A Room to Call My Own
By the end of this some may think that I'm just a spoiled brat, complaining over spilt milk, while most are begging for a glass of water. The tale must be told regardless.
It's just under a 100 square feet ... and it technically isn't "mine" ... and yet ... it's a room I can call my own.
Basically born into an orphanage, I was adopted to the United States when I was six months old. Most would consider it to be a dream come true, and opportunity; and I'm not going to say it wasn't a blessing in some respects.
Though many will eventually ask, if so racist ... why buy brown boy?
To which there really is no good reply; this is not the story I wanted to write, nor that I want to write, but it is the story that is ... the best that I can come up with is as follows:
If they were to adopt the white child, all the pressure for success would be on them; but if they bought a brown child, anything they didn't like they could spin-off as genetic defects ... because, as I overheard the woman who bought me say, "You never know what you'll get when you adopt from a developing country."
And so the logic served to enable their worst behavior, while allowing her to present the best face; and this is why I say she thought of me as her pet monkey.
A truly horrible thing to say, though the experiences that even enabled such thoughts in my heart and mind, I cannot solely attribute to fantasy nor delusion.
In context, it is not that the man, her husband, was weak ... he had been strong for too long. His own father was an alcoholic and a womanizer; none of his sons turned out the same. Though his own wife, the grand-mother, was also a racist; though somehow I was different ... or something, all very weird.
Either way, the man never hit me; there was one altercation, but that was all their ever was until my young adulthood. He tried to get physical with me once, I wrapped him up in my arms and told him that we weren't doing that. And I was arrested for disorderly conduct.
It's funny because ... I didn't have anywhere else to go ... surrounded by the wealth that turns the world, and I had no place else to go but jail.
As while I cannot entirely blame the man, he also benefited off of my absent presence ... he could interact with a projection he could discard when convenient.
Like an umbrella for when it rains, or the sun is too hot ... truly an odd experience.
She was an expert at doing the absolute bare minimum; enough to argue her case in front of whiteness and no more! She did enough to prove to whiteness that she was a mother who cared; but that is the only metric she feels compelled to overcome.
We went to a therapist of color; who also happened to be a published author of Evangelical Christian things ... a token, by all sense of the word. And this "doctor" simply parroted the narrative that I was mad at my biological mother, and taking it out on this poor white woman who was trying to help me ... a bit like Oliver Twist perhaps.
I was the ungrateful, possibly rabid, delinquent on the verge of being disowned, or in process of ... because on the other side of it ... the put the cherry on the sundae ...
The woman thought she had a right to my child, and she exercised that right within the full shadow of the law ... and then she twists the story to convince herself, and others, that she was doing what I asked her to do !!
That's the power of whiteness ... she stole my own child's childhood from me, and blames me for "not overcoming my addiction to marijuana" because I obviously didn't love my child enough to do so.
And to a large degree, the entire community signed on to the narrative ... that I'm "mentally and emotionally unstable" ... or that I'm a "defective drug-addict".
But why and how, those are the questions we seek to answer ...
We often ask what came first, the trauma or the addictions ?
And to be forthright, the guardian ad lidem in this case did not care about me smoking cannabis; he knew that I was seeking to be a present, attentive and loving father. And this was precisely the reason they knew they could use my child to control me; which is exactly what they tried to do.
The problem being, I had no where else to go, and no one else to help me ... I had no roots, except those given to me by my captors and their network; all of whom were happy to dispose of me at the first sign of inconvenience. There was no room for error.
But again, why?
I was raised in an arguably exclusive community ... high property taxes kept the riff-raff out, and the schools well-funded ... with left-leaning teachers no less!
And odd combination where we didn't even have the gateway learning program, we had something entirely different ... no government indoctrination ... just learning, reading, speaking, math, science, literature and languages, Spanish or German.
And I wasn't in the remedial classes ... molecular biology in 7th grade, into to physics by 9th, calculus by 11th grade. Psychology, sociology and anthropology mixed in between.
I was given the tools to make sense of what I was experiencing ... but this didn't mean anyone wanted to listen ... no sir ... this only served to make me more of a threat to anyone who got close; they too would have to change.
I became a social leper; even those who I might be known to associate with were branded as unsavory as well ... because Minneapolis is a very small community; and this made those with whom I did connect with that much more interesting, I suppose.
Minnesota doesn't have a large enough non-white community to scare white people; that's really what it comes down to ... everyone in the community is somehow subservient to white and/or white passing people.
