Hello em_poc hexbears! I’m so sorry this thread is late today, totally my bad. I hope the new year has been good for you all so far! Any plans, goals, resolutions? I’m going to try to read more theory this year!

As always, this thread is EM POC ONLY

  • BGDelirium [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    2 days ago

    Lying in bed and can’t get back to sleep

    I’ve never really articulated this thought out loud so here’s to trying

    As a mixed-race person I’ve always felt a bit more isolated than my other POC friends who identify as one ethnicity and obviously belong to that ethnic group. I present as maybe white-passing with an Asian tint [ethnically ambiguous].

    Just kind of envious of most people, white, POC or otherwise who have a shared cultural background to fall back on, while I just have my general interests, leftyness, and dirt-poor upbringing as points of conversation.

    Any other Hexbears in this boat?

    • Belly_Beanis [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 day ago

      Half white, half Filipino here. I’ve found more acceptance among non-whites than whites throughout my lifetime. Especially for family. Whites will never accept you as one of them because they believe in bullshit one-drop rules. It’s caused a lot of stress for me because I get this weird imposter syndrome where I can’t tell if I did something wrong or if whitey is just being racist.

      I mostly regret not speaking any of the Filipino languages and the disconnect it’s caused, separating me from that part of myself. My Spanish is shit, but I can understand certain things more than Tagalog (where I understand nothing at all). But in the Philippines, Spanish is the language of former oppressors, so AFAIK it’s fallen out of use. There’s so much I don’t know about the homeland because I was raised outside of it among white devils.

      Another struggle is identifying with other minorities in the US. There’s generational trauma in my family due to colonialism, but it’s nothing like the slavery experienced by black Americans. It does have some overlap with what Native Americans went through, but then their genocide was so thorough and all-encompassing it’s not comparable. We have more in common with Latin America than we do with China and Vietnam, while also not being part of Latin America. So there’s all these groups where our problems intersect, yet those problems are different enough you can’t find the support needed (maybe I’m not phrasing this right).