race_in_america
unhinged let me just start with this: any white person that is offended by discussions of this topic is either stupid or a coward. we cannot deny the facts we don't like. facts are facts. let's please quit with the selective ignorance in the name of jesus already.

second of all, THERE IS MOST FUCKING DEFINITELY A RACE PROBLEM IN AMERICA.



i grew up in a suburb of cleveland ohio. when i was about 12 or 13 my dad announced that he was building a house in a rural county 45 minutes away cause 'those people' were moving into our neighborhood. textbook white flight. except it was my freshman year of high school and i hated my dad for a few weeks for making me switch high schools. i moved to an even whiter town (there were literally like two black families in the whole area, maybe even most of the county.) i know me and my brother rolled our eyes at our dad's dog whistle 'those people.' me and my brother gravitated towards any and every kind of people. there could have been a subconscious level of parental rebellion in it, but over the course of our lives, me and my brother have forced our dad to accept black, brown, and asian people as our friends and significant others. sadly, he still spews racist shit whenever given the chance. trump has made it ok for him; he brings it up whenever given the chance. the cops getting killed in dallas and the riots in milwaukee were prime targets for my dad's pent up rage from the 60s and 70s back when he was a young republican for nixon. (interestingly my dad was a union man that hated bill clinton in the 90s but that's another rant for a different page).

long story short, i grew up in a house steeped in racism. my parents were both products of the civil rights era in a manufacturing town in the midwest. they had forced bussing to integrate schools. my mom seemed more accepting of it than my dad, but she would also make vaguely racist comments about the black ladies she worked with at the bank. so much for the wholesome midwestern thing that everyone out here on the west coast seems to believe.

i moved from rural white middle of fucking nowhere america to youngstown. y_town , the goddamn armpit of middle america. a town owned and operated by the italian mafia. the strangely nice part about the mob is they don't really discriminate. they will sell anyone drugs or loan them gambling money. they will bribe steal or kill anyone that gets in their way. they aren't picky about things like that. in retrospect, it was a strange respite from the racial tensions that shaped my childhood to there.

(i was always uncomfortable when my parents went on their whitey white rants about how everything wrong in the world was because of 'those people' sitting around on their welfare. or that "those people" stuck together and weren't to be trusted. even the positive stereotypes my dad had of asians made me squirm. even before science proved racial superiority wrong in many dimensions, my parents saying that shit out loud made me cringe. me and my brother have argued with our dad til we were blue in the face. he refuses to believe the fact that it is untrue that black people are genetically inferior in intelligence to whites. it embarrasses me to even write that here. my dad never went to college. he worked a blue collar job his whole life. he is a statistical snapshot of a trump voter *sigh*)


youngstown was a cesspool. i broke my back to get my degree in four years so i could get the hell out. then i let my friend convince me i needed to study violin pedagogy in milwaukee. milwaukee was in another era when it came to segregation. the 2010 census only confirmed it. milwaukee wisconsin was statistically the most segregated city in america. (cleveland was also in the top 10) in fact, 7 out of the top ten most segregated cities in america were in the midwest.

i lived in milwaukee for eight years and the racial issues were constant and uncountable but several will always stand out.

not long after i moved to milwaukee and wasn't yet aware of the racial borders of the city, i crossed the line into the black neighborhood without realizing it to go to a payless shoe store for shoes. my white friend drove me there. as both of us walked in the store everyone inside stopped talking. every last person became totally silent and stared at us. i walked to where my size shoes were but i just quickly glanced around and walked right back out of the store without trying on any shoes because everyone was still staring at me. this happened in 2003...it was like a scene out of a movie.


i was taking the bus with my friend genea to her house from school. we both played violin at the university and neither of us knew how to drive so the bus was the only option. she lived right where the cops killed that man that triggered the riots. all the pictures of that busstop that got torn down was where her and her sister would wait for the bus. the university was on the white side of town. taking the bus from where genea lived to where we went to school was a feat of urban survival. after the bus crossed over the river we were solidly in the hoodiest part of the black neighborhood. every person that got on that bus stopped talking to stare at me. i am not exaggerating. until we got across fond du lac avenue everyone that got on the bus stared at me. i was the only white person on the bus. i turned to genea and said something to the effect of if that bus was always like that and that i couldn't believe she had to deal with stuff like that every day to get to school.


