I figure folks I've recently followed/interacted with might like some token of my being an actual person, so here are kelpies drawn by me and my preK kid who is utterly fascinated by them, especially their most gruesome aspects.
I do not need AI to draw a creepy flesh eating water horse. Aa you can see, I perfected my horse art technique by the age of 8 and have refused any impulse to improve since then.
I was on Pinterest for a while and kept seeing all the Tumblr hype and this place is in fact as refreshing as for profit social media in 2026 can be. Which is not to endorse for profit social media in any sense. But people actually write long things, and read them here and I like that. Among other things that I also like.
I have a handful of tags I follow at this point but please don't think these are the limits of my interests/priorities/values. I am open to recommendations and conversation, and to sharing more about myself as needed to create safety for others while maintaining safety for myself and my family.
Hopefully that all sounds sincere and not Fed ish. I'm not sure if feds on Tumblr is a concern.
Also for transparency: yt, cis woman, disabled in several ways, one of those damn latent bi/pansexual women in a hetero marriage (to the least toxically masculine man I ever met). Proud mother in the sense that I am hopefully raising my daughter to be a Fucking Problem.
There's no liberation without child liberation. There's no liberation without decolonization and landback (including Palestine and the US). There's no liberation without dismantling white supremacy. Gender Euphoria for all. Reproductive autonomy for all. I don't surrender to fatalism or the illusory certainty of the Lenski Model. It ain't over til I sing and we don't know what's possible until we do it.
Etc as I think of more things that are essential and possible and actionable and fun.
like its kind of frustrating to me how people will talk about italians history of being racialized in america as if it was like. this quirky oddity we stumbled into. how strange! how unnatural! that WASP americans wouldn't consider europeans white! its used as proof that whiteness is a construct, and it is proof of that, but when the takeaway is more "old timey racism was so absurd people were racist towards europeans, instead of only the obviously nonwhite people!" you end up decontextualizing everything in a way i. do not like.
like racist criminology was fathered by a northern italian who specifically applied his theories to southern italians. if you read the shit people wrote during the unification of italy, it was straight up racist imperialism, with the explicit goal of "civilizing" the "primitive" southerners:
As the northern bourgeoisie crafted a national identity from its history of medieval city-states, the Renaissance, and the “glory” of the Roman Empire, it sought to discipline the insurrectionary and “barbarous” South. Many of the government officials who traveled throughout the South following national unification commented on southern Italians’ supposed racial inferiority. The senator Eugenio Faina, for example, noted that Sicily was unlike other regions in that it was “inhabited by rough people with primitive instincts.” As a result, the Italian state confronted southern resistance movements with martial law, violence, and by stigmatizing peasants “as criminal members of a racially inferior people who preferred the superstitions of religion to civiltà italiana.” As one government official wrote in 1861, “What barbarism! Some Italy! This is Africa: the Bedouin are the flower of civil virtue compared to these peasants.” Civilization, northern officials believed, would have to be imposed on southern peasants at gunpoint— “otherwise the tumour represented by the Southerners’ behavior would grow and infect the rest of the nation.”
Government officials found support for these views from the new school of positivist anthropologists, including Cesare Lombroso (1841–1936), Guglielmo Ferrero (1871–1942), Alfredo Niceforo (1876–1960), Giuseppe Sergi (1841–1936), and Enrico Ferri (1856–1929). Together these men founded the field of criminology, providing “scientific proof” to support the ruling elite’s beliefs in biological evolution and racial determinism. In particular, they advanced an argument that supported what many northern political leaders suspected: the darker “Mediterranean” southerners were not only racially distinct from the lighter “Aryan” northerners; they possessed “inferior African blood” and demonstrated “a moral and social structure reminiscent of primitive and even quasibarbarian times, a civilization quite inferior.” Southern Italy’s history of Greek, Roman, Norman, African, and Arab invasions, and its location as a crossroads between Africa, Europe, and the East, they argued, had given shape to “a region that is a priori condemned to perpetual inferiority.” [...]
By the late nineteenth century, Lombroso and his colleagues in Italy produced hundreds of studies to support this ideology, arguing that the pathology of the “savage woman” was located in her anatomy. Their publications often included elaborate drawings that compared the “sexual anomalies” in the “primitive genitalia” of Italian prostitutes to African women. In popular culture, these connections were often extended to all southern Italian peasant women. Travel writers routinely argued, for example, that southern Italian women “seem to favour that ideal of the Hottentot Venus which you may study in the Jardin des Plantes; they are decidedly centripetal.” The Italian ruling classes also drew these kinds of connections between Africans and southern Italians to justify two simultaneous military invasions—one in southern Italy and the other in Africa. In 1890, the same year that the North launched a brutal campaign to suppress antinationalist sentiment among peasants, Italy prepared to conquer Eritrea and join Europe in the colonization of Africa. One contemporary observer noted, “They [southern Italian rebels] kill and rape like beasts thirsty for blood and booty and not men created in the image of God.” Similarly, a government official conducting an inquiry into the southern resistance movement noted that, “in short, this is a country which ought to be destroyed or at least depopulated and its inhabitants sent to Africa to get themselves civilized!”
