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thebibliosphere

Hello Potterheads…I thought I’d left you behind on livejournal but evidently not.

Hope you like suffering.

libelula202

I’m a Harry Potter fan that follows Rowling on twitter

Of course I like suffering

thebibliosphere

You could have just said “I use twitter” and I would have accepted that second sentence as is.

allerasphinx

fic writers i promise you–on my life–that readers remember that finn’s skin is dark brown.

i promise that if you use a descriptor besides “the darker skinned man” in relation to all the characters around him, people will know who he is in your sentence.

e.g. the sun’s golden rays made his dark amber skin glow as it slid lower in the sky.

e.g. the harsh white light surrounding his body roughened the soft lines of his face and made his skin appear greyish as though he were a wraith.

e.g. the only imperfection marring his skin was the raised brown scar that slashed jaggedly across his back. (finn’s skin’s rich with melanin, so even if his fresh scar’s initially raw and pink, eventually it’ll heal to a brown shade–either slightly lighter, same tone, or slightly darker)

i promise that you can describe him as you do rey or poe and your readers won’t forget that it’s finn you’re talking about.

i promise you, you can describe poe without making him sound like a white dude.

n.k. jemisin’s a master at writing her characters, who are predominantly people of colour. for this reason, she usually describes them in relation to each other and doesn’t rely on their skin tones. she explicitly describes her white characters’ skin tones to flip the dominant perspective that assumes white as default. here are some of her tips:

describing characters of color

describing characters of color pt. 2 (some of her rowling thoughts are ehhh, because rowling does otherise her characters of colour, but this is an old post)

describing characters of color: other people’s poc

other resources:

7 offensive mistakes writers make

writing with color: poc and food comparisons (john boyega can call himself chocolate and black people might describe him as such, but you probably shouldn’t)

writing with color: words for skin tone

words to describe hair (i’ve read a couple fics where y’all are clueless about finn’s hair)

describing natural hair

writing with color’s colorful critiques

describing poc and avoiding caricatures

writing authentic characters of colour in first person pov

in depth guide to drawing different ethnicities

hoosierbitch

thank you so much for this post. it is so important and so helpful.

thecheshirecass-deactivated2018

Heads up for all my writers out there.

kakaphoe

reblogging so I can find it later.

Westworld

I think we can safely just give up on film now and go with the tv series as being way better than anything possible in a film format. Westworld has convinced me of this and I've already watched the whole thing twice and would definitely watch it for a third time at the cinema and this should definitely be a thing.

#westworld #cinema #magnificence

me at the beginning of gbbo: Yeah, whatever, the ginger one's pretty good

me now: Andrew, 25, is originally from Northern Ireland. He currently lives in Derby where he works as an aerospace engineer for Rolls-Royce designing jet engines. He was taught to bake by his mum and grandma and has their safeguarded recipes in his arsenal. He's a straight A student and went to Cambridge University. Andrew strives to make all his bakes look beautiful, he loves to push the boundaries of design and baking, for his next big ambitious bake he's designing a baguette concorde.

jnghyns

i refuse to let this video die

terri-leigh13

Weird to think that the majority of UK children are huge fans of middle class pigs.

postscribed

alticamelus

*slams the reblog button so hard it falls off*

screengeniuz

😒

tobamory

I’m

dyemelikeasunset

Actually that reminds me, there is something about Chinese Americans I think not enough people are aware of that I’d like to talk about.

Lemme start off by saying I’m a Mandarin speaker and US-born so some of my info may be wrong, also I’m at work right now so I don’t have sources readily available so please fact-check me BUT

Cantonese as a culture and language is oppressed in a way that doesn’t effect Mandarin speakers. Historically in China, Cantonese people have been pushed to the outskirts of society and lingering biases still exist against them. From small things like Cantonese sounding “uglier,” or the people being “lower class,” “louder,” “ruder,” “less cultured,” etc, Mandarin speakers still greatly look down on Cantonese.

