Cat sounds compilation.
Don’t let the short duration of this video fool you - it is VERY good.
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@todancewithdeath
Cat sounds compilation.
Don’t let the short duration of this video fool you - it is VERY good.
Clone Wars AU where instead of chips, the clones are actually raised to be undercover as loyal soldiers knowing they'd betray the jedi ("traitors") on the order, and are all ready to complete their mission—
But uh. The jedi are really nice?? And kinda dumb??? And they reaaaally don't know how they survived this long when they are just so dumb and trusting and oh no they're attached.
There are many unfortunate realizations. The clones form a support group to rant about their stupid jetii because "—guys you don't understand he loses his lightsaber every two seconds and then smiles at me when I give it back and has decided since I have it so much I should know how to use it and this week he ordered chocolate for everyone what do I do—"
Bly be sitting in the corner, rocking because "Oh no she's hot"
Wolffe is sitting there holding in manly tears because Plo is a buir but he's a traitor but Plo is such a buir can he be my buir
Rex is like "listen I know Skywalker is supposed to be the one non-traitor of the bunch but like. He's crazy???? And the Commander is also crazy???? How am I supposed to keep up with them???? How much worse would they be without Kenobi????????? And I think Skywalker might actually murder us all if anyone touches the commander or Kenobi???????????"
And meanwhile Fox is all "I keep pulling this one weird jedi out of the dumpster and I can't get rid of him. How do I get rid of him, he's growing on me like mold and I hate it."
Meanwhile I cant decide if the Jedi know that somethings up with the clones and are keeping them close or if they just are genuinely like "man those guys are so great ❤️❤️❤️ I'd trust my life with them ❤️❤️❤️ if they don't tell me smth they def have a good reason ❤️❤️❤️"
SOMEBODY FUCKING SEDATE ME RIGHT NOW
[ID: a photo of a green garden as seen through a circular hole in a large wooden fence covered in vines. end ID]
so in my headcanon Tholme is like, the best teaching master ever. he’s super-dad, able to wrangle Quinlan when he’s full of jelly beans and also when he’s angry or grieving and his handle on the force is in shreds. when he is overstimulated and screaming, and when he is questioning the jedi teachings in ways that are hard to answer. He manages to teach him everything he needs to know to be the best Shadow and jedi and man he can be; even if he needs to learn it first in order to figure out how to teach it to his kid, and ensures that no matter what happens, and how much of a hard time Quinlan is having; he knows that he’s loved and supported, that he is tethered and grounded (deeply rooted) but not attached, and is just all around a great dad.
also, because Qui-Gon Jinn is trying to become one with the living Force or whatever, doesn’t wash regularly, and eats like a bird despite being built like a wooky; it’s Tholme who makes sure Padawan Obi-Wan knows how to stay clean and reasonably healthy on the go during missions, as well as at home; teaches him Shadow secrets about how to pack one’s cloak and belt pouches (or secret undercover pockets) for nearly any eventuality (including hold out blasters and knives), how to go undercover and not get made immediately, how to wash his hair, and makes sure he has enough to eat for a growing Stewjoni—because he’s already done all this research on Kiffu so he might as well look into Stewjon while he’s there. He also teaches him how to cook, and ends up being the one to give him the sex talk (though this time he makes sure T’ra Saa isn’t waiting in the wings to give him nightmares about Neti reproduction, like she did for Quinlan, lmao).
so basically what I’m saying is he basically half-dads Obi-Wan. mostly it’s because he cares about who Quinlan cares about; but a good 30% of it is because it irritates the fuck out of Qui-Gon Jinn, and Tholme loves giving that guy as much shit as possible. It’s his favourite hobby.
also my faceclaim for him is Danny trejo.
so basically what I’m saying is
while everyone in the galaxy sees Master Shadow Tholme like this:
Quinlan, Obi-Wan, Aayla and eventually Anakin see Tholme like this:
05.23 - Within the Waves
Weinhardt Mansion built in 1888 in Chicago, IL
Meeting Obi-Wan and Anakin for the first time, one might think they've got it all figured out.
Anakin Skywalker - Hero with no fear - the youngest Jedi General in the GAR, cocky and arrogant, sure of himself. One of the best pilots in the Order, a brilliant mechanic and a skilled warrior. He sure means trouble for his enemies and friends alike.
Obi-Wan Kenobi - the famed Negotiator - the first to defeat a Sith in a one-on-one battle in a millennium while not even being a Knight, he radiates calmness and quiet confidence, that assures all around him that nothing will go wrong with him in charge.