The elite considered the anarchist movement, in Italy and abroad, to be the most dangerous form of political rebellion. This fear developed not only in response to the willingness of some anarchists to utilize assassination and bombing as political tools but also because adherents sought to overthrow the state and capitalism and thus attracted “a sizeable and militant following among the Italian working classes until the late 1920s.” The anarchist movement took hold in Naples and Sicily in the 1860s as a result of government repression and spread quickly because of its compatibility with peasant resistance traditions. Once the island was placed under martial law after the uprisings in the 1890s, those anarchists who did not languish in prison went underground and into exile. Most went to the Americas to nurture a transnational movement in Buenos Aires, São Paulo, New York City, and Paterson, New Jersey, among other locales.
To the criminologists, like most of the Italian elite, anarchism was merely a form of brigandage. Thus, they considered the popularity of anarchism as indicative of the inherent criminality and primitive nature of the southern peasantry. In this way, they helped “to formulate the definition of the political subject by elaborating ever more closely the criteria for political exclusion.” Enrico Ferri, for example, declared that it was possible “to delineate good idealist revolutionaries and sick rebels”—one struggled for the nation, the other against it. Lombroso linked the Sicilian peasant rebellions of the 1890s with race, explaining that the epicenter of the movement was in the towns surrounding Palermo, because it was here that “the rapacious Berber and Semite tribes had their earliest and longest-lasting settlements and where anatomical types, customs, politics, and morality retain a clear Arab imprint.” He pointed out that “the Arabs are a race of greedy conquerors who are hospitable but cruel, intelligent but superstitious, and always restlessly in movement. Their blood must play a role in fomenting spontaneous and implacable insurrections and perpetuating brigandage.” Consistent with his overall ideas about female criminals, Lombroso viewed southern Italian women rebels as the most abhorrent, noting “everyone agrees that the few violent women far exceed men in their ferocity and cruelty.” In this way, the Italian criminologists used political radicals as a “foil for defining the boundaries of nationhood and the shared characteristics of ‘normal’ citizens.” Moreover, they offered “a scientific way to understand the failures of unification and a blueprint for disciplining groups that resisted integration into the new national culture.”
(from Living the Revolution: Italian Womens Resistance and Radicalism in New York City, 1880-1945 by Jennifer Guglielmo)
and Italy shipped its homegrown racism right over to the US and Canada. & i think something similar can be said for how people act the same way with racism against the Irish in the US, as if its not directly connected to the colonization of Ireland and the oppression of the Irish people in their homelands.
and this is just scratching the surface of this topic, but it feels like the result of internalizing the specifically USAmerican white supremacist worldview, that the natural state for European people is imperial colonial whiteness before any ethnic identity, to the extent that the idea of Europeans being conquered / colonized / racialized feels unnatural - separate from whether or not you think blatantly racist ideas are good, you still think its natural for Europeans to be the conquerors even if its bad. you still think there is a fundamental whiteness that really exists, its just that its been poorly defined by avowed racists.
that sense that people you are taught to see as white were once blatantly racialized & that being unnatural may be used to introduce people to the construction of whiteness, but if that feeling isn't ever used to radicalize people further on resisting white supremacy, then what good is it actually doing? how can we discuss the racialization of italians in the US without discussing the imperial violence and racist ideology constructed in italy against southern italians, and in europe more broadly? how can we discuss the assimilation into whiteness of italian-americans without the broader context of escape from poverty and oppression, the anti-social(ist) violence of the First Red Scare and how it targeted anti-racist leftist Italian organizers including many women? how the bloody pursuit of whiteness and imperial dominance is an intergenerational cycle of violence, one southern italians on both sides of the atlantic have participated in?
#It also extends into Italy today#There's a lot of mainland Italians who talk shit about the way Italian-Americans pronounce common words#But the reason the Italian-American pronunciation is different is because the majority of immigrants were from the Calabria region#And they spoke the Calabrese#Which is somewhere between a dialect and a separate language#Unification prioritized northern languages and ignored southern dialects#So a lot of the ways we clip off terminal vowels is part of the Calabrese dialect#And that dialect persists in some of the small villages and towns in Calabria's rural regions
speak on it! although this is by no means the result of Calabrian immigrants uniquely. speaking a local language with its own pronounciations is obviously not unique to Calabria & italian american italian is influenced by by Calabrese, Napulitano, Siciliano, etc. the cutting off of the end of words is common throughout these languages!
