#if they care they will read the facts and the words of their bipoc followers and make a decision based on that

[literaticat]

With parents/guardians regulating  (I hate the word but I think it's accurate) what they want kids to have access to, it makes libraries and the poor librarians have to fall in line and carry what only certain parents 'approve of' (to the detriment of us all). And publishers and writers might not take chances on books they know might be banned or challenged. 

Sooo how much power/influence do publishers really have? I mean in society and pop culture, I guess. I feel like publishers are beholden to everyone no matter what side of the political spectrum you fall on. 

And that old adage 'if you try to please everyone you will please no one' is starting to really be the truth. The recent Scholastic fiasco comes to mind.

(so sorry in advance this turned into a lengthy rant that doesn't answer the question) (but then again, I am not even sure I get what the question part is, so OH WELL, strap in for some book ban talk!)

A very small minority of unhinged, ridiculous parents and horrific politicians are actually trying to ruin schools and libraries for everyone. I mean:

Louisiana has current legislation that would criminalize libraries joining the American Library Association. (ie, yes, a librarian could be ARRESTED AND SENTENCED TO TWO YEARS HARD LABOR what the actual fuck???)

Utah has a law that allows any district to pull any book that any other district has pulled

Florida "moms for liberty" (LOL - FU) are trying to have librarians arrested -- Again and again -- etc etc --

I could keep going but I actually have to work at my job THWARTING BOOK BANNERS today!

So just for what it's worth -- I don't think most librarians want to or are "falling in line" and bowing to these parents. Librarians, hopefully, want to make a library that has a collection of material that will best serve all their patrons. And it truly is a very small number of patrons that launch these bizarre campaigns against books.

They do have budgets though, which are also being slashed in many cases, and obviously if they know that their particular community leans toward a certain mindset, they might make choices that reflect that when curating their collection, sure. But yeah -- all the librarians I know are big fans of free speech and freedom to read, and are willing to go to bat for that -- that's why some places are going so far as to pass LITERAL LAWS against librarians, because short of that, librarians are tough to stop!

I would say, too -- Publishers are not trying to "avoid bans" (I mean they aren't ENCOURAGING them either obviously!) -- but in my experience, they simply don't think that way when deciding what to acquire. They can't, because the fact is, it doesn't MATTER what the book is about. A book doesn't have to have "scandalous content" for people to want to ban it -- PICTURE BOOKS are being taken off shelves -- books with themes like embracing your own beauty. Or making stew with neighbors. Lots of times books are challenged for pretty blatantly racist reasons -- no reason at all, actually, other than a BIPOC person wrote it so it must have "critical race theory" (???) in it. For reals.

(Also -- these "banners" / "moms for liberty" aren't READING the books. It is a few people using canned language that somebody else came up with to paper objections to books across districts where they don't even have children. I'd argue that whoever is pulling the strings here doesn't actually even care about ANY of this -- they are using some batshit people who have too much time on their hands to just heap school districts and public libraries with challenges about every last thing because they want it to become so difficult and annoying that the librarians and library boards just give up. They want all libraries and schools to be privatized. I dunno - follow the money.)

Ugh. Again -- this is probably not answering your question??? Sorry, and I really do have to stop typing now. I guess my point is :

Publishers are beholden, in some cases, to their shareholders -- but really, to readers at the end of the day -- most readers want freedom to read and the free exchange of ideas and freedom of speech, etc -- those are the people who pay for books -- so that's who publishers cater to.

Librarians are mostly pretty staunch advocates for free speech and freedom to read, and publishers are supporting them as well.

Writers hopefully, same!

(In the case of the "Scholastic Fiasco" -- Scholastic wasn't trying to bow to nasty parents, exactly -- they were trying to protect the educators who might get harassed, fired, or potentially arrested by those nasty parents. Unfortunately, as you say, it blew up, because you can't have it both ways, etc etc.)

I really do have to go now sorry I couldn't solve book banning this morning :-/

[hussyknee]

Every time I think white and Western leftists can't disappoint me more, they prove me wrong.

