Do you remember the Black Lives Matter movement? Where people were protesting the unfair treatment, and outright murder of African-Americans by police officers across the country?
Yeah? Then you probably remember the All Lives Matter movement? Which was… a movement against the Black Lives Matter movement.
Everyone suffers, at least a little bit from fear of missing out, FOMO.
People don’t like to feel left out. That’s why FOMO is an actual thing.
If this group of people is going to protest the systematic oppression of their people then I’m gonna protest too. Everything needs to involve me and if it doesn’t then it doesn’t mean anything.
Since the internet gives you access to everyone’s business at every time, you want to be in all the business all the time. It makes you feel included in something larger than yourself, and it’s through our interactions with others that we come to know ourselves. But, the anonymity of the web makes people feel the need to share their unnecessary opinions without any regard for the consequences of their words.
But somewhere along the timeline, we became a hive mind of offendedness.
How dare you say that Indian women are beautiful?! Are you saying that I, an anonymous racially ambiguous woman, am not beautiful? I don’t care if it’s your opinion! Compliment me!
There's a black rapper named "Black Thought"...Imagine if there was a singer or rapper who was white named "White Thought" - Drea (@DreaAndrea38) December 15, 2017
The internet looking for something to be offended by.
We want things to be relatable. Everything has to cater to us all the time. Subreddits and subtweets allow us to steep in our own ideologies. There are sure to be Tumblr accounts dedicated to the experiences of 15-25-year-old white, lower-class women who live in the American southeast. If 2,593 other people think that slavery was underrated than your backward mindset can’t be all that wrong.
It’s important to remember not try to one-up each other. We all struggle. Buddhism suggests that all human existence is suffering. But, we do not suffer the same way, no matter how colorblind you want to believe you are. We are different, and being different is okay. I am not white (in case my name didn’t make it obvious) but I have been fed white culture since the day I was born, and I can relate to white characters in books. I'm not Latinx but I get hype whenever Gina Rodriguez steps on the screen. I not Indian but I can acknowledge that Lilly Singh is the most beautiful soul in the history of the world. I am not included in any of those groups but I care more about how you are than who you are.
People use “colorblindness” as an excuse to ignore the problems that are tied to race. Valuing people’s personalities over their race is wonderful and necessary but it’s not going to get rid of the injustices that society subjects them to. If you really cared about them then you would want them to live in a world where they are valued as a Black/Asian/Latinx/Indian/White/Native American individual in addition to all of their other positive traits. By being colorblind, you are ignoring a critical part of a person’s identity, and you can never really know them like that.
“But what does this have to do with feeling left out?” you ask.
We pretend that we are all the same because that illusion of sameness allows us to believe that we are all equal. We want to strip away the dirty race/sex/gender politics that rule our world and just “be ourselves”. By forgetting who we are, and who everyone else is, we can live under the illusion that we do not have to do anything to change ourselves or the world that we live in. If we all live in a haze, then we’ll always be part of the crowd.
But that is not cool.
What is cool is being every single part of yourself that you can be, and fighting for a world where everyone can have that same right. Each one of us is a unique being, with innovations that only we could think of and inspirations that only we can bring into the world. To deny any part of ourselves is to deny the beauty and genius that we have inside. We are all different and it’s those differences that make things interest, that move life forward. So it is okay to not be included.