& these languages still exist!!!!! & yeah whenever i see someone commenting on a video of like. someone's nonna who literally is speaking the italian she grew up hearing and was taught by her family, insisting that "it isn't real italian!!! no one actually speaks like this!!!!!!" as if its a performance she's putting on to trick people. instead of being obviously the result of 1. physical and linguistic isolation caused by immigration & the passage of time 2. the fact that a Lot of southern italians came over before most people even spoke standard italian, or even identified as "Italian" over regional identities 3. that any of us still speak any italian after years of being pushed, sometimes violently, to assimilate into the unhyphenated white american mass at the beck and call of the empire's whims, should be celebrated and not mocked.
Thank you for these addition! I almost added something similar. The YouTube comments any time someone speaks with a NY-Italian accent are just unbearable. But explain this to those commenters and they don't care. The insist the speaker is just American, the Italian in Italian-American is irrelevant. Do they think immigrants just immediately forget their language and culture, and so they and their descendants re-learn an "Americanized" (re: culturally appropriated) version? (I do think the current trend of acting like everything that exists in America was stolen from somewhere else is part of the problem here too. I've seen some people suggest that they think most Americans are descendants of the original British colonists.).
valid frustration around US-centrism, and particularly the bog standard diaspora culture vs homeland culture conflict, which is worsened when the diaspora is in the US and thus on an international level, the diaspora has more visibility/voice than is necessarily fair, especially when people in that diaspora talk about of their ass about a lot
antimeridionalismo making Italian-American culture inherently suspect because it is so shaped by the South, and being already stigmatized + diasporic means ever calling yourself "Italian" is an unforgivable sin. i do not think you can separate the hostility towards minority Italian languages in Italy from the hostile reaction certain Italians have towards seeing someone in America speaking Italian """"wrong""""
people who aren't from the US not understanding how assimilation into American whiteness functions as a tool of white supremacy & the layers of violence that have gone into stigmatizing "hyphenated Americans" & portraying any immigrant who clung to any element of their old ethnic identity was suspect, because real (good, white, worthy of humanity) Americans should speak English and practice Protestant Christianity and only identify with the United States and the construct of whiteness as defined in opposition to Black people, and the pressure and violence that went into enforcing this ideology and severing any connection between immigrant communities and their homelands. and also the fact that a lot of white USAmericans also don't understand white supremacy and how it functions and how their own assimilation into homogenous whiteness plays a larger social and historical role, and so are bad at explaining it themselves.
like i feel when you are taking an anti-racist perspective and really understand the full context of assimilation, insisting that people should stop identifying with their ethnic heritage and "just be American" should immediately strike one as pretty ominous? i don't think it is a coincidence that people are encouraged to think of retaining an ethnic identity outside of apple pie american whiteness to be "embarrassing" and "clinging to the past" and portraying continued assimilation into whiteness as "mature" and "appropriate," even if there are legit criticisms about how many white USAmericans go about it. that people depict the loss of ethnic identity as natural and inevitable and something people should just let happen is Not Socially Or Historically Neutral imo.
but i don't think this conversation exists enough right now for people to recognize all of this at play. and if people in the US can't see it, its not surprising that people outside the US also can't see it, especially when neither people are conscious of white supremacy in any context. we just do not have enough anti-racist conversation going on for people to recognize that there are in fact options other than "white ethnic americans doing a caricature of their own ethnicity and speaking over people from those homelands" or "white ethnic americans completely give into assimilation and stop bringing up their ethnic heritage entirely."
i really want more people to learn about this because i don't think we can have a meaningful conversation about anything italian-american without understanding anti-southernism both past and present, and imperialism and white supremacy and anti-Blackness both past and present on both sides of the Atlantic.
This speaks to and provides context to so many things I've been thinking that I don't even know where to begin. I wish I had the bandwidth to actually add to the conversation. I guess without wanting to muddy the waters, the way that various European groups in particular want to disown their USAmerican ethnic branches reminds me of the way white Northern USAmericans like to distance themselves from "the South" (I am not saying this parallels the conversation about Northern vs Southern Italians, which has a specific racialized dimension).
White Northerners dodge accountability for the ways they benefit from and contribute to white supremacist systems by putting it all on a regionally distinct other, because that region is the direct site where many of the crimes they have often historically benefited from occurred (not just slavery either although that's more than enough. Also the Trail of Tears. Also everything that has pretty much ever happened in the Appalachian coal fields, also etc etc).
Europeans do the same thing with the United States when they try to erase the ethnicity of their "cousins" in favor of a broad "American" identity. In one fell swoop they erase their own culpability in global systems of colonial oppression, erase the Indigenous people who are in many ways most profoundly harmed by these systems, and erase the oppression of their own fellow "citizens" who migrated to the US out of desperation or even by force.
I'm not fleshing this out all that well. Just thoughts I'm having, not even all that unique tbh.
