...Replaced...It's All Good w/ Revolutionary Cries

RaceMash: hatedforeveryone: PHALLIC RAGE: Yeah, I have No Tolerance for...

a-place-to-stand:

In your defense, I think you have a point. I haven’t always understood the experiences of Blacks, and I never fully will for that matter. But the point is I continue to educate myself day by day, and It’s all a learning experience. My original post may have seemed to come off in the way that it might have felt I was “dismissing another person’s experience,” but I assure you it was just one behavior I was observing in her post. I respect her. She’s bright, intelligent. But I just don’t want to see her become bitter, and its because I care about her. By the way, if you refer back to my original post, you will see that I made no such statement/inference as you are suggesting.

Peace and love.

For those of you who are interested, you will find my final thoughts on the matter here: http://a-place-to-stand.tumblr.com/post/16465964916/last-note-on-yeah-i-have-no-tolerance-for-racism

Thanks for reading!

I saw this yesterday but I was so dumbfounded and psychologically worn out, that I didn’t respond.

If you respected me then why didn’t you directly address me instead of accusing me of things based on one line of a very, very long post.

The post was called ‘let’s talk about my feelings’. You may not have been aware, but it was a response as a black woman to everybody reblogging Jane Elliot’s video (about the exercise in experiencing racism in the classroom) and calling it reverse racism and cruelty because the white woman cried. This is called ‘white woman tears’. It is when a white person is confronted with their racism and she cries or otherwise puts an emphasis on how she feels terribly and then the sympathy is shifted to her rather than the PoC who was wronged. SO, I wrote a post that was undermining in the fact that it flipped the whole situation on its head by me as a black woman centering a conversation on race around my feelings, something that is never done.

Your response to that is a perfect example in why black people do not write how I write (normally). White people make us think that our feelings are not legitimate. We are told to deal strictly in facts and textbook definitions. To not be angry or sad. But I am not afraid of talking about my feelings because I am not ashamed of utilizing my full humanity in discussions on race. If a white woman can cry if I call her out on something racist, then I can cry when someone says something to racist to me. It works both ways.

Your idea of respect alludes me. If you had been in an area where the vast majority of white people regularly exacted straightforward racism towards you, it alters how you think and what you expect. Because I am black, white people do not think I have the right to alter my life based on the mistreatment I’ve experienced by whites.

As a black person, I have no business talking about my experiences from an emotional perspective (of anger sometimes, but more often than not, of disillusionment). I have no business articulating the fact that I do not trust white people, because I am expected to get hurt time and time again and still look at everyone the same.

My post ‘let’s talk about my feelings’ was… very honest. It was written in sadness and disillusionment. I do not divorce myself from my feelings when I write. That’s not me. I have always been taught to value my emotions and my experiences, and I will always retain that mentality even when I am attacked for it. Because I am human too.

I’d challenge you to find a time when I attacked a white person individually by saying they were horrible because they were white, rather than them being horrible because of what they said. I firmly believe in the equality of all people based on race. But from personal experience, I can tell you that most white people are not of the same opinion.

It’s not even merely that I like to be respected. It’s that I deserve respect. I have thought carefully about my life and I’ve come to the conclusion that if I deal with being treated as a subhuman too much by one demographic, I will turn into a bitter person. And with that comes a lot of things: mental health problems in the form of depression or anxiety (that has been scientifically proven) and just general dissatisfaction. So I’ve made choices.

If a white person treats me with respect and sees me as more than a caricature, as in, somebody who has the right to feel. To feel pain when wronged. To feel anger when wronged. To feel disillusionment when excluded. Then I will appreciate them.

Your response to my post, shows that you are very much like most white people in that you don’t believe the feelings of PoC are justified. If my blog can and will do anything, it is to let people know, especially black women (who are maligned as irrational and overly sensitive by men and white people) that it is okay to feel. Audre Lorde says (essentially) the Black Mother in all of us says I feel therefore I am. If I do not show my feelings, even when they are of anger, then i am not a human anymore. I am a caricature. I am a robot.

I do not write about race from the perspective of a Sociology professor. I write about race from my heart. Because my race & my womanhood impede people from seeing my full innate humanity. And that will always trouble me more than words can express.

I am not even writing this for you, because I know you won’t understand. You are comfortable in not understanding.

I write this for every PoC who has been told not to feel. To always be trusting and happy. To chuck and jive. I write this for them, becuase you will never understand. Justl ike you will never understand my humanity. Which is why I need to protect myself and my spirit, by surrounding myself with people who do.