Little Fires
It feels like the world is on fire, huh?
I'm already super stressed and isolated. To cut to the chase, I'm fine, I've been medically healthy, my family is fine, they too are medically healthy. I'm grateful for what I have. I'm not bemoaning my situation but I am however, entitled to an opinion that is not all sunshine and lollipops. Now on to more interesting things...
The recent situation with George Floyd has lit the U.S up. And perhaps the combination of already being so vexed and then you add in this "kindling" so to speak and a firestorm would naturally erupt. You can't really say for sure why this instance mattered so much when literally hundreds of years have proceeded this of black persons being being killed for no reason by white people who get seemingly no punishment but my guess is that we were just primed up and ready for it. If President Trump's administration wanted to act as the lighter fluid, then here's what the outcome is, right? I'm not trying to sound indifferent. I'm just not shocked. It was going to happen one way or another. Things were going to rip in half and I'm going to go on a limb and just say it, everyone is so anxious and angry and willing to point fingers at imaginary enemies that we're likely to fall into a war in the not too distant future.
Listen, if the murder of Archduke Ferdinand could start WWI, I'm not sure why this is that much different.
I'm not black. I can't speak to the black experience but I can confirm the experience. Yes they are treated worse. Yes police do give them a harder time. Yes they have to behave as "model citizens" if they want to assimilate into society. Yes and yes and yes.
And beyond that, there's a system in place that perpetuates this pattern. Everyone with half a brain is reading up on how to be a better ally so I don't need to tell you that resources are available. They're everywhere and you have access to google. But I will say that in my own experience as a first generation child of immigrants, surely life was hard and my parents had to work really hard to save money and learn the language but they were able to get an apartment, save up for a home, get approved for a mortgage, buy a home, get their child into a public school in the suburbs in their lifetime. People are not scared of an Asian family moving in. I have literally no stories in my life of ever being scared of police officers. I have no stories of my childhood being made complicated by my appearance.
I am a person of color and I mostly move through life unscathed. I say mostly because no one looks at me and thinks "oh that's a criminal." Most of the time I am so unthreatening no one cares. No one would even bat an eye at me 90% of the time. The other 10% is mostly random war vets trying to speak broken Japanese at me or confused people who swear I look just like "insert person's name I've never heard of because I'm highly unpopular in my community" who is probably also their teenager's age. But then enter Coronavirus, stage right. And suddenly the sight of an Asian person brings a great deal of distress to anyone nearby who thinks that I am apparently some kind of carrier monkey for this virus even though I've never been to Wuhan. I'm not even Chinese. None the less people don't take time to dissect my genealogy so I'll let it slide that they just thin slice me and move along with their assumptions. No matter how many generations removed I am because of my Asian eyes I am a threat to national health as we know it. People turn away and walk REAL fast from me. I pretend that they must be real busy or forgot to go grab that gallon of milk but let's get real...I know why they turned away. They're scared. I don't blame them for experiencing fear but my hope is that beyond the knee jerk reaction they can see the underlying reason for that behavior.
And that's basically all racism is; fear of what you don't really understand and that you perceive as scary. And our little brains are built for compartmentalization. When you're a caveman in a small community of other cavemen all of your peers look like you. And if you run into a band of "other" you're scared because you're afraid they'll attack you. It made sense at the time because it was an issue of staying alive but we don't live like that any more.
I also hate when people say "I don't see color" or "I'm not racist" because it's a lie. I don't care if you dated a black guy one time. I don't care if you have a rainbow of friends because I most certainly do as well but I would never feel comfortable saying I don't see color. I see it; even with my terrible vision I see the differences between us. And frankly I want you to see I'm Asian because I'm proud of who I am. I am proud of my family and the delicious yet slightly pungently odored food we eat. It's part of my greater identity and sure I love some pizza and beer too. I'm allowed to have both. I still have that "flavor" in my history and I am allowed to be proud of it just as you should be proud of yours.
And if racism is basically just a bias either for or against others, can you really say you live an unbiased life? I am so biased because my brain has been conditioned to be biased. Also, it doesn't help that people of color are racist as hell against other people of color. The problem is not just white passing people oppressing all other non white people. The things your nail girl is chippering away about in her native tongue could make you turn red. I'm not saying anything revolutionary when I admit my own parents said very inflammatory things against others of color. And if I brought a black boyfriend into our home? Expect to have heard the screaming from the next state over. This was my environment for 17 years and of course that's going to have some impact. It would be naive to ever insist otherwise. Being a person of color does not exempt you from needing to do your homework about racism. You can be repressed by your race and still harbor resentment and bias against others. It's not mutually exclusive and it's important to understand it's not a one way street. Everyone insists they are not racist and frankly anyone who says that is basically trying to say "I'm not a bad person" and I don't blame them for feeling that way. No one readily wants to admit out loud that their beliefs and their behavior is flawed. If everything in your life is rooted in something, and suddenly people demand that you're wrong you're not apt to just roll over and accept it. It's easier to just blame everyone else and tell them they're being "oversensitive" since seemingly a year ago they were just fine taking all the microaggressions in stride. "Why can't you just suck it up? Wasn't it fine being borderline assaulted by policemen and wrongfully identified all the time since seemingly all black men look the same? What's wrong with some more of that?" The status quo might not be great, but the fear of the "other" is so compelling that many people are willing to continue arguing for the status quo anyway.
