Out Here Tryna Survive
This podcast is a trauma-informed, hope-oriented, safe space. It is a warm hug of solidarity for Black women 35+. It is a celebration of our resilience thus far & our determination to not only survive but THRIVE.
Join me, Grace Sandra, a Mama, author, advocate/activist, storyteller, for some good ole self-love shenanigans.
We are braver than we believe✨
Out Here Tryna Survive
Ep 31: Motherhood is Sacred in the Performance of Whiteness
A high school football game ended with an injury—and a prayer. What came next exposed something bigger than sports: the way covert racism hides behind “safety,” outrage, and the performance of white motherhood. When my short clip of my son praying went viral, the internet rushed to judge a 14-year-old Black boy as a criminal, calling for prison instead of proportionate accountability. We walk through what actually happened on the field, how the refs missed it, and how a missed flag turned into death threats, doxxing attempts, and a media circus that prized punishment over truth.
I share the uncomfortable pattern I’ve seen my whole life—raised by a white mother in Northern institutions where racism rarely shouts but always signals. We unpack why so many of the most aggressive comments came from white women, how “protect the children” becomes a permission slip for control, and why the carceral reflex lands hardest on Black kids. This isn’t abstract: the comments moved from moral judgment to targeted harm, and we had to draw firm boundaries to protect our family and the students at the center of the story. Along the way, there were bright spots. My son’s calm, thoughtful response reached even farther than the prayer clip, and families began reaching out to make peace beyond the glare of virality.
Together, we separate accountability from vengeance, context from panic, and safety from supremacy. We talk practical steps for navigating online harassment, centering kids’ dignity, and refusing unpaid “prove it” labor when the receipts are already public. Most of all, we wrestle with the power of narrative: who gets to be seen as a child, who is cast as a threat, and how those stories shape schools, policing, and the daily lives of Black families. If this resonates, subscribe, share with a friend who cares about racial justice and youth sports, and leave a review to keep these conversations visible. Your voice helps push back against the noise and keeps the focus where it belongs—on humanity, truth, and protecting our kids.
I don't know about y'all, but I'm so tired of the subtle racism of white folks, and I got a story to tell y'all today because I went through some crazy mess on the past couple weeks with national news. I was gonna be on Inside Edition. I actually interviewed with the producer, it never aired. Me and my son's social media blow up for something crazy. So I want to tell y'all a little bit about it. But I really don't want to focus on the event as much as I want to focus on what happened in the aftermath and the subtle and ignorant racism of white folks and how much that can have an impact on us as black women. But before we get into that, let me introduce myself. My name is Grace Sandra, and welcome back to the Out Here Trying to Survive podcast, episode 31. If you are not, could you please go on ahead and subscribe, hit the like button, and share this on your Facebook page. Share it because that lets YouTube know that you care. And if you're on Apple Podcasts, please leave me a review, boo. Even if you're new, just be like, hey, I'm new. But she got a good vibe, and I can tell. And as always, I thank y'all for being here because I know you could be anywhere else on these internets. And so if you're here with me, I'm grateful. So, yeah, y'all, let me just tell y'all what happened in the last couple weeks. It's been so crazy. So something happened at my son's school because this is very well documented on my TikTok. If you're very interested in the school, what happened, why it made national and even international news, because yes, me and my son were mentioned, tagged, and posted in the daily mail, which is crazy to me. Crazy to me. It's all on my TikTok at Out Here Trying to Survive if you really want to know the details. So, yeah, y'all, I've just been thinking a lot about what's happening in our country and the kind of racism we're experiencing is so it's so over. It's so almost even over the top. Even with the laws being passed now, the ICE and other law enforcement can arrest people just based on the color of their skin and how they per are perceived in the world, what race and ethnicity they are perceived to be. It's such a sad, sad, sad thing to have happen, right? But there's still so much covert racism. And I think what I wanted to get at and I wanted to show y'all was how much some white women have still not evolved from the kind of white women who would do what that white woman did to Emmett Till. And that is what I've been experiencing lately that has really sobered me in a way about the state of the