sarah HANNAH gómez

reader. writer. editor. pilates instructor. ex-librarian, nearly phd. entirely too ambitious. reads everything, reads too much, never reads enough.

[leidensygdom]

Please be aware that the "opt-out" choice is just a way to try to appease people. But Tumblr has not been transparent about when has data been sold and shared with AI companies, and there are sources that confirm that data has already been shared before the toggle was even provided to users.

Also, it seems to include data they should not have been able to give under any circumstance, including that of deactivated blogs, private messages and conversations, stuff from private blogs, and so on.

Do not believe that "AI companies will honor the "opt-out request retroactively". Once they've got their hands on your data (and they have), they won't be "honoring" an opt-out option retroactively. There is no way to confirm or deny what data do they have: The fact they are completely opaque on what do they currently "own" and have, means that they can do whatever they want with it. How can you prove they have your data if they don't give everyone free access to see what they've stolen already?

So, yeah, opt out of data sharing, but be aware that this isn't stopping anyone from taking your data. They already have been taking it, before you were given that option. Go and go to Tumblr's Suppport and leave your Feedback on this (politely, but firmly- not everyone in the company is responsible for this.)

Finally: Opt out is not good under any circumstance. Deactivated people can't opt out. People who have lost their passwords can't opt out. People who can't access internet or computers can't opt out. People who had their content reposted can't opt out. Dead people can't opt out. When DeviantArt released their AI image generator, saying that it wasn't trained on people who didn't consent to it, it was proven it could easily replicate the styles of people who had passed away, as seen here. So, yeah. AI companies cannot be trusted to have any sort of respect for people's data and content, because this entire thing is just a data laundering scheme.

Please do reblog for awareness.

[shgmclicious]

‘Racist’ is not—as Richard Spencer argues—a pejorative. It is not the worst word in the English language; it is not the equivalent of a slur. It is descriptive, and the only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it—and then dismantle it. The attempt to turn this usefully descriptive term into an almost unusable slur is, of course, designed to do the opposite: to freeze us into inaction.

Ibram X. Kendi, How To Be An Antiracist

[shgmclicious]

I do not write for myself, but for other people. Real people. For you. I believe it was Umberto Eco who said that writers who say they write for themselves and do not care about having an audience are full of shit, and that the only thing you write for yourself is your grocery shopping list. I couldn’t agree more.

Carlos Ruiz Zafón

[shgmclicious]

But sometimes you can like something so much you probably shouldn't have a job in it, you know what I mean?

Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz, "The Guy in Charge of Sports"

[shgmclicious]

It is institutions that help us to preserve decency. They need our help as well. Do not speak of "our institutions" unless you make them yours by acting on their behalf. Institutions do not protect themselves.

Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny

[shgmclicious]

in the shadow of liberty

in the shadow of liberty

I read In the Shadow of Liberty in just under two hours, over the course of two nights of elliptical sessions. It’s a quick read. I made a mistake making it my gym book, because holding a hardcover with one hand two nights in a row is a great recipe for finger pain and hand cramps. This is good, but I don’t see it as quite as revolutionary and amazing as so many others seem to. That may be a…

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[shgmclicious]

(via How we fail people of color with eating disorders | Fusion)

I have so much to say about this article. It’s depressing af, obviously, but it’s also vindicating in that it’s something I’ve noticed but never really taken the time to explore or research or connect with, aside from recently committing to a therapist who is a woman of color, in the hopes that she’ll be able to work with me not just on my equal opportunity mental illness but also the psychology of race and ethnicity and how that plays into it as well. (By the way, you can find mental health, nutrition, and other health professionals at mavenclinic.com if you are a woman, and your first appointment is free [up to $25 value] with the code ARIZONAHG, and yes, I get a tiny kickback, but I’m saying it because I’ve been using the service for a month and it’s already amazing and it’s cheaper than copays and available at weird times of day, which is SO SO SO useful for me. Anyway.)