'girl...me and anthony got questioned by a cop when he was dropping me off from brass bell last night' his eyes got as big as saucers and he still seemed a little frightened when he told me the next day. my best friend (who is also now my roommate for over five years) is black and grew up in south carolina. so he knows a little bit about racism and profiling. his parents taught him how to act around police. but he was still scared out of his mind because he was very aware of what can happen to black men if they don't obey orders from cops (these days the cops are killing them even when they obey but i digress). the cop asked them what they were doing and where they were coming from and when my friend said the name of the music store we work at the cop knew the manager and the fact that they both knew her diffused the situation and the cop left. some white people go 'so what are you crying about? the cops left you alone' but they have obviously never had to watch how frightened their friend got when telling them they were being questioned by the police for sitting in a car talking to their friend across the street from their apartment.



we have problems people. there are places in american (milwaukee) where it's like civil rights never even happened. after decades of policies ensured segregation the goddamn mayor and governor can't figure out why people are burning shit down because the cops murdered another black man in the street. (and yes driving while black IS a thing in milwaukee assholes. i had many friends that would only give me partial rides home at bar time because they would be driving into a heavily policed heavily white neighborhood and they were not white and not sober.) but the politicians in wisconsin have their heads so far up their white asses that instead of going to the north side and standing on the corner of sherman and auer and talking to the community, instead of listening to the community, tom barrett calls scott walker who calls in the national guard. THAT is exactly what is meant by white_priviledge to all the rush limbaugh listeners out there. wisconsin is still stuck in the 50s but in the global internet age there is now a growing minority of people that don't believe in the heinous lies of white superiority.

maybe, just maybe, when the baby boomers die we will finally have a measure of racial equality in this country
160906
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flowerock. You_said_it

A lot of mu family is still in minnesota and Wisconsin.
I only recently understood what white privilege meant and that it was a thing.

It's easy not to notice living on the west coast in areas where you see a huge variety of people and things seem "ok".
Or when I grew up in southern az and it was not uncommon to be the only white person in sight and get harassed for being white in a Mexican neighborhood. I realize that is different, but it is a small window into the other side of the race divide.
160908
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unhinged me and my best friend have known each_other for almost twenty years now (crazy thought) and he has given me much insight into white_privilege growing up black in south carolina. just the other day he told me that he, or maybe one of his family members, lived near a ku klux klan grand wizard that he saw over the fence regularly. he always made it a point to wave and say hello, southern manners being what they are, but always walked away trembling to think of burning crosses and lynchings.

one semester in graduate school we drove from milwaukee to columbus because both of our families lived in ohio by then. we stopped at a rest stop in indiana to eat because a blizzard was starting to pick up so he wanted to rest for awhile since i couldn't help him drive. as we walked up to the counter of the mcdonald's every worker there stopped talking, stared at us. not a word of 'can i take your order?' they just stared at the black man and white woman in front of them like we were a beast with two heads. we stubbornly ordered food anyways, but as we sat down to eat he looked at me and said 'girl, we need to get out of here as quick as possible. let's eat and go.' so we scarfed our food and went back out into the blizzard cause a snowstorm on the highway was safer and more hospitable than those bigots working at that rest stop.


i have the privilege of walking down the street without cops harassing me for no damn reason. sad to say that is a privilege in a supposedly free country.

but i have also been a target of racism, i.e. my experience in that shoe store and on the bus in milwaukee. i watched a lot of videos of interviews about the riots a few weeks back and the sister of the man the police killed was asking 'why don't white people come into our neighborhoods and hang out with us?' and my gut twisted. because i tried and i was met with open hostility for it. then my friends from music school started a hip_hop group that brought the white college students and the black hip_hop community together and it felt more like a social statement than a musical one to me. see people, we can coexist, we can party, we can have fun together and there is no violence here. several venues denied my friends access because they didn't want 'those people' coming to their bars. but they persisted until the mc moved to nyc to try his bigger fortunes.


