Last Thursday night, before the kids even left, I started tearing out my dining room. I worked on it Friday, spent Saturday, Sunday, and Monday elsewhere, then spent yesterday with the cousins and then in class. I was exhausted and hit the sheets before 9pm. This morning, I finished in here. As in, it’s done except for steam cleaning the carpet. I am well pleased.

And this afternoon, because the whole goal of the open shelving was to see what I have so I can use it, and because this one puzzle hangs two inches over it’s assigned space…. I’m going to put it together on my cleared table.

Also, in case you see this post and we aren’t Facebook friends…you need to read what I wrote there this morning:

Anger is a tertiary emotion. One of the elements is usually fear, which is a response to a threat of some kind. Now, if we as white society have learned to fear the “angry black man,” maybe we need to ask why he’s angry. What of his have we threatened? His life through race related crime? His pride through systemic discrimination? His family by rigging the economic system in such a way that he cannot earn enough money to support his children except by turning to crime?

I think somehow, we’ve become convinced that being politically correct means we don’t talk about race in “polite circles.” “Politically correct” has become a way for white people to pretend that race and sexuality and all those other differences among us don’t matter. We can pretend not-white is equal to white male heterosexual. Clearly it is not.

I’ve been challenged this week, as I have been challenged multiple times over my academic career. “What are you going to do about it?” And I think my answer is that I am done being politically correct if it means couching my opinions in language that ignores the effect of race on what I have to say.
I think, also, that I will remind myself and my white friends that while we may rant about the racial, sexual, and whatever else kind of violence happens in this country, we sit in a place of relative safety. Especially the heterosexual males among us.

Maybe, just possibly, people who are darker than us and people who are not male or not heterosexual aren’t overly sensitive and looking for discrimination where it doesn’t exist. Maybe it’s really there, everywhere, and we in our whiteness don’t see it because we perpetuate it with our own willful ignorance. We should probably be ashamed of that.