And obviously, Obi-Wan is the steady anchor to Anakin's wildness.
Most often, this is the impression that this famous pair gives to all who know them for no longer than thirty minutes of some fancy meeting.
And then something inevitably happens.
And a completely different side of them reveals.
Eloquent and suave Master Obi-Wan, who always looks collected and put together, who people think will give a look of disapproval to anyone who as much as implies something impolite, this Jedi Master - swears worse than a Spicer during a streak of bad luck in sabback.
And his shameless apprentice - the one who sasses Sith and Separatists alike, the one who is not afraid to dive head first into the thick of a battle - blushes every time, and scolds Obi-Wan in a high embarrassed voice.
When Cody first witnessed such a scene, he thought he was hallucinating. There is no way his dignified and ever-polite General will ever utter a phrase like 'brainless bantha-kriffing moron' into General Kleeve's face before hitting him square in the jaw.
It can't be that Obi-Wan will toss his lightsaber towards Cody and throw himself into hand-to-hand combat. And be a street fighter to boot! He even bites!
For Rex, he thought it was some convoluted plan to mislead the Separatists.
Because it's impossible for his General to cast a look of such indignation when he hears his Master mutter curses under his breath after their squad got caught up in an ambush.
Rex didn't even know Anakin's ears could flush such a vivid red color. Or what he blushes down his neck.
He also didn't expect him to be such a lightweight. Anakin literally gets drunk just by getting a wiff of something vaguely alcoholic. Rex lost count of how many times he had to drag Anakin back into his quarters after some kind of diplomatic mission. This was not something the Longnecks had trained them for. Rex definitely hadn't been prepared for it.
Or to see General Kenobi drink twelve of his brothers under the table without even batting an eye. While wearing Force blocking cuffs!
It was a little disturbing. But also weirdly soothing.
The Jedi have always been somewhat separated from the rest of the Galaxy. Their powers and abilities were frightening, making all around forget that they were also just people, that they had feelings and fears.
But watching an outraged Anakin chastise Obi-Wan after yet another tough battle helped to remember that.
And also made Cody and Rex's pockets fuller.
After all, there was no way Master Kenobi will ever swear, or Anakin Skywalker will ever proclaim his love to his droid after only one sip of moonshine.
Absolutely no way.
Now I would appreciate a fic where Anakin Skywalker just kills Palpatine on accident. I was watching revenge of the sith and through the whole sequence of Obi-wan and Anakin saving Palpatine from the ship I was thinking: “Anakin is waving his damn sabre EVERYWHERE it’s a miracle he hasn’t hit something on accident” and then bam: idea.
In Anakin’s defence there’s a LOT going on so like it’s not his FAULT that he wasn’t looking where he was slicing and the next thing he knows Palpatine’s head is no longer on his shoulders but rolling down some flight of stairs and Anakin just sort of,, pees himself a little.
“Oh. Shit.”
A whole mile away Mace Windu is sitting in his quarters and suddenly the migraine in the back of his head disappears and he’s like “whoa.” And then jokingly is like “who had to be sacrificed for that damn ache to finally go away.” Turns out!
Obi-wan, through a holo-call, (with Anakin skywalker furiously sobbing and heaving through snot and coughs in the background): hey so, we should look into getting Skywalker some ADHD medication.
The Jedi council: why? What has happened?
Obi-Wan: just a little loss of focus, it happens to the best of us.
This is top tier comedy
Love the idea of collective Jedi parenting. Like technically I only have one padawan but my friends' padawans are also coincidentally my padawans. My padawan’s friends are also my padawans. This padawan who got separated from their master? My padawan today. This other padawan who needs to learn to pilot but their master is afraid of flying? Now my padawan twice a week.
love the co-opting of padawans and jedi order as a family and community!!!
younger Padawans (tweens/young teens) thinking newly knighted jedi (objective disasters in their early twenties) are so Cool and Competent and asking to tag along with them on missions. meanwhile the poor knights are fumbling and sweating to keep track of these adorable kids who can and Will launch themselves off of rooftops
temple guards "helping" and "covering" for padawans trying to "sneak out". their masters know exactly where they're going but the illusion is fun for the kids and funnier for their masters who get to watch their adorably poor attempts at lying
a master-padawan duo getting an off-world mission and having to face a dozen padawans showing up at their door shamelessly asking to tag along for the educational experience 🥺. knights with padawans and masters gain a lot of experience facing down the cutest and most dangerous doe eyes
padawans doing the jedi equivalent of "mom said no so i'll ask dad! 😃". except there are a lot more jedi masters, so they go from their master to their grandmaster to their friend's master to their other friend's master to master yoda to master-
"i don't like the refectory food and my master can't cook so I go over to master jacobi's rooms for dinner. he always makes extra anyway." master jacobi ends up cooking food from his homeworld for all the padawans at least once a week (and some knights...and a few masters)
much older masters with fully grown padawans who've flown the nest not having a moment's peace either.
