AnasAbdin
YOU ARE THE REASON
blake kathryn
hello vonnie
Keni
Andulka
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
$LAYYYTER
Today's Document
will byers stan first human second
⁂
No title available
Cosmic Funnies
trying on a metaphor
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
almost home
Kiana Khansmith
❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
Discoholic 🪩
No title available
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from Türkiye
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from Saudi Arabia
seen from Taiwan
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from South Korea
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from South Korea
seen from Türkiye
seen from Canada
seen from Malaysia
seen from South Korea
seen from Pakistan
@owlramblings
“A collection of common glyphs of the poorly understood Memeorite civilization of the Second Silicon Age. Memeorite glyphs possess multiple conflicting interpretations and a complexity of meaning impossible to capture in a few short words. These are rough translations only.”
Source: https://twitter.com/beach_fox/status/1325668490431246336 (which include more “memeorite glyphs”
I don't want a Career I want to Fuck Around
And not find out. I cannot stress enough how much I do not want to find out.
Is it true Indigenous Australians were classed as flora and fauna and not human? I’m Native American and what I’m reading about Indigenous Australians is blowing my mind right now.
This isn't correct - there's a myth that they were classified under the "Flora and Fauna act", which isn't true. The myth also goes that they were finally counted as human thanks to the 1967 referendum - which also isn't true.
HOWEVER - just because people are mistaken about the particulars of how the law treated Aboriginal people, doesn't mean it's not rooted in very real discrimination and dehumanisation. Just because the law didn't classify them as animals didn't stop people from treating/thinking them as animals.
The 1967 referendum did two things:
One: made it possible for the Commonwealth to make special laws in regards to Aboriginal people (before they were only made by states) and this meant that it was possible for the federal government to override state acts and provide anti-discrimination legislation (which didn't happen until Whitlam - because of course it didn't). It also enabled the federal government to have a royal commission into land rights, and make laws on the subject, and then decades later: Eddie Koiki Mabo could take his case to the High Court because of this and that's how we have the Native Title Act of 1993.
Two: included Aboriginal people in the census. So they weren't previously counted as part of the population of Australia for constitutional purposes which meant lots of things. The amount of seats in the House of Representatives/area they cover is determined by population. Government services rely on statistics to provide funding, infrastructure, programs, etc, so it took until the 1971 census to determine things like life expectancy or child mortality - and therefore provide information on whether or not programs to improve those issues are working or not. Being counted as part of the population isn't the same as being counted as human - they were human enough in the eyes of the law to have citizenship, and serve in the military, and have jobs (though severely restricted). They also were legally exploited for all those things.
They were counted as British subjects by birth from 1829 onwards - which is perhaps the first legal point they were counted as people even if the colonial attitude of the invaders wasn't to treat them like that.
Aboriginal people were given the right to vote federally in 1962, or 1949 if they had served in the military (though it wasn't compulsory for them like other Australians until 1983) - and had been given the right to vote in every state by 1965 (Queensland being the last - and South Australia being the first in 1895, including women).
So at least some of the rights of citizenship and personhood legally existed by 1967 - even if in some places they'd only been given years prior. From 1944 to 1976 in WA Aboriginal people could apply for citizenship if they could prove they spoke English, were disease free, and had severed ties with their Aboriginal friends and family. This did not automatically transfer to their children.
So as you can see the law saw them as people able to have citizenship... the issue here isn't being legally classified as human. Because even the hoops to be granted citizenship are cruel, racist, and awful.
Slavery existed even until the 1970s. Employers straight up stole wages from Aboriginal people. In Western Australia for example it was illegal for Aboriginal people to enter the Perth CBD from 1927-1954 after 6pm - so if they worked there they had to physically leave or get arrested. Even AFTER the referendum Aboriginal people in multiple states needed to ask permission to marry, to travel place to place, to manage their own money, to drink alcohol - because the federal government hadn't made any laws to replace all the pre-existing discriminatory state legislation.
