One thing I can most certainly tell you is that, when my internalized racism was at its peak, being “not stereotypically black” played a role in it. I felt like both black people and white people were so focused on my race that they forgot that I’m an individual.
I’d get called an “Oreo” and that kind of shit for something as harmless as liking metal. I couldn’t just be a metalhead who happens to be black. Nah, that must raise eyebrows. Having gone through such massive amounts of internalized racism, I definitely know some aspects of where it can come from.
It took a major paradigm shift in how I was perceiving being black in America for me to overcome it. The stereotypes were just one aspect of why my internalized racism got so bad, and it wasn’t even the biggest reason.
I also saw posts by reactionary queer people (think /lgbt/ types) that reinforced the notion that POC are more likely to be queerphobic. This effectively led me to think, “If I’m queer and black, then black people are my enemy, and I should hate them.”
Nowadays, my thinking has certainly changed. It’s no longer “Black people are more homophobic, so I should hate my own race because I’m queer.” It’s more “White people will be racist to me, even the queer ones, and cishet people will be queerphobic to me, even the black ones.” It seemed as if I was pinning black homo/transphobia on race instead of just the fact that it’s black cishet people in particular being this way, just as white cishet people often do. However, I never got any shit or any kind of infighting from my fellow black queer people. Even beyond racism, forms of gatekeeping like transmedicalism and enbyphobia in the trans community are things I’ve only seen white trans people commit.
Definitely based for acknowledging that class seems to trump race in these circumstances, even if people don’t realize it. There seems to be a real lack of awareness of how all of this shit ties together in the grand scheme of things. Myopic, as you said.
One thing I can most certainly tell you is that, when my internalized racism was at its peak, being “not stereotypically black” played a role in it. I felt like both black people and white people were so focused on my race that they forgot that I’m an individual.
I’d get called an “Oreo” and that kind of shit for something as harmless as liking metal. I couldn’t just be a metalhead who happens to be black. Nah, that must raise eyebrows. Having gone through such massive amounts of internalized racism, I definitely know some aspects of where it can come from.
It took a major paradigm shift in how I was perceiving being black in America for me to overcome it. The stereotypes were just one aspect of why my internalized racism got so bad, and it wasn’t even the biggest reason.
I also saw posts by reactionary queer people (think /lgbt/ types) that reinforced the notion that POC are more likely to be queerphobic. This effectively led me to think, “If I’m queer and black, then black people are my enemy, and I should hate them.”
Nowadays, my thinking has certainly changed. It’s no longer “Black people are more homophobic, so I should hate my own race because I’m queer.” It’s more “White people will be racist to me, even the queer ones, and cishet people will be queerphobic to me, even the black ones.” It seemed as if I was pinning black homo/transphobia on race instead of just the fact that it’s black cishet people in particular being this way, just as white cishet people often do. However, I never got any shit or any kind of infighting from my fellow black queer people. Even beyond racism, forms of gatekeeping like transmedicalism and enbyphobia in the trans community are things I’ve only seen white trans people commit.
Definitely based for acknowledging that class seems to trump race in these circumstances, even if people don’t realize it. There seems to be a real lack of awareness of how all of this shit ties together in the grand scheme of things. Myopic, as you said.