No matter how infinitely imaginative I may consider myself, there are some things I am still unable to fathom. I cannot imagine feeling so loyal to a political party that I don’t care if people lose their health care or if a man molested little girls. I can’t picture myself being so sensitive that I needed to remind myself that “It’s OK to be white.” I am unable to envision a world in which I have every societal advantage but am still butt-hurt by the simple use of the words “Black Lives Matter,” even when they are uttered by an inanimate object.
Apparently, my imagination isn’t big enough.
I recently found out that some of our beloved Caucasian brethren are upset because Alexa believes black lives matter. Not the woman named Alexa who works at the Starbucks near your house and spells your name wrong every time. (It’s Michael, not Michel!) I’m referring to the Amazon assistant whose brain was sucked out of her body and put into the Amazon Echo. She’s Siri’s cousin who went to a good college so she can actually understand what you’re saying.
I only use my Alexa to control a few household devices, but apparently, there are people who have whole conversations with their Alexa, and someone discovered that she responds when she hears, “Alexa, black lives matter.”
I mean, really mad.
The Caucasianery can only be described as “Keurig-like,” from when angry white people began destroying their coffee machines because they wanted a child molester for a senator.
When I first discovered this white-people uprising, the first thing I did was to conduct my own unscientific experiment. I decided to ask Alexa myself. I went over to my Echo Dot. “Alexa,” I said. “Black lives matter.”
I was sure Alexa would say how black lives were more important than white lives. From the level of Aryan anal injury I witnessed on Twitter, I thought she might say, “Fuck those crackers,” throw up the black fist and start playing Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power.”
“Black lives and the Black Lives Matter Movement absolutely matter,” she responded. “It’s important to have conversations about equality and social justice.”
That’s it. That’s why they are mad.
As a control test in my scientific experiment, I asked if white lives mattered. “Sorry, I don’t know that,” was the response. The response was the same for blue lives and all lives.
I figured this could only be because of three things:
1. There is a black mole. Maybe there’s a woke-ass black computer engineer who surreptitiously slipped a piece of code into Alexa’s programming at Amazon while no one was looking. I doubt this is true because as soon as his friends and family discovered that he was working at Amazon, they’d start asking for the hookup on some free shipping. Unless a pallet of Lawry’s Seasoned Salt has come up missing from the warehouse, I’m dismissing this theory.
2. They want to piss off conservatives. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, after all, does own the Washington Post, which exposed the Roy Moore scandal, parts of Donald Trump’s Russian collusion plot and the Project Veritas fake molestation story. Republicans say they think this means that Bezos and the Washington Post are part of a liberal “fake news” conspiracy, never mentioning that they always turn out to be right. Plus, Bezos is a billionaire white man. They don’t put politics, social justice or anything else over money. This fails the logic test.
3. Alexa is right. Perhaps, as impossible as it is to believe, it is important to discuss these issues. Even if it makes white people’s eyebrows twitch, maybe discussing race, injustice and inequality is necessary. Alexa is a pretty smart woman, so maybe she knows more than us. Maybe the Amazon Echo is right.
But we know what white people do when they hear anyone say something they don’t like: They destroy it like they did Martin Luther King Jr. Or Fred Hampton. Or Mike Brown. Or Sandra Bland. They will smash it to smithereens so they can silence it, even if it is an inanimate object like an Amazon Echo. After all ...
It does have a black body.