We Are Not Dye To Be Dipped Into And Completely Absorbed

I will not say: no foreigners allowed. That is a rather horrible thing to say considering an overwhelming tendency here to welcome foreigners with open arms and bend over backwards for them, at the cost of discriminating against our fellow...

Instead I will say: this is no country for strangers. This is not a people that can be known by observation alone, without the risk of actual engagement. This is no land where you can set yourself apart and then delude yourself with claims that comprehension naturally comes with high-minded goals and noble intentions to enlighten a system whose only fundamental flaw is ignorance of your ways. This is not a place that needs more foreigners coming in to visit, then taking away with them their misconceptions and their privileged judgments -- because we have been misrepresented enough, not just in the international community but also amongst ourselves, and false categorizations and claims about who we are and where we came from and where we should go are unneeded and shouldn't be welcomed.

This is an entry you should read. It's about, among other things, colonialism and imperialism. Colonial and imperialistic thought broken down and exposed and showing brilliant explanatory lead ins to my point that it is already known the real question being asked is "You want us to give up our monopoly over your people/culture/history/stories???!!!??"

I'm late to the band-wagon of promoting this essay, due to various health distractions. But it is worth reading, re-reading, bookmarking, saving and printing it and probably carrying around with you in your wallet.

Eco-tourism, fiscal-tourism, polisci-experimental tourism, writer-tourism, sex-tourism & more; all of it 'you need to cater to our ways of doing things, our needs, our desires and then everything will be fine - you will live up to and become US, the ultimate world champions; the more powerful nation/people etc...'.

Read These Links

Read This

- The Neutral and The Marked: A Primer For Your Kids


- From Pale To Pumped: With Racial Stereotypes


- Why & How People Of Colour Are Included In Advertising: 1st of a Series

- "Your Body": Men Are People and Women Are Women

Everything that activists have been saying, of how white equals the default, equals neutral primarily white male at that and everything else is other. Everything else is marked and labeled differently.

When we say this stuff is everywhere we do mean everywhere. It's indoctrinated from the very beginning of life; in toys, on tv, in how people relate to the infant or child.

"What a pretty baby, is a boy or a girl?"

"What a pretty little black/asian baby."

The answer to this is not to say well, don't mention race at all. Because it's already been proven that not mentioning race, due to years of social conditioning, defaults to white. The answer is to make race and culture recognized as distinctive but not fundamentally different.

I'm a girl, someone else is a boy. It's pretty damn distinctive. But we're both adults, or children depending on age and experience and we're definitely both human beings. If I'm the black woman and someone else is a white male, it's distinctive, it means something, it filters and shades our perspectives and that is important.

But there is no either or scenario. It's not 'be human' or 'be a black/asian/american first nations human'.

It is not impossible to hold two concepts in the mind at the same time. If lemonade can be sweet and tart or sweet and sour, surely the concept of a human being having distinct experiences as well as more common ones can be understood - no matter how impossible various individuals would like to make it seem, world wide.

Human AND Muslim (not plus, like it's some built on addition or extra attribute that comes in a special kit). Human AND Female. Human AND Black.

Frankly, I think that 'special kit' attitude is why so many white people scramble to find american first nation history in their family pasts and why they embrace other cultures, like hiphop. They figure they had to throw away their special kit to become white, so now they'll just annex someone else's distinctiveness because they had to give something up and sacrifice equals oppression.

Nevermind they gave up their roots in the hopes of meeting and matching up to the financial elite and became 'white'.

But if this stuff gets caught early enough, if it's an African Descended Family Toy Set, with an Asian Descended Family Toy Set with a European Descended Family Toyset (and notes for ALL on where in that particular Diaspora that family came from) - then maybe there can be change.

I was reminded today of the Sami, which I grew up learning about under a different name. And it brought home a point I've been nibbling on for a while when it comes to the phrase 'Indigenous Peoples'.

White folk were indigenous peoples too. They've the indigenous peoples of Europe. And they like to forget that their greed and wars and using up resources of their homelands led to them venturing out to meet other indigenous groups and then lying to them and defrauding them and killing them off with their native diseases. Or rather, those with power in those native tribes, lied and cheated, both the new indigenous peoples they met and their own, less wealth endowed, peoples.

And I guess if you write your history to say that the only other human beings you found in the world, were all inferior to you, then you don't have to think about the lying and cheating and murder. And it's possibly even easier to do with strangers after you've already practiced it on your own people.

But that just leaves guilt in the end - useless, impractical guilt and a whole lot of habits to learn to drop. I wonder if all the people saying 'Teach us. But you never teach us. You keep telling us to learn on our own.' Are basically saying the lying, cheating, murder is hereditary and comes with a side of laziness?

