Why, YES, I am always this paranoid
I think I was probably 37 when I met Tom Fejeran. I had gone to GIS school. I was trying to pursue education pertinent to plans to have a career in Urban Planning. I was a homeschooling mom -- aka the teacher for a two-student private school under California law -- and military wife and facing a divorce that I knew would happen though the paperwork would not be filed for some time.
Tom had been an urban planner in Guam for some years until shortly before he met me. He was retired military and he had recently left his planning career to begin working as a school teacher.
I think I was involved with him for over a year. Sometime during that relationship his youngest child was eight years old. I remember because we were talking about our kids and he was listing their ages, maybe in parentheses, and it created a musical note on screen and we both laughed about it.
He was legally separated and had been since that child was something like three years old. So his divorce and mine were both long, drawn out affairs in part for the sake of our children.
In short, we had a LOT in common and it's hardly surprising we hit it off and liked each other a lot. I was very aware we had a LOT in common.
But one thing we had in common that never crossed my mind is Native culture. I thought the fact that he was Native was something that made him different from me, not one more thing we kind of had in common to some degree, though I am part Cherokee and he was Chamorro.
My mother is a German immigrant. She grew up in Germany during World War II and its aftermath. Under the influence of the Nazis, being White was important. They sent people to concentration camps for being the wrong kind of people.
The Nazis valued blonde hair and blue eyes. It was part of their ideas about some superior race.
My mother had dark brown hair -- until she began dying it blonde to cover the gray as she aged -- and olive skin and she was a HUGE sun worshipper, laying out to work on her tan or pulling weeds in the yard in a bikini top and shorts on a very regular basis. She is as dark as a light-skinned Black American and I once briefly mistook her for a Black woman when she was driving up to meet me somewhere while wearing dark sun glasses covering her blue eyes.
She has striking pale blue eyes, made all the more striking by the contrast with her dark skin. And, at least when we were little, two of her three children were blonde.
My maiden name is Irish in origin. My father's arms and head were dark from 26.5 years in the military but if he took his shirt off, he was pasty white beneath it. I never thought of him as anything but White, though I knew he was part Cherokee.
My parents were not originally from Georgia. I had friends who were of various ethnicities and nationalities, as did at least one of my siblings. It was only after my father died that I realized that some were part Cherokee and this was sort of an invisible pattern in my life.
When and where I grew up, race was largely about Black or White. If you weren't either of those, you didn't really fit anywhere.
There were very few Latinos. A friend of mine once told me that a Latino girl I knew about who had a terrible reputation as a floozy was viewed that way because there weren't enough Latino boys to date and she saw no reason to pick EITHER Blacks OR Whites to date, so she dated both. This broke some kind of unwritten social rule and got her branded as a scarlet woman.
In sixth grade, one of my best friends was a girl whose father was Cherokee. She was half Cherokee, had a very "obviously" Native-sounding last name and wore her hair down to her butt in two braids, so she looked pretty obviously Native. I seemed to be her only friend.
In high school, one of my best friends was one quarter Cherokee. She also seemed to fit nowhere and ultimately dropped out of school. Her last name was a bit more ambigious as were her looks, but I suspect her inability to find a circle of friends or remain in school were related to her being part Native.
I concluded at some point that my father not speaking about being part Native and how that impacted his life helped make certain patterns in my life invisible to me. They weren't spoken about and this made them hard to see until after he died and I saw that photo of that actor that looked uncannily like him and began to wonder what else I had failed to see.
Eventually, this provided me a mental model for why I had so much friction with White men. My background is multi-cultural and multi-ethnic but I don't LOOK Native to Americans -- my German relatives in Germany can see that I am part Native -- yet I never quite seem to fit in with White Americans.
There is something seemingly cultural that they expect me to conform to and I never got the memo.
The following is something ONLY White men ever do to me. It isn't ALL White men but no other ethnicity has ever done this to me and it's been a real nuisance that baffled me for a lot of years and only made sense after my father died and I started this blog -- which had a lot more content at one time but got redacted repeatedly and started over -- and I began grappling with the Native influence on my life.
White men seem to think I'm a "slut" throwing myself at them for being socially warm and chatty and when I'm offended, they seem to think I "run hot one minute and cold the next." And I just cannot fathom how ANYONE thinks I am "throwing myself at them." That's just not a thing I do yet White men sometimes seem to think I'm doing exactly that.
