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

[kadymae.livejournal.com]

Actually, I rather like this post because it's such a raw self-examination and shows how insidious racism really is. That the hurt and the damage ultimately touch everybody, in different ways and to different extents, and what we discover during acts of "exploratory surgery" is often not what we thought (feared) we might find, but it is something different, but no less painful.

[maygra.livejournal.com]

It is insidious and while I can, indeed, point to the roots of it in myself (both familialy and geographically), I'm of a mind that my experiences really aren't the point.

I mean living where I live, white privilege isn't exactly something either unconscious or even unacknowledged and until a very few years ago, it was more of a banner flag to wave than something to shed yourself of...