On the button honesty

The title of this post is misleading. I don’t know how to deal with being weird. More importantly, I don’t know how to deal with being weird and black, which is a double whammy for a lot of people. My ideas don’t fit in with people’s idea of me, if you know what I mean. People like to put people in boxes, but I fucking hate boxes. The sort of all caps hate people reserve for great crimes. I’d like to say that race affects me more as I get older but it appears I’ve been the colourblind one all this time. In my younger years. (anyone who’s actually got some years under their belt look away now, I’m about to get real over angsty here) when I was 21 or whatever, I used to think race didn’t matter a jot. I was gonna go into whatever field no matter what anyone said. And I still think that. But I’ve started to realise the world isn’t as evolved as I’d like it to be. And what’s common sense to me isn’t common to everyone else. Maybe I’ve been the fool all this time, I don’t know. I’d like some comfy trust fund parents and to have my only angst be ‘will my parents cut me off’ as opposed to ‘will I get paid on time?’ but you can’t change that. And I wouldn’t be the person I was today if it weren’t for the burning desire to succeed, to excel, to be great at something, anything.

Jason Dike is a great fashion writer, journalist and thinker. I’ve had his blog in my reader for the last year or so, yet this latest post (pasted above) moved me. He’s right: ignorance just won’t fuck off die. No, Sir. It’s just evolving and as I get older the underlying notes of class prejudice and racism in people adopt new forms and blend. I hate it when people say, ‘Chav’. Do they know what that means? Probably not.

At school I had to worry about the skinheads and now I get shit from middle-class asians for listening to indie and, apparently, being a, ‘coconut’. I wasn’t white enough as a kid and now I’m not brown enough as a grown up.

To hell with them all.