The Stolen Generations are a MASSIVE example of abuse, discrimination, mistreatment, and an absolutely abhorrent use of government power that has destroyed cultural traditions, destroyed families, and left many people with intergenerational trauma that lasted OVER 60 YEARS. It was a fucking genocide. They wanted to "breed out the colour" of Aboriginal children who had "white blood" in them to make them "civilised." That continued into the 60s - and although the legal basis and motivations have changed, Aboriginal children are still being taken from their homes at massive rates still to this day. The harm that these oppressive and dehumanising policies have inflicted continue to have consequences to the present day.
The more you read - the more abhorrent, disgusting, and cruel the mistreatment of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders has been in Australia. Racism, discrimination, abuse, deaths in custody, over-policing, and paternal policies continue to this day. The list goes on. It's awful.
The Flora and Fauna act may not have classified Aboriginal people as animals, but that's a technical point that does nothing to negate the 200+ years of colonial oppression and racism.
That’s it, the Professor is truly the King of Sass
The letter didn’t come from the Nazi party, but from the publishing house which had expressed an interest in the German translation of The Hobbit. Tolkien’s response really is a thing of beauty, though, so it deserves to be quoted in its entirety:
25 July 1938 20 Northmoor Road, Oxford
Dear Sirs,
Thank you for your letter. … I regret that I am not clear as to what you intend by arisch. I am not of Aryan extraction: that is Indo-iranian; as far as I am aware none of my ancestors spoke Hindustani, Persian, Gypsy, or any related dialects. But if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people. My great-great-grandfather came to England in the eighteenth century from Germany: the main part of my descent is therefore purely English, and I am an English subject - which should be sufficient. I have been accustomed, nonetheless, to regard my German name with pride, and continued to do so throughout the period of the late regrettable war, in which I served in the English army. I cannot, however, forbear to comment that if impertinent and irrelevant inquiries of this sort are to become the rule in matters of literature, then the time is not far distant when a German name will no longer be a source of pride.
Your enquiry is doubtless made in order to comply with the laws of your own country, but that this should be held to apply to the subjects of another state would be improper, even if it had (as it has not) any bearings whatsoever on the merits of my work or its suitability for publication, of which you appear to have satisfied yourselves without reference to my Abstammung.
I trust you will find this reply satisfactory, and remain yours faithfully
J.R.R. Tolkien.
(Letter 30)
The Hobbit wasn’t published in German until 1957.
This might just be the politest “fuck you” ever written.
W.h.a.t.
Not just “I wish I had Jewish ancestors, but I don’t,” but also “you do realize that’s not what ‘Aryan’ actually means, right,” and “you guys are making it pretty hard to be proud of my German heritage.”
Nazis: Are you Aryan?
Noted linguistics freak Tolkien: Are you?
Hot take but praise is a good tool for encouraging healthy behavior. Positive reinforcement is good. Relying exclusively on punishment to change people's behavior is both cruel and ineffective. If someone does better than they did yesterday, let them know you appreciate it, let them know that they're improving!
"Don't praise anyone for doing the bare minimum" is a shitty take that prioritizes your sense of superiority over the actual betterment of people. I understand that things shouldn't be as bad as they are, and anger can often be justified, but you need to get over the propaganda that kindness is naïve, that cynicism and bitterness are intellectual. Withholding praise from those who haven't caught up with you doesnt actually help them, it doesn't motivate, it doesn't encourage, it only discourages them. It breeds bitterness and apathy, which are antithetical to empathy.
Growth isn't something you do on your own. People need support, they need community. Bootstraps won't get them there. Kindness will. Do you want results or do you just want to feel superior?
Dot by dot, star by star…
#what the fRESH HELL#
of course, my frustration with how The Left handles people trying to become informed about their ideas is partly motivated by fear. I swear being online is like I’ve been sent back in time to stop a disaster that’s already happened.
On some level y’all get that the far right extremists are good at recruiting and radicalizing, but generally speaking The Left curses at and attacks people who are trying to ask questions, constantly reiterates that its people’s own responsibility to be informed, repeats the exact kinds of propaganda right wing media spews out because they think the concept of Christians being oppressed or whatever is funny, encases all their discussions in jargon that is impossible to understand without context, refuses to define the jargon even as right-wing media “educates” them about its Real Meaning, and spreads the idea that having a discussion with anyone right of center morally taints you. A part of me is screaming internally every second I’m online because of this. If you think of this as a cultural and ideological battle of sorts, the Right is actively recruiting soldiers while the Left is busy chasing anyone who doesn’t already have military training, a uniform, and weapons away from their recruitment office (which is boarded up with signs saying that anyone who asks where they can join will be forcibly removed from the premises) with baseball bats.
