Hello Readers. This week I was triggered by a few different jerks saying ignorant white boy things. This resulted me in crying for days. Not sleeping, constant weeping, helplessness.. About every sexual assault since I was a little girl. I know I've talked about this before. In fact I speak and write on it all the time, but what I don't do is feeeel it. I get angry, but never sad. I scream because I'm pissed. It's clinical, I don't let myself feel hurt. For once I really felt the emotional scars; I felt like a victim.
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What are "ignorant white boy things"? It's saying something that's racist because being a white male forces you to be racially ignorant. For example saying your sad for me because I don't feel romantic emotions during sex is not ok. You do not get to treat me like a victim. The people of your race and culture literally raped away me feeling love with sex. You do not, get to pitty me for the common social actions of your people. You do, get to own it and evoke racial and sexual change within your own people. Before all the white guys send out angry messages (gmail/twitter @KangSunLee1991 ^_< ):
1) Saying something racist, does not mean you are a racist. Not intending for your statement to be racist or even about race, does not mean that it's not racist or not about race.
2) Being ignorant does not mean you are stupid. It means you aren't capable of fully understanding something. As a white male you can never understand what it means to be a brown person.
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For those of you that didn't grow up in Lakeville, it's a different kind of MN town. Most people call it a small version of Edina or Bloomington, but those cities are more spread out. This means there's all sorts of ethnic pockets hiding around town, but Lakeville is densely white. I shit you not, psychologists in the area make note of how extremely white Lakeville is.
This is what I grew up with in Lakeville schools:
To my peer's.. To my adoptive sister's peers. We grew up in the same America. You were my classmates; we grew up together in the same town and neighborhoods. We had the same teachers and studied in the same classrooms. We shared desks and were lab partners.. But you were white and I was yellow. I grew up being publicly sexually assaulted, molested, and sexually humiliated threw out my attendance of the Lakeville school system.. Not by a teacher or staff, but by my classmates. Our peers, our friends, your siblings, boys from families we all knew.
It started in 4th grade and didn't stop till college. It was apart of my everyday life. I was groomed by many hands, and I got fucking used to it. I did not have a choice. For those of you who went to Lake Marion Elementary, let me take you to the old wooden playground...
After lunch we'd all run out, my friends and I ran to the big silver slide in front. It was connected to the jungle gym, and just behind that there was a big blue rope net. It was so fun to climb on and lay in.. The first time I was sexually assaulted I was standing in front of that net.. When my classmate grabbed me I looked directly up to the curb where one of the two playground staff stood. She was right there. He was grabbing me, hurting me, violating me, and I stared at her to do something, but she kept her gaze behind her black sunglasses.. She glanced around the playground, her head going side to side, not noticing me. It killed me! How could she miss me?
The next day I hide under the slide and cried. That was the first and last time I remember crying over being hurt. I remember her spotting me under there a few times, but she never walked over or said anything. At the time I was a little girl, amazed that no one had seen a thing, convinced that no one had seen nothing. My brain could not handle living in a world where people could see the worst and not try to help. But now I don't need to convince myself of anything to survive.
I have zero doubts. She saw me! Other kids saw me! He knows what he did! No one help me! No one stopped him! This set me up to be constintalty revitiumized for the rest of my life!! The scent never goes away, a predator can spot an Asian woman from a mile away, and if she's been abused before he can spot her from 10 miles away. I am lucky that I'm good at profiling, because some of the best profilers in the world are predictors.
While you were getting high fives in front of the tiled Panther in North's cafeteria, and enjoying pep rallies in South's giant glass gym, I was being dragged into stairwells and forced on my knees like a "good Asian girl". There was one time in particular.. The first time a classmate told me to get under the stairs was at Lakeville South. The school officer must have seen us ditching class on camera and started looking for us. We caught his reflection walking towards us in the glass. We stepped out. My makeup was wrecked. I was trembling with shame. My abuser was holding my hand. The school officer looked hard at my face, then told us, "Get to class".
In the theater the rule of thumb is if you can see the audience, they can see you. Step back from the side curtains or you're wrecking the illusion. Sometimes an audience member shouts that they can see a flouting head. But the rest of them stay silent, they try to keep the illusion going that it's characters not actors.. I wish someone had shouted out when they saw my head peeping through the curtain. But I'm an adult now, and I will gladly rip down the curtain for you! I want everyone to know what really happened back stage.
I always remember these 2 cases the best. I think it's because they are the only times I know for sure someone saw and knew something was wrong. I wonder how many classmates and staff members actually saw and knew it was bad. It happened so many times during school hours, school events, and even the places my friends and I hung out at on the weekends.
Is it at all possible no one saw? Or do white people really think this is what Asians are there for? Please think on this.. Please try to remember to when we were kids. Do you remember my round face flouting between curtains? Begging the audience for help.
You were white and I was Asian. We grew up in the same America. But I was treated differently because of my skin color, while you got high fives.
*Cheers*