ANYWAY. My real point is that this really speaks to how eating disorders are, yes, a form of anxiety/OCD, and OCD is equal opportunity brain wackiness, as far as I understand it. But they are also a reaction to emotional and psychology exhaustion when it comes to microaggression-based oppression, and THAT has to do with media representation and diversity, hello. In the same way that research shows that educational and professional achievement in kids is affected by the lack of diversity and the abundance of stereotypes in the books they read (not to mention their capacity for compassion and ability to function in a global, multicultural world), this article examines how the way people of color are portrayed (or not portrayed) in all sorts of media also affects their day-to-day functioning and the way they present to the world. And we’re already exhausted when it comes to presentation, since every day when a person of color gets dressed for work, we have to think about whether our curly hair will be seen as “unprofessional,” whether we’ll get yelled at because there are no clothing companies that sell work-appropriate clothes that accommodate larger hips and butts, etc. IT’S ALL CONNECTED. IT ALL SUCKS. It’s hard to practice self-care when even fun pastimes like reading a magazine or buying makeup or shopping for new jeans systematically function to ignore you at best and humiliate you at worst.

[shgmclicious]

#blackgirlsquibs

I was really excited about a lot of books this spring. You may recall that I wrote a whole post about it. There was a lot of #blackgirlmagic in the works, and nothing could be better or more necessary than that. The biggest readers in the country are college-educated black women, while in the UK (and I gather in the US), young black girls are the biggest demographic of readers under 18. We…

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[shgmclicious]

When someone takes a blind leap into the unknown, it doesn’t necessarily mean she’s brave. Sometimes it means she doesn’t understand what she’s up against.

Look Both Ways, Alison Cherry

[shgmclicious]

Any discussion of criticality without an understanding of its historical and social foundations is fantasy.

On Critically Conscious Research

[shgmclicious]

dear white writers, agents, and editors

As a member of a dominant culture (that is, a white Australian living in a nation whose prosperity is built on the destruction of Indigenous cultures), I am powerfully conscious of the fact that I am an outsider to those cultures. This means that I am an outsider also to Australian Indigenous textuality, and that I must approach Indigenous texts in a very different way from how I read the Western texts that lie within the ambit of my experience and training as a scholar. My training in the methodologies and theories of Western scholarship is so central to my repertoire of reading strategies and theoretical understandings that when I read Indigenous texts I frequently experience a sense of destabilization. I say to myself: But how does this text work? What can it mean? My experience of textual unfamiliarity is itself a cue, alerting me to the fact that I am reading a text that originates from a culture different from my own.

-Clare Bradford, “Critical Reading of Children’s Texts,” Critical Content Analysis of Children’s and Young Adult Literature: Reframing Perspective, edited by Holly Johnson, Janelle Mathis, Kathy G. Short

Bradford is a children’s literature academic who tends toward postcolonial reads of literature from all over the world. I don’t know her, but she seems pretty chill, and I’ve read her work before, and it, too, is chill. Trust her; she has hella qualifications to be telling you what to do.

I get that authors, agents, and editors are not scholars. You don’t have to be. This is still applicable to you if you are not an #ownvoices writer when it comes to a particular work*. Bradford later goes on to remind us all that “cultural outsiders...are not entitled to understand all that there is to know of the worlds of these texts” (emphasis mine), and I (and others on Twitter and beyond who explain this ad nauseum) would like to add that that doesn’t mean it’s not a good work worth representing/publishing. This is why sensitivity readers exist. This is why non-dominant-group editors and agents must exist. But in the meantime, you employ the former to make up for not having the latter; you don’t tell a writer from outside your experience that they’re not accessible just because you don’t understand every little thing. Nobody understands everything. Get schooled; don’t demand remedial lessons or watered down explanations of everything that you have randomly determined are not understandable to your fallacious idea of what most readers are.

If you’re a writer from a dominant social group, and especially if you are one of the butthurt trolls who has been derailing Twitter conversations lately, your takeaway here should be that now you can understand a bit more why minority writers are frustrated with you stealing our stories. You can write about us if you do your homework, but our voices are still more authoritative than yours; our voices are still stifled while yours are free to fly; and our culture is not a la carte or on sale for you. It’s expensive, and when it comes to expensive things, you should do a lot of waiting to make sure that thing is really what you want and need and can take care of.