Like we can debate “performing emotional labor” until the sun burns out and probably some good points will be made but at some point it’s gonna be either emotional labor or living under a fascist dictatorship because all the people it wasn’t our job to educate went out and finally educated themselves, just like we wanted them to, using their free Google…
…which showed them how to find nazis that would happily answer all of their questions, without cursing or implying that they should already know everything, and lots of free, non-paywalled, easy to read and jargonless articles about how it’s a minority’s fault that things suck.
If we’re fighting back we’ve got to fight to win. That’s it.
Please listen to me, a person who knows the American Christian Right inside and out.
The Right weaponizes our unwillingness to educate. When we scoff at a person that doesn’t understand what “white privilege” means, there are comforting voices that will be there to tell them that the Leftists are just people who have never suffered or hurt a day in their lives, that speak of “white privilege” because of their bitter hatred of anyone with differing opinions than they have. That person will return to the familiar narrative that the Left is filled with violent, hateful, destructive people that are both incapable of understanding their needs and struggles and completely indifferent to them. THIS IS HOW THEY WORK. The confrontational attitudes and confusing language are used as essential tools by the Right.
“I shouldn’t have to explain what privilege is!” we say.
“They respond that way because what they really mean is that they think no white person has really struggled or suffered,” other voices say. “They don’t care about you because you’re white. Isn’t that what real racism is?”
And that narrative makes sense to them because no, they don’t know what real racism is, because anyone who asks questions about what racism is is “sealioning,” and anyone who googles racism is probably met with the dictionary definition, and anyone who says “but this is what the dictionary definition of racism is?” is assumed to be acting in bad faith and probably cursed at.
I am not asking marginalized people to constantly be available to answer questions about their traumas and shit. I don’t want people to go through that. But as someone who’s extensively seen the inside of the group that elected trump, I am BEGGING people to understand what I’m saying and be as frightened of its implications as it deserves.
I don’t know!! If you’re white you have no excuse to not AT LEAST SOMETIMES perform racism-related “emotional labor,” start memorizing responses and spreading definitions and stuff!! Instead of “deconstructing our patriarchal colonialist capitalist mindset” or whatever, let’s deconstruct the long words we use to discuss literally everything for a hot second! I have answered very strange ignorant questions before and I will do it again! Because no matter how ignorant the question is, the person still went to ME. And I’m not throwing that away so they can look for answers on google and end up with the alt-righters on reddit in a place where they can educate instead.
I’m realising recently that one of the major reasons for this trend is that the web is fkin huge and people don’t often venture very far beyond their own circles. Which means that within a circle and just at its outskirts, the questions and arguments people make have honestly been addressed and re-addressed so many fkin times that it really is just “oh my god ugh” when there’s another one who’s missed all of those learning times. And it seems like it’s out there and it’s obvious and why do I need to be doing this again when it’s right there. Except that it’s only really right there from a specific spot.
So, in conclusion, I think we need a FAQ to redirect people to.
The left needs an on-ramp which incrementally builds up all of its concepts. It has to start from common sense and truths that are obvious to someone not on the left and get from there to the insights the left has to offer in ways that most non-lefties can find intuitively logical.
Most people on the left can’t actually offer that. They are too far removed from the actual philosophical justification of their views. Too willfully unable to put themselves into the perspective of the right. Too uncritical of the left’s ideas. You can’t lead people who don’t already mostly agree to your perspectives from that position.
To be fair, some of the left’s progress in the culture has been due to reliance on the mechanisms of offendedness, outrage, and ostracism. But the success this achieves is hollow. It gets you disagreement becoming resentfully hidden rather than disagreement becoming agreement.
