Feb 19, 2021
Loading...
seen from United States
seen from Austria
seen from Austria
seen from Türkiye
seen from Mexico
seen from Vietnam
seen from Austria
seen from United States
seen from Türkiye
seen from United States
seen from Bangladesh
seen from Türkiye
seen from Türkiye
seen from Argentina
seen from Türkiye
seen from United States
seen from Greece
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from United States
@eastladiva-blog
“Just letting you know the bird feeder is empty.” #squirrel #squirrelsofinstagram #funnyshit #cuteshit #lifeonbarnettway https://www.instagram.com/p/CGSyhDbplF4/?igshid=1d301hb5m6luh
Per the corona truthing I am seeing here on tumblr.com I will say that 1 (one) person in my fathers place of work had poor and inconsiderate mask practices, and now my father is hospitalized. While he was sick he developed pneumonia. His symptoms are strange and not just flu-like. My vision still has not bounced back.
Please don’t make conspiracy theories to cope. Please don’t pretend to care about the working class when you want to go to the club 👁👁 (yes this is a subpost).
I’m not telling anyone what to do, but please don’t rationalize your choices by spreading toxic rhetoric about this disease. Love you guys.
Our Lucy in the Sky is 7 today! Happy birthday, Lucinda! https://www.instagram.com/p/CF3LmGMgT61/?igshid=1omgb0iihv70i
Trans Author Makes NYT Bestsellers List History With Cemetery Boys
With the release of their debut young adult novel Cemetery Boys, writer Aiden Thomas is celebrating a historic first on the New York Times’ Best Sellers list, Pride.com reports.
This is the first time an openly transgender author with a book with a transgender protagonist has appeared in the fiction part of the Best Sellers list.
The book is about a trans boy who decides to prove his gender to his traditional Latinx family by summoning a ghost.
“Cemetery Boys was inspired by a writing prompt I saw on Tumblr,” Thomas tells Petra Mayer in an email interview.
“What happened if you summoned a ghost and couldn’t get rid of it?’ My main character, Yadriel came to life first. He’s transgender, Cuban/Mexican, and gay. I really wanted to explore and showcase Latinx culture, and the plot aligned perfectly with Día de Muertos!”
Thomas continues:
“A big part of the story that pulled from my personal experiences were the family dynamics. I feel like most stories about trans kids, either their families fully support them without so much as a blink, or they completely reject them. I wanted to show how it can be more nuanced than that. I wanted Yadriel’s relationships with his family to reflect more of my personal experience — a family that isn’t intrinsically transphobic, just uninformed.”
The book is available over at Amazon.
See also: Cemetery Boys: A Conversation with YA Author Aiden Thomas
Ok, pulling my own covers here. Mila was decidedly not excited about any of the Schuyler sister dresses I was encouraging her to wear. Here’s the problem. She wanted to be the king! #milamonster #ourlittlemilagro #lifeonbarnettway #hamilton https://www.instagram.com/p/CFQCmcXgRKM/?igshid=bwnr0rl66mrh
Try to see the past as a room separate from the one you live in now. You can go in there, but you don’t live there anymore.”
Richard Templar, The Rules of Life (via bookmania)
from swolizar
Hormones, behavior, physical characteristics, developmental processes, chromosomes, psychological qualities have all been fitted into gender dichotomous categories. Scientific knowledge does not inform the answer to ‘What makes a person either a man or a woman?’ Rather it justifies (and appears to give grounds for) the already existing knowledge that a person is either a woman or a man and that there is no problem in differentiating between the two. Biological, psychological, and social differences do not lead to our seeing two genders. Our seeing of two genders leads to the ‘discovery’ of biological, psychological, and social differences.
Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach by Suzanne J. Kessler and Wendy McKenna (via commiekinkshamer)
Individuals who want to believe that there is no fulfillment in love, that true love does not exist, cling to these assumptions because this despair is actually easier to face than the reality that love is a real fact of life but is absent from their lives.
bell hooks in All About Love: New Visions (via guayasamins)
I don’t know if you’re aware of this news. It seems that, unfortunately, the problem doesn’t lie just in the education system, but also in the students who refuse to be taught on racism.
Someone submitted this to me a while ago, and I thought I’d post it as an example of how “don’t feed the trolls” doesn’t work in life, as I’ve mentioned. I’ve honestly seen and heard stories like it before.
Educators who talk about many of the same topics that I do are often suppressed, reprimanded and fired for trying to teach white students that racism exists. And most of the time, it doesn’t make the news.
A black female professor at Minneapolis Community and Technical College was formally reprimanded by school officials after three of her white male students were upset by a lesson she taught on structural racism.
Shannon Gibney says that the students reacted in a hostile manner to the lesson in her Introduction to Mass Communication class, with one of them asking her, “Why do we have to talk about this in every class? Why do we have to talk about this?”
“His whole demeanor was very defensive. He was taking it personally. I tried to explain, of course, in a reasonable manner — as reasonable as I could given the fact that I was being interrupted and put on the spot in the middle of class — that this is unfortunately the context of 21st century America,” she explained in an interview with City College News.
