BGB: Overcoming misogyny, racism, generational trauma, and various jackasseries with the power of Stories and Sarcasm

Although this is the Brown Girl Blog, I’m no longer a girl.

I’m a brown woman here to lay down burdens of shame that aren’t mine, carried since I was a young brown girl.

I was in grade school before the internet, a spot of brown in a sea of beige. There were few supportive communities who passed around helpful information. There was no access to other children with abusive, demanding, unsupportive, and/or first-generation-immigrant parents who were subject to, and felt free to pass along, severe generational trauma.

So I dealt with my childhood alone. My father’s physical abuse. My mother’s emotional abuse. Horrendous bullying at school, and my mother’s bizarre quasi-religious dogma, which worsened it.

My curly hair, and the ignorant, racist attitudes towards care of it. My C-cup breasts at age 12, which resulted in me repeatedly being told, and believing, I was lazy for not wanting to run any more.

I’ll talk about these things and many others. The catalogue of adult and peer stupidities and cruelties, for which I was made to feel responsible as a child, is long and inglorious.

I hid them for decades, never spoke about any of them, either out of loyalty to my mother or fear of professional consequences to myself.

Events over the past year have made it necessary to break my silence. Like so many other brown women, I was diagnosed with a severe autoimmune disease. It’s likely to be directly attributable to lifelong trauma and other stresses.

I’ve carried them this far. But no further.

I’ll use life stories, and sarcasm, to shed that burden. Because I fear repercussions to myself, I’ll also use a pen name, one I came up with when I was 1/3 my current age.

A note on the word ‘brown’: I mean brown-skinned. I used to use “brown” to mean “colonized” and/or “oppressed”, but it’s generally the darker-skinned people in the world who have the worst of that, so it winds up meaning the same thing.

I’m North American, so my experience and thinking skews Western. I have beef (a LOT of it) with my parents’ ethnicity, which is racist and misogynist in the extreme.

To me, brown people fall into different categories by ethnicity: Black/African-American brown people, Hispanic/LatinX brown people, South Asian brown people, AAPI brown people, and so on. (“Wyt” people aren’t, so I call them “beige”.)

Most brown women and girls from every possible category have dealt with some of these traumas, which is why I tagged these ethnicities.

Ethnicity/culture is separate from race, which is a social construct. People’s ethnicity directly shapes who they are because of their families and communities. (Mine is a patchwork.) People’s ‘race’ shapes who they are because of how society treats them: Equally integral, but a different story.

I’m brown, no race, ethnicity undisclosed, and not out to claim identities that aren’t mine.

Another goal of BGB is to make space for brown girls and women of every shape, shade, ethnicity, and race to talk about the racism, misogyny, and generational trauma that so many of us got spoon-fed as girls.

I’ll talk about the harms I’ve directly experienced. Others’ experiences are in their own hands, if they choose to share.

If you’ve come this far, welcome. I look forward to your company on the journey. Bring some bubblegum for when we aren’t kicking ass.

© Harker Sabine, 2024