Funny that's what they keep saying is wrong with the people they tend to lie to, cheat from and murder. Intergenerational projection, perhaps? Maybe coming from all that useless guilt?

And then there's wondering as to why some folk won't accept an apology that's nothing but a 'Please forgive me for my huge sense of entitlement guilt. Please tell me what to do, impose a penance because after all, you still work for me.'

Vocabulary

If you're the person who broke down via dictionary definitions the term Reverse Discrimination, or if you know of the person or remember the site that has it, could you please comment and link it to me? I'd appreciate it.

That said:

Someone broke down reverse discrimination and it made me think.

Reverse:

• 1. opposite or contrary in position, direction, order, or character: an impression reverse to what was intended; in reverse sequence.



• 3. pertaining to or producing movement in a mechanism opposite to that made under ordinary running conditions: a reverse gear; a reverse turbine.



• 4. acting in a manner opposite or contrary to that which is usual, as an appliance or apparatus.



• 10. an adverse change of fortune; a misfortune, check, or defeat: to meet with an unexpected reverse.



• 17. to turn inside out or upside down.

I've kept the numbering because I didn't even go flip through an actual dead tree dictionary. I went to dictionary.com. Hopefully, some of you are now having illuminating moments. I know I certainly did when I read the original post. That post wondered why it was called reverse discrimination. And wow, doesn't the dictionary definition make it plain.

Of course my strong emphasis (usually seen as bold) likely helps the illumination along. But I needed that bolding there for me. I need the visual to come to mind, strongly, for every time someone brings up how there is no racism, but somehow, there is reverse racism, reverse discrimination. Somehow, despite there being NO RACISM. NONE.

It is a reverse of fortunes that is happening to whites. It is the world going inside out or upside down, on whites. It is the system moving OPPOSITE TO THE WAY IN WHICH IT WAS INTENDED and thus, trodding on whites.

Racism didn't leave, die or disappear. It just picked up a dictionary. It went to college and got a BA in BS.

The original post blew my mind (which is why I want to find it again and link it - I'm pretty sure it's someone I read regularly too. But everyone I think it is, it hasn't been)

But like I said - blew my mind. There's a reason they won't use the term 'bigotry'. There's a reason they won't say it was plain old discrimination. Nuh uh. It was reverse discrimination - things done gone backwards to the way the world's supposed to be and a white (man) is finding himself on the bottom! It ain't right!

From now on, whenever I encounter someone spewing that nonsense, I'm going to tell them find a dictionary and look up the word reverse. Then I'll wait and see if they have two brain cells to rub together.

If they do, maybe then we can have a conversation about (white) privilege.

Once Upon A Time I Was Clueless & Other Truths

I may not have the utensils (Universal Utensil Theory) right now to collect this second wave of intra-PoC conversations and writings into a PoC in SF Carnival. I wish I did. But I'm marshaling my strength to be able to host and support future hosts come the later half of 2009.

These conversations.... important conversations; Symposiums On Being, are tough as hell. PoC University doesn't give out gold stars or A's, just personal enlightenment and growth and sometimes as a booster, incredible bonds of friendship.

I am struck by how in depth we all are, how much we know. Because as the title says, Once Upon A Time I Was Clueless. A different culture in my childhood, with different problems and stresses and emotional and social manipulations and of course a child's innocence in yet deciphering the talk of grown ups.

But my cluelessness shed itself in layers. Every time I look back and think about it, I start three years ago and then leap back considerably to when I was thirteen and had my eyes opened to facts that I hadn't wanted to believe.

Did I want to believe the Korean Grocer had a reason to look at me suspiciously? No.

Did I want to believe my own anger at said Grocer, simmering under my skin and beneath my eyes, challenging and hot, seen and no doubt confusing on their end? No.

Did I want to truly feel my own anger at policemen hassling me as a thirteen year old child? No.

Did I want to feel my fear of them? Hell no.

Once Upon A Time I Was Clueless, because it hurt to be anything else. Not discomfort; Not guilt, as many white folk claim for themselves. IT HURT.

Realizing that those policemen saw me as less than human? That hurt.

Realizing that my neighbourhood had become the front lines of a cold war? That hurt.

Realizing I was picking up all sorts of survival tactics and theories and suspicions - that I was being warped? That I was casting aside others who were hurt, because the pain was so much we lashed out at each other? That hurt.

But pain is not an excuse not to grow and not to learn. Pain's expected. Growing pains are more than aches in bones. This is why I have no sympathy, no empathy, no civility towards those who haven't grown; who haven't looked and haven't seen and haven't bothered to know, learn and comprehend.

I will not treat them like children.

