- Date posted
- 5y
- Date posted
- 5y
I was a resident advisor in college (just graduated in May!) and I’m black, I did a series on Microagressions. Microagressions are “defined as brief and common daily verbal, behavioral, and environmental communications, whether intentional or unintentional, that transmit hostile, derogatory, or negative messages to a target person because they belong to a stigmatized group.” Sometimes you can’t see or recognize a bias. Our media is inherently racist. I had a asian friend ask me, “why do all black people sing with soul?” And she blinked at me not knowing what she said was racist. She believed this based on what she saw in the media. How is that supported? Black RnB singers, Black Gospel Choirs, and Beyoncé. This belief was subtly pushed. Our media they’ve vilified and made certain jobs and actions belong to a certain group. It’s not your fault because that’s what we’ve all consumed. Your subconscious may have learned this but your conscious mind knows that’s not a correct thing to think. What you can praise is that you recognized this as a stereotype and harmful. You didn’t play into it. It’s scary but we’re all bias and our goal is to unlearn it. The fact you can see this as wrong and working to change, you can feel good about it.
- Date posted
- 5y
i read something once that stated “what you think first is what you’ve been conditioned to think, your thoughts after define who you are”
- Date posted
- 5y
We're conditioned into those thoughts and stereotypes. Your immediate thought about something says very little about you, noticing it and not doing any harmful behaviour based on it says lots- that you care enough to notice, and you prioritise doing the right thing over the discomfort of the topic. As anonymous said, you didn't do any microaggressions and even if you had, if you noticed it and apologised and made a note to be more mindful, then you're doing as much as anyone can expect of you. Systemic change can stop this from being so pervasive for future generations. As for the OCD suggesting that you haven't applied for those jobs in the past due to the association with Hispanics- you can only give it a maybe. It could be that you hadn't considered cleaning jobs as a prospect, or didn't think they'd hire you, or that it felt low status, all sorts. It's probably some combination. We probably all behave based on unconscious conditioning all of the time, it's not our fault and also isn't something we can change until it comes into our awareness for some reason. So let what it's telling you be just another thought. It might make you a little uncomfortable but you don't need to investigate it.
- Date posted
- 5y
Thank you guys. I'm trying to be better and educate myself everyday. Especially with the Black Lives Matter movement being so important.
Related posts
- Date posted
- 24w
I just left my apartment and was heading out ,when a guy who was black poked his head out of the elevator and scared me by accident. I immediately apologized bc i think i jumped or gasped a little. Then i was like 'what if he thinks I'm racist if I take the stairs like i usually do instead of the elevator ' bc i usually take the stairs since I'm on the 2nd floor. I went over and tried to go in the elevator but it was already closing. So he awkwardly held it open and I apologized again. I stood in the elevator and I think he took a step away from me. I'm scared i was racist somehow and it felt rly awkward overall.
- Date posted
- 19w
I don't know if this is super OCD related, but it's just there are so many things I want to do in life, but I'm scared. I want to apply for this restaurant waitress job near me, but I'm worried I'd be terrible at it as I have no experience and I'm worried they wouldn't train me properly. What if someone has an allergy and I accidentally serve them the wrong food and they have a severe allergic reaction and something awful happens and then I'm sued or go to prison? It feels like there's so many things holding me back. What if I give someone a drink but a piece of my hair falls in? It just feels like I'm never going to be able to do anything. I've never tried anything, never properly stepped out of my comfort zone, never had any kind of job. So I'm so nervous to try anything in life because there are so many things that could go wrong.
- Date posted
- 15w
Cross post from Reddit: TW Religious ocd TW Racism This is going to confuse a lot of people but I’ll try my best. OCD could be tricking me. I don’t know. But I’ll do my best to explain. Warning: there are some extremely sensitive themes including racism. OCD has caused me to worry about making bad prayers. It is mainly an anxiety of what others would think of if I prayed for something bad. Basically, it can think of something bad, and I can think of why I want it, and say “amen” pretty easily. Not sure if that constitutes a prayer really since it is ocd driven, and might even feel more real to me than it actually is, but it gets very complicated. None of this makes any logical sense to anyone but me, but to me it makes sense and that’s the issue. My mind invented something where I can pray to pray for something. Yes, that’s right, and it makes no sense. Essentially these ideas for prayers come in automatically. I don’t necessarily choose them. I can somewhat choose how I react, but that is where it gets tricky. OCD also blunts my emotions with certain prayers or makes things feel more real than they are So, what happened, is my ocd targeted the theme I was most worried about having a bad prayer about, which was unfortunately racism. In the past, I made a mistake that was racist (I won’t get into what it was here), and I thought about it a lot. I imagined people never wanting to forgive me and saying I deserve to suffer forever. Additionally, worrying about making racist prayers made this go up. It was frustrating, because with ocd it can take what people say too literally. So if someone says: “you deserve to suffer,” I might be thinking that thinking about it 10 hours a day for multiple months was justified. This made me have a misdirected frustration towards the people I perceived as yelling at me, which was unfortunately people of color. Here’s where ocd comes in with the prayer obsession. OCD gave me the idea: well you’re so mad at them you could pray for them all to die. Unfortunately, with the prayer obsession I’ve had, I’ve had a bit of a history with doing bad prayers when I’m not feeling great, and I don’t know if that is just part of the ocd or not, or just doing them to do them. One example is world war 3. I don’t want people to get hurt, but when I was feeling horrible I thought “screw it, I’ll pray for it cause I want to die.” I knew God wouldn’t actually do it, and the normal me didn’t want him to. Then, and I don’t know why, it seemed extremely easy for a moment to pray for people of color to die, and I actually almost did it, but I stopped myself. This is where the praying to pray comes in. With ocd, if I have a moment where I almost did a bad prayer, my mind “saves” that mindset, and it is possible for me to go back to it any time. So this situation will present itself many times to me. With praying to pray, I can essentially be put back in the mindset at any time no matter what is going on, and by saying “amen,” my brain basically magically does it and it feels like the same thing. Because it feels real to me, it seems like the same thing as a prayer. Last night that is what I did for this and I regretted it less than a two seconds later. So basically, I ended up doing a prayer that was racist. This is exactly what happened in that moment. This isn’t who I normally am (although my brain would disagree), but in that moment, with magical thinking, I prayed for all people of color to die, out of what my brain said was “hatred.” My brain also said I felt genuine hatred, but I don’t think I really do. I think it is all related to a misdirected frustration of feeling like I was yelled at, which stemmed from ocd. After the prayer, all those feelings were immediately gone. I don’t know how messed up my brain was, or how much of a role ocd played. It probably at least blunted my emotions. It sort of came on all of the sudden too, but I did it. I’m really sorry. I don’t hate people of color despite what my brain says, but I feel like I did something really bad. When I sit with what happened and don’t engage with it, it does not feel like a big deal at all. The guilt is almost all ocd driven. So I don’t know if that means there is something I’m missing or not. I might be missing something, but I know what happened in the moment
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