country and the racism still present in the country, which is not a surprise to anyone. But it is still good to talk about it that we are experiencing this enormous amount of cognitive dissonance around how we're being treated and people living in denial of that. But first, let me tell y'all a story. So, y'all, it's been crazy. About three weeks ago, something happened at my son's school. And again, I'm not gonna say the names of the players or my son or his school. If you want to look that up, you can go on my TikTok at Out Here Trying to Survive. I did pin the two very viral posts that I had as a result of that and other media coverage. It kicked off into this national and even international media circus that had my son and I on the Daily Mail online in the UK, and I was getting hate from the UK. I mean, I was catching strays from UK white people, y'all. It was insane. Anyway, let me tell y'all what happened. If you want more information, you can look it up there. But I'm just gonna leave off names and identifying details from here because really that's not the point of this story, but I do want to tell y'all what happened. The gist is that my son's school, who is a predominantly black school with predominantly black football players, entire chiliing team is black, coaches is black, okay, played a predominantly white school. And during the game, one of the black players pancaked one of the white players. He was down, and then while he was down, he jumped up and pancaked him again. And as a result, the kid got two spinal fractures. Now, at the time, we didn't know that. I won't go into all of the details, but basically nobody saw it because there was a two-point conversion going on at the other end. It was kind of like just off to the side. Like I think if the two-point conversion was happening maybe like the 10-yard line, this was happening at like the 30 or the 40 or something like that. And I don't even really know the yard lines that well, but I know it's split up into 100, right? So like it was some distance in between them. So everybody was looking at the scoring, cheering for the scoring. The refs didn't see it because there was no flag calling. It was clearly an egregious, uh, an egregious move that it was flagrant. It was unnecessary roughness, right? Isn't that what they would call it nowadays? I think that's what they would call it. Whatever the case may be, he got really injured. But I was sitting there and I did not notice. I knew that everybody went down um and that what there was quite a long time before he got up. But he did get up and he, with help, he was he was assisted, he got up and he walked off, and then his parents took him to um the hospital right away. And then I learned the next day that he had his back broken in two places. But when they left the game, my son told me, because the game was kind of cut short. You know, they usually pause the clock for timeouts and all these kind of things. They didn't. My older son was like, Why did the game end so quickly? Like that game was over quick, and my son said, Oh, yeah, the other team said they didn't feel safe and they just wanted to get it over with. And so I was like, Not feel safe? Why? And he was like, Oh, because this one kid, and he told me and my older son who were sitting on the sidelines watching, because we didn't see it. Anyway, I'm telling you these details because this is really important. Some of these details is what ballooned into downright unbelievable violence, unbelievable verbal violence online. I didn't know that. I was like, Oh, that's terrible. And he was like, Yeah, he left, you know, um, he did not leave in an ambulance, his family took him, but none of us on my son's side knew what was going on at all. He said, Yeah, he might be paralyzed. And I was like, Well, no, he can't be paralyzed because I saw him walk off the field. So he's not paralyzed, like I saw his legs moving, and he was like, Oh, there some some people were saying that. Now, apparently, the kid on my son's team didn't get pulled off the field because number one, the coaches and the refs and nobody saw it. But number two, the mom who saw it, who filmed it, uh showed the refs, but the refs wouldn't let my son's coaches see it. So they still didn't have a visual of like what actually happened at all, have any idea what happened. The coaches were in the dark. Everyone that I know of, I did not poll everyone because it seemed to be a big deal online. But everyone who were in my DMs, like, why didn't you guys pull your sons out of the game? You know, once you knew that this kind of flagrant violence happened, and I think it would be good just to reiterate, I didn't know that kind of flagrant violence happened because I didn't see it and there was no flag and there was no whistle and there was no nothing. Anyway, during the game, I saw my son kneel down to pray. And I said to my other son who I was sitting with, like, Oh, I wonder what he's praying for. And I just took a quick little video in part because I do share a little