#stop normalizing racism

[creamecafe]

You guys can say whatever you want about the Sabrina Carpenter thing of how it’s super offensive or people overreacting stuff like that. But the one thing I fear that you all forget, especially when a celebrity does something that might offend a group of people is that if they apologize and it’s not your apology to accept. Like it’s not your culture or anything, it’s not for you to decide what’s acceptable of that culture to tolerate of someone that says something that could hurt them whether they like it or not.

She could have written the apology better, but if you’re not Arab or middle eastern, don’t accept her apology or say she’s forgiven when she didn’t do anything to you

[mr-kench]

Minority Ambassadorship

I need to get something off my chest and it’s been bothering me for a while but I could never figure out the right words. So I’m just going to shoot my shot and clarify if need be. I’m all for representation and all that but the way it’s been handled in recent years.

The thing that helped me finally click all the pieces together was the recent Spider-Man game. While Peter has a proper adventure Miles is not. He’s doing side jobs and while obviously showing he’s part of the community, his story also falls into a dangerous trap I keep seeing. They (the writers) make him the ambassador of his culture no one is the entirety of their culture but writers keep doing this stuff.

White folks in stories have the freedom to be anything, like anything and feel anything. They’re organically made all the time. But the moment a different race takes the stage they’re chained to the cultural stereotypes. Even Wakanda has just become “Africa the Country” theirs no uniqueness to it, it’s populated by every conceivable African Stereotype. Heck I remember a few years back a marvel comic was made with Miles being made the new Thor and IMMEDIATELY Asgard turned into a Ghetto and it was the most racist joke I’ve seen in a while.

This isn’t new by any means. More often than not when an American enters an anime they’re stereotypically American. Wearing the American flag, usually blond for some reason, constantly swearing and won’t shut up and if we’re feeling REALLY spicy we can make them big and scary.

That habit of writers though can create a feeling of “otherness” to anyone that isn’t you and can actually reinforce stereotypes. You’re not your culture and you shouldn’t be pressured into that mindset. You can absolutely be influenced by it but people aren’t just ambassadors to their culture. That’s ignorant to the highest degree.

Considering many games that do this are affiliated with Sweet Baby Inc. I’m not surprised but it just means we should fight harder against it.

Sweet Baby Inc. is one of those companies that’s basically “sensitivity writers” they show up to punch up stories to make them more “inclusive” but what this usually means is make them subtly racist, homophobic and authoritarian and barring that making a story less interesting. They’re involved with almost every failure within recent types in the gaming market including Suicide Squad and Last of Us 2. They even worked on Spider-Man 2 and the Miles Morales Game. Both of which you can see what I’m talking about by making Miles the Ambassador of Black People and Harlem. They were even involved with the Spanish Translation of Spider-Man 2 which upset that entire part of the world because they used words like Latinx which is considered a slur and an act of colonialism as white people try to force them to change their own language.

Sweet Baby Inc. and its employees are a bunch of racists, homophobes and Authoritarians pulling the greatest grift of all time by pretending to not hate those people and acting like they don’t want to control how people think. The mask has come off frequently and only recently has it come off in such spectacular fashion that a lot of the internet is starting to notice myself included.

In conclusion though, don’t be a racist and let characters of other races and sexual orientation be actual people instead of being the ambassadors of their people. Don’t support bigots that pretend to be on your side and be mindful of people like that. Also don’t buy anything Sweet Baby Inc touched because they’re all of those things.

[luckyzombies]

Okay. Essay time.

Ever since NASCAR banned Confederate flags at their events (yay!) and ever since the major changes regarding acceptance of Confederate statues and names of generals being immortalized in school names and military bases, I’ve seen a ton of backlash. A. Ton.

I don’t think that people fully understand why Confederate symbols are frowned upon and I especially don’t think that people understand what they symbolize. I’ve seen lots of excuses. “It’s a part of our country’s history!” “I’m not openly supporting the ideas or ideals of it, I’m just showing where I’m from!” “It doesn’t symbolize racism.”

No.

It’s not that the flag isn’t important to our country’s history. It is. It’s definitely not that the Confederacy isn’t important to our country’s history. It is. Everyone should at least know of the Civil War and the incredible role it played in our country’s culture and development. Glorifying the losing side is not the way to do it. And that’s exactly what flying these flags and building these statues is: glorification. Unnecessary glorification that paints these racists and slave-owners as heroes of a war that they lost. It’s not markers of history of an area; it’s a way to say “we respect you for fighting for what you believe in, even though you lost.” We shouldn’t respect them or the cause they fought for: slavery. The statues of Confederate “war heroes” and the Confederacy flag should have been extinct long, long before the BLM movement.

Next problem: the Confederacy doesn’t exist anymore. Some would argue that it never really “existed” politically in the first place since no foreign nations ever actually recognized the Confederacy as an independent nation. So please, please, please stop waving the flag and claiming that it “represents where I’m from”. No. It doesn’t. You are not from the Confederacy; you are from the United States of America. You from the region where the Confederacy existed, sure, but the Confederacy does not exist anymore and therefore you are not from there.

Probably my biggest problem with waving around Confederate symbolism, however, is how people keep claiming that the Confederate flag doesn’t represent racism. It does. And this is because the Confederacy itself stood for racism and slavery. The Southern states did not secede from the Union because they were mad that the North had manufacturing and they didn’t. They didn’t secede because they could do better on their own.

They seceded because they wanted slavery and they knew that Abraham Lincoln would eventually push to abolish it.

A lot of people don’t understand that in the early-to-mid 1800s, slavery was nothing short of a way of life for whites in the South. If they were too poor to afford slaves (which a lot of them were), they were constantly working for the money to eventually get one. Even if you didn’t own a slave by the time the Civil War broke out, you were on the side of the Confederacy because you still clung to the hope that you would eventually get a slave. The Confederacy. Stood. For. Slavery. It’s as simple as that. They fought to keep their way of life, lost, and we are somehow still idolizing their leaders through statues and memorials.

And it has to stop.

So if you’re supporting the Confederate flag still, please read your history again. If you don’t think these statues should be torn down, please check your priorities. I guarantee you that you have better things to do than be mad that a symbol of slavery and racism was torn down by protesters. We live in the United States of America. United. Stop supporting a former country that wanted to rip the “united” out of the name.

[space-feetus]

 I took a college algebra test with a racist question on it once. Anyone else come through some stuff like that? I’m genuinely curious.