Texas here–go ahead and add us to the list, if you’re making one.
Growing up half-Asian, with an Asian surname, in the American Midwest in the '60s-'70s-'80s, it was never clear to me just how many people were truly struggling with my name, or if they were telegraphing microaggressions intentionally or unintentionally.
They even had problems with my first name (my given name).
My name is common, and it’s French in origin.
I am identifiably mixed race, as is Harris. All the crap she is going through now, I feel on a molecular level and it’s completely crap. The overused line “haters gonna hate” does not begin to describe the BS glacier of stress, added one insulting snowflake, sleet droplet, ice crystal at a time, layer after layer after layer, year upon year.
If I had not learned early to push it out of my mind, every day, I’d be flattened and carved out like like Lake Michigan. I am certain my experience is very common in the U.S. This consoling fact is one I embrace, in solidarity, with people who suffer as dominator culture chafes, squeezes, injures and yes sometimes kills them.
I consider myself lucky, btw.
Part of my life’s work had been to build the ladders that others seek to pull up behind themselves.
https://www.macmillandictionary.com/us/dictionary/american/pull-the-ladder-up-behind-you
“History is ending because the dominator culture has led the human species into a blind alley, and as the inevitable chaostrophie approaches, people look for metaphors and answers. Every time a culture gets into trouble it casts itself back into the past looking for the last sane moment it ever knew.”
–Terence McKenna