bit here and there on my TikTok and on my Instagram and my Facebook of my family. I'm not like a family vlogger. I don't typically routinely share my kids like in a vlog style, but like if if they're doing something cute, I'll get a little video. I'm like, oh, I want to either keep that or share it. And once I saw him praying, I was just like, oh, you know, let me get a little video. I didn't actually think I was going to share it. I was just thinking, oh, he's praying. And I saw that there's three other players praying. So I took the video the next day. That was on a Thursday. The next day, when my son came home from school, I found out that the kid had his back broken in two places, and then my son was like, Yeah, that's why I was praying. So, or maybe I asked him, like, hey, is that why you were praying? And he was like, Yeah. So I was like, Hey, do you mind if I share this of you praying? And he was like, What yeah, whatever. So I shared it on my TikTok and I noticed it was going pretty viral pretty quickly. Viral for me, I will say. Like within I think like an hour, and I shared it on a Friday night, which is not typically a videos go viral kind of night for me on in any on any night, really. But it had like 20,000 views in an hour or so. And so over the next few days, the video just ballooned up to I think like half a million views or so. Like right now, it's at 1.2 million, which is viral for me. Again, I know that's not viral for some people on TikTok, but for me, the highest video that I had ever had at that point was like 375,000 or something like that, and it was already at half a million. It was like Monday by Monday. Thousands of comments coming in. The number of comments on that post right now is a thousand eighty-eight, and I probably have blocked probably a good 500. I mean, I'm serious, I've spent time. I have spent time blocking because they were so vile. But I noticed right away within a couple hours of me posting that that there were hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of comments that were saying horrible things about my son and about my son's teammate and about me. I was just like, what what'd I do, boo? Like, what did I do? But I realized right away that there were a lot, and I mean a lot of white women in my DM. Or no, sorry, not in my DMs yet. Not in my DMs yet, but on the comment saying that kid should go to jail, that kid is a monster, that kid is a beast, that kid this, that kid that. Not talking about my son, talking about my son's teammate. The aggression with which these women were speaking of my son's teammate was insane. It was really, really insane. So the first thing I did was I I took note, like this is very subtle racism because here is what I know as a light-skinned biracial woman who has a white parent, may she rest in peace. My mom is no longer here, but my mom was Italian American, my dad, may he rest in peace too. He was black American. Okay, so I had a white mom and a black daddy. I was raised around very covert and overt white racism growing up with my mom. My mama, may she rest in peace, but low-key, my mom was kind of racist sometimes, y'all. Like she was very, very covertly racist, which, you know, if you're from the north, I'm from Michigan, okay? I was born and raised in Michigan. I still live here in Michigan. Sometimes in the north, sometimes the racism can be a little bit more, it's a little bit more subtle. It's the kind of like, oh, you're pretty for a black girl kind of racism, where it's like, that's a very racist thing to say, but you said it in a very covert, dog whistly kind of way. Let's say you're new to Earth, you might be like, wow, that hit me some kind of way, but I don't really know why it hit me like that. I just know it didn't feel good, you know, because you know if somebody says you're pretty for a black girl, you know what that means, right? We all know what that means. I don't have to explain that to anyone. That's the kind of racism that I feel like I have grown up with. Now it's interesting. The reason I'm pointing that out is because I was just talking to my man about this the other day. My man is born and raised in Texas, been in Texas, lived in Texas, he's still in Texas, okay? I call my man Mr. Texas because he's still in Texas. But one day, one day we're gonna be together. But anyway, but we were talking about this the other day, and we have realized like how much we both hold really distinct beliefs about what racism looks like because he was born and raised in Texas, and I was born and raised in Michigan, and I'm like, yeah, southern racism is just different, like y'all experiencing something really different down here. And he was like, Yeah, up there, that's that's odd. And I'm like, Yeah, yeah, but anyway, but my whole point in saying that is that wherever you're from, you might experience American racism really different. But one thing I know from being raised by a white woman with white sisters, because my mom's three children from her first marriage are all white, had a white