mpoetess says this:
Very very short version: If you're tired of reading about [RaceFail 09] subject and want to forget about it? You're probably White. Which means you can. Fans of Color don't really have that option, because the problem is going to be there for them whether they have to hear people talking about it or not. It's going to be there for them when they walk away from the keyboard and head off to a bookstore. It's going to be there for them at the bus stop. At work. At the supermarket. You see where I'm going with this? Hopefully? Because that's pretty much the heart of the discussion.
I can pass as white. I have the education, I have the flattened vowels. I have the pale skin and a tiny nose.
I've been told to keep it quiet. I've been told not to align myself as one of
those people. I've been told to explain it away when I'm confronted on it. I've been instructed to tell people I'm 'only part Mexican'.
Because that excuses me from being wholly dismissed.
This is hiding. This is being afraid of being discovered. This is
passing.
This is destroying the stories. This is dismissing the ideas. This is keeping quiet instead of speaking up.
This is not how I live my life. This is not how I want to live my life. Anyone who has an issue with that, well, that's your issue. Try and hang your issue on me, and you're liable to get it back. Depending on my mood, you'll either get a politely worded 'no, thank you' or you'll get it returned at high velocity, wrapped around a brick.
One thing I have learned about myself through this latest round is how deep the repression has affected me. I have been writing stories since I was 11 years old, when I bought a typewriter from a neighbor at a garage sale.
I lugged it into my bedroom closet, barely two feet wide, closed the door, and typed. I hid the pages under heavy books so no one would find them.
I have stories to tell. But I had been convinced no one wanted to hear them. I tried to make them like the stories I'd read, but they're all flat stories, stories about blonde haired, blue eyed tall Viking women who are orphans with no family.
Write what you know, they say---but what I know isn't being published. What I know isn't reflected in the books I read, in the books other people read. It's not in the TV shows and it's not in the movies. People like me, according to the professional storytellers, don't exist.
And a part of me was always saying that no one wants to hear from a woman like me, una mestiza, a mix, racially, culturally, sexually, a shook up muddled up kind of woman.
I am beating that part of me to death with a big stick. And then I will set its corpse on fire and dance.