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Spitting at the Mirror
Jan. 28th, 2016 11:34 pmCN: family pains, complicated heritage thoughts, white privilege white privilege white privilege. Maybe don't read this if you are full up on navel-gazing White Thoughts for the year. It is okay to have zero interest in this. It isn't a pressing social issue I have here. It is just personal.
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When I don't wear makeup to choose how my face looks, I see people in it I try hard to avoid resembling any other way. There is my mother's smile on my father's mouth. There are my mother's eyes with my father's near-black irises. There are my father's cheeks with my mother's cheekbones. There are my mother's arms with my father's hair on them. There are my mother's hands with my father's bitten cuticles.
The only people I can look at myself and see the stamp of their genes without cringing and looking away are people I don't have the right to talk about because our family got back so quickly to being white that I'm constantly weaponized against the family I have most worth my loyalty just by existing and receiving the training that formed me to hurt them without even trying.
And I hate it. But I'll never be a totally safe neighbor to my Penobscot fam. No matter how I try, the poison that is all the rest of my blood will never be 100% gone. It may end with me, but poison has a way of leeching out. Ethnic cleansing turns children into battlefields, and my life is easier because I'm a battlefield considered won for whiteness. I'm a born traitor. It's not a guilt thing. It's just an ugly truth. The only way for me to give back to the best people I see in the mirror is to give back in the ways that involve me myself the least.
So I give money. I chew off the faces of white people who assume I'll be glad I'm a weapon against the best in me. I spread the word about things that matter to the family I can't go too near. But I stay away. Otherwise I would hurt them even more from that more intimate distance and I'm sick enough at the harm I cause as it is.
This isn't a problem worth solving. Me feeling scant detriments amid the overwhelming benefits of white privilege isn't worth spending time and energy on that could be going to ethnic cleansing's primary victims who are still being screwed over by the white supremacy protecting me. But sometimes people remark that I don't post anything "personal" online so here is something personal.
In some Frankenstein movie (idk if it is from the book) someone referred to the monster as "evil stitched to evil stitched to evil," and in my case it is mostly true. It's visibly true if you know how to look. There is a little bit of good in me, though, just enough that I can feel myself as a living betrayal of it. Sometimes it feels shitty is all, that the best I can do for the source of that tiny bit of pride, is hold myself at a distance from the folks I have to thank for it.
But the people who filled my veins with poison and themselves punished me for being able to see each other in me? Nah. I help them keep winning no matter what I do (at best sometimes managing to be slightly less helpful than I was designed to be).
I don't hate myself by a long shot, but whiteness? I'll be its weapon until it's gone. That I do hate.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
When I don't wear makeup to choose how my face looks, I see people in it I try hard to avoid resembling any other way. There is my mother's smile on my father's mouth. There are my mother's eyes with my father's near-black irises. There are my father's cheeks with my mother's cheekbones. There are my mother's arms with my father's hair on them. There are my mother's hands with my father's bitten cuticles.
The only people I can look at myself and see the stamp of their genes without cringing and looking away are people I don't have the right to talk about because our family got back so quickly to being white that I'm constantly weaponized against the family I have most worth my loyalty just by existing and receiving the training that formed me to hurt them without even trying.
And I hate it. But I'll never be a totally safe neighbor to my Penobscot fam. No matter how I try, the poison that is all the rest of my blood will never be 100% gone. It may end with me, but poison has a way of leeching out. Ethnic cleansing turns children into battlefields, and my life is easier because I'm a battlefield considered won for whiteness. I'm a born traitor. It's not a guilt thing. It's just an ugly truth. The only way for me to give back to the best people I see in the mirror is to give back in the ways that involve me myself the least.
So I give money. I chew off the faces of white people who assume I'll be glad I'm a weapon against the best in me. I spread the word about things that matter to the family I can't go too near. But I stay away. Otherwise I would hurt them even more from that more intimate distance and I'm sick enough at the harm I cause as it is.
This isn't a problem worth solving. Me feeling scant detriments amid the overwhelming benefits of white privilege isn't worth spending time and energy on that could be going to ethnic cleansing's primary victims who are still being screwed over by the white supremacy protecting me. But sometimes people remark that I don't post anything "personal" online so here is something personal.
In some Frankenstein movie (idk if it is from the book) someone referred to the monster as "evil stitched to evil stitched to evil," and in my case it is mostly true. It's visibly true if you know how to look. There is a little bit of good in me, though, just enough that I can feel myself as a living betrayal of it. Sometimes it feels shitty is all, that the best I can do for the source of that tiny bit of pride, is hold myself at a distance from the folks I have to thank for it.
But the people who filled my veins with poison and themselves punished me for being able to see each other in me? Nah. I help them keep winning no matter what I do (at best sometimes managing to be slightly less helpful than I was designed to be).
I don't hate myself by a long shot, but whiteness? I'll be its weapon until it's gone. That I do hate.
