Edit: Cleaned up a few things, tried to get rid of the "but it's so hard being white" entitlement, but that's what growth looks like.
For awhile now I've been coming to grips with the fact that the lessons I learned as a child about how honesty, integrity, equality and tolerance were the most important things in life aren't valid in the real world.
I was excited when I first started to tread into Social Justice territory, I felt empowered that people were actively working to improve the lives of others and wanted to do anything I could to help, although I accept that I am relegated to the lowly level of the armchair activist. I do my best just to try and spread the word and sign petitions.
I hope I can at least get the word out to people who can afford to support causes financially, or even have the time to invest that I don't.
I see some of my friends making great changes and causes. I don't resent that I'm not one of them, I know that's just the way it is, and maybe one day I'll be able to be one of them.
It is discouraging that this was the last post I put on my 'serious' blog and how my personal status has changed little and quite possibly degraded since. http://kiyarasabel.wordpress.com/2011/11/08/the-only-power-is-purchasing-power/
I didn't believe in racism. Oh sure, there were a few hillbilly rednecks out there but they didn't really count.
That's what I thought, my whole life. And then one day I realized that people are still backwards and set in their ways, that the little jokes about stereotypes weren't actually jokes.
I still have trouble processing it, trying to understand how the society I thought I had grown up in didn't exist. I can't process that people judge human beings as anything else.
I have trouble believing that these words by which I always strove to live my life aren't true.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vd1c7sRaw_k
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WibmcsEGLKo
I can't handle the fact that the words of this child, so strongly matching how I felt growing up, have gone on all but completely ignored for 20 years.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQmz6Rbpnu0
I can't handle that I knew as a child just how dire our condition is, and that I still don't see a strong attempt to restore our home.
"Nobody wants to be left out of shit, but the fact that Whites literally cannot handle it (while other races put up with it day-in/day-out) and feel personally attacked when excluded from Non-White safe-spots tells you 1. how rarely White people experience someone excluding them based on skin color and 2. how completely White culture has failed to provide tools for sharing space, instead teaching Whites that all space is White space (“because all space is space for everyone”, a perception Whites share with no one)."
How to participate in Social Justice Issues you don't understand: Continue to stick to stick to the issues you do know something about and people who share your values. Keep lurking, keep your head down, keep listening, and keep reading about Social Justice, especially in regards to inequalities you don't understand, but NEVER speak over someone else, and trust that the oppressed get the last word on what counts as oppression.
