Take Me There to Disneyland

Whole video is here 

Please watch the whole video

Republicans are racists. It's not "economic anxiety" it's racism.

The NYT covers it like this:

He's a fascist not an intellectual.

uk journalists having to report through gritted teeth that there were no riots last night as thousands of anti-racist protesters significantly outnumbered the racist rioters across the country

around 10,000 people counter-protesting in walthamstow last night

here in brighton, with the three (3) racists vs thousands of anti racist counter-protesters

So twitter is being really fucking weird about Imane Khelif because they found out that she has elevated levels of testosterone. Anyone do this to Phelps who had the proportions and lung capacity to be a great swimmer? How about strongman Eddie Hall who has a gene that allows him to build muscle a lot more efficiently? She doesn’t even have a perfect record so it’s not like she’s been beating women left and right and setting off world records here. A white woman cried about getting hit too hard in a BOXING match and and all the transphobic racists came out to play. Hell she was born and assigned female at birth in a country that is notoriously anti-trans 😭

This is Caster Semenya all over again. Black women and women of color are never escaping the manly allegations.

It's the same thing with Lin Yu-Ting. These are two intersex(1) women of color being discriminated against for being good at their job. And this is a feature, not a bug. I recently found out that in the 19th century, British and American scientists argued that only white people could fall within the gender binary; everyone else was suspect. (2) The use of gender testing by the International Boxing Association (IBA) is a remnant of that racist ideology.

(1) Neither Yu-Ting nor Khelif identifies as intersex in the cultural sense (unsurprising as neither of their home countries are very queer-friendly), but the general consensus in Western medicine would classify them as intersex due to their natural testosterone levels.

(2) This is the post where I learned this info, and supporting information can be found here and here. As a warning the second of the three links is a letter from the time period and contains outdated, racist and sexist language.

This is the history Republican's want to ban

Guy certainly knows about it

Hi I want to let you kids know how effective these walk outs are: public schools are payed by attendance. Meaning if you’re not going to class the whole school isn’t getting payed their share. Now if it’s just like the normal kid has a sick day that’s normal.

But a class of 200? And you know who’s getting the blame? Administration. So kids continue to plan your walk outs in DROVES. Convince the kid with perfect attendance to join you, get your teacher involved by having them accept your homework at a later time.

You kids deserve a proper education and school experience. Don’t let these adults take that away from you.

My high school was 2 THOUSAND. Back in 2018, we had a beloved teacher put on leave for talking about the Parkland shooting. Nearly 300 students + staff did an impromptu walkout. We were threatened with loss of prom and graduation… until a certain magazine caught wind of us. It was TIME. Our random high school was now national news. One of my classmates went on primetime news. We had helicopters for days. The next time we walked out, over half the school participated. We were blocked in on all sides by cops.

Walkouts make them scared. Walkouts get attention. Walkouts work.

APRIL 10, 2023: Four days after being unjustly expelled by racist Republicans in Tennessee, Justin Jones was sworn back into office

He then marched arm-in-arm, back to the Tennessee State House with thousands of cheering constituents and supporters

With his head and fist raised high, Rep. Justin Jones triumphantly returned to the Tennessee Chamber where he reclaimed the seat that voters elected him to

We love to see it.

There’s also a large grey area between an Offensive Stereotype and “thing that can be misconstrued as a stereotype if one uses a particularly reductive lens of interpretation that the text itself is not endorsing”, and while I believe that creators should hold some level of responsibility to look out for potential unfortunate optics on their work, intentional or not, I also do think that placing the entire onus of trying to anticipate every single bad angle someone somewhere might take when reading the text upon the shoulders of the writers – instead of giving in that there should be also a level of responsibility on the part of the audience not to project whatever biases they might carry onto the text – is the kind of thing that will only end up reducing the range of stories that can be told about marginalized people. 

A japanese-american Beth Harmon would be pidgeonholed as another nerdy asian stock character. Baby Driver with a black lead would be accused of perpetuating stereotypes about black youth and crime. Phantom Of The Opera with a female Phantom would be accused of playing into the predatory lesbian stereotype. Romeo & Juliet with a gay couple would be accused of pulling the bury your gays trope – and no, you can’t just rewrite it into having a happy ending, the final tragedy of the tale is the rock onto which the entire central thesis statement of the play stands on. Remove that one element and you change the whole point of the story from a “look at what senseless hatred does to our youth” cautionary tale to a “love conquers all” inspiration piece, and it may not be the story the author wants to tell.

Sometimes, in order for a given story to function (and keep in mind, by function I don’t mean just logistically, but also thematically) it is necessary that your protagonist has specific personality traits that will play out in significant ways in the story. Or that they come from a specific background that will be an important element to the narrative. Or that they go through a particular experience that will consist on crucial plot point. All those narrative tools and building blocks are considered to be completely harmless and neutral when telling stories about straight/white people but, when applied to marginalized characters, it can be difficult to navigate them as, depending on the type of story you might want to tell, you may be steering dangerously close to falling into Unfortunate Implications™. And trying to find alternatives as to avoid falling into potentially iffy subtext is not always easy, as, depending on how central the “problematic” element to your plot, it could alter the very foundation of the story you’re trying to tell beyond recognition. See the point above about Romeo & Juliet.    

