Thoughts Since Last Post & Insomnia

so i have some random thoughts brewing in my head and since in a strange and unusual pattern of behavior I have woken up from my sleep and can't get back to sleep so i thought i'd vomit what i could on the blog before trying to go back to sleep....

its funny the advent of the facebook status updates has had the effect of me wanting to capture my mood or thoughts into a concise update rather than spew a long verbalization on my blog but alas, there are some things you can't say on facebook...

such as i get so sick of the worship of whiteness.... i mean in Thailand amongst activist communities it dumbfounds me that the link between skin color and racial oppression has not been made, and that people don't challenge the paradigm of fairness as beautiful. i understand that paradigm is present throughout the world, but the activits, in my experience in US and other countries are supposed to try to undermine and challenge that. thus when i joke with my thai coleagues that i don't have a boyfriend because thai men prefer white skin and they all agree, its that tacit agreement that secretly infuriates me... its the way their reaction endorse that point of view.

one of my colleagues was like "but it will be fine for you when you go back to your country (in this case he means America, somethings they mean India) because they like dark skin" and then i was like yeah, but then began to agree that yes my brown skin would be liked in the US and then realized what i was saying was preposterous - I mean i was aghast with myself for even the way i initially responded, trying to correct myself i had to explain that sure white people like to have tan skin but it doesn't mean they like black people --- it became harder and harder because the conversation was in Thai to talk about race and skin color in a clear way as the words don't allow for those distinctions easily and then i realized how absent the discourse of race really was in Thailand.

Maybe my brown skin wouldn't make me unattractive to the entire society but its not a homogenous society in America, and we don't try to generalize it as such, where that lends itself more easily for Thais. BUT FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, what about all the other forms of racial discrimination i experience in the US, -especially as a young woman of color, i mean they don't like my "brownness" and its been a major obstacle especially the higher up I've gone up into established power structures like the legal system.

So anyways, I've always said I could never date a white man seriously, because the gap of understanding of my experience of racial discrimination would be too much for me handle at that higher level of intimacy. For me, the the personal becomes the political at that point, and though I no longer lecture my friends all the time about my values and trying to lobby them, i still hold a strong set of values, a way of life and thinking that informs everything i do and the person i see myself as. And the racial discourse is part of that and is part of who i am and would need to be both shared and understood by anyone who would be my partner. But i guess i can add thai men to the category of white men, because as long as the dominant view in thai society is to worship whiteness and there is virtually no subculture to challenge it, despite being part of the 'developing world' and me being a 'westerner' - the primary issue i see i would not be a cultural clash, which is difficult but i believe not as bad as failing to understand the basic tenet and ramifications of racial discrimination. i mean cultural clash is normal for us first generation americans, negotiating between two cultural spaces can be challenging but is not impossible.

anyways, maybe when i was younger- like my first years in college in the American south, did i bemoan the fact that white men didn't give me a lot of attention and didn't see me as attractive, but i quickly realized the problematic identity politics involved in relating to them, and over time i wasn't upset by the fact they didn't find me attractive, i no longer found them attractive and could care less how they viewed me, (and honestly once you leave the south you can find abundant subsets of white men who have indian fetishes, which is just as bad)and with thai men, i think its got to be the same philosophy. anyhow i am not here long enough to really have it be a serious issue for me anymore. but honestly, the only thing worse than being white in terms of the identity divide i feel, is worshiping whiteness. endorsing and treating whites with a greater respect and love, etc. it sickens me from time to time.

needless to say, there are always exceptions to these massive generalizations i've made, and i think i am not a hardliner - open to the outliers, but i have yet to really meet anyone who i can identify as one - who i'd be interested in dating (plenty of outlier friends).

okay - i had more to say about having dengue fever and people who get under my skin and my ego, but i guess whiteness won as the topic, and is definitely not appropiate for a facebook status update.