My Top Ten Favorite Science Fiction Shows

I grew up watching a lot of SciFi on TV and I don’t think I’ve ever talked about my top favorite series cuz I got favorites y’all , and this time I’m actually going to rank them fromleast to most in the order I’m supposed to instead of just tossing them up in any kind of order like I normally do.

This isn’t a list of best and worst SciFi because I don’t normally think of the media I consume in terms of best and worst. What most matters to me is how I felt when I watched it, how long it sticks in my memory, and if the show had any personal relevance for me, not whether or not other people (who I decided are not me) liked it. Don’t get me wrong, I love it when people like the things I like, but that doesn’t often factor into whether or not I like it.

10. The Bionic Woman (1976)/Wonder Woman (1975)

And right off the bat, you can see where some of my little baby feminism is leading. I had to do a twofer on this one because I watched both of these shows around the same time. Like a lot of little girls I’ve known I wanted to see women and girls onscreen, having adventures, kicking booty, etc., and in the 70s and 80s, this is what I got! I count these two shows because I had the TV all to myself at the time of day these shows aired. I don’t know where my brothers were, but they never bothered me during these shows. I remember they used to air on Saturdays, usually around 11AM or Noon.

The Bionic Woman was a spinoff series from The Six Million Dollar Man and I thought of both them as superhero shows. I didn’t learn about The Bionic Woman until some time after The Six Million Dollar Man left the air in 1978. My brothers had Steve Austin (which I also watched) but I had Jamie Somers, and I have a very distinct memory of all of us doing that slow-motion running thing that the main characters did in the series. Yes, it was silly, but this was the 70s and we were like 7, 8 and 9 years old. The series was about a woman who had had various body parts, like her legs and arms replaced by machinery which gave her the ability to run really fast and super strength. Needless to say, this was not depicted very well on network TV, but it was good for what it was. There was a one-season remix of the idea in 2007, which had an engaging lead character and better special effects but couldn’t overcome the nostalgia factor of the original I guess, because It didn’t last long.

The Bionic Woman first aired in 1976, and Wonder Woman aired in 1975. I was five and six years old and I watched them in syndication around nine or ten. The lead character in WW was Lynda Carter who has had a bit of a resurgence in her popularity since the release of the WW movies. I’m sorry guys but Gal Godot is pretty and all but she is, at best, a whispy presence next to the truly Amazonian frame of Lynda Carter, who will always be my favorite Wonder Woman, with her sunny smile, twinkling eyes, and truly impressive bosoms. I also remember the themes songs from both series and yeah, and I and every other girl my age definitely did that twirling around shit that turned Lynda into Wonder Woman.

9. The Incredible Hulk (1977)

This was one of my favorite shows and I have the memory of watching it with my Mom. I’m often surprised by how laid back and relaxed a lot of the shows we watched were from that time period. I watched a retrospective of this series a few years back and I was struck by its wholesomeness, Bill Bixby’s gentleness, and intelligence, and the series’s complete lack of urgency, something of which was captured in Mark Ruffalo’s version in The Avengers, which is probably why I like him so much.

Another reason these shows are favorites is because of the theme songs. The song for The Incredible Hulk was a treacly piano number titled The Lonely Man and it just perfectly captured the tragic vibe of the series, where Bixby’s Banner had to keep moving on from place to place, getting involved in various adventures while dodging the authorities and a nosy news reporter who was determined to out him to the rest of the world.

The Incredible Hulk was one of the few SciFi shows introduced to me by my mom, even though she wasn’t into superheroes and didn’t watch many SciFi shows. I know she approved of Bill Bixby and knew that I liked him from shows like My Favorite Martian (which she did watch), and The Courtship of Eddie’s Father. When The Avengers came out The Hulk was one of the few characters we could talk about, and I think it was because of her grounding in this series that she was able to smoothly glide into a discussion of superhero movies.

8. Space 1999 (1975)

This is one of my favorite shows right now. I remember that a lot of my relatives thought the show was pretty boring because they didn’t think much happened on it, but I also have the distinct memory of watching this show in my grandmother’s living room, and my other relatives indulging my love of this show because it aired around the same time as Star Trek and Lost in Space. I think the reason they indulged me most of the time is because the theme song for the show just slapped, but there were times we would groove to the title song, and then turn the channel.

I was only a kid but I remember Martin Landau from other shows I watched, and I grew to like Barbara Bain, but my favorite character was the shapeshifting Maya, played by Catherine Schell, but she didn’t show up until about season two or three. I thought she was beautiful and exotic at the time but I saw this series before I watched Star Trek so I didn’t know she was a kind of Spock ripoff. Admittedly the show and the characters were slow-moving and very non-dramatic in their behavior, which prompted quite a few people to say the show was boring. It’s true that it was not an especially dynamic cast and the show was a lot more cerebral than most of my family was willing to sit through, but part of the reason I liked it was for its Horror elements. The show was genuinely scary in its first season.

The show was ind of built on a Horror premise about a group of scientists on Moonbase Alpha who get lost in space when the moon gets knocked out of Earth orbit. Yeah, the basic premise is silly, but I watched a retrospective of the show on Youtube a few months ago and the episodes not only still hold up, but fit right in today’s shows from a plot point of view, and involved things like portal aliens that swallowed people alive, a man who was turned into a vampire like creature and had to be stopped, and creatures that were like ghosts. Every episode had a mystery that needed to be solved, the outcome wasn’t always predictable, and people died in some fairly gruesome ways.

There were also a number of toys associated with this show and I remember I had a large replica of the spaceship from this show. I don’t remember if my Mom bought it or I stole it from one of my brothers but I cherished this toy and played with it with my Legos! I was not a Star Wars fan. I was a Space 1999 fan.

7. Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone (1959)

Watching this first iteration of the Twilight Zone is one of my earliest memories of watching TV shows with my Mom. She was a huge fan of Rod Serling, probably because of the social messages in his work. I remember having discussions with her about the meanings of some of the episodes we watched or just hearing her talk about some of her favorites.

One of our top favorite episodes was It’s a Good Life, with Billy Mumy from Lost in Space as a kid with reality-bending superpowers, which was genuinely terrifying to me at that age, and one of my Mom’s favorites was Nightmare at 20,000 Feet which starred William Shatner before I knew him as Captain Kirk. I thought that episode was a bit overdone but some of the scarier episodes for me were Time Enough At Last, about a man who manages to get time to read all he wants except for one little hiccup, the Living Doll episode which might have something to do with why I find inanimate objects that move so terrifying, and The Monsters are Due on Maple Street spoke to both of us. I think the saddest episode was Five Characters in Search of an Exit, about five characters trying to escape some kind of prison, but with a horrible twist.

The Twilight Zone aired after Primetime and was one of the few shows she would let me stay up late on a weeknight to watch, which was a big deal when I was ten, sitting in my Mom’s bed while I drank milk and she had soda, and my brothers were already asleep. She and I didn’t have a lot of favorite shows that we watched together (although she carefully monitored what I watched sometimes) but whenever the original series aired we’d be right there for it, so you can imagine there is a huge nostalgia factor for me here. I was very young and until my own tastes started to diverge I simply watched whatever she watched and she had some fairly wide-ranging tastes. I did however draw the line at soap operas. She absolutely loved her “Stories” while I found them uninteresting.

6. Aeon Flux (1991)

When I was in college MTV and the Syfy networks used to air a program called Liquid Television very late in the evening, and this was where I first saw Aeon Flux. I loved the animation style but otherwise was kind of puzzled. I didn’t know what to make of the plots or stories and I wasn’t sure if they were supposed to be funny or not. Later, I decided that only some of the episodes were meant to be funny. Aeon herself was something of a sad sack. She never accomplished her goals and almost always died either because she was simply unlucky, or just through her own clumsiness.

When the series began the episodes were just one-offs that were not entirely connected to one another, although some had recurring characters, like her arch-nemesis Trevor Goodchild, who was the leader of some kind of authoritarian state that Aeon was in opposition to. Later, the single shorts became an entire series which was every bit as bizarre and puzzling but at least Aeon lived to the end of the episodes, sometimes.

The very first episode I saw, I thought was pretty groundbreaking. In it, Aeon is fighting a running battle between two different hordes of soldiers, and all of the viewer’s focus is on her until she gets taken out about halfway through it. I wasn’t expecting that! There’s another one where she’s doing some spy stuff on a train with Goodchild and she accomplishes her goal but is unlucky enough to get strangled by her own rope as she escapes. In another episode she just gets shot in the head by her enemy before she can finish the job. As an artist (who studied animation in school), the animation style was very exciting to me and unlike any other style I’d seen on TV, although it looks kind of jerky today, and I still don’t get why everyone was wearing BDSM gear, which I thought was pretty funny.

5. Star Trek Discovery (2017)

Before the show aired, I’d been watching Sonequa Martin Green’s character on The Walking Dead. I was pretty upset that she was killed off that series but later found out that she asked to be written out of the show because of her newest project. And then I heard about this show, and I was very excited since I really liked her. When I heard that she was starring in the series as an Ensign I was a little put out by that because I was led to believe the entire series would be based around her and it couldn’t be that way if she wasn’t a Captain. See, up to this point, all the Star Trek shows revolved around Captains and their crews.

But the show had something a little more subtle in mind because it turned out to be a psychological study of the effects of trauma, and a chronicle of Michael Burnham’s fall, redemption, healing, and eventual rise to Captaincy. I saw this pattern by the second season, but I don’t think a lot of people understood what the show was trying to do. I also had to explain to several people that weren’t used to seeing this kind of thing that this Black woman was basically getting the Full Hero Treatment that is usually given to straight white dudes in these types of stories, and that in itself was groundbreaking for Star Trek!

I have to admit, I couldn’t contain my excitement for this angle of the series, and I had (and still today) no patience for other people’s criticism of this show. To Hell with all of them! This was what I wanted to see and I don’t give a damn if people call it pandering because I want to be pandered to as much as every other demographic! This was what I’d been asking for for years. This was the representation I always wanted to see of women who looked like me. I waited forty years of my life for this, and to have Star Trek do the thing was enormous to me, and celebrating this kind of story was the reason I started this blog. The top four genres of film and TV (Action, SciFi, Horror, and the Western) had almost entirely erased the existence of Black women. We showed up from time to time and said a few lines, or supported some other character’s journey, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with any of that, but when that is the only type of character you infrequently get…

Michael wasn’t just a sidekick or a token. She is the hero. She is the star around which all the other characters and the plot orbited, just like what happened on shows with white lead characters. She is passionate, smart, brave, reckless, and foolish, and I watched this character grow and learn and become everything she is to today and I am here for it. And she wasn’t the only great character on this show. I grew to like all of the top characters, (Tilly, Saru, Stametz), the tech was unique, and there were also all my old friends, the Klingons, the Romulans, and the Terran Empire. And I am fortunate to have gotten four whole seasons of this series.

Don’t get me wrong. I liked the other Star Treks well enough (at least the ones I watched), and consider at least one of the spinoffs some of the finest hours of television ever made, but you can’t tell me nothing about Discovery. Straight white guys have had umpteen bajillion SciFi series where characters who look like them were the center of attention, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that but…

This one is mine!

4. The X Files (1993)

I’m not sure what I can say about this series. it was my first introduction to conspiracy TV via Chris Carter. I was initially attracted to the show because when it first began it used a monster of the week model, and it was the monsters that kept me addicted to it. Along the way, I got a heaping helping of alien conspiracy theories, and a will they/won’t they love affair between the two lead characters, Mulder and Scully, which I only halfheartedly rooted for. I have never cared too deeply for romance in the shows I liked.

I remember when the show first aired I kind of hated Mulder who I thought was like every mansplaining, arrogant, know-it-all nerdy white guy I’d met in college, but over the years I grew to like him and his better qualities (one of which is that he turned out to be more or less right in his theories.) I liked Scully right away, although later in the series watching her get damseled always irritated me, and eventually, her skepticism became rather annoying, but I never stopped liking the show, not even after both lead actors left, and I continued to watch it even when it was briefly rebooted a few years ago.

I don’t always know why I like certain shows and The X-Files falls into that category. I can’t exactly pinpoint why I loved it so much, which is something I can do for other shows like Buffy and Supernatural. The X-Files just happened to show up at the right time for me to like it, I guess.

3. Farscape (1999)

This is another show I don’t have a whole lot to say about other than it was one of my all-time favorite SCIFI series, back when the SYFY network was firing on all thrusters. I loved it purely for the aesthetics, and there has really never been anything like it since. I watched all five seasons multiple times. I just liked spending time with these characters, and it had puppets, and it was funny, and actually, it was a very sexy show without being too upfront about it, with lots of black leather and high heels.

Not pictured above is the actress Virginia Hey who played the elegant, blue-skinned, Pa’u Zotoh Zhaan. This was an actress I remember from The Road Warrior. My favorite character wasn’t Crichton though, it was Gigi Edgly’s Chiana, who was just weird, and I really liked the weird. The aesthetics for this show were just crazy. I can say it was one of the prettiest and most imaginative SciFi shows on TV. The fashion, the colors, the special effects, and no bumpy-headed humans. Since the show was created by the same company that created The Muppets, they had the ability to make aliens that really looked (and in many cases acted) truly alien.

Storywise, the show wasn’t a rival for Star Trek but it made up for that by being hella sexy, about an American astronaut who flies through a wormhole, ends up on a living ship with a bunch of galactic prisoners, and gets chased around this new universe by various baddies while trying to find his way back home. I’ve never seen that much black leather in another SciFi series. Yes, I had favorites, but all the characters were engaging, which made the stories terrifying, funny, or sad just because you cared about what happened to them. Speaking of which, I kinda miss these guys. It’s probably time for a re-watch.

2. Mork and Mindy (1978)

I don’t think there are enough words to express how much of an effect this show had on me in my formative years and just how much I miss Robin Williams. He was a strange guy and Mork was a weirdo and this series taught me that it was okay to be like that, no matter what anyone said. This show taught me to love and accept myself, and through that love, accept the eccentricities of others. I was a strange little girl. I didn’t get picked on too much or teased a lot when I was little but I did get raised eyebrows from a lot of my teachers and my family, and most kids my age were disinterested in me or just generally avoided me. My mother however never batted a single eyelash at her strange daughter, who dressed funny, had odd but very focused interests, read everything that wasn’t nailed down, was a picky eater, watched entirely too much TV and liked the weird shows, and talked like the books she read. My Mom just rolled with all of it, loving me no matter how weird I was, never asking why, and indulging every one of my odd artistic interests, like weaving!

I remember watching this show when it first aired because I was in the fourth grade. I remember this because I went to a school in my neighborhood and I remember wearing those exact suspenders to school every day. No one and I mean absolutely no one, recognized those suspenders, but I loved them and wore them with everything. I guess that was my eight-year-old version of cosplaying. Other little girls had tutus. I had Mork Suspenders. I memorized Mork’s catchphrases and hand gestures (the sideways split hand greeting) that I later recognized from Spock, sitting in chairs on his face, how each and every episode was Mork discovering some new thing to report back to his people. This show went a long way towards explaining other human beings to me and as Mork discovered these things, so did I.

I loved this show so much, and if that’s how I felt about Mork and Mindy, then you can imagine how I must have felt about Star Trek!

1. Star Trek: The Original Series (1963)

What can I say about how great this series is that hasn’t already been said:

From Forbes Magazine:

Star Trek stories are humanistic; they are founded in Gene Roddenberry’s belief in the perfectible human. They provide an optimistic vision of our future. Star Trek tells us that no matter how crazy the world may look today, it will get better. We will get better. There will be a time in which doing great things will be the norm.

Star Trek depicts a meritocracy. The characters were cool not because of looks, wealth, or social position, but because they were very good at their jobs. It is a rare television show that sends the message that it is cool to be smart.

Star Trek’s optimistic view of the future stands as a contrast to the bulk of science fiction. Most television and cinematic science fiction depicts varying dystopian futures. Dystopia provides writers with shortcuts to conflict; it’s easier. When just making it through the day provides conflict, writers don’t have to generate as many new ideas. Star Trek thrives on those new ideas.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2016/07/28/theres-a-reason-why-star-trek-remains-so-popular/?sh=42326b231dc3

Star Trek showed blacks, Asians, and women in roles of respect in a time when that was not the norm. Whoopi Goldberg has talked about freaking out when, as a child, she tuned into Star Trek and saw that black women were part of the future. Nichelle Nichols has told the story of how when she was contemplating leaving the show, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. told her not to, because her character was a symbol of hope for equality.

Oh, and we not gonna talk about how I wanted to grow up to be Spock when I was a kid, or how I used to pretend I was visiting a new planet whenever we moved into a new house, or how eventually my goal in life became being as elegant and beautiful as Lt. Uhura. The ideology of the series became something to aspire to. It was okay to be smart in this universe. The focus was on solving problems, not infighting, or shooting things (although there was some of that too). The show was pretty imaginative for the sixties, and I liked the aesthetics, the uniforms, the bright colors, and the fashions.

Star Trek was the show to which I compared all the other shows, tbh.

List of Political Ideologies

Sometimes you don’t know enough to ask the correct questions, or be able to look up the correct key words. Here’s a quick Wikipedia rundown of the different types of political parties and ideologies that you always hear people talking about but have no idea what any of the terms mean. Arm yourself with knowledge.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_political_ideologies#:~:text=In%20social%20studies%2C%20a%20political,for%20a%20certain%20social%20order.

Part of the Politics series
Party politics
Political spectrum
Left-wing Far-left Centre-left Centre Centre-left Radical centre Centre-right Right-wing Centre-right Far-right
Party platform
Communist Socialist Social-democratic Liberal Syncretic Populist Third Way Conservative Nationalist
Party organization
Cadre party Cartel party Entrepreneurial party Mass party
Party system
Non-partisan One-party Dominant-party Two-party Multi-party
Coalition
Hung parliament Confidence and supply Minority government Rainbow coalition Grand coalition Full coalition National unity government Majority government
Lists
Ruling parties by country Political parties by region Political ideologies
Part of the Politics series Basic forms of government Power structure Separation Associated state Chiefdom Dominion Protectorate Federalism Confederation Devolution Federation Integration Empire Hegemony Unitary state Administrative division Power source Democracy (rule by many) Demarchy Direct Liberal Representative Social Socialist Others Oligarchy (rule by few) Anocracy Aristocracy Capitalist Ergatocracy Geniocracy Gerontocracy Kakistocracy Kleptocracy Kraterocracy Kritarchy Meritocracy Noocracy Particracy Plutocracy Stratocracy Synarchy Technocracy Theocracy Timocracy Autocracy (rule by one) Despotism Dictatorship Military dictatorship Tyranny Anarchism (rule by none) Anarchy Free association Stateless Power ideology Monarchy vs. republic (socio-political ideologies) Absolute Constitutional Directorial Legalist Parliamentary Presidential Semi-presidential Socialist Authoritarian vs. libertarian (socio-economic ideologies) Anarchism Colonialism Communism Despotism Distributism Feudalism Socialism Totalitarianism Tribalism Global vs. local (geo-cultural ideologies) Commune City-state Intergovernmental organisation National government World government Nationalism Internationalism Globalism Politics portal

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• List of communist ideologies
• List of forms of government
• List of ideologies named after people
• Political international
• Political party

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Roberts, Andrew (2004). The State of Socialism: A Note on Terminology. Cambridge University Press. 63 (2). 349–366.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes on: The Old Guard

 

Joe and Nicky

The Old Guard has totally blown up on Tumblr. The movie, which aired on Netflix last month was a real treat for women who love action movies, so much so, that there has been a lot of great meta writing and fanworks on the site.The movie is based on the Graphic Novel, by Greg Rucka, about a team of four immortal warriors, Andromache of Scythia,(Charlize Theron), Nicky, Joe, and Booker,  living in the modern world,  fighting a pharmecutical CEO ,who wants to use them for medical experiments. In the meantime, they need to find and recruit a brand new immortal, named Nile Freeman, and deal with a betrayal within, and outside of, their group.

Its one of those big idea movies, where the rules are all laid out beforehand, and  doesn’t stint on the development of its characters. It has some truly lovely scenes between Nicky and Joe, and Nile and Andy. I thought the movie was a lot of fun, and I really enjoyed the characters and their interactions. I think its really worth a watch if you like action movies, with strong, ass kicking, smart women, who interact realistically with one another, along with a well illustrated, found family dynamic. There’s also a strong philosophical thread that runs through the movie, which asks questions about the purpose of living, and what its like to be alive for hundreds of years.

Andromache of Scythia aka Andy

The Old Guard is a fairly predictable film as far as the plot. What makes it groundbreaking however is its Black female director, Gina Prince-Bythewood, the well executed action scenes, its racial diversity, its Black female co-lead, and the presence of a canon gay inter-racial couple, who both survive to the end of the movie.

I read a lot of meta on this movie and was moved by how much fans seemed to really embrace this movie, especially Nile, since fandom hasn’t always been any good about its approach to black female characters. Its true that some fans tend to infantilize her, but that’s somewhat understandable, since the character of Nile is a brand new, baby-immortal, just learning about her powers, and the actress who plays her, Kiki Layne does have a kind of sweet baby face.

The story makes an effort to set up the knowledge that the characters are immortal, but that their survival is not a guarantee, so the tension about who will survive, remains really high, no matter how many fights we see them get into in the film

Nile Freeman

One of the things I loved about this movie is that the stakes never were less than. You would think, because the characters are unable to die, that there’d be nothing for them to lose in the several firefights, but there are many intangible things they can lose. They can lose their freedom, they can lose their trust, or their friendship, for Nikki and Joe, they could lose each other, or even their sense of purpose, or self, the way Andy did.

 

Another love of this film was the character arcs. We find out at the beginning of the movie that Andy has been retired from fighting for over a year. She’s given up, she’s cynical, and has no hope that she has done anything useful for the world, and we watch as her character gets back her reason for fighting and Nile is the key to that. Andy doesn’t just go out and save Nile. Nile saves her too.