Fun fact I put a couple things in my queue because I thought that was like, the "this looks interesting but I need to read it later when I have more time" place, except now I can't find my queue, I don't actually know what it is, I don't remember what I saved in there, and it looks like it's maybe something other Tumblr users can see?
please read this even if you're not indian. especially if you're not indian.
you've seen the jokes. india is "dirty", indians are "everywhere", why don't they fix their own country. ok. let me tell you why, and what's happening right now while nobody's watching.
first, the history you skipped: britain ruled india for two centuries and drained it. economist utsa patnaik's research estimates around $45 trillion in today's money was taken. the india that got independence in 1947 was one of the poorest countries on earth. every "why is india like this" question starts there. you don't get to profit off a robbery and then mock the crime scene.
now, what's happening RIGHT NOW:
in may the question paper for NEET leaked. that's the national medical entrance exam. over 2.2 million students took it. cancelled. years of studying, families' savings poured into coaching, gone overnight because someone sold the paper. students died by suicide after. these were kids who wanted to be doctors.
and out of that came a protest movement. a gen z group called the cockroach janta party, started by a 30 year old named abhijeet dipke, got 22 million instagram followers within DAYS. they've been doing a sit-in at jantar mantar in delhi demanding education minister dharmendra pradhan resign.
and then there's sonam wangchuk. if you've watched 3 idiots, he's the real engineer the character was based on. built solar schools in ladakh. invented ice stupas so himalayan villages have water. spent his whole life on education. he's 59 and he's been on hunger strike for 17+ days now. reporters went to see him this week and he was too weak to talk. and the troll armies are calling him "anti national" and "foreign funded". a man starving himself for other people's children. that's the thing here, anyone who asks a question is suddenly a traitor.
it's not one incident, it's everywhere you look:
• infrastructure worth thousands of crores failing within months of the ribbon cutting. tunnels collapsing in regions where heavy rain is a guarantee, not a surprise.
• youth unemployment near 10% for ages 15 to 29, 13.6% in cities. in a country of 1.42 billion where more than half the population is young.
• only about the top 3% of indians earn above 10 lakh a year. meanwhile billionaire wealth keeps ballooning and the headlines celebrate it.
• manipur burned for over two years. an ethnic conflict, tens of thousands displaced, and the prime minister barely said the word manipur while it happened.
• journalists raided. critics' houses bulldozed. activists sitting in jail for years without trial under laws like UAPA. our press freedom ranking has cratered.
• even the petrol is a fight now, ethanol blending pushed through while drivers complain about their engines and get no straight answers.
and through all of it, the PM, who came to power on religious polarisation (americans, sound familiar?), travels abroad for photo ops and has not held one single open press conference in over a decade. not one.
what i'm asking:
if you're not indian: share this. our media mostly won't cover any of it because the big outlets are owned by the same billionaires the government serves. the only reason wangchuk's fast is getting any coverage is people refusing to look away.
if you ARE indian: speak up even if you're comfortable. especially if you're comfortable. join the protests. add to this, correct me, translate it. staying quiet is a choice when nothing in this post touches your life.
india is not "dirty". india was robbed, and it's being robbed again, from the inside this time. but it's also the country where a 59 year old will starve for strangers' kids and 22 million young people will rally behind a party literally named after cockroaches, because cockroaches survive everything.
The movement, which began as a satirical protest, has evolved into a nationwide challenge to Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government.
Supporters of India's youth-led Cockroach movement said Tuesday they will continue their protest in New Delhi, refusing to leave their sit-in site a day after police used tear gas and batons to disperse thousands of them as they tried to march toward Parliament.
Hundreds of protesters camped at Jantar Mantar, a designated protest site, under heavy police presence, saying they would stay until Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan resigns over alleged failures in India's examination system.
"We are going to continue our protest," said Abhijeet Dipke, founder of the Cockroach Janta Party, which emerged just two months ago.
The movement, drawing students, professionals and families, marks a rare public challenge to Prime Minister Narendra Modi 's government in its third term, reviving criticism over its handling of dissent and its use of force to respond to protests. [...]
Sona Bisht, a 20-year-old student who was part of the protest, said the confrontation strengthened her resolve.
"If the government thinks that doing this with Gen Z, they can stop us, then that won't happen. We are here talking about education, talking about securing our future. And till the time our demands are not met, we will not move from here," she said.