i have loved people of all races. i have always been that way in spite of the environment i was raised in. in the past year politics in general, and race politics in particular, have worked me up to the point of anger. but when i dig underneath as so many buddhist teachers have been begging us white buddhists in america to do, i am just sad. sad at the narrow minded 'other' mentality that pervades our culture of fear. i contemplate writing about race in a bigger venue than blather but i am not sure if i am strong enough for that yet.
160908
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flowerock. I'm still growing my understanding and views. I feel like I understand what is meant by privilege and I see it, but I don't like that the way it's used to divide us by race as a "you couldn't understand) thing.

I don't know how to speak a out it gracefully.
160908
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unhinged i dont like the divisive nature of 'you dont/couldnt understand' either but i cant. i cannot understand what it feels like to be brutalized or harassed by police. i have no first_hand knowledge of that. admitting that to people that do, listening to people that do is the best step to take.

humans have neurological biases of race; we seek out those that look like us and reject those that look different. it is a evolutionary impulse of our brains. but we also have discernment intelligence and empathy (at least some of us do anyways). we can end inequality if we dare to activate our higher emotional intelligence instead of letting our lizard brains win.

(there have been many great articles on race in america in the buddhist magazines i subscribe to in the past year. you might want to check out the teachings of angel kyodo williams on youtube or take the bart to the east bay and listen to her in person. her dharma talks on race and what we can do to fix all the horrendous things still festering in this country have changed me)
160909
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unhinged between the world and me - ta-nehisi coates

'this is required reading'
160917
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srealisma I need to read it again. If I recall correctly, it was the one book I managed to read in a trying period of time having to do with my illness, or whatever.

Coates has a few reccomended reading lists on the internet - the one posted at goodreads has the most books directly about race. I hear you gotta read lots of James Baldwin, "for starters", also something I haven't done. First, i'm winding my way through the "literary map of the united states" at bkmag.com (now that i'm doing ok on that level). On southern california: "The White Boy Shuffle" by Paul Beatty, 1996, brilliant as hell and a kick in the pants that racist people deserve.

I went to an all-white school, which i imagine feels different than a multirace school, or even one that has one black, brown, or Asian person in the class. To be honest, there were a handful of Hispanics and a handful of Asians in the whole school when i was there, but none in my class, if I remember. Does it matter? at age 5, age 10, age 15. In a way you just miss that aspect of society - doesn't exist. On tv, occasionally the store. Later on you make a few black friends, but it doesn't change the crucial negotiations of meaning that a child will do with a child brain in the absence of people that don't look like you vs in their presence. So then i'm confronted with my ignorance and the fact that there are no re-dos, and the shame that the school mascot is the whippur, originally a purple cat with a whip, an embarrassment which some people find a nihilistic humor in and won't change because for some odd reason, pride goes along with it. I do my best to speak up, but i don't have kids at that school now, and i'm easily discredited and football-blocked.

So, bottomline, i gotta read and self-examine. It's a too-simple thing, my memories of racist comments in school. Too simple because they didn't seem to matter. no referrents were ever going to hear them. Not important. Not required to be thoughtful just batting around a concept from the media or the dinner tables at home, not sure of where it really belonged, if anywhere. This is white_privilege in a structural sense. I often wonder if it is also subscribing to "postrace" and wildly speculate that me and the other kids were other races in lives immediately previous, insolently throwing a wrench into the structure (my tendency). The Illinois book will be Native Son. I look forward to it.
160919
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unhinged i read native son in high school. i remember it being a heavy book for me. i also remember doing a reading from that book as part of a class project. the invisible man was also another impactful racial novel i read in high school


according to my dad obama is a racist for sending the department of justice to ferguson because michael brown was a criminal who went after a cop who forensic doctors said didn't have his hands up when he was shot so he deserved to die.

obama is a racist because he doesn't point out every time black cops kill white people.


