coastal midwesterner

[coastal-midwesterner]

Text I got from C today re: our upcoming camping trip, which will include lake swimming and inflatable creatures.

[coastal-midwesterner]

[coastal-midwesterner]

soft things don't break

[coastal-midwesterner]

From the friendship archives. A sweet note from @notreadingintoit on the day of my comprehensive exams. And a WhatsApp chat exchange with @clothesandbuttons earlier this week. So much shitty stuff happening in our world these past couple of weeks. Grateful for loving friends and the ways we show up and make space to care for one another.

[coastal-midwesterner]

I have a lady surf date and just checked the webcam. Flat as a lake out there, but spotted this cutie swinging his legs while sitting on a bench and looking out to sea. Hope you’re having a good rest, stranger. 

[coastal-midwesterner]

So I’m co-planning/facilitating a public event tomorrow for the local chapter of Showing Up for Racial Justice (white people organizing white people to dismantle white supremacy / racialized violence). We’re about six months in and our past monthly meetings have averaged ~20 people. Right now there are 40 people going and 125 “interested” on facebook. I’m guessing that we’ll probably get ~100 people. Which is GREAT! And overwhelming!

I’m used to facilitating ~25 person groups, often on topics less high-intensity than people getting murdered by the state because racism is awful and pervasive, so, um, ... wish me/us luck?

[coastal-midwesterner]

I’m at a new-to-me old coffee shop and there’s an older lady working on a crossword puzzle. She’s periodically calling out clues to the other old men sitting at a nearby table and they’re helping her finish her puzzle. It’s all pretty sweet.

[coastal-midwesterner]

Omg, and now she’s talking with the young barista about Catholicism and Protestantism. This conversation developed after the older lady told the young woman, “You’re so cute. You’ve got a nice style. Please know I’m saying this in a non-sexual way... You’ve got to clarify that these days. That’s what I hear on Catholic radio.”

[coastal-midwesterner]

I’m at a new-to-me old coffee shop and there’s an older lady working on a crossword puzzle. She’s periodically calling out clues to the other old men sitting at a nearby table and they’re helping her finish her puzzle. It’s all pretty sweet.

[crossconnectmag]

Illustrations by Aster Hung

Aster Hung is a Taiwanese-American Illustrator recently graduated from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA 2016). Her illustrations aim to capture fantastical spaces, light, and beauty within the unsettling.

Her shops: Society6 and Inprnt.

Receive art updates from our Twitter feed

posted by Margaret via

[wordsnquotes]

My mission, should I choose to accept it, is to find peace with exactly who and what I am. To take pride in my thoughts, my appearance, my talents, my flaws and to stop this incessant worrying that I can’t be loved as I am.

Anaïs Nin (via wordsnquotes)

[coastal-midwesterner]

Yesterday my friend gave me a print of a painting of hers that I really love.

[coastal-midwesterner]

Um. 🤔

[coastal-midwesterner]

My self care regimen in horrible times like these is to slay white men in internet conversations about gun violence, police brutality, and white supremacy and anti-blackness.

[shrinkrants]

The Politics of Evidence

I should say clearly in introducing the following quote that I am an admirer of empirical research. I became a doctor in part because my best high school teachers were my science teachers. They taught me a love of observation and inquiry, of curiosity about how things work, and of the scientific method.

But I rage and agonize over the way so many of us in the applied sciences let ourselves be complicit with the politics that underwrite research. There is a lot, largely unexamined and unspoken, going on behind what sort of studies get valued, who gets money to study anything, how findings get disseminated, … I could go on and on, but I’ll just share this quote from a paper by Maya Goldenberg:

“Because EBM [evidence-based medicine] is largely an effort to manage the unruly social world in which medicine is practiced via objective scientific procedure, the movement appears to be the latest expression of ‘scientism,’ modernity’s rationalist dream that science can produce the knowledge required to emancipate us from scarcity, ignorance, and error. However, such efforts tend to disguise political interests in the authority of so-called ‘scientific evidence.’ The configuration of policy considerations and clinical standards into questions of evidence conveniently transform normative questions into technical ones. Political issues are not resolved, however, but merely disguised in technocratic consideration and language. Thus the goals of medicine and other normative considerations lie just below the surface of these evidentiary questions, and evidence becomes an instrument of, rather than a substitute for, politics.”

