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Lex Brown

Blue Book
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... As a young person, existing in my body within the architecture of school always brought such a great deal of anxiety as well as guilt for being privileged. As a young Person of Culture (POC) I did not yet understand that my internalized sense of guilt was just another mechanism by which the powers that be prevent social capital and currency from flowing from someone like me, a very privileged female POC to others who might benefit it. It would take more than a decade for me to learn that these were actually the reverberations of cultural stereotypes rattling my body. Later, I also came to associate this invisible force with growing up in the Intelligence Community – literally – just a stone's throw away from the CIA, Pentagon, and Washington D.C. Anyone who grows up around D.C. will tell you there is a strange placeless-ness to it.

Once I began to connect the root of this placelessness and deeply felt-anxiety with an actual social structure and power, I was able to see something that I hadn't seen before, that now seems so obvious. It was like finding out a big secret. None of my perceived inadequacies actually belong to me. They were, truly, projections. We all face these projections, and they are built in order to confuse us. I think most of us can recognize, at a surface level, that "the bad things we think about ourselves might not be rooted in reality," but we don't necessarily make the next step to understand that what we register as "bad things we think about ourselves" are the reverberations of a system that is meant to control us. All the things that we feel are informed by the society and the structures that guide or control our bodies. And one of the most powerful systems of control is the control over education and the intellect...

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