Even their treatment of Booker’s betrayal comes from a place of compassion. Yes, they’re very angry with him, but they don’t permanently exile him either. They think a hundred years of being separated from his family is punishment enough. They’re not out to physically harm him, or cause him emotional damage, but there have to be consequences for what he did. They know being alone however is horrible for him (it’s the reason he betrayed them in the first place) but it’s the only consequence they have available.

 

For male directors character development and emotions, may be a 3 or 4 on the scale of priority in a movie, and I normally don’t have a problem with that manner of filmmaking. I’ve watched enough action movies to be able to glean the emotions in them, but usually that’s not a male director’s focus. I’m mostly thinking of movies like Winter Soldier, Inception, and Fury Road, (and quite a large number of Asian action films,) where the focus is on the plot and action, with character development as more of an afterthought.

I think there are a number of male action directors who do bring emotionalism into their work, and manage to be successful at it, but I think the difference is for male directors their priorities are simply different than female directors. For women directors though, the priority on relationships, character interaction, and character development, may be at a one or a two, thereby making the plot much more character driven than in male directed films, where the plot is more situational, but that’s just an observation I’ve made with my limited sample size.

There really aren’t a wealth of action movies out there directed by female directors ,and the ones that do get made, are  either always being trashed as the worst movies ever, or lauded as the second coming of Jesus. There seems to be no in between, reasonably thought out, reviews or critiques. Everything is either the best of times or the worst of times.

And yes, I am geeking out over the addition of a Black female character as an action heroine. There really are not enough female action heroes, but there are almost no Black or Asian ones. This is why I’ve become a lot more discerning about the kinds of shows and movies I watch now. I’m thoroughly spoiled for diverse content, that has depth and at least some meaning, and  very dubious about sitting through any more all white, all male productions of shows and movies. I’m definitely not willing to sit through any of the lazy, sorry, excuses PoC have gotten in the past for not having diversity both in front of, and behind, the camera.

The Old Guard is a lot of fun, with just a touch of melancholy. Its just deep enough to be satisfying without getting too heavy. The plot isn’t really all that remarkable, and very predictable, but what the characters and director do with the plot is worth watching. It’s got some great action sequences, and although there are a couple of moments of cringey dialogue,  and the music is sometimes overwhelmingly blase, its not too bad, and doesn’t stray very far from its comic book origins, as the script was written by Rucka. Theron carries most of the emotional heavy lifting in the story. In fact, she almost overpowers the story, but that gets nicely weighed by the other characterizations, and action scenes.

Fans are clamoring for a second season ,especially since there was a ice set up for it, in the last 30 seconds, but the word isn’t out yet on whether or not there will be one.

 

As for what Tumblr thinks:

This was a beautifully written examination of the movie’s characters. Please visit their Tumblr site for more insightful observations of their newest obseesion.

fuckyeahisawthat

 

the old guard: loneliness, connection and immortality

 

APPARENTLY I am writing a thing about The Old Guard today.

 

(Bear in mind that I haven’t read the graphic novel, although I’m eager to now, so this is solely based on the movie and some things I’ve read about the comic in articles about the movie.)

 

Under the cut for spoilers, although the discussion is fairly general.

 

Keep reading

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fuckyeahisawthat

the old guard and moral uncertainty

One of the things I love the most about The Old Guard, which I haven’t seen discussed much, is that there is no why to their powers. There’s no origin story, either via destiny or accident. There’s no prophecy, no curse, no ancient god, no super-serum, no lab accident, no mutant spider bite. If there is a reason why these people, in particular, are like this, we don’t know it and they don’t either. Where their immortality comes from, and why it fades when it does, is a complete unknown.

 

In other contexts I could see this coming off as a frustrating lack of clarity in worldbuilding. In The Old Guard I think it works as an essential piece of the philosophical landscape in which the story operates.

A parallel and interlocking component of this landscape is the fact that the immortals exist in a world where there are very few, if any, other superpowered beings. There are no pre-ordained forces of darkness, no aliens to fight, no neatly-arranged supervillains that only they can defeat. There are only humans.

 

This means they have to create their own framework of meaning for their actions, the way the rest of us mortals do. The mythology of their world doesn’t provide any built-in delineation of good guys and bad guys and What We’re Fighting For. There’s no easy certainty of purpose or moral clarity to be had.

 

Keep reading

 

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fuckyeahisawthat

Let’s talk for a minute about how The Old Guard shows Nile as a character who’s worthy of protection and caretaking without infantilizing her or minimizing her agency.

I’m thinking particularly of the scene when Nile wakes up from the nightmare about Quynh, which honestly might be one of my favorite moments in the whole movie. The three guys are all sleeping in the same room as her and they all immediately wake up and reach for their weapons, ready to throw down. Like, at least a couple of them look like they’re sleeping on cots. They could have spread out around the space, but all three of them are sleeping in the same room as her, armed. Only Andy has chosen to separate herself and is not-sleeping in the next room.

 

And their reaction isn’t just an ingrained response from a very long life of combat. They’re all very clearly focused on Nile and whether she’s safe, and once it’s clear that there’s no physical threat, they want to make sure she’s okay emotionally and help her understand what she saw in the nightmare.

 

This is one of those moments where context sensitivity matters a lot. Because we can easily imagine a scenario where the exact same scene would play as overprotective, condescending or downright creepy. But when the focus of the scene is a Black woman, a moment that says this character is worthy of both physical, bodily protection and emotional support reads very differently.

 

We already know Nile is a tough and self-sufficient character. She’s an elite soldier who grew up in the inner city, raised by a single mom who pushed her to succeed. She has excelled in a dangerous, physically demanding, male-dominated career. She is, in many ways, the template of the Strong Black Woman, and a lot of movies would have left it there. But with this scene, and all the other little moments of care and attention she receives, the other characters are saying, hey, we know you are tough and self-sufficient, but you don’t always have to be.

 

Keep reading

 

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grizvser is writing some very nice meta about this show, especially the two lovers, Joe and Nicky. Please check out their Tumblr site for more astute observations about the show and characters.

grizviser

Okay, so I’ve seen a lot of people say that Joe and Nicky were way too hard on Booker and that it’s out of character for them to have reacted so harshly to his betrayal, but y’all gotta remember (and I say this as someone who loves Booker): Joe and Nicky paid the heaviest price for Booker’s betrayal.

 

They were the ones who were kidnapped and tied up. Nicky had to watch Joe get stabbed repeatedly by Merrick. The two of them were the only ones who got experimented on, poked and prodded at and sliced into, and who knows what could have happened to them if they hadn’t been saved so soon. They had to deal with the trauma of possibly being kept there for god knows how long. When Booker and Andy were captured, they were only trapped for a little while before Nile came and rescued everyone. They never had to deal with any of that trauma.

 

Not only did they suffer the torture themselves, but they had to watch the person they love suffer too. If Booker hadn’t betrayed them, none of the events of the movie would’ve happened. Joe had to watch Nicky not only get tortured, but get shot in the damn head. All of this is because Booker sold them out.

 

Combine that with the fact that the two of them are clearly very loyal, honourable men, who are undoubtedly devestated that someone they trusted and thought of as their family would sell them out just because HE didn’t want to live anymore? Joe and Nicky are happy to be alive because they have each other, but Booker put that at risk because of his own feelings of grief. Even though I understand Booker wasn’t motivated by any malice and I’m empathetic to his struggles and feelings, it’s understandable why Joe calls him selfish. Joe is willing to live for eternity because he has Nicky (and the whole guard too, of course), and Booker’s actions could have taken that away from him.

Nile forgives him quickly because she’s new and doesn’t fully understand the weight of his actions, meanwhile Andy is more sympathetic because she, too, is a little bit tired of living, yet Joe and Nicky, the ones who want to live, bear the brunt of a lot of the suffering that came along with Booker’s choice.

 

Now, I do think they will get over it sooner than 100 years, but right now, the betrayal was so raw and the impact of what happened so fresh in their mind, I understand their reasoning.

 

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grizviser

One of the best things about Joe and Nicky in The Old Guard is their sexuality/relationship is a very important traits of both of their characters, but it’s not their only trait.

 

So many times when I hear people talk about gay/queer characters in media, I hear, “their sexuality isn’t an important part of their character” or “they just happen to be gay,” and I’ve always thought that was bullshit and a cop-out. Sexuality and romance plays a HUGE part in people’s lives. People spend a lot of their time looking for “the one”, looking for romance, looking for a relationship or sex or both. Think about classical male heroes and how often they bed women (think James Bond, James Kirk in Star Trek, etc.) Wouldn’t you say sexuality is a huge part of their characters? Yet with gay characters it’s said to be “not important.” It’s just a cop-out.

 

Joe and Nicky’s sexualities are very important because their relationship is so incredibly important to both of them. It’s portrayed to be the reason they’re both still happy to be living while Andy and Booker have grown jaded and suicidal due to loneliness. They are the most important thing in the world to each other. They aren’t “badass but just happen to be gay.” They are badass AND gay.

 

They’re incredibly competent fighters who can brutalize an entire army but when they go home they flirt, they wink at each other, they snuggle, they kiss, they talk about their love for one another. They’re no less masculine when they’re expressing their love for one another than they are when they’re massacring an army of soldiers.

 

Yet still, their characters are not reduced to just the token gay guys who are also tough. They have their own distinct personalities. Joe is impassioned, quick to anger, protective, playful, romantic, vengeful, but with a soft heart full of deep love. Nicky is quiet, reserved, compassionate, loving, and sweet, but also calculating and sarcastic and a force to be reckoned with in a fight.

 

They’re both such distinct, powerful personalities and it’s portrayed through their individual actions as well as through their love for each other. It fills me with so much joy that these characters were allowed to be so unapologetically, textually gay without it being an afterthought and also without it becoming the centerpiece of the story.

 

*******************

And these aren’t all. Visit Tumblr and type in The Old Guard to find whole blogs devoted to the topic, fanart, and various headcanon, and fictions.

Things to Ponder – Black Lives Matter Edition

Anti-Blackness permeates every single industry in America, and its about time that many of these industries started asking themselves serious questions about how deep the racism goes, holding their employees accountable for racist actions, and how these industries can do better in the future.

Law enforcement everyone  knows about, but anti- Blackness goes wherever white people congregate. Racism is both systemic and individual, because the individual white people, who make up these systems, refuse to reckon with it, to examine it in themselves, and keep trying to ignore, erase, or run away from its symptoms.

 

Law Enforcement

Serpico on Police Racism: ‘We Have This Virus Among Us’

https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/06/11/george-floyd-protests-serpico-police-racism-good-cop/

Nearly half a century ago, Frank Serpico became a household name in the United States—and in many countries around the world—after he was portrayed by Al Pacino in the classic 1973 movie Serpico. The award-winning film told the true-life story of the New York City detective’s efforts to expose corruption and abuse inside the police department.

 

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Education

The banality of racism in education

https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2020/06/04/the-banality-of-racism-in-education/

We asked, “How much of the difference in test scores between white students and Black students can be explained by discrimination against Blacks or injustices in society?”

 

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Music

The Music Industry Was Built on Racism. Changing It Will Take More Than Donations

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/music-industry-racism-1010001/

Amid nationwide protests over the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, record labels decided to use Tuesday for a rare industry-wide reckoning. Two related conversations have unfolded in parallel. First, can the music industry use its vast resources and wide influence to help reduce police brutality and combat systemic racism? Second, can the music industry finally face down its own history of racism and build a more equitable future?

 

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Film

Institutional racism in the film industry: a multilevel perspective

https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.1108/EDI-05-2017-0108/full/html

The findings highlight how power structures, network-based recruitment practices, as well as formal and informal learning lead to and sustain racism in the film industry. However, agency on an individual level is observed as a way to break those patterns.

 

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Publishing

Over 1,000 Publishing Workers Strike to Protest Industry Racism

https://www.vulture.com/2020/06/publishing-strike-racism-book-industry.html

The publishing industry is standing against systemic racism today by striking, donating money, and serving the black community. Over 1,300 workers have committed to taking the day off and using it to “protest, donate a day’s pay, phone-bank, join in mutual aid efforts, and work only on books by Black creators,” according to a statement shared with Vulture and cosigned by five Macmillan workers 

 

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Banking

This Is What Racism Sounds Like in the Banking Industry

“You’re bigger than the average person, period. And you’re also an African-American,” the employee, Charles Belton, who is black, told Mr. Kennedy. “We’re in Arizona. I don’t have to tell you about what the demographics are in Arizona. They don’t see people like you a lot.” Mr. Kennedy recorded the conversation and shared it with The New York Times.

 

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Technology

Black Tech Employees Continue to Face Workplace Racism

https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/behavioral-competencies/global-and-cultural-effectiveness/pages/black-tech-employees-continue-to-face-workplace-racism.aspx

Miley says a fellow Google employee—who was not security personnel—raced in front of him and physically stopped him, demanding to see Miley’s badge.  It wasn’t the first time that a colleague had body blocked Miley when he was trying to go to work. 

 

*********************

Retail

Claims of Racism at Zara Portray the Retail Industry at Its Worst

https://populardemocracy.org/news-and-publications/claims-racism-zara-portray-retail-industry-its-worst

This week a new report casts a spotlight on employment discrimination at a particular retailer: Zara, a fairly new clothing chain in the United States which nevertheless is part of the world’s largest fashion retail company. Based on interviews of 251 Zara employees in New York City, researchers at the Center for Popular Democracy uncovered troubling pattern of concerns about racial discrimination.

 

*********************

Travel

Three First Steps Toward an Anti-Racist Travel Industry, as Told by a Black Editor

https://www.heremagazine.com/articles/anti-racism-travel-industry

As the travel and hospitality industry works to become anti-racist, one Here editor (and Black traveler) lays out three steps industry leaders can take on the road to diversity and inclusion.

 

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Medicine

Racism In Medicine Isn’t An Abstract Notion. It’s Happening All Around Us, Every Day

https://www.wbur.org/cognoscenti/2020/06/12/anti-racism-in-medicine-hospitals-ayotomiwa-ojo

Racism is part of my daily experience, even as a medical student rotating through the teaching hospitals of Harvard Medical School. The health care system is one sector within the larger framework of white supremacy embedded in American society. 

 

********************

Environmental

Coronavirus Death Rates Are a Direct Result of Environmental Racism

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/k7ev93/coronavirus-death-rates-environmental-racism

Along with other forms of systemic inequality, environmental racism can cause many of the underlying conditions that make the virus particularly dangerous for black and brown communities.

 

*******************

Theater

Four Black Artists on How Racism Corrodes the Theater World

A playwright, a director, an artistic director and an actor share their experiences — and prescriptions for change.

What has been the impact of race, and racism, on African-Americans working in the theater world? How should that world change? Those questions have taken on renewed, impassioned life since the killing of George Floyd, the shooting deaths of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor, and the nationwide protests over racial injustice that have followed.

 

*******************

STEM

Thousands of Scientists Go on Strike to Protest Systemic Racism in STEM

https://www.nbcconnecticut.com/news/national-international/thousands-of-scientists-go-on-strike-to-protest-systemic-racism-in-stem/2285866/

More than 5,000 scientists and two prominent scientific journals shut down operations and pledged to use the day to address racial inequalities in science

 

*********************

Music

Rewriting Country Music’s Racist History

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-country/country-music-racist-history-1010052/?src=longreads

This is kind of impressive. In 2020, audiences are so used to genres blending into one another, used to having no borders in music. But the image of what country music is persists. It does not matter how many variations of country abound — it’s somehow easier to reduce country to a single dimension. And with that comes along an image of who listens to the music. And more important, who makes it.

 

*******************

Social Class

How White Women Use Themselves as Instruments of Terror

There are too many noosed necks, charred bodies and drowned souls for them to deny knowing precisely what they are doing.

 

*********************

Writing

Romance Writers of America aims for happy end to racism row with new prize

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/22/romance-writers-of-america-racism-row-new-prize-ritas-vivian

The RWA has been at the centre of an acrimonious debate about diversity, criticised for the paucity of writers of colour shortlisted for its major awards, the Ritas, as well as its treatment of Courtney Milan after she called a fellow author’s book a “racist mess” because of its depictions of Chinese women.

 

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Fiber Arts

Racism In the Knitting Community

Carley Marston

https://youtu.be/HvLwaANQAM4

Kristy Glass is a knitting YouTuber that I follow and she posts videos every single day. Her newest video popped into my feed. She was seated with three African American ladies and a man. They were all talking about how someone in the knitting community had posted a racist image on Instagram and what they felt about it.

[Stitch Talks Ish] Episode 6: When Black Lives Matter, But Black Opinions Don’t — Stitch’s Media Mix

https://open.spotify.com/embed-podcast/episode/5CBPIUHdMn24myb30Cvp2k

They’ve bought the books. they own White Fragility. They share their few friends of colors’ GoFundMe ease and cashapps. They really do care about racism in the abstract. And of course, they definitely don’t want Black people being killed because we’re Black, but they also don’t really care about us as people.

via [Stitch Talks Ish] Episode 6: When Black Lives Matter, But Black Opinions Don’t — Stitch’s Media Mix

 

Here, Stitic h talks about what its like to be subjected to anit-Black racism from people hashtagging Black Lives Matter.

I know I’ll be very glad when this “trend” of saying Black Lives Matter is over, so I won’t have to be subjected  to any more “white noise” from people who only want brownie points for recognizing they’re sitting in the middle of a trend.

There are far too many people out there hashtagging  BLM, while they commit the same anti-Black behavior that helped cause the trend! How the f*ck does someone sit with themselves like that? Or not recognize the sheer batshittery of trolling and harassing Black creators, with racial slurs, while hashtagging BLM?

Ahhhhh!!! Tumblr!

Here are some interesting tidbits from Tumblr. I hope these are  informative.

Writing with Color is a great resource for writers who want to create characters of color with depth, and avoid stereotyping.

writingwithcolor

just-an-observer-ignore-me asked:

I was wondering what kind of female black characters do people want to see more of? Like, them being soft or selfish?

writingwithcolor answered:

Black Girls & Women: Representation We Want

As a Black woman reader, I definitely want to see more soft Black girls and women in literature. Girls with their own self-interests (caring about oneself isn’t necessarily selfish) and not always someone else’s caregiver is great too.

Here’s my list!

More Black girls…

• In love
• With close family bonds and healthy relationships and support systems (that don’t require enduring abuse, fixing their partner, or overall emotional labor to earn domestic happiness)
• Being protected
• As main characters, heroines and anti-heroes
• On adventures
• In fantasy and magical settings
• In historical settings as peasants, upper-class society, and royalty
• Descriptions of Black Afro hair, skin, features as a normal thing in books (see this compilation) and not in an Othering way
• On the other hand, vibrant, sometimes hyped up descriptions that allude to their beauty (see this ask. Or this one). Not Othering, just appreciating!
• Put us in fancy dresses and give us a sword and let us dance at the balls and have admirers!
• Experiencing complex emotions not necessarily in reaction to racism or racist violence
• On the book cover! And with an accurate, not light or white-washed model

~Mod Colette

Responses:

@madamef-er

• Soft black girls and nerd girls who like cute things.
• Shy black girls not just in situations with boys.
• More lgbtqia+ black girls. Studs! Femmes!
• Gender fluid and non conforming constantly changing their style because they like it!
• Spies and not just as the ‘sexy bait’ or ‘weapons master’ let us sit behind the computer for once and be hackers and stuff

@tanlefan

• Black girls who are just…people.
• I want a fantasy escapism adventure that isn’t a thinly veiled discussion on slavery or racism or any other aspect of The Struggle. I am tired.
• Can I just have a happy Black girl who believes in fairies or something?

@esmeraldanacho-1776 More autistic Black women/girls! I don’t care what genre really; just have them in there!

@briarsthicket And enby black people!

@mattiekins

• Def soft black girls.
• Energetic and playful.
• Or shy and quiet.
• I want to see more black girls who are nerds and not just mommy mommying or nanny nannying everyone.
• I want black girls who want to be a ballerina, or a talk show host, or a game designer etc.
• I want a black girl who gets to be happy.
• Who doesn’t have to act older than she is and be the shoulder for everyone, always.

@xiiishadesofgrey

• I want more black lady nerds, if we’re talking modern settings!
• More black ladies who have a sporty/playful nature!
• Who aren’t afraid to get dirty and make chaos, without being dirty or frowned upon!
• Strange as it sounds coming from me, more black princesses! Brandy as Cinderella in the 90s was my first Cinderella, and I LOVE that.
• Please, god, more black wlws.