There was a time when this “get offended and ostracize” strategy was more common among the right. Sociological pendulums and all that. It is a strategy you do when you have the power to shut people up and the privilege to get away with being an ass about it.
(Contrary to the Abridged Lefty Theory for Children most people get from Tumblr or Twitter or wherever, power and privilege are not the same across a society - power and privilege constantly change depending on where you are and who you are with, both in meatspace and online.)
But it is a toxic strategy regardless of who does it, with a high risk of being more harmful than helpful in ways that are not immediately obvious. And it becomes more harmful the more progress and success you achieve.
So, let’s get started. What are the essential words and phrases that need to be defined in order to start the conversation? I’m serious. Let’s start a dictionary.
# dictionary of the American Left
Let’s start with what privilege is—not just white privilege or male privilege but privilege generally speaking. There has been discussion about what that is, but still I’ve seen widespread misunderstanding among republicans or similar about what is meant when people say it. And that means that people are REALLY DEFENSIVE when talking about it—they feel like their lives and their personal struggles are being attacked when someone says “privilege.”
I really think the misunderstanding is partly because of “white privilege” being defined apart from the context of what privilege is. Because people on the right don’t really consciously think of the world as consisting of systems of oppression. So even the best attempt to define “white privilege” is going to fall a little short.
I had to learn this—to check myself a bit, and realize that I sounded super condescending when I talked about privilege to people who were first generation college students and abuse survivors or who had grown up poor or who had been in the foster system, et cetera.
Here’s where I think you’d start—start a discussion about fairness. Because fairness isn’t a loaded word in the same way that “privilege” is. Privilege is often seen as very presumptive just because people don’t really know what you mean by that. The first question is, “Well, does the world treat people and judge people fairly, or are there ways in which it’s unfair?”
And it’s very hard not to see that the world is unfair. A person who is born rich has a lot of advantages over someone who is born poor. Someone who has loving, supportive parents has a better chance at being brought up in a way where they can succeed than someone who never had good parental figures. Metaphors about privilege don’t get through to these people because they don’t explain why they apply to the real world. A metaphor about a fence or running a race is just a metaphor. Talk to them (if you’re comfortable with it) about times when you have experienced unfair treatment, or get them to share their own experiences.
The problem you will run into is that people will not see these things as systemic, because the idea of systemic injustice is probably kind of foreign to them. They get really tripped up on the idea that someone can participate in an unjust system without themselves doing unjust things because they already read everything related to these discussions as aggressive and blamey. They probably don’t see examples of racism or sexism as a fundamentally ingrained part of society—they’re the actions of individuals who are wrong, yes, but people tend to see them as isolated incidents.
So provide examples. Lots of examples. Don’t just talk about one axis of oppression (and don’t say axis of oppression because they don’t really know what that means). DO NOT, by any means, assume they have the historical context for these things…because they don’t. American public school history education is propaganda. Have reliable sources on hand for the history of racism and sexism and other prejudices in America because people usually don’t know there has been, for example, really any legal/institutional aspect to racism since the 60’s. American history textbooks stop talking about racism with MLK. Talk about the history. Talk so much about the history. Almost everything I know that convinced me racism was still a real and important threat ingrained into our society I had to research outside of textbooks.
Talk about how the assholes that anyone could identify as racist don’t just “end up” racist. Why are they racist? Maybe they grew up hearing that kind of stuff as a kid. Well, racism being basically normal in a whole group or community is an example of something bigger than individual choices that causes racism. “A person is this way because their parents raised them like that” is the simplest and most accessible way to introduce the idea of actions and beliefs being part of a system.
Don’t talk about privilege about being just in terms of gender or race. Talk about class privilege. Talk about privilege as broad and flexible and a thing that doesn’t fully 100% define an individual person, because “White privilege” refers to something that exists in a whole society, not just “you, a white individual, are privileged for being white, regardless of your individual experiences, and you never struggled.” It’s not an attack and it’s not meant to be a way of broadly simplifying a group’s experiences. The necessity of explaining this isn’t all because of “white fragility,” it’s definitely at least partly because they’ve probably heard very inflammatory and dishonest things about what the Left means by privilege and that has to be dealt with. There is a lot of prejudice and bigotry in our history and there are still ways of thinking and laws and structures that don’t treat people fairly because of qualities they can’t help. And we want to make the world more fair. If they shut down, go back to that—it’s about treating people with fairness.
to check myself a bit, and realize that I sounded super condescending when I talked about privilege to people who were first generation college students and abuse survivors or who had grown up poor or who had been in the foster system, et cetera.
