dam…….. that website “you feel like shit” (it’s like a questionnaire / troubleshooting guide for when you feel like shit) really works………………….. im not even all the way thru it and i even half-assed a lot of the suggestions and i already feel loads better
Jewish baby named Edgardo Mortara is seemingly about to die in Bologna, 1851
Catholic nanny secretly baptises him to save his soul, which she’s not exactly the kind of authority who can do that, but w/e, it’s interpreted by the church as valid later
Kid survives
1857 her secret gets out, a baptising makes a kid a Catholic according to the Church and a Catholic can’t be raised in a non-Catholic household in the Papal States, so the church authorises the police to kidnap Edgardo from his family
Raised personally by Pope Pius IX, Jewish family not allowed to take him back due to Church doctrine, this action destroys the family with grief and despair
This case gets international infamy with the Pope not understanding why everyone’s shiting on him for doing this, including allies
Emperor Napoleon III shifts from opposing Italian unification to supporting it as a direct consequence
Bologna falls the next year, 1859
Kingdom of Italy forms 1861
By 1870 Rome is lost to the Italians and the Papal States are no more
(Edgardo Mortara goes on to become Father Mortara)
(He dies in Belgium in 1940 three months before the Nazis occupied the nation, which if he’d have lived he would’ve been persecuted as a Jew)
Fun fact: the Catholic Church did not stop doing this after Edgaro Mortara. During WW2, many Jewish children were put in convents or catholic-run orphanages for their own safety. Sounds nice right? Except after the war ended, when parents or surviving relative went back to claim their children, the church went, “uhhh, actually they’re catholic now, no take backs!”
The most infamous of these cases was the Finaly affair. Two Jewish children in France, Robert and Gerald Finaly, were placed in a Catholic nursery in 1944 in anticipation of their parents being deported to Auschwitz, where they were both murdered. Their aunt, Marguerite Fischel, survived the war and went to find the boys so she could take them to live with her. However, the nun who had custody of the boys, Antoinette Brun, adamantly refused to give them up, reportedly saying that “The Jews are not grateful”
What followed was a years long custody battle where despite being repeatedly ordered by courts all over Europe to return the boys, Brun took them to many different countries and hid them, with the support and help of other nuns and priests. It was suspected at the time, and later confirmed by documents released in 2020, that Pope Pius XII had supported the effort to keep the boys away from their surviving family and have them be raised Catholic.
Thankfully, after negotiations between a sympathetic cardinal in France and the chief Rabbi of Paris, the boys were finally recovered and reunited with their aunt.
Documents reveal the private discussions behind both Pope Pius XII’s silence about the Nazi deportation of Rome’s Jews in 1943 and the Vatic
I wish I could say that the phenomenon of the Catholic Church kidnapping children and keeping them away from their families for the purposes of forcefully raising them Catholic is unique to Jews, but it’s not. From the mid nineteenth century to the mid twentieth century, the Church ran hundreds of residential schools in the US and Canada where indigenous children were kidnapped from their homes and forced into these cruel and inhumane “schools”. The children were forbidden from speaking their own languages or practicing their own cultures and religions, their hair was cut, and they were subject to emotional, verbal, spiritual, physical, and sexual abuse. Many of the children died due to malnutrition or medical neglect, their bodies buried like dogs beside the schools. The Catholic Church was not the only Church to participate in this, but they’ve been the most reluctant to fully acknowledge and apologize for it. It was only in 2022 that Pope Francis apologized on behalf of the Catholic Church for their part, but some people found the apology inadequate.
Idk what my point is here, just that there’s such a clean link between evangelizing, cultural/religious imperialism, and how damaging and horrifying a religion can be when it is thoroughly convinced of its own superiority. And that unless an institution is forced to change, it probably won’t change on its own.
fighting for my fucking life in the work gc because nobody else has curly hair. freaky ted why have you done this to me.
and that marg was good because my boss made a comment i didn’t care for on the monday of that week so i overserved everybody by at least a shot to haemorrhage stock. there was no skill involved i out enough tequila in that to end Your bloodline freaky ted
“Because the truth is, tech doesn’t have an image problem. It doesn’t have a message problem. It has an intention problem. What’s wrong with the axe murderer who broke into my house is not that he hasn’t successfully persuaded me to buy into his narrative. What’s wrong is that he’s trying to kill me with an axe. Similarly, when you launch a product that’s designed to put millions of people out of work, block access to sources of verifiable truth, replace human creativity with slop, and lower the barriers to every sort of atrocity, the problem isn’t that you haven’t told the public a good story about those things. The problem is that you are trying to do them.”