I don't think people are "bad" because of their beliefs, I just think they need time to work through them and realize for THEMSELVES where the flaws in argument are. If you want to believe in a religion I don't agree with I wouldn't bother arguing with you about how ridiculous religion is because at no point would anyone be open to listening to you insult and berate their core values. But people on differing sides of politics do this non stop and somehow expect people to come flocking to their side? If you insult me and values I hold dear to me, why am I compelled to join you? In-group/out-group behavior is incredibly compelling if you're IN that group but if you're not in that group anyway it feels incredibly alienating.
It's 2020, someone insulting me and calling me ugly does NOT mean they have a crush on me. Can we stop arguing like 6 year olds?
Also why are people so hung up about the term privilege? Sometimes I think the left wing needs better PR people because the words they use aren't fluffy enough. Can they like...have crowd sourced funding to get better people on that? The right has it really figured out. If nothing else I really admire their ability to release really confusing or vague terms into the zeitgeist. We spend so much time arguing about semantics that it becomes a distraction from the real issues.
Do I have the answers? Of course I don't otherwise I'd be a millionaire, but I do think rather than focusing on us versus them, black versus white, left versus right we can't only bicker about our differences and we should instead focus on our commonalities and the things we all feel we deserve as humans. And if we focus on the shared things we care about then we could probably make some headway.
Also my perspective is so limited but I'm only starting to realize that we're not one thing. You give yourself the grace to be multifaceted and complex but you rarely extend that grace to other people. People can both "nice" to you and also terrible to others because they're allowed to be multiple things to different audiences. Have you heard of code switching? I do it literally all the time because it would be weird to talk to my husband in the same tone I talk to my kiddos in as I talk to my coworkers in, as I talk to my boss in. That's what confuses me about people trying to insist "So-and-so was nothing but kind to me, he would never have assaulted that lady." Um? That's exactly how people behave. Do you think they go around assaulting everyone they interact with from their mom to their postal carrier? Abusers pick and choose whom they think would be the best victims. The fact that a person has the capacity for kindness toward one girlfriend doesn't mean they don't have the capacity to assault the next one. If you're secretly a cannibal do you try and kidnap Julia Roberts whose sudden disappearance would be noticed within minutes or do you pick someone no-name homeless person hitchhiking on some lonely stretch of highway where there are no witnesses?
Sorry, I recently was listening to a Jeffrey Dahmer podcast and I know it's not a current event but it's still so amazing to me how many times he could have been caught and punished and was not. I am so sick of current events that I will occasionally dive backward in time to when the world was even more naive. Not because I have any nostalgia for it, but I can feel some comfort that even in the supposed "good old days" that people allowed this white weirdo with vats of acid in his apartment to go under the radar for literally years. That's what white privilege looks like, guys. The freedom to be a total weirdo with neighbors literally right on top and left and right of your murdering and it does not garner even the slightest bit of suspicion from authorities until the guy you're mid-stream trying to drug and assault runs half naked out of your apartment with handcuffs attached to him screaming for help. It's weird, but that's what privilege looks like. It's not that he was a some rich or powerful or intellectual dude, but when you glanced your eyes over him he just didn't look suspicious when in fact he was highly dangerous and unstable.
But anyway, my point was that people have apathy if they've never felt harmed or burdened by something. The old "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mentality. It's not broken to YOU. And I get stuck in that rut a ton of thinking just because I worked hard doesn't mean other people didn't also work hard. I'm the kind of person who drives a car for 13 years because, ya know, it's clunky and starting to rust and maybe water pools up in the door and all but, hey I don't have a car payment, it's environmentally harmful to constantly get new cars every few years, it's not like they're made of renewable resources, the insurance is so much cheaper...and it's something I can count on even though it's not great. Sometimes it's okay to say, hey this old bucket of bolts is certainly functional but for the sake of your own safety and the children and family members you have riding with you, it's worth considering that maybe this isn't the right fit anymore and that there's bigger and better things if you open yourself up to them.
