Rainbow Runner @thesadpalace - Tumblr Blog

You were born with blonde hair.

You hate it.

It looks terrible on you and you've always thought that. When you were really young, you thought that's just what everyone thought about their hair colour. When you were a teenager, people chalked it up to hormones and wanting to be unique and follow the trends of dying your hair. It wasn't.

You've seen people with brown hair. It looks so good. You start imagining yourself with beautiful brunette hair. What if you could be that? And then you hear someone talk about you, call you 'that blonde over there' or someone telling you, 'your blonde hair looks so good!' and you're reminded all over again.

Your parents talk about something. Something you've never heard of before. "All those young kids, dying hair everywhere," they say. You ask them what it means. "Oh, that's when someone with one hair colour thinks they're better off with another hair colour." Your heart lights up. There's more people like you. You're not insane. And then- "Fucking insane. They just want to feel special. All this ridiculousness over trends." It hits you in the heart. You say nothing, just mumble an 'okay' and turn your attention back to your food.

That night, you're scrolling on your phone, and one video pops out. It's talking about dyed hair. You see people not just with natural-coloured dyed hair, but blues and greens and so many other colours. It looks beautiful. You remember your blonde hair. Could it finally be brown? These people are like you. They might be able to help.

You do research. You reach out to people online. And finally, you have your hands on a box dye from a store. it's not the highest quality, but you have it. At midnight the next weekend, you do it. You dye it brown. It's messy and tricky, but your heart is swelling with joy the entire time.

You expect people at school to be happy. Your hair is beautiful. You're beautiful. You finally feel comfort in your hair, confident in the way you look. Instead, you get side-eyes. People whisper and glare. One of your friends pulls you aside. "What happened to your hair?" You tell her you dyed it. Asks her if it looks nice. She grimaces. "Yeah... it looks fine.... but your blonde hair was your natural hair colour and it looked fine as well." You tell her the truth. How you've always hated it on you. Found brown to be so, so much prettier. Looked so much more amazing on you, and felt it too. "Yeah... but blonde is still your natural hair colour, right? No amount of dye is going to change that." Your confidence starts to sink. Will everyone think this?

Turns out, they will. You hear people still refer to you as "that blonde there". New people express confusion. "But her hair's brown? It's very clearly brown." "Well, yeah, but she dyed it. Her natural hair colour is blonde." "Oh... okay."

Your parents don't like it. "Your blonde hair was so beautiful," your mother sobs through her tears. "Why did you have to ruin it? My beautiful blonde child is gone! Gone forever! Why did you do it?" And you tell her that her child is not gone, her child is right here, just with different hair. She doesn't listen to a single word. Your father is mad. He yells at you to get out of his house, that you're a fucking disgrace, that you're mentally ill and brainwashed by trends and so many other hurtful things. You can only leave.

You try to go to another friend's place. She answers the door with a scowl. "Why are you here?" she seethes. She's angry. Why? You tell her about your situation. "Serves you right," she spits. "You're incredibly offensive to everyone with blonde hair." You ask her why, puzzled. "You clearly hate blonde hair. Why else would you dye it? Do you find blonde people disgusting?" No, no, that's not it. Blonde people are fine, you try saying. It just didn't suit me. I wish it did, but it didn't, so I changed it. "Stop twisting everything," she says. "I don't want to see your face." The door closes and you're left there on the steps.

You don't know what else to do. Were you truly lying? No, blonde hair has never suited you. Brown looks better. Brown makes you feel secure. You feel it's what makes you feel like yourself. But why can no one grasp that?

You search up more on your phone, and you find a community for similar people. People thrown out, disowned, abused for dying their hair or expressing wants to. When you get there, you find that they accept you with the warmest smiles and the coziest hugs. You find people that bleached their brown hair to blonde and dyed their blonde hair to brown, just like you, and they look so amazing. You find people with all sorts of coloured hair too, red, blue, yellow, purple, multicoloured and hair that gets redyed differently depending on the day. They all have similar stories. You've finally found a place you belong.