daddy. I was her first and only minority child with my black ass daddy, okay? But my mom's mom, who I was around occasionally, and my mom's siblings, um, she had five siblings, and then their my aunties and uncles and their kids, all of them had some sort of subtle racism, and I got very good at parsing out when it was happening and when it wasn't. It's almost a language in of itself that I learned from a very young age. Also, also, my mama was sending me to PWIs. So, I mean, as young as four, I was in like a little Christian private preschool down the street that was majority white, and then she was sending me to a private Christian school that was a Baptist denomination. So we're talking about white northern Baptist people, which if you don't know, racist, through and motherfucking through. Okay, through and through, all the way through. I got a sense for the language of how white people practiced racism. I was not down with it from a really young age, but anyway, post start coming in. I'm like, ain't this about a bitch? Because here's what I know for damn sure, and you will never, ever, ever, ever be able to convince me otherwise. The way that this story really blew up would have never happened. It would have never, ever, ever, ever happened if my son's teammate had done that to another black kid. Nobody would have cared. Nobody would have gave a damn. One black kid hurt another black kid. They don't give a fuck. They wouldn't have given a fuck. They made it seem like all of these white people flooding in my comments, flooding, flooding these comments with hate. Mostly women, by the way. They made it seem like they were just so concerned because my son's teammate was so violent. What a violent little boy. This little boy needs to go to prison. Throw the prison at him, throw the prison at him, lose the key. This and that and horrible things that I'm not even explicitly saying. Also on my Facebook, too. Some of these white folks found my Facebook and then proceeded to harass me there as well. But then they went further to attack me and my son as well, which really my son didn't have anything to do with it other than he just stopped to pray for the kid and and asked two other teammates to pray with him. That was the extent of his involvement in this at all. Literally was that he prayed and then I posted him. Somehow he was catching strays too from white people who were saying, like, oh, and your son, your son, he should have, and then, you know, going on this whole violent what my son should have done while he's just playing football with his team. What I realized is that their focus so much on the character of my son's teammate. If it had happened to a black boy, I knew that this was a case of like this is mirrors literally what happened to Charlie Kirk. A lot of white people went really, really, really crazy because Charlie Kirk, a white man, someone who they think is the epitome of the gospel of Jesus Christ, which is like I said in my last episode. If you missed it, gone and check that out because that was some bullshit. But anyway, those same people, those same white people, which was a good fair amount of this godforsaken horrible country you live in, a good amount of them had nothing to say when the two black boys within like I think two days, three days, were unalived by getting hung on trees. Which is, for those of you who don't know or can't put this together, extremely violent and triggering, particularly for a people group who suffered thousands and thousands and thousands of violent lynchings, who have grandparents that still remember that time or lived during that time or died like that. For example, my dad was born in 1932. Okay, lynchings were happening in the 20s. People think we're so far from it. White people always want to pivot to that. It's like this is this kind of trauma is still very recent. Like, I'm literally the grandchild of the generation that was living through that. These white people have nothing to say about that. Nothing, nothing to say, didn't even make a blip in their radar. But because Charlie's life as a white man seems so much more valuable, and I think in this instance, it was very clear to me like, oh, okay, I get it. This little boy's life, you think his life is more valuable because he's a little white boy. And so your rage has been ignited. So once those comments started pouring in, I think once my son's video got up to like 200, 300, 300,000 views on TikTok, I started getting pissed. So I started making crash-out videos on TikTok. Now I have since made them private because I did realize I'm saying the truth. There's nothing I said on them crash out videos. I just re-watched them because I made them private. I didn't delete them. I just re-watched them before I got started. I'm like, there's nothing I said that's not true. But I recognized at the time that tensions were running too high. I ended up privating them because I realized that nobody could hear what I was saying because I was crashing out and all they could focus was on