This week I also wrote my essay; I happened to select sexuality, as I had this tangent planned about what it means to be female, white, and heterosexual- what kind of boxes that puts you in, what social norms you'd better adhere to, and what privilege my primarily 'normal' status imparts upon me. The essay ended up going somewhere else entirely, and I'm really nervous about it fitting the bounds of the assignment, but it is thesis driven, even if it has some elements of personal details- but that is neither here nor there.
The back and forth tension I'm seeing on the issue of race in this chapter is fascinating- between the for Klan member vouching for 'white equality' (what...) and the one-step-forward-one-step-back and forth back and forth that never quite seems to balance out, and only makes racism a more pervasive part of society...
In my paper, I brought up that to me, homosexuality was invisible- and thus never became something that I considered or thought about as a child and young adult. The last bit that I wrote- about how if they didn't exist in a productive society that I could see, then if I was one I wouldn't exist either?
I can't even begin to imagine what it would be like to feel that way about something so shallow as my skin tone.
My boyfriend reads comic books, and I've started flicking through them, noticing trends we've talked about in this class. As I do so, I can see it- this pervasive sense of invisibility, the non-personhood of people who aren't white.
I used to think that things were really pretty equal- there was a civil right's movement, and Martin Luther King day, right? Black people are people just like me, no big deal.
But the fact is, growing up? I was never in the same class as a black person. There were some latinos. My class had two immigrants, once. Even though we lived near the poor part of town- walking to school I'd be walking through what were called the 'Projects', government housing- I experienced very little cultural diversity aside from exchange students in my own home. Hell, none of the places I lived really had anything other than white people and latinos.
What's up with that anyway.
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