DECORATING? NOT REALLY. | The Spring 2020 One Room Challenge (ORC), Black Lives Matter, Instagram, scattered thoughts from a mixed-race non-designer, whathaveyou.

Here we are on week six of the One Room Challenge. There wasn’t a week five. Did you clock that? The organizers decided to take a beat (the correct thing to do, obviously) and for a week Instagram was black squares and “learning and listening” comments from all the well-meaning newbies out there.

I don’t mean to sound like I’m knocking it. I’m not. I mean, I think a lot of what I saw happening online last week was an absolutely vapid mayonnaise-tinged waste of time, sure, but I appreciate it nonetheless.

I witnessed some sketchy things, of course.

There’s always a little bad with the good. I watched one white woman with a decor account complaining that she was so tired of all the annoying social justice talk. She wanted to ‘agree to disagree’ or ‘focus on the pretty’ or something. When her white privilege was mentioned, much like a confused Facebook bot, she decided she was the victim of hate speech, deleted the comments, then the whole comment thread. A few days later she was hashtagging BLM as if the whole thing had never happened.

There is still no safe running water in Flint, Michigan.

But there was and is so much real, good, social justice ACTION happening as well. After years of feeling ground down by the status quo and lack of interest, dare we to hope?

Kenneth Walker, boyfriend of Breonna Taylor, was jailed because the cops who killed Breonna said he shot a Louisville police officer in the leg when they forced their way into the home in the middle of the night. Since the public outcry, the case against Walker has been dismissed. For now. 

My thoughts are scattered. Have your thoughts been scattered?

Police fire tear gas grenades on protestors on the streets of Lyon, France, during the 25th weekend of Yellow Vest protests. Photo by ev on Unsplash.

Being mixed-race, and on one hand obviously non-white, while on the other, maybe not so obviously, depending on who is doing the looking and when and why, is complicated.

I have complicated feelings about it. I’m not Black and I’m not Indigenous, and I enjoy a lot of privilege thanks to my white-sounding name and my comfortable middle-class upbringing, education, and decision to marry a cis het white dude. At the same time, I experience racism ALL. THE. TIME.

Light racism. Everyday racism.

Ask me how often I’m pulled into the “special” line at the airport. Or don’t. They answer is almost every time. Once I wore my hair in a long braid while going through customs in Miami. That was … a mistake. But it’s just hair.

In 2017, 5,646 Native women were reported missing in the United States. Of the more than 5,700 American Indian and Alaska Native women and girls reported missing as of 2016, according to the National Crime Information Center, only 116 of those cases were logged with the Department of Justice. In Canada, The National Inquiry into Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls began its mandate on Sept.1, 2016. The rate of violence against Indigenous women and girls continued unabated during the national inquiry created to investigate the root causes of the issue, according to figures in two separate databases provided to CBC News.

I often have to sit through my own in-laws making idiotic comments.

There’s one about how South Asian names are just “too hard to pronounce” that I’ve heard a few times. And I’ve just let fly because… I don’t know. I guess I don’t “have to” sit through anything. That’s disingenuous. But sometimes I do. I just sit there and I smile. Or I don’t smile. I mean, the comments are so small and so constant and I am so tired. That’s why these things are called micro-aggressions. When you’re the only squeaky wheel, and it’s clear that the room already fucking HATES you and your infernally annoying squeaking, sometimes you stop squeaking. And then you feel guilty and angry, mostly with yourself. What does it matter if some old white person thinks the name Peters makes sense and Patel doesn’t? What does anything matter?

If you type George Floyd into your search engine, the autofill for top searches will likely include “… criminal past” and “…record”. 

People have assumed I am my white-presenting child’s nanny so many times now, I’ve lost count. She’s only FOUR YEARS OLD. I started being mistaken for the (adult) nanny when I was a 15 year old teenager, babysitting white cousins. Last year, a little gaggle of white women even attempted to threaten me, asking who I worked for, assuming me to be an unrelated caregiver, so that they could … tell on me, I guess? Get me fired? Call ICE? They didn’t like my caregiving. They assumed, like so many do, that my child was not my child. It was an upsetting experience, and yet, so familiar. So small.

Immigration detention centres remain full-to-bursting in this country. ICE detention centres are now allegedly using a COVID-19 disinfectant in at least one facility over 50 times a day.  HDQ Neutral — which manufacturer Spartan Chemical warns can be harmful as it can cause skin burns and serious eye damage when inhaled — is allegedly being sprayed in poorly ventilated areas filled with detainees 50 times a day. The prisoners report that they are bleeding. Experiencing skin rashes. They can’t breathe. When one collapses, they’re disappeared.

Is a joke funny when it’s a not-particularly-exaggerated representation of what’s actually happening?

And don’t get me started on the fat phobia. The constant constant CONSTANT food and body policing.

