Since LJ is unashamedly making war against privacy, I have 6 DW codes if someone wants them:

YCPYMDEJGF9XKAAABPZ2

DVXPJ8G7PPDJ6AAADU8U

ZFDHMQWGZB2KZAAAJARY

AF6DSZ7F89333AAAJARZ

XS8XNAMDRMVWFAAAJAR3

RHP6PWFTMKHFBAAAJAR4

PQK98V8EB3Z2DAAAJAR5

9J46E77MZRCPZAAAJAR6

GB38V9QJBE879AAAJAR2

Also, I don't need to tell you to NOT crosspost private things on my journal, or private comments of mine elsewhere.

Via delux_vivens, ‘We are human.’

But they want a tour guide. They want to watch somebody bleed. Pain as entertainment.

“Can you share with us a time when you experienced racism and how you dealt with it?” she asks, her eyes bright in a flushed face. “What was the worst thing that ever happened to you?”

I stopped relating my experience when I realized incidents that cut me deeply became cocktail-party chatter for others. When I realized that doing so caused white people to have a sense of false familiarity with me. When I realized that they recounted my life as if it were their own, as if they owned it, as if they owned me. When I realized they did so not to make others feel my humanity, but to reinforce their belief in their own.

Picnic lunches beneath a hanging man.

The reality is that I cannot convince others of my humanity when they do not believe it. Or when they have lost so much of their own humanity that they cannot possibly see my own. And the reality is that my attempts to do so make me feel loathing and self-hatred and shame.

If I were truly human, would my humanity be self-evident? If I were equal, would this equality not be recognized?

The answers seem obvious. But history tells me otherwise. Depersonalizing racism allows me to see that it is not my humanity that is actually being called into question. It is the humanity of those who cannot see the humanity of others. And yet this racism is like pouring acid on my own skin. With my own hands.

I tell myself: I cannot seek a reflection of my own humanity in a mirror that is encrusted with racism. Seeking that reflection is like rubbing the dirt onto my own hands, my body, my heart. I cannot find validation in white people. There is no true reflection.

I will not say I am human too.

Although both white people and some people of color espouse the belief that living as a credit to my race is the best way to change hearts and minds, I do not believe this to be true. Because nothing about the way I behave or comport myself does anything to change the deeply entrenched, racist views of the majority.

It does not matter what I do. It does not matter who I am.

My parents took care to keep us clean and presentable. They had stricter rules of behavior and deportment than any of my white friends. Hair always combed and clean. No shorts in public. No bare feet. Yes ma’am and no sir and thank you very much. Good grades in school and impeccable behavior. G-d help you if you didn’t. They came from the “We beat you now so the police won’t kill you later” school.

And yet it didn’t really matter. I am reminded of this years later, when a white woman in an upscale department store glares and refers to two nearby children as “dirty little things.” She thinks they are mine and that I am not “controlling them properly.” I look to see two extremely clean, well-groomed, very wealthy appearing Asian children, a little girl and a little boy, who are laughing and talking to each other. I mostly hate kids and yet I can’t see anything wrong with their behavior. But I see it in her eyes.

Their reflection: Dirty. Little. Things.