Walking Targets

I don’t expect you to understand my perspective because you haven’t experienced what I have nor do you know my circumstances.

Today a war was lost – a war on gender and a war on race. All my life I knew racism and sexism existed, I experienced it. But my experiences were in a way that I could dust off, that I could push aside and not allow to make an impact on me or hold me back from what I wanted to do. (Or so I thought)

You have no idea what it’s like to live in a place where you know people around you may outwardly or secretly dislike the fact you are a woman and a woman of colour.

To know that everything you fought for your whole life may actually still hit a glass ceiling. To know that no matter how hard you tried you will always be treated differently because you’re a woman.

I knew sexism wasn’t dead but I didn’t realized how prevalent it was.

I am weary of women receiving differential treatment due to gender though I think currently we need a more reflective society that realizes half its population consists of women. Does that sentence sound contradictory, it might and I’ll try to explain.

Women need more role models, better maternity care and leave, more professional advancement opportunities to pursue whatever they want to, choice over their bodies and an equal role in the household. All these need to be afforded to women so we can equalize the playing field and get to the era where we can choose candidates based on their skills and not their gender.

A man who does not respect race, does not see women as equals in society, and strives to turn back the clock decades is now to serve as a role model. What is scarier is that there is a substantial amount of the people who believe in such divisiveness and inequality and treating people differently based on gender, race and sexual orientation. This makes women and visible minorities a walking target of inequality – and at a much unequal playing field.

Sadly the country is now broken into three, those that are happy with the outcome, those that are angry about the outcome and those that think the country needs prayer but will simply go along with whatever is passed to them. It is this latter group that frustrates me. They say they’re unhappy about the results but are willing to wait four years to see how things pan out. Ironically, this is where we all are – waiting – waiting to see what happens. Waiting to see if we’re targets.

First written by me on IamRealisRare on November 12, 2016 https://iamrealisrare.wordpress.com/2016/11/12/a-walking-target/

Then reposted by me on madder and shade/wordpress on December 21, 2017: https://madderandshade.wordpress.com/2016/12/21/a-walking-target/

Finally re-reposted to this final madder and shade site in 2018