former padawans, now middle-aged, popping by. their grandpadawans feeling completely free to show up anytime. their former padawans roll their eyes at how much their old masters indulge their grandpadawans and the younglings and padawans at the temple. every decade they look forward to getting to know new and unfamiliar younglings and padawans showing up at their doors wanting a chaperone, help with their jedi homework, or to simply meditate together.
Thought you might appreciate this gem that popped up in my self care app today
It's almost like George Lucas didn't make this up to show that the Jedi were actually bad guys and in fact it's an important mental health practice! Who knew?
It's almost like emotional regulation and having your shit together is a good thing???
I made these as a way to compile all the geographical vocabulary that I thought was useful and interesting for writers. Some descriptors share categories, and some are simplified, but for the most part everything is in its proper place. Not all the words are as useable as others, and some might take tricky wording to pull off, but I hope these prove useful to all you writers out there!
(save the images to zoom in on the pics)
Sun Tzu is so fucking funny to me because for his time he was legitimately a brilliant tactician but a bunch of his insight is shit like "if you think you might lose, avoid doing that", "being outnumbered is bad generally", and "consider lying."
My personal favourite is his lengthy lecture on the subject of Supplies Being Very Important I Cannot Stress Enough The Importance Of Protecting Your Supply Lines But Also Supply Lines Are Expensive As Shit So Steal The Enemy’s Supplies At Every Opportunity.
via- @elidyce
One of the more important things to consider about any historical work is the audience it was published for. The Art Of War was aimed at fancy nobles high on philosophy with little practical military experience who were nonetheless leading armies.
Sun Tzu, after desperatly trying to explain extremely basic logic to a bunch of upper-class twits, basically sat down and wrote the most elaborate "As per my last email" ever
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“Writing all Races Equally”, Problems Inherent In That Attitude
@missdrarrydawn asked:
Hi! I recently joined a very diverse writing group in order to learn more about other races and ethnicities from people living those experiences so that I can include diversity in my own writing in a healthy, balanced way, and it has been a lot of fun, but then yesterday there was a conflict which resulted in me getting removed from the group. Most of the POC in the group are from the USA, but I’ve grown up in, and still live in, a small European country, so A LOT of the negative tropes and stereotypes about POC that are deeply rooted in the USA are things that are basically non-existent where I live (mostly because there’s not really any people of color living here). I had always been under the assumptions that POC characters are best written just as regular people with emotions and struggles and relationships etc., not reduced to just their race and treated more special/more negative for the color of their skin. They’re just normal people after all.
My idea had been to write POC characters the same way I would write my white characters, with the same respect and depth and not treat their skin color as something special or exotic or anything like that. However, when I expressed that to the writing group, a lot of the people there got very upset with me, telling me that the way I viewed writing POC was disrespectful and that I couldn’t write any POC characters or POC coded characters the same way as white people because they are inherently different and therefore must be written in different ways. I could see I’d hurt a lot of the other writers from the group, and I tried to apologize but the damage had been done. Now obviously I’m not going to sit here and say they are all wrong and I am right, but I do wonder if this is a widely held opinion, because in my head, all races are equal and I wouldn’t have ever given writing one race more thought or care over another until this experience made me question that.
Is the idea that POC characters have to be written with more care than a white character and treated better or with more respect or thought because of all the racism in real life a stance held by the majority or could this be a product of centuries of racism and oppression that caused a lot of POC people to request that they be written with so much more compassion than anyone else because of frustrations of never receiving equal treatment and finally being sick of it? I do want to clarify though that this wouldn’t apply to writing about a culture or religion, because those are very special and sacred things that I will always do a lot of research on before attempting to write about, here I’m just talking about writing POC characters on their own, not related to a culture or a religion, although I realize as I write this that that might be an issue all of its own, but that’s something for me to reflect on and ask about another day because this is getting really long and I don’t want it to get any longer. I know this isn’t a directlywriting related question and I apologize, but you have an amazing writing blog with a lot of perspective and thought put into it so asking you guys was my first thought after I’d gotten kicked out. Thank you for your time :)))
WWC Note: this ask has been edited down to just the points we’re replying to:
Colourblindness
The attitude you hold is called “colorblindness” and it’s a problem for multiple reasons, the primary one being:
White is not the default emotional experience of the world, and assuming we’re all the same is the biggest way ignorance-based racism persists.
