When They See Me

Why do I suddenly want nothing to do with you? Because you declare yourself openly anti-gay. -- Shayna Grissom

The difference between first time fantasy novelist Shayna Grissom and left wing journalist PM Beers is generational. Shayna will block my account on Twitter. Beers and I will argue with each other, then play according to the binary choices offered by the tools and unfollow each other. I owe my readers an apology for PM Beers, although she too, like Jason Dorwart, had been linked to my account long term. I knew Beers was the California version of the hard left, but I stayed with her, including through her Twitter suspension, because I believed her able to call the left on bad behavior. Last evening, she posted a link celebrating the aghast recoil viewers are supposed to feel over When They See Us, the Netflix series about the false accusations leveled at the Central Park Five (yes, I remember, the police and the DA were desperate to diffuse hysteria and things went awry, as they usually do over race and sexual crimes). I raised my voice, deliberately, on this woman's thread, because I can't even remove myself from a rental agent guilty of serious criminal negligence, when I am a woman actually and repeatedly victimized by black aggression and criminal behavior, as if the police state in this country isn't firmly entrenched.

Noa Pothoven's saga makes all arm chair theorists like myself uncomfortable, because when I advocate for euthanasia as the better part of valor, her circumstances in no way reflected what I saw as an equitable solution, and if the Belgian state medical apparatus was involved in her death, it is an involvement that goes one step too far. She was raped by two men as a child and developed anorexia, but she was only 17. My sexual abuse began institutionally at the age of nine in a Catholic home for children where black ignorance simply didn't know any better. The age of 57 sees me back in exactly the same place, in which black prejudices reflect the best I can navigate in my life. Black people are not saints. They prey upon each other with ignoble exploitation, just as whites do, especially when entitlement is involved. I do not regret PM Beers. She is an entitled gadfly I tolerated until yesterday and decided not to anymore. Unlike Austin Petersen, I do not call her "friend," which in Petersen's case, a reasonably known libertarian personality, is mainly an honorific. 
With Shayna Grissom, I was simply trying to be supportive of a first time novelist. But here's the thing about Shayna and I, our interaction for a year: she never read my work, nor my blog, and slammed me only because I lent support to The Federalist, on the issue of homosexuality, in public. After she blocked me on Twitter, she had no affliction of conscience following my account on Goodreads. As I told her in message, I was a professional reviewer. Books sales evidently trump whatever offense I impinged upon.