{"id":8031,"date":"2016-12-11T07:00:06","date_gmt":"2016-12-11T07:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/archive.gabapple.com\/tumblr\/gabapple\/2016\/12\/11\/representation-matters-to-white-people-too\/"},"modified":"2016-12-11T07:00:06","modified_gmt":"2016-12-11T07:00:06","slug":"representation-matters-to-white-people-too","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/archive.gabapple.com\/tumblr\/gabapple\/2016\/12\/11\/representation-matters-to-white-people-too\/","title":{"rendered":"Representation Matters to White People Too"},"content":{"rendered":"

bethrevis<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Look, when I say\u00a0\u201crepresentation matters,\u201d I believe that the most important thing is for people who are often ignored in arts and media to see themselves there.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But I also mean that it\u2019s important for white\/hetero people to see people who aren\u2019t white\/hetero.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the thing. I was raised in a very white\/hetero community. Every friend I had was white. I never had a black person in my classroom until late high school. I never had a black teacher until college. There was one out-gay student at my high school. One. And I saw what shit he had to go through by being out.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And, if I\u2019m honest with myself, most of the adults in my life were racist and homophobic. They were good, loving people\u2026to me. But they were also racist and homophobic.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And as a kid through my teen years, I\u2019d be lying if I didn\u2019t say that didn\u2019t affect me. I parrotted the adults in my life, which meant that I often parrotted their hate and their prejudice. I\u2019m ashamed of those attitudes now\u2013now that I\u2019ve had education and met people who were different from me and travelled the world and put aside hate.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But then? It was easy to excuse racism. People who weren\u2019t white and straight didn\u2019t exist in my world\u2013and they didn\u2019t exist in the world I saw on television and in books and on the radio. It was easier to live in the bubble of that world.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Representation matters to white people, too. It is important for white people to see diversity. Not as a token, not as\u00a0\u201cpolitically correct\u201d\u2013the white people who feel that adding a minority character to a storyline is pandering are horrible people who are entirely missing the point. I\u2019m talking about the white kids who don\u2019t see minorities in their lives, but who see a black girl and a white boy being friends on Sesame Street. I\u2019m talking about the straight teen reading More Happy than Not<\/i>, I\u2019m talking about the white teen empathizing with Malala Yousafzai. The more representation we have, the more we hold a mirror through the world rather than whiting-out people who aren\u2019t like the majority, the better our world is.<\/p>\n

Representation matters.<\/b><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

THIS.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I grew up in freaking white bread Utah but I always gravitated toward minority friends because I had PoC friends in the media I watched. Which probably sounds super weird, but because of the aforementioned Sesame Street and Family Matters and etc etc etc, I<\/i>\u00a0grew up with a different view on it. I deeply emphasized with the stuff I was watching and reading, so even though I am sooo not perfect, I was a lot further out the gate than a lot of my local peers.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And our media today gets better and better and includes more and more… and we, as we get older, have more power to help it grow and spread and get into the hands of future generations.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Representation is so so so so important for EVERYONE. We all desperately need it.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

bethrevis: Look, when I say\u00a0\u201crepresentation matters,\u201d I believe that the most important thing is for people who are often ignored in arts and media to see themselves there.\u00a0 But I also mean that it\u2019s important for white\/hetero people to see people who aren\u2019t white\/hetero.\u00a0 Here\u2019s the thing. I was raised in a very white\/hetero community. … Continue reading Representation Matters to White People Too<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3095],"class_list":["post-8031","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-political","without-featured-image"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/archive.gabapple.com\/tumblr\/gabapple\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8031","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/archive.gabapple.com\/tumblr\/gabapple\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/archive.gabapple.com\/tumblr\/gabapple\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/archive.gabapple.com\/tumblr\/gabapple\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/archive.gabapple.com\/tumblr\/gabapple\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8031"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/archive.gabapple.com\/tumblr\/gabapple\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8031\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/archive.gabapple.com\/tumblr\/gabapple\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8031"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/archive.gabapple.com\/tumblr\/gabapple\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8031"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/archive.gabapple.com\/tumblr\/gabapple\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8031"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}