In a US-context, I know of generally two waves of Chinese immigrants, the first wave of primarily Cantonese speakers and the second wave of Mandarin speakers. The original wave of Chinese immigrants were the first ethnic group that were ever denied US citizenship, a lot of them being from lower class families who were escaping wars and needed new homes and resources. A lot of them ended up as railway workers and miners, laboring in hellish conditions and dealing with horrible racial backlash. As a lower income class, this generation of immigrants eventually led to establishing things like “China Town,” and the early Chinese restaurants. This is why generally most Chinese restaurant owners are Cantonese speakers.

After WW2, the US and China’s relationships were better, but the US still had some rather biased views of the Chinese. The immigration criteria for the Chinese began weeding out lower income people (again, usually Cantonese), and welcoming immigrants who had lifestyles that were “more fitting” to US politics. Those who have gone to English-speaking Universities, had better incomes, engineers, doctors, scientists, etc. The construction of the Chinese model minority is actually quite deliberate.

A lot of these well-to-do second wave Chinese immigrants still hold negative biases towards Cantonese people and Cantonese speakers. So as a non-Chinese, if you ever find yourself thinking “Mandarin sounds nicer than Cantonese” you might want to re-think this. And if you’re a non-Chinese and have Chinese people agreeing with the mentality, it’s not your place to tell them off but please be aware that they’re perpetuating a deep-rooted ethnic and economic oppression. And this probably goes without saying, but Mandarin-speaking Chinese American kids who are reading this…yeah please let’s all stop making fun of Cantonese while also stealing their voices and experiences. The era that our parents and grandparents immigrated to the US greatly effect our different diaspora and we need to be mindful of them

dyemelikeasunset

Actually that reminds me, there is something about Chinese Americans I think not enough people are aware of that I’d like to talk about.

Lemme start off by saying I’m a Mandarin speaker and US-born so some of my info may be wrong, also I’m at work right now so I don’t have sources readily available so please fact-check me BUT

Cantonese as a culture and language is oppressed in a way that doesn’t effect Mandarin speakers. Historically in China, Cantonese people have been pushed to the outskirts of society and lingering biases still exist against them. From small things like Cantonese sounding “uglier,” or the people being “lower class,” “louder,” “ruder,” “less cultured,” etc, Mandarin speakers still greatly look down on Cantonese.

In a US-context, I know of generally two waves of Chinese immigrants, the first wave of primarily Cantonese speakers and the second wave of Mandarin speakers. The original wave of Chinese immigrants were the first ethnic group that were ever denied US citizenship, a lot of them being from lower class families who were escaping wars and needed new homes and resources. A lot of them ended up as railway workers and miners, laboring in hellish conditions and dealing with horrible racial backlash. As a lower income class, this generation of immigrants eventually led to establishing things like “China Town,” and the early Chinese restaurants. This is why generally most Chinese restaurant owners are Cantonese speakers.

After WW2, the US and China’s relationships were better, but the US still had some rather biased views of the Chinese. The immigration criteria for the Chinese began weeding out lower income people (again, usually Cantonese), and welcoming immigrants who had lifestyles that were “more fitting” to US politics. Those who have gone to English-speaking Universities, had better incomes, engineers, doctors, scientists, etc. The construction of the Chinese model minority is actually quite deliberate.

A lot of these well-to-do second wave Chinese immigrants still hold negative biases towards Cantonese people and Cantonese speakers. So as a non-Chinese, if you ever find yourself thinking “Mandarin sounds nicer than Cantonese” you might want to re-think this. And if you’re a non-Chinese and have Chinese people agreeing with the mentality, it’s not your place to tell them off but please be aware that they’re perpetuating a deep-rooted ethnic and economic oppression. And this probably goes without saying, but Mandarin-speaking Chinese American kids who are reading this…yeah please let’s all stop making fun of Cantonese while also stealing their voices and experiences. The era that our parents and grandparents immigrated to the US greatly effect our different diaspora and we need to be mindful of them

timemachineyeah

This is a jar full of major characters

Actually it is a jar full of chocolate covered raisins on top of a dirty TV tray. But pretend the raisins are interesting and well rounded fictional characters with significant roles in their stories.

We’re sharing these raisins at a party for Western Storytelling, so we get out two bowls.

Then we start filling the bowls. And at first we only fill the one on the left.

This doesn’t last forever though. Eventually we do start putting raisins in the bowl on the right. But for every raisin we put in the bowl on the right, we just keep adding to the bowl on the left.