@daintythoughtswritersblock

• I want to see tropes exercised
• Black women of all shades and tones

@hazelnut4370

• Tbh just fellow black people being happy, like I rarely see that,
• Or enjoying hobbies

rivergoddessdream

• Happily childless black women
• Black women traveling the world
• Fat black women in happy, healthy, poly relationships
• Black cis and trans women having a true sisterhood
• Autistic black women
• Black women in period pieces that aren’t about slavery and don’t take place in the US
• Black women thespians
• Black women painters
• Black women revolutionaries
• Black women front and center in the narrative
• Black women healers and storytellers
• Non christian Black women stories
• Black women rockers

#complicated black women characters #tell those stories

@missnancywrites

More Black Girls…

• With diverse cultural and social backgrounds!
• That are nerdy, girly, intelligent, ditzy, all the personality types that white girls in literature get!
• That are fragile, shy or anxious. Almost every single black woman I’ve seen in media or otherwise are wise and adult. Let us be an absolute wreck, or an anxious mess!
• In science! Characters like Shuri, Moon Girl and Iron Heart in Marvel revitalized me, cuz young black girls only get two types. Both these girls are in intellectual and in science, but have bery different personalities.
• In interracial relationships, and not because they hate black men or something along those lines. They just happen to be dating outside their race, black women get hate for that in real life and it’s unfair. Let us have relationships outside our race! That said…
• In platonic relationships with black men! I think that’s important, cuz I don’t often seen black solidarity unless it’s for the purpose of showing how diverse the writing is. Let them share interests, daily frustrations that they would only understand, but don’t force a romance.
• In solid friendships with other black girls! For some reason, we’re pitted against in each other inside and outside of writing! Write some sweet wholesome friendship!
• With different sexualities! Let there be some that are ace, others are gay, bi or pan! Just be sure you don’t sexualize them, or turn em into a robot.
• •Who are dark-skinned! This can be seen a lot in tv or movies, but when you want a black girl in your stuff don’t just hire a light-skinned black girl or a biracial black girl. It’s not the same.
• Who get to act their age! Black women have a long standing history of being adultified, starting from a very young age, and it’s extremely harmful. Little black girls can wear what they please, the problem is people sexualizing them. Let the teen black girl be a teenager, she can look out for her siblings but she isn’t the keepern the house or their lives. Young adult black girls are not ideal housewives or capable working machines, they mess up and mess around just as much as any young adult.
• With mental/physical disabilities or illnesses.Alongside with being forced to be more mature than they are, disabilities/illnesses are never taken seriously and we’re forced to just deal with it. Having black girls who happen to have these issues, but also have a healthy support group is always good!

@ink-and-roses

• Seen as beautiful and desirable and NOT in a hypersexualized way
• Interracial relationships are wonderful because black girls are beautiful and lbr everybody sees it
• Sensitive and allowed to feel something other than righteous anger
• Some black girls are skinny! Some are big! Some are slim and some are curvy! There’s no mold!
• Dark skinned!
• A YA protagonist out to save the world from something other than racism
• Superpowers or magic that doesn’t come from generational trauma or slavery
• Black characters who support other black characters. None of this token crabs in a barrel business.
• Black girl nerds and punks and goths exist. I promise.
• And this may be a personal preference but I’m not against the idea of a damsel in distress. We are always being strong. Let her be soft and delicate and cared for. Let her be princess carried and rescued from the tower and the dragon.

[Note from Mod: It’s not just you! I love a Black damsel being saved and protected. What is progressive for one woman varies due to historical and present depictions and is why intersectionality in feminism is so important! -Colette]

@nightlyswordswoman

As a writer, I write a lot of my black female characters like this because I rarely ever see black women being represented in these ways! ESPECIALLY on the covers of books, unless the author themselves is a black woman and even then its rare.

Too often black women are stereotyped as strong protector types that are always rough, tough, and don’t need anybody in books (and real life), when that’s honestly just dumb and inaccurate–black women are as vulnerable as anyone else (in some cases, even more vulnerable, but that’s another topic).

So yeah, this list is 100% accurate and I encourage those who are interested in writing black female characters (whether you’re a black woman or not) to consider writing them like this, because the stereotype needs to die lol.

 

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A lot of people are talking about Racism these days. Here are some pointed and relevant rebuttals, facts, and figures, for people who want to argue with you about the subject.

Visit: alwaysanoriginal at the link, to continue reading the rest.

We’re all having “hard conversations” about racism, police brutality, and #BlackLivesMatter I hope.

You’ve probably noticed that detractors often use the same “racist talking points” in response. Here’s a researched and sourced guide to help you answer, for the times you may get stuck.

Feel free to save these images and share them!

Originally posted on Twitter

Source: alwaysanoriginal

 

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A litany of the dead:

writingaboutmyrapists

#Say Her Name

Korryn Gaines

Renisha McBride

Aiyana Mo’Nay Stanley-Jones

Miriam Carey

Messy Mya

Sandra Bland

Shelly Frey

Shelley Amos

Cheryl Blount-Burton

Dawn Cameron

Sandra Bee Wilson

Juliette Alexander

Alberta Spruill

Latanya Haggerty

Annette Green

Lenties White

Tameka Evette Anthony

Octavia Suydan

Andrena Kitt

Marcella Byrd

Emma Mae Horton

Angel Chiwengo

Guanda Denise Turner

Andrea Nicole Reedy

U’Kendra Johnson

Annie Holiday

Shonda Mikelson

LaVeta Jackson

Mary Williams

Tesha Reena Collins

Darneisha Harris

Nuwnah Laroche

Clanesha Rayuna Shaqwanda Hickmon

Ciara Lee

Dijon Senay Jackson

Denise Michelle Washinton

Keara Crowder

Tyra Hunter

Clara Fay Morris

Stacey Blount

Tanisha Anderson

Gabriella Monique Nevarez

Keisha Redding

Kendra Diggs

Laquisha Turner

Keoshia L. Hill

Kindra Chapman

Audwyn Fitzgerald Ball

Rosette Samuel

Makiah Jackson

Demetria Dorsey

Jameela Yasmeen Arshad

Joyce Quaweay

Mariah Woods

Jameela Cecila Barnette

Raynetta Turner

Bianca Davis

Patricia Hartley

Martha Regina Donald

Eulia Love

Sophia King

Joyce Curnell

Redel Jones

Tessa “Teesee” Hardeman

Tamara Seidle

Alicia Griffin

Shulena Weldon

Gina Rosario

Remedy Smith

Emily Marie Delafield

Jacqueline Culp

Delois Epps

Jacqueline Nichols

Queniya Tykia Shelton

Latoya Smith

Jacqueline Reynolds

Makayla Ross

LaTricka Sloan

Ralkina Jones

Elaine Coleman

Iretha Lilly

Gynnya McMillen

Malissa Williams

Janisha Fonville

Mya Hall

Patricia Thompson

Michelle Cusseaux

Janet Wilson

Latandra Ellington

Aubrey Zoe Brown

Terry Pittman

Carulus Hines

Lana Morris

Dominique Hurtt

Michelle “Vash” Payne

Tiffini Kuuipo Tobe

Yvette Henderson

Tameka Huston

Leronda Sweatt

Kisha Michael

Portia Southern

Kisha Arrone

Jessica Williams

Jessica Nelson-Williams

Vernicia Woodward

Alexia Christian

Tyisha Miller

Kourtney Hahn

Lamia Beard

Tarkia Wilson

Deshanda “Ta-Ta” Sanchez

Sharon Rebecca McDowell

Ricky Shawatza Hall

Glenda Moore

Danette Daniels

Shontel Edwards

Sharmel Edwards

Lashonda Ruth Belk

Zoraida Reyes

Natasha Renee Osby

Kathryn Johnson

Rekha Kalawattie Budhai

Natasha McKenna

Shontel Davis

Nizah Morris

Duanna Johnson

Asia Roundtree

Darnisha Harris

Shereese Francis

Alesia Thomas

Tracy A. Wade

Yvette Smith

Lnaaar Edwards

Gabrielle Lane

Varez Michelle Cusseaux

Taneisha Anderson

Aura Rosser

Raynette Turner

Tarika Wilson

Eleanor Bumpurs

Kendra James

Ahjah Dixon

Shantel Davis

Alberta Pruill

Marjorie Domingue

Bessie Louise Stovall

Margaret Mitchell

Darnesha Harris

Frankie Perkins

Monique Deckard

Kayla Moore

Queonna Zophia Edmonds

Sheneque Proctor

Kyam Livingston

Wanda Jean Allen

Kimberly McCarthy

Meagan Hockaday

Litvishma Millerr

Summer Marie Lane

Antoinette Griffin

Desseria Whitmore

Adebusola Tairu

Erica Stevenson

Halley Simone Lee

Erika Tyrone or Erica Rhena Tyrone

Lanaka Lucas

Breeonna Mobley

Antonia Martines Lagares

Delicia C. Myers

Tameika Carter

Dana Larkin

Kassandra Perkins

Rekia Boyd

Stacey Wright

Dorothy Smith Wright

BreeAnne Green

Adaisha Miller

Bettie Jones

Catrell Ford

India Kager

Deresha Armstrong

Chanda White (Pickney)

Sahlah Ridgeway

Marlene Rivera

Lashondria Rice

Brandy Martell

Marquesha McMillan

India Beaty

Chandra Weaver

Teikeia Dorsey

Deanna Cook Patrick

Ashley Sinclair

Zella Ziona

Tiara Thomas

Papi Edwards

India Clarke

Constance Graham

Shade Schurer

Erica Collins

Rosann Miller

Lonfon Chanel

Sonji Taylor

Malaika Brooks

Ashton O’Hara

Vida DeShondrell Byrd

Maria Tripp

Eveline Barros-Cepeda

Rosa Flores Lopez

Sarah Ann Riggins

Ty Underwood

Yazmin Vash Payne

Kandis Capri

Elisha Walker

Keonna Redmond

Rikessa La’Shae Lee

Charquissa Johnson

Fatou-Mata Ntiamoah

MOVE bombing victims

Kristina Grant Infiniti

Ariel Levy

Yolanda Thomas

Marquita Bosley

Barbara Lassere

Taja Gabrielle DeJesus

Tamara Dominguez

Vionique Valnord

Linda Yancey

Amber Monroe

Brianna Elaine Carmina Ford

Kendrinka T. Williams

Arabella Bradford

Loretta Gerard

Hanna Abukar

Talana Salissa Cain

Diane Kemp

Amber Nashay Carter

Pearlie Golden

Brenda Williams

Catawaba Tequila Howard

Beverly Kirk

Tamu Malika Bouldin

Denise Gay

Anita Gay

Laura Felder

Alice Faye DeFlanders Clausell

Uteva Monique Woods Wilson

Marnell Robertson Villarreal

K.C. Haggard

Derrinesha Clay

Milinda Clark

Angela Beatrice Randolph

Denise Nicole Glasco

Mercedes Williamson

Dominique Battle

Demetra Boyd

Francine Sonnier

Angelique Styles

Linda Joyce Friday

Shari Bethel Cartmell

Ashaunti Butler

Laniya Miller

Breonna Taylor

 

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What its like for Black women fans who look at fandom through a race critical lens:

eshusplayground

Fandom is toxic to fans of color, especially Black women

TRIGGER WARNING: Mass shootings.

On another post I’m not going to link to, someone commented that people hate Kylo Ren because he’s a white dude and asked if that would still be the case if he were a woman of color.

This person seemed genuinely curious, so I did my best to briefly put that reaction to his character into a broader social and political context. Namely, that whether deliberately or not, Kylo Ren, as a character, exhibits traits analogous to mass shooters, and people may be responding to that because of the scars that mass shootings have left on the collective American psyche.

I also mentioned how we unfortunately live in a world where white male mass shooters are treated better than Black people murdered by cops and white men with guns, and people who would be targeted by the “typical” mass shooter (entitled, pissed off white males with alt-right/neo-fascist/white nationalist leanings) may find Kylo Ren particularly repulsive.

What the hell did I say that for?

You’d have thought that I said, “If you like Kylo Ren, you’re a horrible piece of shit, and you need to be locked up or executed.”

Which I didn’t, BTW. I have better things to do than shit on people for enjoying a fictional character. Like picking my nose.

Unfortunately, I can’t say I’m surprised. I’ve seen it all before.

This sort of thing inevitably crops up whenever fans of color attempt to address the larger social and political context of media and fandom. Almost without fail, someone will respond as if we said, “You’re a terrible person if you like this character, ship, or work of art.”

Unless you’re talking about outright bigoted propaganda like Birth of A Nation or Triumph of the Will, I rarely see fans of color say that. I have seen fans of color be sharply critical of behaviors some fans engage in. I have seen fans of color urge fans to be mindful of how they consume media and how they participate in fandom. I have seen fans of color attempt to add depth and nuance to the way fandom addresses race. I have seen fans of color apply the framework of intersectionality to better understand media and fandom. I have seen fans of color warn each other about fandom environments toxic to people of color.

But straight-up hating on fans who like something they don’t? Not really. I’ve seen fans of color, especially Black women, get labeled as haters and antis because they do the things I mentioned up there. I’ve seen fans of color, especially Black women, get accused of hating fans who like a certain character, ship or piece of media because they examine characters, ships and media from a social and political context different from the fandom norm. I’ve seen fans of color, especially Black women, get labeled as hostile, angry or mean because they didn’t code-switch thoroughly enough.

Most of the time when we catch this kind of flack from fandom, nobody sticks up for us. Nobody assures us that we’re valid. Nobody comforts us. At best, there might be a handful of women of color in the same fandom who see what’s going on and speak up. But the vast majority of the time, we’re on our own.

It’s painful and exhausting.

So where does this leave fans of color, especially Black women? It seems there are only a few choices if we don’t want to constantly deal with all that:

1. Remain silent or stick to “safe” topics
2. Keep to a small circle of other fans of color
3. Leave the fandom

Many fans of color, especially Black women, just fucking leave. If somebody’s always going to get bent out of shape when a fan of color brings a teensy bit of BIPOC realness to the fandom experience, that’s not a place that’s healthy for fans of color to be.

 

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A list of articles and books discussing racial topics:

urcadelimabean

As white people, we can’t begin to eradicate our internalized biases without knowing how to identify them. Let’s educate ourselves. And don’t forget that these are biases you need to call out when you see them in others as well.

Understanding Implicit Bias (article)

Stereotypes of African Americans (wikipedia): do the work to understand the links between old incredibly harmful stereotypes and modern white expectation that Black people be caretakers, for example.

Black people are not here to teach you: What so many white Americans just can’t grasp (article)

The White Internet’s Love Affair with Digital Blackface (video)

Dismantling Whiteness as the Beauty Standard (article)

I don’t care if you’re ‘fascinated’ by my afro, stop touching it (article)

Racial empathy gap: people don’t perceive pain in other races. (article)

Read about how scientific racism was used to institutionalize racism and justify slavery and white supremacy in the United States by claiming that enslaved people could withstand more pain.

Connect this to Black people today being denied the same medical treatment as whites: Some medical students still think black patients feel less pain than whites (article)

Let’s End The ‘Strong Black Woman’ Stereotype. Can’t We Be Vulnerable And Emotional Too? (article)

On calling Black people articulate/well-spoken/educated: The Racial Politics of Speaking Well (article)

The Dangerous Delusion of the Big, Scary, Black Man (article)

Consider why perceptions of Black people as dangerous/aggressive make white folks so reactive to Black anger: to perceive civility as incivility and to perceive anger as a violent threat.

Perceptions and stereotypes of Black men being bigger, stronger and scarier can also be fetishizing. Fetishizing people of color isn’t a compliment, so don’t act like it is (article)

Hyper-Sexualization of Black Women in the Media (pdf)

Is This How Discrimination Ends? (article)

I encourage anyone to add, with links or by writing out your own thoughts.

As white people, what should be guiding us is compassion: breaking down the way white supremacy has reduced our compassion for Black lives.

tolkienillustrations

Anger Benefits Some Americans Much More Than Others, by Davin Phoenix, author of “The Anger Gap: How Race Shapes Emotion in Politics.” (article)

 

Racial Profiling and the Loss of Black Boyhood, by Hussain Abdulhaqq (article)

 

What “Misogynoir” Means … and Why It Has to End (video)

Source: urcadelimabean

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Black Culture 2020: 101

This post is primarily for any of my readers who are not based in the US, who may have heard these things being referred to on Facebook and Twitter, but don’t know the meanings or origins.

 

What is a Karen?

You have probably been seeing this term everyhwere. White people keep trying to appropriate this term and diffuse it by using it for their own ends, because they don’t like the way its being used against them. It is a specifically Black term. We invented it, and it needs to be understood in that context.

This vlogger even goes into the different manners in which the term Karen is being misused. Its not about snitching, or acting irate, or someone with whom you politically disagree, and  is not meant to apply to ALL white women. Its meant to specifically be applied to  an incident involving a white woman that has a racial component.

 

 

 

What is cultural appropriation?

There is a thin line between Cultural appreciation and appropriation. I generally subscribe to the idea that there must be some kind of social cache, or  monetary benefit, for the people doing the appropriating, and vilification and discrimination on the end of the people who produced the terms or  items.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/black-slang-white-people-ruined_n_55ccda07e4b064d5910ac8b3

From “the bomb” to “holla” to the very short-lived “YOLO,” black slang words often go through the cycle of being used by black people, discovered by white people, and then effectively “killed” due to overuse and a general lack of understanding of how to use these words.

 

 

 

What is Black Twitter?

I kept seeing this question all over the internet, and I think I briefly addressed this before in another post. Black Twitter isn’t actually a place on Twitter. You don’t sign up for it, you simply participate in it. Its basically a collection of hundreds, possibly thousands, of Black people (mostly African American although others in the diaspora are free to chime in) of all walks and persuasions, having conversations, sometimes innocuous, sometimes important, sometimes deeply funny or political, in a loose chain of followers and retweets.

Anybody can join in but if someone tries to join in with some racist drivel, they will not just get blocked, they will get dragged for filth. Their wigs will be snatched, tea will be spilled, virtual hands will be thrown! Black Twitter is not afraid to call out individuals, international corporations, and even each other and has officially changed the dialogue on dozens of important issues in globally.

 

Trust me when I tell you, Black people know Black people, and we can always tell when someone is being inauthentic. There have been and continue to be, lots of attempts to infiltrate Black Twitter to introduce misinformation to the Black community, but one of the big things about Black Twitter is if you’re not a part of Black culture,  you can’t. (I am not currently on Twitter, but being deeply embedded in the culture means I can probably jump in anytime.)

 

What is A Hotep?

Answering one question can often lead to whole new questions. I briefly mentioned this before in another post. I’m gonna be nice and call the Hoteps, “Black Enthusiasts”, and they are sometimes called the Ankh -Right, but you can trust me when I say that they are, quite possibly some of the most exasperating Black people on Earth, because they are deeply homophobic, transphobic, patriarchal, and sexist. Incidentally there are female versions of the Hotep, called the Hertep!

 

 

What is Juneteenth?

This Friday is Juneteenth, a holiday which holds a special significance, in the Black community. It’s usually an opportunity to showcase Black achievement and joy, and there are still attempts being made to make it a National holiday.

 

What is Black Girl Magic?

This is probably another phrase you’ve seen on Twitter.There’s a reason that this phrase is trending in the Black community. From Karens to Black girls…

Here. Kendra Thomas gives a brief history of the mistreatment and rise of Black women in America. As I mentioned before, you can’t find information on some things unless you know which questions to ask.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Marion_Sims

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Baartman

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ida_B._Wells

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirley_Chisholm

 

This has been a cultural 101.

Next up: Black women in music, you probably never heard of!

 

 

What I Said: Tumblr Edition

This is just a compilation of some of the posts I made for my Tumblr account. I post very different things there, than I do here, but sometimes I post some things which overlap. These are just some thoughts that occurred to me in the past couple of weeks, and I wrote them down really quick, because although my thoughts about things are consistent, I sometimes forget what I wanted to actually say, and how to say it.

On Narrative Conditioning

As usual, I have this habit of watching events that happen in the rest of the world through the lens of the films I’ve watched, because the analogy just hits me, not because I can’t tell the difference between fiction and reality. It’s just how my mind connects things to other things. Nothing that happens in stories is new, and I see fiction as a reflection and reinforcement of things and thinking that happens in the real world. On some deep level, white people do understand that certain things are wrong, because they keep making fiction (often fantasies) about it.

I think fictional narratives are important, even today, because so much of what we all believe about other human beings does not come from direct experience. A lot of what we believe comes from popular and mainstream media, which is primarily owned by straight, white, men, and it is their thinking about the rest of humanity that gets prioritized. The images of black people that white men put out in the world, for decades, not just in fictional narratives, but in news stories and opinion pieces online, all of it, essentially teaches the rest of the world that our lives are unimportant, and teaches us to hate ourselves. Everyone (yes, PoC, and me, too) are inundated with the idea that whiteness is the default, and takes priority. Some of us overcome this constant messaging by critically challenging these narratives. Some people don’t.

For example, as I grew up, I was inundated with the idea that I was ugly because I was black. Not because I was ever told I was ugly. And not because people told me that white was prettier, but because the words “beautiful” and “pretty”, were never associated with women who looked like me. Those words were used everywhere, in tv ads, and shows, and movie after movie, to only refer to thin, middle-class, white women. (For a good example of this, count how many times Uma Thurman’s character is referred to as beautiful in the Kill Bill movies, and how none of the other female characters looks are ever mentioned. Those women do not have to be called ugly for us to get the message. She just has to constantly be referred to as pretty, while their looks are ignored.) Now imagine a steady diet of this from childhood onward. No one is calling you ugly, but you get the message loud and clear, that pretty doesn’t mean you. This is what is meant by passive conditioning. All of us have this conditioning, and most of this conditioning is done through mainstream media, like books, movies, tv shows, and music.

 

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On Not Thinking

lkeke35

One of the things I’ve observed about trump supporters is that many of them seem to be every bit as incoherent in their mental faculties as trump is. These are not people who have ever had clear, and consistent thoughts, in the sense that one idea follows the next, but instead, seem to have a collection of specific talking points, that are attached to whatever issue sparks their outrage.

These are not ideas that are part of a coherent schema, and most of these thoughts are separate and unattached to one another. It’s one of the reasons so many of them gravitate to raving anger when asked deeper questions about whatever it was they just said. If you ask one of them how sheltering in place is like slavery, to elaborate on that, then they’ll simply produce a string of more talking points, at the mention of the word slavery. They are simply parroting what theyve been told to think, when a specific word is mentioned, and it’s also the reason that while they are consistent from one person to the next, they are internally inconsistent with the individual.

This, I think, is why none of their thoughts make logical sense, to the rest of us, who do have a consistent life philosophy. We form our philosophy over time and then fit circumstances, events, life experiences, and people, into that philosophy. (I’m not speaking about Evangelicals because they’re a special case of nasty, so this doesn’t fit them.) I could be wrong about this but the bottom line is that non-trump supporters are generally pretty coherent and consistent in their thinking in a way that his deepest supporters are not.

