My whole life has been a weird back and forth of this. I grew up in a hyper conservative household and lived in a hyper conservative town, but I wanted to go to art school. So I moved to Seattle.

Fast forward I was a conservative in Seattle of all places, and racist af to boot. Being 18 coming off the heels of my family meant I had no original thoughts and just repeated everything my mom taught me.

I quickly learned better, both through college education but also meeting the people I’d been brought up racist against. Being in a multicultural hub like Seattle means having to see the charicatures my mom had painted for me live, breathe, and talk to me, and it’s hard for anyone with 2 braincells to run together to keep thinking those things when you interact with the people daily.

I stayed in the area after college and became increasingly more leftist. Then at a point I ended up moving to a small conservative town again due to financial issues.

Here I faced the flip side of what I’d experienced in Seattle. I’m white so everyone would try to pull me into conversation about immgrants or people on welfare or LGBT people and I was the sole voice against those views. I tried to reason with them, provide an alternative perspective, and over the years I’ve had mixed results. But the thing I’ll say that was different was the amount of violence and threat I’ve felt being the outsider in these communities.

I said some straight up racist shit when I was younger in Seattle. I lost friends and reputation over it but I never felt afraid. In the small town though, I lost jobs, was threatened, flipped off, verbally abused… I never had anyone physically attack me but it came close a few times. And the only thing I said in those areas was things like “they aren’t bad people because they are Mexican, they’re bad people because they did X to you, Debra.”

The racism and homophobia was the biggest hurdle honestly. People in that sphere dont think the things they are thinking are wrong. Often they only know what they have somehow been slighted, and they misatteibute their frustrations to race or politics. “I can’t afford groceries because so many (insert race) people are on food stamps.” No, you can’t afford groceries because your work isn’t paying you anything but beans and Walmart is the only grocery store in town. There are so many people on food stamps because they are socio-economically disadvantaged. Perhaps if you can’t afford groceries you might also qualify for food stamps."

But that’s hard to quantify, it’s easier to blame the have-nots as being morally lacking than it is to be mad at systems that are hard to quantify.