"Definitions developed thus far about youth, like the Gen Z narrative, have largely been linked to roles attributed by the dominant system. The rulers have invented a whole range of terms — rebellious, irresponsible, apolitical, extremist, consumerist — not to understand youth, but to neutralize it. They know as well as we do that whoever wins over the youth wins over society. [...] Thus the question is not whether youth is powerful, but in whose interest this power is directed. Today’s uprisings — such as those in Nepal, Bangladesh, Madagascar, Indonesia, Kenya, Morocco, and beyond — demonstrate that youth continues to emerge as a decisive actor. Young women like Deniz Ciya have proven this with their lives. These uprisings are not expressions of generational temperament. These „Gen Z uprisings“ are expressions of a social force confronting structural crisis inherent in the current system. [...] Recent youth uprisings — whether in the form of environmental justice protests, labor movements, or uprisings against authoritarian governments — are proof that youth worldwide are not only responding to a set of circumstances; they are consciously and collectively rejecting the narratives that seek to define them. Thus, it is crucial to analyze what transpired, and draw lessons from these uprisings, particularly in the context of building a global youth democratic confederalism. For the power of youth movements is interconnected, despite being geographically distant." — "Beyond "Gen Z": Defending Revolutionary Youth Spirit" by Lêgerîn
"The youth in general, and especially the young women, are the spark of every revolution.We can’t look at the history and found a revolution without the youth. We are a fundamental factor. We should be aware of this reality, we should take conscience of our historical role. By doing this we will provide ourselves with a plan that will allow us the unity of action and objectives. The Youth should not be condemned to be a slave of the capitalist system. [...] If we reject the labels and mentalities imposed by the system, taking consciousness as Internationalist Youth in a global level and organizing ourselves, is there someone who can stop us?" — "The youth is the spark of every revolution" by Lêgerîn.
“Europe is literally the creation of the Third World. The wealth which smothers her is that which was stolen from the underdeveloped peoples. The ports of Holland, the docks of Bordeaux and Liverpool were specialized in the Negro slave trade, and owe their renown to millions of deported slaves. So when we hear the head of a European state declare with his hand on his heart that he must come to the aid of the poor underdeveloped peoples, we do not tremble with gratitude.”
— Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (via howieabel)
are people talking about the labor conditions at Taylor Farms yet? like the fact they use enslaved prisoners in their facilities?
are we drawing the connection between worker safety and consumer safety & public health yet?
are people demanding to see the conditions in this place that keeps making us sick? why are the enslaved workers not having the time to use the bathroom or to rest when ill? very few people would shit in front of their coworkers given any choice at all.
Haven't researched it personally,but some rb's who did research are saying Taylor Farms doesn't seem to use prison labor currently fwiw, but still no end to exploitation and endangerment of their workers (and by natural extension, the public).
are people talking about the labor conditions at Taylor Farms yet? like the fact they use enslaved prisoners in their facilities?
are we drawing the connection between worker safety and consumer safety & public health yet?
are people demanding to see the conditions in this place that keeps making us sick? why are the enslaved workers not having the time to use the bathroom or to rest when ill? very few people would shit in front of their coworkers given any choice at all.
It is kinda sad to see how pretty much any leftism is gonna leave someone's body as soon as you bring up youth liberation, fat liberation, and disability rights.
It is also notable in all three areas that indeed, these three topics are inherently connected.
Namaygoosisagagun First Nation/Collins has burned to the ground. The entire community is nothing but ashes after being quickly consumed by wildfires. They did not have any support from emergency services, and no one offered aid. The community saved themselves by escaping into boats because no one came.
Mishkeegogamang and Cat Lake have lost power. Families are ending up in shelters with nothing. Armstrong, Lac La Croix, Whitesand, Gull Bay, Lac des Mille Lacs are currently in the fires path and all members are being evacuated.
All this loss, all this devastation, and it was entirely preventable.
After steadily underfunding wildland firefighting and purposefully excluding Indigenous wildland firefighters and Indigenous wildfire organizations from wildfire operations, firefighter training, decisionmaking, and resource exchanges, in 2025, Doug Ford slashed the forest firefighting budget.
It's hard to ignore his decision to cut funding and leave us out of adequate fire training (even though we've lived with forest fires for thousands of years—far longer than settlers have been in Canada—and made sure fires like the ones we're all seeing today were prevented through kinisitotēn) when, despite making up less than 5% of the population, we account for 42% percent of all wildfire evacuations in Canada.
And when we are successfully evacuated, we face discrimination and racism—like Kashechewan—because it's always been easier to blame us than it is to blame the true culprit: denialism, corportate greed, and colonization.
The people of Collins and every other impacted community deserve better.
Right now, the AFN is currently accepting donations to help Collins First Nation. If you're able to, please consider donating.
ONWA (Ontario Native Women's Association) is another great place to donate to. They have outreach vans going to motels and inns and offering food, water, resources, and cultural support to those impacted by the wildfires.
Other places to consider donating to are Mikinakoos Emergency Fund, Red Cross, True North Aid, Indigenous Climate Action. You can also send donations directly to Whitesand First Nation via e-transfer ([email protected]) and they request that you add your full name in the e-transfer comment section to receive a tax receipt.
*Before sending money, verify that the appeal appears on an official First Nation, Tribal Council or registered charity channel.
If you can't offer financial support, please consider donating items of need. Moontime Connections is currently accepting drop-off donations. If you live in the Thunder Bay area, Namaygoosisagagun Health Office is also taking in donations! They can also bemailed to Superior Inn Hotel & Conference Centre at 555 West Arthur Street, Thunder Bay, ON, P7E 5P8.