Many of trumps supporters didn’t logic there way into the statements we hear them make, and so cannot be logicked out of any of those ideas. These are things they have been told to say, and believe, when a subject is mentioned, even if there is no consistency between the answers. They literally do not see the inconsistencies because they have been conditioned not to think critically, not to ask questions, while the rest of us have. I don’t think they believe sheltering in place is like slavery. That’s simply the thought that’s been attached to their frustration at being inconvenienced, even if that specific thought contradicts another thought they might have if you bring up slavery (It wasn’t real, black people need to get over it, I didn’t own slaves, etc.)

 

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I wrote this one when I was feeling particularly salty, about some dumb shit, I saw on Tumblr.

On Speaking Out

lkeke35

So as soon as some shit pop off, you got white people coming out from under the floorboards, (honestly, these people are like cockroaches, they only come out when our lives are at their darkest), with their traditional hot takes about black violence. What do these people do? Lie in wait for an opportunity to tell black people how they should respond to white wtf*ery? Yes! That’s exactly what they do.

 Some people are so shameless, they will take any and every opportunity to express their anti-blackness. They’re completely oblivious to injustices that aren’t happening to them, but when hands get thrown, they finally notice that, and manage to work up enough energy to care…but only about the response….like those teachers who only saw when you got fed up with being bullied, and finally kicked some ass!

 If they didn’t have shit to say about a single Black person’s death, at the hands of vigilantes and extrajudicial killers, (or worse yet, didn’t even notice that shit was happening), they don’t get a say in how black people respond to the violence that was done to them, especially the kind of violence that could have been thwarted, if they’d paid closer attention to what was happening ,and done something.

Offering their shitty hot take, on what black people need to be doing right now, is very possibly some of the most mentally lazy, and easiest bullshit they can pull right now!

 

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On the Optics

lkeke35

One of the reasons you keep hearing about how George Floyd’s death was the worst one yet, is because of the way in which it was caught on film. In movies, this is called “framing”, and unfortunately, this framing accounts for at least some of the responses we’ve seen from people, who previously, were capable of ignoring most of the deaths of unarmed black people. With almost all the other deaths of black people we’ve seen captured onscreen, most of them, even while seen up close, didn’t allow us to look into the victims eyes,and follow that person down into death, while it happened, and for a lot of people (especially the ones who hadn’t been paying close attention) that shit was deeply traumatic!

 With the Floyd imagery, there is a visceral component to it,that even the worst of these types of videos lacked. As viewers we sat there, and watched his face, and heard his last words, and looked into his eyes for as long as it took to kill him, and that had an effect on people that the other videos didn’t.

Even in other videos we didn’t see the victims faces up close. The videos were from a distance, or the victims were seen from behind, or it happened so fast it almost didn’t register for some people. Just like in a movie, the way the image is framed has a lot to do with the level of emotional engagement with the subject. The closer the camera is to the people being filmed, the higher the level of emotional engagement with that image.

In closeup, in broad daylight, one man is being killed, while the person that does it, looks completely indifferent to what he’s doing.

 Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think these are like movies, but this is how a lot of our minds have been conditioned, through decades of movies and television, to think and/or feel about death. If it’s not up close and personal to the viewer, then the emotional engagement, (certainly for a lot of non-black people), just isn’t there. They didn’t really SEE it, or FEEL it. But this time, they were standing right there, watching his face, hearing his last breath, watching the life being strangled from him ,and knowing it was real.

They watched the face of his killer, and could see the lack of humanity, of empathy, of care, in his expressionless face. In such imagery, there is a level of complicity that’s absent from mostof the other videos ,where you didn’t see the perpetrators face, or the victims expressions. This felt different because it looked different.

 

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On All Cops Are Bastards

lkeke35

I have an even simpler explanation for those not understanding. You got a bowl of skittles. Every one in ten skittle is actually a cyanide tablet, and you cannot tell the difference between it, and any of the other skittles.

 

Would you eat from that bowl? Would you grab a handful and chow down, knowing that in a bowl of 100 skittles, ten of them will kill you?

 

No. You’d throw the whole damn bowl out. The whole damn bowl is bad.

 

We cannot tell, just by looking at them, which cops are going to kill us, and which ones won’t.

 

All cops are bad, because it is the system that is bad.

 

The correct phrase is: One bad apple spoils the whole bunch.

 

If one cop is bad, and the others don’t work to eject him, that makes them all bad!

 

You throw the whole damn group out!

 

“What does it mean when people say that all cops are bastards (ACAB)?”

If it were an individual thing, you’d give them the benefit of the doubt, but it isn’t; it’s an institutional thing. the job itself is a bastard, therefore by carrying out the job, they are bastards. To take it to an extreme: there were no good members of the gestapo because there was no way to carry out the directives of the gestapo and to be a good person. it is the same with the american police state. Police do not exist to protect and serve, according to the US supreme court itself, but to dominate, control, and terrorize in order to maintain the interests of state and capital.

Who are the good cops then? The ones who either quit or are fired for refusing to do the job.

While the following list focuses on the US as a model police state, ALL cops in ALL countries are derivative from very similar violent traditions of modern policing, rooted in old totalitarian regimes, genocides, and slavery, if not the mere maintenance of authoritarian power structures through terrorism.

• police shoot people twice as often as previously thought. Keep in mind that this was self-reported, so we have no way of knowing if these numbers speak to the actual number of shootings in the US. Many of these people are completely unarmed. Police kill far, far more people than terrorists in the US and have killed over a hundred people more than mass shooters did in 2019 that we are aware of. Mass shooters are easily tracked. Police killings are not. 1 2
• Oh, and cops also killed more people in 2019 than school shooters did in all of US history.
• And if they don’t shoot you, they might just airstrike your block and burn your children alive.
• They also shoot one dog every hour, every day. At the absolute least.
• Once you’re in jail, be prepared to sit there for weeks -or months or years. It’s so bad that people constantly plead guilty just so they can get out. It’s so bad and so common, in fact, that over a third of all exonerations come after an individual has pleaded guilty. So much for the right to a speedy trial, huh?
• And getting arrested is easy – tens of thousands of people yearly, in fact, thanks to lowest bidder garbage that police departments use in order to test for illicit substances. Field drug tests are about as reliable as lie detector tests or horoscopes. They just don’t work. They just don’t.
• Think you’re safe if you just follow directions? Yeah, no. And if they don’t just outright kill you, they could make their instructions so arcane and hard to follow that they’ll kill you for not following them, and they’ll usually get away with it. He got away with it, by the way. Surprise!
• They’ll prosecute you for even knowing about crimes cops have committed.
• Think you’re safe in your home? lmao nah. Not even your 7 year old is safe from getting her brains blown out. check out this horrifying megapost on no-knock raids
• Being a taxi driver is literally more dangerous than being a cop.
• cops are more of a danger to themselves than anyone else is to them
• they’ve admitted to stealing as much -or recently more– than burglars through “asset forfeiture,” and the rate of their thefts has been climbing yearly. Keep in mind, these numbers only articulate what’s been reported. It’s probable that they’ve stolen far more than just this.
• police are literally allowed to rape people on the job in 35 states, as they have the power to determine whether or not you consented to sex with them while in their custody.
• up to 50% of the people police murder are disabled
• the police are being trained to kill as if they’re an occupying army and we’re an insurgency. this is an inevitability, as the military-industrial complex needs to keep expanding into new markets.
• Eugenics was still alive and well in the prison-industrial complex up until very recently, and could very well be continuing for all we know, as it was forcibly sterilizing inmates as late as 2010. I honestly don’t see a reason to believe it’s stopped.
• The US surveillance state is massive (and while this post primarily focuses on the US, other countries are just as bad), though much of our surveillance is privatized. This doesn’t stop the police from partnering with private companies, however. This will only get worse as time goes on. Also, we can’t forget about the Patriot Act and Snowden’s PRISM leaks.
• the police, as an institution, are so completely steeped in violence, that up to 40% of them commit acts of domestic violence and other forms of domestic abuse. Most citizens are not even allowed to own firearms if found guilty of domestic violence, and these guys are expected to handle military-grade equipment.
• Police exist to control and terrorize us, not serve and protect us. That’s only their function if you happen to be rich and powerful.

also this: lol

the police as they are now haven’t even existed for 200 years as an institution, and the modern police force was founded to control crowds and catch slaves, not to “serve and protect” – unless you mean serving and protecting what people call “the 1%.” They have a long history of controlling the working class by intimidating, harassing, assaulting, and even murdering strikers during labor disputes. This isn’t a bug; it’s a feature.

The justice system also loves to intimidate and outright assassinate civil rights leaders.

The police do not serve justice. The police serve the ruling classes, whether or not they themselves are aware of it. They make our communities far more dangerous places to live, but there are alternatives to the modern police state. There is a better way.

Further Reading:

(all links are to free versions of the texts found online – many curated from this source)

white nationalists court and infiltrate a significant number of Sheriff’s departments nationwide

Kropotkin and a quick history of policing

Malcolm X Grassroots Movement. (2013). Let Your Motto Be Resistance: A Handbook on Organizing New Afrikan and Oppressed Communities for Self-Defense.

Rose City Copwatch. (2008). Alternatives to Police.

Williams, Kristian. (2011). “The other side of the COIN: counterinsurgency and community policing.” Interface 3(1).

Williams, Kristian. (2004). Our Enemies in Blue: Police and power in America. New York: Soft Skull Press.

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Source: Watch large group of officers protecting George Floyd’s killer (reddit user american_apartheid)

Source: second-degree-education

 

 

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On Trump’s Photo Op

lkeke35

I am a movie lover, and I especially love horror movies written by Stephen King. I grew up watching horror movies. In fact, I think my mother and I (I blame her for my sordid addiction to horror films) tried to watch every one that got made between 1982, and 1989, before I went off to college.

 One of the movies that always stuck with me, on a moral and political level, was Stephen Kings The Dead Zone. Christopher Walken plays a man named Johnny, who gets psychic powers after a car accident. After he gets these powers, he meets a union delegate named Greg Stillson, played by Martin Sheen, and has a vision of the future, where Stillson, as president, starts a nuclear war. Haunted by this image, Johnny decides to assassinate Stillson during his campaign for president. He doesn’t succeed in killing Stillson, but he does change the future.

 During Johnny’s assassination attempt, Stillson, while standing at a podium, grabs a little girl (who happens to be the daughter of Johnny’s ex-girlfriend) and is photographed using the child’s body as a shield. It effectively ends his campaign and he never becomes president.

 Movies often use the trope of a person’s willingness to harm the innocent to protect themselves, as a way to show how corrupt, ruthless, or just sheer evil they are.The other day, Trump, who has a life long record of shitty behavior it would take too long to get into here, used police brutality against a crowd of peaceful protestors (against police brutality,) and Australian journalists, to clear them away from a photo op he wanted to take at the church in Lafayette Park, which is across the street from the WH. Every moment of the brutality was caught on film.

 George Floyd may have been the death heard round the world, but this is different. The footage from this was seen and heard around the world too, only this time, Trump was directly involved, and in doing so, has created an international incident that has received global censure. We have reached the point where government officials, of other countries, are openly trolling and just blatantly disrespecting the president, and his staff, on social media. Any kind of moral standing we ever had in the world, as a nation, has been entirely spent. Even the rest of the world are utterly sick and tired of this man, and are feeling free to express their contempt for American imperialism.

 There have been a lot of times, we’ve watched his actions and thought, “This is it, this is the last time he can do something like that. His term is now over.” But it never happened. This may actually be Trumps Baby Shield moment. At any rate, with every terrible decision he makes during this crisis, he insures the demise of his career.

I certainly hope so.

But, I’ve been wrong about that before, huh?

 

Just as his supporters mistake cruelty for honesty and bluster for courage, Trump has mistaken bloodlust for leadership. The bombast hides the fundamental truth that the president is a coward, so crippled by the fear of appearing weak that he screams for blood from the safety of his darkened White House, emerging only to gas peaceful protesters and clergymen in an attempt to look strong. He is incapable of understanding how further brutality fuels the unrest he has proved incompetent at confronting.

Adam Serwer: A Nation Without Law, Order, or Justice 

 

Lkeke35’s Hot Takes – Weekend Reading

I have a Tumblr blog where I follow certain people and conversations. I’m not on Twitter or Facebook ,as Twitter eats up far too much time, and Facebook is largley useless to me, for talking about issues. I talk about different things on Tumblr than I do here, and I noticed my manner there is more blunt and direct than here. I feel like when I’m on there I need to say what I need to say as fast and with as much clarity as possible, not like here on my own blog, where I can take my time to make my point.

On Tumblr, I can send some quick missives off into the ether, and maybe I’ll get  some feedback, maybe not but its a good way to dash off some thoughts about something before  forget what was being talked about. Here’s a few (largely unedited) hot takes I made in response to whatever issues were being talked about on my dashboard.

Tired Of Superheroes

These are just the thoughts that occurred to me after I had a conversation with a friend of mine (who is white, btw), and she and I got into a discussion about why she feels anytihng at all about movies she has no plans to ever see, and doesn’t care about. I’m genuinely baffled at the idea of people being angry about  certain types of movies getting released. My friend knows nothing about comic books, or superheroes, so I get her disinterest. If she said she didn’t care for the quality of such films, I would understand, but that’s not what she said.

I was having a conversation with a friend of mine yesterday,and she proclaimed that she was getting really tired of superhero movies, and that they should start making other films. I had to get on her case about that, because I’m pretty sure she doesn’t know how she sounds. Hollywood does make other kinds of movies, but people don’t go see those. She certainly doesn’t go see them. Maybe if she went to see the other kinds of  movies Hollywood makes, they would make more of those types of movies.

First of all how are you going to be mad about Hollywood making movies that you don’t ever go see, and are not particularly interested in? I mean how does it work that you’re upset that other people are making certain types of films popular. I also told her that these kinds of movies are still a relatively new thing, especially since the technology has caught up with out ability to imagine absolutely anything. Its really only been about ten years that this has really been kicking off, and that’s mostly due to the MCU.

Hollywood is going to keep making superhero movies as long as we keep giving them money and making them blockbusters. Now I happen to like superhero movies. I like their action, colors, and inventiveness. I prefer the comedies, and the straight up actioners, and I just enjoy watching the onscreen version of characters I’ve always only ever read about in books, and you know what? I simply don’t pay any attention to movies I’m not interested in. I hate watching Rom Coms, and Hollywood keeps making those, but I’m not angry they are making movies I don’t like. I just don’t go see those films. How you gonna be mad that other people are excited about movies you’re not interested in seeing? I’ve never understand that kind of thinking.

I also think it’s mighty funny that I’ve been hearing this refrain a lot more often, now that women, and poc are starting to get superhero movies made about their favorite characters. I’m not saying people who make such statements are racist, but it doesn’t look good, that the only time I hear so many people talking about how they need to quit making so many superhero movies, is when poc and women start to get theirs. When it was just white men, I heard this complaint a little bit, but not as much as I did after Black Panther was released. Now suddenly after Captain Marvel, and BP, Hollywood needs to stop making these types of movies.. That’s just an interesting observation.

 

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https://fangirlish.com/2020/02/04/queerly-not-straight-prioritizing-white-queer-couples-over-those-of-color/

 

White Feminism in Fandom

This is part of the continuing conversation to be had on Tumblr where we discuss intersectional feminism in movies and shows.This time it was about the treatment of Uhura, specifically her relationship with Spock, in fandom. Black women on Tumblr are forever trying to get white female fans to understand that the way Women of color are traditionally treated onscreen, is not the same as white women’s treatment,  and how the treatment of black female characters in fandom is often full of racist tropes. As white women you cannot demand the same things of Black female characters that you can of white ones.

What white feminists want is for black Woman to be”strong and not need no man”. Uhura is just supposed to be unloved and single, like she was in the original series, like every black woman in genre narratives. I’ve been watching the original series since I was a little girl.

Don’t get me wrong. I grew up on Spirk, I read a lot of Spirk, and that was my thing for two decades because I knew no one was ever gonna let Uhura be loved, but when I saw that JJ had went there in the new movie, I stood and I applauded.

As a little girl I used to dream about being as beautiful and elegant as Uhura, and I was sure I was gonna marry Spock when I grew up, and I finally got that representation at my old age, but I guess the dreams of little black girls don’t mean shit to white women who just want, yet another, after another, after another, mlm ship, in yet another show!

Teen Wolf, The Flash, Walking Dead, in every single show where there is a black female love interest with the white male lead, white women fans always show their whole duplicitous asses, about the black woman not being worthy of their white male love, and how she should be replaced with any compatible white woman, any same age white male he’s ever locked eyes with more than once, and even the villains who have tried to kill him, and his love interest, multiple times. We’re not talking about your individual ship, or attacking you personally. We’re telling you you need to examine why you need yet another mlm ship in yet another show or movie when fandom has dozens of such examples, all of that while ignoring canon male interracial ships, at that!

Why do all the ships need to be white!

This is a pattern across multiple genres, for more than two decades! This is racism!

Fandom is not the same for black women as it is for white women. The stereotypes for black women are the opposite compared to white women, though the objective of those stereotypes may be the same. Where white women get damseled, we don’t. We get to be strong onscreen, white women don’t. White women in movies get to be brides, while WoC only get to be side pieces, and murder victims.

Ship what you want, but be mindful of what you’re doing. Be mindful of how it looks to black women. Be mindful of what you say in defense of your ship when someone says something to you about. Our biggest issue isn’t always with the shipping you do, it’s the deceitful and racist manner in which y’all defend said ships that piss us the f*ck off!

(Spirk= Spock +Kirk; mlm = men loving men)

 

 

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/lets-talk-about-the-black-women-in-joker_n_5d9605dae4b0da7f6622abc7

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This was said during a discussion about how the failure of BoP at the box office,(which is not a compete failure, but that’s another discussion), is being spun by the “manosphere” to say that movies that include feminist thoughts and ideas, are all going to be failures. I think this is once again just part of white men’s agenda to only have films made that center them and their needs.

One of the  biggest complaints about BoP before its release was that none of the female characters were sexy. That said, the movie is unapologetically femme! So, the answer to that was “not sexy according to white men, no.” Now that the movie has under performed at the box office, these same men are using that to say that if the movie had given in to their demands to make the female characters sexier for men to look at, it would have done better.

Birds of Prey and Quality Films

So, because this movie isn’t doing as well at the box office as predicted, there’s been this gleefully obnoxious strain of thought, that the reason why the movie isn’t doing as well as the creators would like, is because of feminist messaging.

And I’m calling bullshit!

There’s a hundred different reasons why a movie could not do as well as expected, some of which we will never know. But some things we can, like Timing, people’s lack of money, it came out too soon in the wake of something else, not being shown in enough theaters, improper advertising, sometimes a movie is just plain bad, etc.

Any one of those reasons (or ones we don’t know) could be the reason this movie didn’t do well.

But there has been a concentrated effort on the part of comic book and superhero fanboys to denigrate this movie, on the basis of its “feminist agenda”, while calling it on its “quality”, which I say is utter bullshit.

There’s a good half dozen “feminist” movies  that have been released in the past ten years that everybody loved, and I don’t think that the reason people may have disliked this movie, is because of the messaging in its story. For one thing you have to pay money to see it, in order to know it’s a shitty film, but that’s not what the detractors have done. What they’re doing is claiming the story was so heavy with feminism that it was a bad story. Hell, Fury Road was one of the heaviest feminist films, I’ve seen in the past ten years, and there has been nothing to top it, and people loved the Hell out of that movie, considering it one of the best action movies of the past ten years. Captain Marvel has a blatantly feminist message in it and it made plenty of bank! Wonder Woman had a milder message in it, and it made bucks.

No, this type criticism is, yet another attempt, by comic book fanboys, to argue that feminism, and any form of social justice messaging, doesn’t belong in their precious superhero films. In fact, they would prefer that no PoC, and no women be involved in these movies at all, except as stereotypical sexy, love interests and sidekicks. Creators start making these types of fun stories with marginalized people in the center of it, and fanboys HAVE to object. Their objection to such material has become so routine that the rest of us no longer bat an eye at it anymore. We just expect it, and trot out the same arguments we used on all the other movies they objected to…and this is just the latest version of their near constant objection, to women and PoC working in genre movies.

Dozens of feminist movies get made every year. Some of them fall quietly, and no one says shit. Some of them blow up and win awards all over the place. But the only movies you’ll see a couple dozen Youtube videos about its feminist agenda are superhero movies. Fanboys have been trying really, really hard to vilify any form of social messages in genre movies. It’s a lot easier to do it with a movie like Birds of Prey, than Wonder Woman, which still has enough gratuitous prettiness in it to satisfy their little WW fap dreams. (But yeah, they definitely objected to WW real hard, too.)

Birds of Prey was hated for having a director of color, a cast full of diverse women, who were not trying to be sexy for the male gaze, and a cast of men not centered in the middle of the story, who were busily getting their asses kicked by said women. The movie being good or bad is not my point. My point is that whether it’s good or bad had nothing to do with its “wokeness”, which is another word (along with feminism) that’s being heavily vilified by white men in the mainstream media. There have been plenty of “woke” movies that fanboys haven’t said a damn thing about, it’s only when those movies contain comic book characters, or are products of their childhood nostalgia, that these men suddenly become deeply concerned with the “quality” of the movie.

I also know damn well they’re not sitting there clocking the story  and telling themselves it’s a bad story. They don’t give a flying f*ck about “story”! Not a one of them gives a fuck about the story when it comes to any of the movie franchises that have white men in the center of them, like The Transformers movies, those Kick Ass films, the last Batman or Superman films, the umpteenth iteration of Spiderman, the original Ghostbusters movies, or just about anything in the MCU.