Outside, people are still outraged. They scream at the community that they're brainwashing their kids, that they're grooming every kid to dye their hair until there's no natural hair kids left. You don't feel hurt anymore. You know now they make no sense. They push out their own children, and this is the result. They don't want people with dyed hair banding up together.

Brown hair has always suited you. You're rather tired of people trying to pretend it doesn't.

This is not about dyed hair.

nymph1e

On Discomfort and Morality

My father finds gay men uncomfortable.

He's told me before that it's like a knee-jerk for him. Something he doesn't consciously control. He sees two men behaving romantically, and his body reacts with mild discomfort.

In the 1960s, when he was in high school, most of the boys in his form thought he was gay on the simple fact that he wasn't homophobic. He wouldn't participate in insulting queer people, he didn't care if someone was gay, he wouldn't have a problem hanging out with gay people. So people thought he was gay. That's how prevalent homophobia was in his formative years.

When I was 10, my dad told me very seriously that Holmes and Watson were gay. That it was obvious from the literature and the time period that they were meant to be a gay couple. When I was 14 and I came out to my parents as bi, when my mum was upset my dad ripped into her for it. Told her that she was being stupid, that it was my life to live how I wanted to and that she needed to get over herself.

My dad formed my views on censorship: that being that it was completely ridiculous and thoroughly evil. He didn't believe in censorship of any kind. If I asked him a question about sex, he answered it honestly. When I was 12 and I asked him about homosexuality, still young and uncertain, he told me that there was nothing wrong with it. That it was just how some people were. That there was likely an evolutionary reason for it. And that for some people it was uncomfortable on an instinctual level.

He taught me that just because you're uncomfortable with something, doesn't make it wrong. He also taught me that most people don't understand this.

I see a lot of this on the internet as of the last few years. The anti shipping movement, the terf movement, the anti ace movement. It all stems from discomfort that people have crossed wires into believing means wrong. Really every -ism and -phobia out there stems from this same fundamental aspect of humanity.

The next time you see something and you automatically think it's disgusting, or wrong, or immoral, I invite you to ask yourself: is this actually wrong or does this just make me uncomfortable?

scooplery

sooooo cooool to live a lifetime of punishment for my inherited disabilities. punished socially and academically in school, punished socially and financially in romantic relationships, punished medically, now economic punishment for becoming too sick to work (became too sick bc i've been punished all my life for being sick in the first place?) (tortured to insanity?)

weaselknievel

*introducing myself to the guards who caught me* seized to meet you

uncleromeo

if you don't do anything else today,

Please have a moment of silence for the people who were killed instead of freed when news of emancipation finally reached the furthest corners of the american south.

have another moment for the ledgers, catalogs, and records that were burned and the homes that were destroyed to hide the presence of very much alive and still enslaved people on dozens of plantations and homesteads across the south for decades after emancipation.

and have a third moment for those who were hunted and killed while fleeing the south to find safety across the border, overseas, in the north and to the west.

black people. light a candle, write a note to those who have passed telling them what you have achieved in spite of the racist and intolerant conditions of this world, feel the warmth of the flame under your hand, say a prayer of rememberance if you are religious, place the note under the candle, and then blow it out.

if you have children, sit them down and tell them anything you know about the life of oldest black person you've ever met. it doesn't have to be your own family. tell them what you know about what life was like for us in the days, years, decades after emancipation. if you don't know much, look it up and learn about it together.

This is Juneteenth.

white people CAN interact with this post. share it, spread it.

patientno7

my humor 2016

patientno7

10 years

#Me with “did you see it?” It's like a sleeper cell phrase #Haha farting on my roommates door *extremely loud farting; ghost hunter voice* “did you see it?”

batmanisagatewaydrug

bringing a sort of "slavery is still alive and well in US prisons" vibe to the office Juneteenth post that my higher ups don't really like

hunter-gratzner

From what I understand slavery was never actually abolished in the us. It is still legal and all.

