All the Sad Young Pretty Girls of Color

April 13, 2012

Knowing your subjectivity will never truly be accessible, or palpable to the white imagination is, at its core, an empathy issue. Empathy is to be able to imagine yourself in someone else’s shoes. You don’t have to understand everyone but you have to be able to feel for them when you think about who they are, and where they’ve been.

Empathy should be colorblind. Some white people can’t, and won’t read anything by women of color. Women of color are so far outside the scope of the imagination for them. Lest we are performing for them, women of color are invisible. Show me a woman of color who has a readership but doesn’t touch on the touchy social fact of race, and I’ll show you someone who made a decision to appeal to white sensibilities before her own sensibilities. I’ll show you a performance artist well-versed in the art of shucking, and jiving.

Where’s the woman of color Elizabeth Wurtzel, or Lauren Slater? How the fuck can there be two borderline identical books about white girls with depression (Prozac Diary and Prozac Nation), but not a single book like that from the perspective of a woman of color? Where are all the sad young pretty girls of color?

Readers of color know how to default to white. We know how to fade to white in our minds. We can, and do place ourselves in white people’s shoes. Effortlessly. Too bad our shoes don’t fit anyone else but us.

This is in response to this.

Relevant.

(Source: fatwasandfanboys, via unicornology)

1:36pm | URL: http://tmblr.co/Zu71EyJbd_F_

(Notes: 315)