Contextualize this for yourself by remembering that you’re literally in Florida

You deserve sanctuary, not from the world, but in it. Your exhaustion from being denied that is all too real. Take rest wherever you find it, you’re beyond due.

all im getting is that people are baffled by black people existing as anything more than a caricature in their heads

The notion that these things are at odds with my blackness is something I don’t feel uneducated enough to understand.

Imagine the characters in a kids show - they each have one adjective because it’s a simple show, so there’s a brave one, a smart one, a cool one, etc. Which is fine on its own; it’s okay for a show to be simple. But because being a cishet white etc etc male is the default, each difference from that also counts as an adjective, so while the show might have a character that’s the girl one, the black one, or the gay one, those characters don’t get any more adjectives.

Then take it out of a kid’s show, and we’re still stuck with cishet white etc etc males as the default, so every difference from that counts as being “complicated” and if you’ve got too many then you’re “making things complicated” and some asshole is going to hate you for making them think.

as weird as I look and as much strangeness as I get being a queer-looking cis white lady in small town rural Ohio, I can only imagine how much heavier that judgey gaze falls on you in Florida

You are loved and treasured here, and I hope someday soon you feel that in all your waking hours, not just the ones you spend with us ❤️

I’m a black, non-binary, pansexual, and neurodivergent person

Misunderstanding is the primary ingredient for my depression and internalized oppression

wow it me. I have definitely experienced similar feelings and I wish I could give some great insight, but I don’t know. I’ve always felt either invisible or like a…curiosity(?) thanks to these intersections and my appearance, both to strangers and family, and I have to fight that desire to be hated, because that at least feels like it implies some form of recognition or understanding. That’s nonsense of course but it feels real.

It annoys me when American liberals and conservatives bring up the persecution and/or discrimination of minorities in communist countries and how that’s evidence that gommunism BAD.

Apparently communism and communists cannot change and progress, yet if I bring up the the democrats’ creation of the KKK and lynch mobs or the republicans’ eventual pivot towards supporting those same things, it’s whataboutism. They act like the inclusion of minorities in the capitalist machine didn’t only happen less than a century ago.

The notion that these things are at odds with my blackness is something I don’t feel uneducated enough to understand. Why would my being black make me shy away from these things? My being black, along with all of my intersections, makes the case for my alignment with these even stronger, yet I remain invisible.

It’s based on stereotypes imposed upon the group as well as from within. It’s also whether the dominant group also has control of perception. Sometimes people fall for their own propaganda. For example, I believe that statistically, POC are more likely to be vegan in the US, but the media only shows white, annoying, weak hipsters in skinny jeans or preaching to their parents as vegans. Not only does it create biased hostility towards vegans, it also creates the image that it’s a “white thing.” Similarly, the USSR has been reduced to “Russia” in the west, so they’ll falsely attribute every failure and achievement to just Russians which makes other nationalities upset for rewriting their contributions, and it causes the somewhat knowledgeable yet propagandized westoid to assume that everyone is like them and try to “correct” you when you say the Soviets did something by saying “Umm… actually, the Russians didn’t do that. It was [Soviet nationality] that did it”.

Black interest in anime is now pretty normal, but back when I was younger it was associated with the weird, nerdy white and Asian kids lol. You can also see this in the fantasy genre; studios will try to throw in a token minority, get a bunch of backlash, and if it affects their profits they never do it again, so all you get is a bunch of white people in a realm of make believe and magic because white people deemed it unacceptable otherwise, so those who never see themselves represented or included will assume it’s not for them. Another example is I have a female coworker who said she always assumed video games were just annoying toys for boys until she played Tomb Raider and other critically acclaimed games with female leads. The dominant group gatekeeps which results in us being ignorant about it completely, or other people in our group self-enforcing the gatekeeping because it seems like “the natural order of things.”

I speak generally and don’t mean that you, specifically, need to go out and do this, but I think one of the ways we fix this with or without the help of the dominant group (or gaining a position of influence) is to keep being yourself even if other people say you don’t belong there or “we” don’t belong there. You may even get other people in your group to explore their true selves and interests and lean on you to guide them through an unwelcoming environment.

What’s the EM in EMPOC?

Big mood, there’s also the case of being never quite whatever enough for the all the various groups because of other facets of identity, or at least that’s been my experience. Others see us, society consists of many individuals, perhaps we can be very, very slow agents of inspiring change for the better, though its a terrible experience of endless alienation.

Many leftists I’ve encountered have been perfect paragons of the bourgeois system’s morality, no different than the libs, sometimes very hostile, and others as some sort of precious curio like one would find in shelf of artifacts at a museum, rather than a person, and very, very far from comrade.

There’s not much I can really say here that you haven’t already other than I know your struggle, and pray to the divinities I worship that you find at least a way station you can find peace for a time at, if not permanently.

You comrade, shall inherit the uranium salted earth and everyone not like you shall die, for you are the pineapple of the human condition.

I see a shirt with your face on it in the future

and a couple stars too

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but there are people who don’t acknowledge me whatsoever.

My wife is nonbinary and holy shit the way people ignore anything she says all the goddamn time. I can also relate to not trusting non-hexbear leftists, I meet some weird characters out there. It sucks being a walking litmus test for people’s ideological commitment.