Like, I once saw a woman a gringa obviously accuse the movie Knives Out of racism because the one latina character in the otherwise consistently white and wealthy cast is the nurse, when everyone who watched the movie with their eyes and not their ass can see that the entire tension of the plot hinges upon not only the power imbalance between Martha and the Thrombeys, but also on her isolation as the one latina immigrant navigating a world of white rich people. I’ve seen people paint Rosa Diaz as an example of the Hothead Latina stereotype, when Rosa was originally written as a white woman (named Megan) and only turned latina later when Stephanie Beatriz was cast  – and it’s not like they could write out Rosa’s anger issues to avoid bad optics when it is such a defining trait of her character. I’ve seen people say Mulholland Drive is a lesbophobic movie when its story couldn’t even exist in first place if the fatally toxic lesbian relationship that moves the plot was healthy, or if it was straight.                          

That’s not to say we can’t ever question the larger patterns in stories about certain demographics, or not draw lines between artistic liberty and social responsibility, and much less that I know where such lines should be drawn. I made this post precisely to raise a discussion, not to silence people. But one thing I think it’s important to keep in mind in such discussions is that stereotypes, after all, are all about oversimplification. It is more productive, I believe, to evaluate the quality of the representation in any given piece of fiction by looking first into how much its minority characters are a) deep, complex, well-rounded, b) treated with care by the narrative, with plenty of focus and insight into their inner life, and c) a character in their own right that can carry their own storyline and doesn’t just exist to prop up other character’s stories. And only then, yes, look into their particular characterization, but without ever overlooking aspects such as the context and how nuanced such characterization is handled. Much like we’ve moved on from the simplistic mindset that a good female character is necessarily one that punches good otherwise she’s useless, I really do believe that it is time for us to move on from the the idea that there’s a one-size-fits-all model of good representation and start looking into the core of representation issues (meaning: how painfully flat it is, not to mention scarce) rather than the window dressing.

I know I am starting to sound like a broken record here, but it feels that being a latina author writing about latine characters is a losing game, when there’s extra pressure on minority authors to avoid ~problematic~ optics in their work on the basis of the “you should know better” argument. And this “lower common denominator” approach to representation, that bars people from exploring otherwise interesting and meaningful concepts in stories because the most narrow minded people in the audience will get their biases confirmed, in many ways, sounds like a new form of respectability politics. Why, if it was gringos that created and imposed those stereotypes onto my ethnicity, why it should be my responsibility as a latina creator to dispel such stereotypes by curbing my artistic expression? Instead of asking of them to take responsibility for the lenses and biases they bring onto the text? Why is it too much to ask from people to wrap their minds about the ridiculously basic concept that no story they consume about a marginalized person should be taken as a blanket representation of their entire community?

It’s ridiculous. Gringos at some point came up with the idea that latinos are all naturally inclined to crime, so now I, a latina who loves heist movies, can’t write a latino character who’s a cool car thief. Gentiles created antisemitic propaganda claiming that the jews are all blood drinking monsters, so now jewish authors who love vampires can’t write jewish vampires. Straights made up the idea that lesbian relationships tend to be unhealthy, so now sapphics who are into Brontë-ish gothic romance don’t get to read this type of story with lesbian protagonists. I want to scream.      

And at the end of the day it all boils down to how people see marginalized characters as Representation™ first and narrative tools created to tell good stories later, if at all. White/straight characters get to be evaluated on how entertaining and tridimensional they are, whereas minority characters get to be evaluated on how well they’d fit into an after school special. Fuck this shit.                            

I’ve had people fuss at me for writing sassy effeminate gay men.

My bff in college was a sassy effeminate gay man. I write them being cool because of someone I love and miss who was very goddamn cool, thank you very much.

If you avoid stereotypes, you create obligations. “No effeminate gay men” means compulsory masculinity for them, and no representation for the ones that actually exist. “No angry black women” = black women not allowed anger. “No bury your gays, no dead women that’s fridging” or the like limits one’s ability to genderswap characters or put a same-sex romance into a story if the character in question is dying. “No queerbaiting or anything that can be accused of it” means bisexual characters can’t end up with the opposite-sex love interest if there’s a same-sex one around.

Obligations are a shitty thing to do to a story, and even worse to do to actual living people.

The real solution is more stories with more representation so the stereotype-hitting ones are a fraction of the total message, but also, well-rounded characters whose stories are built to showcase them as real whole people whose coincidence with a stereotype is only a part of them, should not be thrown out with the bathwater, so to speak.

The opposite of stereotyping is not puritanical avoidance of stereotypes. The opposite of stereotyping is complexity.

ALOK VAID-MENON Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness 1x03 (2022)

Alok’s book report of The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century by Dr. Kyla Schuller

I love how it is all polite history and then that post script

I appreciate this as a reference

just a pro tip if you reblog this im blocking your dumb ass. dont care if youre my bestest friend

Jesus fucking Christ

holy shit

Artist Daniel Rarela creates “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” memes to stop people from whitewashing MLK

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