I'm already super stressed and isolated. To cut to the chase, I'm fine, I've been medically healthy, my family is fine, they too are medically healthy. I'm grateful for what I have. I'm not bemoaning my situation but I am however, entitled to an opinion that is not all sunshine and lollipops. Now on to more interesting things...
The recent situation with George Floyd has lit the U.S up. And perhaps the combination of already being so vexed and then you add in this "kindling" so to speak and a firestorm would naturally erupt. You can't really say for sure why this instance mattered so much when literally hundreds of years have proceeded this of black persons being being killed for no reason by white people who get seemingly no punishment but my guess is that we were just primed up and ready for it. If President Trump's administration wanted to act as the lighter fluid, then here's what the outcome is, right? I'm not trying to sound indifferent. I'm just not shocked. It was going to happen one way or another. Things were going to rip in half and I'm going to go on a limb and just say it, everyone is so anxious and angry and willing to point fingers at imaginary enemies that we're likely to fall into a war in the not too distant future.
Listen, if the murder of Archduke Ferdinand could start WWI, I'm not sure why this is that much different.
I'm not black. I can't speak to the black experience but I can confirm the experience. Yes they are treated worse. Yes police do give them a harder time. Yes they have to behave as "model citizens" if they want to assimilate into society. Yes and yes and yes.
And beyond that, there's a system in place that perpetuates this pattern. Everyone with half a brain is reading up on how to be a better ally so I don't need to tell you that resources are available. They're everywhere and you have access to google. But I will say that in my own experience as a first generation child of immigrants, surely life was hard and my parents had to work really hard to save money and learn the language but they were able to get an apartment, save up for a home, get approved for a mortgage, buy a home, get their child into a public school in the suburbs in their lifetime. People are not scared of an Asian family moving in. I have literally no stories in my life of ever being scared of police officers. I have no stories of my childhood being made complicated by my appearance.
I am a person of color and I mostly move through life unscathed. I say mostly because no one looks at me and thinks "oh that's a criminal." Most of the time I am so unthreatening no one cares. No one would even bat an eye at me 90% of the time. The other 10% is mostly random war vets trying to speak broken Japanese at me or confused people who swear I look just like "insert person's name I've never heard of because I'm highly unpopular in my community" who is probably also their teenager's age. But then enter Coronavirus, stage right. And suddenly the sight of an Asian person brings a great deal of distress to anyone nearby who thinks that I am apparently some kind of carrier monkey for this virus even though I've never been to Wuhan. I'm not even Chinese. None the less people don't take time to dissect my genealogy so I'll let it slide that they just thin slice me and move along with their assumptions. No matter how many generations removed I am because of my Asian eyes I am a threat to national health as we know it. People turn away and walk REAL fast from me. I pretend that they must be real busy or forgot to go grab that gallon of milk but let's get real...I know why they turned away. They're scared. I don't blame them for experiencing fear but my hope is that beyond the knee jerk reaction they can see the underlying reason for that behavior.
And that's basically all racism is; fear of what you don't really understand and that you perceive as scary. And our little brains are built for compartmentalization. When you're a caveman in a small community of other cavemen all of your peers look like you. And if you run into a band of "other" you're scared because you're afraid they'll attack you. It made sense at the time because it was an issue of staying alive but we don't live like that any more.
I also hate when people say "I don't see color" or "I'm not racist" because it's a lie. I don't care if you dated a black guy one time. I don't care if you have a rainbow of friends because I most certainly do as well but I would never feel comfortable saying I don't see color. I see it; even with my terrible vision I see the differences between us. And frankly I want you to see I'm Asian because I'm proud of who I am. I am proud of my family and the delicious yet slightly pungently odored food we eat. It's part of my greater identity and sure I love some pizza and beer too. I'm allowed to have both. I still have that "flavor" in my history and I am allowed to be proud of it just as you should be proud of yours.
And if racism is basically just a bias either for or against others, can you really say you live an unbiased life? I am so biased because my brain has been conditioned to be biased. Also, it doesn't help that people of color are racist as hell against other people of color. The problem is not just white passing people oppressing all other non white people. The things your nail girl is chippering away about in her native tongue could make you turn red. I'm not saying anything revolutionary when I admit my own parents said very inflammatory things against others of color. And if I brought a black boyfriend into our home? Expect to have heard the screaming from the next state over. This was my environment for 17 years and of course that's going to have some impact. It would be naive to ever insist otherwise. Being a person of color does not exempt you from needing to do your homework about racism. You can be repressed by your race and still harbor resentment and bias against others. It's not mutually exclusive and it's important to understand it's not a one way street. Everyone insists they are not racist and frankly anyone who says that is basically trying to say "I'm not a bad person" and I don't blame them for feeling that way. No one readily wants to admit out loud that their beliefs and their behavior is flawed. If everything in your life is rooted in something, and suddenly people demand that you're wrong you're not apt to just roll over and accept it. It's easier to just blame everyone else and tell them they're being "oversensitive" since seemingly a year ago they were just fine taking all the microaggressions in stride. "Why can't you just suck it up? Wasn't it fine being borderline assaulted by policemen and wrongfully identified all the time since seemingly all black men look the same? What's wrong with some more of that?" The status quo might not be great, but the fear of the "other" is so compelling that many people are willing to continue arguing for the status quo anyway.
