What Does a Racist Feel?

July 14th, 2018

Here I am: another weekend cooped up in front of this computer trying to learn Algebra from the ground up. I’m using the Khan Academy website for a lot of help. Regardless, I can’t stand being around math for longer than a few minutes.

Every video I listen to and quiz I take feels like rubbing stroking a cat’s fur backward; against the grain, sort of speak. My flesh is crawling. My head hurts from the attempt to soak in ridiculous equations that I don’t care to retain — or has anything to do with me. I don’t HAVE to know it. I don’t WANT to know about it. It’s not a matter of ‘fear’, but the adaptation of associating with higher math is against everything that is within me. All I hear, as hard as I try, is a jumble of numbers that will never connect with me. in comparison to things that DO connect easily with me — words, sentences, and paragraphs — math is the polar opposite. 

With those feelings exposed, as I do, I looked at how those feelings relate to others. That above paragraph likely, without a doubt, details what someone who is deemed a ‘racist’ feels about other races. We like to throw it around that fear and anger is what breeds that kind of person, but consider the possibility of genuinely born having opposing rejection. 

It’s not too hard of a stretch to imagine. As humans, we master our DNA for generations passing down traits, physical and mental so why not a molded preference to auto-hate something. Why are a lot of creative people born into one family with the occasional one born without a creative bone in their body? Why can one person swim in an ocean of math like a fish and the same person crash and burn in other subjects? I wrote about the roles life dishes out to us. This is just one consideration and, considering how many people out there ‘hate’ based on color, it kind of reasons with the numbers.

We can take a full family of generational racists and think their next child will come out one to because of the way the family teaches him or her. Come to find out, no matter how much they are exposed to it, they still reject it. It happens but that story is seldom told. No matter how long and hard I reject math, my daughters are good with it. My son isn’t. So on and so forth.

Hammering into it every day and it’s just. not. sticking. It repulses me.

I reject it like racists reject others.

Both of us are losing out in growth.