Antiracism crisis.
Fuck! So I've been taking the Earn A Bike course at Bikes Not Bombs in Roxbury (For those of you who aren't from the Boston area Roxbury is to Boston what Harlem is to New York.) I'm the only white youth in the course. There are both youth and adult instructors who are more racially diverse. Anyways there is this one youth instructor who is a 16 year old POC female from Roxbury, lets call her X. She has Asthma and as a friendly gesture a few days ago when she couldn't ride anymore because she was having a mild attack. Since then she's been really nice to me and I figured it was just a budding friendship but today our ride stopped in a park for a while because of the heat. So I played around in the sprinklers for a while to cool off and I was sitting alone just drying off when this 12 year old girl from the class comes up and say that X wants to know "if I had a girl" obviously I knew what was going on and I said "no" this method of incredibly awkward communication continued for a while and I was informed through this young mediator that X liked me (which of course I knew from the original question). I said that I was overwhelmed and that I didn't really know X well enough to say if I liked her.
Here's the part that I've been struggling with; I've been craving summer romance for weeks but as soon as I heard X liked me I began thinking about how I could get out of the situation. My initial reaction was that we had very little in common mostly in terms of education and interests, probably true, I'm not attracted to her, I'm not sure how to analyze this, and that I didn't know her well enough, true. Yet, how can I expect us to have anything in common if my standards come from a much more priviledged world. It's not even that i want a girl who likes bikes and punk rock, allthough that would be awesome, its that I don't get the idea that X and I could have the kind of educated meaningful conversations that would make a relationship intellectually stimulating for me. I'd like to think that that is a legitimate motivation but the more I think about it the more I worry about my own Classism and Racism coming into effect.
I don't know if I phrased this right but I'd love to hear some thoughts. There's a lot about his thats striking me as really fucked up but I can't put it into words yet. Fuck!
Here's the part that I've been struggling with; I've been craving summer romance for weeks but as soon as I heard X liked me I began thinking about how I could get out of the situation. My initial reaction was that we had very little in common mostly in terms of education and interests, probably true, I'm not attracted to her, I'm not sure how to analyze this, and that I didn't know her well enough, true. Yet, how can I expect us to have anything in common if my standards come from a much more priviledged world. It's not even that i want a girl who likes bikes and punk rock, allthough that would be awesome, its that I don't get the idea that X and I could have the kind of educated meaningful conversations that would make a relationship intellectually stimulating for me. I'd like to think that that is a legitimate motivation but the more I think about it the more I worry about my own Classism and Racism coming into effect.
I don't know if I phrased this right but I'd love to hear some thoughts. There's a lot about his thats striking me as really fucked up but I can't put it into words yet. Fuck!