Y'all memefied the threat of war with Iran following the assassination of Soleimani, the Australian wildfires that razed Aboriginal communities to the ground, Black Lives Matter, the fall of Afghanistan, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and Putin, and the mass protests in Sri Lanka. The No Fly List has been leaked for the first time since 2014, showing that the majority of it are in there for the crime of having Muslim and Russian names, taking part in anti-war protests and being a child while Muslim. And now y'all have started merchandising the memes?

Every single time we point out that the suffering of diasporas and the Global South is not yours to joke about, we are inundated with screeching about how y'all need them to '''''cope'''' with having woken up to the fact that other people have been living in a fascist dystopia, that memes spread "awareness", that it's unfair to take the jokes to mean you don't care, and "we can be concerned about two things at once". Meanwhile, the jokes and memes and white coping drown out the voices of BIPoC and Eastern Europeans almost entirely. Then you forget all about us and eventually say that nothing we did made any difference, fighting the state is hopeless, and meme some more.

At this point I can only imagine that you wander into random people's funerals, crack jokes about the dead guy to his family and sell funeral t-shirts in exchange for telling everyone else that they're dead. "Well why can't we celebrate and uplift queer people?" – you mean white and Western queer people, because it's sure as hell not our queer people who're getting profiled and bombed and starved.

"That's not my experience of what we did" – we do not care. Your experience of your own actions, of how events unfolded for you and of our hurt and our suffering is utterly irrelevant. You do not get a say on whether you're hurting us. You don't get to police our tone and wording and anger. You don't get to weigh in with your white guilt and white defensiveness and Western and white privilege and pathological need to be the Main Character in every situation. "Why is this so guilt-tripping" that's your white guilt, Karen. The fact that you only just woke up to all the ways you've been asleep is your white privilege. Your inability to boost our voices and center us without any commentary and not speak for us is white supremacy. Your consistent focus on valorizing activists and advocates and centering white saviours is white supremacy. Your making money and fame off "raising awareness" and "educating" other people about our suffering is capitalist exploitation and white supremacy. You are not living through a "major historical event", we are. Every damn day.

Those of you who don't behave like this will never chime in and tell your racist fellows "hey stop that, that's fucked up! That's racist! Shut up!" You dont look for resources yourself, dont accept that maybe we can't provide solutions every time we raise concerns, that maybe your allyship should be about self-reflection and learning how to handle your own emotions without taking up all the air in a room.

This shit is fucking constant. Every single time. We are suffocating. Even with all of that, do you have any idea of the amount of patience and understanding and forebearance we have tried to give you?

Edit: btw the trans femme of colour who uses it/its pronouns that said "please stop memeing about our very serious issue, go read these sources, pay attention to this bill, if you care then act like it"? Y'all sent it so much racist hate that it had to deactivate. But yeah, y'all care about queer people. Lmao.

#racism #white supremacy #anti-blackness #white privilege #western imperialism #usamerican imperialism #social justice #colonialism #capitalism #holy fucking bingle #no fly list #war in ukraine #black lives matter #climate change #climate justice #sri lanka protests #war on terror #police state #fascism #white people #western leftists #current events #us politics #eastern europe #global south #knee of huss

[teruthecreator]

anyway friendly reminder that you need to hold the funny internet men whose content you consume accountable, no matter how much u enjoy their work 

critical thinking and perception does not mean hate, either. you can be justifiably critical of a creator’s silence while also being a consumer of their content. accountability is how we make sure these people don’t get crazy w power in their communities

#ignorance cloud on #anyway this is a mcelroy critical blog i will never slobber on the cocks of these men bc they Have been kinda :/ w shit #and stans of theirs need to see that and understand that they can still do sus shit while also claiming to be 'activists' #if they care they will read the facts and the words of their bipoc followers and make a decision based on that #lets not forget the performative activism of justin using a quote from His Own Podcast to combat the words of a terf #that wasnt a good luck considering the character he quoted has problems related to representation in their own graphic novel

[rpbetter]

"writes dubcon therefore is a freak who should be bullied off the site" ho boy i'm fed up with people acting as if consenting adults writing [insert "problematic" fictional thing here] is the worst thing in the world. seen way too many people justifying harrassment of REAL PEOPLE by "they write thing that triggers me". ok, and? mute the tags or don't follow! "it triggers someone" is not a valid reason to ban a topic. piano music triggers me yet i don't go around demanding everyone stop playing the piano.

