bleeding out

20 december

There is nobody left that is a racist, not anymore.

Neither there is anybody that believes that a woman can’t do the work of a man.

And yet.

Just six letters. andyet. Six letters to tell the tale of our years. Six letters to humiliate us, to rub our noses with the stench of our unbelievable resilient prejudices. Six letters to illustrate all those daily small injuries that we do unto ourselves, those little cuts in our skin, those cuts that don’t even hurt no more, those cuts that bleed us away, and away.

Just imagine,for a moment, that it is all about the damage, about the bleeding, about the offenses. Just imagine that it is all about the daily price that we people of color pay. Just imagine. Then it would be easy, wouldn’t it? People of color could grow a thicker skin, as most of us have. Get resilient and never mind the discrimination. We will get other job anyway. And for the rest, for the ones that are not that hard, that resist the hardening, for them we have the bandages, the coagulant medicines. We have the open conversations and the positive posters with lots of different people smiling at us, we have got all the policy that creates safe spaces, that forbids the colored jokes, the pinching the butts of the ladies. We have got the governments that ask forgiveness, few hundred years later, for the genocides of colonization. And we have got the sculptures and the paintings and the monuments, we have got all that does remind us that we are not alone, that racists are wrong, that male chauvinist pigs belongs in the pigsty and not in the workfloor. If it all would be about the damage that it does to us, then it would be easy to solve. Not even, we are already solving it.

But it is not about us.

It is about you, you prejudiced fool. It is you who is loosing, it is your street and your city the ones that will not bloom as they could have. It is you that dirts yourself when you hate others, when you are scared of others, when you pre-judge the other. It is your loss. It is you that become this scared person that fears an imaginary enemy that has never existed. It is your fear that infects and corrupts us all, as if some sort of mutated and always mutating necrotizing virus, from which even Ebola is scared is killing us all. It is an autoimmune disease, that prejudice that you still have, my poor prejudiced fool. It is that disease, your fear, the one that is killing us all. Because I can grow a skin, I can reject and fight all the offenses that I have received and more. I will be always able to find another job, I will grow in despite of you.

But I’ll grow twisted. I’ll be angrier, I am angry and getting angrier every day. Your fear is not killing you alone, is killing me too. My anger is killing me, too.