an angry black woman. And then the comments came in like, oh, did you see what she said in her next video that she said this and she said this? And I realized they're just taking out of context. They're not really listening to what I'm saying. Yes, my cat's face is in the camera, but I'm gonna just keep talking because Lord bless him. Okay, he's leaving. He's leaving, y'all. So I decided to make them private because I was like, you know what, this is not helpful. I'm not, I'm not in any sort of mood to be making a video about this right now, about my anger, about how these white women are responding. But I was taking it to my Instagram stories and I asked people on my Instagram stories, why do you think that so many of these comments, not even so many, I would say 99%, y'all. 99% of all of the comments that were coming in that were either racist in nature, very aggressive, very dare I say verbally abusive kind of comments, things that were are cheap shots. For example, there was a woman who said, and I did not screenshot this one because as soon as I read it, I was like, oh my god, that's so violent. And I just like blocked her and deleted it. And I really wish I had screenshot it so I had at least her name, so I could at least expose her on this. I wish I could. But she basically said, There's no way your new relationship is going to last. He's going to abuse you just like everyone else did. And I hope in six months I see a podcast episode of you talking about how you were abused. And I was just like, What in the actual fuck? Bro, like what the hell? What the hell? Who who says stuff like that? And why? In this scenario, did I do to deserve you wishing abuse on me? I just found it to be such a violent thing to say. Of all the things that were said, that was the one that like kind of immediately jarred me, and my I could feel like my eyes filling up with tears, and I'm like, girl. So I blocked her and I deleted it like instantly, but it it shook me. That was such a cheap shot. Like, damn. That was the day that the Daily Mail, the UK Daily Mail, had posted something about it. I saw a comment from a white dude on the Daily Mail that said, it featured my son. Oh, I skipped a step. I'll go back, but I'll just finish the story since I'm listened. But it featured my son's follow-up response video. By that time, Reese had done a follow-up response video, and that one was picking up traction fast, actually faster than the first one, than the praying video. And so the Daily Mail featured it and it tagged my TikTok. And then someone in the comments said, This white guy said, You should go check out his mom, Grace Sandra. Look at her TikTok. She is divisive, she doesn't support the Trump administration. She's crying and whining about racial issues and just random stuff like that. But like it had like thousands of likes. And I realized later a bunch of people came to my Facebook and started just saying horrible stuff on the reel that I also posted on Facebook. Because you know you can double post things here or there and everywhere. It was very jarring. So after that, after I saw that woman who said that, and then there was this other woman who was just going nuts on me, like literally just going crazy. Um, I was just like, Well, I need to take a step back. My son had posted a response video, and in that response video, he tried to address some of this. Like, hey, as a result of this incident blowing up, not just on my social media, it was like everyone who talked about it, it was blowing up. But my son was like, as a result of that, my school's getting death threats. People are calling the school, saying the n-word and hanging up, saying we're gonna unalive you n-words and hanging up. Social media harassment of the my son's teammate and my son and me was increasing. And so I got contacted by the local news about the death threats because my number, I didn't know, apparently is easy to find. Maybe I shouldn't have said that. But anyway, people were finding it and sending me texts, and I was starting to feel a little unnerved, you know, because I've never been in the middle of a media circus. It didn't make sense to me as someone who only allowed my son to post and didn't have really anything to do with the story. I really still felt like y'all are so mad at me only because I have a voice and a brain to address the racism that's happening. So I went on the local news and they asked us, like, what is the biggest issue? And both my son and I focused on the big issue is that these kids are getting death threats, that people are calling my phone and hanging up, that I'm getting weird texts. I feel afraid for my life and my son's life. And there's children who feel this way, and there's a kid who's only 14 years old who is seeing himself being called horrible names on social media. So we tried to focus on that, but they kept coming in. And I asked my social media on Instagram, y'all, why do you think it's white women? Why are white women doing this? And I want to read to y'all what another white