Anon, not only is everything you said absolutely valid, but also, thank you for demonstrating that triggers are incredibly varied and as such, we cannot predict everyone's triggers. Making the entire "point" of banning for possible triggers invalidated as hell.

We should be aware of things like the most commonly occurring phobias (things like arachnophobia and coulrophobia that are, additionally, easily triggered by imagery) and tag them. We should be aware of very obvious triggers, that are, again, easily set off by imagery, like blood, eye trauma, and depictions of domestic violence. And we should always read and be aware of our writing partners' stated triggers so that we can tag them appropriately or even decide that it isn't going to work because our muse, canon story, or interests are going to present an unfair situation in this partnership.

But triggers can be highly unusual, as well as activated differently (even at different times) for everyone. I'm not triggered by seeing hotel rooms in pictures or movies, I'm not triggered by writing scenes that take place in them, but I'm triggered to some degree by being in one. It's outrageous oversimplification to act like all triggers are the same, they all display the same way, they're all going to trigger someone on the same basis, everyone's going to react the same to their triggers. There is absolutely no way to prevent 100% of possible triggers for 100% of the population, 100% of the time.

Add to this that way too many people trivialize triggers by throwing around that term to justify the banning of something that makes them uncomfortable or that they take a personal, moral issue with. "I don't like this" and "I'm grossed out by this" and "this makes me feel uncomfortable" is not being triggered. It's just a good way to weaponize the better nature of other people so that they comply.

Most people legitimately do not want to trigger someone, especially if they have triggers and know what it's like. Just like no one wants to be accused of cruelty towards trauma survivors in general, or be designated a pedo, rape apologist, or fascist. They're all things to weaponize in order to isolate, shame, and control. And that's really fucking gross. These are serious, real things that have no business being trivialized to police content, win internet arguments, or garner popularity.

The potential for someone to be triggered isn't a reason to ban anything; we have tags, we have blacklist.

While I'll be the first to say that tumblr's blacklisting can be as shitty as everything else on the site, the primary issue with running into content you don't want to see comes down to two factors: no one tagging/tagging correctly and actively exposing yourself to that content. Going through people's properly done tags and blog warnings about their content in order to "call it out" is actively exposing yourself by choice. You actual walnuts.

Calling people on on their "problematic" content is bringing those topics to the attention of other people. That's the whole point of this gross behavior: look at the freak pedo abuse apologist I found, they write dubcon!! Don't look if you'll be triggered uwu

Buddy, pal, my guy...you just put that on blast for anyone to run across. Maybe their blacklist catches those words in your callout post, maybe it doesn't. Maybe they think you're a safe space because you promote yourself that way, so they click it anyway. Point is, you just willfully and irresponsibly exposed people because it's more important to you to demonize a rando on tumblr RPing something you take issue with. Good job!

Furthermore, dubcon itself is such a hilarious issue to take. Do they realize that isn't always sexual, or? Not? I'm thinking not. Funnily enough, one of the oldest posts I've been working on for this blog is about exactly this topic, the myriad situations that are dubious consent. That doesn't have to be sexual, and neither does it have to be intentionally predatory. You can come up with some amazing character development with a lot of muses in the RPC with dubcon because almost everyone's muse has some manner of trauma that might negate their perception of their own consent...and what do you do then? Is it removing more agency from that muse to shut them down, or is that always the better option? Can you separate your opinion as the mun from your muse's natural reactions? How does this impact the muses involved not just that moment but the next year?

Point is, dubcon isn't always some rapey situation. Even if it was, even if someone is writing it that way, it's literally not your business or your problem.

There's one mutual-in-law on my RP blog that really bothers me. They write things that I find fetishizing, incredibly rapey, all around shit that bothers me. I don't want to see it, some of the things they write makes my damn skin crawl. This person doesn't know it, we certainly don't speak and I don't think they like me very much, but I've repeatedly defended their right, specifically their right as a person with some long-term callouts on them, to write what they want to. I have them blocked and their urls blacklisted so I never have to see my mutual reblogging their threads. It's not a problem because I don't click "show anyway." Why would I, if it genuinely bothers me so much?