batmanisagatewaydrug

the amendment that "ended" slavery specifically left permission for slave labor as punishment for convinced criminals and our inmates have been legally exploited ever since, yes

standwithdaanes

I recently wrote a paper on prison slavery in the US & I wanna recommend the ACLU's report from 2022 on this system for anyone looking to learn more:

Captive Labor: Exploitation of Incarcerated Workers, an ACLU research report produced in collaboration with the Global Human Rights Clinic o

[I]ncarcerated workers typically earn little to no pay at all, with many making just pennies an hour. It is rare that a job pays more than a dollar an hour—even the incarcerated firefighters braving the flames that rage across California’s forests and hillsides year after year are compensated at $1 an hour. Even so, many consider themselves lucky to receive these low wages. That is because, in seven states, incarcerated individuals are forced to work but are paid nothing at all for most jobs. At the same time, incarcerated workers produce real value for state prisons and state governments, the system’s primary beneficiaries. Nationally, incarcerated workers produce more than $2 billion a year in goods and commodities and over $9 billion a year in services for the maintenance of the prisons where they are warehoused. Even though prison labor is not what is driving mass incarceration in the United States, incarcerated workers’ labor does partially offset the staggering costs of our country’s bloated prison system.

Also, fun fact! In 2018 Colorado actually removed the exemption for prison slavery from their state constitution, making it illegal.

In 2023, NPR published this article which revealed that was still occurring in Colorado prisons, and in fact there was apparently no change even five years after banning prison slavery:

After a few months working in his prison's hot and crowded kitchen, Richard Lilgerose noticed he was having trouble sleeping. "I was always anxious about having to go to the kitchen and work under these conditions for hours upon hours and not knowing when I was going to be able to go back to my unit to get some rest," he told NPR in a call from prison. Lilgerose, who has been in prison for 20 years, suffers from PTSD, and says the chaos of the kitchen made it hard to work there. He kept asking for breaks, and eventually the guards stopped making him work. But Lilgerose says they also punished him, moving him to a unit with less access to the outdoors and to phones. He says he also lost "good time," which can determine parole eligibility. [...]

"Unfortunately, here we are five years later, and we have not seen the change happen inside of our prisons. It's been business as usual," says Kym Ray, a community organizer with Together Colorado, a multi-faith community organization. "It was never intended to be a symbolic sort of thing, like we removed it from our constitution with no expectation of change. We actually did, in fact, expect there to be some level of change."

Imprisoned people are often subjected to solitary confinement (which is itself a form of torture that needs to be banned) for refusing to work.

In February of this year (2026), a judge ruled that the Colorado Department of Corrections was violating the state constitution by doing forced labor (by which they mean slavery but we can never just call a spade a fucking spade. if the law itself is about slavery then i'm pretty sure breaking that law should be considered slavery!) Let's look at what they said in their defense!

"We respect the judicial process and continue to evaluate the full legal and operational implications of the court's decision to determine next steps. The Department of Corrections agrees that slavery and forced labor are wrong and illegal and do not believe we have engaged in either," she wrote. "CDOC programs are designed to provide essential skills, vocational training, and rehabilitative opportunities that support successful reentry into the community. The Department remains committed to upholding the Colorado Constitution, and believes we have been despite the ruling. We are also committed to ensuring the safety and security of our facilities, staff, and the incarcerated population." Wallace said in her ruling that CDOC argued that it "merely provides incentives to work, and withholds privileges from individuals who refuse," and argued "there were no disputed material facts to support the claim CDOC subjects incarcerated persons to involuntary servitude." [...] "Governor Polis strongly agrees that slavery and forced servitude are wrong and illegal. The Department of Corrections does not engage in either and is always interested in how prison reforms can better ensure that this never occurs in Colorado. The Governor's Office is reviewing the judge's order to determine next steps."

So, they tooootaalllllyyyy didn't do slavery guys, they LOVE not doing slavery so so much, and they just always want to be making prisons even better so that all the slavery they aren't doing doesn't happen, and they are reviewing the orders given by the judge who ruled that they had broken the law about not doing slavery to ensure they will continue never having done slavery better in the future!

