not today.

Today is not the time. If we’re being honest, some of us are scared today. Many more of us are angry. And today, we are all exhausted. We are tired of finding out. It is always us. The arc of the moral universe might be long, but I have seen no evidence that it bends toward justice. However, if you avert your eyes away from the blinding glare of whiteness long enough, you can witness Black people bend it by their goddamned selves. I have seen it with my own eyes.

America is not a failed colony because we saved it. It became a superpower because of us. We are the ones who made it a quasi-democracy. And yeah, if Trump doesn’t set it on fire, we will probably save it again. But we won’t do it because of retribution or with the hopes that they will find out. We won’t do it for America or exclusively for ourselves. We will do it because it’s just what we do. It’s who we are.

So stay woke, but do not concern yourself with white people. Even if they never ever ever ever find out, you should remember the ancient African-American adage that echoes through every negro spiritual and sweetens every pound cake-flavored soul that ever survived a grenade called America:

Do not die.

Today, that is enough.