*because the way people are leaning towards replacing the misuse of “diverse” with a misuse of “own voices” is making me annoyed. Everyone is #ownvoices if they are writing about their own culture, and they are not when they are not. Period. Just as individuals are not “diverse” and using it as shorthand for nonwhite is cowardly and lazy, #ownvoices is not shorthand for non-dominant. So don’t use it that way, k? PRECISION OF LANGUAGE, JONAS.

[shgmclicious]

You envy her. How come she doesn't have the weight of ambition? You pity her. How come she has no ambition?

Caroline Kepnes, You

[shgmclicious]

This entire book.

[shgmclicious]

...at the end of the day, your life is your message and only you can create yourself.

Robin Arzón, Shut Up and Run

[shgmclicious]

He looks like me, she caught herself thinking. Not black, not white, but both and all of it.

Jacqueline Woodson, The House You Pass On the Way

[celestetrimble]

Native Books for Native Youth!, a project from Ms. Trimble

My students need culturally relevant books so that they can see themselves in literature, helping them see that they, too, can be readers and writers. Students in my school are in grades 7-12. Located in southern Arizona, 99% of students are enrolled tribal members, and 85% are eligible for free or reduced lunch. Because the literature that they...

I began a new job this July as an English teacher at a reservation high school near Tucson. The first day I had to wander around the school, I went to the library and was surprised to find very few books written by Native authors, and a few questionable books about by non-Natives (think When Legends Die). Thinking that maybe the books I sought were somewhere else, in individual classrooms, or in the multiple copy rooms, I began a search. Fiction was nowhere to be found. I did find a class set of Ishi: The Last of his Tribe (!), as well as a few other non-fiction titles. Finally, I found a class set of Silko’s Ceremony and one of Tapohonso’s Blue Horses Rush In.

But, for a school with about 300 students, all Native American, I became very worried. Looking at the textbook that was has been in use the last few years, I found excerpts of fiction by African American, Chicano, and Asian American authors. None by Native authors.

So, thinking that maybe the physical artifacts of past student reading of Native authors might be missing, but that they may have been reading photocopies or e-books, I asked.

“Have you ever read anything by a Native author?”

The answer was a resounding, “No,” with the exception of about 4 students who had read Sherman Alexie. A few students wrote about Leonard Chana, a Tohono O’odham illustrator.

So, I have created a DonorsChoose project to bring a wide variety of Native literature to this school. Some are for the library, some are for classroom sets. The list for DonorsChoose is partial, but it is a first step. This school district has recently adopted a Data Driven Initiative, which, in my mind, does the opposite of creating a love of reading. Hopefully, with a larger collection of Native authors, a bit of enthusiasm and motivation born from a successful fundraising project, and the knowledge that not only having culturally relevant literature, but having role models for Native reading and writing, we will together combat the destructive effects of data driven education and teaching to the test.

Please help share the power of Native American literature with these Native youth. Thanks.

[shgmclicious]

This is my friend! She is also a great teacher who I got to shadow in anticipation of teaching the class that she taught while she was dissertating. Her students are lucky to have her, and they will be even luckier when they get to read books by people like them. Please help!

Any amount helps, especially since if you donate by August 6 and enter the code LIFTOFF at checkout, DonorsChoose will match every dollar you donate. Let’s diversify American public education, one classroom at a time.

[errorschacha]

If you think all Black people’s blogs are “social justice” blogs, you’re racist.

[ferenginar]

I read some newspaper article recently that pretty much summed up Tumblr and the responses to it this way—privileged people who come here are shocked to see marginalized people talking about their experiences, so they think everyone’s just obsessed with social justice, rather than talking about their own lives.

[forevrdreamingofbetterthings]

this is really important. 

[shgmclicious]

This is why it is so hard to explain the white-as-default thing to white people. 

“You make everything about race!”

No, it’s just that YOU make everything about NOT identifying race. The way you know something is default white is that it doesn’t engage with anything racial or ethnic at all, because those are the only people who can actually go through a day of their lives not doing that. The rest of us all encounter something racialized every single fucking day.