This orc looks a lot like that one guy...who played all those orcs in the original trilogy. Plus an elf. Plus a warrior or two. Plus his kid was Arwen & Aragorn's baby. I don't remember his name but I swear that's gotra be him.
I mean tbf there's also the type that is like "no how dare you be in any way acknowledge even the mildest discomfort in how race/ethnicity end up being repeatedly aligned with good and evil in such a way that the tall blonde "Western" guys are always the heroes and the darker, smaller, Eastern peoples are the enemies. Let me spend ten hours detailing posthumously published lore and the personal letters of Tolkien (including his own stated discomfort with the same fucking thing) to 100% vindicate him from anyone ever having mildly mixed feelings about this."
I really don’t want to open this can of worms because Tumblr hath no fury like people called out on their political performativeness but it is literally driving me up the wall to watch people react to Serkis’ ‘keep Tolkien white’ commentary by insisting twice as hard that Tolkien would descend down to earth and dropkick the entire Republican party to hell or whatever, just because they want to ensure that a piece of media they enjoy isn’t seen as being morally impure. Case in point: I have seen at least five instances of Tolkien’s ‘I hate apartheid’ valedictorian address being used as a ‘counter’ to Serkis being racist, including by actual news outlets.
Except it’s only ever the ‘I hate apartheid’ line that’s shared, and not the actual quote in its full context. Because here it is:
If we consider what Merton College and what the Oxford School of English owes to the Antipodes, to the Southern Hemisphere, especially to scholars born in Australia and New Zealand, it may well be felt that it is only just that one of them should now ascend an Oxford chair of English. Indeed it may be thought that justice has been delayed since 1925. There are of course other lands under the Southern Cross. I was born in one; though I do not claim to be the most learned of those who have come hither from the far end of the Dark Continent. But I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones; and most of all I detest the segregation or separation of Language and Literature. I do not care which of them you think White.
Which is to say. This isn’t exactly the antiracist quote of the century, to say the least. This is a white South Africa born man and a white Australian shaking hands and going ‘omg we relate’ and expressing what is a very, very mild ‘segregation is not great’ opinion in order to convey his thoughts on an academic subject, ie the confluence of language and literature. Using race to make a point about his own subject of interest, in his own interest, which is, amusingly enough, what a lot of ostensibly well meaning progressive seem to be doing.
I also think that some of the general surprise around ‘what do you mean large swathes of the Tolkien fandom are incredibly conservative!?’ in lib/left Tolkien fandom is the result of a tendency in said parts of the fandom to transpose one’s own progressiveness onto Tolkien and turn a blind eye to things like, say, the Shire being a very specifically mid-century British racist construct that is very, very clear in its politics, often going so far as to insist it’s anarchist or an ideal society or whatever the fuck… and then getting really Pikachu-meme ‘but they’re misreading it’ every single time a conservative explains exactly what it is about the legendarium that they really love, and get surprised when someone uses the Shire being a racist construct to do more racism. It is 2026 let us do away with ‘I don’t see colour’ interpretations of media, I beg. Nobody is cancelling you for enjoying a book that is not kind to race. Most of the books I love are not kind to race.
I genuinely don’t have the energy to go deeper into it now because I and others have been beating this drum for ages but like man. Man. I’m not surprised by Serkis’ comment. I don’t really give a shit about what Andy Serkis says and does because if I was the kind of person who gave a fuck about Andy ‘I felt like an ethnic minority on the Black Panther set’ ‘I somehow interpreted Animal Farm in the most ridiculous way possible’ Serkis’ opinions on anything, let alone race, my life would be much sadder. I think the adaptation will be an enshittified money-grab, and I will probably embrace cannibalism when McDonalds inevitably starts giving out little Gollums with every Happy Meal. Again.
What I am surprised and disappointed by is how the liberal-left reaction to this shit is to always and forever just either pretend it doesn’t exist in the text, or is the result of a complete misreading. So seldom is the response ‘fuck me, this book has some real wild thoughts on race, let’s see how we can engage creatively with that in an adaptation’. Which has never happened. In fact, all your thoughts on Amazon and lore faithfulness and other adaption criticism or applause aside, TROP, the only Tolkien interpretation that has directly engaged with race has thus far done so very, very badly, and only on a surface level. Why?
Because the loudest parts of liberal Tolkien fandom is not interested in exploring race as it exists in the text, to explore it progressively, to engage creatively with the structural conservatism present within the very construction of Middle Earth. They’re interested in concessions that change very little: you can have your brown elves, as long as we don’t have to think about the implications of foundational aspects of our beloved world, which we relate to greatly and do not wish to think about why we relate to it beyond our own experience of encountering the text.
No, it’s always either an insistence that the Racists are Wrong because the Text is Pure, or a slight, grudging concession that Tolkien had ‘a few racist elements’ but ‘nothing like the racism of today’. Of course it’s nothing like the racism of today. Tolkien isn’t writing in 2026. It was the racism of yesterday, and it is very clearly written into the text. Tolkien is not your mildly problematic grandpa. Tolkien was an Oxford don with an enormous, wide-ranging cultural impact, and refusing to acknowledge that is the misreading, not the pointing out of or engagement with structural racism within the text.
