This Is Not the Life I Ordered -- We Really Are All the Same After All

 There are some good ones on both sides that get a bad rap because good, decent, empathetic, human-loving people are the real minority in this country.

I used to hate it when wt people would tell me "You're not like the other ones." But I also knew what they meant, and shamefully, privately agreed even. For I knew how disingenuous of me it was to pretend I didn't get what they meant just because being proud to be bk was something forced onto me no matter how revolted I often was by some of my communities' cultural attributes. Similarly, there are a lot of people I could say that about who are wt in today's unabashed racism renaissance. Simply, there are some of us that they like and there are some of them that we like. To quote a broken clock, "There are good people on both sides." We need to find a way to integrate these two communities and leave the ones no one likes on both sides somewhere else. Ideally together with their guns, their Jesus, and their h*nky-tonk accents. Because evangelist country bumpkin h*lllbillies and churchy, basic bks/ghetto rats are so much alike it's the biggest irony of racism in this country. They sound alike, they worship alike, they even kind of look alike if you erase skin color. (Anyone else notice that?) I can't count how many times I've thought that looking at clips of MAGA rallies on television and thinking of the kinds of willfully ignorant Jesus freaks and country bumpkins that are equally present in the bk community.

At the end of the day, we need to stop equating certain values and cultural norms with phenotypical traits. If only both groups would stop perpetuating the very same stereotypes and then pointing at the other without realizing that the great majority of Americans are exactly the same, regardless of color.