For any lesbian, gay, bi, transgender folks alone for the holidays...
http://www.yourholidaymom.com/ is a blog run by a bunch of moms (and sometimes other parents) who will post a letter to you daily until Christmas with words of acceptance and welcome. It was designed specifically as a project for kids and adults who face rejection over the holidays because of their sexuality or gender. This meant a lot to me the first year that I was isolated by my family, and I wanted to share it with all of you.
i’m going to take a moment to deviate from my usual posts, so bear with me: the actress starring in the 2020 Mulan remake, Liu Yifei, has just voiced her support for the Hong Kong police. these are the police who have been brutalizing protestors for several months now with batons, tear gas, and rubber bullets, and recently blinded a young medic in one eye. Liu has a social media platform of 65 million followers, and has been in the national spotlight since her casting - her words have influence and impact. her conscious decision to stand by the HK police sends a clear message: that violence against civilians is acceptable as a means of control, intimidation, and suppression.
this breaks my heart. as a person of Chinese descent, Mulan’s character was a source of inspiration and empowerment throughout my childhood, and I’m sure I wasn’t alone in my excitement to see the remake, but I’m even more saddened and disgusted by Liu Yifei’s support of the police. note that Liu is a naturalized American citizen, and reaps the benefits of freedom and democracy in the US while supporting those who are fighting to silence it in China.
if Mulan were real and here now, she would be out on the streets of Hong Kong, fighting for the fundamental rights of 7 million Hong Kong citizens. please, please, please consider boycotting this movie. skip it, pirate it, do what you need to do, but show that you won’t stand for police brutality.
The amount of support that this post has gotten is, quite honestly, incredible. LGBT Muslims are constantly forgotten and ignored because people from both the LGBT community and the Muslim community view our existence as a contradiction or an impossibility. It’s time that people acknowledge us and our experiences with islamophobia and homophobia/transphobia because like I said: we’re not going anywhere.
another twist: the story focuses on beauty in the context of racial prejudice
the stepmother is white and known as the ‘fairest of them all’ but then this girl with dark skin grows to be more beautiful than her and she doesn’t understand and she doesn’t like it and she is threatened by it
An alphabet selection from Dykes to Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel, possibly this first print collection from 1986:
You can read DTWOF at Bechdel’s website at the source link or find copies of the various collections at your local library. TERFS, radfems, and transphobes, this post and the entire comic series (which features multiple trans characters) are not for you so keep your grubby paws off ‘em C:
From Al Jolson to Dov Hikind, blackface has a complex history in the Jewish community.
White and black performers — including Bert Williams, the most-prominent black entertainer of the Vaudeville era — darkened their faces in this way. Blackface became a staple of Vaudeville, and of ads for such products as cigarettes and pancakes.
Then came “The Jazz Singer,” which took blackface to a wider, national audience. In addition to Jolson, leading Jewish entertainers who also performed in blackface included such prominent names as Eddie Cantor, George Burns, George Jessel and Sophie Tucker.
Jews then played a disproportionate role in the entertainment industry.
“Jews performed this kind of minstrelsy in the 1910s and 1920s better and more than any other group in America. Jewish faces covered in cork were ubiquitous,” Michael Alexander, University of California religious studies professor, wrote in “Jazz Age Jews” (University of Princeton Press, 2003).
The late author Michael Rogin, whose 1998 book “Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot” (University of California Press) investigated this phenomenon, wrote that many Jewish members of the entertainment industry “thought that depicting Jews [as themselves] would promote anti-Semitism, so they hid it. Blackface is a metaphor for that.”
“In actuality,” wrote film scholar Lester Friedman in “Hollywood’s Image of the Jew” (Ungar Publishing Co., 1982), “many Jewish performers gained early and continued success using [blackface] … Indeed, it is too easy to ignore the derogatory aspects of such activities, the unconscious racism accepted and nourished by such cruel parodies, by citing historical contexts.
“The undisguised elements of ridicule in such blackface portrayals by Jews mimicking the outlandish stereotypes of blacks,” he continued, “now looks suspiciously like one group’s desperate need to assert its own superiority by mimicking another.”
This is one of the few times this blog will discuss something other than antisemitism. It is important that non-Black Jews, especially in the USA, are cognizant of this history.
