Day 351: Digital color

Anger, after thinking about it, it was anger I felt. Not at anyone in particular, but I was angry and hurt and a lot of other similar emotions, but I was angry most of all. People kept letting me down and it took a chance twitter conversation for me to realize why I was yet again left feeling so fucking angry.

For those of you who are not familiar with the latest Sci-twitter drama, one of the founders of MeTooSTEM was pretending to be an ASU professor and indigenous, to be more specific, Hopi. I am not indigenous, but I am hispanic and I was outraged when I found this out so I can only imagine the feelings the indigenous community was feeling. My heart goes out to them, although that does absolutely nothing to help, which is equally frustrating.

When I expressed this frustration, that a pro-feminist movement could be headed by someone who was so racist, a twitter friend mentioned that while we have organizations like MeTooSTEM, we don’t have a anti-racism equivalent. In fact, a lot of pro-feminist groups turn out to be quite racist and that was what made me realize that I had been thinking about this all wrong.

I was conflating pro-feminism with anti-racism. Just like until recently I conflated the LBGTQ+ movement as all gender accepting (spoiler: some were not!). See the problem was MY thinking. I know what it’s like to be judged by my color, to not “talk like a mexican” or “not look like a mexican” so I have sympathy and compassion for other marginalized groups. I’m very much pro-feminism, I love the LBGTQ+ community, and here in the US (and a lot of other places) we live on stolen land. We treat the indigenous community like they don’t have a right to be upset, like it was ours by virtue of a flag.

These things hurt me deeply, so I want equality for EVERYONE. I want people to acknowledge our bloody past, Not even to take blame, but to at least fucking apologize for their ancestors and to attempt to make things right. Love is love, a simple statement in a time of turmoil that causes backlash. Black lives matter, how those three words can make white people afraid I will never understand.

At the heart of most of this hate is racism, I mean let’s call it what it is and it’s been so normalized that openly racist people don’t have any sort of repercussions. More importantly, openly racist people still try to argue they are not racist even when called out by the marginalized communities that they are hurting. I think at the heart of my problem was that I wanted to think people were better than they really were and that’s all on me.

I mean I still have hope, but it was a firm (kick in the teeth) reminder that when people show you who they are, you believe them no matter what message they are trying to spread.