From that first NPR article, this professor put it pretty cleanly:

"It's not clear to me that in any state where that amendment was adopted, that the Departments of Corrections actually said, 'Oh, OK, it's our understanding that we will not force anybody to work again,'" she says.

This isn't just a "repeal the amendment" situation, we truly need some deep systemic and cultural change to actually abolish slavery once and for all (and all of the institutional civilizational forces that allow it to exist and be justified).

cosmicretreat

segamascott

titleknown

The Trump administration is cynically exploiting calls for stricter AI regulation to pass broad censorship measures at the federal level.

So, in terrible news, Trump's trying to pull some strings to pass this massive internet censorship bill, featuring all the kinds of internet censorship we're terrified of, including mandatory ID for accessing basically any website, specifically to crush state regulation of AI, because apparently this man will always see the moral bottom of the barrel and start digging.

So, if you live in the US and hate censorship and AI you know what to do, contact your congresspeople and tell them do not fucking dare let this through or so help us god...

kosher-salt

More direct source of concern

Congress and the White House are negotiating your online speech rights away. Tell lawmakers: reject KOSA, NO FAKES, and age-verification man

rfpreiwaphase

5calls has NOT updated to reflect this

6/14/2026

All of the bad internet bills. One website.

Call now. Call often. Get your Americans on the horn. 📞 Every time you call, 🐨 will hug you

battlecrazed-axe-mage

HBO Harry Potter is going to set records on an astronomical level, and I imagine more than half the people reblogging you are performative cowards and will watch it anyway directly on HBO. (I say that as anti HP and JKR). Pretending like it’s not going to be the most successful show in HBO’s history is insane and really underestimating it. Boycotts are not going to work because it is a tiny blip of people willing to do so. What do we when it is mega popular and people continue to love and enjoy her work?

So I wouldn't even answer this ask EXCEPT it's a fantastic example of someone who hates you and wants you to undermine your cause pretending to be on your side, so let's go through the points.

1.) Makes the assertion that you've already failed eight months in advance. Wants you to give up and give in because you think the cause is already lost.

2.) Implies that everyone else is secretly gonna do it, so you may as well too. Wants to chip away at your resolve.

3.) Claims to be on your side and therefore a trustworthy source.

4.) "Boycotts don't work." Demonstrably they do, as long as people are organized and persistent. Look at how Target and Starbucks are sweating and begging people to come back. Boycotts work.

If someone comes to you doing this shit, they are not your ally, they're trying to mess with you. They want you to fail. On the bright side, they're also often an indicator that your cause has gotten big enough that they're worried enough to go about it all underhandedly, so yay?

alivehouse

capitulism

The largest mass shooting in American history was a hate crime against gay people. Don’t ever forget that.

exmellivorinae

June 12, 2016. Putting a date on this for when it gets reblogged months from now by people who think the post is about something from 30, 40 years ago.

butch-reidentified

I am a survivor of the Pulse nightclub shooting, having grown up in Orlando and just turned 20 a month prior. If you didn’t know, there were several families who refused to claim the bodies of their relatives due to their sexuality. One family even had their relative’s name removed from the memorial. Murdered by the same hate with which their families reject them in both life and death.

Many, many people celebrated Pulse. We were told we deserved it. That it was God’s punishment for our sin of loving the same sex. We are sent messages like these I received in 2018:

We in the community often call the victim count 49+ to include the survivors who couldn’t live with the pain.

The event was never officially declared a hate crime or targeted homophobic attack and is rarely listed as one in databases.

At our vigils for those slaughtered, Extremist Christian groups showed up to protest, holding signs like this:

ID: Me kissing a woman I was casually seeing in front of an angry looking man with a “Sodomy is Sin” sign.

Please understand how much more than just a mass shooting this was. We are still to this day harassed and told we deserved it by some.

This year was the sixth anniversary. The first couple years I received dozens of messages checking in on me on 6/12. Year 5 got enough news coverage for people to think to reach out to me. This year it was my therapist, the woman I kissed in that photo, and a couple of other gun violence survivor friends. People are forgetting already.