There is some invisible culture clash between me and some White men and I have come to believe that it is rooted in the Native influence on my life.
This longstanding, baffling and frustrating experience with how some White men react to me is part of what informs my opinion about the MMIW crisis.
I have previously written a few things with tidbits that are pertinent, such as Putting Victimhood Behind You and Not Really Rude, but I feel those will make little sense to Natives trying to navigate racism and a more extreme clash of cultures, because I grew up in the 'burbs and have a very White-middle-class coded experience of life in many ways.
There is a multi-part thing called The Gervais Principle. It makes the point somewhere that the person who is less socially developed "wins" in some social heirarchy thing because they are less sophisticated. I think this is a contributing factor to Natives being victimized by Whites: Whites are unable to understand the socially sophisticated approach to sexuality that is the norm for Natives, so Whites misinterpret and victimize them.
I come from a very chatty background and this seems to be due to a variety of factors. I have written about that here: The Talk.
I'm a very big talker and I get along with people with like "international diplomat" style approaches to communication and that starts with a baseline assumption that if we've just met, it's going to take some TIME and significant interaction to get to know each other. And as best I can tell, SOME White men only REALLY talk "in depth" to women when looking for sex -- which has me going "Do you not HAVE a mother??? What the hell?"
I TALK to people. Me TALKING to you is NOT me throwing myself at you, but this seems to be an assumption made by White men and I have written elsewhere about what I think is probably going on there.
So what I have concluded is that Native women run into White men at, say, some isolated corner store in a relatively rural environment and these women think like I do: Sex occurs within the confines of a serious RELATIONSHIP, if I JUST met you 30 seconds ago, sex is not on the agenda AT ALL and we do not know each other well enough for you to even begin thinking of me that way.
So she makes casual conversation and this guy is someone who doesn't ever REALLY have deep conversations with ANYONE and her idea of casual conversation is like emotional crack cocaine for this guy with a shockingly empty life. And he feels he is SMITTEN and all this outright CRAZY stuff.
She is operating on an assumption that his social experience is like hers, that merely TALKING to him for a few minutes in a public place is not a big deal of any sort and she's WRONG. In many cases, White men are very DANGEROUS to women who feel their sexuality belongs to themselves.
I do NOT get this kind of cold "you are NOTHING but a sex object" treatment from ANYONE but White men. Black men don't do this. Hispanic men don't do this. Native men don't do this. Middle Eastern men don't do this.
And I have come to believe that a lot of White men are dangerous because White culture is so toxic that White men do ugly things to try to protect theselves from OTHER WHITE MEN, like my father making racist jokes to try to say "I'm not one of them. I'm not Native."
White men treat their women like chattel property. They do this to WHITE women too, not just "you."
White men are much more likely than other ethnicities in the US to make enough money to have a full-time homemaker wife. Black women in Black couples are much more likely to have a job and Black women have more say in the family finances than White women.
If you live in the middle of nowhere and are a Native woman, the best advice I can give you is do NOT engage with random White men that you bumped into for five minutes at the corner store or something. They are NOT like you socially and MERELY talking to them is NOT SAFE.
As described in the above linked piece about Putting Victimhood Behind You, I recommend you do NOT have open/welcoming body language around random White strangers and do NOT meet their eye.
Also, do NOT make small talk with them. If they ask questions and it's not literally your job to answer the questions they are asking, don't answer their questions.
Unlike YOU, they are NOT "making conversation." In MOST cases, White men asking questions are engaging in INTENTIONALLY predatory behavior with malice aforethought. It is PREMEDITATED.
They are scoping you out. This is an intelligence-gathering activity to figure out how to get what they want and your consent be damned. They figure if you are stupid enough to ANSWER their damn questions, you have "agreed" to their ugly rapey abusive agenda already without knowing it exists and if you DO NOT answer their invasive, inappropriate questions, this will NOT dissuade them. They will come up with some NEW excuse for intentionally taking advantage of you.
If they ask if you have a boyfriend, they are probably NOT asking if you are "available." They have already decided they want you and they are only trying to figure out what it takes to get you out of your clothes. You having a boyfriend will NOT be protection from their unwanted attention.
