ARDENT 38 @ardent-38 - Tumblr Blog

Along with thinking about my Mario AU again, I have also been mulling over some ideas for my Sonic AU.. 👀 Its fixing to get some major changes, but good ones I think! :}

afronerdism

The conversation surrounding cultural appropriation has been so severely mutilated by white “allies” that the original intention behind that conversation has become almost unrecognizable in most social contexts.

afronerdism

To explain what I mean, the conversation around cultural appropriation was started by black and native people to discuss the frustrations we feel at being punished socially and financially for partaking in our cultural heritage while white people could take, I.e. appropriate, aspects of our culture that we are actively shamed for and be heralded as innovators. It was about the frustrations we feel when the same white people who shamed us would take our culture and wear it as if they were the ones who created it while still actively shaming us for doing the same.

The original push behind naming cultural appropriation and having these conversations were so that we as a society could evaluate why we were punished for our heritage while white People were not. It was supposed to be about seeking solutions. The idea was to create a society where we could celebrate our cultures with impunity. It was never about telling white people that they “weren’t allowed” to do certain things. We did ask that white People stop doing certain things because they weren’t doing them respectfully and were not invited to do them, but the primary reason we asked them to desist was to reclaim the things they had stolen and to reassign them culturally back where they belonged.

White “allies” saw these conversations happening and instead of trying to aplify our own voices or even try to learn about the complexities behind why we were saying what we were saying, they instead began screaming over us and creating a narrative that was hardly even the bones of what we originally set out to say. It was like they took the conversation we were trying to have, completely decontextualized it, and stripped it of all it’s nuance in order to gain social currency by seeming progressive.

So the conversation around cultural appropriation went from “This aspect of our heritage belongs to us and we find it egregious that we are shamed for it. What steps can we take to address the racism that’s creating this situation as well as rehome the things that have been stolen” to “you’re not allowed to do that because if you do that you’re racist, we don’t really understand why that’s racist but you’re not allowed to do that and if you do that you’re a klansman no exceptions. So you’re not allowed because because”

At the end of the day, did I like the fact that sally was wearing dreads? No. But my primary concern was not that sally was wearing dreads but rather that sally could wear dreads and I couldn’t. THAT was the intended focus of those conversations. It was about addressing the inequality. It was about us. Now the conversation is just about sally and were completely forgotten.

White People are always asking me what they can do to help. You want to know? Stop talking. Aplify our voices and shut the fuck up because you all have pretty much derailed this conversation and many more like it to the point that we no longer are trying to make steps to understand and dismantle the racism around cultural appropriation and instead are just using it as social shaming tactics.

afronerdism

TL;DR: read my post. Most things worth learning about can’t be summarized in the bullet points of a buzfeed article. Don’t come into academic circles and complain because everything hasn’t been conviently summarized for you. Stop pretending that things aren’t accessible to you because you refuse to do the intellectual labor that is learning.

cat-boots

lil girl things

pitzips

Robot requiem. A comic about a dreaming robot & my first riso print :)

pavizi

pavizi dcau harlivy art. these ones got a little weird

jan-meloti

strawberry-crocodile

like fundamentally the concept of the femboy is what a transmisogynistic society wants out of transfems- for us to be skinny, white, and young, for us to put the maximum effort into passing but to still maintain and affirm the sexgender binary by identifying with our agab. and, of course, to be sexually available. they want us to do that or die.

strawberry-crocodile

the idea of a young transfem finding this as her only option, her shaving meticulously and spending an hour a day doing makeup and voice training and cutting her weight, and after all that to not even ask to be respected as anything but a submissive sex object thats still Biologically Male... harrowing. surely some people are happy that way but...