this is one to be skipped
gosh, something has just sparked. i can't stop thinking. all i want to do is know and learn and understand. but not superficially understand. like understand understand. on a deep level where i come to my own conclusions. i'm finally in a class that is what college is supposed to do. make me think for myself, question my own ideas. i don't know. it just makes me think about the world differently. and for a long time, just think in general. race is always something that has been blurry to me. i've never understood its importance. and this could stem from a number of sources, including my very very mixed family and my own white, middle class-ness. but for whatever reason, radical racism and race pride has always left me with a sense of question, a feeling of annoyance even. gosh, why is race so god damn important? i don't know, you know. i just know that even though i've never understood its intesity or or ferocity or its polarizing, dividing affects, i've always been very, very aware of it. and that i was white. with a black brother. i never felt the difference, i just always knew there was. and made a point of it to people. that i was white. as white as they come, like white-bread. with a white mother and father. but that my brother, well, he was black. which meant something, on some deep, unconscious level. i've always felt my whiteness very strongly. not in a white supremise way, just in a way that i knew i was white. like that haha kind of white. every school i've been to, save my few years at mar vista elementary, i have been a minority. i white girl surrounded by blacks and latinos and all other ethnicities. but i could always count the number of white kids, girls in particlar, that were in my classes. and they were always few. i remember remarking to my 5th grade teacher how funny it was that, in class, i, as a white girl, was a minotiry when whites were the so-called majority. the oppressors. i couldn't really understand it. but i knew it. and i loved it! gosh, i loved being friends with all the black kids. i would always have a strange connection to the other few white girls in my classes, a sense of similarity and commonality. but i loved nothing more than to be in with my black friends and make fun of the other white girls. of just how white they were. and man, i loved hearing that i was the coolest white girl they knew. i got a strage sense of coolness and belonging, feeling in with black kids but knowing i was white. always in the back of my head, i knew i was white. but boy oh boy, i loved being in with the black kids. the only white girl cool enough to be in with them. and then, as i got older, gosh, i just became more and more "white." well, i'm not really sure what that means, i just know that my friends in elementary school would no longer think i was cool. i traded in my obsession for black rap and hip hop for nsync. and got way more into school and out of shows like moeshia. i don't know what triggered it, but gosh i became so stereotypical. but still, i got a thrill out of being friends with a mixed group. i loved not having any real white friends (this is middle school i'm talking about). until i went to mark twain, where the 5 white girls in the 8th grade had to stick together. and boy, did i stick. in the back of my head, i've always just wanted to shout out "what's the big deal with race!" by the time i got to high school, i was so tired of hearing how african americans today were oppressed and marginalized by slavery. i think in some part, i felt guilty for being white. for not sharing in that ancestral marginalization. but also, it was the race thing. yes, slavery was awful and brutal and horrific. but why was the enslavement of blacks in the united states so much worse than the enslavement of other peoples all around the world? was it because of the contridiction to founding notion that all men are created equal? i don't know. and i still don't. but gosh it fascinates me. classical greeks, with all its spleador and amazements, was literally a slave state, founded and functioning and the backs of slaves. aristotle and plato even reference slaves as human pieces of property. everywhere in history are slaves! why was this one so much more important? and really, i think it's race. and this class i'm taking, gosh, it's really opened my eyes. the history of the united states is a history of racism. of blacks being oppressed and marginalized. most heartbreakingly even after slavery. i just can't digest how it would feel to be so judged and cubed by race. i thought i was when i was called white. but really, what does white mean? but it's not even being judged by race. it's being put down by race, negatively thought of by race. and gosh, it's so not fair and i hate it. i wish race was not an issue. i've spent my whole life telling myself that it's small. but really, it's in our history. the color line has drawn so many legislative and political and economic lines. it's just all so much to think of, you know? challenging your preconcieved notions. but at least now i feel like i'm in college. and boy, is it wonderful!