There was a piece on Metafilter back when I was active and it was about a serial killer. I believe he was a long haul trucker and he used some phrase about "The invisible people."
In other words, he picked victims -- like Native single mothers who lived in the middle of nowhere -- who would NOT be missed and not be looked for.
Serial killers routinely choose jobs that facilitate their ability to murder people, such as long haul trucker.
Here is a comment by an Indigenous individual about "agreeing to disagree" and how he got past superficial racist bullshit with someone he had to work with: Linky. It's a great read for ANYONE wanting to learn to get along with others in this big, wide world full of very diverse people.
If you REGULARLY interact with a White person and get to know them, SOME White men are okay. But if you do NOT know them -- they are a stranger and just passing through -- PLEASE err on the side of assuming they are a racist heathen with zero respect for women (so probably a rapist) and POSSIBLY a serial killer and err on the side of caution. There are TOO MANY Native women dying and disappearing for you to "politely" make small talk with someone because you think that's the socially acceptable and socially expected thing to do.
If a random White man "just passing through" in any way INSISTS on trying to engage you, ASSUME you are in MORTAL DANGER and take action to protect yourself. Do not walk home ALONE. Call someone. Stay in a public place with people around. Etc.
I will reiterate what I say in Not Really Rude: If this guy is thinking of killing you or has decided he wants to have sex with you (and your opinion about that is unimportant), the sooner you set boundaries and shut him out, the LESS danger you are in. If he violently assaults you at that point, violent assault was ALWAYS on the table and it ONLY GETS WORSE if he can make you look complicit, convince people you went on a "date" with him willingly, get you alone, etc.
I once was talking in a chat room with some woman and she was talking about some guy she knew being skeevy and she was trying to "be polite" and "give him the benefit of the doubt" and I told her bluntly she needed to stop that and be more aggressive about protecting herself because this shit is how women slippery slope themselves into ending up raped. And some WHITE guy was like "Are you always this paranoid?" (and tried to tell the gal I was giving her bad advice).
Why, YES, asshole, I'm ALWAYS this paranoid.
As one of my sons quipped later when I related the story to him "Better wrong half the time than raped half the time."
Take YOUR safety seriously. YOUR safety matters MORE than "being polite" to random White men just passing through.
Tom had been an urban planner in Guam for some years until shortly before he met me. He was retired military and he had recently left his planning career to begin working as a school teacher.
I think I was involved with him for over a year. Sometime during that relationship his youngest child was eight years old. I remember because we were talking about our kids and he was listing their ages, maybe in parentheses, and it created a musical note on screen and we both laughed about it.
He was legally separated and had been since that child was something like three years old. So his divorce and mine were both long, drawn out affairs in part for the sake of our children.
In short, we had a LOT in common and it's hardly surprising we hit it off and liked each other a lot. I was very aware we had a LOT in common.
But one thing we had in common that never crossed my mind is Native culture. I thought the fact that he was Native was something that made him different from me, not one more thing we kind of had in common to some degree, though I am part Cherokee and he was Chamorro.
My mother is a German immigrant. She grew up in Germany during World War II and its aftermath. Under the influence of the Nazis, being White was important. They sent people to concentration camps for being the wrong kind of people.
The Nazis valued blonde hair and blue eyes. It was part of their ideas about some superior race.
My mother had dark brown hair -- until she began dying it blonde to cover the gray as she aged -- and olive skin and she was a HUGE sun worshipper, laying out to work on her tan or pulling weeds in the yard in a bikini top and shorts on a very regular basis. She is as dark as a light-skinned Black American and I once briefly mistook her for a Black woman when she was driving up to meet me somewhere while wearing dark sun glasses covering her blue eyes.
She has striking pale blue eyes, made all the more striking by the contrast with her dark skin. And, at least when we were little, two of her three children were blonde.
My maiden name is Irish in origin. My father's arms and head were dark from 26.5 years in the military but if he took his shirt off, he was pasty white beneath it. I never thought of him as anything but White, though I knew he was part Cherokee.
My parents were not originally from Georgia. I had friends who were of various ethnicities and nationalities, as did at least one of my siblings. It was only after my father died that I realized that some were part Cherokee and this was sort of an invisible pattern in my life.
