The smallest taste of what it's like.

[bladespark]

It's interesting. I recently read this account of somebody role-playing a female character and suddenly understanding what "sexism" actually means, that it's not vocal or even conscious mistreatment most of the time, it's just a constant, low-key denigration that wears you down.

I could go on a whole discussion of the reverse experience that I had, of the mind-blowing revelation, something like 20 years ago now, that presenting as male online completely erased an entire group of behaviors directed towards me that I hated, and why that thought was a handy shield to keep me from facing the reality that I didn't "play" a man because I was one, it was just more...comfortable because sexism. (People who've read Coffee and Free-Fall from yesterday can now smile and nod and how much of a self-insert that was!)

But I actually want to discuss something else entirely. I'd like to discuss the experience I had last night, of realizing the smallest fragment of what it's like to be black in America.

So as I mentioned before, there have been riots in my city. The police have responded by enforcing a curfew. Said curfew has been enforced by the simple method of tear-gassing anybody on the streets of a particular segment of town after the appointed hour. Gas folks first, ask "why are you out?" later. Thing is, though, that I am not glued to the news, so I didn't know there was a curfew on Sunday night, and I didn't know there was one last night...until our phones started going off.

After being criticized for inadequately warning folks about the curfew on Sunday night, they apparently decided to use the emergency broadcast system to warn people last night. My husband's iphone went off with the warning a generous twelve minutes before the curfew started. My phone, however, didn't get the announcement until over a fucking hour after. If I hadn't been sitting with my husband, if I had instead been out for my evening walk, something I do all the time, something I had literally been thinking that I probably should do that night, to work out some of my stress, I wouldn't have known there was a curfew on at all.

I would have been out on the street after curfew, and my evening walk very frequently passes through a specific neighborhood that was in fact one of the "gas first, ask questions later" areas.

My ordinary, normal, legal, non-criminal, perfectly innocent, every-day habits could have gotten me fucking gassed with no warning last night. The more I think about that, the more terrified I feel. This isn't some distant, strained "well every now and then good people have bad things happen, just the roll of the cosmic dice" hypothetical. This is "something totally normal I do every day came that close to making me a statistic."

And I realized that this is what it feels like to be black in America. Or the smallest slice of it, at least. Simply going about normal activities can get you shot, not because of anything at all you did wrong, but because of hatred, bigotry, self-important psychopaths, the breakdown of sensible systems, and the abuse of the law. Black people live with this every day, for their whole lives.

Good fucking god. I have no idea how they manage.

Comments

[the_siobhan]

(I may have told you this story before. I lose track.)

When my partner first transitioned she had a very unhappy-making interaction with a mechanic. She asked me afterwards if this was what she could expect going forward.

I was very sad to have to tell her yes.

[cornerofmadness]

Good fucking god. I have no idea how they manage.

This

[thewayne]

And so many people don't believe or refuse to believe that our country is broken.

[silveradept]

Yes. The kind of thing where stuff that I would do without a thought for the consequences because of the privilege I have versus everyone else who has to calculate the costs associated with doing that same thing while not looking like me. And yet there's a hundred thousand narratives around why a population that has to devote a permanent part of their brainpower to this calculation is "inexplicably" getting different outcomes in their lives, right from the start in schooling.