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I suspect that most of this will sound obvious and silly, and that eloquence will fail me completely.
I think of myself as anti-racist. I try to educate myself on race and racism. I try to speak it, and point it out, and push other people's heads in something like the right direction. This is not to say that I do anything near what I should do. And, just as I see people, even lovely, well meaning people, completely miss the point when talking about various segments of identity that I know from the inside, I'm sure that a great deal of the time I'm embarrassingly blind to it. For example, last year, for the very first time, I was shopping for a birthday card for a friend when I realized that, besides the five available cards that were about being black, and only about being black, the pictures and drawings of people on cards are all of white kids. I live in a black neighborhood in a very big city, and the little boy playing baseball, and the serene grandmother, and the little princess, were all white. Somehow I hadn't noticed before. I felt so ignorant.
Livejournal has bestowed upon me the gift of nine-thousand more user icons than I can possibly use. I'd been aware for a long time that nearly all of my icons are of white kids. That is strange and uncomfortable and my fault, and I am trying to change it. In my books I have seen a few lovely pictures of Harlem Renaissance women in furs and big hats, Latina guerrilla soldiers with their guns on their hips, women in workers' movements in every generation since the camera was invented. But I cannot find these pictures. Either my internet superpowers are failing me, or the pictures are not there. Women's history is being incorrectly defined. Things are not being documented. I thought I knew that this was a problem before I started looking, but I didn't really get it. I didn't know that the pictures just weren't there. I hate that I can spend my whole life looking at something, and never see what isn't there. I hate that there are so many more things that I'm not seeing.
I think of myself as anti-racist. I try to educate myself on race and racism. I try to speak it, and point it out, and push other people's heads in something like the right direction. This is not to say that I do anything near what I should do. And, just as I see people, even lovely, well meaning people, completely miss the point when talking about various segments of identity that I know from the inside, I'm sure that a great deal of the time I'm embarrassingly blind to it. For example, last year, for the very first time, I was shopping for a birthday card for a friend when I realized that, besides the five available cards that were about being black, and only about being black, the pictures and drawings of people on cards are all of white kids. I live in a black neighborhood in a very big city, and the little boy playing baseball, and the serene grandmother, and the little princess, were all white. Somehow I hadn't noticed before. I felt so ignorant.
Livejournal has bestowed upon me the gift of nine-thousand more user icons than I can possibly use. I'd been aware for a long time that nearly all of my icons are of white kids. That is strange and uncomfortable and my fault, and I am trying to change it. In my books I have seen a few lovely pictures of Harlem Renaissance women in furs and big hats, Latina guerrilla soldiers with their guns on their hips, women in workers' movements in every generation since the camera was invented. But I cannot find these pictures. Either my internet superpowers are failing me, or the pictures are not there. Women's history is being incorrectly defined. Things are not being documented. I thought I knew that this was a problem before I started looking, but I didn't really get it. I didn't know that the pictures just weren't there. I hate that I can spend my whole life looking at something, and never see what isn't there. I hate that there are so many more things that I'm not seeing.
