#tennessee

[cyanide-sippy-cup]

For anybody not caught up: Tennessee just passed a new map that pretty much makes it so black neighborhoods have no power in local votes. Two things about this. While protestors were chanting "No Jim Crow", white Tennessee lawmakers were caught laughing on video. On top of this, Representative Justin Pearson and his brother KeShaun Pearson were arrested for trying to give their takes on the matter (which is not only their legal right but literally his job). If you give a shit about black people, help fight this. We can't allow a return to Jim Crow.

[saywhat-politics]

TN lawmaker Justin Pearson was blocked from a Capitol committee room as Republicans moved to erase the state’s only Black-majority district after Louisiana v. Callais, the Supreme Court ruling that weakened the Voting Rights Act by making Black-majority districts easier to challenge as racial gerrymanders.

Black Americans won enforceable voting protections only in 1965.

📸 Nicole Hester / The Tennessean

[kuchipatch1]

yall have got to be more normal about Southern people and I'm not kidding. enough of the Sweet Home Alabama incest jokes, enough of the idea that all Southerners are bigots and rednecks, and enough of the idea that the South has bad food. shut up about "trailer trash" and our accents and our hobbies!

do yall know how fucking nauseating it is to hear people only bring up my state to make jokes about people in poverty and incestuous relationships? how much shame I feel that I wasn't born up north like the Good Queers and Good Leftists with all the Civilised Folk with actual houses instead of small cramped trailers that have paper thin walls that I know won't protect me in a bad enough storm?

do yall know how frustrating it is to be trans in a place that wants to kill you and whenever you bring it up to people they say "well just move out" instead of sympathizing with you or offering help?

do yall understand how alienating it is to see huge masterposts of queer and mental health resources but none of them are in your state because theyre all up north? and nobody seems to want to fix this glaring issue because "they're all hicks anyways"

Southern people deserve better. we deserve to be taken seriously and given a voice in the queer community and the mental health space and leftist talks in general.

[snototter]

Prehistoric pictographs of dogs/canines in the 60th Unnamed Cave, Tennessee, USA

by Alan Cressler

[unteriors]

Lonesome Pine Trail, Mosheim, Tennessee.

[raccoonmilf]

I’ve got several questions in my inbox about why I would willingly live in a highly red state like Tennessee that is trying to take our rights away, and I’m sure I’ve answered it before, but it’s been a while.

Anyway.

I like the weather here and the mountains and trees and the biodiversity and I’m not going to let literal pieces of shit displace me from my natural habitat (the temperate broadleaf and mixed forest biome of the Appalachian–Blue Ridge forests.)

I mean sure, I could gross the border to Georgia or North Carolina and stay in the same biome, but that would just isolate me, put me out of a job, and my raccoons would be illegal.

I also don’t have to mask so much here, because folks at the grocery store will just randomly start telling me about the raccoons on their porch. It is good for metal health that I can mask less without feeling weird.

And finally, there are so many queer, trans, and POC folks who don’t have the luxury of just going to a new state. If all of us who have the ability to leave do so, where will that leave them?

[swordedtongue]