For the first time in my life, I just lived a full year without a single white person around me.<\/p>\n
For the first time in my life, I didn\u2019t share any kind of personal space with a white person. First time, ever. <\/p>\n
It\u2019s been very easy to deal with. You could say that I Got Out. And no, I haven\u2019t seen the movie, that shit looked good and far too close to my life. Ex-life.<\/p>\n
I didn\u2019t plan all this at all, it just happened. The racial climate in this country and this world just kind of nudged me into this situation.<\/p>\n
An insane storm of powerful things have been happening to me. There are many, many things to ponder on.<\/p>\n
For instance I\u2019ve always wondered why I never was attracted to D&D, a giant pillar in the world of games.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s because I\u2019d been performing my whole life without realizing it. It felt vain to act on another layer. I just didn\u2019t know why I felt like not wanting *at all* to pretend to be a paladin or a rogue. It\u2019s clear as hell now.<\/p>\n
It goes deep. My absurd resilience and discipline come from living in a world 99.9% white for a very long time. A world that corrodes and doesn\u2019t care about me, ultimately. My tech career is filled with terrible stories. After decades through a dozen game companies, I have yet to work directly with someone looking like me. My current day job happened because a black woman trusted me. I exceeded all her expectations. It\u2019s been wonderful, except for the reality of getting paid what a black man in America is getting paid. Resilience, blending with self-care when necessary. Black poverty, black upper middle class, white elitism. I\u2019m visiting them everyday. So many layers. Constant code-switching. Learning. Paying attention. Deciphering. My roots running in opposite directions with no one really grasping the entirety of who I am. There\u2019s no time to explain.<\/p>\n
Black love \u2014brotherhood, sisterhood\u2014 showed up. It makes me feel like I didn\u2019t know that love could be so real. So real and smiling. So instant. It\u2019s prodigious. You have no idea.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s very painful yet I\u2019m blossoming. No time to play the \u201cwhat if\u201d in my head. I already know it\u2019d be different.<\/p>\n
This new paradigm makes me a lot more sensitive about gentrification. Not only I see it happening with tremendous detail by biking every day on the same streets for years, but because of my personal story, it feels like\u2026 A hunt. Can white people just relax and stop obsessing about growth, I fucking wish.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m grateful to know good white people though. They helped me out. You guys are far too rare, that\u2019s for sure.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s also not the same. I don\u2019t overcompensate either. I know bad people are everywhere. But black life is enveloping me like a thick bath robe after a burning hot shower following a rough day and it feels so good.<\/p>\n
It feels so good.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For the first time in my life, I just lived a full year without a single white person around me. For the first time in my life, I didn\u2019t share any kind of personal space with a white person. First time, ever. It\u2019s been very easy to deal with. You could say that I Got […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2939"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2939"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2939\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2940,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2939\/revisions\/2940"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2939"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2939"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/har0ld.com\/playground\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2939"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}