In which I reveal how judgmental and bitchy I am.

There’s a specific class of person I don’t do so well with. I think of them as cream cheese. They are white. They grew up in a basically safe environment–sure their parents might have been alcoholics, but they weren’t beaten and they had food and they had a consistent roof and appropriate food and after school activities and…

No one gets through life without some trauma. No matter how safe or easy your life… something shitty has happened. I get that.

But cream cheese people had fairly… digestible pieces of trauma. It’s easy to sweep it all under the rug and pretend that everything is smooth and creamy.

I don’t do well with cream cheese because for cream cheese I am ALWAYS the problem. Racism isn’t the problem, I am the problem for bringing up racism. Sexism isn’t the problem, I am the problem for bringing it up. Etc.

These are the people who hate my fucking guts for refusing to be more conformist… but they can’t say that out loud so instead they come up with a bunch of digs about how inappropriate I am. *shrug*

These people are, in my judgy as fuck experience, always low key white supremacists and misogynists. Not the kind who would you know… call someone a rude ethnic name… but the sort who will not mix. The sort who will talk about race and violence as if there is only violence in some groups. The kind who will have two daughters and talk about how “they just never shared my interests” but now that they have a son… they can teach about their hobbies.

But they are Nice White People! You can’t say anything bad about them! That’s carefully cultivated. They won’t do things you can criticize in public… but they will entirely preserve the status quo and be against peaceful protests because they are so “rude”.

Flint Michigan not having clean water for more than three years is unfortunate but no one’s fault, amIright? Those people shouldn’t complain loudly and be rude.

Cream cheese people think that “paying it forward” means volunteering in their child’s all white upper middle class school. Naw… that’s not paying it forward. That’s closing the circle. That’s ensuring that all the resources stay with people like you.

I am always far too rude and abrasive for such people. I take that as one of the best signs that I might have some real character. If they approved of me… I wouldn’t like me anymore.

But the fact that I can’t/won’t get along with cream cheese is kind of rough for Noah. He’s fine with putting up with them. He isn’t particularly cream cheese, but he can mostly fake it for a weekend. He can have close friends like that. It’s hard for him that I can be in the room with cream cheese for about an hour a year before I start picking. I start going, “Oh look… I see some mold….” Then I’m the fucking problem again.

My friends are people who can listen to me rant about the shitty history of white people without getting personally offended. “Yup, we did that.” My friends tend to be people who can listen to me say, “So have you noticed how shitty you are behaving? Let’s talk about that.” Because my friends look at me in similar ways. When I’m fucking up my friends tell me so explicitly. There’s no passive aggressive hinting and “letting me make my own mistakes”.

My friends want me to do better. So they challenge me.

Thank you. I’m really grateful that not everyone in this world is cream cheese.