as much as i love my dad i will be happy to get back to seattle where i won't have to hear him talk about how he would have voted for trump because there is an immigration problem in this country and he wants a wall because illegal immigrants that can't read street signs killed eleven people in head on collisions caused by going the wrong way on the highway in arizona last year, cause if you live in america you better be here legally and you better speak and read english fluently...

but to my dad it isn't a matter of race. it's a matter of right and wrong and personal responsibility. cause black people are scamming the system by having 'illegitimate' kids and sucking more out of welfare. because the only legitimate way to get knocked up is if you're married...(hence why i had an abortion but that is something i never told my dad about)

*siiiigh*

according to my dad, obama has set race relations in this country back 50 years and i am naieve and uninformed if i think any different. but i guess i agree with him in one aspect, obama has pushed race back to front of the national dialogue instead of festering under the rug where we have left it for the past 50 years.
160920
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srealisma I should have fashioned this reply earlier but I had a family funeral to go to- my grandfather's sister. I've been thinking about it though.

It's hard to tell if there's been a setback in race relations. From what I hear things were still worse 50 years ago. What's happening now has it's roots in new media and white supremacy with antiblackness -the really crass rudeness of segregating people against their volition- coming in third. It's hard to call that a "setback" when people are fighting about the future using the tools of the present. But if you have a thought that some people are "backward" in their thinking you could call it a setback. I certainly never thought the KKK would be active again and have been horrified to find out Grand Wizards still exist.

There was a lady at the funeral - community minded person - who brought up the protests in Charlotte and looting. She said this all started in LBJ's Great Society, welfare programs - the welfare queens argument, basically. A remark that stuck with me is she said that the black community is not given the chance to "feel some dignity". 1) it's an issue for me and my inability to navigate the world, socially 2) when you say others are in want of dignity, is your inability to control them an affront to your own dignity, somehow? Because you know the world is a big place with lotsa people in it, and dignity seems to be an organic social quality, you meet the world in the eye when it's meetable - it can't be enforced or imposed. 3) I remember thinking as I walked Navy Pier and there were young people of mixed race walking it too wearing basically loungewear, pajamas-type clothing, "the forces of apathy have conquered us". Is this a similar thought to what the lady at the funeral was saying? and 4) what do millennials think of "dignity" when the news is too bad to be hopeful? I don't really know (I don't consider myself a millennial but others around here certainly might consider themselves millenial)

my last remark is kind of hotheaded, but it comes from this situation I've always had where there really isn't police in my area. Why would you even be a policeperson if you had no issue with killing others? Isn't that against the job description? I take it even further- if it's a dangerous job why do you have a family and do the job at the same time? Fire department I can see because it's all about saving people, stopping nature. But policemen shooting civilians to protect themselves is not that cool - not that I think cops should be murdered- but cops shouldn't be thinking they have to shoot the person because what if they don't make it home to their kids if they don't shoot the person. I know it's hard to be honest about that kind of thing but cops need to think about if they are psychologically good for the job, and of course they should be well trained and talk to each other about how to do their jobs.

To me, it's about guns. I'm against them. The protests are about media, like a lot of social stuff is now. There's no way to suppress media unless we get truly fascist, and that actually might happen because NIMBY apathy- the vulnerable are victimized because they are used to that, right? That's the underlying thing. You're really not supposed to ruin a happy person's day. There's a reason for that... Too much blight is depressing for damn sure.
160923
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unhinged blood done sign my name - timothy b tyson

after charlottesville , the author of this book was part of a video on maybe the real news network...maybe. i cant remember. so i got this book from the library. after charlottesville, this is even more pertinent

this book and ta-nehisi coates book to his son should be required reading in every high school in america
170908
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unhinged https://youtu.be/-HHY_4f5nds

my best friend and roommate is related to the man that that video is about. it brings tears to my eyes every time I watch it. but at least the crawfords have some small amount of healing now, even though it took one hundred shameful years for someone to acknowledge this atrocity.

