Hear Me Out...
When I was younger I had a boyfriend who got me a pearl pendant with a diamond for Christmas.
I remember immediately throwing it at him and starting to cry.
I was furious and sad because it couldn’t be further away from not only what I wanted, but from anything I like at all. It just made me feel that someone I had been dating for a year knew nothing about me. He got me something he thought a woman would want (diamonds are forever!) instead of something that is true of me in any way.
This is the mistake my former boss made in buying me the pink Yankee jacket. I work a job with him that requires heavy lifting and involves cursing like a sailor and drinking a lot. I’ve never worn anything pink to work and you can barely get me to wear anything but ratty t-shirts and white or black wife-beaters most of the time. Given the choice between a regular jacket and a pink jacket, he got me a pink jacket.
There is no reason to think this is a good idea unless you ignore everything you know about me except that I am a woman. And I’m not being paranoid. I wear navy blue Yankees shirts to work often and regular navy blue shirts far too often.
I am so tired of my being a woman or my non-whiteness being the defining characteristic of me for others. An old co-worker from a different job once got me a bottle of Alize for my birthday because he thought people of my ethnic make up were into it.
Allow me to let you in on something: I actually don’t spend that much time thinking about having a vagina and not being white until someone does something to let me know they are thinking about it. I’m just a person who likes what they like and if we are friends I make an effort to know these things about you, so can you please try to retain more information about me than my race and gender?
I got really sad after I wrote the earlier post about the jacket and I was trying to figure out why. I think that, for me, a bunch of people walking around with racist signs about Obama are scary and weird but they’re not the kind of people I know. But these little things, these moments where people ignore everything they know to be true of me despite all the conversations we’ve had about the similar interests we share (these shared interests are in fact the reason we know each other!), these moments make me feel sad and different.
I can’t think of any time I have gone to get a friend something and then thought, “oh but she’s white” or “but he is a guy,” because I started by trying to get them something based on what they like. I can see if you hardly know the person and its a secret santa or something, (“Oh I got the guy from accounting and I don’t know what he likes) but I’m not talking about acquaintances. I’m talking about people I’ve spent real time with.
