Males are violent and rapey.

After two days on the new meds, I have more energy and feel more clear-headed. I'm kinda bothered by the idea that the meds are working because I was actually clinically depressed. I'm still kinda miserable, but it's a more purely psychological misery now, not something that's in my body so much. Henceforth, I'm going to try to tag posts 'tmi' for potentially unwanted medical information like the following: I feel like bowel movements are coming more easily and abdominal cramping has decreased.

No, actually, I'm not going to bother with the tagging.

Right now I am taking a break from drilling vocabulary because I was stressing out and feeling that I was giving myself abdominal discomfort. This is the first time I've ever experienced abdominal discomfort as something connected to my mood or state of mind. The more worked up I got, the worse I felt.

Earlier this evening, I had decided that I would post about a particular type of intra-group racism, but I feel like I lack the energy for that or maybe I have only the energy to mention it briefly.

I think maybe this is a thing with all minority ethnic groups in the United States (probably elsewhere as well): group members get paranoid about losing their cultural identity in the face of what they see as the encroaching dominant culture. Every member of the group behaving in lockstep with the sub-culture takes on a sort of desperate importance. And in the case of my family at least, mistreatment by the dominant group (white-privileged people) transformed into a disgust with what is perceived as that group's culture.

So there was a venomous hatred in my family of "acting white." I think I was the only immediate family member to be accused of this, however. I spoke, thought, and behaved the most different. It wasn't deliberate; it was almost certainly a manifestation of my (then undiagnosed) learning disability: I didn't automatically pick up my parents' or siblings' behaviors, perspectives, or speech patterns like neurotypical kids tend to do. I didn't pick up the speech patterns typical of our ethnic group, and my family noticed and commented on it. I spoke then, as I do now, like something I'd write, something you'd find in a non-fiction book. I do use more slang now, partially because it saves me on the energy required for speaking.

I just now remembered an uncle visiting us once and, after listening to my sister and I talk, asking my dad why his kids spoke "so proper." My dad then suggested that I spoke the most "proper." I was uncomfortable with this but I knew I'd get in trouble if I uttered anything other than agreement. I'm not sure I fully understood the meaning of "proper" at that age, but I knew it wasn't something positive.

My dad wouldn't allow me to listen to rock music because he regarded it as "white people music." I'd saved up my leftover lunch money and bought some alternative rock CDs in junior high school. When my dad found out, I was in trouble and he took them away permanently.

At the time, during my adolescence, I think I was preoccupied with trying to fly under his radar. Now that I'm an adult, I've recognized how racist and incredibly disrespectful of my individuality this behavior was. I had no preference or bias for any culture and was simply doing what I liked. Late childhood/early adolescence was the beginning of a life-long issue with racist expectations of others in my ethnic group, and it's one of the reasons why I prefer to avoid that group. There are similar things common to other groups, like not wanting the children to date or marry outside the group regardless of the child's preferences. That just now brought back a traumatic memory.

One of my sisters was a piece of shit who for some reason delighted in taking my dad's side (or his girlfriend's side) against me even though our father was abusive. One day shortly after school, she went through my backpack without my knowledge or permission and took out a little journal-type book I'd bought to trade notes with other girls in my seventh-grade math class. She showed it to my dad with the obvious intention of getting me in trouble, and my dad found a note a girl had written to me that probably said something about me getting into a relationship with a boy in our class. My dad asked me whether this boy was white, and I said yes. His eyes got large and he became enraged. My dad was a racist. He would probably rather have killed me than see me in a relationship with a pale-face person. I was afraid. Of course my worthless mother did not intervene, nor did my dad's other two girlfriends. Fortunately, he did not get too violent, mostly just threatening.

I would have been much better off with legitimate warnings about white-privileged people rather than the racism and threats my family communicated. I didn't listen to them because I had never experienced racism; they all treated me worse than any white-privileged person ever had. In fact, the racism I've experienced from my own ethnic group has been far more overt than almost anything I've experienced from yt. So I've never really experienced any sense of solidarity from this group of people, which is a damned shame because that's supposed to be a bullwark against the racism of the dominant culture. When these people find out that I don't have the personality traits they expect me to have, they act surprised, confused, and suddenly awkward. There's a lack of social skills for dealing with people who are different, and I'm beyond sick of it. I expect racism when I meet one of them. That just now occurred to me. How shitty and sad.

Part of this is a class issue: it's been my experience that lower-class people have stricter social mores and are less familiar and comfortable with human diversity and things outside their upbringing and sub-culture. That is a big reason why I decided to move here despite the high cost of living: to get away from lower-class people. It's not just the ignorance and rigid social expectations, it's the crime and social dysfunction. They smoke more, their pets are half-feral, their kids are half-feral, they're louder and less considerate. Impossible to live around.

This minority group behavior I've described is evidence of internalized racism. It's sad. These people seem so desperate for a sense of identity or group belonging that they take pride and find comfort in self-imposed limitations, a kind of self-stereotyping, with some of the very same stereotypes their oppressors apply to them, and they ostracize those of us who don't fit the stereotypes, thereby failing at their supposed goal of group unity. The sub-culture, the abstraction that is supposedly holding the group together, has become more important than flesh-and-blood group members.