Stop! Explaining Our Pain to the People Who Profit from It

There comes a time in every liberation struggle when the survivors must stop explaining. Not because the wounds have healed, not because justice has been served, but because the performance of explanation itself has become another form of captivity.

This week, we watched the captivity parade itself across daytime television. Whoopi Goldberg, seated on The View, wasted her breath trying to explain what life has been like for us, so that white people like her co-hosts might finally understand. But this wasn’t a misstep; it was a symptom. A symptom of how even our elders, survivors of violently racist industries, can mistake inclusion for influence. How we are still being urged, even by those we honor, to explain ourselves to the very people who build, profit from, and inherit empires erected on our blood, sustained by our labor, and bloated with the currency of our grief.

Let us be clear: the oppressors are not confused. The United States, where this commentary was made, is not some innocent, wandering land in search of moral direction. It is a militarized plantation with Wi-Fi and flags. It is the modern empire of public executions, privatized prisons, and generational theft. Its police are armored like soldiers. It's January 6th, the insurrectionists were coddled, not condemned. Its commander-in-chief is now a convicted felon. Its democracy is a reality show rerun with a collapsing set.

And still! Still, they beat the drums of war.

We are told to grieve politely while the United States spins a new narrative to justify yet another act of aggression, this time against Iran, lecturing the world about democracy while its own house is ablaze. They dare to assess the “challenges of the Iranian people” with alarm and concern, while omitting their runaway Congress, their racially gerrymandered districts, and their executive branch bloated with corruption, sedition, and unchecked violence. This nation, built on the genocide of Indigenous people and the genocide and enslavement of Afrikans, dares to pretend it is aspirational. Dares to speak of women’s rights while immigrant women are sterilized in detention. Dares to speak of justice while Flint still has no clean water. Dares to speak of law while mass shooters terrorize the nation and convicted rapist and killer police officers retire with pensions.

They know. They know exactly what they do, and who it serves. They knew that during the lynchings, they knew when Afrikan bodies were hung like ornaments and sold as postcards. They know that during the modern lynchings, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Tyre Nichols were largely discussed but led to no systemic change like the millions before them. They know about the school-to-prison pipeline. They know about monetized prison systems, police quotas, and 2025 eugenics ideology, adding to eugenics still embedded in the American healthcare system. They know about ICE rapes, about medical apartheid, about redlining, about institutional theft. They know about the stolen labor that built their cities on stolen land, and the propaganda that keeps them looking innocent. They know, and they do not stop. Because oppression is not a mistake. It is a model.

So, when Whoopi Goldberg and others in our communities plead with the colonizer’s children to understand the obvious, we must intervene. We must ask them, with urgency and finality, to stop. Stop! Because there is no need.

We do not need to inform the murderers that they killed. We do not need to remind the rapists of their violations. We do not need to show our graves to the genocidaires and their heirs. Those who engineered our suffering do not require our feelings to know what they’ve done. And the daughters of empire, those sipping coffee on national television while inheriting dividends, seats at the table, and sanitized lies, will not be moved by our stories.

The political analysts crafting think pieces about Whoopi and Afrikan apologists know exactly what they are doing. They are not ignorant. They are echo chambers of state propaganda, guardians of the status quo. So let us be clear: nothing we say, sing, write, or recite will pierce their calloused hearts. And that must shape our strategy. Because liberation will not be found in their understanding, it must be forged on our own.

We do not speak to educate the architects of our trauma. We speak to remember.

To protect. To unlearn. To resist. To restore.

There is a difference between truth-telling and explaining. Truth-telling is for us. Explaining is a trap.

We owe no televised testimonies of pain. We are not required to validate our existence so that women whose children will inherit banks, bombs, and black sites can sleep more soundly. Our dignity is not their spectacle. Our justice will not come through their comprehension.

Let the murderers remain confused. Let the empire choke on its own myths. Let its daughters inherit not grace, but the shame of their fathers, their husbands, and their monetized gods.

We are not here to help them feel. We are here to make them obsolete.