When you begin to assume that everyone has a generally similar life path that’s only faintly informed by race, you ignore everything that shapes a person. You currently view your own white experience as the default that anyone has the potential to live if they have the same class, gender, sexual orientation, religion (including cultural religion), and education as you.
But this is a fallacy, and a person’s race will modify everything they have experienced even if they are identical to you in every other way. You say that you would never disrespect a person’s culture, but even when you live under a single unified culture, you will often create a new culture based off your racialized experience. Race and culture are often interlinked.
The thing about marginalized groups is, we have assimilation pressures. Native people have been forced to live like white people for centuries, and it’s resulted in a lot of bloodshed. A lot of critique of the adoption system is about how white saviour-y it is, and how much trans-racial adoptees (aka, adoptees that are different races and cultures from their adopted parents) suffer either because their white parents refuse to participate in their culture, or assume that because the child of colour is from a white family in a white-majority area, they won’t experience racism because, somehow by the virtue of having white parents, they’ll magically get access to white privilege.
Aka, it’s traumatizing. Very traumatizing. Even if you weren’t directly being assimilated, the trauma just… lingers. It’s generational. Your body remembers, your bloodline remembers.
And the impact of writing colourblind is: a lot of PoC will feel assimilated into white society, when society already tells you that you should assimilate, and it hurts. One of my biggest points in writing diverse characters is: you have to be careful you’re not re-skinning your own values onto a different skin tone. Remember how I said culture and race are often interlinked, even in a diverse area? This is part of it.
Equity vs Equality
There’s a concept in social justice: equality vs equity. Equality forces everyone to be the same, while equity accounts for their differences. This comic illustrates: Equity vs equality vs justice.
For example, equality is having everyone wear the same sized hat. But if you have thicker, fluffier hair (either curly or coiled) then your hair won’t fit in the hat. As a result, many PoC (especially Black) are forced to wear their hair much shorter, because their hair won’t fit in the required hat. This is assimilation
Equity would acknowledge that people have a right to wear their hair however they want, and has multiple sized hats available for people of all different hair textures to wear. They might all be in the same colours or style, so you can tell they’re all from the same place, but they are varied and allow people the freedom of self expression. This is equity that results in actual equality, because it allows everyone the same level of freedom of self expression with their hair.
Intersectionality
Writing from a colorblind perspective is the fastest way to hamstring any research efforts for where to put equity, because you are assuming sameness and therefore not researching. Your assumption when writing any sort of character of colour should be assuming difference, because everyone—white people included—have a racialized experience.
This is the principle of intersectionality: that the mixing of any race with anything else will produce a unique experience. A Black Muslim will experience the world differently than an Arab Muslim, and both will experience the world differently from a white Muslim. A Native woman will experience the world differently than a Persian woman. A white trans man will have a wildly different experience than a Chinese diaspora trans man.
They will share similarities, yes, because people are people and anything shared will produce some sameness between experiences. But if you assume that the white experience is the default, you’ll miss all of those intersections and write something inauthentic. The amount of sameness is probably a lot less than you think of on first pass. And then on pass twenty, you’ll realize a bunch of similarities you probably never considered.
It is not reducing people to their race when you acknowledge that race influences every part of your life. It is respecting their unique experience as a person of colour.
Racial Influence
So yes, it is a commonly held view that you should write characters of colour as being deeply influenced by their race, because their race influences everything about them. This isn’t even getting into how a lot of things white people assume are constants aren’t; emotions, gender, sexual orientation, mental illness* and emotional expressions are all culturally influenced.
Racism has existed for five hundred odd years (since the concept of race was invented for European colonialist ends), but xenophobia has existed ever since people have existed. As soon as you are Other, you have a different experience than the dominant culture. You’ll probably make a new culture, or will have already had a new culture that made you the Other.
Assuming we’re all the same, while it looks kind-hearted, is actually the fastest way to invalidate everyone around you. It closes your ears to hearing about difference. Yes, we are all people, yes we all have feelings and likes and dislikes and interests and we can share many, many, many things. But our relationship to those things will still be influenced by where we came from.
