Letter 8

Dear No One,

Here I sit at my laptop at 10:30 at night on May 31, 2020; writing a hurried letter to you with aim of posting it to Lost in Aporia before midnight. Again let me get just one post on the site before the end of the month. Is this a philosophical post, a post about growth, a short story, a poem, any of my creative writings, or ideas?! No. It is me trying to reach out to you No One. The last person I come to talk to but the first to listen. No One am I just lazy or pressed for time? Do I have no insights at all or just lack the words to describe them? Am I a failure or just a budding writer? I have no answers to these questions. My last letter to you described some aspects of my life and gave a glimpse of things going on in April. This should be the best time to write, there is so much going on, and yet, I have not been writing. There are a couple of factors, the biggest one being time, not having enough of it to complete all the things that I want to do. Perhaps I do not give myself enough credit No One. I mean there are a lot of things that I am trying to keep balanced, from work, my relationship, my family, my personal development, and completing school. Writing is my hobby though I want to consider it my calling. Well here I am struggling to put together a post for my site, to feel like I have not abandoned my goals completely. Times are hard and time are strange. Last month I touched upon the pandemic which has shut down most of the “normal” business of the country. People are less concerned with coronavirus and are ready for things to be back to business as usual. Protests have broken out throughout the country. At the beginning of the month people were protesting the restrictions put in place in order to contain the spread of the virus. Now people in this nation are protesting police brutality after the murder of another black man by police. No One I do not sit down with the intention of commenting on these issues. I wanted to focus on the writing process and my own struggles in finding my way in this craft. But a writer must capture the times in which they live. What good would I be if I did not comment on the history I am living through?

The protests at the beginning of the month were against the government and all the policies which had been enacted because of the coronavirus. No One, the truth is that these protests annoyed me. In my perspective it were groups of people who are entitled and did not want to be inconvenienced. Now No One my perspective is colored by the retail industry I work in. Before I get to into, however, I think I should talk a little bit about race in America. Well I really don’t know what to say about race in America except that it is a very confused and painful situation. This country is majority white and the culture and institutions reflect that. This doesn’t mean that every experience is about that, or oppressive, or discriminatory. But it’s there everywhere, like a ubiquitous tension which underlies daily lives of everyone in this country. No One my perspective is a strange one. I am mixed race, white and Latino, but I have darker skin. This is important because I live in a white area. As a child I didn’t know this to be a white area I learned this as man. Now there are all races in the Beach Cities where I have grown up. There area is a mix of working class and upper middle class Americans, there are some here who are rather affluent. Yes it’s an area with people of all races, all whom work in order to pay the bills. But that doesn’t mean that all races feel welcomed here.

The color of your skin still matters No One, that is why you are lucky that you are transparent. I have lived in this community my whole life, I know the streets, I know the culture, I talk like them, I dress like them, I can relate to them, but I am still different. I will never be white the way that they are white. I can feel it in the way that I am looked at, I can hear it in the way that I am spoken to, it’s this ubiquitous feeling of judgment. Especially in times that are racially charged. I have caught people, strangers, looking at me with expressions that are hard to understand. Do they not like the way I am dressed? Or is this look asking me why I am here in this area? Or do they just not like Latino people? Is this really what is happening here? No One it is hard to determine because I can’t tell if I am seeing true or just filtering the world through my biases. These experiences started when I was a teenager and now more than ten years after the first interaction which was questionable, I have come to understand the difference between subtle and explicit racism. Explicit is obvious, you know it when it happens, like when the police stopped me because I matched the description of someone who robbed a store, or when a worker asked me if it was white side or Mexican side which painted a door (a question I still do not understand to this day). The cops stopped me when I was on a skateboard, on a bike, in a car, and just walking down the street. Now truthfully those interactions all ended well, the police did their jobs and let me go. It’s just the experience of hearing multiple times that I matched some description. Subtle racism is so much harder to diagnose because it is part of that ubiquitous tension underlying this country. It comes out in those questioning suspicious looks I get when I am just minding my own business. It appears when someone makes a distasteful joke about Mexican culture. It appears in these odd ways and I’ve always been caught of guard because it’s unclear whether it’s just tasteless behavior or true subtle racism.

It is something very deep in this country, it is the differences in the sub-cultures of the nation. White culture, black culture, Latino culture, Asian culture, all of which interact and mix with each other but also remain distinct. White culture doesn’t understand the minority experience. I observe this in the community I live in, in the way that white people talk about the issues of minority communities, in the way that they don’t understand certain things Like distasteful jokes, or comments which are said in passing but very offensive. Why doesn’t white America understand that when white men “protest” for the right to bear arms by entering a government building fully armed without being interfered it highlights the difference in treatment. People of color would never march on a government building in such a fashion even if they believed in that cause because they know the consequences would be serious. Black Americans are perceived as a threat when they are not armed, black people are killed on the streets and in their homes because they could be a “threat”. Tamer Rice was a child, 12 years old, with a toy gun and was shot without hesitation. Police brutality effects everyone but people of color are automatically perceived as a threat. This brings me back to the protests the coronavirus policies. These protests were covered by the news and was motivated by people wanting life to be “normal” or convenient. Some of their signs literally saying sacrifice the weak. All for them to get what they want. These protests and riots are result of people who have lived in fear of the institutions which oppress them, have been challenging the system for years with no change to show for it. There is a division in this country and I honestly don’t even know how to write about it.