I will not coddle them.

The colour of their skin does not earn them soft pettings and gentle murmurings that everything will be alright.

It is amazing to me, that a group of able bodied and/or neurotypical individuals would want, what even those with mental disabilities don't - to be treated softly, with a "C'dear, they don't know any better. What can you expect?"

But I will not enable them to use White Privilege as some kind of claim against observing the ills and needs of the world.

Meanwhile, I suggest they stop displaying that attitude when those of us who've fought and climbed our way to emotional and mental maturity are having a conversation.

I don't care if they're startled that we have a voice, or that it is loud, or that we are obviously having an ongoing conversation with roots and history that they've never seen.

It's the ... "But what are you talking about???? What language is that?" It's the ignorance that makes me want to bend them all over a table and take to their tails with a fresh switch.

It's the arrogance to go through life and not know the history of words like lynch and uppity. This same arrogance that makes them believe that we are as ignorant as they and thus are using words (Racist, Racism, White Privilege) that we don't understand. It's the arrogance that assumes because ignorance is prized among their folk, that it must be prized among ours.

Such ignorance, combined with feelings of superiority (fostered over generations) lead to people who know nothing about nothing, but won't listen to anyone telling them anything, because they believe they are the experts.

And then when we actually get them to listen to us, to pay attention to our words? They hold this ignorance up like it's a crown jewel and not a stinking turd and demand, in the name of the shit, that we educate them.

Lazy Ass Mofuckers.

Wanting to climb up steps we carved ourselves, because they still want to be the expert and want to take the quickest path to get there.

And when we say - "Hell no, I'm not letting you copy off the sheet that is my LIFE!"

They threaten to stay in pigshit ignorance, like a two year old holding their breath until they turn blue and pass out. But we're supposed to care. As if we haven't had to live our lives, working around the fact that they don't know and don't do, jack squat.

For that, I'd pay attention to them long enough for the switch. For that I think their hides should be tanned pink, red and purple.

But I can't make Ignorance = Pain.

So aside from the odd total loss of temper, I focus on us. On community and strength, respect and forbearance, self teaching, personal seeking, knowledge sharing - the courses of the Symposium of Being PoC and Non White. Because there is so much more to learn and so much more to create.

Once Upon A Time I Was Clueless - but I didn't stay that way and I keep leaving that past further and further behind.

Note: Symposium Course - Staking Out My Stamping Ground (DeepaD)

I Am A Story Teller

I have been adding links to my sidebar. I point out this one in particular because it echoes what was between the lines of my Open Letter; the post that started it all. It further defines what I assumed writers willing to talk about 'Writing The Other' would already know.

I threw a book across a room, because:

1. A being associated with the word Caribbean; ate humans, and was enslaved. And I thought, "Your WTF Spaceship Is Waiting E.Bear" because in that tale, I and those like me were being given an old, tired blueprint/map in our escape to fantasy.

2. The being who assists others in their quest, but whose story is traditionally one of being arbitrarily listened to, and of being tricked and betrayed - now had dark skin. This new map said; you can be powerful, but only in relation to the story of another person's quest. And only in this story all about their culture.

And of what I read, that being didn't want their life disrupted. But it had to be, or the paler characters would never fulfill their dreams. And it didn't matter that the unwilling adventurer is its own trope. What mattered to me was being told, via that story "But you're an important part of THIS story, with celtic faeries and white dreams, why aren't you grateful? Why aren't you excited? What's so important in your little life, making your music, when you could be part of this grand white tale."

And it's not like I don't enjoy Arthurian Legend *points up to blog title* It's not like I can't comprehend or recognize Quests to save the Land, the King and all the People; quests of Freedom; quests of Self Determination.

Especially considering I seem to be on such a quest.

It's seeing the familiar, worn and dreaded path. It's seeing a character with skin like mine and possibly hair like mine, not being given an option to say no. The lack of autonomy is an over used and tattered map/life lesson. Watching a black woman essentially be told - if this white man wants you, then he will get you. End. Done. It was having to throw away the visual image of someone who had history and a life of their own, up on a virtual slaver's block, with two pale characters bidding for them, in whatever form that bidding would take. [Seduction can be currency when the auctioneer is inside one's (the character's) head.]

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* Asian Woman Blog Carnival: Deadline - DEADLINE: April 3rd 2009.

* PoC in SF/F Carnival Special Edition: De-Colonizing The Mind (Intra-PoC Dialogue) - DEADLINE: March 27, 2009

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It Is Time To Tell Our Stories.

It Is Time To Go Somewhere That Wants To Publish/Spread Our Stories.

It Has Been A Mistake To Believe Anything Else Would Work.

Got the name.