This means that there can be no perspectives beyond the pale of white sanctioned ideas and behaviors. And any possibility is isolated and left to hopefully die on the vine, so to speak.
Which remains curious, especially from the mouths of open capitalists, the entire thesis of which is predicated on a diversity diverse enough to perpetuate innovation.
Though again, we find ourselves against the wall of "white-sanctioned" innovation; only that which benefits whiteness first is allowed.
As in this way, the very idea that there could be another way, a different path; white Jesus died on a cross to prove that there was, there is, no better way ... than for all non-white people to die on crosses for whiteness singing praise and hallelujah for the opportunity to do so ...
Uff, sorry for that, but I needed to get it out!
Anywho ... that is the crux of the matter, the idea that a new idea could come from anything other than a white mind, or the seed of a white mind, is heretical in certain circles.
Circles larger than a hemisphere, to be sure.
And this is the society that has been built; a society which is composed of words largely written by white men, in which white men openly claim that there are not enough studies of white men for them to consume and thereby comprehend their own plight as white men.
A society in which a white man will swear up to heaven and down to the depths of hell that they are not white ... or if they are, that it's not their fault, or their choice, and that they are conscious of the privilege ... so we're all on the same team.
And if I can't accept that fact, then I'm racist; and just as bad as the people we're supposedly fighting ... bro ... who's fighting?
I'm trying to survive while you skim the fat off the milk, selling delusions and racialized fairytales.
Uff, ok ... so there was once a kid who told me one thing, and then said another.
- Apparently I am not allowed to use the word slave, or allowed to allege that someone has been treated like a slave ... because I am not Black.
- This is true, I am not Black.
- I do not claim to be Black.
- Apparently a few years ago they claimed to be retiring from activism ... now that's a privilege ... if ever there was one.
The issue being that this individual has dramatically lighter skin than me, no matter what time of year it is ... while my use of the word slave wasn't ever used in a durogotory sense, I never said it as insult nor outside the context the participants agreed to before ever engaging the conversation.
And so we find ourselves in the land of fictive kinship and porous community boundaries. Where again, Minnesota doesn't have the autonomy to call-in, or call-out, such behavior; which is a consequence of a larger pattern found in white communities as well.
Society rewards those who evade accountability ... almost as though it rewards those best at perpetuating delusion ... One look at the recent MSNBC / Hassan Piker interview really illustrates how far the delusion has been carried.
Believe it or not, I always like the idea of accountability ... it was something, it is something, to work towards, to improve ... because the results are both infinite and ever evolving; both tangible and intangible.
But what then does accountability look like ... it means first acknowledging one's ability to lie to themselves. Then it means getting through this tendency, and then realizing, one never does get through it; and the objective is consistent, if not perpetual meditation to remain consciously free of it.
The next step is to discern what one truly wants, free of the lies ... what is the real objective.
For me, it was to be free ... so that my child my know what that takes, and what that means.
So that I could finally be free ... of everyone who ever tried to confine me ...
Free to breathe, free to work on the things that interest me, with ... well if not support, no one trying to take more than I'm willing or able to give ... while I toil away at my own curiousities and interests.
I know, it all sounds so selfish ... but there is also a sense of capitalism and economic efficiency about it all too ... as in ... when doing the things I love, follow my honest curiosity ... I'll work on the problems and ideas without even thinking about such things as work ... I'll work even when I'm not at work; constantly pondering improvements and possible modifications ...
That is simply the mind of a man at rest ... the stereotypical, architypical man at rest ... thinking for the shear joy of thought, when not feeling for the simple joy of being able to feel.
So what are my curiosities ...
First off, data ... nom nom nom ... so I've finally put together the scripts to start building DataSnaxx; the sibling site of DigiSnaxx!
This data includes stocks, treasuries, commodities, consumer price indexes and more. All of the data I'm interested to collect, so that I can see the pictures that I want to see ... not saying that each picture will say what I want hear, but my preferred lens through which to process what is happening globally.
Information is initially being gathered from Yahoo!Finance, and the St Louis Federal Reserve's FRED; more sources to be added.
I'm still finalizing the internal API, and I need to design the actual dashboard, or at least get something to start with ... uff, excited though!
The place that I'm living at ... we have to ration the water, climate change etc ... so this is an interesting component I'll document as well.
Though for the first time in my 42 years of life, I have a room to call my own ... and well ... that feels special to me.