So much this. And while you’re at it? Be aware of what privilege you may have in the convo including that which may be invisible to you. Because you don’t know someone’s history. You don’t KNOW if they’re an abuse survivor, or a survivor of extreme poverty; you don’t know their disability status. (Hell THEY may not know how ablism is affecting their life.) Unless you know someone VERY WELL INDEED these things WILL be invisible to you. Which means you may well be acting your own privilege out, without noticing it - and yes, you may well have some at play. And the far right absolutely exploits that hypocrisy, too.
Do yourself a favor. Sound up. Enjoy.
This is a serotonin machine
I fixed the audio for that Boston Dynamics video.
I can't wait to get the COVID vaccine and level up
harry potter rated by mentions of goats
philosopher’s stone: mentioned that a bezoar can be obtained from the stomach of a goat which would be pretty solid except its mentioned in the context of snape being a dick to some eleven year olds. the goats didn’t give up their magic healing kidney stones for this. 3/10
chamber of secrets: no mentions. 0/10
prisoner of azkaban: no mentions. 0/10
goblet of fire: both karkaroff and young dumbledore are described as having goatees, a type of facial hair that, unless you’re idris elba or brad pitt or someone, is probably best left to goats. first mention of my main man aberforth and his fondness for goats, though unfortunately phrased in a way that convinced half the readers he fucked a goat. 5/10
order of the phoenix: a nice bit foreshadowing in which the hogs head smells like goats. unfortunately, there’s also a mention of the giants eating dead goats. a harrowing image. -5/10
half-blood prince: harry reads the half-blood prince’s tip about bezoars and with some truly stunning information retention, remembers what snape said about them being an antidote to most poisons + coming from the stomach of a goat in their first ever potions lesson. i am so proud of him. harry uses this totally unprecedented feat of academic success to flunk out on doing any actual work and piss off hermione. worth noting that harry also uses a bezoar to save ron’s life, begging the question, would the wizarding world be ruled by voldemort and all of our faves be dead if it wasn’t for goats? the answer is yes. a monumental achievement for goats everywhere. we owe them so much. 20/10
deathly hallows: aberforth and his fondness for fiddling with goats returns. he apparently throws goat dung at people in times of stress- what a guy. a goat patronus saves the day by looking kinda like a stag if you squint a bit. aberforth reminisces about feeding the goats with ariana. a touching, bittersweet moment. all around a pretty good time for goats. 10/10
Kidding (2018)
This is called
Shaynas Sequence
a lot of people are tagging this with “film” and “movies” or talking about the magic of moviemaking but i really want to point out that Kidding is a TV show.
i feel it’s important to make this distinction because there’s a common (sometimes subconscious) thought that TV is a lesser form of digital art compared to film, but television, especially recently, has been phenomenal and it deserves proper credit as a storytelling medium, as well as a craft just as capable of amazing work like this
This is fucking INCREDIBLE.
Masterful.
Divergent is a bad book, but its accidental brilliance is that it completely mauled the YA dystopian genre by stripping it down to its barest bones for maximum marketability, utterly destroying the chances of YA dystopian literature’s long-term survival
please elaborate
Sure. Imagine that you need to make a book, and this book needs to be successful. This book needs to be the perfect Marketable YA Dystopian.
So you build your protagonist. She has no personality traits beyond being decently strong-willed, so that her quirks and interesting traits absolutely can’t get in the way of the audience’s projection onto her. She is dainty, birdlike, beautiful despite her protestations that she is ugly–yet she can still hold her own against significantly taller and stronger combatants. She is the perfect mask for the bashful, insecure tweens you are marketing to to wear while they read.
