i don't like to talk about racism.
as a transparently white, incredibly sheltered, shit public education, shit college education, small town girl who grew up split between baptist and evangelical churches, it's not my place.
i grew up in a really small town of 5,000 people and i think you could guess how many of those would check anything other than "caucasian" on a government form.
when i really think about it, i can logically know that there were a multitude of cultures in my school. it was a fort town, a trading post back in the day. the middle school is still named Fort [small town]. it was a city built around railroads, sawmills, fur trade, farming. it developed as natural melting pot of cultures between native americans, eskimo, traveling tradesmen, railroad workers, timber mill workers/loggers, coal miners...etc. most of those industries didn't care what color you were if you showed and didn't get killed on the job, they were happy to treat ALL of their workers equally like absolute shit.
but i'm a slightly oblivious person and i was incredibly introverted as a child (reading books in my closet to avoid people); it never occurred to me that people were different. we all lived in the same town. we all went to the same school. we were all the same. the only difference was money, and my family didn't have any, so, that was that.
i didn't have friends. i didn't do sleep overs. i wasn't exposed to any other way of life outside the 4 cedar sided walls of our tiny little house two blocks from the city park. i didn't do sports or dance lessons. i attended 2 meetings of some kind of FHA (future homemakers of america) before they kicked me out. my biggest exposure to the outside world were the few years we were on a canadian swim league. all that taught me is french canadians are weird because they don't shave their armpits and to be scared of doukhobors, again because of a body hair issue. i don't know either.
was there was no such thing as play-dates. i was only allowed to associate with kids from my church and their lifestyles and skin colors were for the most part very similar to mine. maybe an extra sibling. probably not a step-parent. they all had "real" parents. the REALLY GOOD (rich) christian families sometimes adopted a baby from china or haiti, maybe india. those were the only colors in a very whitewashed town: the ones being rescued by good white christian families.
it was a small town and a sheltered life.
but i knew about racism.
i grew up face to face with racism.
family history time:
in april 1955, my mother's father was killed in a plane accident while looking for land to build a nursing home in idaho.
at the time, my grandmother was 6 months pregnant with my mom and already had 3 little boys. she had been excommunicated from her family back east (iowa) because the order of the 3 little boys and the marriage were slightly OUT of order.
this is all very sketchy information i picked up over the years. no one ever talked directly or openly about it, but i've had the power of invisibility since i was tiny and was able to sit very still and very quiet for very long periods of time and hear grown ups talk about PLENTY of things never intended for my ears.
so, 1955, excommunicated from her family, widowed, 3 babies in tow, one on the way. she had to pay $5,000 to have his body transported via rail road from napa, idaho, to kirkland, wa where they lived.
to this day...i just...i can't. a widow in 1955 with 3 babies and one on the way trying to find $5k to have her husband's body sent home for burial.
fuck man.
so, after a few years, my grandmother did what she needed to do and she got married again.
second verse was NOT same as the first. again, i don't know much, but i do know her second husband was in the military at some point and was somehow involved in WWII where he apparently began to adopt his racist beliefs.
here's the snippets i've picked up of the type of man he was:
when my grandmother was giving birth to baby 5 (or maybe 6), at home, on the bathroom floor, he was screaming at her that dinner wasn't ready.
when they were kids, my mom and her brothers would get beat with "whatever was handy" as in literally the first thing his hand landed on. horse shoe? yup. metal stake pulled out of the ground? yup. hair brush? yup.
my grandmother passed in 2011 from SO MUCH CANCER the doctors said: here's a morphine patch, good luck. while she was on a hospital bed, in their living room, unable to speak or breathe on her own, having to have mucus and liquid suctioned out of her throat, in her literal dying days, he was screaming at her that she just needed to get up and make him a sandwich. just walk it off. she's just being lazy.
the thing people tend to forget about ugly, hateful, racist people: they don't just save it for strangers.
all that ugliness lives at home every. single. day.
i don't know what specific brand of racist he was. i heard a few different names over the years but nothing that particularly stuck.
i think the closest i can describe it is this: think of kenneth copeland, the super smooth televangelist. so polite. so charming. so charismatic. a seemingly docile, heartfelt southern gentleman. then think of the videos where he snaps. that INSTANT ugly, pure hatred that comes whipping out. so fast, so viscous, so evil, you don't even see it coming til it's too late.
mix that personality, that religious intensity (he ran his own church) with some deep anti-government conspiracies.
he was more of the fuck the government first, racist second. he didn't like the aryan compund in idaho particularly; to him were a bunch of undisciplined punks. they were good if you needed to scare someone though. i honestly never heard the klan mentioned growing up. it wasn't until i was an adult i realized there were active members in wandering around the woods around the PNW. so while his wasn't an "official" cult, there were several families that attended his church every week and plenty of people that subscribed to his beliefs: heavy on the religion, heavy on fuck the government, heavy on snorting cyan pepper will cure cancer. racism was thrown in as kinda standard boilerplate beliefs in association with the rest.
