#inalienable truths

We were raised to believe that the racial injustices of this country were bought and paid for by the blood and perseverance of our ancestors. We were told the fight was over, that it had already been won, and we were lied to. They told us a soft history.

They didn't tell us about the race riots in Tulsa, Oklahoma on May 31, 1921. They didn't tell us the first terrorist attack using planes was perpetrated by White American law enforcement officers when they dropped incendiary bombs on an affluent Black neighborhood killing thousands of people.

They didn't tell us how many lives were lost at the hands of our own citizens. They isolated the violence, giving us faces like that of Emmet Till to represent thousands of injustices without actually telling us how or how many. They gave us Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to show us how peacefully equality was gained. They gave us half-truths, glossing over the harsh reality of the world. 

They didn't tell us how long the protests lasted or how many riots ensued. And they didn't tell us how many lives were stolen. They told us we lived in a world of equality but they conveniently left out the crimes against humanity that led to it.

This soft history isn't good enough to dismantle the foundation of Black bones and Black blood White Americans used to build this country. We need to learn the truth as children because silence and ignorance are why we live in a society where institutionalized racism still exists and is thriving. Our passive ignorance is why White cops can kill unarmed Black men, women, and children and suffer no consequences.

 And this is how to start. We must raise our daughters differently. We must also raise our sons differently. We do a great disservice to boys in how we raise them. We stifle the humanity of boys. We define masculinity in a very narrow way. Masculinity becomes this hard small cage and we put boys inside the cage. We teach boys to be afraid of fear. We teach boys to be afraid of weakness, of vulnerability.

... But by far the worst thing we do to males, by making them feel that they have to be hard, is that we leave them with very fragile egos. The more “hard man” a man feels compelled to be, the weaker his ego is. And then we do a much greater disservice to girls because we raise them to cater to fragile egos of men. We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls, “You can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful, but not too successful, otherwise you would threaten the man. If you are the bread winner in your relationship with a man, you have to pretend that you’re not. Especially in public. Otherwise you will emasculate him.” But what if we question the premise itself? Why should a woman’s success be a threat to a man. What if we decide to simply dispose of that word, and I don’t think there is an English word I dislike more than, “emasculation.”

... Because I am female, I am expected to aspire to marriage. I am expected to make my life choices always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important. Now, marriage can be a good thing. It can be a source of joy and love and mutual support, but why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage and we don’t teach boys the same?

I’m trying to unlearn many of the lessons of gender that I internalized when I was growing up. But I sometimes still feel very vulnerable in the face of gender expectations. 

My own definition of feminist is: 

feminist : a man or a woman who says, “Yes, there’s a problem with gender as it is today, and we must fix it, we must do better.”