Thread by @GeeDee215

i really do wish there were fewer barriers to ppl to getting therapy and more Black therapists for them to find.

https://twitter.com/JohniiTheRaven/status/1376192804838326274

That’s really all i can muster for this stuff at this point.

there are just so, so many spaces where Black people actively affirm other Black people and are reminded that they are valid *however they show up* that these people won't find... bc they actively don't bang with/distrust other Black ppl.

I think a lot about a conversation I had with David Eng and the book he co-authored called Racial Melancholia, Racial Disassociation. It's a book that is specifically about Asian American college students/subjects and the anxieties/neuroses they show up with when seeking therapy.

there's something he said that I think about a lot — about people creating valorizing storie sto tell themselves about the specific traumas and separation that attend immigration and the long tails of those traumas. (That is, they become stories of parental sacrifice/grit.)

it's a way to make sense of the way parents' pain shows up in *your* life and it also falls neatly onto the readily available narrative scaffolding of "meritocracy."

Anyway, I say all that to say if this isn't a version of that as it pertains to *integration.*

This feels like a story the kids of Black Boomer/Gen X parents who moved their kids to the suburbs for "good schools" or whatever tell themselves a lot. They had to make sense of a real, material proximity to white people and more attenuated relationships with Black people.

and not surprisingly, they adopted the logics of the white spaces they grew up in: the Black people who teased them bc they spoke like the white people they grew up around were, in their telling, people who disliked them for "being smart" or "talking proper."

so you have parents who are trying to make choices about what's best for their kids in a racist system — "which flavor of intense school segregation am i subjecting my kids to?" — and kids trying to make sense of antiblackness AND their social distance from Black people.

it makes sense that if you're socially distant from Black kids, and your relatively infrequent interactions with Black same-age peers are awkward and maybe fraught, that you tell yourself that Black people dislike you for reasons that are pretty aggrandizing.

You're not the only Black student in your AP classes because your school system is *racist.* No, you're the only Black student in the AP class because the other Black kids can't hack it. Or whatever.

Adolescence is trash. Adolescence and being isolated from Black people in white spaces at the same time? that sounds *horrible.*

But there are plenty of antiblack scripts available for people who are struggling with these issues to fall back on.

Next thing you know, you're pushing 30 and have never interrogated the story that helped you get through sophomore year of HS. It's just been over decade and a half of accretion.

This is abt navigating shitty choices in a racist system, but you're still suspicious of Black folx.

you've had to cop pleas for the casual antiblackness of your white friends and the white spaces you occupy and feel more comfortable in. that muscle is *very* developed.

But Black people, in the aggregate, are still on the hook for some shit that happened in the cafeteria.

i want to be better at extending grace to people who were really hurt during their school years in these ways.

But it's also important to underline that the racial dynamics of the cafeteria are not the racial dynamics of adulthood. There are different stakes to solidarity.

your social universe isn't being engineered by school segregation and residential segregation in the same way. you have agency.

anyway, yeah. this is a problem to be worked out with a therapist. Not "the Black community."

but also, consider the argument for NOT extending this grace.

ppl are supposed to *want* to pursue community w/ you you when you, at your big age, talk about "i don't really feel rock with Black people like that" —  in a world otherwise full of antiblackness?

Who has the time?