There's also a version of this where people cite Tolkien's 1938 letter to the German publisher, ie the one where he refuses to confirm he's of "Aryan" descent and basically tells them to fuck off, as the other canonical "proof text" that Tolkien Was Not Racist, and it does the same flattening as the valedictorian quote. It's a great letter, very ‘get thee gone from my gate’ but it is also a letter about refusing a specific, legally coded Nazi racial category, not a statement about the internal racial logic of his own fiction.
Nobody is saying Tolkien was a fascist white supremacist Nazi. Hell, Tolkien’s own thoughts on military atrocity in general is pretty clear in the depictions of the escalating kinslayings. But people love to conflate "hated actual fascism, said so on the record and is very evident in his fiction" with "therefore the legendarium contains no racialised hierarchy," as though those two things have to rise or fall together, when they don't. You can be sincerely, personally opposed to Nazi race science and apartheid violence and still write a mythology where moral and aesthetic worth consistently map onto a Northern-European somatic ideal. Because the racialisation Tolkien both inherited and passed on wasn't Nazi race science, it was the broader Edwardian/interwar philological raciology he was actually swimming in, hell, drowning in, considering the Oxford environment. And I find it so, so frustrating how fandom keeps failing to make this distinction: structural racialisation and personal bigotry are not the same axis, and refusing to be measured on one doesn't clear you on the other.
The Southrons/Easterlings material is obviously the part most quoted when it comes to Tolkien’s ‘problematic elements’ except it's imo super telling how rarely it actually gets quoted compared to how often it gets vaguely waved at (except Charles E Mills. I love you Charles E Mills). Anyway “Black men like half-trolls," swarthy, slant-eyed, riding out of the south and east to serve Sauron… it’s the same mapping of good-north/evil-south-and-east you get in a dozen other early-twentieth-century adventure texts. And this imo actually undermines the "it's just medievalism, calm down" defense, because medievalism is a selectively retrospective construction of which past you're claiming and which one you're othering, not some sort of static, neutral historical styling.
Tolkien's medievalism is specifically Northern European heroic-elegiac medievalism, the "Northernness" he talks about loving as a kid, and that aesthetic preference is not extractable from the racial hierarchy it produces on the page. You cannot keep the aesthetic and disclaim the politics because as in all art, the aesthetic is the politics, that's what "structural" means as opposed to "incidental”, and I just wish that many extremely clever people who understand this in a contemporary sense would allow themselves to feel uncomfortable and look at it in a beloved text.
Jackson's trilogy didn't invent racialisation in Tolkien, hell I think he even softened some of it because the Scouring is straight up impossible to adapt without it being very clear about its politics, but his adaptation does go quite some way make the existing racism legible… casting, costuming, choreography and cinematography does the same racialised sorting the text does, and does it visually: Uruk-hai as a kind of grunting brutalised, brutalistic mass, Haradrim on oliphaunts as a fairly straightforward Orientalist boogeyman, and the Fellowship itself photographed like a Pre-Raphaelite fantasy lmfao. Serkis isn't introducing a new interpretive layer with his commentary, hell Serkis was in all those Jackson films as well! Serkis is being very clear about what aspects of the legendarium matter to him, and that aspect happens to be the whiteness of it all. And I genuinely cannot understand why the huge ‘scandal’ around his comment is not that someone said the quiet part, but that saying it out loud is what became the scandal, taken as some kind of transgression against Tolkien and all his readers with Good Politics™️, rather than the quarter-century of adaptations, readings, and analysis of the text that wordlessly encoded the racism and got called faithful and dedicated for it.
I didn’t want to go to author is dead territory but. Fandom discourse keeps reaching for authorial intent as the arbiter of textual meaning in exactly the way most of these same people would reject in any other context. Everyone is a massive New Critic the second the author in question is someone they love. But Tolkien doesn’t need to have consciously intended a racial hierarchy or a white nationalist mythology for the text to functionally produce one, for it to be so loved by conservatives and ethnonationalists who come fifty years after his time.
Intent is not even a contested position in literary theory, it's just the very basic understanding that "text has ideology independent of authorial intent". The insistence on relitigating Tolkien's personal feelings as though that settles the structural question is wild to me, and I find it so extremely unproductive how liberal fandom reaches for this constantly, repeatedly chanting Tolkien’s few vaguely liberal statements that read far less liberally in context. But I guess the alternative, ie reading the actual construction of race in the legendarium on its own terms, requires giving up the fantasy that the thing you love is politically inert. And it’s just so sad man. Like I fucking love the legendarium, and I think insisting on its moral purity is the worst thing you can do to it.
