Maygra's Musings

I will start with an apology: I am sorry. I am sorry that I have used racial tropes and stereotypes in the past and failed to note them. That I have, and continue to find myself backsliding from time to time into those tropes, into separating or categorizing things based on race when I damn well know better. I am sorry for anyone who has ever been hurt by my failure to recognize my own prejudices. I apologize to my friends, both PoC and non, for being silent. I am a poor ally, but worse, I am frequently a silent observer of struggles that matter and I neither help nor offer haven. I'm sorry.

( For most of us who have white privilege of any degree, race fail is not an option, it's an inevitability. )

Even my apology is about me. I'm not sure how to fix that but I'm working on it. My silence aids no one. I'm not sure my words do either, but my silence means I think every thing is hunky-dory. It's not.

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.