A person who listened to a certain band to survive a terrible time in their life will have a much different relationship to that band than someone whose parents were fans of them so they associate it with happy times. If you can understand the difference between those two people, and realize you should write their internal lives while listening to the same song differently because of that different experience, you can understand the difference that race and culture will produce in response to the same stimulus.
~ Mod Lesya
* a cross-cultural study of schizophrenia showed that in two non-Western cultures (Accra, Ghana; and Chennai, India) auditory hallucinations aren’t seen as scary, and are instead seen as ancestors helping guide. This positive-to-neutral view of voices was not found in the American population of schizophrenics, who universally found the voices bad and destructive, indicating there is a strong cultural component to views of your mental illness even if you experience the same symptoms.
Placing Care
As to why you need to put more care into writing characters of color than you would white characters: it’s not because people of color want to be treated better in fiction out of some sort of affirmative action to make up for the racism we experience in real life. It’s because it’s always more difficult, on a writing skill level, to write about things that you aren’t familiar with, than about things you know well.
This principle applies to a lot of things. If you’re writing a story set in a location you’ve never been to before, it will require you to put in a lot more work to write it accurately than if it was set in your hometown. Same for a story set in a time period you don’t know well, versus a contemporary story. Or for a story about a character who has a highly specialized job you know nothing about.
Skill and Difficulty Levels
Think of it as a difficulty setting in a video game. The more you add variables that you are unfamiliar with, the more you’re raising the difficulty level. Writing a story set in your home town in the present day with characters who share your background and life experiences is playing on easy mode. (There’s nothing wrong with playing on easy mode. In fact, until your skill level increases, I recommend it.) Writing a story set in the 12th century on a different continent with characters who are nothing like you? That’s a lot harder. And will require a lot more effort, and care, and research. If you go about it carelessly, you’re bound to get things wrong, and the story won’t be very good.
This also applies to writing characters of color as a white person. Especially as a white person who has little to no interactions with people of color in your daily life.
You wouldn’t assume “well, 12th century South Africa is basically the same as present-day Europe,” right? Even if you don’t know how exactly it’s different, you assume the differences exist, and you put in the care and effort and research necessary to learn about them before writing. Similarly, don’t assume writing characters of color is basically the same as writing white characters. You might not understand what the differences are, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. It just means you can’t see them, and need to put in the work to learn about them.This is why you need to write your characters of color with more care than your white characters. It’s because there’s more that you don’t know, and it will be more difficult to get it right.
Authors of color aren’t exempt from this, by the way. Whenever we write characters whose background we don’t share and aren’t intimately familiar with, we need to put in more care than we would writing about characters who are just like us. It’s a question of competency. You have to be aware of what you don’t know, and be willing to put in the work to learn, in order to do right by your characters.
People and Culture
Lastly, I want to draw your attention to this sentence in your ask: “I’m just talking about writing POC characters on their own, not related to a culture or a religion.” You said yourself that you realized as you were writing it there might be something wrong with this way of thinking, and you were right. Nobody exists outside of culture. Unless you’re writing characters who got their memories wiped before getting dropped on an isolated, uninhabited planet, they have a culture. They have been immersed in culture since the day they were born, and that has shaped who they are. You have a culture that has shaped you, and if you don’t think about it as culture, it’s because you’re so immersed in it that it’s invisible to you. And so you assume your cultural background is just what “normal” is, and you expect everyone to share it by default. Anything that deviates from it sticks out to you as “culture”, while everything that aligns itself with it is just the way things are. This is flawed thinking, and you only start realizing it when you become exposed to other people’s “normal” and notice how those are different from yours.
- Mod Niki
Historical Context for Colorblindness
A little background on colorblindness: It’s a deeply ingrained philosophy in Western spheres that emerged over the latter half of the 20th Century, with the Civil Rights Movement in the US and other activist movements providing a push to view people equally. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s quote from his I Have A Dream speech, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” is a major backbone of the approach. Most of the people that preach this philosophy tend to have grown up in white-majority suburban areas, which shapes the culture surrounding race very differently from non-white majority areas.
From a racial-ethnic socialization (R-ES) standpoint, it typically emerges in children aged 2-5, as this is when they first start encountering children who look different from them–their parents tell them to treat everyone nicely and that it doesn’t matter what they look like. Psychologically, it changes attitudes towards race and reduces general capability of understanding the differences in experience based on race, like Lesya said before. Many adolescents discovering their own opinions on race can run into this barrier when confronting their biases and struggle with their conception of race in the absence of encouraged discussion of race and its related issues.