I think my entire argument can be summed up in a few questions. Why do conservatives keep saying "I love Tolkien" completely unashamedly, in a way they don’t realy say about most other ‘canonical’ twentieth-century texts, while we on the left have to perform a whole apologetic dance before we say it? What is it that they embrace about the text, that we have to occlude in order to express an unproblematic ‘love’? Why do we have to disavow parts of a text to claim we love it? Who are we performing to? What are we losing in focusing so hard on this performance?
This is why the Serkis-style comment, or the Rings of Power casting discourse, ends up being the deepest engagement we collectively get in fandom terms. Because both "sides" of that fight are actually shallow in the same way, just from opposite ends. The right-wing backlash to diverse casting is, repulsively, responding to something absolutely present in the text: a defensive crouch around a racial aesthetic it identifies as being under threat. The liberal-left response, the "just add brown elves" gesture, claims the problem to be one of representation and casting rather than structure, which is precisely why the racial elements of The Rings of Power satisfies no one and changes nothing.
You can put actors of colour in Númenor and Harfoot villages and yet the underlying moral framework of who is coded as inherently noble and who as inherently monstrous, whose skin colour the textual narrative uses as a standin for corruption, stays completely untouched. Again, see my TROP link above, with the jihadi-coding of the villains. Because that framework isn't located in the casting of an adaptation, it's located in the construction of Arda itself and physiognomy-as-morality at the level of the prose itself, constantly present throughout the text. Casting a Black actor as an elf doesn't do anything to the fact that "evil race coded as racially other" is still sitting right there in the Southrons and the orcs, unadapted, undiscussed, doing exactly the same work it always did, and this work takes on a new look in post-2001 adaptations.
So what you get is two adaptations of the same tiresome insanemaking discourse rather than two different arguments: the right defends the racial aesthetic as the substance of their love, and the liberal mainstream defends the fantasy that representation-level tweaks constitute engagement with race. And so, nobody actually produces the adaptation that takes seriously what nonwhite Tolkien scholars have been saying for decades, which is that you'd have to touch the orc/Southron/Valar/Valinor/blondeness architecture itself to ever productively have this conversation. Not diversify who plays the good guys, but interrogate why "evil" in this legendarium has a face and a hair colour and points compass east.
But if the talk about this goes on as it does, and continues between Tolkien the Pure versus Tolkien the Misread, there will never be anyone willing to make that adaptation, and we’ll go on forever in a sisyphean climb, where both the reactionary embrace and the progressive denial are just two versions of refusing to read the same damn book. Basically, I think we on the left etc need to stop treating "is Tolkien racist" as a yes/no gate you have to clear before you're allowed to enjoy the books, and stop acting like enjoying problematic media makes you a fascist. We need to start treating the racialised architecture within Tolkien’s world as the actual object of study, same way you'd read imperial romance or Forster or Kipling or Haggard, without needing to acquit or convict the author first.
Which means we have to name the conservatism specifically rather than gesturing at "some outdated attitudes," trace where it comes from historically (the philological Northernness Tolkien grew up steeped in, not some special personal failing that reflects badly on you), and then ask what an adaptation would look like which dramatised that rather than smoothing over it or weaponising it. We have to let go of the idea that critical engagement is disloyalty, and let go of the idea that loving something requires defending its honour. We need to get the resilience needed to engage with the idea that a work can be both formative and ideologically compromised at the same time.
We don’t need to resolve that tension into either adoring hagiography or totalising cancellation. If we do, we're going to keep getting “keep the Shire white” Serkis soundbites and “hooray we cast a brown elf in our we-invented-elf-jihadis show!” news cycles standing in for a conversation that hasn't actually started yet, and ngl buddies I have to say I personally will be biting people the next time I see yet another rendition of the same damn response-reaction cycle start again because everyone, both the conservatives and the left, wants the things they love to be a reflection of themselves, and will twist themselves into pretzels to ensure that remains the case.
What would you do if you were scrolling through recommended tumblr posts and one was from someone you don't know and it was just a picture of your dad captioned "fucking hate this guy" and it had hundreds of notes
Middle Earth characters using baby carriers is my new special interest.
This looks like a Hmong carrier I typically see called a Nyias (usually with other interchanging words as well, I don't know the language or exact translations so my apologies if I didn't get it perfectly right). There are other similar"blanket carriers" as well so I'm not 100% sure.
Here in the US the closest you'll see to a carrier like this, especially commercially, is a meh dai or some styles of wrap strap onbuhimo. Both are East Asian in origin, broadly speaking (my kid is harassing me to get odd my phone so I can't go into specifics RN lol).
Anyway carriers are cool and I like to imagine the beautiful styles of carriers different Middle Earth cultures would have used.
Fun fact: this is not an ad or something but there's a Scottish company called Oscha Slings that makes the fucking prettiest LOTR themed baby wraps and carriers you've ever seen. I have two. I could not afford them. But they're beautiful.