yes, he believed snorting cyan pepper will cure cancer. you can't make this shit up.
bet your fucking ass snorting cyan pepper will cure cancer. the exact same way drilling a hole in your fucking skull relieved headaches in egypt. you'll never complain about it again, so you're cured!
we didn't spend much time a the ranch growing up. maybe it was my mom's way of sheltering us from the hate? maybe it was her fear of us accidentally stumbling on a cache of weapons in one of the barns (that was somehow part of things)? maybe it was her worry that we would get beat like she did as a kid? i think her growing up was a very egg shell kinda life, always waiting for whatever was the next thing to set him off.
either way, we only went to the ranch on special occasions. for better reference, "the ranch" is 680 acres of land tucked into the valley basin. most of it is in a federal land trust, and thereby protected/not lived on. think of ashton kutcher's ranch- a farmhouse that probably looked rundown the day it was built, a few outbuildings, vehicles parked wherever there was space in various states of repair. a dirt driveway ended at a carport that didn't so much house cars as much as abandoned equipment and broken household items. there was a massive upper garden and an acre potato garden down below. there were rows and rows and rows of raspberries you could spend hours picking and still barely make a dent. up the road to the north was a pond and the church building as well as a few random driveways with older single wide trailers smashed in between groves of tree rented out to "friends of the cause" that were probably on various watch lists.
and as little as we went to the ranch or talked about it, i knew FOR SURE not to talk about the ranch to people. names didn't only live on newscasts. places like waco, texas, ruby ridge, idaho, and wilmington, ohio had connections back to the ranch.
i grew up face to face with racism and hatred.
in the early 00's a black family moved to town once for about 3 days. they moved into a run down little house adjacent to one of the worst trailer parks in town behind the walmart. it could not have been a move
they did by choice, it must have been a move of desperation. a mom, dad,
a few little kids. they lasted somewhere around 3 days before crosses were burned on their lawns and they were "strongly encouraged" to consider living in another town.
thankfully, not my family, but, you see, in addition to whatever brand of racim was tied to my family, there's also (as in currently, today) still active klan and a militia community 20 minutes away.
i mean hell, the first fucking thing you see when you hit the city limit sign is a giant white cross up on a hill overshadowing the whole damn town.
racism was everywhere growing up.
i never understood it. i didn't know what they were angry about. to me it just seemed like they hated everyone who wasn't them.
which, i guess, is basically what racism is. hating everyone who's not like you.
it's not logical.
you can give all the beautiful speeches you want, write all the deeply researched, soundproof factual think pieces, all the obscure unread blog posts you want. it won't change racism. you can't use logic against the illogical.
the anger and hate behind racism isn't logical.
to hate everyone who's not like you.
because i'm a particular fan of pointing out irony, i think i remember overhearing once that my grandmother's husband was actually a twin. he and his brother had both gone off to war together. they both came back and had a parting of the ways over ideology.
literally hated his own twin. i don't know if this is 100% true. it may have been just a brother, not a twin? i don't know. i never met anyone beyond the grandparents.
back to it: there's nothing logical about someone who hates someone simply for being different than them self. to hate another person because of the color of their skin.
there's nothing rational about a person who spends every moment of every day soaking in hate.
i don't like talking about racism because it's a waste of breath. because talking about it brings trouble and talking about it doesn't change anything. i'm sure PLENTY of people are hyper aware of the doxxing, attacks, stalking,
harassment, death threats, violence, intimidation, life destroying
results from even mentioning certain ideologies and groups.
i'm hyper aware that there's a lot of words i've typed in this post that are on watch lists, especially when all smashed together in one space (what? people wouldn't keyword scan content with out consent, that's crazy talk! ahem).
i am very familiar with the fight against hate.
and i'm not talking about the people who didn't really know they were racist. ones that are just now realizing just how entirely system is fucked from the ground up. the people who, by lack of exposure, education or experience have never really had to think about where they stand. people who haven't understood just how systemic the problem is; the ones *just now* finding out about juneteenth and the tulsa massacre. there may be hope for them. rational, reasonable people still have the chance to open their minds, consider new points of view, make a change.
KEEP HAVING THOSE CONVERSATIONS.
i don't like to talk about racism, but i know i have to because i still have MASSIVE amounts of learning (and unlearning) to do.
i still struggle DEEPLY with the phrase "i don't see color" because i was taught to ONLY see color. i was taught to immediately judge someone by their skin tone.
ironically enough, being taught hate by a racist only teaches you to be scared of angry, shaved head, white dudes.
go figure.
but they tried to teach me: black is violent drug criminals. red is alcoholic trash. yellow is fine as long as they stick to the books. brown you just pretend is white as long as they don't act brown. just pretend they have a tan.
and yes, i was taught race by color JUST LIKE THAT.
jesus loves the little children: red and yellow, black and white.
let that sink in for a minute.
one of the most well know, most enduring, most widely taught children's songs in churches: red and yellow, black and white.
the entire world, the entire sum of human experience boiled down to four COLORS of people.
