“I’m a person of color and I don’t believe racism exists because I have never felt discriminated against.”

Good for you???

Was it your light skin? You cis gender identity? The fact you live in a “good neighborhood?” Your heterosexuality? The weaponizing of your melanin not against white supremacy but the other melanin who don’t know their place?

Probably a combination of these that apply and those I didn’t even mention. (Hint: How marginalized are you?)

I used to envy you – unaware to the subtle jabs at your humanity and personhood. It flies over you instead of through you like the rest of us. You don’t have to feel second class, less human, ugly, weird, other – not normal.

But if I see the car coming at me, I can get out of the way. You didn’t even notice you were crossing the street.

To live comfortably is to live ignorantly. Deny the dangers around you. Laugh at jokes that perpetuate the idea that people like you and me aren’t as good as the Becky with the good hair. (Fuck you, Becky.)

V. S. Ramachandran (The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human) explains that humans, the only animals capable of metaphysical thought, have the most complex humor. Why do we find someone slipping on a banana to be funny? They could have really gotten hurt, breaking a bone or being impaled by a foreign object? Because it didn’t happen. It might be a defense mechanism, knowing the danger is close but not close enough.

So I suppose that danger is closer to me than it is you.

Go ahead and feel uncomfortable.

I wish discomfort was the worst thing I could feel.