Internal Bias Because of Colorblindness
Racial Colorblindness can limit understanding of intersectional issues such as wealth inequality, sexism, queerphobia, etc., as race affects every part of a person’s life. One’s ability to empathize on common issues can also be affected. This approach to socialization affects perception of facets of identity in most respects. Many believe that they judge entirely based on merit or behavior, even when their unconscious bias proves otherwise.
Even though it’s really only been super widespread since the 60s/70s-ish, it’s everywhere in Western media. After the popularization of the approach, the representation of various groups and the messaging spread about race began to reflect it. This continued to the point where it’s being socialized into people of all races beyond the normal parental racial-ethnic socialization. It can affect how children of color approach racism and discrimination before learning coping skills. It can lead to isolation from their culture of origin because they struggle to reconcile the very real issues they see in their communities with their upbringing. In recent years the approach has started to fade, but its legacy remains, and the ill effects can be combated through education and extended R-ES.
Writing characters with a colorblind eye means that character is probably not going to reflect actual experiences, and if the goal is representation, that isn’t going to cut it.
~ Mod Abhaya
Published Nov 2021
Respectfully, I’d like to offer up a different point of view regarding colorblindness for anyone who might be interested in reading:
I’m an Asian American woman. The daughter of 1st generation immigrants (without money 😩) I was raised in a predominantly first generation immigrant community where English was not our first language, and where our community was heavily entrenched in our Asian cultural traditions.
In short, I think it is overwhelmingly fair to say that the community I grew up in was not one that any sociologist would consider “assimilated” to white culture.
Not by a longshot.
And while I read what these mods believe about colorblindness (and everything else they touched on), respectfully:
These beliefs are not rooted in objective, immutable facts.
The opinions expressed by these mods are just that - opinions. They are opinions borne from a specific type of worldview, based on a particular ideology.
Of course, these mods have every right to hold and freely express these opinions in whatever capacity they choose.
But that does not mean their opinions reflect the sole truth; nor does it mean that their opinions apply to all people of color.
Because they certainly don’t apply to me, or any other person of color I know in real life.
“Racial Colorblindness can limit understanding of intersectional issues such as wealth inequality, sexism, queerphobia, etc., as race affects every part of a person’s life.”
I respectfully disagree.
Race has not, and does not, affect “every part of my life”.
My identity and the trajectory of my life has not, and does not, hinge on the color of my skin because that is only one part of who I am. And given that it is a trait that I was born with and had no control over, I consider it one of my least interesting characteristics.
And let me tell you: I am an interesting person (at least, I think so 😅).
So if an author was writing about me, I’d hope that they’d write about all the insane shit I did to get through school.
I’d hope that they’d write about my professional life, and why I chose the career path I did.
I’d hope that they’d write about the mentors I’ve had and their incredible stories; the friends I’ve made in every country and every city I’ve lived in; the languages I’ve tried (and failed) to learn 🤦🏻♀️; the food I love to eat; the music I enjoy; the wildest wedding I’ve ever been to; how many times I’ve been a bridesmaid; and the things I value and the people I love the most.
In short: I would hope that they’d write about my CHARACTER.
My flaws, my strengths, and how I behave when nobody is looking.
All of those things that make up who I am, and the life I am trying to build for myself, and the life I have lived to date were not solely predicated by the color of my skin.
They were largely dictated by my character: the good, the bad and the ugly.
So, @missdrarrydawn - if you ever read this, I hope you’ll be reminded that just like there are many religions that people worship (ideologies based on things we cannot see; that are not based in any immutable facts), there are also different worldviews and opinions when it comes to race.
I know it seems like most of woke!Tumblr and anyone in a western university setting these days fiercely espouses race essentialism: a worldview where one views EVERYTHING through the lens of race.
But please believe me when I say - there are plenty of people of color who do NOT espouse that worldview.
In the real world - outside of Tumblr, Twitter, or any of these woke! US-centric digital activist spaces: there are plenty of regular folks who do not wake up every morning and formulate every thought or opinion through the prism of race.
There are plenty of people of color (such as myself) who would rather focus on our common humanity, and would hope that an author trying to portay them and their experiences would focus who they are as individuals, rather than agonizing over this, that or whatever based solely on the color of their skin.
I think the brilliant Ayishat Akanbi said it best:
“Despite popular beliefs, I’d prefer it if you didn’t consider my race, gender, sexuality while speaking with me as I’m interested in your honesty, not your approval.”
xoxo, Birk
Published Nov 12, 2021