Think like a white lady, act like a n***a

I called in the spirit of my wise meathead best friend to help me deal with adversity, and the pretend version of him advised me to lean in to my roots.

My meathead best friend whom I grew up hooping with is one of the wisest people I know.

He came up under an abusive stepdad addicted to meth who once locked him in a basement for several days when he was in fourth grade, only letting him out on the condition he wear a dress to school. He spent most of his childhood navigating physical, spiritual, and emotional abuse on the daily, while attending ‘hood schools as one of only a handful of white kids in the building.

Most grown men would’ve folded under that kind of pressure. Instead, what emerged from that brutal crucible was a tough-as-nails kid with a calloused soul and an unbreakable spirit.

And here’s the wyld part: if you asked him today, he’d probably say he’s grateful for how it went with his stepdad. Because these days he’s got a beautiful family and is a self-made millionaire who built a construction company from a rusted-out van in his driveway into one of the biggest — and most charitable — in the Midwest.

One of my absolute joys in life is tagging along with him on job site runs. Watching him put out fires is like watching Winston Wolf in Pulp Fiction — he’s three or four steps ahead while everyone else is stuck on stupid about step one.

And he’s like that in loads of other parts of life.

I used to dismiss him because he doesn’t talk fancy like me, but I’ve come to see his plainspoken style as more effective than half the convoluted gobbledygook I slip into when I get fired up. The funny twist? He’s gotten more “civilized” over the years, and I talk more like his old self since I stopped lawyering. We’ve basically swapped dialects.

He’s Trumpy — not because he’s hateful, but because he’s one of those money-rich dudes who thinks he has to be. But most of his role models and favorite athletes have always been Black. We both enjoy listening to motivational speakers, and while I gravitate toward the cerebral whites, he loves the down-and-dirty loud brothas. 

Half his best friends are Black, including me and his other best man from his wedding. If he could live as a Black man for 49% of the time, he’d probably go for it even though he has a white wife and three kids. At the very least, he’d have some decisions to make.

Point being: he truly admires Black folks.

He’s also said and done some mega racist stuff — like the time he went as his best man (not me) for Halloween and wore full blackface. He knows now it was ignorant, but part of me recognizes it came from a misguided admiration for a style he wishes he could authentically pull off but can’t.

Growing up, Black kids called him “my n****a” on the playground, and he said it back because he thought it meant “friend.” And as a swagger-filled hooper who got approvingly told by older Black players he “hooped like a n****a,” he clung to the word way longer than he should’ve because he took it as a compliment. 

Eventually, at some point before he had kids, he got it together about the n word after his best men told him that if he kept saying it, we’d have to beat his monkey ass. 

These days, the worst he does is scream the word at the top of his lungs when he plays old skool DMX and Dr. Dre after Chris Rock gave him and the other whites “the pass” during a comedy special. But I’m pretty sure he refrains from doing that around his kids.

Even though my friend has some racist tendencies, he’s still one of my Sages — someone I call in spiritually when I’m struggling. And lately, I’ve needed help: I’ve applied for sixteen jobs and submitted my second book to sixteen publishers and gotten nothing but rejection. So I spiritually called in my friend and asked him what I should do to get my swagger back.

He’s known me for three decades and, like any long-term good friend should, in many important ways he knows me way better than I know myself. 

His answer hit hard af:

“Think like a white lady. Act like a n***a.”

To be clear, I don’t love the n word and I seldom use it. I just don’t approve of it. I’m not even sure I’m supposed to use it given that Kendrick Lamar told Drake not to and called him a colonizer.

But my friend knows there are rare moments when something in my spirit calls the word forth — and every time it does, his face lights up like a fat kid’s in a candy shop. And even though he can’t say it around me in real life, I’m so glad the pretend-version of him said it then.

Because I knew exactly what he meant.

The White Lady Side of Me

The white women in my family are so fancy they identified more with my estranged daughter’s “downgrade” in accommodations at my new crib than the fact that her mother cut me and my Black dad out of her life. 

But my mom? Momdukes was the fancy-white-lady GOAT.

Growing up, my house felt more like a Victorian museum — one of those robber-baron relics that should be torn down for proper affordable housing — than an actual home. I caught hell for touching the walls or leaving a duvet in the wrong corner of the sofa. We had several chess sets I wasn’t allowed to play with because they were only for show. 

As a rowdy Black kid living in a refined white lady museum, my bedroom became my sanctuary. But even that had its drawbacks because I couldn’t leave unless it was clean enough to resemble an IKEA display room.