have we really fixed anything if it took one hundred years to acknowledge the brutality of jim crow even fifty years after the civil war? have we really fixed anything when black men rot in prison and are legally executed by the state for crimes they didn't commit? have we really fixed anything when the klan don't even need to wear hoods anymore?

i see you crawford family
you are here
i love one of you as my own
your pain is my pain
your triumph is my triumph
your family is my family
i am a witness
show me so that i never forget
tell me so that i always remember

his name was anthony crawford
he demanded justice
and they hung him for it
then shot him two hundred times
and left his body in a tree
as an example to any other black person
who would dare to demand justice

three generations later
i share a house with an ancestor
of anthony crawford
and dare to demand justice
because i have been hated for walking
beside the man that grew up
listening to cousin doria talk
about how they lynched anthony crawford

a monument doesn't seem like enough
but
it's a start
170908
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unhinged 'what occurred to me then and still strikes me now is how much of the painful past we have yet to confront, even when we love one another and think that we know one another. so much of what agonizes and divides us remains unacknowledged. even more of it simply fades into Oblivion.

there it should stay many people seem to think - why dredge this stuff up? why linger on the past which we cannot change? we must move toward a brighter future and leave all that horror behind. it's true that we must make a new world. but we can't make it out of whole cloth. we have to weave the future from the fabric of the past, from the patterns of aspiration and belonging - and broken dreams and anguished rejections - that have made us. what the advocates of our dangerous and deepening social amnesia don't understand is how deeply the past holds the future in it's grip - even and perhaps especially when it remains unacknowledged. we are runaway slaves from our own past, and only by turning to face the hounds can we find our freedom beyond them.' timothy b tyson
170914
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unhinged back_handed

'in being friends with white people i've always had to live entirely inside their circle of experience - inside their white world. and my white friends have rarely if ever spent a moment in my indigenous world...

so at reardan high school i was successful and acceptable and loved because i was - and still am -great at negotiating with whiteness. but that means my white friends often mistakenly believe that my ability to successfully negotiate the white world means that i am white - or more white than native. my white friends can mistakenly believe that my intellectual and artistic abilities are intrinsically white. and yes i am heavily influenced by whitman, dickinson, springsteen, hank williams, and dusty springfield - and i owe them and many other white and non-native artists and intellectuals a huge debt but i am also very much a product of my ancient tribal culture. i am the genetic artistic and political descendant of my mother and father and grandmother and thousands of years of salmon-fishing ancestors.'

- sherman alexie
171001
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unhinged the hate u give - angie thomas


a must read; i devoured it in two days and it had me in tears on the bus more than a few times
180205
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unhinged no justice: one white police officer, one black family, and how one bullet ripped us apart - robbie tolan and lawrence ross

'I've learned over the years that there's something in america's dna that only allows us to be shocked by racism and the violence that comes with it if we have some type of personal connection. black and latino people live with racism on a day-to-day basis, but white americans always appear to be shocked every time racism rears its ugly head. i find it to be damn scary that i've gotta rely on your personal experience with racism for you to care. i'm pretty sure it's the same way with sexism, where if the victim of sexism looks like a wife, girlfriend, sister, or mother, then we have empathy, but if it's some random woman we don't know or a systemic issue with misogyny, then we tend to be dispassionate.

in some ways, that's sad, mainly because i don't want to walk this earth as a black man who depends on people having a relationship with some other black men before they can overcome their prejudices and empathize with me when something bad happens. the comments sections of the news sites showed me that many white people don't have that empathy, and as a result, my getting shot is seen as an 'oh well' in their lives. i mean nothing to them. and when you're seen as nothing, you get death threats designed to let you know that you're nothing.' - robbie tolan


'black lives matter for real, and it's not just a slogan. if we're going to be a country where every citizen is asked to believe in the police, then we're going to need to trust the police, and i don't think any black person, at least any sane black person, should blindly trust the police. this isn't to say that you hate the police or, hell, that you love the police. hating or loving the police isn't germane to whether or not black people can expect to live on this earth without being harassed or killed by the people who are supposed to be protecting and serving their citizens.' - robbie tolan


