#internalized ableism yet are disabled made me paranoid about that too [and also I just didn't want to be ableist])

[fennthetalkingdog]

I was just watching the Alt-Right Playbook today and I had the realization that a lot of what the dude was saying about white people could've easily applied to me. Like, I was raised with the same colorblind approach he was talking about, and I haven't started paying attention to race until the last few years (noteably, the intersection of when Trump came to office, when the pandemic happened and all the anti-maskers and qanon folks crawled out of the woodworks, and when I realized I was queer/trans). Since then, I've had a lot of conversations with my parents about race, black history as told by black people, and politics, and I have an actual stance politically other than "Your poltics need to be internally consistent." But I'm having the slow, quite cold realization that, if I'd not been black, trans, and queer—or even if I hadn't been trans/queer—I could've been a much different person than I am today. If I'd been white, then I could've oh so easily fallen into the trap of not seeing racism or not seeing issues as being systemic, and if I'd not been trans/queer (or had trans/queer friends), it's extremely likely that I would've become the kind of "I love people but I don't believe gayness or transness is real" that my parents actively believe. So... I don't really have a punchline or overall conclusion about this. I just wanted to post it to keep myself accountable, I guess.