that doesn't even include the brown color of jesus' own skin.
but go on about how christianity isn't inherently racist. TO THIS DAY i've never heard one person i grew up in church with acknowledge the fact that jesus was a brown man. to be perfectly transparent, it was never even something i thought about until well into my adult years. he was middle eastern. OF COURSE HE HAD BROWN SKIN. maybe that's why brown people were marginally accepted. a grudging non-acknowledgement. but my precious moments bible had pictures of a white jesus, so white he was. and yes, somewhere in my head jesus and the 12 apostles all still look like precious moments cartoons.
circle back: i know i have more to learn, more to unlearn.
i don't know how to change my language yet. i don't know how to change my perceptions going forward.
when i say "i don't see color" i mean i'm trying like fuck to not have that be my knee jerk judgement and my entire basis of interaction about a person.
i want to see the PERSON. their beliefs, their sense of humor, their values, their fears, their goals, their experiences, their taste in music, their work ethic, their humanity, their kindness, their empathy, their obscure interests.
i would rather judge someone for the weird way they pronounce cinnamon or aluminum than by the amount of melanin in their skin.
BUT i know that saying "i don't see color" is also discounting entire cultures, collective histories and unique experiences. and because it's from my perspective, it whitewashes entire life experiences. it strips away entire layers to interactions, histories. it automatically blocks the ability to see from a different perspective; it attacks the ability to have empathy. to say you don't see color is to say you don't acknowledge other people have a difference experiences just because the color of their skin. waking up in the morning, or, holy fuck, even just sleeping in their own damn house is different. saying i don't see color takes all that away. i HAVE to acknowledge that. i have to acknowledge that skin, one of the basal layers of cells, one of the first things to begin to develop on an embryo at 5 weeks. a fucking basal layer of cells, one of the most basic building blocks to being a human being, is enough to inspire hate.
so, i struggle. i don't want to see color, but i need to see color.
i've spent a lot of time over the years dating.
95% of my experiences have been with white men.
i know that i see color because any color or ethnicity automatically got a left swipe for a long, long time.
i was terrified for a person of color to even consider dating me. shut it down. stay away. warning cones and caution tape. i feel toxic by association.
how the fuck could i ever consider potentially exposing someone to the pure, blind, angry, vicious, unbridled hate in my family?
those were people that would shoot a dog for taking to long to respond when called, and they liked the dog.
i would NEVER, EVER ask someone to walk into the lion's den like that.
it's the same reason i never dated a woman around my family. there's no way i could open the door to someone else being screamed at and told they're disgusting, dangerous, going to hell, inhuman, that they should kill themselves.
i know the hate. i know the violence. i know the anger. i know the destruction.
but i don't know what to say.
i don't want to see color because i believe people are more than color.
i need to see color because, i mean, holy fuck, how can you NOT?
and around and around in circles i go.
the one thing i DO know, the one thing i CAN say is this:
i condemn, with every fiber of my being, the brutal murders of people of color, trans people, indigenous people happening across the country.
racism, hatred, bigotry has no place in our homes, our communities, our businesses, our government.
RACISM HAS NO PLACE
i will stand against racism every chance i get.
i will quit more jobs. i will get screamed at in more nail salons. i will keep calling out the jokes and stereotypes. i will have the hard conversations. i will ask the ugly questions. i will read the history. i will read the proposals for the future. i will hear as many voices and perspectives as i can. i will continue to speak up for people who are being mistreated and ignored and murdered.
i don't know how to change people who choose hate and cling to it.
but i can show a different way.
i have seen racism. i know it exists. i grew up with it.
don't listen to the dog whistles. don't let people say it's not a problem anymore. don't let people say it ended with the emancipation proclamation. don't let people say it ended with juneteenth. don't let people say it ended with integration. racism is still thriving across the country.
i honestly, i don't know if it can ever end fully because some people cling to their hate, so hard, with both hands, til their dying breath. you can't legislate hearts and minds. you can't reason with the unreasonable.
but i can stand up against it.
and so i do. in my bubble, in my world, in my circle of people, racism is not welcome. i will stand up against it, i will say it is wrong, i will not associate with it. i will separate myself from people who allow it in their bubble. i will stand in the gap and use my privilege to de-escalate situations or take the abuse myself.
but i don't know how to make it stop.
maybe if enough of us speak up and say it is no longer allowed.
don't stay quiet when a coworker tells a racist joke.
don't stay quiet when you see someone threaten to call the cops because another human being simply exists.
don't ignore the under-the-breath comments and out-of-earshot snide remarks.
don't walk away when you see someone be ignored or overlooked.
don't walk away when you see someone being attacked and targeted.
don't allow it in your bubble.
maybe if enough of us say it isn't allowed in our bubble we can stand in our bubbles, side by side and create a safe space.
i'm sure that idea is simplistic and flawed, but it's what i can do.
i can't change it. i've seen it up close. i know that even in death people will cling to their hatred.
but i can stand against it.
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