Reading the struggle session in the trans megathread just makes me glad ethnic enclaves are a thing. My experience with various diasporic communities is that there’s a huge correlation between how mentally fucked up you are and how often you’re surrounded by white people. If someone’s formative experience is in an ethnic enclave, they’re nowhere near as self-loathing as someone who’s the only POC in an all-white HS for example. And Lord help you if you’re a POC with adoptive white parents in a town that’s 95% white. And if not self-hatred, they always have a chip on the shoulder where they overcompensate. It’s like the more you’re surrounded by white people, the more likely you either have deeply-entrenched self-hatred or you have a massive chip on your shoulder constantly trying to assert your POCness.

This ties to the concept of passing. Being white-passing conveys enormous benefits of course, but if you’re in an ethnic enclave, there’s less pressure to pass for the sake of not getting hate-crimed because if nothing else, there’s safety in numbers. It’s vastly different if you’re stuck in a 95% white place because being that 5% makes you stand out and there’s enormous penalties for standing out.

Being queer is basically like the POC in a 95% white town and my fear is that all the brainworms and general mental fuckupness of a POC being stuck in a 95% white town is present in almost all queer people, meaning far more queer people have well-entrenched self-hatred and are far more susceptible to the siren call of assimilation. A queer safe space is basically an attempt at trying to create the queer equivalent of an ethnic enclave except they lack numbers so the safe space doesn’t extend beyond a building. But there’s massive qualitative differences between a safe space that doesn’t extend beyond a building vs a safe space that covers an entire city block vs a safe space that covers the entire city period. There’s the cliche of a Black American being transformed after visiting Africa into a Pan-African New Afrikan and the cliche rings true because going from an environment that’s only 35% Black to an entire continent where everyone looks like you is transformative. How could it not?

Sometimes, you just need a break from crackers, and a POC living in an ethnic enclave can spend the entire day outside socializing with other people while at the same time not interact with a single white person. Can a queer person do the same with the cishets?