The worst mass murder in Connecticut history just happened in my hometown, in fact, less than a mile down the street from where my mom used to live. One of the fatally shot was one of the community soccer coaches, the father of somebody I graduated with.
It’s painful to write or even read about. My Facebook is blowing up with all types of condolences — the aforementioned victim was a well-known guy in my town and his kids are my age, so all of my high school FB friends knew him. This is just infinitely worse than the worst tragedy any of us could imagine possible in our little town.
But admittedly, the first thing I thought when I realized that this happened in South Windsor was, “Please don’t let the perpetrator be a POC…” And that it’s been documented in numerous news outlets that the gunman complained of racism in the workplace and being harassed, and nothing was being done about it? The general consensus is that we’re not supposed to have sympathy for the dude, but you just don’t know how much my heart hurts…
I’m well aware of the atmosphere, the racial tension in that area. It is an invalid, “nonexistent” kind of tension that people will constantly say you must be imagining because there aren’t enough POC’s in the area to back you up. “It’s not about race” is a mantra. I mean, I’ve written at length about my own experiences with racism growing up in that town, and I constantly felt like I was losing my mind. Even as an adult, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been cornered into absolutely inappropriate racist conversations in the workplace.
But as exhausting as these experiences are, and as shitty as it is when you’re the only POC almost everywhere you go, we get by in CT rather non-violently. Connecticut may mostly be white as hell, but it’s not the Deep South sticks and there are no burning crosses. And it makes me really uneasy that race is even entering this conversation, given how threatened white folks already seem to feel around here.
I can’t write about it anymore, but I wanted to at least get it out of my head.
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