The Racial Animus of the White West & Booker T/Ida B

How my awe and disappointment of Booker T Washington's Autobiography brought me to the book "A Voice of the South, By: A Black Woman From The South" and "Southern Horrors: Lynch Law In All Its Phases"

Free Europe.

My name is Marissa. I am the co-founder of babes.

I am going to go on tangents in this post, but its more of a shared journal entry. I wasn’t going to post it, but I think it may be useful and more importantly, i’m realising this conversation needs to be had when it comes to the future of the US, the UK and Black sovereignty and freedom across the Imperial Racial Animus led society we live in. I am leaning more and more into working on a PhD that looks at the racial animus and the White colonial subconscious and its unrelenting need to destroy, consume and own.

I think everything in the US and the West is happening is because, essentially, and at its most basic, White people are afraid of their ancestor’s (maybe their) evil, or if you wanna use Jung and psychoanalysis - their ‘shadow self’ - a word I used to love but now I have trouble with because of this work - but that’s another conversation.

I believe the White West have not and will not face the image of their violence.

They will not look at their ancestors lynching our ancestors.

They will not talk about the skulls being drunk from in Universities in the US and the UK.

They will not talk about their experiments, their tortures, their money sources or where their endowments come from.

They are frightened of their ancestors while in general Black people praise and honour theirs.

The White Imaginary hates their own reflection so much, they project to the point of annihilation of self, they won’t admit the lynching never stopped.

We can’t see we are still campaigning for the same thing Fredrick Douglass was.

We must see that Black Lives Matter in the UK is a mirror to Ida B Wells campaigning against Lynching in the UK. Anyway, I digress.

So, where is this coming from? Well, I think all the goddamn time and im noticing some things.

I am based in London and have lived here for 8 years, but what is not widely known is that during my childhood, until I moved to the UK, I lived in five states across the United States of America. And in those states I have gone to 13 schools.

I say all of this because Northern Virginia, which is undoubtedly the South, was where I first saw the racial animus of the United States.

I remember being afraid of the KKK as a child whenever they came on tv, and the horror I felt learning about Emmett Till’s murder and his murderers who were left free.

I still feel deep, deep fear, whenever I am too far south. Whenever I see a city called Lynchburg. Whenever I see a lone tree in a Virginia park with a hook in it. Whenever. When ever I am there.

I have seen the United States’ racial animus and its sprawling shadow, even up until today. I’ve had my hand smacked by a white woman when reaching for something, I have been called coloured and mulatta, I have been given that stank face and been outright ignored.

My last trip to California a few weeks back, I was once caught in an embittered back and forth with myself after deciding to call the police when no one did anything but watch when a vulnerable and mentally unwell Black woman was walking down the street naked in the middle of the day in Los Angeles. LA is Gotham City now if no one has told you, don’t let them fool you.

She was walking past shops, traffic, grocery stores, weed shops, gas stations, and restaurants, i.e., many, many people. She seemed to be on her way towards Loyola Marymount University. Down there were wetlands where someone had been found murdered a couple of years before. She was on the phone, but not sure if anyone was on it with her.

When I called the police, the first question they asked was her race. It bothered me. She was naked. Surely the naked woman was enough. I hung up.

She was not the only vulnerable person on the street; I saw many others, clothed but just as unwell. During that trip my brother told me my grandmother took the clothes off her own body whilst driving and seeing someone else, another woman, months prior who had walked down the street naked too.

I was up to chapter 6 in Tuskegee University’s founder’s autobiography before things got a bit too weird, his depictions of slave masters a little too understanding and his voice and ‘pathos’ for freed enslaved individuals too racist. It fucked me up. I thought about the Tuskegee men used as test subjects for syphilis. I thought about the flax shirt Booker T was forced to wear, that his older brother ‘broke in’ for him.

I researched to see if others felt bothered by his language, if anyone else but admired and disagreed with him, and I was not surprised, but slightly in awe by how many did not agree and in fact were radical, including his old mentor Fredrick Douglass and a peer Ida B Wells. W.E.B. Du Bois thought he was pandering to Whites and there is a lot to discover in their relationship.

But he was a good man. A man who cared about his people. How can this co-exist in our minds, how can we as Black people who care about our people, and want justice and equality, how can be cope with this?

Even with his sometimes racist regurgitations, he spoke of lynching and it was obvious of the violence of that time and his intense all-possessing desire for the upward advancement of Black people, and how he decided to undertake his own version of any means necessary, though it meant “separate but equal”. I wonder what he really thought, what was in his heart.

I was disappointed and enraged at some points, thinking perhaps his white male Editor had made him say the things he did in that book. I was shook because of how much his lived experience touched my heart but also violated my soul through its portrayal of freed enslaved people and its racism-white supremacy notes.

I feel conflicted by the feelings I get reading about his enslaved young mother and older brother, and his loving, sacred, kind depiction of them, and how it is juxtaposed so harshly against free enslaved families and individuals and those who wanted to use ‘their wit’ instead of ‘their bodies’ to get ahead.

Back when I was younger, I saw gerrymandering and its desired effects of educational and economic disparity in many forms, including but not limited to tattered books that had to be used between students and classrooms 40-1 with teachers who did not care or did once and gave up a long time ago. Math teachers with liquor on their breath, pregnant 12- and 13-year-old 8th graders inside of abstinence classes, broken computers, and school counsellors who did fuck all. It looks like a prision lowkey - one school I went to for 3 months.

Only once in my entire education did I have a Black teacher.

I sometimes wonder how my education would have been different if I had more Black teachers or if this deficiency in my life is what subconsciously inspired me in my work.

This is one of the reasons I believe I am only now learning about Cress Wesling, for example, or reading Booker T. Washington and learning about accommodationism, or learning about the “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law In All Its Phases” by Ida B Wells, and the book "A Voice of the South, By: A Black Woman From The South" both written 100 years before I was born.

Only one hundred years.

Same as now, 2025 – the roaring 20’s.

…Cooper’s pursuit of a PhD at the Sorbonne in her 60s—and her 1924 dissertation on Slavery and the French Revolutionists—is often celebrated…She traveled to France alone, worked in French archives (where she was ignored or dismissed by white scholars), and dug into 18th-century records to prove how French abolitionism was undermined by economic self-interest—work that directly challenged the mythology of French “liberty.”…

After Wells published editorials in Memphis Free Speech about lynching, a white mob destroyed the newspaper’s offices in May 1892 .

Wells took her anti-lynching campaign to Britain in 1893 and 1894, it was not just an act of personal courage—it was a calculated strategy to leverage British opinion against American violence.

This might all seem disparate, but the older I get the more of a mirror it feels.