Black Girl From Eugene: A letter to white America in crisis
7 min read
Presenter: Ayisha Elliott is producer of the KEPW program ‘Black Girl From Eugene,’ here sharing: ‘A Letter to White America in Crisis.’
Ayisha Elliott (Black Girl From Eugene): A note before you read or listen: If you are a white reader who is not ready for this fight, reading on will likely make you feel attacked, defensive, and you may dismiss this as angry or divisive.
That discomfort is not accidental. I am a professional. I work with people in leadership roles all over the country to deconstruct the culture of white supremacy within their organizations. There are pillars to focus on, and a few are listed throughout the piece. It is an insidious form that affects every individual person living within our society.
The discomfort is the necessary friction between your current understanding and the reality you need to face. My intention in this piece is not to make you comfortable. It is to provoke you into a new practice, a new set of action.
If you choose to continue to listen, you are choosing to be uncomfortable, and if that discomfort moves you to actually do something—anything—other than analyze others, then we’ll finally getting somewhere.
If you want to understand more, contact me. I’m happy to go over my approach.
Not all white people, but always white people. I’ve witnessed so many things in the past few weeks that have left me speechless.
My first reflex is to say, I told you so. We told you so. Everyone who wasn’t white said this could and would happen.
But in my years on this earth as a survivor of serial violent acts by the state, by the system, by friends, by professionals, I’ve learned to refrain from quick reactions. and observe first. What I’m observing now is remarkable in its misdirection.
I’m watching white people respond to a direct attack on the very state they have killed to preserve, and the response is subdued, confused, almost paralyzed, or only moving on autoresponse.
I’m witnessing a population that has no idea what to do when the state is no longer available to protect them. You have identified so completely with the state that now with the status revoked, you’re left standing with nothing but your rugged individualism and your demands for comfort.
Even now, even in these darkest times, your racism remains louder than your need to survive. It’s baffling. But let me explain.
In George Orwell’s 1984, the state announces that the chocolate ration has been raised to 20 grams. The population celebrates this increase. What they’ve been conditioned to forget is that the ration was 30 grams a week before.
This isn’t just a cut. It’s a cut they’re expected to be grateful for receiving. Or while understood a crucial mechanic in authoritarianism: control. The faster you can get the public to forget the prior condition, the faster and more disorienting the manipulation becomes.
It’s not enough that people accept the reduction: They must feel grateful for it.
This has been the lived reality for nonwhite people in America since its founding. First, we were told we deserve none. Once we fought for our freedom, that ultimately was to the benefit of the state, and on a lie of earning our liberty. We have watched our rights, our resources, our very existence, treated as a chocolate ration, reduced, repackaged, and presented back to us as generosity.
We have been told to be grateful for the scraps while watching the full ration distributed to white communities who believed they somehow deserved it. Not all white people, but always white people.
And white people through the logic of white supremacy observed this happening and justified it. You believed we deserved less. You believed the state’s gaslighting applied to us, but not to you.
You convinced yourselves that the difference was race, was merit, was culture, was anything except what it actually was, class, the entire time. The only difference to the state has been whether you are in or you are out, and that circle gets smaller every day.
Now the same mechanism is being turned on white people, and you are shocked. Outraged. You cannot believe the state would do this to you. When you discover that the manipulation you accepted—-even champion—for non-whites is now meant for you too, you find it obscene.
The chocolate ration has been cut for you now, and you are being told to celebrate.
Witnessing a white woman, a mother, a neighbor, a loving citizen standing up for the people she believes should have the same rights as she does murdered by federally sanctioned officers is horrific. Full stop. Nothing more needs to be said about the horror itself.
What does need to be said is this: The violence is normalized for all other racial identities in our society.
Our initial reactions may differ, but our hearts hurt the same. The critical difference is how we process what we’re seeing. Those of us who are not white recognized immediately the ease with which they murdered a white woman and the ease in which they gaslit and dismissed it. We have been trained to recognize these mechanisms because we have survived them.
For white people, this recognition came differently. It was delayed, disbelieving, accompanied by the shock realization that they are not in fact exempt. This is not the canary in the local mine signaling danger ahead. This is all of us standing in the mine staring at the dead canary, while the people who sent it refuse to believe the bird could die.
They are still insisting that the air is fine. It is a lie. They’re telling you to be grateful you’re allowed to be in the mine at all.
There are ways to fight fascist regimes. We know this because we have done it before. There are leaders who fought for the people to live freely in lands that claimed freedom for all, while denying freedom for most. There are people who wrote books about the necessity and heartbreak of loss required to move liberation forward.
There are leaders today who have been asking, begging, training, posting, marching, solidarity in workplaces, social spaces, private spaces for resources for access to equitable justice, insisting that equity must be the priority. That call to evolution was never one-sided. It was an attempt to prevent us from arriving exactly where we are now.
The division was created by the very people withholding our constitutionally-protected rights. You are the only group that theoretically can use the Constitution to fight back. The answer to your current crisis is not complicated, but it requires you to examine your relationship with the myth and supremacy in your legacy.
‘There is no supremacy in your legacy.’ That was the lie that kept you compliant while the state built the apparatus now being used against you.
The answer is in social collaboration, equity, and equality as an expectation it is in the community and diversity. Every community that is non-white, gender-inclusive and socially and economically diverse, has already given you the blueprint.
We have built thriving communities against the odds, and the odds have always been the state, the institution, the very forces now threatening your liberties as well.
Racism, misogyny: These are the anchors dragging down any possibility of effective resistance. You do not need to reinvent the wheel. You need to follow the people who already know the road. We have been walking it for generations.
What is your hesitation? There is no time left to debate the legitimacy of movements led by marginalized people. Our success in solidifying community, building power in surviving, and creating liberation despite systemic opposition is already proven.
You are watching those proven strategies work in real time across the globe, but you’re so mirrored by the belief that there’s only one right way and that it must come from the people who look like you, that you cannot see it. You are denying the answer.
Your current plan—another march, another petition, another appeal to the institutions currently dismantling your rights—reveal how thoroughly you’ve been indoctrinated into powerlessness. This is not a condemnation.
This is an urgent invitation to get up. Break free from the indoctrination that tells you salvation comes from above. Release the either-or thinking that says you must choose between your safety and someone else’s liberation. Let go of the myth that there’s only one right way, and it must be led by white people using white frameworks.
Move away from that idea. Pick up Angela Davis. Read Malcolm X. Study Nikki Giovanni, learn from Frantz Fanon, from Audre Lorde, from the Combahee River Collective, from the countless theorists and organizers who have been doing this work.
While you dismissed it as not for you, the strategies exist, the roadmaps exist, the solidarity you need exist, but it requires you to stop centering yourself and start following the people who have always known how to fight the state because we’ve never had an option not to.
Your right to comfort has to be put aside. We are running out of time. The chocolate ration is being cut again tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that. The question is whether you’ll finally recognize the pattern or whether you’ll keep analyzing each new reduction until there is nothing left.
The canary is dead, the mine is filled with poison, and we already know the way out. Who is telling you the canary doesn’t matter or that the signal is for someone else or something else?
I’ll leave you with a quote from Kwame Ture: ‘In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience, and the U.S. has none.’
Thank you for listening. This is Ayisha Elliot with Black Girl From Eugene.
Ayisha Elliott is a relational leadership coach assisting in centering introspective alignment to intention and impact, who will work with any organizations. Contact her by email: BlackGirlFromEugene@gmail.com. You can subscribe at BlackGirlFromEugene.substack.com.
Copyright 2026 Ayisha Elliott. All Rights Reserved. Recorded for KEPW-Whole Community News and reprinted with permission.