That's how you handle things that bother you; you use the tools available to not interact even by accident. Not by launching a morality crusade.

If any of us want to write what we enjoy, we have to allow others that same freedom. It's always a matter of time before this policing grows to include more and more topics, it's been used multiple times to get well-meaning people who don't fall into the general demographics to police queer, BIPOC, and other marginalized groups off of platforms. We've been fortunate in most of the RPC that it implodes on itself before it gets all the way there, but even so, you can see it.

It starts with things that produce a visceral reaction in the great majority of people, positions this with a repeatedly condemned idea presented as solid fact that fiction is reality, and you've got the start of something awful. Today it's something you don't like, maybe even something that triggers you, so you either support it or you quietly allow it to happen. Who needs to write that "freak shit" anyway, can't they just be gross privately? Six months from now, it's something "problematic" that you enjoy like violence that's canon-typical for your muse, or your OTP because they're gay and that's fetishizing, they're cis male and female but one or both is bi and that's bad representation, or they canonically have a rocky relationship so that's romanticizing toxic/abusive relationships.

If you can't care for any other reason, you really should care about how it is going to impact you sooner or later. In an environment like this, you can stay in your space, put warnings on your blog, and tag properly and you're still going to get a callout if the wrong person finds your blog. Just takes a single person with more time, energy, and skewed ideas of justice than they have reading comprehension or common sense.

Again, I cannot encourage people enough to give warnings, but it's difficult to ignore why those warnings are slipping; they're a way to be found, designated as a Problem, and called out. Look, it's another reason why callouts actually make things worse, not better! People put that shit in their rules so you can avoid content, they're being responsible and interested in promoting a safe RPC. Let them do it, damn.

You can't tag everything, and if you've never experienced what a giant series of repetitive tags is like on a screenreader you probably should before you tag seven paragraphs of possible issues. You can tag for visuals, you can tag for the obvious things, and you can tag for what's in the rules you agreed to when you followed/followed back. But you should also warn people that you write "dark topics" on the tin, and expand on that in your rules for specific things like graphic violence, toxic relationships, dubon, and addiction.

That's how responsible adults, not over-aged children, make better decisions about their mental health and general comfort. Not by appointing themselves the watchdogs of the damn RPC, here to protect you whether you want to be or not, find that incredibly insulting or not when you're in one of their categories of people who must be protected, by forcibly banning Problematic Everything. Problematic, of course, being entirely in the eye of the content police.

It's fiction. No one and nothing real was harmed. It's great that you are so invested in the fictional world and people that make you happy, but take a fucking big step back into reality. The real people you're harming with your bullshit had every right to peaceably exist. If what they're writing is triggering to you, stay. away. from. it.

Without any coincidence whatsoever, that's how you get from the base-point of Problematic Material to Problematic Mun. Yeah, it's just fiction, it's just RP, but I also took something out of context OOC or was upset by their tone on their own blog or couldn't exercise the minimal adult logic to remove myself from their presence OOC as well. So, now, you've got OOC behavior being added to the callout, if it wasn't already. Everyone is now ableist, transphobic, racist, and a misogynist because it lends that visceral reaction to the callout and ups the game from just being "y'all so gross you aged up a cartoon character to ship" to "this is REAL and it won't be tolerated! OP is actually a pedophile, they told a sexual joke in a discord server with a minor present and I have the receipts!"

What are the most storied callouts in the entire RPC? I'm absolutely certain the same names came to mind no matter what fandoms you're in, and one of them was "Matt." Another was probably "Ares/Snow". They're all successful and keep being brought up out of the closet anytime people are bored enough because their primary punch is the mun themselves being a predatory threat to the community. The mun is verified to be a bad person. Well, of course, that's got to be repeated, it worked. (Even if it did not, at all, work and only made it harder for people to avoid any of these muns.)

Are there people in the RPC who are legitimately a problem? Absolutely, yes. We're all supposed to be adults, however. Part of being an adult is having and acting upon one's agency. If someone is coercing you into things you are not comfortable with, shut it down. If you have difficulties being certain of those situations, run it by a trusted, honest friend or available, impartial source in the RPC for a second opinion. If you can't handle any manner of confrontation, there really are situations in which it's perfectly alright to block someone without any discussion. It's just the internet, you're in control of your space. Own it.