'if i come off as sad and bitter, then so be it. all i can do is react to the world that i see. i see charlottesville, where young woman, heather heyer, gets killed by a neo-nazi, and donald trump, who currently occupies the white house, openly coddles the neo-nazis as having 'good people on both sides.' we live in a world where the leader of the free world instructs police to not worry about 'being rough' with potential suspects. how in the world am i to believe that i live in an america where my rights are protected and the bullied that entered my chest is justified by a man who sees me as a nothing?

i don't.

i see an increasingly cruel america, an america where colin kaepernick and nfl players kneel over the issue of police brutality, and white america gets fake mad about 'disrespecting the flag.' how can i believe that police departments from los angeles to new york city are going to take the shootings of black people seriously, when white people want to turn an intentional blind eye to the issue?

as a black person, it makes you want to scream, because no matter what we do, we're told to keep quiet. we march in the streets, and we're told we shouldn't march. we silently protest, we're told we shouldn't protest. but when we're shot the silence about our lives is deafening.' - robbie tolan


more required reading

more tears; maybe because of all my own personal experience. would i have this much empathy without all my black friends? i'm not sure, and i'm not sure if it matters. i stand with you all anyways and when i read stories like this my heart breaks. because all of my black friends have told me stories over the years about being harassed by police, about being harassed by stupid white people. hell i've even been involved in a few of those stories. my own childhood was a classic example of white_flight . all of this has been a conscious part of my life for decades. and then i read a headline recently in the seattle weekly that black lives matter activists here were heard saying 'i don't even know why white people are at this march'. come on. COME ON. that's just as racist as saying all lives matter. and until white people stop boycotting the nfl cause of the protest movement and black people don't accept white allies in their search for justice, we will stay racist and divided.
180205
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unhinged baracoon - zora neale hurston 180823
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unhinged white fragility - robin diangelo 181017
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unhinged the art and science of respect: a memoir - james prince 190204
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smurfus rex You should design a Udemy course on this, and use these books as your required reading list. 190205
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unhinged who?
what?
where?
190207
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unhinged on the come up - angie thomas 190304
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unhinged 'to hip_hop. thank you for being my voice, for giving me a voice, and for showing me myself. the world criticizes you often, and sometimes rightfully so. hell, sometimes, im one of your biggest critics. but i do it from a place of love. ive seen what you're capable of - you can, you will, and you have changed the world. ill never give up on you. ill always have your back. keep sparking brains and making noise.

and finally, to those roses in concrete in the real Gardens of the world - even when they doubt you, even when they try to silence you, never be quiet. they can't stop you, so get your come up.' - angie thomas
190304
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unhinged the best we could do - thi bui


explicit: this one hit me pretty hard. the man that impregnated me was a refugee from the vietnam war. i still think about the baby i didn't let us have. the trauma in her genes...the violent drunk behavior of her dad...the depressive anxiety of her mom...call me a killer but i sent that little one on her way to better parents. hopefully.
190325
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dafremen Meat puppet over-identification.
That's all.
190326
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unhinged socialist realism -trisha low

the last cigarette on earth - benjamin alire saenz
191005
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unhinged how to be an antiracist - ibram x kendi 191008
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unhinged america is in the heart - carlos bulosan

east goes west: the making of a oriental yankee - younghill kang

the hanging on union square: an american epic - h.t. tsiang


(american adjacent)

i hope we choose love: a trans girl's notes from the end of the world - kai cheng thom
191218
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unhinged minor feelings: an asian american reckoning - cathy park hong


to_alex

i believed the myth
your reticence seemed strange to me then
but it was just the residue
of growing up chinese in detroit
of growing up the second child
in a family that placed all hope on the firstborn


what you needed from me
makes more sense now
but_still
i couldn't give it
but_still
i feel echoes

of us
of guilt


(but maybe
it was the best either of us could do
at_the_time )
200401
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unhinged minneapolis
louisville
denver
los ángeles



are you the white person that prefers tranquility

OR

are you the white person that wants justice for ALL
200529
what's it to you?
who go
blather
from