Holiday dinners were elaborate productions with more forks than I had fingers. My dear mama, bless her soul, would roll over in her grave if she knew I now eat Thanksgiving dinner with sporks off paper plates while sipping THC seltzer from a mason jar.

My mom might’ve been fancy, but she was also a revolutionary. She had a big heart and felt the pain of the world. And she didn’t love the idea of contributing another white man to the ranks of the folks doing most of the damage. 

So she chose my dad — consciously or unconsciously — because she could sense he carried something different: soul power.

She knew exactly what she was doing when she conceived and raised me.

Much like Paul Atreides’ mom in Dune, my mom spent my childhood actively training me in the weirding, witchy ways of white women.

Now I can sense white folks’ vibe the way white ladies do — subcommunications, spiritual static, emotional weather patterns. White women cultivated these skills over generations to handle white men—the most violent and destructive sub-species to ever walk the planet by far—as mates. Because of the pain white men put white women through, they had to adapt to manage them and survive.

Most other cultures embraced women’s innate ability to connect to the spiritual realm and revered them. In European countries, this was feared and repressed with atrocities like the Holy Inquisition. That culling didn’t kill witchcraft — it drove it underground and made the surviving witches stronger. They had to develop a form of witchcraft hiding in plain sight. And they did: subtle mind control.

Most white women don’t realize what they’re doing when they’re doing it — from their perspective, they’re just out here surviving. But some know exactly what they’re doing. And a few know that I know, because my vibrational signature hits like a fancy white lady’s. Of course it does — my dear mama was the fancy white lady GOAT.

Everyone does this to some degree. But women generally do it way more effectively than men, and nobody has perfected it quite like fancy white ladies.

I can’t do it like they do, but I’ve gotten better at exerting subtle influence through spiritual channels instead of brute force. It’s way more effective that way.

When a fancy white woman really leans in, her voice takes on a whole new timbre and dimension, similar to the all-female Bene Gesserit order from Dune using Voice. Fancy white ladies have cultivated that into an art form.

Just watch a grown fancy white woman piping up — especially on a brother — to get her way and you’ll see what I mean. And because my mama trained me in the white lady witchy arts, I’m not nearly as susceptible to it as most men, especially brothers who’ve been conditioned to obey white women lest they get modern-day lynched by armed men trained for violence with a propensity for using it.

I didn’t know what my mom was doing when I was a lowercase j, but she was simultaneously teaching me and building up my immunity to white-woman witchy ways — the same way white moms unconsciously do it with their daughters. After all, I was her only child and got all her motherly attention.

This is part of why some white women are often very uncomfortable around me — my presence hits on a frequency they recognize but don’t expect from a big Black brotha. And they really can’t stand that their mind control—or however you want to characterize non-physical influence—doesn’t work very effectively on me. These kinds of women feel exposed when they’re in my presence, like I’m a free-ranging wild animal who could strike at any moment. That’s why they like calling the cops on me for existing. And because they can get away with it.

My white-lady vibe used to hit like that of a middling adolescent, but it hits way harder since I took up yoga, breathwork, and meditation. I’m not quite a sorceress, but I navigate the spiritual realms as skillfully as most women — and in some ways even deeper, because as feminine as I’ve become, I’m still very much masculine.

I still don’t read the room as fast as a fancy white lady sorceress — I’m way slower on the uptake — but lawyering activated my logical brain enough that I usually figure out what’s what sooner or later.

Even the white women in my family sense that I’ve been embracing my white-lady side more. I can tell they feel mega uncomfortable around me, like something is off but they can’t name it. It’s simple: I’m a big Black man with swagger like a brotha and white-lady mind control. They find me unsettling and think I’m out of control.

Which I am — out of their control, which they enjoyed over me until I wised up to what they were doing.

Sometimes when I sense how afraid white women get around me, I laugh out loud. That freaks them out even more.

I see you, white ladies.

And the white women who aren’t uncomfortable in my presence? They find it intriguing and often can’t get enough. Some want the challenge of taming the “beast” and controlling me, but just as many simply want to know what I’m about and be my platonic friend. I imagine Miley Cyrus — my favorite powerful famous white lady witch — would vibe like that if we met.

Especially gay white women of a certain age, whose vibrational signatures hit similar to mine and who have instinctively stuck up for me since I was a lowercase j—often when other white women were needlessly jamming me up because my existence made them uncomfortable.

