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Your Privilege Makes You Complacent

Waking up now...

By Emily the Period RDPublished 4 years ago 3 min read
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Your Privilege Makes You Complacent
Photo by Pawel Janiak on Unsplash

It’s almost like when you’re white everything else is blotted out. Or least the things that don’t apply to you are blurred, a little more challenging to visualize. Fuzzy around the edges and the muffled sound like when you’re coming up from underwater. Coming up for air.

“I can’t breathe.”

You can’t hear the screaming – today’s voices, yesterday’s voices, the voices of millions in the years before. Terror, joy, pain, power. Songs about freedom and songs asking for justice. Begging for justice. And the edges of the blur you see are bright, colourful, smoky. Buildings on fire and bodies on fire and people making fire to carry through the dark. What a shame the buildings couldn’t withstand the flames. What a shame for the humans inside.

If only the rules had been followed, you say. Things are stolen but thankfully lives are more important than televisions, right? Thankfully bricks are less appetizing to hold when they weren’t put there with good intentions. When they weren’t meant for building but for breaking down and never for the right reasons.

If only there weren’t a handful of bad people. A handful too many in a hands-on profession. Bad apples always spoil the applesauce. A good one can’t undo the damage. Breaking down doors and crashing through windows. Crushing airways.

The fruits of our labour aren’t even of our own labour. Histories of migration patterns where the takeaway should be much more than it is. Bodies turning out babies turning into more bodies. Bodies created to do the work with and without a whip. We think of watermelon but quietly remember cotton. Railways underground that were somehow still policed, somehow a thing to start a war over. A war over who decided which bodies were worth buying. Who owns who?

It carried on medical science, you say. Without it we’d have nothing. Yes, it took sweat and tears and a relative lot of work, but it didn’t need to take blood or lives. The pain was felt. It was always felt. All it should have took was a clear lens. And some consent. The skin is the same no matter what colour.

And what of our families? Children brought into a world where the nasty details can be ignored. Wait until they’re older before they learn their history. Wait until they can ask more questions. Until the colour of their skin is suddenly a risk – when we realized that to exist in kindergarten was a danger. Will waiting bring them home again? Will waiting protect them from the gunshots fired when their hands, immersed in imagination and wonder, became weapons? Tell me, mama, did you hear them when they cried for theirs?

It’s just a little bit of hard work. Work a little harder, make a little more. If only the jobs were easier to find and the employers read the applications because the names didn’t scare them. Because the names were just what people would respond to and nothing more. If only the idea of pulling up your bootstraps was more airtight, if the straps were tighter and easier to pull. If getting the support you needed wasn’t about jumping through hoops and peeing in a cup and proving your worth every step of the way…

Are you worthy enough to live? Someone else gets to decide, it seems.

And here where you come in – out of your blur and into the noise. Into the chaos that is beautiful and awful. Into the smoke and the screams. A second birth with a similar pain. Here is where it is asked of you: Are you the one who decides?

Or are you letting someone else?

Welcome to the world, little one. Time to wake up.

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About the Creator

Emily the Period RD

I help people with periods navigate menstrual health education & wellness with a healthy serving of sass (and not an ounce of nutrition pseudoscience).

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