Second Layer Cake

The best way for me to describe prejudice is from a personal perspective. In the cake metaphor I have never really felt like I've contributed a cake. How does welfare have such a stigma? I recently came to confirm, that in my youth welfare was a system that helped my mom and I. She had denied this for so long and I had wondered how I could remember our poverty. Was I imagining and turning them into memories. It also say a lot about the shame that comes with our communities cultures perceptions around needing help. Recently hear my mom embarrassingly confirm my childhood memories validated a mysterious part of my identity. It also reopened other hurtful experiences that I can now question and consider their validity, after suppressing and dismissing them.

I am a contributor to the cake despite having had to mooch from the cake because of irresponsible circumstances that my family created. This makes me grounded, and feeling comfortable wanting to grab Newt and telling him fuck your ignorance, fuck your entitlements, and fuck his lack of genuine desire to see people. I have forgotten and was never taught the ingredients to make my families traditional cakes. This makes it hard having to adopt an entitled cultures recipes, but welfare gave me a place to stand.

Now, I mostly think of myself as in the middle of the road socially, class-wise, and intelligently. But this has dismissed the small and few moments that have devastated me and likely others. These moments are moments of prejudice. Prejudice is for me the message of disconnection, the message of difference, the message of pity, and the message of ignorance. I have prejudice and only until now have I been able to see it so clearly. I know it is because of my ignorance and resentment, but knowing this does not help with the intense discontent, or hope for vengeance. It sucks, because I cannot describe how easy it is to move between compassion and contempt. It isn't so much a racial concern, but unfortunately that is where the dividing lines are most discrete. to be continued.....with the forgiveness of a concept where no single person can be forgiven.