My Awakening

****Please know I do not equate my suffering with what black people have suffered for hundreds of years, just trying to make a point*****

My awakening began when my oldest daughter came out and revealed she is a lesbian. Mind you I always felt I supported the gay community but I started seeing things in a new light. This enlightenment came through learning and listening.

Then came the 10 months as a caregiver for my biological father. The experience was two fold. Sadly he is a racist and homophobe. He was corrected when he said things that were inappropriate. In the end he was very unkind to us and left our care, but there was a blessing that came out of it. Having him living with us triggered a lot in me and I started to learn more about the decades of abuse I suffered at the hands of my mother and how it still effects me. When I was about 10 years old my father finally left for good and during a very hostile argument with my mother I was crying and begging him not to leave, his reply was “you don’t want me to leave so you will be protected”.  After he left the abuse was worse because she had no one else to focus her energy on.

Now I say all this in my attempt to explain racism and how it is embedded into society. For decades I was conditioned to believe I was worthless, “you are so stupid”, “why can’t you be smart like your brother”. My mother did everything she could to tear me down, physical abuse, emotional abuse. When I was finally old enough to start speaking up for myself and challenge her, she became a master at the narrative that I was a bad person. At my cousin’s wedding rehearsal dinner she sat and cried to anyone that would listen about what an awful person I was.  “She can’t do anything right”, “she is lazy”, “she is an awful daughter”. It is a narrative I still have problems with today.

What does this have to do with racism you ask? Well, for hundreds of years we have been conditioned to believe Black people are inferior. “They are stupid”, “they are lazy”, “they are criminals”. Hollywood’s narrative of the White man always saves the Black man. Black men for a very long time were often the villains if they weren’t the domestic help or slave. Crime and incarceration statistics aren’t really what they seem when you delve into all the nitty gritty details, (don’t worry, I’m not launching into all that), under served schools and tons more I could detail. Google “Red Lining”, I had heard inklings about this but never really understood till I started researching and listening these last couple weeks.

The web of lies, misinformation and perpetuation of the narrative is pretty darn impressive for it to last hundreds of years. Well why not, I still have issues trying to believe I’m nothing like my mother described and I’m 55 yo.

Imagine hearing your whole life you are worthless in every way possible. Imagine strangers on the street being terrified of you. Imagine realizing you the will never have the same advantages as others because of your skin color.

Add on top of all this having the constant fear of being killed on a daily basis. In the last few months there has been a Black man hunted down like an animal and shot in the streets, then a Black man literally had the life squeezed out of him while he cried out for his mother.

I’m not professing to be perfect, I have been conditioned to believe many misconceptions about Black people. I am realizing a lot I have thought is flat out wrong. The light bulb went off when I realized what racists throughout hundreds of years have done to Black people and to society, the same as my mother did to me.

Society has been conditioned to believe the racist narrative.

It is very difficult to bust out of the abusers narrative, especially when the abusers have a knee on their neck for hundreds of years.

I went no contact from my abuser in 2006, it was the only way I could heal. Black people do not have that option.

Please listen and learn.