woman who is an ally that I know of said to me. Let me get my reading glasses on because y'all know I'm going blind. Y'all know can't see nothing no more. Nothing up close, no more at all. Hada hada hada hada hada hada ha da hada ha da let me find it. Okay, so I said several times, y'all, what is going on? White women are going nuts, they're literally losing their mind. And I was pontificating about this on my Instagram story, and I'm like, why aren't the the white dads doing it? Because it feels like if this is a white people thing, it would be men and women equally, but it was so much like literally 99% white women going fucking nuts in these comments. You can go to my TikTok right now at Owl Here Trying to Survive and look at the two pinned videos. Both of them have almost one has a million and a half views and one has 1.2 million views, and look at these comments, and I have deleted thousands of comments from both of these. Some of them I just left up. I'm like, you know what? Just let people see. They're 99% white women, middle-aged white women with kids. What's going on? Somebody, white people help me understand. Here's what one of my white women friends said. She said, it's the look of it. If a white man says it about young black men, it's more obvious. It's more obviously racist. But if it's a mother, a white mother, you get to do all kinds of racist stuff because motherhood is sacred in the performance of whiteness. Just white motherhood, of course. But the politics of it can be couched in a way that racism can't if the men do it. And I was like, girl, that is it right there. And she was like, Yeah, the KKK had a women's league and no one likes to talk about that. But letting white women cry and be scared for safety and for children while calling black boys scary men does so much for the cause of bigotry and racism. And then she goes on telling like a personal story of like what happened at her own kids' schools. I realized that dynamic was happening. And so I made another crash on video. That one is also now private because I just felt like I could not contain the amount of anger that I was feeling at the kind of attacks we were getting. And sometimes I would say, This is racist. This is clearly racist, the stuff you're saying. And it would be too much of a bombardment of a bunch of more now more racist white people pouring on. She's just pulling the black card and she's just like, oh, how convenient you're pulling the black card. And it just can get really super annoying. It wasn't even like a, you know how sometimes like if you say something and too many people push back and you're like, oh, maybe I was wrong, or let me rethink that. It's more of just like sometimes racist white people, there's so many of y'all that it can get actually overwhelming to even try to fight. Y'all can say the silliest, stupidest shit, and then one black person will say, That was some silly, stupid shit. And then you'll get like 50 racist white people who will be like, No, it wasn't. You're just a black person playing the the race card. It's just exhausting. This is gonna be a never-ending thing until this news story dies down. I should just kind of stop trying to point out the very obvious covert racism going on here and how dangerous it is, and just delete the comments because I realized there were a lot of students at my son's school reading these comments, and some of them were trying to defend themselves. And these white women being violent as hell, not knowing, like these are kids that you're talking to saying the most horrible things. I literally couldn't believe the type of violence that these people had to say about someone who is 14 years old playing a football game. And I said something in one of my TikToks. I said something like, Aren't y'all tired? Like, aren't y'all tired of this whole like angry mob to throw black boys in prison? Like, aren't y'all tired of that? The number of white women who said to throw him in prison without even thinking for one second, like really considering what that means to request a 14-year-old child go to prison who did not commit a crime and who was playing a football game, doing something that football players do in games. Players are sustaining injuries like football players sustain injuries in games. As my son so wisely pointed out in his viral video, anything off the field in football is assault off the field. Bottom line. But when you play in the game and the whistle hasn't blown and the flag hasn't been called, from what I understand, it's a violent sport, y'all. People doing violent shit to each other. So I'm not saying this to excuse the egregious nature of what my son's teammate did, but to point out the hypocrisy of people calling for the kind of violence that going to prison does to someone who did not commit a willful, violent crime. That is crazy work to me and broke my heart a little bit. Broke my heart a little bit anew for the kind of women that are walking around every day who we are interacting with every day. Because I