• they/them

27ish bi of ace enby creacher from a bay. made of eyeballs slop and some sort of wet soup perhaps.
kintroject-heavy median system. tme, perisex, & white jewish.

"in the face of extermination, say FUCK YOU!" - gerard way


sealsona
@sealsona

When I think ab racism/ethnicity in the furry fandom, I think about the BIPOC room party at FC a few years ago that got backlash from white furs on Twitter who felt excluded because they assumed it meant "no white furs allowed". Naturally, they took it out on BIPOC furries and tbh I think that was one of my joker moments. Like I know I don't need to explain myself but like.... Being a furry who's also a person of color is like "haha I'm a little animal :3 " but also "I am a human being and I deserve to feel safe in a community with people like me" is the reason why I'm so loudly Asian now, cuz I gotta make sure people know what I am ✨


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in reply to @sealsona's post:

The mixed/cross-cultural experience can be so different in so many ways, but none of it should invalidate your identity as someone who is mixed! Your own experiences make you yourself, and you deserve a comfortable space to hang out with others and be able to express that individuality ;w;
For me, I had trouble seeing myself as Vietnamese-American cuz that's what my family is and that's what I am, but I never felt "Vietnamese" or "American" enough. Once I started reading more about BIPOC experiences, I realized a lot of us have that same kind of self-doubt and I've found a lot of comfort in that and being able to express it! Which is why I like identifying myself with the vague "Asian" more than anything else haha

Yeah, my situation is... trickier. I'm a Spanish-Filipino born and raised in the Philippines to a family whose Spanish roots actually date to over two decades after the Spanish colonial era ended and the Americans took over, and that maintains a lot of close ties to family in Spain to this day.

The issue is - in the West, I'm certainly not seen as white. In the Philippines, not only am I generally assumed and categorized as "white", but I'm seen as a white westerner foreigner even moreso than that, because I'm read as white to people here and the idea of a "white Filipino" is simply... not valid, in the framework folks have of the nationality here. My Filipinoness is constantly erased, ignored, invalidated, or straight up denied, and the fact that much of the nationalistic attitude encouraged by our government, institutions and cultural movements (seriously like you have educational foundations listing "nationalism" as a "Filipino virtue" that must be instilled in the youth) is rooted in a bitter anger about the colonial period means that... that anger has occasionally been taken out on me, especially in more left leaning spaces here. I had a very, very bad time in local tabletop RPG circles, because they're obsessed with fantasies of an "uncolonized" world in which I simply wouldn't exist, or which cast people like me as the villains...

Its... left me with this persistent doubt, this struggle to claim my Filipinoness despite it being half my family and half my roots and the place where I was born and raised. I feel unable to exist in "PoC" spaces because my entire life, people here have communicated that for all intents and purposes I'm "white", that I'm an outsider or worse a "colonizer'", while I know (and, during my time in the states, directly experienced) that elsewhere, i absolutely am not considered as such.

So I walk this strange line. Neither white or not, because I am rejected by both. Balanced on the edge of a knife by howling winds pushing me away from falling on either side, while those winds chafe at me and the knife edge cuts into my feet.

Trapped, between two categories, and wishing for a world where I can just be... me. Both Spanish and Filipino. Where the most that matters is me making jokes about having two completely different kinds of turón in my kitchen.

But that feels like such an impossible dream, with the way the world talks and thinks about ethnicity and race.

"So I walk this strange line. Neither white or not, because I am rejected by both."
While I know we come from different backgrounds, I think what's important is thay these labels of ethnicity/race are built up from years of other people deciding what these labels mean, and that they don't define you as an individual. It doesn't detract from you being Spanish-Filipino, although people may jump to their own conclusions.
I wish you the best in finding/creating a space where you can comfortably be yourself, and I'm sorry to hear you had those kind of experiences in the past!