Madame Thursday

Jul. 29, 2012 at 4:04pm with 101 notes

Reblogged from seekingwillow

How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America

bankuei:

An amazing excerpt from the book.

You should just click the link and read.

I think the reason I saw this linked on a mainstream site isn’t the writing, but rather, that there’s probably a significant number of white folks who are nodding at the point of self hate, but ignoring WHAT IS CREATING the self hate to begin with.

White violence. White amnesia. White projection. It’s the thing that gets people to focus on black on black crime while ignoring police violence, banks lying to people and jacking them out of money, policies of neglect for schools, neighborhoods, healthcare, apartheid-style race imprisonment, job discrimination and more.

Always easier to say the victim does it to themselves and magically erase the person who set it up, encouraged it, kept it going, and profited at the end of the day. It’s like torturing people in a prison cell and leaving a noose hanging and then when they finally kill themselves going, “See?!? They did it to themselves!”

Yeah, we see you. And you’ve never had the courage to see yourself. And we see that too.

___

”…It’s like torturing people in a prison cell and leaving a noose hanging and then when they finally kill themselves going, “See?!? They did it to themselves!”

This bit here hits hard, just reminding me of a kaliscope of life possibilities and memories; of bullies from all stripes and placements in life who point to people who self-harm physically and go ‘See, they’re doing that to themselves’ as if they weren’t pushed, prodded, poked and driven to it. “They’re nothing but trouble”; As if trouble hadn’t long found them and reached in and started clawing.

At how fighting, drinking, ‘swinging back’ and more isn’t seen as self-harm. Self-harm somehow is only young white girls who cut and mark themselves; which is bad enough for any human being feeling that much pain. But it’s never a brown girl, far less a brown or black boy doing such a thing. It’s never getting into fights cause it’s the only time you feel. It’s never drugs. It’s never lashing out at others cause nothing you do makes you feel anything on yourself anymore and you end up numbly angry-envious that OTHER people can feel anything at all or worse even feel good things.

A whole subset of peoples slowly drowning in PTSD, and no one wants to pay attention to how they go all banged and bruised up in the first place.