Al chet sheh-chatati l'fanecha: A plague of prejudice(s) :(
Al chet sheh-chatati l'fanecha--for the sin that I have sinned before You.
You might as well start here. Seriously, is it even possible to be white like me and not be a racist?
Here's what I read on Facebook (unfortunately, I can't copy and paste, so give me a minute to copy by eye): Ijeoma Oluo said, "The beauty of anti-racism is that you don't have to pretend to be free of racism to be an anti-racist. Anti-racism is the commitment to fight racism wherever you find it, including in yourself. And it's the only way forward."
I'm working on it.
Then there's, well, I guess for me a few lessons needed regarding sexual and gender diversity. When I was a teenager in the 1960s, there was no such thing as being "out of the closet''--you could loose your job, your home, your family, and even your life if anyone found out that you were gay. (Unfortunately, I'm not sure the "losing your life" part ever went away.) I was literally in my twenties when I first heard the word "bisexual," and roughly 68 before I first heard the term "gender non-binary." And there was that interesting time about 15 years ago when a friend and long-ago ex-boyfriend came out as a transgender woman. At his her recent Zoom memorial service, all of his her New York friends agreed that none of us had handled the transition very well, and that he'd had to leave New York State to become a she.
Really, Shira, did you have to stare at that trans woman for the several days of that group study session last December? She didn't ask to be born in that body. You owe her an apology.
I'm working on it.
This one is so new to me that I don't even know what to call it. The closest I can get is "fat shaming." It's a bias against people who are, um, heavier than average. (?)
Again, I'm copying by eye from Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10164065407300565&set=pcb.10164065407735565&type=3&theater):
"Stop moralizing food. Stop demonizing food groups. Stop worshiping diets. If you're missing that inner calibration that tells you what you need to eat and when to stop, talk to an eating disorder specialist. It astonishes me that I experienced decades of this madness before I was referred to someone qualified to help."
Honestly, it never occurred to me that will-power was not the problem, that being overweight might actually be a genetic glitch. Does anyone blame anyone for having been born legally blind?
If you have access to Facebook, I strongly recommend that you read the entire post. Many thanks to Eliana Light for sharing this on her Facebook page.
We shame people who are above average in weight, and sometimes even those who are under the average weight. Why do we pay attention to such things, and allow ourselves to get distracted from what's really important?
Again, I'm working on it.
1 Comments:
Shira, here is a URL to the patrilineal thread along with a new response there by me:
http://onthefringe_jewishblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/p-i-discuss-patrilineal-descent.html#comments
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