Only five and a half more hours of construction noise... So I'm spring cleaning my music playlists for as long as I can today and that will be followed by many podcasts..
S made me feel pressured to go to his neighborhood to get a vaccine. But I am lighter skinned than him and what he doesn't understand is that if I did that I'd be on the evening news or the source of outrage on someone's instagram story for using resources that belong to people who are brown -- brown like my dad. (White faces in line already made the news last week.) It fucks with my head that my dad, and 99% of my friends and lovers would be warmly welcomed, while I would need to bring a brown family member as proof of my background or risk being shunned by society for wanting to keep my brown family safe. Do I need to carry around my family tree at all times?
And yet at the same moment I feel I'm not allowed to feel outcasted by my skin, even though it's always been more a mark of shame than a privilege where I am from. I don't have a white family to run to. I don't know the white side of my family. It's an isolating feeling and a deep deep pain I've always carried, and now it's intensified. I'll always feel that my skin betrays my roots and upbringing. I hate colorism with every fiber of my being. The same colorism that gets women murdered is the same colorism that ostracizes mixed kids at every turn, except where is our community to run to when we are attacked by both sides?
But no one wants to hear rants about the mixed experience. It's too complicated. Too much mental gymnastics for monoracials to juggle simultaneously. It's too much for us too. I'm tired of thinking about life in terms of race through everyone else's eyes. I would like someone to see the world through our eyes for a change. Until then I'll feel like I need to continue hiding myself from the world until the world chills the fuck out and judges us for who we are on the inside.
In the past decade but especially the last four years, every time I hung out with my black-presenting but also mixed best friend, we both witnessed all the uncomfortable assumptions strangers make of each of us. She saw how I was sometimes a magnet for drunk angry dark misogynists who think I'm trespassing cultures and want to blow off steam at a female, and I saw how everyone in my life is assumed to be trespassing when they enter my overly secure lobby - because I live in a poor black neighborhood where it's assumed everyone is trying to break in at all times. -- And each time it was a POC who racially profiled my friends and lovers. Internalized racism?
I just want to fucking have fun with my friends and family without weird shit happening all the time, without men compartmentalizing what "color" everyone is. Fuck. Please tell me there's more to life than this.
Sigh. I hate the world sometimes. Who else is tired of hearing about victims of violence all the time? Tired of feeling scared and tired of feeling helpless. I want to be able to walk alone without fear. We all deserve that right.
I haven't even been on social media at all. I guess my brain just decided to dwell on these thoughts today.
9:26 a.m. - 2021-03-22