No! the only time white men trot out ideas about “Quality” is when whatever they’re criticizing involves women and people of color. Funny that! From books, to movies, to job positions, etc. it’s really funny how the privileged are only concerned with the “quality” of something  when that something is not catering or servicing their needs…

Birds of Prey was aimed at white women, and women of color, and was meant to be a quick, fun romp, not too deep, a little violence and some asskicking. That it didn’t cater to the men’s needs when watching it, and was never aimed at men as its audience, let’s me think they definitely felt some type of way about it.

This disingenuous critical bullshit is yet another reason I do not trust white male critics to judge anything having to do with the field of entertainment, at this point. They have shown their whole, moon white, pale asses over every genre movie that features women and PoC, so damn often, and so badly, that their opinion about what’s good or bad, or what I should see in the theater is thoroughly suspect, now!

So, Fuck their sensibilities. They don’t give a flying fuck about quality. They only care about two things. Can they fap to it, and can they center themselves in the middle of the story as the hero!

 

 

 

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This was a response to some white guy on Tumblr who was upset about Black people not wanting to interact with white people, calling it racist to not trust them. This sounds exactly like men who are upset that women have difficulty trusting that men won’t hurt them and refusing to interact with them, because as men, they are individual,, special beings, that women  should be able to tell, just by looking, that they would never hurt anyone.

Habitual Foot Steppers

 

Every day, PoC in this country have negative, sometimes even violent, interactions with white people. Hell, they probably often have such interactions with members of their own culture, but it’s only white people, especially those who control mainstream public messaging through media, who are constantly advocating that white people are individuals who don’t represent their group, and need to be forgiven for those negative interactions, without a single one of them making any effort to bring those types of interactions to a halt.

In fact, many of them will simultaneously argue that not only should such actions be constantly forgiven, overlooked, or gotten over, they will also insist those interactions don’t happen at all. It’s the equivalent of people stepping on your foot every time they see you, and when you complain, or tell them to stop it, them telling you they didn’t do it, to prove they didn’t step on your foot, and it didn’t happen because they didn’t notice it, or intend to do it. You would naturally be well within your right to not only avoid that people in the future, and probably be more than a little pissed that they didn’t listen to you when you told them they hurt you.

All these different people, from the same cultural group, insist on stepping on your feet, while proclaiming loudly to their audience that not only didn’t they intend to do it, that it’s not hurting you, they didn’t actually do it, and you’re too sensitive and should get over it. And when you get angry about it and avoid them and express resent,ent over their behavior, they call you a racist, for not trusting them, and deciding to protect your feet by avoiding them.

 

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These are some of the hot takes I left on Medium.com. This one was about men who think, if they pursue a woman hard enough, long enough, she will eventually give in to his desires, and this is an idea that is prevalent in Pop culture media.

Stalking for Love

One of the reasons some men are like this is because they are socialized to do so, from the moment they start consuming the culture. Songs after song, books upon books, movie after movie, and TV shows after show, are really good at imparting one major message. That women are prizes given to them for persistence, correct behavior, owning the right car, shoes, house, and sometimes just for having a penis!

They have been shown again and again, that if they pursue a woman hard enough, stalk her long enough, just keep asking, and asking, and asking, they will eventually wear her down, she will reach enlightenment, and of course, dispense her charms. “No”, in Pop culture, really just means, “Not right now.” or “Keep trying!” This is what they’ve been sold, and you can tell which ones have fully bought it, because they are the ones who get enraged when women go off-script.

They are behaving exactly the way they’ve been taught to behave, having fully, and uncritically, drank the Kool-aid, that persistence wins the girl. Almost nothing in our culture tells men they need to have the correct character, or hold certain virtues. Too much of Pop culture teaches men that they don’t have to be genuinely good, or kind, or gentle men, to attract women. They are taught that women are fickle creatures that need to be tricked, or hounded into wanting them.

This is not a hard and fast rule because there are plenty of men who have, somehow, managed to avoid this kind of thinking, but it is definitely an element in the thinking of these kind of men. I don’t think there is a causality, so much as a life long influence.

 

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White Fragility

These responses I wrote as comments on Medium.com.

Both of these responses ended up being tangentially related to each other. The first  was a response to an article about White people’s hypocrisy in calling PoC racist, whenever we express any form of unhappiness (or sarcasm) at the existence of White people in a public sphere. I  remember that Asian woman who lost her journalism job over tweets she made years ago, where she joked about white people. It is important to keep in mind that these people are reacting to things that progressives have been doing, and its been the tactic recently of marginalized people not  just to  talk back to the kinds of people who victimize us on social media, and in public, but to see that such people be ostracized by society, by contacting their families and employers.

This particular article was about a young African American woman, who made a public statement about there being too many white people in her college’s Multicultural Center, and white (mostly men) opinionators in the news media, having a full on meltdown,  and calling her a racist. For the record, I think what she said was kind of stupid, but it doesn’t make her a racist. It just makes her very young and silly.

Since reactionaries have a tendency to lack imagination, they have this nasty thing where they appropriate the tactics that have traditionally been used by marginalized people to fight their oppression. Its especially galling when such people use those same tactics against, not just the people who invented the tactics, but whom they have traditionally bullied. Marginalized people invented the tactics out of desperation, to teach a lesson, or to make the harm  they cause have consequences, but what reactionaries are doing (as so much of their behavior is often motivated)  out of pure spite.

1.

I definitely think this is a backlash against white people being called out for everything they’ve gotten wrong for centuries. They’ve  been calling everyone who isn’t white, straight, or a man, nasty slurs, since the invention of American English. They still do that on the regular today, and these same people are the ones who like to argue about saying the N*word, but let some anonymous black girl make a dubious statement, and they lose the entirety of their shit! I’d be angrier, except it’s amazing to behold.

But then: Never, in the history of this country, have white people been spoken back to, and challenged, by marginalized people, in such great numbers, as much as they have, since the invention of the internet.

(Every time they say anything, they are reminded that white people have caused an incredible amount of damage to other people, and are still doing it. No one likes to be called out for behavior they have always known is wrong, but are  reluctant to change, because they derive  emotional benefits that they are unwilling to acknowledge, what Du Bois called “the psychological wages of whiteness.”)

And this isn’t like before, where your garden variety white person was largely unaware of all this “talking back”, and could simply quash any talking back, they encountered by screaming, and extreme violence. Now its impossible to not know how marginalized people feel, and our pushback against oppression, and injustice, is often immediate, and intense. They are working desperately to reestablish their equilibrium, by upholding the status quo. But someone once said to me, that’s what Conservative means: to conserve. To keep things as they were.

They’re so used to simply ignoring any form of oppression, but now it’s constantly being thrown in their face. They can’t ignore it anymore. (This is mass white fragility (rather than individual).

2.

I commented on this very thing in another post. I think it’s time for us to stop focusing so much on just black pain and racism. Although we can still make such stories, I think it’s time to start imagining ourselves in new environments, new types of stories, and in the future, which is why I’m a huge supporter of Afro-Futurism.

Part of the reason white fandom acts the way it does is that so often, those have been the only type of stories they’ve been exposed to, in mainstream media. Black people know there are other types of fun, lighthearted Black oriented, movies out there, that are not associating our race, yet again, with crime and slavery (even positive depictions still associate our race with these two topics). These are often the only ways that white audiences know us, even though we can list a dozen or more films about Blackness that don’t center either of those.

I think part of this is also a “white lash” against the pop culture demands of black people in the past ten years, demands which are finally, slowly, being answered. I know it’s not because we’re taking over white characters roles, because even with original roles, in original stories, black actors get harassed and vilified by white fandom. So it’s not about any of the reasons they state, and in quite a few cases, it’s simply an excuse for some of them to engage in the anti-Black bigotry they’ve always wanted to express, in the real world, but can’t do so without being called a racist bigot. I think that’s something that’s never going to change.

It’s because Black People are being highly visible, everywhere, and demanding, not asking, not begging, to be included in any industry that takes our money. We are demanding they include us, or we will give our money to someone, or anything else, or make our own, and rake in that dough (look at Fenty Beauty!)

There’s also an increasing sense of white male irrelevance, which is the kind of backlash that happens, every time there’s a pop cultural shift of any kind. This sort of behavior happens every time white people start feeling like they are no longer in control of the culture. It’s happened in music for nearly a century (Jazz, Rock, Rap). This is also currently happening in even the most innocuous subjects, like the knitting community, and Romance fiction.

I’ve been thinking about this, studying this, and trying to put it into some kind of historical context, for a while. This kind of behavior from (primarily) white people is far from new. It’s been going on for decades.

Next week:

We will return to our regularly scheduled programming, wit hsome actual essays and reviews!

Talking About Stuff On The Interwebz

On Watchmen

I had so much love for this show! Too bad its not going to get a second season, at least not according to the showrunner, which makes me only mildly upset, because really, its better to go out on top, then to dribble off in shame. Lindhelof says that what we saw is all of the story, and he doesn’t have any ideas for a second season, although he has given HBO his blessing to continue the show without him. I would prefer that the show simply end now, to  introducing a new and mediocre showrunner, for the second season anyway, which is the problem that American Gods has run into.

American Gods  should have just stopped at season one, with Bryan Fuller who, no matter which shows he works on, is just really hard to top. The same thing happened with ST:Discovery. On the other hand, if HBO  wanted to bring in Fuller, for a second season of Watchmen, I would be totally on board with that. The show is so rich, I just know he’d do some awesome work with it, but as it stands HBO isn’t looking at a second season right now, and the show has not been renewed.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/09/the-incendiary-aims-of-hbos-watchmen

 

https://www.dailydot.com/parsec/hbo-watchmen-hooded-justice-costume/

https://www.slashfilm.com/watchmen-and-race/

https://themuse.jezebel.com/god-is-black-and-nobody-batted-an-eye-1840460304

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On Black Film

The first link is a list of 84 films that starred or were directed by women of color.

The second link is an article about why Black art and film criticism requires diversity. Because really the only people who can cogently discuss aspects of the culture that are represented in art, are Black people. Its not that white people don’t have opinions, its just their opinions carry less weight because most of them just don’t know enough about Black culture, to be able to speak on it, with any clarity.

And finally, a video on why we need to make more movies about Black people just being happy, and living our lives, without some criminal or racial crisis involved.

https://www.indiewire.com/t/directors/

https://wearyourvoicemag.com/entertainment-culture/all-black-art-deserves-valid-critique

 

http://blackyouthproject.com/waiting-wakanda-black-joy-film-epic-resistance/

 

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On Horror

Here are a number of opinion posts from The Artifice, on the subject of Horror and its themes. I’m going to urge everyone to visit the site, as it contains some of the best film writing and criticism on the internet. There’s not a lot of diversity, the people there pretty much stay in their lane, and are not professional writers for the most part, but its far better than a lot of the Bro’tube videos about pop culture.

https://the-artifice.com/wrong-turn-2003/

 

https://the-artifice.com/maternal-horror-films-dysfunctional-mother/

 

https://the-artifice.com/silence-horror/

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And from Medium.com

I can’t link to Medium articles here ,but here are some titles and authors to look for, should you give the place a visit. And be sure to check out my last post about Horror movies set in the suburbs.

Recently, Stephen King weighed in on the issue of diversity at the Oscars. (There isn’t any.) Considering that this is the same man who insisted on putting at least one magical negro in every single one of his earlier novels, (and a couple of his more recent ones, too), he really should have just kept his opinion to himself. In all fairness though, after he had the situation explained to him, he did backtrack a little bit on his statement.

Stephen King Needs More Black Friends

As decades of his Black characters show, one tone-deaf tweet is the least of his problems

Scott Woods

Also:

http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/articles/stephen-kings-super-duper-magical-negroes/

https://constantreaders.org/home/dick-hallorann-mike-hanlon-it-the-shining-magical-negro-stephen-king-blk-stg

One thing that is deeply funny about this topic, at least for me, is that I actually have met, what I like to call, “Magical Negroes” in my own life. Several times, Black people have shown up to help me with some issue, and then afterwards they disappeared for me to never see or hear from them ever again.

I was practicing for my driving test one day, in an empty parking lot near my house, and some guy (who was, as King would probably say, “four sheets to the wind”) came along to teach me how to parallel park, and how to back into a parking space. This went on for a while, and he was incredibly helpful, for someone who was very probably drunk. I went home afterward, but I never saw that man in my neighborhood again, although to be honest, I’d never seen him before the event either, and I’m reasonably familiar with the people in my neighborhood. This has happened to me several times in my life. Strangers who show up, help me do something, and then disappear, and well… I have questions!

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On this subject, I said in another post, that this is what fandom has devolved to, at this point, where media consumers have become so toxic, that they think they can just harass the actors they don’t like, off social media, since it worked in a few cases. But I have to ask, what do any of these campaigns gain from  this? Although such people are incredibly loud, there simply aren’t enough of them, in population size, to affect the bottom lines of any of the corporations these actors work for. Their fleeting victories, sending actors off social media, and downvoting movies on Rotten Tomatoes, and Netflix, are just that. Fleeting, and ultimately unimportant.

Not only have they engaged in harassing movie actors, they have harassed other fans who simply don’t agree with them, (which is separate from the racism and misogyny that normally goes on in fandom). The vast majority of people (and this is just the ones who watch these movies), know nothing about what’s going on, what these people have been doing (beyond what’s been reported in mainstream media), or even why its being done.

These “fans” have accomplished nothing, but have become so used to bullying actors off the internet, that they were really surprised that Boyega didn’t leave, and they most certainly believe they are more influential than they actually are. In fact, like the strong Black man he claimed to be, he stood his ground, took no shit, and clapped right back at them, so that now the White women who started this beef with him, by personally @ing him, on his Twitter account, are  now whining that he is hurting them, somehow! It’s all perfectly batshit, and also completely useless. He still has a career. He’s still going to be working, and now that he no longer under contract with Disney, he can say what he wants on social media, with a freedom he didn’t have before.

I asked Nicole (the writer) if I could have her permission to post an excerpt from her Tumblr blog here, and she kindly gave consent. If you’re not familiar with the complete White Feminism Racefail of 2020,  here’s a decent rundown of those events.

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John Boyega and the Racism of Fandom

A look into the harassment John Boyega has faced at the hands of rabid Star Wars fans

Nicole M

Everything came to a head not just with John’s post about how he felt about Reylo, but he posted a video on his Instagram. In the video, it shows Boyega responding to his harassment by attacking the responses. Instead of realizing they were wrong, many Reylos started to accuse him of bullying them. It didn’t matter if they were the ones who replied to John with racist, degrading comments and it also didn’t matter that the comments they made were public: they couldn’t be held responsible. it’s John’s fault for not taking abuse silently. Some people are so upset about this, they’re already planning smear campaigns for his upcoming movies.

Tumblr Hot Takes

I’ve been on Tumblr for a while now, and I’m still not tired of it. Here are a few hot takes about various subjects.

On Acting

karazrel

sc*rjo made more than 2 facial expressions for the first time in her career and got a leading actress nomination meanwhile lupita played 2 entirely different people in the same movie and got snubbed.. shut it down

 

avintagekiss24

People in the comments are missing the entire picture.

It’s not as simple as ScarJo getting nominated and Lupita not and it’s not about our “fave” vs your “fave”.

Scarjo was nominated for playing a normal, regular woman whose relationship breaks down. Haven’t we seen this before? I think it was Revolutionary Road with Kate Winslet and Leo DiCaprio. Before that it was The War Of the Roses with Kathleen Turner and Michael Douglas, before that it was Kramer vs. Kramer with Meryl Streep and Dustin Hoffman, all of which were nominated for various awards from the Bafta’s to the Golden Globes to the Oscars… the point being, we’ve seen this role over and over again, the actress just changes.

Lupita literally played TWO SEPERATE PEOPLE in the MOST ORIGINAL MOVIE OF 2019 and was shafted. A very limited group of actresses could have pulled off what Lupita did in Us. Horror or not, she put on a better performance than Scarjo did in A Marriage Story. Horror or not, Us made $250 million dollars on a $20 milllion dollar budget mostly because of HER performance and she got squat.

One role could have literally been played by any actress.

The other required skill.

But guess who got nominated? Let’s stop celebrating mediocrity.

 

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On Life

 

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On Experiencing The New

Gonna tell y’all what I can hear now that I got my hearing aids

saltysurvivors

Birds! They chirp and it’s so beautiful.

 

saltysurvivors

Far away cow moos

 

saltysurvivors

My friend has this is his back yard and to say I cried is an understatement.

 

saltysurvivors

My best friends singing voice

 

saltysurvivors

Chickens: *chicken noise*

Me, sobbing:

saltysurvivors

The filter for my fish tank! Bubble bubble bubble

 

saltysurvivors

I sit in the bass section in band. Today I could clearly hear the flutes up at the front! They’re not great, but I can finally hear them!

 

saltysurvivors

The sound of walking in sand.

Soft but kinda crunchy? Very nice sound 10/10

 

saltysurvivors

Me playing guitar for the first time. Took the hearing aids out. Not a very good sound… yet

 

saltysurvivors

Tree leaves in the wind. I got a little spooked at first because it’s 1 am and I’m alone in the park but it’s a real good sound.

 

saltysurvivors

Bees

Let me say, it was really fucking terrifying walking past the flowering tree in my backyard and hearing zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz coming from it.

 

saltysurvivors

“sunlight” by Hozier

I sat in my car alone while listening to it. I knew it would be special but wow, that was a religious experience.

 

saltysurvivors

Their hooves make sounds in the grass but they are completely silent. Beautiful creatures. Beautiful sound

 

saltysurvivors

Pine needles and pine cones make crunchy sounds!!! Oh my! Very nice

 

saltysurvivors

Colored pencils make a real nice scratch noise when I’m drawing. I didn’t know they did that

 

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On White Culture

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On The White Savior Trope 

 

 

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On Gay Sarcasm 

neocores

fellas is it gay to be gay

 

anastrophilesworld

according to historians? no

 

bigskydreaming

Ugh, why can’t you just let friends be friends? Like where does all the friendphobia stop, I just wanna know. So sick of the societal pressure to bone a bro just cuz he’s sitting less than five feet away from you in the hot tub.

I mean for real, what I wouldn’t give to live in a time like Alexander the Great. When two fellas could just have such a deep and abiding bond of friendship – like, just pure platonic beefcake buddies with No Homo additives, not a single one, not even a vibe – that the King Bro almost bankrupt his kingdom throwing his best bud the funeral to end all funerals. And he owed to never take another bro, so long as he lived.

Like, that’s the dream. Just two dudes being dudes and doing dude things together. Just the two of them. No group hangs. Table for two only.

Both on Earth and in the afterlife, forever after.

Together.

Eternally.

*A moment of silence for the bro-ships of the days of yore, when polishing another dude’s staff of manliness after battle was just like, what a good friend does. Out of respect for his, y’know, battle prowess. And masculinity. And like. His muscles and stuff.*

….But then you guys had to go and make everything gay. Like wtf. That’s so gay, dudes.

 

****************

On Canada

pizzaforpresident

petition to rename the usa ‘south canada’

 

mellowminty

what about alaska

are we then normal canada

 

wasereborworthit

canada a bit to the left

 

zillystring

moniker-padacklyte 

What about South America? Is that just America? Or South South Canada?

winchesterwolves 

madamedepompador

 

 

bunnyinafez

pebbles5ever

 

*********************

 

From: Lkeke35

On Villains and Fans

This was my hot take on the discussion of fandom sympathizing and excusing pop media villains. I wondered if some of the reason some fans do that is because they identify with the villain, but villains are bad, and associated that villainy with themselves. If that is the case I wanted to reassure them that liking a villain in a movie doesn’t necessarily say anything, in particular, about your morals.

Somebody needs to let them understand that not only is it okay to like problematic shit, as long as you own it, it’s okay to like the villains. It doesn’t really say anything about you if you like a charismatic villain, but spinning up a bunch of bullshit philosophies about the villain because you feel ashamed to like them is the problem. And trying to cover up your racism (and sexism) by making up bullshit stories about the only PoC in the narrative is what’s our problem.

Nobody cares if you like Kylo, or Loki, but you DO NOT need to hate on the other characters to like them. You don’t need to make your liking of those characters sound like the most progressive thing one can do, by making up bullshit character traits for them that are not remotely evident in canon! We dislike the people who are showing their ass over liking a fictional character. That’s the problem.

I’ve liked plenty of villains over the years. I acknowledge the fact that they are charismatic villains, and I own that shit. That they are darkly seductive or whatever. I liked Darth Vader but I didn’t need to hate Lando Calrissian to do that. Hell I actually love Loki exactly for who he is, an emotionally messed up spirit of utter chaos, who is something of an asshole. I liked Hannibal from the tv series, but I didn’t need to hate Jack Crawford to do that! It says nothing about my character or morality that I find him enjoyable to watch, while condemning his actions. And it’s perfectly okay to like both the good guy and the bad guy simultaneously. Sometimes villains are created for the purpose of inducing such feelings in the audience. They’re handsome, or charismatic or sympathetic.

Plenty of black people loved and sympathized with Killmonger from the movie Black Panther. In fact that’s exactly why he was written the way he was written, to reflect certain thoughts and feelings of the audience, and we didn’t need to shit on T’challa to like him. I really wish these people would understand it’s okay to like the villain.

Unless, of course, your real goal is to express your racial resentment of other characters, and you’re using your love of the villain as a shield to do so…

 

On Getting Old and Tired

My hot take about not getting too excited to watch the latest movie, about Black people, showing how strong they are, by experiencing pain.

I’ve been a comic book, sci-fi, and film geek my whole life. I just love good stories, but now I’ve reached the point where if I haven’t read (name some famous black author), it ain’t gonna happen. Not saying I have no need for inspiration, or that such writing isn’t useful, and you do what you have to do, but I’m out.

