Audubon Ballroon (he/him)@maureen_w_hamblin, Black Royalty, wrote:
Grief and racism: Denial and self blame
In the last twenty-six years, I think I’ve gone through all the stages of grief regarding racism without even realizing it. For the first fifteen years,
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I was in denial. Deep, deep, deep denial.
This denial led me to abandon myself: my culture, my hair, my accent. It helped me cater to the white gaze just so I could fit in and survive. I am convinced that "Pick-me-ism" for anything—patriarchy, white supremacy, tribalism
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is a survival mechanism. Many times, I was told I was "so different" from other Black people, and I would smile hard because I thought it was a compliment. I didn’t know then that I had inherited internalized racism epigenetically from those who went before me.
Don’t get me wrong; once in a while, I’d write an angry post, and my Transition Year speech in secondary school was about racism.
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