Minors are a whole other can of fucked up worms I'm not even getting into right now except to say that because a minor exists in a space they were told to stay out of does not mean we ban all topics inappropriate for their consumption.

tl;dr: banning shit doesn't work anyway, the whole idea is predicated upon some incredibly problematic takes IRL, and no, there's no justification for it outside of intense personal problems with one's own importance. That energy would be infinitely better spent volunteering one's time to help real people in crisis or after surviving one, or even oneself in developing some healthier approaches and thought patterns.

#hey what if we all start saying we're triggered by callout culture is that bannable then lmao #vespertine #drama cw #bsnf #callout culture #tumblr rpc #rp problems #also thank you again anon I hope you're having a great day!

[excelsi-or]

just a little sweeter (pt.9)

Heeelllooooooooo, friends~ It’s been ages since I’ve had a chance to post on here. I hope you’re all well and being safe. For those of you who also went back to school, I hope it hasn’t been horrible. And if it has been, God, I know the feeling. I’ve had to rearrange my schedule and reevaluate some things so that I have more time for writing. Not just this story, but the two big personal projects that I’ve been working on for most of the year. 

BIPOC rec (because hell yeah we’re still doing this): A couple that I found who do workout videos (I’ve been slacking on the exercising because I hate home workouts with a passion), MrandMrsMuscle. Check them out on YT. I’m currently doing their 30 day workout challenge, just to ease me back into consistency. Anyway, byyyyyyeeeee. (and good luck to my American readers. This election has been a rollercoaster of a ride to follow.)

w.c. 1.7k (fluuuuuff, I just wanted to write them interacting more. lol they touch a lot, but my love language is physical touch and those are just my favourite moments)

pt.1; pt.2; pt.3; pt.4; pt.5; pt.6; pt.7; pt.8

“So, it’s getting pretty serious,” Seungcheol comments.

Eunha shows Jihoon a picture that she’s working on. Jihoon kisses the side of her head. “I’m sure she’ll love it. I’ll let her know you’re making it so she can be excited about it.”

Eunha smiles up at him and he takes the opportunity to kiss her forehead. He straightens and addresses Seungcheol’s statement. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know? It’s been a few months. You bring this woman with you when you go and do things with Eunha on your day off. How is that not serious? Your daughter spends time with her instead of at your parents’ when we go away for a few days.”

“That’s just a convenience thing.”

“Bumzu hyung lives in the area,” Seungcheol points out. “And he has definitely spent more time with Eunha than she has.”

“He’s not as good with Eunha as she is,” Jihoon answers. He slips back into his shoes. “Hyung, I don’t want to set my expectations too high. A few months really isn’t that long.”

“It’s long for you,” Jeonghan comments. He’d been sitting in the kitchen having a snack. “We can’t deny that fact.”

“Okay, yes, fine,” he groans. “Since Yeri, this is long.” He buries his hands into his pockets.

“You like her,” Seungcheol states.

Jihoon rolls his eyes. “Obviously.”

“Love?”

He feels his cheeks warming. The word has been floating around in his mind for a while. He hasn’t had the guts or the heart to mention it.

Jeonghan chuckles and meets Seungcheol’s gaze. “Wow. No wonder his love songs have gotten so good.”

Jihoon turns to the door before the boys can get into the brunt of the teasing. “Can you please just call me when you put Eunha to bed?”

Seungcheol huffs.

“I can bring her downstairs to Seungkwan if you’re going to be like this.”

Seungcheol sighs, following Jihoon to the door. “Yes, yes. I’ll call you.”

“Minghao said he’d be home later. So, if you can’t handle her, he said to pass her off.”

“Jeonghan and I can take care of Eunha for an evening,” Seungcheol insists. He gives Jihoon a nudge out the door. “Go. And be in love.”

Jihoon can’t be angry at them. Instead, he rolls his eyes once more and heads to her place.

