*does the anime character with glasses thing*
Does that really work though?
What…?
Really guys? Let’s see about that.
MOTHER OF GOD
Well I guess I might as well try it out too
not that it’s gonna
hOLY SHIT
what have I done
yo hold up lemme give this a shot
HOLY SHI T
DEAR LORD THIS IS AMAZING
IT GOT EVEN BETTER!
I don’t think I’m going to even bother having a party next year.
This is too much fucking work and no one ever gets their availabilities back to me and no one wants to drive out this far and constantly asks me to come and have my party there, but that means I have to drive out there?
growing up almost exclusively on one side of my family did a lot of little things to me as a kid that i’ve only just been starting to pay attention to
ive always been aware of my mixed heritage and i’ve never thought of it as a negative or bad thing like i imagine many kids growing up in my situation might have done, and because of the city and schools and neighborhoods i grew up in i’ve always had very diverse groups of friends and peers, so in retrospect i lucked out in that way
but there are still ways that it affects you
i remember drawing myself a lot as a kid, later on i loved to draw all my friends and myself in the art styles of all the cartoons i watched, and i was always really good at it except when i drew myself. looking back at pictures i drew after not having seen them in a long time was interesting. i would always give myself straight black hair and i never gave myself the right skin color even if i used many different colored pencils to get the tones for my friends spot-on. i never remember consciously thinking about it at all, i am very sure i wasn’t ashamed of anything, i just never thought about myself as a person of color because that wasn’t part of my life.
i recently brought my childhood Playstation 2 across the country to my apartment and i found two memory cards full of almost decade-old save data. mostly custom skaters from tony hawk games. i flipped through them all and smiled at skater versions of friends i hadn’t talked to in years and i was impressed with how close i’d gotten them. and then there were the ones for me, and sure enough, there was that straight-haired white kid. that game had plenty of skin color options. it just wasn’t a part of my life back then.
in kid me’s defense, i’m pretty sure i’ve gotten notably tonally darker as i’ve gotten older? either that or disposable cameras whitewash skintone. my hair used to be loose and wavy, my curls have gotten very noticeably tighter with age. maybe that had something to do with it. but it’s still interesting to look back and think about.
there might be something to be said about the fact that i often feel uncomfortable when i speak with a POC voice about issues of race and privilege. i’ve embraced it more in the last couple of years than i ever have, but regardless of the fact that half of my family is about as black as you can get without looking like an offensive caricature i still feel out of place whenever i say that yes, i’m part of this, this is us, we’re people of color, i’m not looking from the outside in or talking in a place i shouldn’t be. i’ve got the exact same racial background as our president, who is universally understood to be a person of color by anyone you could ask. so why do i feel like i’m intruding in someone else’s territory when i call myself black? i certainly can’t call myself white and i certainly can’t speak with the voice of a white person, that’d be silly.
i’m still learning how to deal with having a “not really one or the other” racial background and what it means to me now and what i want it to mean to me.
long story short yes it’d be nice if i could imagine my animal crossing avatar as me without feeling like i’m being just a little bit disingenuous to myself
