Camouflage

My boyfriend is white. Well, white-ish. His white half comes out at inopportune movements. Like when I was at an outlaw biker bar in the middle of the country celebrating his sister’s 21st birthday. Picture that. Me, a Black person, at a bar in the middle of nowhere North Carolina surrounded by your friendly neighborhood racist bikers. The bar was tastefully decorated with a humungous confederate flag on the wall, right as you walk in. Beautiful. A Trump 2024 sign graced the outside of the building. Tasteful. Redneck bikers with patches that signaled their outlaw affiliation sat in the corners, staring as we walked in. It was immediately the most uncomfortable situation I’d ever been in. You might wonder, why didn’t we leave? Because of the caucasity. Aka, white people shit. It was me, my boyfriend, his sister, and several of their white family members. While my boyfriend and his sister are half white, after a couple of drinks and in the dim light of the bar, they looked white-white. The patrons seemed to ignore us after we walked in, but I stood frozen with my back turned to them. My game plan was to not attract any attention and to hide all signs of my non-whiteness. I didn’t dare move. My boyfriend tried to immediately drag me out of the bar so that we can leave, but I refused. It was a stupid decision, but I didn’t want to ruin his sister’s birthday. Despite my obvious discomfort, the so-called woke people that I was with thought that the situation was amusing. They joked that I “would have a cool story to tell.” Their reactions to the situation deepened my distaste for a lot of white allies. They’ll associate themselves with the woke crowd and social justice but will drop that real quick when it suits them. The people that I was with chose to diminish the situation. They tried to claim that they “understood” my discomfort. They acknowledged my discomfort but then ignored it so that they could drink and have fun. White “allies” will shed their disguises as soon as their whiteness helps them fit in. When their whiteness no longer benefits them, they’ll zip up their costumes of allyship once more. They try to distance themselves from other white people because they’re “not like the other white people.” They’ll criticize each other and point fingers and call each other Karens and racist. They think that their black squares and #BLM on Instagram prove that they’re different.  They’re not. They don’t care, they just camouflage to hide it.