night strangers

i have major issues with a lot of this, so i am going to try and compile them into a tidy list so that i don’t endlessly rant like a crazy person outside the metreon.

1) the choice epithets she/they (white girl mob… seriously?) use. black people get to be offended at the use of the n word, women get to be offended at the use of bitch and ho. and, to be fair, anyone can be offended because we’re all human and should recognize that slurs are wrong regardless of whether or not they apply to your “group”. using these words doesn’t make you hard, it just makes you ignorant. 

2) the whole idea that because she just got out of jail she is more legitimately aligned with black culture in oakland… there is nothing more offensive about all of this than the insinuation that violating the law and serving time brings you closer to the black community or makes you part of the “in” group. it perpetuates such ugly stereotypes my brain really does hurt trying to even find a way to express my disgust, so i’ll move on.

3) the author’s assertion that because she grew up in a mostly black neighborhood she doesn’t automatically have white privilege… white privilege begins with what you look like, not where you’re from, how you sound or even what you’ve got. are there varying levels of white privilege? sure. there are rich white folks who have access to more and better than my lower-middle class white-self has access to, but even at my most destitute, the fact that i am white will be an advantage (barring some huge systemic shift in our culture that i don’t anticipate seeing in my lifetime). but she does have privilege- as ise lyfe says, at the very least, she is not followed by cops the way black people in oakland are followed by cops and that IS privilege.

in the end, ise lyfe’s vlog says it all. i just needed to try and explode a little, too.