The N***a Side of Me

I don’t mean the word how racists mean it — I mean it how DMX meant it. The way the older hoopers from my friend’s childhood meant it: the grit, the toughness, the refusal to bend under pressure.

Make no mistake: Black Americans survived 500 years of bondage, lynching, Jim Crow, convict labor, and systemic racism — and came out the other side bigger, faster, stronger, more creative, more spiritual, and more resilient than anyone else on Earth. 

And don’t get it twisted: Williams may be the most generic Black last name out, but it’s not my slave name.

My great-grandfather shot a white man in Mississippi for calling him “boy” in front of his family. After firing the kill shot, he fled in the night, changed his name to Williams because it’s commonness allowed him and his family some anonymity, and started over in another state.

My dad and my uncle, bless his soul, carried that fire. They overcame Jim Crow, a racist draft board, Vietnam, and fancy corporate jobs run by racist white men — only to repeatedly get knocked down after standing up for themselves.

But my dad and my uncle, bless their hearts, don’t tune into white folks’ vibe like I do.
So when white men provoked them, they blew up — not understanding they were being tested. Provocation as performance. Slave-master energy disguised as “joking around.” Old habits die hard.

But me?
I can see the game.

I clap back with heart, wit, a wink, and a smile instead of anger—I flip the script—and beat them at their own game. More often than not, the white guys who jam me up end up respecting me for bringing heat but staying cold as ice.

That’s thinking like a white lady.
And acting like a n***a.

Funny thing is, the white dudes who jam me up hardest in the beginning are often the ones who become my biggest supporters in the end. That’s exactly how it went with my meathead best friend: we met at the YMCA, and when I invited him to get next in a five-on-five run, he refused and challenged me to one-on-one instead (a game in which I soundly prevailed).

My parents knew exactly what they were doing when they conceived me.
They built a rainbow warrior.

Even when people treat me like trash, more often than not I can see where they’re coming from and don’t take it personally. I often have to dig deep into my dirt dawg, rainbow warrior spirit to do it, but I usually get there. When I do, I can swap a mechanical mindset for a magical one. Instead of reacting to folks, I relate to them.

So when my fancy ex-wife and the fancy white women in my family cosigned on my babymama cutting me out of my daughter’s life, I see that they did it out of love.

Out of love for my daughter — who looks like me, only if I were a blonde-haired, blue-eyed girl in the Hitler Youth — because they saw she viewed me as a scary big Black man ill-equipped to handle the emotions of a fancy white girl going through puberty.

And out of love for me, because they knew her mom mega resented me and was down like a clown to get me in serious trouble.

Sometimes, love is tough.

So instead of hating on the folks who do me dirty, I spread love by thinking positive thoughts and sending them good vibes from the bottom of my heart. I wish them joy, happiness, and laughter, and my mindset transmits on the back of those high-vibrating emotions.

The Whirling Rainbow Prophecy

I’ve seen the Rainbow Halo in the sky several times — a golden sun ringed by a rainbow-hued halo. The manifestation of loving light.

The Rainbow Halo signals the Whirling Rainbow Prophecy. To the Navajo, Hopi, and other descendants of ancient Americans, the Whirling Rainbow Prophecy foretells a shift in collective human consciousness:

There will come a day when people of all races, colors, and creeds will put aside their differences. They will come togetherin love and community, joining hands in unification to heal the Earth and all Her children. They will move over the Earth like a great Whirling Rainbow, bringing peace, understanding, and healing everywhere they go. Many creaturesthought to be extinct or mythical will resurface at this time; the great trees that perished will return almost overnight. All living things will flourish, drawing sustenance from the breast of our Mother, the Earth.

Each color in the Rainbow Halo represents a different race and creed, and their unified appearance in the sky signals the prophecy’s inevitable fulfillment. This prophetic period will mark the end of war and the dawn of a new era rooted in love, wisdom, and peace.

The great spiritual leaders of the past, known as the Rainbow Warriors, will return to guide humanity. They’ll teach us how to live in harmony and help every soul awaken to its highest potential.

On the New Earth, all beings will lead rich spiritual lives overflowing with joy, laughter, and love.

I’m folding into the New Earth by improving the quality of my consciousness and evolving into the very best version of myself.

By fusing intuition and grit.

By balancing ice with fire.

By alchemizing pain into presence.

By doing good, being kind, and putting love first.

And, yes — as the pretend version of my wise meathead best friend advised —by thinking like a fancy white lady and acting like a straight n***a.