blocked probably in these last two, three weeks since this happened. I probably have blocked like 400 or 500 white women. My age, women between like 35 and 50 who have kids in school, school age kids, married, single, whatever. Women who I might meet and be friends with and not even know that they're the kind of white women who would throw a nigga in jail for no damn fucking reason. It was kind of insane. Now I will say this just as an aside, after my son's video went viral, because my son went viral because he's so well spoken and so articulate, and he was calling for such a reasoned response. And the video of my son calling for peace, essentially, between people went more viral than the video of him praying. And I thought to myself, first of all, what an exceptional young man, and I'm so proud of him. So so proud of my baby. And I think a lot of the positive comments really reflected that. Like, hey, you should be so proud of your son, and I was completely proud of him. It was really beautiful to see that. But I think the reason why his response video went more viral is because there was a beautiful side to it. My son's teammate, the one who illegally pancaked, his stepmom and his mom reached out to me after his video went viral and were like, hey, thanks for what your son said. I'd love to talk, make peace, etc. Um, we never really talked, texted a tiny bit, but that some of that stuff was happening behind the scenes. Um and then oh, about the inside edition thing, they did reach out and was like, hey, we'd love to do a video with you and Reese and just talk about his prayer and his response video because we think he's a really cool, a really cool kid. And I was like, Yeah, that would be dope. Now my son didn't want the media attention and he was like, No, I don't want to do it, so can you just do it? So I just did it, and then later on he changed his mind. He was like, No, actually, I think I would like to do it. So they scrapped my video, but then they never we never refilmed it. So that's what happened with that, which is fine because I actually after that whole Daily Mail thing happened, I was like, oh my god, I'm so glad that the inside edition never aired with just the interview of me because they would have lit my ass up. And so I'm actually kind of glad in hindsight that that did not make it to air. Whoo! So, child, yeah, that was my last three weeks. I've been basically in some ways consumed with all of this. It has caused an enormous amount of stress. And I I realized after a couple weeks, like I just couldn't take it anymore. I was like, I just can't look at comments anymore. I feel really discombobulated. My boyfriend has been so, so supportive and so amazing um throughout this whole thing. I mean, one of the positives for me is that it helped me and my man get so much closer because um he's a community activist organizer, is actually an award-winning community organizer, and he just knows the ins and outs of racial dynamics and how to deal with this stuff. And he was able to really guide me about how to even think about this stuff, how to respond to this stuff, what to listen to. And he was really, really had a very hard line of don't look at them comments, don't look at them damn comments. And I really, really, really, really appreciated his support. I mean, his support during this was just unmatched. I feel like the racist white people would be mad that it helped black love survive, but it did, it really helped us survive and thrive for sure, for sure, for sure. So that is one beautiful thing that I can say came out of this for us at least. But also just such a assurance that I'm in the right place doing what I'm supposed to do, and my son is as well. And it made me really feel good about all of the time I've spent as a parent who is co-parenting with a white man because my son's dad is white, and we have both of us tried really hard to teach both of our sons what social and racial justice looks like, what racism is and what it isn't, how to identify it, how to respond to it, how not to ignore it. What I saw in Reese and how he responded just warmed my heart so much. It made me feel like his dad and I did such a good job, both of us, at educating him on the ins and outs of. What it looks like to be a person of color in this country. And I'm just so proud of him. I'm so so proud of him. As a final thought for all my sisters out there, I just want to remind y'all, it's not our job, it's not ever our job to educate white folks on their racism, how they're being racist, or how they can fix it. If you feel called to do that, I bless you to do that. I spent many, many years trying to educate white people on their racism and how to get them to come to some a different conclusion. Now I have firmly come to believe that it is not black people's responsibility to do free labor for white people. And this is exactly why I mentioned in my last post, and I'm getting lit up in the comments on my last podcast episode about Charlie Kirk about people saying that I didn't provide