I’m just damn tired of reading about black pain and misery. I don’t care what the reason is for, or how uplifting someone else thinks it is. It’s a phase I went through when I was younger, but I’m over it, now.

The only thing I wanna read about, and even watch now, is Black  bravery, courage, and joy. Now that I’ve had access to those kind of  stories, I’m spoiled. I want black love, black heroes, and black fantasies. I wanna see us in the future living our best lives. I wanna see us in alternate worlds bringing that black joy. I wanna see us defeating monsters, rescuing Excalibur, and flying rocket ships. I had so little of this growing up, I’m starving for it now.

I’m running up on fifty years old now, and that’s long enough to have traveled painful roads. And I’m really fucking tired. This world makes me shed enough tears. I don’t want tears in my fiction too.

 

On Cash Grabs and Disney

I’m just saying, it looks really, really, suspicious when the argument about Disney doing nothing but a cash grab only seems to pop up ,from certain corners of the internet, whenever they announce some form of diversity in their latest movies.

To be absolutely fair, there are people who have been making that argument since the beginning of the MCU phase, and I don’t begrudge them their opinion, because yeah, it’s a fucking cash grab. But my counter argument to that is nobody who goes to see these movies gives a flying fuck about how they get representation. They only care that they are getting some representation in some manner. And yeah, it’s a cash grab, because Hollywood is a fucking bizness, which only now, after a hundred years, is starting to realize which side of the bread their butter is on, and the butter is on the side with diversity (and possibly China!) Yeah, PoC are all well aware of Disney’s racist past! You ain’t whitesplaining anything PoC don’t already know. What we have decided is we don’t give a fuck if we get a Black Ariel, a new Blade movie, or the next Black Panther, cuz it’s what we been fucking asking for the past twenty years!

This argument however, doesn’t ever seem to make its way across my dash when Disney announces its latest iteration of “Chris-Somebody Blows Shit Up Real Good!” But as soon as Disney announces that anybody black, or female, or gay, is working in one of their movies, then suddenly people wanna complain about a business trying to maximize its business! What the fuck they suppose to do, appeal to the smallest possible fragment of the American public and go out of business?

 

Generic White Fandom

My hot take on racial issues in pop culture:

lkeke35

What I’ve observed, is that it’s not white gay men writing any of these characters. I’ve read erotica written by gay men and it is very distinct from fiction written by women. The primary writers of these all these characters are straight white women, (there, I’ve said it!)and there have long been conversations in the lgbtq community about straight women fetishizing white gay men in shipping! None of these fandoms, and we are speaking in the aggregate here, are even half as progressive as they want us to believe and like to hide their toxicity behind a faux-reverence for progressivism! In fact, it’s gotten to the point where I am automatically suspicious of any meta written by white women as I feel certain it will be their ex use to express their resentment of female characters who don’t look like them and any characters of color.

Absolute Fan wanking has finally hit the big f*cking time!

Another one of my biggest pet peeves, however, is the utter sameness of the characters being written, as the poster above says. It’s like these women, whose only knowledge of how men are actually like, comes from reading other stories exactly like the ones they write themselves, or the heteronormative relationships they are in, which they then pretend to sneer at in the source material, and only know three or four templates from which to cull their character’s traits, and they use these traits regardless of what any of these characters are like in canon.

On the other hand, I do like to try to give peope an out. And it’s this: White audiences have no f*cking idea what to do with characters of color. Since they’ve only ever been socialized by a racist pop cultural paradigm which centers white men, they can only ever villainize, or sideline, or make servile, characters of color, since those are the ONLY examples they’ve ever been given, and let’s face it, these people aren’t as imaginative as they like to think they are. Doing nothing more than reproducing the same dynamic that one has seen in decades of the source material, which sidelined characters of color, is not progressive or imaginative at all. And they really have no real examples to work from, either, Especially if their tastes in source material, are as white-centered, and/or truncated, as their ability to write fiction. Writing and thinking in a non-racist, non-sexist manner, requires active thought, and participation, and not simply the use of popular buzzwords!

Now put all that together with racial resentment, misogynoir, misogyny, homo- and transphobia, and their complete and utter inability to acknowledge their own personal insecurities, and you end up with thousands of white women writing a delusional toxic stew of all evil darkies, conniving and/or dumb white women, sassy and servile black women, and white gay men with as much character range as blocks of wood.

…And Then It Imploded!

All four of these huge racial implosions happened in the space of a year:

 

Star Wars

This one started in December, just after the release of the last film in the Skywalker trilogy.

In the latest news on racism, we have John Boyega, now that he is free of Disney, which means he is also free of any promotional obligations to them, is lowkey stating what every Black person has felt about the Star Wars fandom, since he first encountered its most toxic members nearly six years ago: F*ck you arseholes!

For the past two weeks he has been trending on Twitter and certain members of the fandom are mad as hell! Here’s an overall  assessment of the situation from Youtube’s Clownfish TV.

This entire thing is so long and convoluted that I cannot possibly go into everything wrong with this fandom. So here’s some links, most of which are all kinds of fun as John speaks in his own words, on his own terms, and let’s  toxic fans have it.

I have long observed that you do not come for British actors and comedians on social media. They are a class of entertainer who have absolutely zero f*cks to give as regards American’s delicate feelings, and tolerate no nonsense from us. Yes, it is primarily Americans who are acting a damn fool about all of this. Americans are so used to throwing their weight around in other countries, that I’m not surprised we try the same shit on social media, and then act surprised when people from other countries push back.

https://www.cinemablend.com/news/2486615/john-boyega-get-candid-about-stupid-star-wars-fan-conflicts

https://www.cbr.com/star-wars-john-boyega-toxic-fandom/

Incidentally, both Kelly Marie Tran, and Oscar Isaac, both pulled a Mark Hamill, and have made it clear they are through with this particular  Disney franchise, and were dissatisfied with how their characters were mistreated in the story. This entire thing must have been especially trying for Kelly Marie, who started out in the franchise as a sweet and bubbly newby, who was excited by her new role, was having a lot of fun, and looking forward to an illustrious career, and look what the so called “fans”  did to her.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-persecution-of-kelly-marie-tran-how-star-wars-fandom-became-overrun-by-alt-right-trolls

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/star-wars-actress-kelly-marie-tran-reveals-how-she-coped-with-internet-trolls-after-casting-201413884.html

Tran, Boyega, and Ridley have endured years of trolling and bullying from a virulently toxic fandom. (Daisy, less so since, as she isn’t on social media.)

 

American Gods

This happened in the fall of last year:

In October and November of last year, one of my favorite actors, Orlando Jones, found out he’s been fired from the cast of American Gods. where he played Anansi, and African Trickster god. Here’s the timeline of the event from Orlando’s viewpoint. According to Orlando, it’s a complete, racist,  wtf*ery…

Here are Jones’ comments on his departure from American Gods.

September tenth, 2018, I was fired from American Gods. There will be no more Mr. Nancy. Don’t let these motherfuckers tell you they love Mr. Nancy—they don’t. I’m not going to name names, but the new season three showrunner is Connecticut-born and Yale-educated, so he’s very smart. And he thinks that Mr. Nancy’s angry get-shit-done is the wrong message for black America. That’s right, this white man sits in that decision-making chair, and I’m sure he has many black BFFs who are his advisors, and made it clear to him that if they did not get rid of that angry god Mr. Nancy, he’d start a Denmark Vesey uprising in this country. I mean, what else could it be?

To the wonderful Neil Gaiman, thank you for allowing me to play this role, for writing this wonderful book, for opening the door for me to become a writer/producer on season two of American Gods, thank you, sir. To the magnificent Bryan Fuller and the incredible Michael Green, thank you for creating this series and for allowing me also to become Mr. Nancy. I hope the fans enjoyed it, because really this is about you. I hope you loved it as much as I loved doing it, and, you know, we’ll see each other again real…

https://slate.com/culture/2019/12/orlando-jones-fired-american-gods-mr-nancy-charles-eglee-starz-gaiman.html

I have no plans at this time to watch the third season. The showrunner for hte first season was Bryan Fuller who is an exemplary showrunner, and out gay man, and has no problems with writing complex, and sometimes, controversial shows. The second season saw new showrunners, and while the season wasn’t a bad season, the drop in cohesion and quality was noticeable. I expect it to drop even further wit hthe ousting of Orlando, and a writer’s room that doesn’t want to be bothered writing its Black characters.

That some of it held together at all, is apparently due to Orlando Jones stepping in to help write not just his own character, but many of the of the characters of color  on the show, as the writers couldn’t bring themselves to be bothered to do it, and for which he received no producer credit. They also did not announce his firing in a timely enough manner for him to audition for a new position in an another show.

Here’s what Orlando stated, in his interview with TVLine:

I showed up in Season 2 of American Gods, and they hadn’t written for my character at all. They certainly knew I was coming. That was literally the studio’s job. And they didn’t do that job. And I wasn’t the only person: They didn’t do it for all of the characters of color. So if you really care about these characters of color, then why don’t you write for them? So, I found myself in a very odd situation, because Neil Gaiman was the one who asked me to write a [character] Bible for Mr. Nancy [at the start of Season 2]. I didn’t jump into the writing process and throw my weight around. I was invited by Neil Gaiman. And when I wrote that character Bible and sent it to him, I got back a message I wasn’t expecting. As a fan of the human and, you know, as a writer myself, I was overjoyed. It was all caps the email, you know, “I F–KING LOVE IT. Spread it around.” …I spread around that character Bible. And I suddenly found myself writing, not just Mr. Nancy, but Ibis and Salim and the Jinn and Sam Black Crow and Shadow Moon and all of the characters of color who weren’t written.

Not only did the creators of the show fire Orlando Jones, but they also got rid of the Jinn and Salim, the only MENA actors in the series, and the only openly gay couple (which the show was too chickenshit to show last season), that I’ve ever seen on TV.

I don’t think the creators on these shows realize what a massive fanbase some actors of color have, and Orlando has a huge Black fanbase on Twitter, with whom he regularly interacts. They are incredibly loyal, and vocal about their love for him, and producers and creators of these shows do not understand how much we certain Black actors, They need to recognize that it is that fanbase that’s tuning in to watch these shows. Celebrities like Orlando, Viola Davis, and Gabrielle Union, have a huge cache of good will in our communities, and to dismiss or disregard it, is sheer stupidity.

What has happened since is that about half the main cast has vacated the show. Mr. World. The Jinn, Salim, and New Media.

 

******

What happened here is not that much different from what happened on Sleepy Hollow. A show that was based on a Black female character got new showrunners, who mistreated the lead actress, and decided to focus more of their writing on the White characters in the show to the point where the original lead actress was simply written out of her own show (and replaced by a lighter skinned actress, btw). Not because of anything she’d done, but because the writers either didn’t want to focus on her,  didn’t know what to do with her character, or were too lazy to write a woman of color.

I say let this new season of American Gods go the same way as Sleepy Hollow. its not a good look when a successful show keeps cycling through more and more mediocre (and cheaper) showrunners. I won’t be watching the new season, and believe we should ignore it until it goes off the air. Don’t talk about it, don’t tweet about it. Let the third season be its last.

https://wearyourvoicemag.com/entertainment-culture/the-sleepy-hollow-ing-of-american-gods

Last week, Jones went public on Twitter about being let go from American Gods, citing that Eglee did not think the “angry” message was the right one to send to Black America and that he would know since he writes from “a Black male perspective”. 

What we are witnessing, once again is “whitening” of a show. Every time Hollywood creates a show aimed at a Black audience, they consider that audience to be expendable once the show gets good ratings. They then try to reset the show to appeal to whiter audiences, instead, get rid of everything that drew us to the original story-line (watching characters of color in a fantastic setting), and  considerably “lighten” the characters each season thereafter.

The decline of American Gods and its once sharp-as-nails grasp of the concept of race in America mirrors such issues, with the departure of Mr. Nancy bringing the casting of Herizen Guardiola as Yoruba goddess Oshun back into question. Oshun, sans her appearance in Lemonade, has always been depicted as a beautiful, darkskinned goddess. And it takes a specific type of toffetry and caucasity to assume the opposite and also assume that there cannot be two darkskinned goddesses onscreen at the same time (re: Bilquis).

*****

But the producers of American Gods aren’t just in trouble for this issue. Fremantle Media, an Australian based company, that usually produces Reality TV shows, is being investigated for the firing of Gabrielle Union, a Black actress from America’s Got Talent.

https://www.kingofreads.com/a-complete-timeline-of-the-gabrielle-union-americas-got-talent-saga/

The Romance Writers of America

Most of this happened in December of last year, and continues to now:

Last year, I published a link to an article on the lack of diversity n romantic fiction, and how women of color were fighting to be included:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/apr/04/fifty-shades-of-white-romance-novels-racism-ritas-rwa

********

NOW:

The Romance Writers guild imploded earlier this month ,in a series of vents which has culminated in the mass exodus of at least a third of its members. Here’s a timeline of the events, as we understand them:

https://www.claireryanauthor.com/blog/2019/12/27/the-implosion-of-the-rwa

********

unpretty

a summary of my understanding of the situation

• courtney milan is a chinese-american romance author and was the chair of the romance writers of america ethics committee
• she wrote a twitter post where she called a book by kathryn lynn davis ‘a fucking racist mess’ (because it was)
• davis and suzan tisdale file a complaint because How Dare She

• are you guys seeing this because oh my fucking god ARE YOU SEEING THIS
• “it was the nineties and she did a lot of research into chinese people, you’re just racist against white people”
• they kicked courtney off the board because of this
• immediately people started resigning because that’s horseshit
• so many people resigned
• SO MANY
• it turned out the people resigning were some of the only people keeping the absolute bugfuckery of the people in charge at bay
• the decision was rescinded like “oh whoops our bad” but like?? too late????
• all the dirty laundry is coming out on twitter

• there are petitions to get the president, president-elect, and executive director of rwa recalled because they’re clearly fuckups
• either the rwa is going to need to go through some big changes, or a lot of authors (particularly queer authors and authors of color) are going to have to make their own org
• the founder of rwa was a black woman so bigots taking over is especially fucking galling
• courtney milan is also the reason we have dinosaur emojis
• that’s not really relevant except who the fuck steps to the woman who got us dinosaur emojis

 

goth-mabel

• Courtney Milan is not only a great author and the person who gave us dinosaur emojis.
• She is also a lawyer who clerked for Federal Judge Alex Kozinski.
• In 2017 she spoke the WaPo and exposed Kozinski’s pattern of sexual harassment, also shedding light on how the clerking system’s confidentiality rules created an environment in which it was effectively impossible to make complaints about the judge one served under.
• This is a massive clusterfuck from the ground up, but particularly because Milan is just about the worst possible person to fuck with in a situation like this.
• The Board also took on the Case of the White Lady Publishers Who Don’t Like WoC Pointing Out Racism on Twitter, but has this same week refused to speak on Dreamspinner Press not paying authors.
• So that’s a look at the priorities of what is *supposed to be* an authors’ advocacy professional org.

unpretty

courtney milan managed to do a TON of good while she was on the board by taking neither prisoners nor shit, and being very vocal about calling out fuckery in the community, but now it’s looking like there were people within the rwa looking for excuses to get rid of her for exactly those reasons

hopefully they’ll be able to get the org back into good hands, because otherwise that’s a lot of resources that are going to go to waste (think: millions of dollars) while good people have to start over

 

******

*This entire timeline has resulted in the  canceling of their annual awards event.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/01/08/romance-writers-america-cancels-awards-program-writer-racism-controversy/

 

 

The Knitting Community

This began around this same time last year, and wound up in the Summer months:

Since this event began Ravelry has banned any form of support for Trump from its website. You can still be a conservative and discuss politics, you’re just not allowed to openly express any support for him, or his administration, on the site.

We are banning support of Donald Trump and his administration on Ravelry.

This includes support in the form of forum posts, projects, patterns, profiles, and all other content. Note that your project data will never be deleted. We will never delete your Ravelry project data for any reason and if a project needs to be removed from the site, we will make sure that you have access to your data. Even if you are permanently banned from Ravelry, you will still be able to access any patterns that you purchased. Also, we will make sure that you receive a copy of your data.

We cannot provide a space that is inclusive of all and also allow support for open white supremacy. Support of the Trump administration is undeniably support for white supremacy.

The Community Guidelines have been updated with the following language: “Note that support of President Trump, his administration, or individual policies that harm marginalized groups, all constitute hate speech.”

Policy notes:

• You can still participate if you do in fact support the administration, you just can’t talk about it here.
• We are not endorsing the Democrats nor banning Republicans.
• We are definitely not banning conservative politics. Hate groups and intolerance are different from other types of political positions.
• We are not banning people for past support.
• Do not try to weaponize this policy by entrapping people who do support the Trump administration into voicing their support.
• Similarly, antagonizing conservative members for their unstated positions is not acceptable.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/xwnp4a/the-real-reason-ravelrys-ban-on-white-supremacy-is-surprising

 

 

A Scathing Critique of the Disney Monopoly

“[If they] want to bitch about movies, that’s certainly their right… are you telling me Ryan Coogler, making Black Panther, is doing something… ‘less than’ what [they] have ever done… come on. There. I said it.”

By invoking Coogler’s name in response to criticism, Iger positioned BLACK PANTHER as representative of a pattern instead of an outlier in Marvel’s track record.  Out of 23 male directors hired leading up to ENDGAME, 21 are white men; the studio’s ratios of non-white male screenwriters and producers are likewise bleak.  It’s also reflected in ENDGAME’s condescending, slapdash battlefield moment featuring all-female characters— largely interchangeable and with negligible prior interaction —and co-director Joe Russo’s small cameo as a gay man—a demeaning footnote to a parade of heteronormality, with its ad nauseam “no homo” inserts of nuclear families meant to symbolize a return to normalcy.  Superficial inclusion means nothing if the underlying message is ignorant.

http://cinemalogue.com/2019/11/18/the-marvel-juggernaut-with-great-power-comes-zero-responsibility/

*
*
*

Let’s set aside for now the film’s internal time-travel “logic”–of which even the directors and writers cannot agree–or the film’s aggressive heteronormativity, and the bizarre lack of closure to the Steve Rogers’ life-defining friendship with Bucky Barnes.  Other publications sufficiently explore these themes:

GameSpot: Avengers Endgame: Captain America’s Ending Totally Ruins The Movie

The Daily Dot: How the straight agenda ruined ‘Avengers: Endgame’

Fansided: Avengers: Endgame: A lack of closure at the end of the line

At the conclusion of Endgame, Rogers struggles for five years with the aftereffects of living in a post-apocalyptic world.  A veteran of World War II, frozen for 70 years, almost every event in his life since receiving Doctor Erskine’s serum accumulates shock and trauma.  He’s left with a litany of unaddressed mental health issues (including depression and PTSD), never truly acknowledged by the franchise.

http://cinemalogue.com/2019/05/20/avengers-endgame-male-entitlement-undermines-steve-rogers-core-characterization-and-story-arc/

 

Unnecessary Tumblr

Hello!

Its Friday ,and that means some little thoughts and feelings for your weekend. Just some completely unnecessary stuff I found on Tumblr, Its not all puppy dogs, and rainbows, but I hope you get a few laughs, and are encouraged to think about something a little differently.

Here’s this long thread about the “Demon From Hell Family” and how they manage to assimilate into an American suburb. This whole thread was based on this random photo found on the internet, and so thoroughly tickled me, I couldn’t help but save it here:

 

threadworks windorabug

 sixpenceee

“A house I pass on the way to work has this sculpture in its yard. Its about 8 feet tall.”

 

 geostatonary

“HELLO NEIGHBOR STEVE, I WOULD LIKE TO INVITE YOU TO BARBEQUE ON THE EVE OF THE BLOOD MOON.  I FEEL WE GOT OFF TO A BAD START.”

“NEIGHBOR STEVE, DO YOU NOT WISH TO PARTAKE OF THE UNCLEAN FLESH-MEATS OF PIGS AND THE POLLUTED ESSENCES OF TOMATO?  PERHAPS YOU ARE A CAROLINA STYLE MAN, NEIGHBOR STEVE?”

“PUT THE GUN AWAY NEIGHBOR STEVE, YOU KNOW I SHALL ONLY RISE AGAIN WITH THE DAWNING OF THE MOON.  WE HAVE BEEN THROUGH THIS MANY TIMES.”

“LOOK AT THIS PICTURE MY SON DREW OF YOU AND CHILD TIMMY, YOUR SON.  ARE THEY NOT THE PICTURE OF PACT-MATES?  THIS COULD BE YOU AND ME, NEIGHBOR STEVE.”

“YOU MISSED THE UNHOLY NEXUS OF POWER THAT IS THE KEY TO MY CORPOREAL FORM, NEIGHBOR STEVE.  YOU WILL NEED TO RELOAD NOW, SO I WILL GO INSIDE TO MY HELL-WIFE AND PUT YOU DOWN AS A SOLID ‘MAYBE’.“

 erinnightwalker

I have the feeling that the families get along great except for Steve. Like, the wives are baking (questionable) brownies together, the kids are playing together, Antler Guy occasionally takes Son and Timmy to school (no car, just carries them in huge swinging strides through a nexus of ungoldly sights in a swirling netherworld shortcut. Sometimes they stop for McDonalds). Hell-wife gave them a potted Audrey Jr., Steve’s wife (who I now christen Sharon) gave them a begonia.

One time Steve tries throwing holy water but all Antler Guy does is thank him, saying that no, Antler Guy isn’t Catholic but it’s the thought that counts, he is so kind to water his creeping deathshade vines regardless.

For Christmas Antler Guy gives Steve a case of ammunition. To be funny/sarcastically mean Steve gets Antler Guy the world’s most hideous Christmas sweater, singing light-up reindeer included. He immediately regrets it because not only does Antler Guy love it and wears it for several months, it will never need batteries because Antler Guy powers it with his own eldritch aura.