-Goldenberg, M. J. On evidence and evidence-based medicine: Lessons from the philosophy of science. Social Science and Medicine 62 (2006) pp 2621 - 2632. (downloadable for a fee here)

[lasmaracuyas]

All attempts to explain the malicious standard operating procedure of US white supremacy find themselves hamstrung by conceptual inadequacy; it remains describable, but not comprehensible. The story can be told, as the 41 bullets fired to slaughter Diallo can be counted, but the ethical meaning remains beyond the discursive resources of civil society, outside the framework for thinkable thought.

It is, of course, possible to speak out against such white supremacist violence as immoral, as illegal, even unconstitutional. But the impossibility of thinking through to the ethical dimension has a hidden structural effect. For those who are not racially profiled or tortured when arrested, who are not tried and sentenced with the presumption of guilt, who are not shot reaching for their identification, all of this is imminently ignorable. Between the inability to see and the refusal to acknowledge, a mode of social organization is being cultivated for which the paradigm of policing is the cutting edge. We shall have to look beyond racialized police violence to see its logic.

The impunity of racist police violence is the first implication of its ignorability to white civil society. The ignorability of police impunity is what renders it inarticulable outside of that hegemonic formation. If ethics is possible for white civil society within its social discourses, it is rendered irrelevant to the systematic violence deployed against the outside precisely because it is ignorable. Indeed, that ignorability becomes the condition of possibility for the ethical coherence of the inside. The dichotomy between a white ethical dimension and its irrelevance to the violence of police profiling is the very structure of racialization today. It is a twin structure, a regime of violence that operates in two registers, terror and the seduction into the fraudulent ethics of social order; a double economy of terror, structured by a ritual of incessant performance. And into the gap between them, common sense, which cannot account for the double register or twin structure of this ritual, disappears into incomprehensibility. The language of common sense, through which we bespeak our social world in the most common way, leaves us speechless before the enormity of the usual, of the business of civil procedures.

[coastal-midwesterner]

The murders of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile are tragic and horrible. My heart goes out to their families and to all the families whose fears and outrage are renewed again and again with each repeated act of injustice. The circulation of the videos of these men dying has me thinking about who looks upon and then away from black death... the spectators of racial violence, who observe without feeling implicated or scared for their own sons or brothers or fathers or selves. I think of Ken Gonzales Day's Erased Lynchings series, in which he alters lynching postcards, removing from view the bodies of lynching victims in order to redirect the viewer's gaze to the perpetrators and the spectators - and ultimately to the broader system of racialized power and violence. White folks, including people who want to say "blue lives matter" and "all lives matter" and those who don't, we're living in that system too and seeing it broadcast all too regularly. Let's keep the victims and their families in our hearts while we direct our gaze to examine white supremacy and the role it plays in keeping these videos in circulation... and to keep our focus on dismantling this system of power and violence. Let's not be spectators, and let's not pretend that our spectatorship is passive or innocent. Many of us may not be jeering or cheering like the subjects in Gonzales-Day's photographs, but our silence is how we express racism today. Let's be witnesses instead. Let's be vocal instead. Let's be self-reflexive and critical of power and violence instead. Let's be moved... moved to act and to refuse this current regime of violence. (From Gonzales-Day's website: "This conceptual gesture was intended to redirect the viewers attention away from the lifeless body of lynch victim and towards the mechanisms of lynching and lynching photography, to allow viewers to see the crowd, the mechanisms of the spectacle, the role of the photographer, and even the impact of flash photography, and their various influences on our understanding of this dismal past. The perpetrators, when present, remain fully visible, jeering, laughing, or pulling at the air in a deadly pantomime. As such, this series strives to make the invisible - visible.") http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/7050424.html https://m.mic.com/articles/97900/10-simple-rules-for-being-a-non-racist-white-person#.66a7nukva https://m.mic.com/articles/121572/15-things-your-city-can-do-right-now-to-end-police-brutality#.22Zu2SeDB

[ibeoutchea]

We know that police somehow manage to deescalate, disarm and not kill white people everyday.

Jessie Williams

#RIPAltonSterling

(via ibeoutchea)