Today we celebrate the winner of the 2017 World Wypipo Tournament. While many worthy competitors stepped into the arena for a chance at fame, glory and dishonor, there could be only one champion.
This year, one great team rose above them all. One lone competitor entered the fray and emerged more despicable than the rest. Others may have had more experience, more hate in their hearts or more privilege, but only one proved themselves to be more loathsome than the Ku Klux Klan, more douche-nozzle-ous than Richard Spencer, more infuriating than Rachel Dolezal and more fucked up than Jeff Sessions.
White allies are the worst wypipo in the world.
Perhaps the reason white allies emerged victorious is that, while many of the competitors played with anger and bigotry in their hearts, white allies played in a perpetual state of oblivion. They have no idea how terrible they are.
I first heard about white allies when I was very young and my mother sang the white-allies lullaby to me. Wait … don’t you know what I’m talking about?
In 1971 the O’Jays wrote a song called “White Allies.” The lyrics were in part:
They smile in your face
All the time they really hate your race
White allies …
White allies!
Unfortunately, the record company asked them to change some of the lyrics to make the song more mainstream, and the tune became a hit as “Back Stabbers.”
Like many of their Caucasian counterparts, white allies are notorious for their endearing smiles, well-meaning gestures and feeble attempts at trying to give you some “dap,” but ultimately they will lead to your demise quicker than any Kardashian, Klansman or Kushner ever will. They are the most dangerous. They are the most evil.
There is no reason to fear neo-Nazis or racists screaming at Walmart checkout counters. You can see them coming. In fact, I applaud their passion and transparency. But white allies will stand close enough to smoothly slice open your gut so fast, you won’t even feel it until they’re stomping on your spilled entrails. And they are as slick as they are evil.
I’ve seen white allies in Birmingham, Ala., who work long hours with the underprivileged, but when the opportunity arose for their community to segregate their schools, they stiff-armed those black kids quicker than an NFL running back.
I’ve had neighbors who marched at Black Lives Matter protests and then called the police on a random black kid walking through their neighborhood “looking suspicious” and carrying something under his hoodie. The “suspicious” thing he carried turned out to be a pamphlet showing the different kinds of cookie dough he was trying to sell to raise money for his band camp.
I’ve seen white allies who said they wanted to fight racism but were caught on camera not only saying nothing to a person who made a deeply racist joke—but also laughing with that person.
One time—and I doubt you’ll believe me—I saw a white woman watch black people help her husband become the most powerful man in the world. I saw that same woman watch her husband lock up black men in the biggest mass-incarceration effort in history. Then I watched that same white lady brag about it. She called the black people “superpredators!”
Then this white lady (I won’t call her name) was endowed with so much privilege and power, she waltzed right back up to those black people whose fathers and sons were still serving sentences, whose communities were still torn apart, who were still soaking the bloodstained shirts from over-policing that she advocated and helped put in place—and she asked them to do it again!
And guess what? Some of them did!
That’s why white allies are the worst. Because they know the exact right pitch in which to sing their siren song. Because they get close enough to shoot you point blank and make sure you’re dead. Because there is actually something more dangerous than your worst enemy:
An enemy who you think is a friend.
Congratulations, white allies. Wear your crown proudly.