You think, as you draft your novel, that you need to add something that appeals to the basest nature of teenagers, something this government does that will be perversely appealing to them. The Hunger Games’ titular games were the main draw of the books, despite the hatred its characters hold for the event. So the government forces everyone into Harry Potter houses.
So the government makes everyone choose their faction, their single personality trait. Teenagers and tweens are basic–they likely identify by one distinct personality trait or career aspiration, and they’ll thus be enchanted by this system. For years, Tumblr and Twitter bios will include Erudite or Dauntless alongside Aquarius and Ravenclaw and INTJ. Congratulations, you just made having more than one personality trait anathema to your worldbuilding.
Your readers and thus your protagonist are naturally drawn to the faction that you have made RIDICULOUSLY cooler and better than the others: Dauntless. The faction where they play dangerous games of Capture the Flag and don’t work and act remarkably like teenagers with a budget. You add an attractive, tall man to help and hinder the protagonist. He is brooding and handsome; he doesn’t need to be anything else.
The villains appear soon afterward. They are your tried and true dystopian government: polished, sleek, intelligent, headed by a woman for some reason. They fight the protagonists, they carry out their evil, Machiavellian, stupid plan. You finish the novel with duct tape and fanservice, action sequences and skin and just enough glue and spit to seal the terrible, hollow world you have made shut just long enough to put it on the shelf.
And you have just destroyed YA dystopian literature. Because you have boiled it down to its bare essentials. A sleek, futuristic government borrowing its aesthetic from modern minimalism and wealth forces the population to participate in a perversely cool-to-read-about system like the Hunger Games or the factions, and one brave, slender, pretty, hollow main character is the only one brave–no, special enough to stand against it.
And by making this bare-bones world, crafted for maximum marketability, you expose yourself and every other YA dystopian writer as a lazy worldbuilder driven too far by the “rule of cool” and the formulas of other, better dystopian books before yours. In the following five years, you watch in real time as the dystopian genre crumbles under your feet, as the movies made based on your successful (but later widely-panned and mocked) books slowly regress to video-only releases, as fewer and fewer releases try to do what you did. And maybe you realize what you’ve done.
one quibble: hunger games was intense and sincere and the writer had worked for tv and knew exactly what she was talking about when she wrote how media machines create golden idols out of abused kids and then leave the actual people inside their glamorous shells to rot. hunger games had a genuine core of righteous anger that resonated with a lot of people. the hunger games was genuinely angry about shit that is genuinely wrong.
but divergent was clumsy make-believe the whole way through. it aped the forms and functions of dystopian lit but the writer didn’t actually have any real, passionate, sincere anger to put on the page. she didn’t know what it was talking about, so she didn’t have anything worth listening to.
there’s a difference between anti-authoritarianism as a disaffected, cynical pose and anti-authoritarianism as a rallying cry by people who believe in a bitter world. and the former is something corporations and industries and publishing houses are so much more comfortable with. so divergent and the flood of books published and marketed alongide and after it showed how the dystopian genre was no longer truly revolutionary, no longer a sincere condemnation of corporate oligarchies. the mass-market dystopian genre was now nothing more than an insincere playspace for people who were writing dystopia as a safely distant, abstract make-believe stage for their pretty girl heroes, rather than a direct allegory for everything that needs to be torn down in this world today.
This is the second branch of this post I’ve reblogged and like the fourth I’ve seen and I’m just thinking about how the Uglies series, a pre-Hunger Games forerunner of the YA Dystopia boom, had significantly less staying power than it could have specifically because…with the toxic beauty standards forced on teenagers being a Big Theme, studios couldn’t figure out how to make a profitable movie out of it. The book got optioned multiple times, but a film version made in Hollywood was destined to fall apart at casting & makeup - their marketing methods relied on exactly what the series was criticizing, which is…part of what made it so popular with teenage girls to begin with.
You contrast that with how the marketing for the Hunger Games films directly contradicts the messaging of the text, and how Divergent seems ready-made for the big screen, and it becomes really apparent why the genre folded in on itself. Capitalism tried to recuperate dystopian fiction criticizing capitalism, and in doing so, butchered the genre.