When they come back from a holiday to Hawaii, Steve is horrified to find out Sharon bought them matching Hawaiian shirts. He is even more horrified that his wife means it that if he doesn’t wear it he will forever sleep on the couch.

 erinnightwalker

I want to expand on this, since I see it’s still passing around and the ideas have grown in my brainmeats.

What drives Steve up the wall and down the other side is how… normal… everyone treats the Abominations. (Yes, that is their last name. No, it is not a joke. Son was asked his last name for the standardized testing at school, had a quick conference with Timmy, and decided that Son Abomination sounded good, “Since my dad calls your dad the Abomination anyway and we can paint it on your mailbox just like the Henderson’s did theirs!”. Antler Guy agreed and did a lovely rendition of it for the mailbox, with only a few glyphs of soul-rending terror added to keep up to snuff.)

The Great Plant Exchange went beautifully, though the Audrey Jr. (named Aubergine for the lovely shade of purple poison that drips from her fangs) is on a diet at the moment. She was in cahoots with the cat and the dog to get into the good people food and ate two frozen turkeys all herself. Now she’s restricted to the hallway table to answer the phone and the door. (Steve actually likes her, and keeps slipping her hotdogs when Sharon isn’t looking. Their door-to-door salesman rates have dropped dramatically since she changed abodes.) Hell-wife has almost gotten the begonia to bloom and say it’s first words.

The homeowner’s association just loves the Abominations. All paperwork stamped and dotted, in on time and in triplicate. Antler Guy likes filing, says it reminds him of his old job. There is a resident who spent 20 years as a lawyer and they have long, animated conversations about all sorts of things that make Steve swear to never need legal counsel.

Hell-wife joined the PTA and spearheaded a committee to fundraise in the fall with a haunted house. It was a county-wide hit, though the claims that a particularly rowdy group had been deliberately lost in a timeslip to the Outer Doors Of Chaos was firmly rebuffed. Most young people nowadays, it was agreed, just couldn’t appreciate flute music.

Antler Guy really does try to connect with Steve. The surprise birthday party was perhaps a bit much, given that most participants do not have the ability to suddenly materialize in front of the guest of honor to give them a hug. Sharon assured them that Steve normally screams on his birthday, and the remains of the cake were heartily enjoyed by all. (A plate was saved for Steve once he came down from the treehouse.)

After the Hawaii trip (which was a present for his birthday) and the Matching Shirt Ultimatum (which was Sharon’s attempt at patching things up with Antler Guy, he really was sad about the birthday screaming), Steve finally grabs his courage in both hands (plus the shotgun, which let’s face it is about as useful as a teddybear at the moment but it does comfort him) and confronts Antler Guy, about why such a group of……Abominations could possibly come to his quiet slice of suburban bliss.

“……BUT NEIGHBOR STEVE, WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN HERE.”

“No no no, I read it in a book! Don’t you have to be invited or something?!”

“WELL YES, TO THE HUMAN WORLD. BUT THIS IS NOT THE HUMAN WORLD AS YOUR THREE-DIMENSIONAL BRAIN PERCEIVES IT.”

“What the hell does that mean?!!”

“DID YOU NOT KNOW, NEIGHBOR STEVE? LEGALLY SPEAKING, ALL OF THE VASTNESS OF HUMAN SUBURBIA IS, IN FACT, A PART OF HELL.”

“……..”

“THE FLAMINGOES ARE THE BOUNDARY MARKERS. IT WAS DECIDED THAT THE FLAMING SKULLS WERE TOO KITSCHY FOR MODERN TIMES.”

 acaffeinejunkie

Reblogging cause I kind of want more of this….

 erinnightwalker

Since you asked nicely ^_^Antler Guy, as one may have noticed, is a calm sort of fellow. In the face of human atrocities he displays a curious Zen sort of state of mind. Timmy asks Son if he’d ever seen his dad angry, and Son hasn’t. (When asked, Timmy says that yeah his dad gets mad, but it’s like the Fitz-Simmon’s chihuahua down the street- mostly high-pitched noise and occasionally TV remote chewing. Sharon replaces the poor thing every 3 months or so.) When pressed (gently, at the monthly book club, and with many cups of tea and at least one daiquiri), Hellwife admits that this comes from serving many years at his old job.

After the revelation of the nature of his neighborhood, Steve has not been overtly mean to Antler Guy. Not yet in the realm of friends, but vastly better than before. No more holy water, no more shotgun blasts. (Still the occasional jumpscare, but Antler Guy really can’t help that part.) They even occasionally share news over the fence as Antler Guy trains the creeping deathshade vines in proper oral hygiene, and Steve waters his lawn (and occasionally slips a goldfish cracker to a deathshade vine that looks particularly adorable. Aubergine has trained him well.)

Which is how Antler Guy learns about the peeping tom that’s been plaguing the adjacent streets. Apparently the pervert has been getting bolder, and rattling doors. He almost broke into one apartment, whose occupants were a single mother and her daughter, Mildred. Millie, a shy girl who is a great horror fan and firm friends with Timmy and Son, had missed school because of it.

Steve knew because Sharon had told him, on her way to deliver a tuna casserole and a double batch of brownies to the pair. (Sharon has been dubbed the unoffical mob boss of the Mother’s Mafia. She is quite pleased with this title.) He tells her to wait, confers briefly with Aubergine, and sends her along with, “Only as a loan, you know, but Auby wants to stretch her roots and she’d probably like getting all ribboned and curled anyway. Little girls still do that, right?” She has strict orders to bite anyone that makes Millie or her mother cry. (Steve is dubbed the official neighborhood marshmallow for this. The bookclub buys him a jar of marshmallow fluff in commemoration.)

He turns to look at Antler Guy, and freezes, much as a chihuahua will when faced with a hungry hellhound.

“You….you alright there buddy?”

“Ň̵̴̫̫̙͙̻̞͈̫̥̪̱͈͈̯̍̀̀͆ͫ̒̿̄͗͘͡͝ͅO̊͑̑͒̎͑̃ͬͭͮ̅̔̆̃̉ͯ̇͗̀҉̵̻̜̞͉̟͙͚̻̪̼̖̀͟ͅ.̵͈̣͈̙̣̜̻̭̩̝̠̞͗ͤͥ̓͗ͬ̓̄͊̓̅̐ͩͮͧͤ̽̐ “

“Uh, yeah, I guess not. Did you, uh, know you’re kinda fuzzing at the edges, there?”

“Ň̵̴̫̫̙͙̻̞͈̫̥̪̱͈͈̯̍̀̀͆ͫ̒̿̄͗͘͡͝ͅO̊͑̑͒̎͑̃ͬͭͮ̅̔̆̃̉ͯ̇͗̀҉̵̻̜̞͉̟͙͚̻̪̼̖̀͟ͅ.̵͈̣͈̙̣̜̻̭̩̝̠̞͗ͤͥ̓͗ͬ̓̄͊̓̅̐ͩͮͧͤ̽̐ “

“Right. Um. Well.”

Steven makes a very ungraceful exit when space starts bending around Antler Guy’s still, unmoving form.

When Steve sees a shadowy form in his back yard when he gets up to pee that night, there’s no hesitation. He grabs the shotgun from the cabinet and peeks out the back door window.

Just in time to see a nebulous form of soul-wrenching terror engulf the man reaching for the door handle. A sliver of moonlight reveals a very familiar eyesocket. After a moment (and a sincere prayer of thanks that he had already peed, cause otherwise he’d have done it then and there) Steve opens the door. The nebulous form freezes, reality bending around the edges.

“Nice night for it, huh?”

“…..Y̮̮͍͔͇͙͙̟̐͌͛̓̏͞͡Eͩͭͮ̓̍ͯ̀ͧ͏̵̴̛̺̠̱͕̕ͅS͈̹̮̟̳̪̩̘͍̤̲̻͈̱̳̽̋́ͩ̃͋̎ͩ̈͆̀͘͢͢͟ͅ.̧̢͈̭̝̥̦͚͍̇ͫ̃̓͆̿̇ͪ͊ͧ̃͛͌͜͢ “

“Guy won’t scare anymore litttle girls, will he?”

“Ň̵̴̫̫̙͙̻̞͈̫̥̪̱͈͈̯̍̀̀͆ͫ̒̿̄͗͘͡͝ͅO̊͑̑͒̎͑̃ͬͭͮ̅̔̆̃̉ͯ̇͗̀҉̵̻̜̞͉̟͙͚̻̪̼̖̀͟ͅ.̵͈̣͈̙̣̜̻̭̩̝̠̞͗ͤͥ̓͗ͬ̓̄͊̓̅̐ͩͮͧͤ̽̐ “

“Good. G’night then. Oh, and if Hellwife has an extra Audrey Jr. that needs a home, let me know. Millie likes Aubergine a lot but Augy’s just too big for the apartment. Dunno if they come in miniatures though.”

“ I̴̛̟̭͉̮̜̩̬̮̣̘̰͚̩͙̟̳͔̜̙͑̂̆̆͗͒̀ ͖̖̰͉̥͖͔̙̤̺͍̳͈̹͙̣̞̇̇ͤ͒̅̈́͆̽ͧ́̚̚̕͘W̶̶̱͈̞͖̼̟̣̮̌͂͒̈́͑͌͒͋̍ͮ͗̈ͣ̓ͤ͘͟I̴̶̞̥̩͇̔ͩͦ̇̉̾ͣͬ̀̀̒͒ͧ͛͌͛͆̚͘͢ͅͅL̠̟͕̠̟̪̰̻ͯ͂͊ͥ̍̏͋̐ͬ̉̆̈̀͠L̸̞̭͔̮ͦ͑̉ͮͩ́ͬͨͣ͘͜.̴͈͎̮͇͓͖̱̻̣͊͊ͤͩ͊̑͗͞ ̸̡̩̖̞̩̻̩̪̭͙̳͚͇̟̺͖̑͊ͫ̀͆ͨ̉̔̓̂̓̋T̷̷̟͉̟̻̻̪̞̰̯̻͈̣̰̬̻̾͐́ͭ̓̅́͡H͇̬̪̩̬̝̣͍͈͇ͯ͛̏͌ͮͧͭͦ͟͜A̴̴̤͕͈̤̮̞̱̯͔͕̙͔͖̰̬̰͈̠ͥ̏ͥ̍̽ͧ̀͝N͗̓͋̃̈̑̀̅ͣ̽̒̂̄ͯͩͤ͏̢͢͏͈̯͎̪͇̟̠͔̯͓͓̰̠̱̠̳͕̳͝K̢̓ͧ͛͛ͣ̄̓̓ͯ̍̈̈́̌͂̔͟҉̛̘̥̖̤̦̻̳͙͟ ̢̢̻̥̹̣̞͉̘͇͚͍̖̯̘͚͔̗̩͓͐ͮ͂͂̀̚͘͠Y̜̞͇̳̗̬͎̰̙̜̩̪͎̞̙̠̔͂̌̃́̀O͇̺̲͙͍̬̳̘͈̱̜̝͔̖̊ͥ̿ͫͤͫͫͩ͋̓̃ͦ̈̄͢͟Ū̢͖̲̦̠̤͎̙͉̦͖̖͓͍̺̺ͪͯ͐͆͆ͭͯ͗ͦ̄̅̌̈̃̾ͭ̋ͧ͢͢͠͡.̶̸̞͓̞̹̗̻̣͈͕̠̬̦ͫ̆ͤͬͨͦ͒͂ͨ̿ͩͪ͘͞.ͧ͛̒̂̂͗ͨ̌͆ͥͭ͒̉͘͜͏̙͖̰̝̙̲͓̙͕͍̥̳̩́͠.̶̷̮͎̱̼̬͖̰͎͚͙̥̓͋͋ͦ̓̓ͯ͆͛̏ͫ̅ͯ.̨̧̙̤̳̮̺̙͖̞͔̗͎͍̑̆ͮ͐ͩͦ̌̽̾̏͘͠.̹̖͕̮͕̞̰͍͚͖̌ͪ̃̐̐̌̌̅̉͑ͧͪͪͬ̓͐́͛̿͘͞ ….NEIGHBOR STEVE.”

“Anytime.”

There are no more peeping reports. Millie brings back Aubergine and spends an entire afternoon teaching Steve the particulars of Augy’s new “hairstyle” (a gravity-defying mass of teased tendrils, ribbons, and barrettes) in between games of tag and hide-and-seek with Timmy and Son.

When Antler Guy and Hellwife present her and her mother Beatrice with a tiny Audrey Jr. (”pOOr ThinG Is a ruNT And wOn’T geT MorE Than A FooT taLL, BEa, aNd NeeDS a New FRiEnD”, assures Hellwife), both mother and child burst out crying. Millie names it Bella, after Bella Lugosi, and shows it to the excited group of boys (Steve and Augy included).

 ripped-up-jeans-and-glitter

IT GOT SO MUCH BETTER!!!!

 erinnightwalker

Life in a subdivision partly populated with eldritch and possibly magical (officially classified as “extra-dimensional”, for even when faced with the physics-defying nature of their new co-habitating citizens the government cannot bring itself to acknowledge them as “magic wielding hell-beasts”, as some high-ranking staff members initially suggested) goes on fairly normally.

Sure, there are a few hiccoughs. The creeping deathshade vines get a stern talking to about appropriate afternoon snacks (”NOT the Fitz-Simmon’s chihuahua, I don’t care how much he has it coming or what he excreted where, now spit it out!”), Aubergine sheds all her leaves at once and snowballs the house (but does helps sweep up afterwards), and moonrise is a good time to watch the night-gaunts fly by (but on moondark it’s best to stay inside, no matter how prettily they glow. They’re somewhat similar to fireflies, and don’t always check to see if their partner glows as well. It wouldn’t be as much of a problem if they didn’t dive mid-coitus and drop just above the ground.)

While the neighborhood in general is accepting of the Abominations, when things get to be a bit much they tend to come to Steve. Since meeting Beatrice and Millie (and the formation of the Terrifying Triad known as Millie, Son, and Timmy) Steve is the adult human male most comfortable dealing with Antler Guy on the whole street. (Sharon as U.M.B. is widely held to have, well, steel-whatever-the-hell-she-wants, and Timmy is known to run over to Antler Guy and ask for rides through “that wobbly grey place, you know, the one with the REALLY BIG alligators?”. Still, the courtesies must be observed.)

So when a writhing sparking ball of snarling terror and teeth takes up residence in the Manzo’s tool-shed, and when Animal Control refuses to come (the street is banned due to a run-in with the deathshade vines), Steve is called. Having heard the description, Steve brings Antler Guy.

When they get there, Mr. Manzo is forcibly holding the door shut. Unholy yowling is coming from inside. At a gesture from Antler Guy, Mr. Manzo leaps away, and the doors blast open.

A 150 pound ball of whimpering, flaming something hits Steve and knocks him on his ass. The whimpering, flaming something proceeds to slobber all over Steve, his shirt, his pants, and a decent portion of grass in between distressed yelps.

“GACK!”

“NEIGHBOR STEVE, ARE YOU IN DISTRESS?”

“GAAACKLEARGHSPLUH- DOWN boy, HEEL, that’s a good- Antler Guy, what is this?!”

“I BELIEVE IT IS A HELLHOUND, NEIGHBOR STEVE.”

“Good grief, I didn’t know they came this big and…..and….. Guy?”

“YES NEIGHBOR STEVE?”

“Is he supposed to be…..skinless?”

“YES NEIGHBOR STEVE. THIS VARIETY WAS BRED TO BE LAP DOGS. THEIR FLAME IS MOSTLY WITHOUT HEAT, AND THEY HAVE NO SKIN FOR THOSE WHO ARE ALLERGIC.”

“…….laPDOG?!”

“YES NEIGHBOR STEVE.” Antler Guy lays a hand on the hellhound, who tries to burrow further into Steve with little success. “HE APPEARS TO HAVE BEEN RECENTLY WEANED. IT WILL TAKE TIME FOR HIM TO GROW TO HIS FULL SIZE.”

“……”

“THE SMALL BREEDS GROW MORE SLOWLY.”

A vile hissing emanates from the shed. (Mr. Manzo has long since fled for the safety of his kitchen.) As Steve attempts to calm the frantic hell-puppy, Antler Guy investigates. He reaches one long hand in behind the riding lawnmower and….. winces.

“NEIGHBOR STEVE?”

“Yeah- I’m right here, uh, doggie, not going anywhere- Guy?”

“I APPEAR TO HAVE AN…. ATTACHMENT.”

Steve is awed at the tiny ball of white fluff attached to one long, thin finger. He didn’t know that Antler Guy’s fingers COULD be bitten, much less by a tiny kitten.

Which is how Steve and Sharon got Clifford (”Aww c’mon Sharon, how could I pass that one up?”), and Antler Guy and Hellwife get Fluffy (”NEIGHBOR STEVE ASSURES ME IT IS A TRADITIONAL TITLE.”)

 

*****

Earlier this year, Bill Maher, the comedian talk show host had a whole lot to say about people who read comic books, and like superhero movies. I’ve enjoyed comic books my whole life, and yes, it’s a way of keeping the wonder of my childhood with me always, but I never shirked any of my adult responsibilities to do so. So Miss Valente had to set his ass straight:

*****

Here’s a thread I found very necessary, about how people who treat fat people like shit, aren’t interested in them losing weight, no matter how much they claim to give a fuck about their health. If they gave a damn about the health of fat people, then that person’s mental and emotional health would also be a factor, and I don’t see how traumatizing, bullying them, and causing emotional distress, is somehow supposed to help them. Miss Allison correctly states that fat-phobia is mostly helpful to making them feel good about themselves, at the expense of others.

Actually this is a truism across all power dynamics, and marginalized groups of people. The people vilifying marginalized people want to punish them, and make them suffer. They are not interested in people being equals or becoming treated in a less marginalized manner.

************

This tiny history on the creation of “Race”.

The racial categories that we’re familiar with developed only 200 years ago, primarily by England and Spain. Otherwise cut off from the rest of the world, England kept on invading Ireland, labeling the people as savages — in fact, the cruel saying “the only good Indian is a dead Indian” first circulated in England as “the only good Irishman is a dead Irishman.”

A little less than 2,000 miles away from England, Spain, loyal to the Catholic Church, was offering the Jewish and Muslim people under their rule three choices: “leave, convert, or die.” While many Jews and Muslims converted to Catholicism to escape persecution, church leaders questioned their sincerity, leading to the 1478 Spanish Inquisition, during which “interest in religious purity morphed into an obsession with blood purity,” as Matthew Desmond and Mustafa Emirbayer write in Racial Domination, Racial Progress.

In both England and Spain during this time, nationalism and capitalism began to rise. To satisfy Europe’s growing sense of nationalism and hunger for capitalism, the Age of Discovery began — “or, from the standpoint of the indigenous people of Africa and the Americas, the ‘Age of Terrorism,’” write Desmond and Emirbayer. When Christopher Columbus “discovered America” — aka happened upon an island in the Bahamas that was already inhabited — the Americas were populated by approximately 50 million to 100 million indigenous people.

With Christopher Columbus’ lead, the Spanish colonized the Americas; the English followed a century later. From 1600 to 1900, 90 to 99 percent of America’s indigenous peoples died as a direct result of European colonization.

With the rise of nationalism, capitalism, and European discovery of the “New World” — which, again, was only “new” from a European perspective — a different worldview was desired to make sense of it all. Through colonialism, “race” became a key element of that worldview.

Whiteness remains the dominant category today — other races are compared and contrasted relative to it.

To further their capitalist interests in the “New World,” the English needed a labor force. So, indentured servitude started. Indentured servants were often kidnapped. They included Irish, impoverished English, indigenous, and African people. (Note how the English and Irish are identified as people from two separate nations, whereas indigenous and African people, all from different nations, are considered as two monoliths.)

Indentured servitude evolved into chattel slavery. Among all other indentured servants, why were Black people singled out to be enslaved? It couldn’t be Native Americans, because their numbers were reducing rapidly, they could escape their captors more easily since they were familiar with the land, and they were already relied upon as trappers in the lucrative fur trade business. It couldn’t be the “savage Irish” because, upon escaping, Irish slaves could “blend in” with their English captors.

Africans, however, could not blend in. Furthermore, Africans were not accustomed to the American landscape, making escape from captivity more difficult; they were also immune to Old World diseases, unlike Natives, and many were already farmers. Africans soon came to be seen as “the perfect slaves” and originally not strictly because of their Blackness.

Thus, Whiteness and Blackness were born: “twins birthed from the same womb, that of slavery,” write Desmond and Emirbayer. The White race began to be formed “out of a heterogeneous and motley collection of Europeans who had never before perceived that they had anything in common.”

Whiteness remains the dominant category today — other races are compared and contrasted relative to it. Whiteness positions itself against ideas of, among others, Blackness, Indigenousness, Asianness, and Hispanic-ness. This is why people of color, rather than White people, will frequently be identified by their race. Whiteness has become the norm.

 

Source:zora.medium.com

************

Yeah, this was my reasoning behind why w should give the more disingenuous bigots exactly what they ask for and teach a  White History month, because I get tired of people asking this question every year in February, during Black History Month,, and then conveniently forgetting all  about it, come March.

************

Dr. Who said it himself: History has been Whitewashed!

karnythia

Literally the only reason people think the past was all white is racism in Hollywood. All the images of the past that you think are accurate from TV shows & movies produced during Jim Crow are actually fictional representations of what racists wanted the world to be like instead of their reality.

That’s why you have people arguing that Egypt isn’t in Africa and that Cleopatra looked like Liz Taylor. That’s why you have period pieces set in London with none of the Black Victorians, Chinese sailors in Limehouse, or Jewish communities. That’s why you don’t see the drag balls that were common in New York, Chicago etc. You don’t even see the diversity of Roman citizens or the Moorish Empire. Next to nothing about women of color at any point in history, despite them being inventors, pioneers, and artists who changed the world.

