neutral pronouns please (use what works)
also i like fun things like good television and music and art
Permalink
Tagged: sj stuff racism i hope it's okay for me to reblog this??? this is important
this is random but I don’t like it when a white person says it’s not “beneficial or constructive” or “childish” to call white people crackers and whatnot
I’m not saying it’s okay to call them that and I never use those words myself
but we’re not trying to be beneficial or constructive when we use those words
we’re trying to express our frustration against people who have oppressed us for centuries
we are childish, yes, because we’ve been reduced to children, something less than children in the eyes of white people
“half devil and half child” is Rudyard Kipling’s description for people like me
so
for us it’s not even social activism or being productive through social activism
it’s everyday in our fucking lives. it’s a fact of existence.
and idk what this is but I felt like saying it so yeah
David Graeber, “Beyond Power/Knowledge: An Exploration of Power, Ignorance and Stupidity” (pdf)
He also says much the same thing in “Revolutions in Reverse,” an essay included in the book Revolutions in Reverse (which can be read in Scribd at the link). I’d been meaning to post a quote from the second source for a while, thanks to Aaron Brady for the actual excerpt above. That last link is a good essay on the recent Rush Limbaugh BS and how patriarchy works and how male privilege is defended by having men like Limbaugh around to keep women’s opinions out of the allowed discourse on the subject. To keep high school boys forever unable to write essays that could relate to the issue of needing hormonal birth control to control ovarian cysts.
(via youthisastateofmind)
We talked about this a lot this year in English. Girls are taught from a young age that we have to connect to what we read, so when we do excercises in class, everyone talks about how they connect to Huck Finn, or to Jay Gatsby, or to Julius Caesar. We connect to all the characters because we have to, because if we don’t then we won’t survive through the years of school.
Boys don’t deal with this. Practically every book or story they encounter from the time they begin school is full of male characters and written by men. So when confronted with female characters of female authors, they don’t know what to do. They feel as if they can’t connect with these characters because of the gender boundaries. As one woman in my class pointed out, “girls have to connect to male characters, but boys don’t have to connect to female characters.” By the time they’re my age, it’s not even intentional: many honestly think that they won’t understand a female character because they have no shared experiences whatsoever.
(via animehrmine)
Awesome and reminds me of the thing I was talking about last week: the deep discomfort I see with YA fiction which has a girl as a protagonist instead of a supporting character for a dude. ‘Will nobody think of the boys?’ and ‘There’s too much of this!’ and ‘This female supporting character is better than any female protagonist ever!’ The overwhelming majority of books are still slanted in favour of boys, but this panicked rejection of the ladies says a lot. I think. Makes me very proud of my genre.
(via sarahreesbrennan)
(via gematriya)
i need you to come to terms with the way white women have facilitated some of the most unspeakable violence upon black and brown and indigenous people, bodies, and community. often in the name of white womanhood. often in the name of freedom. often in the name of feminism.
i need you to understand that you killed Emmitt Till. i need you to think about all of the black men and boys that have been murdered because either you accused them or your men took it upon themselves to defend *your* honor. i need you to look at pictures of lynched bodies and think about what role you played in it.
i need you to know the names of the women raped by U.S. military in countries we invaded, in part because feminists said we needed to save the women and/or children and supported the various invasions.
i need you to know that those reproductive rights you all are up in arms about were created via the destruction and maiming of black and brown bodies. i need you to know who Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsy are, and what was done to them. i need you to know the names of the Puerto Rican women who were lied to and who died so that The Pill could bring you your precious sexual liberation. i need you to know the central role white women played in sterilization programs that targeted black women, poor women, anyone they deemed too “feeble” to procreate. i need you to think about why more big name feminist organizations are up in arms about the most recent kick up about contraception than about sterilized black women getting compensated for what was done to them.
i need you to understand that at this point, it’s not about privilege. it’s not about you being able to find products that work with your hair no matter where you go. it’s about people’s lives. it’s about WOC lives and a centuries old disregard white women have shown for them. it’s about that fact that white women have been an active agent in the destruction of our communities, our histories, and our families. for centuries.
and WOC don’t owe you a damn thing. not. one. thing.
so get that through your skulls then maybe we can work together. maybe.
(via planetkissed)
EVERYONE gets niqab and burka the wrong way round in the West. And when it’s large media organisations, it’s really inexcusable.
(via brightwitch)
Sara Robinson, on “Why Patriarchal Men Are Utterly Petrified of Birth Control — And Why We’ll Still Be Fighting About it 100 Years From Now”
Everyone should read this article.
(via coketalk)
(Source: coketalk, via homoerotics)
I love it when people are like, “Oh my god, your nitpicks about race, gender, sexuality, etc. are so exhausting and stupid! Why does everyone have to have their little label? People are so demanding! They must have too much time on their hands to be worrying about this meaningless shit! Who cares if I’m not getting my cis-whateverisms right? Why should it be up to me to be sensitive? Why do I have to do all this work?”
You, as an individual, do not. You don’t have to do anything. You don’t have to move. You don’t have to care. You don’t have to change anything.
And when you’re dead, it won’t have mattered. The ten-thousand-year knot of human oppression will include your bones. You will have helped unravel nothing, and no fucks will be given about how still you sat in your comfortable chair.
"You are wonderful.
And I am going to keep quoting you forever.
(via farriswheels)
(via lathyrism)
Can fat people be healthy? A provocative new study shows that obese people who are otherwise healthy live just as long as their slim counterparts.
