@clayrivers@BigAngBlack@blackmastodon@BlackMastodon I thought I was doing pretty good. I try to be open-minded and sympathetic and work on my ignorance. But I still had no idea. I come from one of the whitest parts of the country, and I had no idea.
It took living in a big city in another state, then hearing Michelle Alexander explaining the New Jim Crow, for me to start to get it. The scale of it.
It took the movie Get Out, for me to start to grasp how my friendly whitebread liberal culture looks from the outside. The spine-crawling cringe of us, that I can't fully turn off even in myself, it's so built-in.
The vertigo is staggering. A lot of puzzle pieces start to come together.
I think a lot about James Baldwin, and the clipped, sharp, high-tension-wire exasperation in his voice. Already so sick of this shit, beyond tired, decades before I was born. Speaking as clearly as possible right into the faces of people who still couldn't see or hear him, and somehow not screaming at them. So tired.
The things we don't see, right under our noses, even when we think we've been looking.
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