proof and receipts of the things Charlie said because I don't have it. And he never said those things. And it's like, no, no, I didn't provide it because I'm not doing free labor for you, bitch. I'm not your slave, and it's not 1798. In lieu of that, do your own labor. You can find it. It's enough footage of Charlie Kirk out there if you want to see the horrible, racist, hateful, bigoted, xenophobic, homophobic, transphobic misogyny that he said there's plenty. There's plenty out there. I'm not gonna find it for you. And I found myself in that same battle yet again with racist white folks on these posts demanding free labor of me. And I just want to remind you if you are a black woman, listen to this, it's not your job to do free labor for white people. If they demand you prove to them that racism exists, that is not your job. There is Google is free number one, but there is more than enough, more than enough out there for white people to find and understand what the hell is going on in America in 2025. We are in the middle of a fucking crisis, a crisis. And I think that this story, I'm because I'm still trying to figure out why did it blow up the way it did. I think that it's indicative of the state of our country right now, which is to punish brown and black people at all costs for harming white lives, for even being a taint on a white life. And I think this little boy's life represented something to a lot of white women that they're afraid could happen to their son, which is that the rhetoric that black and brown people are just more violent somehow is that they will, if they are not imprisoned, harm a precious white little son of theirs, and they are able to use their white womanness and white motherhood and the performative act of whiteness to like fear monger. And it was really, really sad to see. I mean, damn, I've experienced a lot over the years of racism. For having a white mom, for growing up in a black neighborhood, going to white schools and white churches, being involved in a Christian ministry for a while, marrying a white man. I mean, I was married to a white man for 15 years, y'all. You would think that in some ways, with all of that proximity to whiteness, that I would be somehow exempt from experiencing so much racism, but nope, not even a little bit, not even a little bit, not even a little bit. And this story was a great example of that. Again, I just thank God because I am experiencing, well, you know, I guess I can just say it. Like, I'm in the middle of falling in love right now, and I forgot. This is such an abrupt transition, but like I forgot how falling in love is essentially it's just dopamine after dopamine after dopamine. It's like a dopamine addiction. Like you're just walking around like what I imagine, because I've never had crack before or any hard drug for that matter. But like it feels like I'm walking around like a functioning crack addict. It's what it feels like. Like I'm on crack. I forgot. It's been so long, y'all, since I have genuinely fallen in love. I forgot what it feels like. And your girl is out here genuinely in love, like coming to America, like I'm in love. I'm in love. So that's a good feeling. In the midst of all this craziness, that has been really nice. Shout out to Mr. Texas. Shout out to Mr. Texas. So, anyway, y'all, thank you so much for being here. Again, if you haven't, please subscribe, please like, please uh share this video. And if you haven't yet, got my get my book, Grace actually memoirs of love, faith, loss, and black womanhood. I'm a storyteller and this is a book of stories. It's it's memoir-ish of some of my best blog posts and things I've written in the last like five to seven-ish years on Love, Faith, Loss, and Black Womanhood. And it's highly reviewed, and the people who have read it have really, really liked it. So go ahead and get you one before I take it down because I realize I think I'm gonna take it down soon because I feel like it doesn't completely accurately represent me in how I see myself now. So yeah. And finally, I am gonna be creating a resource soon. I'm a digital product creator and I'm gonna be creating a resource for how to get through living through this nightmare that we are in with the orange demon and his ilk and a fascist takeover in the middle of a hostile government takeover. So sign up for my newsletter, which is on Substack, and I have not updated it in a long time. So trust me, you are not gonna get spammed because your girl has ADHD. And I don't I struggle to do anything consistently, okay? Everything I do consistently is a struggle. So um, you're not gonna get scammed, but when scammed, I mean spammed, but when something good comes out, I am gonna talk about it on a newsletter. So sign it up. But anyway, thank you so much for joining me. All of you wonderful, beautiful souls. Remember that you're strong, resilient, and very capable of creating the life that you deserve. And that's what I'm trying to do. So until then, stay safe out here in E Street, y'all. I love y'all. Bye.