He meets her in front of her apartment, and she has a wide smile ready for him. She’s bundled up in her winter coat, the collar covering nearly half her face. She bumps him lightly with her hip, hands buried deep in her pockets, and then loops her arm through Jihoon’s.

“What’s our plan this evening?” Her voice comes out muffled and Jihoon finds it oddly adorable.

He tips his head. “Well, I was thinking.”

“Good start.”

He snorts. “Shut up.” He starts over. “I was thinking about what you said last week.”

“Vague and mysterious,” she cuts in.

Jihoon pauses before continuing. “You didn’t get a chance to chew out a bad customer today, did you?”

She tips her head up to look at him. “Shit, you can tell?”

Jihoon throws his head back with a laugh. “You like a snarky remark, but not this many.”

She touches her head against his arm in endearment. “You just steal my heart more and more, Lee Jihoon.”

He ignores the flip in his stomach. “Do you want to talk about it?”

Sighing, she shrugs. “This guy was just chewing out my girls when I was about to leave for the day. I had to ask him to leave the establishment.” She frowns. “I haven’t had to do that before.”

Jihoon feels a protective switch flip on despite the fact that she’s clearly okay and is an adult woman who can handle herself. “Did he lash out?”

“He told me I didn’t have the authority, but a few guys helped out. I told the girls to call me if he came back.” Her hand goes to her pocket. “I can’t stop checking to see if my phone is on sound.”

Jihoon glances down at her. All he can see is the top of her head. Her gaze is to the ground, unaware that he thinks she’s one of his favourite people he’s met in a while. And he’s met a lot of people in his short 24 years of living.

“But enough about my work, I’m here to spend the evening with you.” Jihoon looks away, anticipating her eyes to look up at him. “What did you have planned? Something about something I said last week?”

“Yes.” Jihoon pauses. “Pottery class,” he meets her eyes, “are you down?”

Her eyes widen and a smile blooms across her face. “Oh my god, you’d come to an art class with me?”

“You said you would love to see how artistic I actually am. I told you I’m not. You said something about pottery. And I heard it’s fun.”

Jihoon laughs when she starts to wiggle excitedly next to him. Despite both their thick coats, he can feel her happiness emanating off her. They wait at the bus stop, talking about anything and everything.

Jihoon has picked her up in a company car before, but she hadn’t liked the idea of someone waiting on them. She’ll do it if Eunha is with them, since her suggestion of using public transit almost made him throw up. But he’s willing to do it on dates if it keeps her this happy.

Jihoon pulls a mask from his pocket and hooks it around both ears. She tugs him after her onto the bus and he taps his card at the card reader. They stand near the door, holding the same bar. She grins up at him.

“What?” he whispers.

She stands on her tip toes and whispers back, “I’m so excited.”

Jihoon snorts. “Good.” He pecks her forehead through his mask.

They continue the ride in silence since the bus is quiet. When they get off at their stop, they gravitate towards each other and her arm automatically loops through his. She looks both ways.

“Where to?”

Jihoon leads her left and reads the names of the storefronts. He knows it’s between a café and a bookstore. Another reason why he’d chosen this specific pottery store for their lesson.

“This is us.”

She’s basically skipping towards the door. The bell trills overhead as they enter, a warmth passing over them from the heat of the space. Jihoon goes to the counter, taking off his mask on the way, while she admires all the pottery on display. The air smells like clay and peppermint.

“We have a lesson booked.”

“Lee Jihoon?” the woman at the desk asks, her eyes on the computer. “Ah, the teacher said he was expecting you. Come this way.”

“Yah,” Jihoon hisses.

She’s at his side in an instant. Her hand reaches for his and he leads her to the backroom. One of his teachers from a Going Seventeen episode stands before them. Jihoon had recalled that the man dabbled in pottery and he was familiar to Jihoon. He still kept the man’s painting of him on display.

“Hi, ssaem.” Jihoon bows and the teacher bows in response. “This is my…”

She looks to him expectantly, letting him fill the blank.

“Girlfriend,” he says, turning back to the teacher. “She’s the one who’s excited about pottery.”

The man bows to her and she bows in response. “Come in. Take your coats off; it’s going to get really warm in here.”