And the thing about these bowls is, they don’t ever reset. We don’t get to empty them and start over. While we might lose some raisins to lost records or the stories becoming unpopular, but we never get to just restart. So even when we start putting raisins in the bowl on the right, we’re still way behind from the bowl on the left.

And time goes on and the bowl on the left gets raisins much faster than the bowl on the right.

Until these are the bowls.

Now you get to move and distribute more raisins. You can add raisins or take away raisins entirely, or you can move them from one bowl to the other.

This is the bowl on the left. I might have changed the number of raisins from one picture to the next. Can you tell me, did I add or remove raisins? How many? Did I leave the number the same?

You can’t tell for certain, can you? Adding or removing a raisin over here doesn’t seem to make much of a change to this bowl.

This is the bowl on the right. I might have changed the number of raisins from one picture to the next. Can you tell me, did I add or remove raisins? How many? Did I leave the number the same?

When there are so few raisins to start, any change made is really easy to spot, and makes a really significant difference.

This is why it is bad, even despicable, to take a character who was originally a character of color and make them white. But why it can be positive to take a character who was originally white and make them a character of color.

The white characters bowl is already so full that any change in number is almost meaningless (and is bound to be undone in mere minutes anyway, with the amount of new story creation going on), while the characters of color bowl changes hugely with each addition or subtraction, and any subtraction is a major loss.

This is also something to take in consideration when creating new characters. When you create a white character you have already, by the context of the larger culture, created a character with at least one feature that is not going to make a difference to the narratives at large. But every time you create a new character of color, you are changing something in our world.

I mean, imagine your party guests arrive

Oh my god they are adorable!

And they see their bowls

But before you hand them out you look right into the little black girls’s eyes and take two of her seven raisins and put them in the little white girl’s bowl.

I think she’d be totally justified in crying or leaving and yelling at you. Because how could you do that to a little girl? You were already giving the white girl so much more, and her so little, why would you do that? How could you justify yourself?

But on the other hand if you took two raisins from the white girl’s bowl and moved them over to the black girl’s bowl and the white girl looked at her bowl still full to the brim and decided your moving those raisins was unfair and she stomped and cried and yelled, well then she is a spoiled and entitled brat.

And if you are adding new raisins, it seems more important to add them to the bowl on the right. I mean, even if we added the both bowls at the same speed from now on (and we don’t) it would still take a long time before the numbers got big enough to make the difference we’ve already established insignificant.

And that’s the difference between whitewashing POC characters and making previously white characters POC. And that’s why every time a character’s race is ambiguous and we make them white, we’ve lost an opportunity.

*goes off to eat her chocolate covered raisins, which are no longer metaphors just snacks*

kenyatta

Just watched the trailer for Doctor Strange. It looks very entertaining, of course. But the Tilda Swinton as the Ancient One thing felt weird. So consider this reblog my post about it.

goat-bonks

People who are low income don't have to explain their purchases to you.

They don’t have to justify having kids, they don’t have to justify the tv they bought with their tax return, and they don’t have to feel guilty about getting a tattoo.

Low income people deserve to splurge sometimes too, get over it.

revolutionaryeye

The problem for poor, white kids is that a part of their culture has been destroyed

Thatcherism didn’t just crush the unions, it crushed a story – as the report that says working-class white children go backwards at school proves

by Paul Mason

The report came couched in the usual language of inclusion, technocracy and “what works”. Disadvantaged children are doing so badly at school that only one in five hits an international benchmark designed by the authors.

But the headline grabber in the paper from the liberal thinktank CentreForum concerns ethnicity: the serial losers after 28 years of marketisation, testing, a centralised curriculum and decentralised control of schools are poor white kids.

“During the early years, white British pupils are among the highest achievers,” say the authors. “By the end of secondary school however, those white British pupils are overtaken by 10 other ethnic groups to just below average, when compared with other ethnicities.”

Let’s confront squarely what this means. If the country is populated with low-achieving, inarticulate white kids it is something that happens between the year they stop being toddlers and the year they start being Neets (Not in Education, Employment or Training).

So what is it? In short, it is their lives.

