Anecdote time, because the Resetera thread is infuriating.
I wanted to commit suicide numerous times while growing up. Gay kid in a conservative military household, small, short, scrawny, and weak as shit. The son of a white dad and a Korean mom. Easy target. I was the kid that got bullied all the time. I was the chink on the school bus.
You want to know who it was that ganged up on me, bullied me, beat me up, and made my life a living hell? The black kids. It wasn’t the white kids. It wasn’t the hispanic kids. It was the black kids. I still remember how they would also bully the German bus driver, yelling “scheissekopf” (shithead) and other words in his language. My dad was stationed in West Germany before the Berlin Wall fell, and I was there to see Germany unified. I went to a DODDS school.
So when I see discussions about racism applied to white people, as if they were the sole perpetrators of all the ills in the world, it triggers the shit out of me because I think back to those days growing up where I had nobody to turn to for help. Not my parents, not my teachers, not my peers. There wasn’t the internet for me. I was overseas in a foreign land, running away wasn’t an option. All I thought about was killing myself. I persevered and overcame things in the long run.
Fuck every last one of those pretentious Resetera members who push that allwhitepeople bullshit. It wasn’t white people that gave me bruises. It wasn’t white people that kicked my ribs in. It wasn’t white people that pushed me towards suicide.
I know I’m preaching to the choir here, but racism isn’t exclusive to white people. My memories of being beaten up and bullied by the black kids on the bus are a permanent, haunting reminder of that fact, no matter how many times woke Twitter wants to preach to me about my privilege because apparently I pass for white. Fucking assholes, all of them.
www.resetera.com
