I Was Mad & Didn't Even Know It!

Sometimes reading blogs can be a bad thing. That's why I regularly have to take breaks from reading & posting. Today may lead to another break because I thought I wasn't upset about something I read. Thought the blatant anonymous racism out the in the ether of the Internet was something I knew & therefore could be unaffected by. Yet I was wrong.

How this was figured out was after I had already gone agro on someone. While walking to the bank I didn't even realize the post I'm about to tell y'all about was spinning in my head. Not in any kind of loud way, but more like after one thought, a tiny part of this post would come back to me like a burp after a meal. Walking on Burnside ( very busy street) to my destination it seemed cars kept stopping in the crosswalks leaving no room for pedestrians to get by without having to go into the street. One car after another seemed to do this & for some reason when a silver Volvo station wagon pulled so far into the crosswalk I felt nervous to even cross it, I banged on the hood of the drivers car with my fist. Bang bang, my curled hand drummed upon the hood. Needless to say as the driver went by she was unhappy & so to top it all off I gave her the finger. Because you know, that always accomplishes something.

Pause when agitated or doubtful is often said in recovery so I had to stop & do just that. Then a laugh spontaneously poured out of me. Then I felt sad. In thinking why I was sad it occurred to me that deciding a gorgeous woman with an incredible body must be sub- or even not human, because she is Black, just hurt my heart and pissed me off. Pissed because Serena Williams has a beautiful, athletic body that even other Black women think needs to be covered. Sad because many a woman, especially woman of color has to struggle to love her own body & be actually comfortable wearing a two piece swimsuit. Annoyed because racism is so ugly and the people who say "there is no more racism" are so fucking clueless.

Racialicious has a post today on TMZ's post on Serena Williams at the beach recently. I'm not mentally well enough to even attempt going over to TMZ to see what their post had to say but on Racialicious I was glad to see a number of folks admire Serena & take issue with some of the utterly stupid comments that the TMZ site had. Here's just a few shitty things that were said:

"I think you might have found ‘the missing link’ "
"Maybe Black women are not equal to white women—they are built stronger and bigger, and if so, this must be accounted for. So much for equal rights."
And the whopper...
“Is that human?”

Like I said most days I can deal with this stupid fucking shit. But when I see how folks channel what they will not say in public to comments on blogs, saying, at last, what they really think of POC, it is more than my brain can deal with & when I'm already not feeling good, I just kinda short circuit. Anyway I'm going to take a break from blog reading and posting for a couple days. I need to detoxify. But I promise I'll be back soon & with fewer swear words. And here's Serena. Enjoy!
~F