I have been a black female for 36 years in this wonderful and complicated country which I love dearly. I love that we fight, that we're free, that we're not perfect, but, we try. I love and pray for mercy everyday for us black people. I love and pray for all Americans. But I don't know what it means to be white and would make a poor spokeswoman anyway (I know obviously).
This past year has been a real head trip for me. Courtesy of the election of President Donald Trump, I burned all the bridges I had remaining with my white friends and in that freedom has come peace and clarity. Not because white people are so inherently evil but because I am so inherently evil. Little background and then I will get back to the point. I had a lifetime movie of the week childhood. Yes it sucked, but it's over. Anyway, during a real row with my white lady friend said, “the democratic party wants to keep you poor” (because I'm black, obviously). Then suddenly I realized my father wanted me to be poor. For whatever reasons, he wanted me to suffer, truly suffer. Not because he didn't produce me under the bullshit, Republican, nuclear middle class family ideals. Side note, this concept is a complete fabrication of true historical family dynamics and was propagated to sell Maytag refrigerators. It's just the real truth, don't shoot the messenger.
I thought of my father unclouded by my love or my prejudices and really saw him. Not my soul brother hero dad, who somehow managed to fight his way out of the Jim Crow South. And yet, this man who literally and figuratively held my life in his hands, who felt I was his legacy, in his inconceivable and irreconcilable cruelty, ( I can use no other words) frankly set me up to fail. I believe the truest purpose of family is redemption. We each get at chance at bat, if we strike out then we can take what we learned and hopefully pass it down to our children. I imagine all loving parents hope they can succeed where we failed, hit that homer right out the park. This preoccupation we all have with wealth for wealth sake has tricked us into believing that only the rich can be successful parents. The true value of being rich is the influence it unlocks. Wealth without influence is a hat trick. And a family without love is a prison.
When I was in the third grade I started the first steps of puberty. That's right, I am talking about body odor. Deeply embarrassed, I came home with a note from my teacher that it was time I started using deodorant. I remember being extra attentive in my bathing for school the next day. I remember staring expectantly at my father to nod his approval of my cleanliness and hand me a stick of deodorant. Instead he looked at me with disgust and sprayed me with a spritz of perfume and sent me off to class, where, of course I once again stunk up the classroom. Just like that, I was a social outcast, practically for the rest of my life. I think about that look on his face and I can't see how he didn't know 20 other faces in that classroom was going to look at me just like that and didn't care. Why would he do something so humiliating? I'll never know, the dead keep their secrets from the living. But what I knew right then and there was I could no longer trust my father and I was on my own. [In case you're wondering, the saga of the pee girl unfortunately continued far longer than really made sense honestly.]
The social rejection that followed destroyed my self esteem. Isolated and depressed I spent my whole life watching TV like it was real life. One day, I learned about Malcolm X. He was everything I wanted my father to be. Brave and slick, he always looked so genuinely happy to be a father in his family pictures. At the very end of Spike Lee's film Malcolm X, after his assassination scene, various people stand up and declare “I am Malcolm X.” And it happened, suddenly I found something that made me feel pride in myself despite my circumstances. I no longer had to just be me, I could transcend, I could survive by being black. Not only could being black instantly force others to include me, it could give me the power to not be afraid of my father, of my peers opinion, of greater society, naw it was everything.
Here's the problem, I was so comforted by what I thought in my mind was so powerful that I didn't grow up. While many will die, blacks are eternal, I had a permanent father substitute. In my head, you don't meet me, you meet a black woman. And I planned my life as if every experience was a battle to crumble white supremacy instead of you know other people. Instead of pursuits that would've enriched my life and lighten my pain I searched out petty battles that paid their victories in less than dirt. I've been so angry because I'm walking around dead. Of course white people aren't people or worst yet they're the living! You see, then yeah how we think of white people as magic, well news flash, magic=life. What do we really want?
I've dealt with racism and it's beatable. That's it, that's all there is as far as that goes these days. I understand it is complicated to move into the future when it feels the past is so unresolved. I have an odd sorta anecdote, when I lived in Japan a very angry Japanese woman angrily shoved the famous manga Barefoot Gen in my face and demanded I answer for the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I straight up laughed in her face (I was 17). I didn't mean disrespect but the idea I could stand in and answer for the deaths of thousands when forget about me, my father wasn't even born (He was born in 1949) seem well ridiculous. My honest thought was she was being ridiculous. I realized right then that it is a hard truth of life sometimes when something is done, it's just done. No fan fare, no streamers, no trials, no post game analysis-just over. All us descendants can do is learn whatever lesson there may be if any and keep moving the dial of human civilization forward. It's not a shameful thing to be descendants of slaves and that history isn't a final verdict on the integrity of American whites. We all need to commit here and now about what our legacy will be and how future generations will judge us. I am definitely not saying to abdicate our responsibilities to make this country fairer and better.
It's been really hard to understand that I've been a shitty person. But as Charles Offdensen mostly said, a {wo}man can not serve two masters. Make peace.
Submitted June 19, 2017 at 02:41AM by StellaMae9 http://ift.tt/2rFIpnB self
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