ibarw

[maygra]

I've been trying to formulate some kind of post for ibarw all weekend. The miscegenation row tipped something ugly in me and I've been trying to get a handle on it since then.

However.

Every post I try to write, that I put together, all come off as either, "This is why and how Maygra comes by her racism, conscious and unconscious," or as a justification of why, despite my best efforts, those often subtle tendencies and reactions still surface, or how, after a lifetime of actively trying to cultivate colorblindness I now resent (because it is my privilege as a white woman to do so) discovering that that effort may have been misguided and even hurtful in ways I never intended.

That probably says more about me than even I want to know.

Anything else I could say about it would be more self-justification, and while usually I'm all about that?

Not this week.

Comments

[ethrosdemon.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the colorblindness issue really kills me, too. It troubles me, because I actually think in the best possible world that's how we would all be, but it seems like recognizing difference and accepting it is how we need to go now. My own racial issues get wrapped up in this and it becomes a personal issue that I feel somewhat disenfranchised about.

[maygra.livejournal.com]

Allie pointed out to me that, for me at least (and likely for you) that it's an artifact of living in the deep south, of the generation I was born into, that dead center of the baby boomers.

And the truth of it is that I get the why part of it being hurtful and not exactly the best response because it does dismiss the history of everything before.

It just leaves me without a plan, without a response, without something to *act* upon and so I'm kind of flopping around like a dead fish with no idea how to act or even to be.

[ethrosdemon.livejournal.com]

It's kind of funny, because Allie was talking ME yesterday about how she's sort of at loose ends with being from a white activist culture and how she thinks that culture is to some extent an outgrowth of a desire to Not Be a Racist, and oddly enough in my own life I consider myself an activist, but just because it's the right thing to do. Sometimes I wonder if I'm naive even about myself.