Privilege Man. Privilege.

Reading about privilege is mildly irritating when you’re not subjected to it everyday. Though, witnessing privilege is like having someone with halitosis speaking to you in such close proximity their hot breath feels like it’s permeating your skin. It’s as pleasant as hearing that damn ice cream truck outside your window for hours on end and then it stops and goes and stops and goes, then it sounds like it’s a CD being scratched, then it gets louder and softer. It sounds like it might be leaving. The engine starts, but no. It starts up again, from the beginning and it goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on….

Here’s the scenario: Waiting in line for Friday the 13th tattoos behind a girl covered in tats and annoyingly talkative who has no concept of humanity or humility.

The waiting in line would have been absolutely fine if we weren’t stuck behind the most obnoxious human being on the planet and her friend. It was a hot day. My nerves were already on edge because they were being slow cooked by the sun. So, this girl in front of us discussing matters of friendships and their complications with an air of superiority, while dismissively explaining why her friend (not present) decided they “can’t do this anymore,” nearly sent me over the edge into a blind violent rage. 

First, she was talking about how she knew everyone in the tattoo shop and that one of the tattoos was of a dog she knew. These useless fun facts she was spewing to her bored-looking friend were seemingly endless. She knew this person and that person. She knew which tattoo artist did “those tattoos,” she rattled on, as people came out of the shop, their tattoos covered. Her father owns a huge company and she also owns a small one. She was a interested in this and that. Blah blah blah. I knew more about her than my friend standing next to me by the end of the few hours we were trapped behind her, however, the most infuriating thing that came out of her mouth wasn’t the continuous name-dropping or shameless bragging, it was something she said in defense of herself. 

She was telling her friend who seemed to be practicing that thing where you escape your body in times of duress but keep your eyes open. This girl, let’s call her BB for Braggy Bragster, was telling her friend, the poor vacant-eyed one, that she got in a fight with another friend of hers who wasn’t present (how BB had friends in the first place is a whole different query). According to BB, this friend of hers elected to stop talking to her because she claimed BB wasn’t a real adult. Why? BB’s parents were paying her rent and most likely a host of other things, and this friend felt this made BB irresponsible. BB was obviously hurt by these remarks as she laughed heartily at the claim and stated, “It’s not my fault my parents care about me,” then she said, “I can’t help it if my parents love me more than hers.” FLOORED. 

How she can so painlessly admit her ignorance with those few statements and have utterly no idea about how inherently wrong it is to assume someone’s parents don’t love them because they cannot afford to pay for their child(ren)’s rent was cray cray. That’s when I knew she was a grade A psycho. Something already rubbed me the wrong way about her before she even mentioned her “loving parents.” It may have been the way she spoke so loudly as if her thoughts and ideas needed to be heard over everyone else’s conversation. It may have been the things she chose to talk about like how she didn’t know where she was going to get her next tattoo because she “had so many already.” It may have also been the way she butted into my conversation with my friend and within seconds told us her father owned such and such and that she grew up with “the business in her blood.” *Eye roll.* It’s amazing how modesty can completely change the way you see someone in the exact same financial situation. The problem is not that her father pays her rent, the problem is that she doesn’t find the harm in what she’s saying. The problem is that she was completely oblivious to how insensitive remarks like that can be. The problem is that she is so privileged she has no issue with defending herself in the most despicable way possible. Her parents are well off. I get that. That is great, I wish everyone’s parents could pay their children’s rents or whatever, but the thing here is being mindful of the reasons why not everyone has that opportunity. We’re living in a society that has immeasurable discrepancies in wages for workers in all sorts of fields. The reason Daddy Dearest was able to afford paying for whatever is because he is being paid an exorbitant amount of money while his workers are being paid substantially less. It’s called capitalism and it effects quite a large portion of society, but this girl, DD, was not privy to the facts or plain blissfully unwilling to acknowledge them. Weeks after the fact, I am still reeling from her unbearable presence.

And now, I hear an actor who plays one of my most beloved fictional characters is also a bigot. WHAT IS THE WORLD COMING TO?! WHY SIRIUS BLACK?! WHYYYYYYYY?! OH AND ZORG! WTF!?

So, who does he hate?

I think Playboy secretly has it out to uncover every bigoted celebrity, which is kinda funny. Remember that interview with John Mayer where he claimed his dick was a klan member? Yeah, good stuff. People suck.

Here We Go Again

As I was scrolling through my Facebook feed, eyeballs rolling over various headlines like, Top Ten Restaurants That Sell Pork Belly Flavored Pabst or whatever, I came across a piece of true journalistic - if it can even be called that- garbage.At first I was convinced it was some kind of joke- an Onion article or a Fox News blog post, but nay.

This shamelessly off-putting virtual punch to the throat was titled, “It Happened To Me: There Are No Black People In My Yoga Classes And I’m Suddenly Feeling Uncomfortable With It.” However, the entire article is about this girl and her discomfort with herself in relation to a black woman who was taking the class for the first time. This person is a human being with the emotional capacity of a bag of bath salts. There have been some pretty great responses to that stinky heap of dinosaur dung, but I am going off topic to open up the discussion of how this nauseatingly self-indulgent experience made it onto a website that  "is where women go to be their unabashed selves, and where their unabashed selves are applauded – regardless of age, size, ability, location, occupation, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, economic status, relationship status, sexual preferences or lifestyle choices…“ blah blah blah. I think they forgot to add, at the expense of other women (of color). I would just like to know what the process these "pieces” go through before being birthed into the blogosphere to be read by unsuspecting individuals who carry a modicum of sense in their brain pouches and don’t want to read racist aha moments written by oblivious observers who will seemingly never understand the topics they feel the need to so efficiently debase and ruin with ignorance. I took a gander at XOjane, I think I may have poked around the site a few years ago, but there was obviously a reason I never looked back.

It’s more than upsetting that the anecdote was published on a site that is suppose to empower women, but thoroughly did the opposite, which is a continuous trend in feminist culture. As I’ve written before, there is a disconnect between women of color and our white counterparts. It’s inherently different to be a black woman than to be a white woman in society and when we can all embrace and understand this difference maybe we can find some common ground and move on with our agenda as women to better the world we live in where we all ride unicorns and shoot laser beams out of our nipples.

Regardless of how “uncomfortable” some white women may feel about accepting this harrowing reality, it would be soooo much easier to have discussions if everyone wasn’t walking on gd eggshells. The yoga woman as she’s so infamously referred to these days (2) who wrote this is so painfully unsympathetic to how this newcomer may have felt, possibly having a brand new experience with strangers, but instead makes herself the focus of this woman’s discomfort. Privilege doesn’t even begin to explain her warped notions. Granted, I could not make it through the whole thing in fear I would destroy everything around me, I cannot imagine there being any redeeming qualities of her incalculable callowness. All I can hope is that writing what she did made her a better woman for it. I hope that she took the time to read some of the well thought out comments and actually understood where they were coming from- a place of severe frustration with the status quo. 

Teju Cole’s article got me thinkin’, we should all be thinking…