Fat people earn less money for the same work, are regularly denied appropriate medical care, can be terminated or suspended because of body size, face barriers to education and are less likely to be admitted to college despite comparable academic performance. Negative attitudes and body discrimination become apparent in preschool and progress as children age.  Black and fat? Black and a woman and fat? Black and Trans and fat? Black and gender non-conforming and fat? Imagine.

Intersectionality is complicated.

Just before the pandemic shut things down, I was with a small group of well-meaning white women, and one of them said, “Well, I guess I shouldn’t call you white though …because you don’t “identify” as white?” There were invisible air quotes around the word identify. Another small moment. You see how she was actually trying to be nice. She is an incredibly nice person. Trying to acknowledge my identity, even if it’s one she thinks I’m imagining or making up.

It’s so hard to know how to respond.

Seattle police shot and killed 30-year-old Charleena Lyles, pregnant mother of four, inside her apartment in the presence of her young children after she called law enforcement to report a burglary.

Long ago, when I was online dating, the number of initial messages I received that began with racially-charged and disgustingly sexual commentary, utilizing words like “caramel” and “senorita” [sic] and “exotic”  numbered in the several hundreds and absolutely enraged me. I feel enraged thinking about it now, and it’s been more than a decade. (And I was only on those sites for six months, max.) But it didn’t feel complicated. Delete and block. Delete and block. Sometimes throw back a “fuck you” but not often. There were just too many messages.

Where are you from? What are you? Where are you from? What are you? These questions are so fatiguing. (And they’re the easy questions. The ones that are socially acceptable.) But apparently it’s also acceptable to put air quotes around the word “identify”. I don’t know.

Last week, my white husband was out wearing a BLM tee shirt and a older Black man called out to him, “I don’t believe you!”

NKL’s response was decent. He stopped and said that he understood and that it made total sense. That man has no reason in the world to believe. They actually had nice little conversation. But remember, it would have been reasonable for him to hate us, to spit in our literal faces. The wokest of the woke need to face that. Some Black people are never going to be okay with you. They’re never going to believe you no matter how much listening and learning and even protesting you do. They’re entitled to that. They’re allowed to hate you. They’re allowed to feel however they feel.

“I could have shot you in front of your fucking kids.” That’s what a Phoenix police officer told Iesha Harper, a Black woman arrested with her husband after their four-year-old daughter was accused of stealing a doll from a Family Dollar store. The cop tried to rip Harper’s one-year-old from her arms, after she refused to put the baby on the ground. In the video of the incident, Harper begs the officer to stop pointing his gun at her children.

Are your thoughts scattered? My thoughts are scattered.

This is not my racial moment. Being mixed may well feel complicated, but are cops routinely trying to murder me? No. They’re not. Do I need to be afraid that someone’s going to shoot my baby if I eventually let her walk down the road to buy a pack of Skittles? Again, no.

I don’t enjoy enough privilege for this to have been an eye-opening week for me, but nonetheless, I am very very lucky.

The shower curtain I loved when the walls were white, but have since returned.

It’s complicated. I’m tired. I’m supposed to be writing about my bathroom.

What can I say? It’s coming along. I bought a shower curtain online. I returned it. I can’t find a bath mat I like, except for one that is only being sold by a shady online retailer with terrible reviews. The walls are very very green. It’s maybe too much colour.

Yesterday on Nextdoor, a woman in my area posted that she’d called the police to report “two young black men were in the woods who appeared to be searching for something.” She actually spoke to them. Helped one of them look for a lost wallet. “I helped him look on the path and by then I was very suspicious,” she said. “So I called police. Keep an eye out … there is something up. The police said call 911. I had called the non emergency number. I’ve never used 911. This was not the first time this happened.” There are a bunch of comments explaining that calling the police was not a good idea. Most of them are “disappointing” according to the OP.

I absolutely feel like an outsider in the interior design community.

This is not a new feeling. When I first starting blogging on DIY projects, decor, etc. more than a decade ago, I felt like an outsider and that hasn’t changed. I don’t think that has anything to do with my status as a POC, though. I think it’s more about my refusal to spend money on anything and the fact that I like picking my furniture out of the garbage. There are little bright spots, like the fact that another vintage seller basically decided to “sponsor” me and has sent me the most beautiful piece to use in my space. I’m excited about it. I’ll show it to you next week.

As he lay dying, George Floyd, 46 years old, called out for his mother.

This blog wasn’t really about the ORC, was it? Oh well.

ETA: My friend Artis, a Black woman with two young daughters, is really struggling right now and is losing her home. She has started a GoFundMe to try to raise some cash. She’s an individual, not a cause, but she needs a hand. Consider sending her a donation.

As ever, thanks to Linda Weinstein (creator of the One Room Challenge) and Better Homes and Gardens (official sponsor of the ORC). Thank you for taking a beat. Want to see what I do in my house, and read the occasional rant? Follow me on Instagram. See all my One Room Challenge posts here.

*In this post, quotations are sometimes indicated by italics. Whenever text is quoted or paraphrased, the italicized text should contain a link back to the source article.