The detailed ethnic breakdown in the report makes for depressing reading. The worst performers are white Irish traveller children, then “white gypsy/Roma” children – both of which school fails by a long chalk. They are followed by mixed-race children with Caribbean backgrounds, then white British. These are the only groups who collectively go backwards in the two years researchers have been crunching the numbers. By contrast, black Caribbean, and white Irish children go forward a bit, and Chinese and Indian children a lot.

Though I regret the marketisation of education, the league tables and the testing, these cannot be the primary cause. It’s 30 years since I taught in the school system – at a high school and then a special unit for behaviourally disruptive teenagers in Leicestershire. So the only relevant first-hand knowledge I can bring to this debate is that the same problems were apparent then. By the late-1980s people from a white, working-class background already knew we had a problem. We had seen the film Kes, and chuckled at the poverty of aspiration we were all in the process of leaving behind. Our culture was the one celebrated in Ken Loach movies: politicised and articulate, wanting only libraries big enough to house the books we had to wait weeks for.

Then, as if by a 50-tonne steel press, we had Kes status imposed on us as a class.

My dad was one of those kids in the 1930s who would have failed any test designed by a liberal thinktank. He left school at 15. A lifetime of trade unionism, workplace discussion and self-education meant he could sight-read music, grapple with serious novels and sit though five hours of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.

I can still remember, in front of a coal fire and on a carpet with a stone floor beneath it, my dad drawing me a picture of Oxford and Cambridge, complete with rugby fields and laboratories, and trying to explain how I might make the choice between them. He’d never been to either city, but to an impressionable five-year-old, this was a profound message: education is the way out.

It was not always the case that ethnic-minority children did better than white English ones, but the reason why some of them do now is pretty obvious: their problem – racism – is defined; their language skills tend to be well-developed; their culture is one of aspiration; they have social and religious institutions that promote cohesion.

By contrast, the problem of poor white kids cannot be properly defined: not in the language of freemarket capitalism, at least. It has nothing to do with being “overtaken” – still less with any reverse discrimination against them.

It is simply that a specific part of their culture has been destroyed. A culture based on work, rising wages, strict unspoken rules against disorder, obligatory collaboration and mutual aid. It all had to go, and the means of destroying it was the long-term unemployment millions of people had to suffer in the 1980s.

Thatcherite culture celebrated the chancers and the semi-crooks: people who had been shunned in the solidaristic working-class towns became the economic heroes of the new model – the security-firm operators, the contract-cleaning slave drivers; the outright hoodlums operating in plain sight as the cops concentrated on breaking strikes.

We thought we could ride the punches. But the great discovery of the modern right was that you only have to do this once. Suppress paternalism and solidarity for one generation and you create multigenerational ignorance and poverty. Convert Labour to the idea that wealth will trickle down, and to attacks on the undeserving poor, and you remove the means even to acknowledge the problem, let alone solve it.

Thatcherism didn’t just crush unions: alone that would not have been enough to produce this spectacular mismatch between aspiration and delivery in the education system. It crushed a story.

And what the most successful Chinese, Indian and white Irish children probably have – although you would need more research than offered here to give this assertion rigour – is a clear and compelling story.

In my first week at university, myself and a few other working-class kids on our course were quizzed by our middle-class peers: “You must be exceptionally bright to get here, against these odds,” was the theme. We were incredulous. We had been headed for university since we picked up Ladybird books. Without solidarity and knowledge, we are just scum, is the lesson trade unionism and social democracy taught the working-class kids of the 1960s; and Methodism and Catholicism taught the same.

To put right the injustice revealed by the CentreForum report requires us to put aside racist fantasies about “preferential treatment” for ethnic minorities; if their kids are preferentially treated, it is by their parents and their communities – who arm them with narratives and skills for overcoming economic disadvantage.

If these metrics are right, the present school system is failing to boost social mobility among white working-class kids. But educational reforms alone will barely scratch the surface. We have to find a form of economics that – without nostalgia or racism – allows the working population to define, once again, its own values, its own aspirations, its own story. Source:- ww.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/apr/04/the-problem-for-poor-white-kids-is-that-a-part-of-their-culture-has-been-destroyed