8bit here, ready to throw you all another dose of University Disillusionment™, because it's late at night and I'm going to be fasting, so why not!
HERE YA GO.
I'm glad my university bathroom is a prime method of reminding me of the city I'm in. I mean sometimes I forget, you know? Luckily I can sit in a bathroom stall and ponder about these sorts of things.
It's like I decided to funnel myself down the tube of bad racial odds.
- Colorado -
- Mountain Colorado -
- University -
- Engineering -
- Computer Science -
Gotta say, this is an improvement, though. Racism used to be my brother getting forced into a fight with a bully in elementary school, because "a black kid shouldn't have been smarter than him." Now it's in university bathrooms. No one's nose is bleeding, so that's good, in my book.
It was the kid that had his nose bloodied, by the way. Not my brother's.
When I mentioned the quote to a friend of mine, her first response was "did it have quotes around the N word?" We both had a hearty guffaw over that. The longer you stick around here, the more you start to just know the tone of things. The quotes around the word imply so many things about the tone, in this instance. Like the whole thing is a joke, like they're outing themselves in their inability to understand the ramifications of writing that in a bathroom stall. Like the assumption is, "it's fine to scribble this here. I mean, no Black person is going to be in the Engineering Building to read this anyways."
Or maybe I'm making a mountain out of a graffiti mole-hill! Who knows. I was told about a week ago that I "complain about this a lot." I didn't know how to respond to that. Well of course I do! And it isn't even complaining, I don't think. I'd like to think that I'm not accepting the parameters for engagement that I've been given. 'Cause they're shitty parameters! I'd like to believe that pointing this kind of garbage out means people will start noticing, but who knows.
Ever since that episode with the officer a while back, I decided to visit the school's counseling services, because I was going to explode otherwise. I had a discussion, and something that came up was the possibility of creating some sort of organization that deals with this issue.
I don't have the specifics yet...but I think it's about time I got around to getting that started.