When and where I grew up, race was largely about Black or White. If you weren't either of those, you didn't really fit anywhere.
There were very few Latinos. A friend of mine once told me that a Latino girl I knew about who had a terrible reputation as a floozy was viewed that way because there weren't enough Latino boys to date and she saw no reason to pick EITHER Blacks OR Whites to date, so she dated both. This broke some kind of unwritten social rule and got her branded as a scarlet woman.
In sixth grade, one of my best friends was a girl whose father was Cherokee. She was half Cherokee, had a very "obviously" Native-sounding last name and wore her hair down to her butt in two braids, so she looked pretty obviously Native. I seemed to be her only friend.
In high school, one of my best friends was one quarter Cherokee. She also seemed to fit nowhere and ultimately dropped out of school. Her last name was a bit more ambigious as were her looks, but I suspect her inability to find a circle of friends or remain in school were related to her being part Native.
I concluded at some point that my father not speaking about being part Native and how that impacted his life helped make certain patterns in my life invisible to me. They weren't spoken about and this made them hard to see until after he died and I saw that photo of that actor that looked uncannily like him and began to wonder what else I had failed to see.
Eventually, this provided me a mental model for why I had so much friction with White men. My background is multi-cultural and multi-ethnic but I don't LOOK Native to Americans -- my German relatives in Germany can see that I am part Native -- yet I never quite seem to fit in with White Americans.
There is something seemingly cultural that they expect me to conform to and I never got the memo.
The following is something ONLY White men ever do to me. It isn't ALL White men but no other ethnicity has ever done this to me and it's been a real nuisance that baffled me for a lot of years and only made sense after my father died and I started this blog -- which had a lot more content at one time but got redacted repeatedly and started over -- and I began grappling with the Native influence on my life.
White men seem to think I'm a "slut" throwing myself at them for being socially warm and chatty and when I'm offended, they seem to think I "run hot one minute and cold the next." And I just cannot fathom how ANYONE thinks I am "throwing myself at them." That's just not a thing I do yet White men sometimes seem to think I'm doing exactly that.
There is some invisible culture clash between me and some White men and I have come to believe that it is rooted in the Native influence on my life.
This longstanding, baffling and frustrating experience with how some White men react to me is part of what informs my opinion about the MMIW crisis.
I have previously written a few things with tidbits that are pertinent, such as Putting Victimhood Behind You and Not Really Rude, but I feel those will make little sense to Natives trying to navigate racism and a more extreme clash of cultures, because I grew up in the 'burbs and have a very White-middle-class coded experience of life in many ways.
There is a multi-part thing called The Gervais Principle. It makes the point somewhere that the person who is less socially developed "wins" in some social heirarchy thing because they are less sophisticated. I think this is a contributing factor to Natives being victimized by Whites: Whites are unable to understand the socially sophisticated approach to sexuality that is the norm for Natives, so Whites misinterpret and victimize them.
I come from a very chatty background and this seems to be due to a variety of factors. I have written about that here: The Talk.
I'm a very big talker and I get along with people with like "international diplomat" style approaches to communication and that starts with a baseline assumption that if we've just met, it's going to take some TIME and significant interaction to get to know each other. And as best I can tell, SOME White men only REALLY talk "in depth" to women when looking for sex -- which has me going "Do you not HAVE a mother??? What the hell?"
I TALK to people. Me TALKING to you is NOT me throwing myself at you, but this seems to be an assumption made by White men and I have written elsewhere about what I think is probably going on there.
So what I have concluded is that Native women run into White men at, say, some isolated corner store in a relatively rural environment and these women think like I do: Sex occurs within the confines of a serious RELATIONSHIP, if I JUST met you 30 seconds ago, sex is not on the agenda AT ALL and we do not know each other well enough for you to even begin thinking of me that way.
So she makes casual conversation and this guy is someone who doesn't ever REALLY have deep conversations with ANYONE and her idea of casual conversation is like emotional crack cocaine for this guy with a shockingly empty life. And he feels he is SMITTEN and all this outright CRAZY stuff.
She is operating on an assumption that his social experience is like hers, that merely TALKING to him for a few minutes in a public place is not a big deal of any sort and she's WRONG. In many cases, White men are very DANGEROUS to women who feel their sexuality belongs to themselves.
