This is white privilege. Period.
I’m going to fucking throw up.
This is so depressing. Most days, I look at at the world and think “Is it really possible to fix this fuckery?” And I don’t like the answers that I come up with. It’s so pervasive: racism, homophobia, biphobia (btw Ryan Murphy in regards to Glee S2x14…what the fuck?), classism, etc…and that’s just the human issues.
Drawing from daily life, today I went to the barn to show a friend the school horses. I’m at the barn a lot, sometimes wearing street clothes other times wearing riding gear. I’m usually left alone when in riding gear but every.fucking.time I go in plainclothes, someone (usually a customer) pulls out the “Are you lost/Do you need help/Who are you looking for?” line or some variant of.
Thing is, I’m not lost, I don’t need help, and I’m not looking for anybody. I’m there for the school horses. Picking feet, resetting twisted blankets, cleaning tack, socializing with school horses, helping beginners find and tack their horses - lending a helping hand, basically. I’m always safe and I’m never a nuisance. So why am I always questioned?
Because I visually don’t fit in with the barn’s racial demographic. I am literally a black sheep among the herd of WASP-Y, rich clientele.
For contrast, this is the same barn that my fairer-skinned teammates can wander around sans questioning (even on Monday when the barn is closed), the same barn that lets the privileged pony kid run around for hours after her lesson is done, going into stalls and sitting on the horses’ back (DANGEROUS!) Hell, there’s a girl in a class of mine who frequently goes to the barn to take pictures of the horses (I don’t blame her, horses are gorgeous.) She’s not on the team and doesn’t ride. She has yet to be booted off of the property (sounds severe but a non-horsey person wandering around a stable-yard taking pictures can get dangerous very, very fast.)
So, yeah, racism is very much still alive. Fuckery runs rampant and it will for a long, long time. But dammit, I will still try my damnest to fix it.
Ok. I’ll stop rambling now.
(Source: worldstarhiphop.com)
