First off my apologies if you get like 20 million copies of this comment. I'm having posting issues for some reason.
I am an angry black woman a lot of the time, and this is possibly because I'm also a theoretical physicist and so constantly surrounded by largely insensitive white men and almost nothing else.
That said, I wanted to really say I support you in your desire not to be co-opted in someone else's emotional experience and to make the world survivable in a way that works for you! No one should be telling you how to feel -- that's just another kind of colonialism to me.
Also, I don't know if this is related, but I sometimes have a hard time getting worked up about the same feminist-y things that a lot of my white friends get worked up about. Like, someone was ranting the other day in their journal about the Timbaland and Timberlake song "Carry Out" saying it was really sexist. Personally? I like the song, and feel like there might be a cultural divided in attention. But I felt like I had suddenly failed the "is supportive of women" test because I like hip-hop. Also, last year, one of my best friends and her boyfriend decided that because I am pro-pornography (and therefore, in their view, antifeminist), they would make jokes about slavery to help me understand how my view made them feel.
And finally, I admire that your response isn't anger all the time. I need to work on that.
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branchandroot
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Date: 2010-10-14 04:06 pm (UTC)I am an angry black woman a lot of the time, and this is possibly because I'm also a theoretical physicist and so constantly surrounded by largely insensitive white men and almost nothing else.
That said, I wanted to really say I support you in your desire not to be co-opted in someone else's emotional experience and to make the world survivable in a way that works for you! No one should be telling you how to feel -- that's just another kind of colonialism to me.
Also, I don't know if this is related, but I sometimes have a hard time getting worked up about the same feminist-y things that a lot of my white friends get worked up about. Like, someone was ranting the other day in their journal about the Timbaland and Timberlake song "Carry Out" saying it was really sexist. Personally? I like the song, and feel like there might be a cultural divided in attention. But I felt like I had suddenly failed the "is supportive of women" test because I like hip-hop. Also, last year, one of my best friends and her boyfriend decided that because I am pro-pornography (and therefore, in their view, antifeminist), they would make jokes about slavery to help me understand how my view made them feel.
And finally, I admire that your response isn't anger all the time. I need to work on that.