I do NOT get this kind of cold "you are NOTHING but a sex object" treatment from ANYONE but White men. Black men don't do this. Hispanic men don't do this. Native men don't do this. Middle Eastern men don't do this.
And I have come to believe that a lot of White men are dangerous because White culture is so toxic that White men do ugly things to try to protect theselves from OTHER WHITE MEN, like my father making racist jokes to try to say "I'm not one of them. I'm not Native."
White men treat their women like chattel property. They do this to WHITE women too, not just "you."
White men are much more likely than other ethnicities in the US to make enough money to have a full-time homemaker wife. Black women in Black couples are much more likely to have a job and Black women have more say in the family finances than White women.
If you live in the middle of nowhere and are a Native woman, the best advice I can give you is do NOT engage with random White men that you bumped into for five minutes at the corner store or something. They are NOT like you socially and MERELY talking to them is NOT SAFE.
As described in the above linked piece about Putting Victimhood Behind You, I recommend you do NOT have open/welcoming body language around random White strangers and do NOT meet their eye.
Also, do NOT make small talk with them. If they ask questions and it's not literally your job to answer the questions they are asking, don't answer their questions.
Unlike YOU, they are NOT "making conversation." In MOST cases, White men asking questions are engaging in INTENTIONALLY predatory behavior with malice aforethought. It is PREMEDITATED.
They are scoping you out. This is an intelligence-gathering activity to figure out how to get what they want and your consent be damned. They figure if you are stupid enough to ANSWER their damn questions, you have "agreed" to their ugly rapey abusive agenda already without knowing it exists and if you DO NOT answer their invasive, inappropriate questions, this will NOT dissuade them. They will come up with some NEW excuse for intentionally taking advantage of you.
If they ask if you have a boyfriend, they are probably NOT asking if you are "available." They have already decided they want you and they are only trying to figure out what it takes to get you out of your clothes. You having a boyfriend will NOT be protection from their unwanted attention.
There was a piece on Metafilter back when I was active and it was about a serial killer. I believe he was a long haul trucker and he used some phrase about "The invisible people."
In other words, he picked victims -- like Native single mothers who lived in the middle of nowhere -- who would NOT be missed and not be looked for.
Serial killers routinely choose jobs that facilitate their ability to murder people, such as long haul trucker.
Here is a comment by an Indigenous individual about "agreeing to disagree" and how he got past superficial racist bullshit with someone he had to work with: Linky. It's a great read for ANYONE wanting to learn to get along with others in this big, wide world full of very diverse people.
If you REGULARLY interact with a White person and get to know them, SOME White men are okay. But if you do NOT know them -- they are a stranger and just passing through -- PLEASE err on the side of assuming they are a racist heathen with zero respect for women (so probably a rapist) and POSSIBLY a serial killer and err on the side of caution. There are TOO MANY Native women dying and disappearing for you to "politely" make small talk with someone because you think that's the socially acceptable and socially expected thing to do.
If a random White man "just passing through" in any way INSISTS on trying to engage you, ASSUME you are in MORTAL DANGER and take action to protect yourself. Do not walk home ALONE. Call someone. Stay in a public place with people around. Etc.
I will reiterate what I say in Not Really Rude: If this guy is thinking of killing you or has decided he wants to have sex with you (and your opinion about that is unimportant), the sooner you set boundaries and shut him out, the LESS danger you are in. If he violently assaults you at that point, violent assault was ALWAYS on the table and it ONLY GETS WORSE if he can make you look complicit, convince people you went on a "date" with him willingly, get you alone, etc.
I once was talking in a chat room with some woman and she was talking about some guy she knew being skeevy and she was trying to "be polite" and "give him the benefit of the doubt" and I told her bluntly she needed to stop that and be more aggressive about protecting herself because this shit is how women slippery slope themselves into ending up raped. And some WHITE guy was like "Are you always this paranoid?" (and tried to tell the gal I was giving her bad advice).
Why, YES, asshole, I'm ALWAYS this paranoid.
As one of my sons quipped later when I related the story to him "Better wrong half the time than raped half the time."
Take YOUR safety seriously. YOUR safety matters MORE than "being polite" to random White men just passing through.