Gibney says that, after this initial comment, another white male student said, “Yeah, I don’t get this either. It’s like people are trying to say that white men are always the villains, the bad guys. Why do we have to say this?” These students continued to argue and disrupt the lesson until Gibney told them that if they were troubled by her handling of the subject, they could file an official complaint with the school’s legal affairs department.
The students then filed a complaint, and Gibney was formally reprimanded by the school’s vice president of academic affairs for creating a ”hostile learning environment” for trying to educate her students about the existence and operations of structural racism.
Based on this and other actions by the school administration, Gibney and six other professors are filing a federal class action lawsuit against the college alleging that it is a discriminatory workplace.
upset because they feel they’re being depicted as evil. upset because they’re being painted with a wide brush. upset because they’re tired of people judging them for their “skin color”. upset because they have a deep understanding - when it comes to THEM - that race is a social construct.
but they have no problem with depictions of poc in the media as evil, as the bad guys, as all-the-same. as “those people” instead of people.
it amazes me how quick white people are to say “that’s reverse racism” instead of thinking about it for a minute and saying “wow, SO THAT’S HOW PREJUDICE FEELS. I SHOULD STOP DOING THAT TO PEOPLE.”
because even if saying “you’re racist” is racist (it isn’t, that’s just another way for white people to reroute the discussion and avoid dealing with their pain) - even if it was, having the response that white people have - that defensive, panicked, angry response because they feel DEHUMANIZED - should lend them empathy to all the dehumanizing atrocities perpetuated upon poc.
all they say is “that happens to us too” or “everyone has been enslaved at one time” or “that stuff happened in the past. so long ago.”
if that’s true, why are we not joining together in the incredible sorrow and pain and really TALKING TOGETHER about what we’ve all experienced? if that stuff happened so far in the past, isn’t it our collective early childhood trauma, as a species? why aren’t we in therapy about it? everybody’s been enslaved, huh? i wonder if that would have some kind of effect on the world later. you think?
if we’ve all experienced prejudice and abuse and bigotry just for being ourselves, why are we not learning from those experiences and loving one another? why are we still divided? why are we not *actually* “just one human race”, kumbaya my lord?
because inequalities exist. in the example above, for example, two white men EXERCISED THEIR SYSTEMIC PRIVILEGE to have a black woman REPRIMANDED by someone systemically superior to her (!!) for talking about a subject that made them feel bad. using the language of the social-justice movement (“hostile environment”, huh? Isn’t that kinda PC?)
they’re students and she’s a professor, but once they become uncomfortable, their discomfort is more important than her lesson plan. (but poc calling out systemic racism are just being too sensitive. their personal discomfort “doesn’t mean there’s a problem”.)
seriously if being “discriminated” against hurts you so personally, how about a little empathy? how about trying your hardest to learn how not to do that to anyone else? if you love your fellow man so much, why not listen when they say you’re HURTING them with your actions instead of saying over and over and over “no i’m not! no i’m not! even if i did, you hurt me too!”
toddler-style insensitivity. let’s rename the concept of privilege. let’s start calling it being a spoiled little brat. does that help explain it a bit? white folks as little royal children playing in a garden. blissfully innocent that their pretty toys come from exploitation, colonialism, slavery. only able to see that somebody took a toy away and throw a tantrum. siddartha before he went outside the gate, you know.
(except it isn’t a toy, it’s a talking stick. it’s not having the mic for a minute that’s the issue here.)
that’s privilege: being immediately comfortable completely derailing a lesson — this happened all the TIME when i was in college, whole lessons thrown off and disrupted — and arguing back to a person you have PAID to TEACH YOU SOMETHING YOU DIDN’T KNOW.
well excuse me, princess.
i want to say that again: that this woman is a professor, literally paid to teach them something they didn’t know. “why do we always have to talk about this?” would you ever ask your chemistry teacher that? perhaps because it’s something you NEED TO LEARN. like something you didn’t know about. like something you’re systemically SHIELDED from feeling or knowing about. maybe you can learn from someone else’s experience? hm?
maybe that pain you feel when someone hurts you with what YOU call racism — maybe you can take that and do some extrapolating. preferably while reading some history.
and communities of color, queer and trans/gender non-conforming people, fat folks, disabled folks and the whole host of us challenging desirability and defining ourselves for ourselves one selfie at a time.
there’s this thing that i’ve been witnessing over the past several weeks, this discourse on #selfies and #selfieculture where more and more, as many folks coming out in support of unapologetic vanity there are folks coming out to say that selfies actually isn’t all that great.
i’m thinking about the most recent jezebel.com article titled “Selfies Aren’t Empowering. They’re a Cry for Help." as you can probably tell by the title of my blog post that reading that article on jezebel annoyed me. deeply. angered me briefly and now i’m trying to collect myself again.