I don't think people are "bad" because of their beliefs, I just think they need time to work through them and realize for THEMSELVES where the flaws in argument are. If you want to believe in a religion I don't agree with I wouldn't bother arguing with you about how ridiculous religion is because at no point would anyone be open to listening to you insult and berate their core values. But people on differing sides of politics do this non stop and somehow expect people to come flocking to their side? If you insult me and values I hold dear to me, why am I compelled to join you? In-group/out-group behavior is incredibly compelling if you're IN that group but if you're not in that group anyway it feels incredibly alienating.
It's 2020, someone insulting me and calling me ugly does NOT mean they have a crush on me. Can we stop arguing like 6 year olds?
Also why are people so hung up about the term privilege? Sometimes I think the left wing needs better PR people because the words they use aren't fluffy enough. Can they like...have crowd sourced funding to get better people on that? The right has it really figured out. If nothing else I really admire their ability to release really confusing or vague terms into the zeitgeist. We spend so much time arguing about semantics that it becomes a distraction from the real issues.
Do I have the answers? Of course I don't otherwise I'd be a millionaire, but I do think rather than focusing on us versus them, black versus white, left versus right we can't only bicker about our differences and we should instead focus on our commonalities and the things we all feel we deserve as humans. And if we focus on the shared things we care about then we could probably make some headway.
Also my perspective is so limited but I'm only starting to realize that we're not one thing. You give yourself the grace to be multifaceted and complex but you rarely extend that grace to other people. People can both "nice" to you and also terrible to others because they're allowed to be multiple things to different audiences. Have you heard of code switching? I do it literally all the time because it would be weird to talk to my husband in the same tone I talk to my kiddos in as I talk to my coworkers in, as I talk to my boss in. That's what confuses me about people trying to insist "So-and-so was nothing but kind to me, he would never have assaulted that lady." Um? That's exactly how people behave. Do you think they go around assaulting everyone they interact with from their mom to their postal carrier? Abusers pick and choose whom they think would be the best victims. The fact that a person has the capacity for kindness toward one girlfriend doesn't mean they don't have the capacity to assault the next one. If you're secretly a cannibal do you try and kidnap Julia Roberts whose sudden disappearance would be noticed within minutes or do you pick someone no-name homeless person hitchhiking on some lonely stretch of highway where there are no witnesses?
Sorry, I recently was listening to a Jeffrey Dahmer podcast and I know it's not a current event but it's still so amazing to me how many times he could have been caught and punished and was not. I am so sick of current events that I will occasionally dive backward in time to when the world was even more naive. Not because I have any nostalgia for it, but I can feel some comfort that even in the supposed "good old days" that people allowed this white weirdo with vats of acid in his apartment to go under the radar for literally years. That's what white privilege looks like, guys. The freedom to be a total weirdo with neighbors literally right on top and left and right of your murdering and it does not garner even the slightest bit of suspicion from authorities until the guy you're mid-stream trying to drug and assault runs half naked out of your apartment with handcuffs attached to him screaming for help. It's weird, but that's what privilege looks like. It's not that he was a some rich or powerful or intellectual dude, but when you glanced your eyes over him he just didn't look suspicious when in fact he was highly dangerous and unstable.
But anyway, my point was that people have apathy if they've never felt harmed or burdened by something. The old "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mentality. It's not broken to YOU. And I get stuck in that rut a ton of thinking just because I worked hard doesn't mean other people didn't also work hard. I'm the kind of person who drives a car for 13 years because, ya know, it's clunky and starting to rust and maybe water pools up in the door and all but, hey I don't have a car payment, it's environmentally harmful to constantly get new cars every few years, it's not like they're made of renewable resources, the insurance is so much cheaper...and it's something I can count on even though it's not great. Sometimes it's okay to say, hey this old bucket of bolts is certainly functional but for the sake of your own safety and the children and family members you have riding with you, it's worth considering that maybe this isn't the right fit anymore and that there's bigger and better things if you open yourself up to them.
