eshusplayground:

Personal disclosure time.

Some 3 years ago, I brought up racism in a discussion about a communal living space I was part of, and one of the White folks running the show said, “We already know this stuff.”

It was the only time I ever cried about racism in public. I was surrounded by White folks. Do you know how many people actually comforted me? One. Know how many people gave the person who made me cry hell for how they treated me? Zero.

There I was, someone who is normally emotionally very reserved, balling my eyes out in public about racism. And only one person intervened to comfort me. Nobody took the perpetrator to task for their behavior.

This was not the first time a White person has humiliated me in public because they didn’t approve of what I was saying. This was not the first time White people sat by and let things like that happen to me without so much as a, “Man that was fucked up” thrown in my direction. These were people I’d considered my friends. These were people I thought liked me and respected me as a person. And they did this to me or allowed it to happen without comment.

Yet let some White chick get the sniffles around me, and suddenly I’m this big mean scary angry crazy evil Black bitch who needs to be put in her place.

So as far as feelings getting hurt and all that shit? Spare me.