With the recent events in Charlottesville, well the world, and our ~fearless~ leader's comments, it's important for POC to kind of step back and heal because well... it's f*cking traumatizing to watch this unfold.
It's traumatizing to watch those of your own kind get beaten with sticks and run over for simply being a person of color or an ally.
It's traumatizing to hear and see that a group that has supposedly been gone is still prevalent and that racism isn't a thing of the past and of the elder generation. (There were plenty of college aged kids there proudly chanting nazi slogans)
It's traumatizing to see people be like: "Hey I know they are Nazis, and their speech is calling for the genocide of millions of people, whether a POC or Jewish, but we really have to hear both sides and both sides are bad and violent and blah blah blah."
Let's get this shit straight: Me proclaiming that my life is actually worth a damn is not violent.
During the 1950s segregationists would very often do what the President did and condemn the "extremists on both sides." The actors on these sides? The KKK and the NAACP. One fighting for...humanity? The other, white power. But hey, you do you.
The fact that we have to sit here and be told that we have to protect the speech of literal Nazis, after having a damn war over it, and we should be ashamed for trying to counter people who wish to do us harm and take not only our rights but our lives is sickening.
The fact that I can sit here and still see certain people who I view to be allies say nothing because they don't like talking about politics or racial things, whether it's uncomfortable to them or "just because they're conservative and every liberal is gonna jump down their throat so imma just sit here" is traumatizing. Some of us don't get that as we have to deal with it every time we wake up. But, hey, keep doing you!
The fact that people are trying to defend confederate statues (even in states that weren't even a thing until well after the civil war) and try to equate those figures to Washington or MLK is mind-boggling
What's been going on is nothing short of just absolute absurdity. But I know one thing for sure: There is no terrorism in me claiming my life is worth a damn.