There’s also something rattling around my brain about a correlation between how made-for-screen a dystopian book is and how much it Doesn’t Understand Dystopia, with the culmination being Ready Player One, a piece set in a dystopia that somehow still actively glorifies capitalism & that was literally optioned for film before the book was published, but I don’t…know how to expand on that point.
I’ve re-blogged this post before, and also made my own about various dystopian stories, but what they heck, I’ll add just the books here-
(these are specifically ones that I own, nnot every dystopian book ever. also, some of these qualify more as “disaster” or “post apocalyptic”, since that stuff can overlap)
(oh, and I’ll put a little * by the ones that I really enjoyed)
Books-
*Among the Hidden by Margaret Peterson Haddix
*Uglies by Scott Westerfeld
*the Road by Cormac McCarthy
*the House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer
1984 by George Orwell
the Giver by Lois Lowry
*the City of Ember by Jeanne DuPrau
House of Stairs by William Sleator
*a Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle
Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
Feed by Matthew Tobin Anderson
Second Variety (Screamers) by Phillip K Dick
*I Robot by Isaac Asimov
*Cell by Stephen King
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (Blade Runner) by Philip K Dick
Guardians of Ga’Hoole by Kathryn Lasky
*the Time Machine by HG Wells
the Dark Side of Nowhere by Neal Shusterman
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Wouldn’t it?
Blacklivesmatter.carrd.co
#pascalcampion
This shook me to my core
This was so lovely.
But it’s worth mentioning that the second I saw the panel with the cop, my heart dropped, and it’s a shame that this is the initial reaction that I have towards cops interacting with POC
The fact that the notes are filled with non-Black people who suddenly got worried when they saw the cop ….. in an illustrated story.
Now try imagining how hard it is irl for Black mothers, and Black people in general. Each encounter with the police could end with our death, even if we did absolutely nothing wrong.
I think most of us deal with it—bc let’s face it, we have no other choice—but I’d be lying if I said that every single time I come into close proximity to the police, somewhere in the back of my mind there wasn’t always the thought: “what if …”
“what if today is the day” … “what if this cop had a bad morning” … “what if this cop doesn’t like black people” … “what if he thinks my phone is a gun” … “what if he thinks I’m acting suspicious” … “what if he needs to fill a quota” … “what if he mistakes me for some nondescript black man but I fit the description anyway” … “what if my car insurance payment didn’t go through and I don’t know about it” … “what if I have a taillight out” …. “what if he thinks I have a bad attitude” … “what if it was a rough day for me and I do have a bad attitude” … “what if there’s not even any cops around but a white person thinks I look out of place” … what if what if what if
Obviously I cannot speak for everyone who is Black, but these thoughts flash through my mind every single time I see a cop. Every time. Maybe it only takes a microsecond, but it’s always there. Always.
LOL. I know we may make it look easy. But yeah, it’s still there.
And even though I’m very healthy and I manage to … adapt(?) to those fears, I figure that kind of constant on/off stress has gotta be taking some kind of toll on me, right? On Black people in general. It’s like perpetually unexpected games of Russian roulette. Or maybe like the Spanish Inquisition. (No one ever expects it).
Sometimes I wonder if white people understand the constant extra calculations that Black people are doing continuously as we’re out and about. Calculations for any contingency encounter with the police. Or with some white person who might call the police because they’ve mistaken my melancholy mood for “suspicious” behavior. Calculations that white people don’t ever need to do. At least, not because of simply being in the general proximity of the police.
Nice to see that some people “get” it.
I collected a bunch of “haha I don’t have 2020 vision” “oh God not like that” posts
I wouldn’t mind a sequel to this post 🤣
I have kept coming back to this post to see the reblogs, so I can give you the ones other people collected all in one place:
This one I actually found myself!
And I don’t think that this counts, but it still has the beautiful “Ah, fuck” vibes the rest of the post does:
And let’s not forget the cursed “Supernatural GIF Perfectly Describes 2020″ one:
@ferrousferrule: You said you were looking for more and going through the reblogs, right? In which case this isn’t going to be of much use to you, but still. Just in case it is. :)
I just knew having a tag for these would come in handy
So the bleach one should not have become reality but here we are