For those who don't remember, here's the lawsuit two years ago where Tumblr (or specifically Automattic) settled with the New York City Commission on Human Rights regarding Tumblr's terribly implemented porn ban targeting LGBTQ folk more than it should. Here's an excerpt detailing what the NYCCHR ordered Tumblr to do:
The settlement gives Tumblr 180 days to hire an expert on sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) issues and provide related training to moderators. It must also hire someone with experience in this area as well as expertise in image classification, who will review Tumblr’s moderation algorithms to see if they’re more likely to flag LGBTQ content. As part of an overall review, Tumblr will reexamine 3,000 old cases where a user successfully appealed a takedown, looking for patterns that could indicate bias.
Now, on a totally unrelated note, here's the complaint page for reporting discrimination to the NYCCHR. Completely unrelated to what's going on right now or the rest of this post, I swear.
btw i just submitted a bare-bones basic bitch report to them. it was actually easier than submitting one to tumblr and took less than a minute. If you want to take longer and add more details, you absolutely can, but you can also just shoot one off really quickly. Highly recommend you give it a try.
*takes you, fellow white American queer person by the hands* Because of your race you still occupy a space in our White Supremacist society that values you and your life more than a Black person. Yes, even cishet Black people.
There is a reason why legislation and social pushback is typically focused on preventing you from coming out, preventing you from transitioning from the start, or detransitioning and/or closeting you. That is state violence, but the state is hoping you will either do the dirty work yourself (suicide) or fall in line with the White Supremacist Patriarchal gender roles it expects of you (closeting/detransition). I know that is bad. It's abysmal. It's awful. We are not here to downplay the violence that happens broadly to queer people at the hands of the government.
However, under White Supremacy, as a white queer person, you can be "saved" from the "lifestyle choice" you have "made". We're in a country dominated by Christian savior complexes, conversion therapy is a regrowing industry, the laws targeting us are laws of restriction, laws of "prevention". White queer people are a "problem" to be "solved" by trying to "save" us from ourselves so we can reintegrate into broader white, Christian society alongside other white people. We need to be "corrected" and "saved" because our whiteness is still valuable to Christian, Patriarchal, White Supremacy.
White Supremacist state violence in the United States murders Black infants on the false allegation that their mothers are stealing diapers. White Supremacist state violence murders Black children for playing with toy airsoft guns. White Supremacist state violence murders Black women for experiencing a mental health crisis. White Supremacist state violence murders Black men on the unproven allegation that they used a counterfeit $20 bill. White Supremacist state violence murders Black people for simply existing in their homes. Kohen Wiley, Tamir Rice, Sonya Massey, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Roger Fortson. The list could go on because just existing while Black is dangerous under White Supremacy.
Your analysis of your own place in society as a queer person is incomplete without this analysis. It is not enough to say "well trans WoC have it harder than me but cishet people all have it easier" because that is incomplete and ignorant at best and flat out wrong and racist at worst. Why do trans WoC, particularly Black trans women struggle and experience so much violence in our country? Why does that violence happen? You can't just say "because they're transgender and they're women and they aren't white" and leave it at that. What are the institutions, the power structures, the long standing histories of violence and subjugation at play here? Why is it dangerous for someone to exist as a Black person, everything else aside, in the first place? Why and how does your whiteness protect you where their Blackness creates a target for them and how do the systems around you exploit that and target you differently on a material level?
Think more complexly about race and become more anti-racist now!
I think Black feminist writers have many useful things to say for anyone reblogging this. :) Kimberlé Crenshaw writes extensively about the exact theory of intersectionality being discussed here, probably most famously in her article “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color.”
some other mostly well-known texts by Black writers that may be useful here:
Audre Lorde’s “The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House”
The Combahee River Collective Statement
less well-known but really useful: Angela Davis and Jane Elliott in conversation on race and privilege
and, how to use all this work: bell hooks’ “Theory as Liberatory Practice”
several of these authors were or are lesbians or queer and those who ever commented on trans experience were or are trans allies (to my knowledge), therefore specifically relevant to this post. :)
two extras:
this 1975 conversation between James Baldwin and Maya Angelou is much clipped and GIF’d (you’ll probably recognize the imagery if you’ve been on tumblr for any length of time) but I actually don’t know if I’ve ever seen a link to the full thing before - enjoy; it’s beautiful and worth watching
Tema Okun’s From White Racist to White Anti-Racist Ladder, a step-by-step resource designed for white allies who want to do what OP is telling them to do but need help figuring out how to manage their defensiveness/emotional reactions to trying to learn to become anti-racist and unlearning the structural racism in which they have been raised. these reactions are not something we have to be terribly ashamed of (in fact, shame can make us dig our heels into our racist behavior, so learning to forgive ourselves and behave differently is an important part of unlearning racism). feeling defensive is a totally normal part of unlearning racist patterns and white supremacy, just like it’s a normal part of unlearning any kind of privileged pattern we hold. what matters most is that we do our best to keep trying and not to push our emotional reactions onto the people around us and the people we love who are impacted and oppressed by white supremacy.
together, every day, we can work against white supremacy :)
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