many articles on selfie culture provide an analysis of the toxic environment girls and women grow up in: cite statistics on the alarming rate at which girls and women are pushed by cosmetic companies to look like a skinny Victoria Secret model, present reports on how girls and women seen themselves and their self esteem, analyze the shit out of misogyny and what it does to bodies and spirits.
articles like the one found on jezebel talk about the culture we live in where people - especially women - are judged by how pretty (or not pretty) they are. there is this fixation on presentation and attractiveness that is defined by misogynistic standards. what a lot of these articles don’t talk about is the other ways desirability are defined. many of these articles leave out what selfies do and have one for people of color, queer and trans people, fat folks, disabled folks and all of us living at the intersections of those identities.
presenting that sort of information and creating that kind of analysis is great. it’s necessary. yet, very rarely do we read articles and analysis that talks about girls and women of color from folks who are so interested in a better world, rooted in a feminist and anti-misogynistic definition. that’s a problem. when we think about the landscape of desirability and prettiness and beauty, the analysis we offer must do and be two things: rooted in intersectionality and compassionate to the complexity of our lives when we are searching to be so much more than how society has programmed us to look at ourselves and for others to look at us.
that jezebel article and articles similar to it piss me off and aggravate me because i can’t help but to read it as the perspective of cis white women who feel that their investment in eradicating misogyny, tearing down the patriarchy gives them power to define what is empowering and what isn’t. it ignores how everyone else is engaging with selfie culture. and more so, it just seems like a gloomy interpretation of how so many of us are attempting at being more than the culture that picks us a part.
i want to talk about selfies and selfie culture for people of color, queer and trans people, fat folks and disabled folks in particular.
you can read more at the link!
Geishas, Cowboys, Indians, and Skinning People for the Sake of Fashion: Katy Perry’s Racism Knows No Bounds, By Ruth Hopkins
What’s wrong with Katy Perry performing while dressed as another race? The identity and culture of distinct groups of people is not trivial. Cultural items, dress, customs, and rituals have specific meaning, constructed over millennia. It belongs to that group of people; it is their birthright. We are not commodities to be bought and sold. We are not toys, props, masks, pets, costumes, or slaves, and to behave as though we are such is dehumanizing. Whether it’s blackface, redface or yellowface, make no mistake, appropriating the traditional culture of another race of people is wrong.
Appropriation is a weapon of assimilation and is born of a conqueror’s mentality. Colonial empires express dominion over people by conversion. First they defeat the people militarily. Their lands and resources are taken. The people are made to assimilate or face termination. Then they try to break the spirit of the people by re-educating them, and forcing their religion upon them. Eventually, they come for what the people consider most sacred, and try to destroy it by making it illegal or making a mockery of it. Ultimately, whether consciously or unconsciously, they attempt to exercise control over the very identity of that group and cry foul when a member of that group dares to protest the offense. Only the voice of privilege has the arrogance to assume ownership over all things, even the spirit of a people.
So what’s the big deal? It’s just a kimono. It’s not like Americans killed Japanese before, right? Cut to 1945- when approximately 100,000-150,000 Japanese citizens were killed instantly when an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, and another 60,000-80,000 perished from a bomb dropped on Nagasaki, at the culmination of World War II. An undetermined number of people died later from burns, injuries, and radiation sickness.
Besides the wave of genocide that started in 1492 with the arrival of Columbus that killed millions of Indigenous, the U.S. declared war on my people too. We were hunted down and killed during the Dakota Conflict in 1862, and eventually exiled from our homelands. The Governor of Minnesota put a bounty on our scalps. Later, hundreds were massacred at Whitestone Hill and Wounded Knee.
Even loyal Japanese were placed in internment camps. Natives were places on reservations. Many of us still reside there.
Some say Katy Perry’s geisha performance doesn’t mean she’s racist. Well how about this…in an interview on Jimmy Kimmel in the summer of 2012, Katy Perry said the following about Japanese people: “I’m so obsessed with you I want to skin you and wear you like Versace!”
READ THE REST HERE: http://lastrealindians.com/geishas-cowboys-indians-and-skinning-people-for-the-sake-of-fashion-katy-perrys-racism-knows-no-bounds-by-ruth-hopkins/
Sometimes this is the only phrase that fits.
Emotional speech from Australia’s first indigenous female senator, Nova Peris, as she gave her maiden speech in the senate today. After years of misguided and racist policies she has promised to fight for Indigenous equity, to achieve what is fair and just for her people.
#novaperis #equality #justice
The Normal Heart is playing in LA for the first time in 20 years. We saw it last night and it was tremendous. About AIDS in the early days of the epidemic, Gay Men’s Health Crisis, politics, feelings. You should see it!
#aids
#hiv
Today’s outfit is hippie-chic and just warm enough for a bit of chilly weather!
Top by Old Navy (3-6); pants by Garanimals (0-3); hat and boots by Baby Ya-Ya; swing by Fischer-Price.
Yeah, I made a fashion blog for my baby. You know you want to follow this stylish kid.
My adorable granddaughter, Lucinda Patricia.