Gee, it’s like media representation has an impact across time. Like, maybe producing media that isn’t inclusive contributes to ignorance, erasure, and perpetuating racist, sexist, homophobic propaganda. If you’re still producing these bland historically  inaccurate shows in 2015 that’s not about historical accuracy, that’s about your internalized bigotry. .

****************

This tweet can be summed up as :

“The salient fact of American politics is that there are fifty to seventy million voters each of whom will volunteer to live, with his family, in a cardboard box under an overpass, and cook sparrows on an old curtain rod, if someone would only guarantee that the black, gay, Hispanic, liberal, whatever, in the next box over doesn’t even have a curtain rod, or a sparrow to put on it.”

 

*************

American Asylum Seekers and Concentration Camps

con·cen·tra·tion camp

/ˌkänsənˈtrāSHən ˈˌkamp/

noun

1. a place where large numbers of people, especially political prisoners or members of persecuted minorities, are deliberately imprisoned in a relatively small area with inadequate facilities, sometimes to provide forced labor or to await mass execution. The term is most strongly associated with the several hundred camps established by the Nazis in Germany and occupied Europe in 1933–45, among the most infamous being Dachau, Belsen, and Auschwitz.

 

Right now, the US is operating concentration camps of men, women, and children, who came here legally come here seeking asylum,  within our borders. Make no mistake, these are exactly what they are and are not new. But apparently the US does not wish to learn anything from history.  The US has been responsible for the use of concentration camps before. The internment of Indigenous Americans, before and after the Trail of Tears, During the Civil War at Andersonville where some 13, 000 men died from neglect and disease, and The Japanese Internment Camps of WWII. The concentration camps (What Jewish people call The Shoah) were not the only instance of such camps, and Hitler himself credited the American versions of such camps, with influencing his idea to create his own.

Now we have repeated history again. The situation is complicated by Republican attempts to hold onto their power by pandering to his base constituents,.  In service to their grasping for power, trump has created policies that have resulted in the unnecessary separation of children from their families, and the pointless detention of thousands of immigrants that come to America’s southern borders seeking asylum.

Do not listen to propaganda!

Seeking asylum is not illegal!!!

According to UN Convention of 1951, in a ruling that the US helped to craft:

That “Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution” is enshrined in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rightsof 1948 and supported by the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugeesand the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees.^[4] Under these agreements, a refugee is a person who is outside that person’s own country’s territory owing to fear of persecution on protected grounds, including race, caste, nationality, religion, political opinions and participation in any particular social group or social activities.

The immigrant situation has been further exacerbated by events in Guatemala and other Central American countries.

The CIA has a long history of involvement in Guatemala, having helped to orchestrate the army’s overthrow of a democratically elected government in 1954. … In 1977 the Guatemalan government rejected $2.1 million in U.S. military aid because it was conditioned on improved performance on human rights.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/daily/march99/guatemala11.htm

 

And now we have this:

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a27813648/concentration-camps-southern-border-migrant-detention-facilities-trump/

https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/the-unimaginable-reality-of-american-concentration-camps

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/concentration-camps-border-george-takei-family-separation_n_5d2533a1e4b0cfb595fd8e65

************

This photo was taken sometime between May and December 1944. These people are enjoying a bit of “down time” before going back to work. At Auschwitz.

Not because I think what we’re doing is like what the Nazis were doing in 1944, but because this looks so normal. These people didn’t think of themselves as “evil,” any more than the people chanting at the Trump rally do.

Here’s the point: the Holocaust didn’t drop out of a clear blue sky in 1941. The concentration camps had been operating since 1933.

The first people sent to the camps weren’t Jews at all. It was socialists, communists (remember that if you run across someone who tries to claim the Nazis were actually socialists), Jehovah’s Witnesses (because their faith prevented them from swearing allegiance to the Reich or serving in the military), homosexuals, and other people considered “socially deviant.” The camps weren’t awful places in 1933. Guards who abused prisoners were disciplined and sometimes prosecuted.

By 1935, this changed. As Hitler consolidated power, he pardoned the guards who had been convicted for abusing prisoners and made it clear that that behavior was now acceptable. Jews were now sent to the camps, starting with ones who had come to “civilized” Germany as refugees from pogroms in Eastern Europe. They were described as “invaders,” accused of spreading disease and stealing jobs from Germans. I understand if that last sentence sent a bit of a chill down your spine.

There were dozens, probably hundreds of concentration camps in operation by 1937. Many prisoners died there from abuse or simply from being worked to death, but they still weren’t places people were specifically sent to die; it was just that no one cared whether they died or not.

By 1939, mass killings of Jews had started. Not in the camps; the Nazis weren’t bothering to round people up and transport them just to kill them. They would typically be rounded up by the Nazi army and shot en masse and buried in mass graves.

Mass killings of civilians proved to be bad for morale even for Nazi soldiers, which led to the Final Solution. Eight extermination camps were built and went into operation by 1941. None were in Germany proper, so the scale of what was happening could be more easily kept from the German people. Six were in Poland, one in Serbia, and one in Belarus. Some (like Birkenau, sometimes called Auschwitz II) were on the same site as concentration camps (Auschwitz), and some (like Treblinka) were completely separate. Most were in Poland because that was where the largest number of Jews in Europe lived.

These women worked as typists, telegraph clerks, and secretaries in Auschwitz, and were called Helferinnen, which means ‘helpers. Their racial purity had been established—should an officer be looking for a girlfriend or a wife, the Helferinnenwere intended to be a resource.”

The point of these photos is that the Nazis were not all Eichmann and Mengele. Their horror was possible because of the many, many people who went along with what they were doing or at least were willing to look the other way. And it didn’t start with Chelmno and Sobibor. It started with people being willing to vote for Nazis out of fear of the communists and responding to their appeals to “true Germans.”

This photo shows people reading the Nazi newspaper Der Stűrmer (The Attacker) in 1935. The sign above it reads “The Jews Are Our Misfortune”.

How far, really, are people who would chant “send her back” about an American citizen at a political rally from the people calmly reading that newspaper? Remember, that was still four years before the war, six before the extermination camps. It was when the groundwork for those things was being laid.

Let’s talk about our camps for a moment. Pro Publica recently published a long story about someone who works for the Border Patrol and spent time working at one of the camps. Here are a couple of excerpts:

The Border Patrol agent, a veteran with 13 years on the job, had been assigned to the agency’s detention center in McAllen, Texas, for close to a month when the team of court-appointed lawyers and doctors showed up one day at the end of June.

Taking in the squalor, the stench of unwashed bodies, and the poor health and vacant eyes of the hundreds of children held there, the group members appeared stunned.

Then, their outrage rolled through the facility like a thunderstorm. One lawyer emerged from a conference room clutching her cellphone to her ear, her voice trembling with urgency and frustration. “There’s a crisis down here,” the agent recalled her shouting.

At that moment, the agent, a father of a 2-year-old, realized that something in him had shifted during his weeks in the McAllen center. “I don’t know why she’s shouting,” he remembered thinking. “No one on the other end of the line cares. If they did, this wouldn’t be happening.”

No one on the other end cares. If they did, this wouldn’t be happening. Let that sink in for a moment.

The CBP agent in the story is in his late 30s, a husband and father who served overseas in the military before joining CPB.

It’s kind of like torture in the army. It starts out with just sleep deprivation, then the next guys come in and sleep deprivation is normal, so they ramp it up. Then the next guys ramp it up some more, and then the next guys, until you have full blown torture going on. That becomes the new normal.

This is how it happens. Step by step, we become the monsters. Look around the country. Try to remember how things were in 2012 or so. How many things that are simply accepted now, often with a “what can we do about it?” shrug, would have seemed possible then?

Referring back to the grim conditions inside the Border Patrol holding centers, he said: “Somewhere down the line people just accepted what’s going on as normal. That includes the people responsible for fixing the problems.”

“What happened to me in Texas is that I realized I had walled off my emotions so I could do my job without getting hurt,” he said. “I’d see kids crying because they want to see their dads, and I couldn’t console them because I had 500 to 600 other kids to watch over and make sure they’re not getting in trouble. All I could do was make sure they’re physically OK. I couldn’t let them see their fathers because that was against the rules.

“I might not like the rules,” he added. “I might think that what we’re doing wasn’t the correct way to hold children. But what was I going to do? Walk away? What difference would that make to anyone’s life but mine?”

When asked whether he simply stopped caring, he said: “Exactly, to a point that’s kind of dangerous. But once you do, you feel better.”

This man is a father. He watches hundreds of kids. He had to stop caring on order to do his job.

Let’s say that again: he had to stop caring in order to do his job.

Just like, I imagine, the Helferinnen had to stop caring. To look the other way. To learn helplessness against the system.

I know, there are a thousand reasons why we can’t change this. They broke the laws. The President says so. What will we do with all of them if we don’t do this? It will encourage others if we don’t do this.

Know this: those are all justifying inhuman behavior. I’m not saying the people running the camps or the people in the government are Nazis; every historical moment is different. But they’re using many of the same tools the Nazis used. And the same tools are being used against the Uighur in China. And the Rohingya in Myanmar.

Andrea Pitzer is a journalist who has written extensively about the history of concentration camps. Here’s what she had to say on Twitter this morning:

When I went into the Rohingya camps in Myanmar in 2015, I also talked to people in town who were happy their former neighbors were in camps. Insisting they weren’t racist or bigots, many said all they really wanted was for the government to deport the Rohingya to another country.

They claimed the Rohingya were illegal immigrants, rapists, and terrorists. If I mentioned a Rohingya they actually knew, they would sometimes acknowledge maybe *that* Rohingya person wasn’t a criminal. They often argued that the Rohingya should be deported as a group anyway.

It was heartbreaking. I was there just after Trump had declared his candidacy in the US, and it was the same rhetoric, almost word for word. A little over a year later in Myanmar, the military drove hundreds of thousands of Rohingya over the border amid terrible atrocities.

Send her back. Send them back. We’re really not racists. Jews will not replace us.

Do you honestly believe it can’t happen here?

**********

Right now, the American government in the form of Homeland Security and ICE ,are grabbing up migrants, and immigrants, (whether they have  legal status, or not), and deporting them, or sending them to the camps. Tumblr and Twitter have done a great job of disseminatng information to protect individuals from ICE raids, (which are often announced in advance by the president, as a distraction from whatever government coverup he is currently engaged in.)

Protect yourself! Know Your Rights!

thalia: “The difference between an ICE warrant and a JUDGE warrant.”

ACLU‏: “The ICE warrant on the left does NOT authorize agents to enter a home without permission. La orden de ICE a la izquierda NO autoriza a los agentes a entrar al domicilio sin permiso.”

 

If ICE agents show up at your door:

1. Don’t open the door, but be calm. You have rights.

2. Ask what they are there for (and ask for an interpreter if you need one).

3. If they ask to enter, ask if they have a warrant signed by a judge, and if so, ask to see it (through a window or slipped under the door).

4. If they do NOT have a warrant signed by a judge, you may refuse to let them in. Ask them to leave any information at your door.

5. If they force their way in, don’t resist. Tell everyone in the residence to remain silent.

6. If you are arrested, remain silent and do not sign anything until you speak to a lawyer.

If ICE agents come to your place of work: 

1. Ask if you are free to leave. If so, you may calmly walk out.

2. You have the right to refuse consent to a search. Say out loud that you do not consent to a search of your belongings.

3. You have the right to remain silent. You do not have to discuss your immigration status with anyone, such as about where you were born, whether you are a citizen, or how you entered the country. But if you have valid immigration documents, you should show them. Never provide fake documents.

4. If you’re arrested, say that you wish to remain silent until speaking with a lawyer.

5. You have the right to record your interaction with immigration agents as long as you do not interfere.

Know your rights! It has been reported that these tactics have worked successfully at a number of locations.

*********

Most of the detention center refugees are being held in ICE detention facilities, and private prisons operated by corporations such as the GEO Group. This post provides a list of such facilities:

https://concentrationcamps.us/

2600 Magazine has compiled a full listing of Customs and Border Patrol stations, a number of which are being used to imprison migrants, immigrants, and/or refugees, many of whom are children. In the interests of openness, we are sharing that info here. Please note that not every facility in this list is being used for this purpose, but many existing camps are either at one of these addresses or are being managed there. And the potential for expansion is ever present. This is also only a partial list of the total number of camps, as others are operated by different branches of the government, as well as by private companies. We will be updating it as we receive and compile more data. If you have additional info to add, please write to webmaster@2600.com or visit our SecureDrop page at www.2600.com/securedrop where you can find out how to anonymously submit info to us.

Things to do with a list such as this:

• Spread it.
• Download it, keep a back up.
• Publish it offline as well, put it in your local anarchist zine, print posters.

Things to do with the location of camps near you:

• Spread that specific information in your area.
• Get people together. Talk about this. Consider what you can do to spread more information and get more people together. Maybe distribute information at crowded local places.
• When you have a good lot of people, hold some solidarity rallies outside the camps. Inform yourself about your rights before hand. Don’t get yourself all arrested if this is your first step into action and you don’t know each other well.
• If you have a good reliable group of people together and have done some minor actions, start first talking about and then training for more direct actions. Learn your legal rights. Invite activists who can help you as a medic, legal team, etc.
• When you’re ready, blockade the traffic going in and out of these camps.
• Consider moving to more disruptive actions from there.

***********

But there is good news in response to the Ice raids, (which are meant to keep Immigrants silent, and terrified, and distract everybody from the hideous garbage fire going on in the White House.

i wanna share with y’all a great thing that happened in my city yesterday. early in the morning, ICE tried to kidnap an undocumented man while he was leaving for work with his son in the car. this man had no warrant and no criminal record, and had lived in his home with his family for the past 14 years. these ICE agents, un-uniformed and in unmarked cars, blockaded this man’s driveway, while he and his child sat locked in their van, for 4 hours. (obviously this isn’t the good part.)

the man’s neighbors were the first to gather and confront ICE. phone calls were made, and dozens of local organizers, lawyers and activists showed up, in addition to more neighbors. they bought gas and siphoned it into the man’s car so he could keep the AC going. they passed water and food through the car windows. the city government was flooded with calls, and a few city council folks showed up in support of the man.

and ICE left.

the man’s neighbors & the activists formed a human chain around the car so the man and his son could get back into their house. and later, his whole family was escorted to a safer location.

today, that man is still with his family. his children, though undoubtedly shaken and scared (especially the son who was with him the whole time, and was so frightened he threw up at one point) still have their father. one of the neighbors said: “they picked the wrong neighborhood on the wrong day” and “I know they’ll be back, and so will we.”

I know a ton of posts get shared about doing this exact thing, but i want you to know that IT WORKS. community works. so please, above anything else, get to know your neighbors. keep an eye out for each other. don’t let people disappear. keep each other close, keep each other safe.

 

toxic-spill

Direct action gets the goods.

 

profeminist

ICE agents back down in Nashville after neighbors, activists link arms to help man, boy avoid feds

“Neighbors and activists gathered for hours in a Hermitage driveway Monday morning while they said two Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers attempted to talk a man and his 12-year-old son into getting out of their van.

Eventually, more than 10 bystanders linked arms around the van, creating a pathway for the pair to enter their house.

ICE public information officer in Nashville Bryan Cox said the officers then drove away to deescalate the situation.”

Also:

“ICE has taken 35 of 2,000 people they were trying to deport into custody. They are blaming community defense efforts for their lack of success. Keep it up y’all.”

– agitator in chief

35 arrested in Trump-touted ICE operation that targeted 2,000

“Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested only 35 migrants targeted as part of an operation targeting families with court-ordered removals, that President Donald Trump had touted on Twitter, the agency announced Tuesday.

The raids were planned to target around 2,000 migrant families who had been ordered removed by an immigration judge, but the latest numbers show the arrests fell far short of that goal.”

 

***********

This is depressing. This is demoralizing, but remember, cruelty, not just ot immigrants, but to the rest of us who witness these atrocities, is the point. To make us look away. To try to ignore it. To tell ourselves its not really happening.

Don’t do that.

We ,the good decent people in this country, outnumber the frightened, and hateful. We are the majority. We have power. We can do something.

In the meantime, there are several things that ordinary citizens can do. They can contact their representativesto ask what they are doing about the conditions in detention facilities. They can volunteer and/or donate to groups involved in the fight. The National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, a California-based nonprofit, lists several “organizations actively working for just and humane border practices in the United States and Mexico.”

Other strategies:

• Pledge your frequent flier miles to Lawyer Moms of America and Project Corazon, which have teamed up to help get pro bono lawyers and migrant families where they need to go.
• Launch a Dignity Not Detention Campaign in your state. You can learn more about that on the Freedom for Immigrants website.
• Write a letter to the editor to your local newspaper. These reach a broad audience and are often monitored by elected officials. You can find tips on the ACLU website.

In Maine, legislators, community leaders, nonprofits, donors, and volunteers, including immigrant Mainers—who know how hard it is to start anew, with nothing—are joining forces to welcome these migrants to our state.

“These are people who arrived here in Maine with their families after traveling thousands of miles over the course of many months to flee violence and escape hostility and brutality,” said Governor Janet Mills. “They’ve undergone this dangerous journey in pursuit of freedom and liberty, concepts and principles that are the cornerstone of our nation’s principles . . . .”

Americans often wonder why good Germans didn’t do enough to stop the Holocaust. But good Americans didn’t do enough to stop the Japanese internment camps on our very soil, and now here we are again.

https://www.yesmagazine.org/peace-justice/immigrant-children-border-crisis-how-to-help-20190625

• KIND—Kids in Need of Defense—has been leading advocacy efforts for kids in immigration detention.
• The Women’s Refugee Commission is leading national efforts against family separation and child detention to preserve access to asylum, increase use of alternatives to detention, and improve detention conditions.
• The Catholic Legal Immigration Network plays a crucial role coordinating legal services in response to administration-created crises.
• The ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Projectis litigating these and other policies at the border.
• RAICES is the largest immigration nonprofit in Texas offering free and low-cost legal services to immigrant children and families.
• Al Otro Lado serves indigent deportees, migrants, and refugees in Los Angeles and Tijuana, Mexico.
• The Florence Project provides legal and social services to detained immigrants in Arizona.
• Lawyers for Good Government suggests that you can contribute to the Project Corazon Travel Fund to send more lawyers (particularly Spanish-speaking immigration lawyers) to the detention centers and refugee camps. You can also pledge your frequent flier miles to help get more lawyers to the border and volunteer as a lawyer or translator.
• Justice in Motion has created a network of human rights lawyers and nongovernmental organizations across Mexico and Central America to find parents deported without their children and help families reunite in their countries of origin.
• Immigrant Families Together supports bonds, living expenses, and medical and legal needs of migrant families.
• Innovation Law Lab builds tools for immigration-related crisis response, aiming to improve representation and due process.
• ActBlue has a one-click button to support many of these organizations at once.
• Lights for Liberty is doing local event coordination and is organizing nationwide protests and vigils being planned for July 12.
• United We Dream, the American Immigration Council, and the National Immigration Law Center are organizing to help immigrants in the event of raids.
• Human Rights First is a national organization with roots in Houston that needs help from lawyers.
• The National Immigrant Justice Center represents and advocates for detained adults and children facing removal, supports efforts at the border, and represents parents in the interior who have been separated from their families as a result of aggressive enforcement.*

Finally, the administration has ramped up “ordinary” immigration enforcement against individuals and families all over the United States, many of whom have lived here for years and even decades. Many have valid defenses against deportation that they are unable to assert because they lack the resources to pay immigration counsel. In our home states of Michigan and Virginia, two organizations that meet a fraction of this need are the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center and the Legal Aid Justice Center. Your state has an organization too. Google “indigent immigration defense” and your state’s name, and you’ll find it.

Update, June 25, 2019: This article has been updated with more organizations that are helping families at the border.

---

 

https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2019/07/236724/help-migrant-children-at-border-crisis

Support advocacy organizations.

RAICES: This Texas-based organization offers free and low-cost legal services to immigrant children and families. Donate here and sign up as a volunteer here.

KIND (Kids In Need of Defense): The organization provides legal representation to migrant children and lobbies to ensure their rights are protected. Donate here.

Pueblo Sin Fronteras: This group provides humanitarian aid and shelter to migrants on their way to the U.S. Donate here.

Al Otro Lado: This bi-national organization provides legal services to deportees and migrants in Tijuana, Mexico, including deportee parents whose children remain in the U.S. Donate here.

The Florence Project: This Arizona-based organization offers free legal services to people in immigration custody. Donate here.

Justice in Motion: Formerly known as Global Workers Justice Alliance, this group connects attorneys and nongovernmental organizations across the U.S., Mexico, and Central America to find parents who have been deported without their children and help them reunite. Donate here.

Texas Civil Rights Project: This organization has been using legal advocacy and litigation to help families separated at the border. Donate here.

Border Angels: This California-based organization supports San Diego County’s immigrant population and focuses on issues related to the U.S.-Mexico border. Donate here.

Neta: This Texas-based grassroots group helps asylum seekers on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border. Donate here.

South Texas Pro Bono Asylum Representation Project (ProBAR): This project of the American Bar Association is currently supporting over 1,000 unaccom­panied children in detention centers across South Texas. Donate here.

Fronterizo Fianza Fund: This project, run by the Detained Migrant Solidarity Committee, assists families in coming up with the bond money needed for a detained immigrant to be released. Donate here.

National Immigrant Justice Center: This program fights for policy reform and provides legal services to immigrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers. Donate here.

Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center: This El Paso, TX-based organization provides legal representation to migrants who otherwise can’t afford it. Volunteer here and donate here.

More ways to help: ActBlue Charities has set up a link that allows you to donate to 14 different organizations, including the ACLU, United We Dream, the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project, and more. Donate here.