Facebook Publication Date: 43959.295138889

***Required Reading***

(Edited to add this: Okay. It’s the end of my desk job work day, and now I have switched hats to do second shift here. And now I can take a count. Over 250 of you were reached with this post so far. *This post that was clear about it being required reading*.

Exactly nineteen of you responded as of 530pm Pacific.

Because I am self constrained to kind candor , I’m just going to leave these facts here without commentary.)

****

Please indicate that you have done so in the comments. Please also add your own thoughts and reflection.

(Absolutely no reacts. Comments ONLY)

A friend recently wrote (lightly paraphrased because the post is not public and I want to honor and protect her privacy):

‘My feed is filled with the death of my Black people. And it is all overtly or covertly connected to White Supremacy [LoR sez-including the voyeuristic and sadistic need to share them]. I hate living in a land where that is ok.’

Mine too. But it doesn’t stop there.

My inbox-my personal inbox, not Lace on Race- is filled with such things, placed there by ‘helpful’ friends who think that I should experience trauma along with my morning coffee or my lunch break or my evening ruby port, along with not-so-subtle demands (phrased oh so nicely of course, that I do something about this Right Now!)

I understand that I do this work full time.

(Along with a full-time desk job, because 2 1/2 years and 4000 followers later, this space can’t support itself)

Stipulated.

But I need a break, some respite, some ability to practice authentic self-care, and when I’m scrolling through my personal feed I want to be able to choose the time and place of the content that I consume.

The dynamic here is that white people do not appreciate the difference between being informational and being trauma inducing, and that their need to prove to me that they are up on these things but want me to do the heavy lifting, while they praise themselves for their ‘activism’, even when they dump the burden and responsibility to me after they finish massaging the finger they used to forward it to me–

Welp.

That is telling.

These same people, when I share posts or memes, or when I write my own reflections, slide right by them, or wear out their thumbs doing hearts and likes and sad faces but nothing else, or, when they do share, they put it in a restricted friends list so they can preach to their very curated choirs and avoid the ramifications of living their convictions out loud to people who may not agree with them and could hurt them personally or professionally tells me that for them this work and conviction is at best a hobby and at worst a Bloodsport.

That they fail to realize that they are not-so-diluted perpetrators of the same violence that they want to make sure that I see speaks to a lack of empathy and fictive Imagination, and dehumanizes me by thinking that I can absorb barrages of trauma because they underestimate my ability to feel pain, whether psychic or somatic.

There is indeed a real difference, a real delineation, between Lace Watkins the person and Lace on Race, the persona.

There’s a 98% overlap there, but that 2% is the one I hold in reserve for my own mental and physical health, psyche, and soul.

That they feel entitled to that 2% is disheartening.

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