i deserve a reward for making it this long
Remember when the news cycle was black people being shot by police all the time
now imagine you have a mental disorder that traps you in loops of thinking and then you have to still be a normal person and go to work
and then you're just supposed to pretend shit like that doesn't affect you for the rest of your life
it's just wild to me that black people are raised in a society where a not insignificant amount of people (both regular people and people in power) believe that you'll grow up to be a criminal or you're not as smart as others or you act completely differently because of your skin color
and then you have to carry that with you for the rest of your life
imagine being like 7-years-old and you have to think about school and videogames but also that people will just hate you for being a different skin color
that's fucking crazy
It's actually insane how much society downplays this and calls us the ones in the wrong for "trying to incite shit" when we call this out
I wrote about this earlier this year
https://medium.com/@theblacknerd_23078/identity-invalid-cb65739b12f6
but when you're one of the only or the only black person in majority white spaces, you can feel it. You know you're different. People treat you different.
And if you don't measure up to whatever stereotypes they know, it's "why are you different"
"Why don't you act like this?"
"Why aren't you like this?"
Even in more progressive spaces, as a black man, you're still measured up to white male masculinity standards, even if you've never benefited from them