And that wasn’t the only surprising finding. The study also showed otherwise healthy obese people are even less likely than lean people to die of cardiovascular disease.
“Our findings challenge the idea that all obese individuals need to lose weight,” study author Dr. Jennifer L. Kuk, assistant professor at York University School of Kinesiology & Health Science, said in a written statement. “Moreover, it’s possible that trying - and failing - to lose weight may be more detrimental than simply staying at an elevated body weight and engaging in a healthy lifestyle that includes physical activity and a balanced diet with plenty of fruits and vegetables.”
"CBS article on a new weight study
(Source: shallanelprin, via lathyrism)
fussyfangs:torayot:hupsoonheng:trexlover:thedailybeard:k-mac-attack:
forever yes.
pale skin, dark hair or red hair is the most attractive combination ever.[clipped for dashes]
Dr. Syrup is highly unimpressed by attempts to construct hierarchies and dichotomies of skin colour which pay little attention to deeply ingrained histories!
Relatively pale skin has, in multiple cultures and across history, been associated with the following things:
- Wealth
- Refinement
- Beauty
- Chastity
- Moral purity
- Good health
- Good Christian faith [in Christian-dominated cultures]
- Great amount of merit in past life [in Buddhist-dominated cultures]
Relatively darker skin, whether tanned (which I take to mean not simply a tan colour but sun-darkened, previously light skin), or naturally very pigmented, has essentially represented the opposite of the above list.
Pale skin is always something to protect and take care of while dark skin is damaged and disposable -in terms of class, peasants out in the sun while the rich mostly stay indoors; in terms of race/class, POC working outdoors in the sun while white people stay indoors; and in terms of race/gender, the softness and fragility of white women is emphasized by their light skin. Darker skin is associated with tough, leathery hides with correspondingly bestial, savage natures - women with those sorts of skins hardly need protecting, apparently!
You see those ideas in different forms even now, how light skin is seen as “classically” beautiful (like Greek sculptures and old movie stars - disregard the fact they were both painted!), how “darker” skin colours are seen as a trend afforded by bronzers, how there are Lolita secrets where people wonder why brown Lolitas bother to use parasols, and how nobody bothers to tell dark-skinned people to watch for skin cancer. Dark skin may be able to resist sun damage for a while longer (by an hour or two, not half a day of relentless sunshine!), but it is by no means invincible.
For white people, the trend is now to have very very very light brown skin: the colour my yellow arse is when it’s been under layers of clothing all winter is the colour white people seem to be when they can get some sun. White people can be dark but not too dark, or you’ll actually start to look like a darker-skinned POC and that would be too much ambiguity. Also, if a white person is too dark, they are deemed “lower class” and “tacky”. You need to be the right colour.
But this is by no means carries the same weight of historical oppression that dark skin has, nor the physical fact of having pigmented skin you can never really effectively lighten. It is easy to tint the surface skin cells brown, but harder to effect and maintain the upkeep of reducing the natural level of melanin production by using costly whitening creams (cheap creams may permanently damage and discolour the skin), never exposing your bare skin to any sort of sun, consistently covering up and using sunscreen all over just in case, and constantly abrading the surface of the skin with peels and microdermabrasion. Most if not all of these things are usually combined in a skin-lightening and tan-preventing regimen, which leaves the skin extremely fragile and may even increas the risk of cancer. People are sanctioned, even encouraged by culture to be obsessed with skin-whitening - and professionals enable this.
So, basically, there is little need to assert the superiority of pale skin to tan (and by extension any darker skin colour), because it’s essentially already a given and to say otherwise is a kind of privileged false-consciousness with hugely unfortunate implications.
But I’ve been seeing this bullshit more and more, so let’s talk about it. I keep running into people who seem to honestly think that fat-positive is a bad thing, because if you ever allow those horrible fat people to feel good about their bodies and believe that their worth is…
The End of Dieting (via fatgirlposing)
And we’ve had this information since the mid 1940s. That’s seventy years of science behind the inefficacy of dieting.
(via blocky-sheep)
(Source: prevention.com, via lathyrism)
The moment when my passion for comics began is as clear to me now many, many years later as it was then. It was the moment when I saw Batgirl on the TV screen. As a small child I loved Batman, but I couldn’t be Batman because I was a girl. But then there was this girl,…
(via gematriya)
Cinemania: How do you compare Harry Potter with Twilight?
Bonnie Wright (who plays Ginny Weasley in the Harry Potter films): They’re completely different. The way J.K. Rowling writes is way more superior to that of the author of Twilight, besides the story has more different layers…
(Source: demarches)
The problem with cultural appropriation is that it replaces the original with a copy created by the dominant culture. It dilutes the original, removes all symbolic value from it and replaces it with a ready to consume product devoid of context and meaning.
Cultural appropriation, at its most extreme, is a violent form of colonization because it removes the original group behind the culture and reinforces stereotypes about that group (i.e. ALL First Nation folks are reduced to “war bonnets”, whether their culture uses them or not; all Latin@s are reduced to a stylized version of Catholicism regardless of their spirituality; etc.). The mechanism of commodifying a culture ends up being a tool to re-inforce [sic] racism as it reduces the people behind those cultures to a mere cartoon like representation of their realities. It’s a great way to ultimately Other and objectify entire groups of people by taking something that is dynamic and ever evolving and freezing it for a marketing photo opportunity.
"i want to print this out on cards and hand it to anyone obviously appropriating anything
