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plus ultra gay

@dropthepopcandy / dropthepopcandy.tumblr.com

Darrell ★ 20 ★ he/him
multi-fandom, but mostly video games and sports anime
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Reminder: You deserve friends who treat you with love and respect. You deserve friends that listen to you. You deserve friends that try to understand your feelings and respect them. You deserve positive and healthy friendships. Don’t settle for less.

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When people tell stories about how their parents beat them, it’s always interesting to see their face change because they expected me to say “me too lol” but I instead say “I’m really sorry. You didn’t deserve that” Last time a co worker who also has West Indian parents was telling me in a joking way how he remembers being beaten with a belt because lied about his report card. As he was laughing it off and saying he deserved it, I just said “wow that’s awful hun. You didn’t deserve that.” And his whole face changed. Like it hadn’t occurred to him that it’s messed up that a part of remembering his childhood is remembering how badly it hurt to be beaten so badly at such a young age. Another time I had a friend, non West Indian parents, who talked about how she made a mess on a dress that her parents got her. It was really expensive apparently and she spilled red juice on it. She talked about how she was ordered to take the dress of and was beaten with a belt too without any clothes on. And she was laughing and said “I was a bad ass kid lol” and I said “no hun you were just a kid”. And she looked at me and immediately stopped laughing and just sat there like “yea…I was just a kid. I don’t know why they did that to me” My mom was raised in a household where she was beaten so badly….I just don’t understand how she is so loving now growing up in a home where she got so little love. They called it discipline, but once she became a social worker she began to see that it was abuse. That she grew up terrified of her parents, although they thought it was respect that my mom felt. It was fear. We have to get comfortable challenging what is often seen as cultural norms. We have to be a generation of people who are not ashamed to say “I would never beat my child”.

just wanted to add to this important post, but i think this is especially important now as i see a lot of poc using their experiences with abuse to emphasize their “poc-ness” and reject the “soft/easy” upbringing often associated with whiteness (very understandably, and through no bad intention. ofc it is a way of coping/processing abuse to minimize it through humor. it is equally understandable that poc use all that they can to distance themselves from /white culture/) but now its sort of become a joke that many poc have faced abuse and the cultural norms that deem this as acceptable have only been heightened. agreeing with op, i hope we are willing to unapologetically commit to not beating our children, and realizing that experiencing or perpetrating abuse does not give you extra poc points, it is abuse, and it is not acceptable.

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