Bingo this is the missing link. I’ve always known the route to all of our liberation is education. Imagine a nation full of well informed citizens. A future I can clearly see shining on the horizon. The internet is a gift if we really utilize it. The reason for all the fighting in our country is a war of perspectives. Until the internet got to its most recent point somewhere between 2010 and 2015 white people just never heard people of color’s perspectives. They would have to go search it out and let’s be honest like you said if they didn’t know it existed why would they search it out. Sure many of them would pick up the odd well polished approved by white academia black author but just hearing raw perspective like this just didn’t exist.
Not only raw perspectives but on repeat 24/7 so they couldn’t dismiss it as a fluke. It took the internet for me as a black person to realize I wasn’t crazy. I was adopted and raised by white people from birth. I went to private schools had my college paid for etc…I mistakenly thought like many white people that the majority of Americans grew up just like me. It wasn’t until I spent some time online reading people’s perspectives who did not grow up like this that my perspective of the US started to change. Not only that but all of the sudden hundreds of African Americans online were now telling me that the incidences I experienced growing up that I could never explain actually stemmed from racism. Because I had been placed in a different socioeconomic experience than a lot of African Americans I was never able to relate to the concept of struggle. I didn’t have a lot of situations in my life where I could point to being disappointed by not getting something I wanted. I was indeed privileged and it would be dishonest not to admit that. Yet there were all these memories from childhood of adult white people with Southern accents contorting their faces at me. Saying angry words to me out of the blue. Teachers flipping out and throwing school items at me in my desk. Not allowing me to use the bathroom for hours so I wet myself outside as an eight year old, while referring to me as “you people” All the sudden all these black stories of racism started to peice together for me that I experienced horrible racism at the hands of white adults as a child.
I was always a little odd. Anyone who met me as a teenager thought I was on drugs because my socialization was so bad. I was essentially a trauma survivor who never received any treatment whatsoever. It wasn’t just being beat up or being called a N word everyday by little Southern white girls. I was also molested twice by two different elderly adult white men before age 7. The problem with the US as I can see it is that they have zero compassion and empathy. I was so improperly socialized and had survived so much trauma that to racist white people I “appeared” to be on a substance. Imagine all these well off Southern white people so quick to jump to the conclusion that the only biracial girl in their school must be on drugs and a horrible thug because she isn’t acting like we expect black people to act. All the while I spent all my free time drawing. No really I would sit down in a chair and draw for eight hours a day on my Saturdays. I think it was my way of escaping or healing my trauma without me knowing it. In fact I was so nerdy I went and saw The Chronicles of Narnia twice in theaters. I was really passionate about Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings but all the white administration was really worried I was the Thug of Satan. They completely overlooked all the white kids selling drugs there and who were on drugs during Bible/home room. It’s probably a good thing that at the time I didn’t even know any of those kids were on drugs. I would have been really shocked. After I left high school I lived with my best friend from my high school in a rented house with 2 other people. All his friends and my friends were mainly white people and they all smoked weed. I always passed and never tried it even once. Not because I didn’t like them or trust them but because I literally believed I would got to hell if I tried it. They always went out drinking and I always stayed at the house and went to bed. I looked after the animals and read a lot of King Arthur and Dragonlance Chronicles. I honestly think they kept me around because they thought I was an alien. I didn’t try weed for the first time until I was 30. Yes you read it right. Didn’t get drunk for the first time until I was 27. Did I mention I was adopted by Christian conservative white people? This played a factor in why I was so messed up. I had been molested yet I was brainwashed to think my worth stemmed from me waiting until marriage and abstaining from any sin. Little did I know my skin color was what made me a sinner in most Christian’s eyes. I wasn’t stupid I could talk for hours about the themes in British literature and Ancient Greece but my personal affect was beyond strange. It still is beyond strange. Some may even be able to tell from my writing. Anyway my point is that with a change in perspective comes a change in dimensional understanding. The world is shifting toward humanity’s eventual liberation from ideological cages.