They get a private lesson. The two of them are sat at their own pottery wheels with the teacher correcting their form and giving them pointers. They each make three pieces. One vase, a bowl, and a figurine each. Hers are significantly better, but Jihoon chalks it up to her artistic hands. They laugh, joking with the teacher. She peppers him with questions between all the banter.

Their pieces will be put in the kiln once they dry a bit more and Jihoon will receive a text when they’re ready to be painted.

“That was the best date I’ve ever been on,” she says as they walk out of the store.

“Well that’s a bold statement.”

“I’ve been wanting to do that forever and it was so much fun to do it with you,” she sings.

Jihoon guides her into the bookstore next door without saying anything. Her eyes dart towards the books as they walk up and down the aisles. She picks books off the shelves and reads the synopses while they chat.

When Seungcheol calls because Eunha’s about to go to bed, she and Eunha talk about different books. By the time they all say goodbye, she has a stack of three children’s novels that they’re going to read together. She goes to the counter to pay and Jihoon beats her to the card reader.

“Jihoon,” she sighs, a smile on her face.

Jihoon shakes his head, tucking his wallet away. “This is still a date.” He’d kiss her if the employee wasn’t watching them. “I haven’t taken you home yet.”

She laughs and takes the brown bag offered to her. As they wander out of the shop, she thanks him.

He kisses the side of her head. “Now come on. You need to read me those books before you read them to my daughter.”

Her gaze lifts to meet his, an eyebrow raised in question.

“She talks about the characters from the stories you read and I can’t talk about them with her, because I’ve never read the books.” He leads her into the café. “So, what would you like, jagi?”

Both her eyebrows raise at the nickname, but she seems pleased. “Mint tea.”

“Go sit.” He nudges her towards the tables while he heads to the counter. “I’ll bring it to you.”

She yanks him back and whispers in his ear, “Best date ever.” Then she pecks him on the cheek before finding a table by the window.

She misses the deep blush that spreads across his face.

#woozi #woozi imagines #woozi scenarios #lee jihoon scenarios #seventeen scenarios #seventeen imagines #Svt #Seventeen

[tlbodine]

Literary vs Genre Fiction

The divide between literary and genre fiction is one of those topics that gets endlessly debated in writer circles. You’ll see it making the rounds on social media every time a book gets some buzz for busting out of its category. You’ll hear it in MFA programs across the country. But what even is literary fiction? How is it actually different from genre fiction? Is one better than the other? Why does anybody care?

A lot of smart people before me have thrown their hat in this particular ring, but I’m going to try tackling this one anyway. 

First Off: What Do We Mean When We Say “Literary Fiction”? 

Defining the thing is almost the hardest part of this whole discussion, and that may be part of the reason why people argue so endlessly about the literary vs genre divide -- if you don’t have a clear definition of the categories, that divide can be drawn up just about anywhere. 

So before we dig into characteristics of literary fiction, let’s look at some clear examples. The Booker Prize is a literary award specifically given to works of literary fiction, so it stands to reason that winners of that award would be the best examples of the category, right? Here are some recent Booker Prize winners (as pulled from Powell’s bookstore): 

Margaret Atwood - The Testaments The sequel to A Handmaid's Tale, told as testaments from three female narrators in Gilead, a dystopian setting where women have been stripped of their rights.

Bernardine Evaristo - Girl, Woman, Other Twelve central characters, mostly black British women, lead intersecting lives with struggles of identity, race, sexuality, class, etc.

Anna Burns - Milkman A girl identified as "middle sister" catches the unwanted attention of "the milkman," a local paramilitary, and has to deal with the threat of violence and spread of rumors.

George Saunders - Lincoln in the Bardo A father-and-son story about Abraham Lincoln and the 11-year-old son who died of illness in the midst of the civil war, leading to them both struggling in a type of purgatory.

Paul Beatty - The Sellout A satire about an isolated young man who ends up at a Supreme Court race trial after trying to reinstate slavery and segregate the local high school in an attempt to put his town back on the map.

One thing becomes immediately clear about literary fiction when skimming through the titles and summaries of these award-winning books: These novels are well-nigh impossible to summarize in a way that actually sounds enticing. 

So okay. What are some genre fiction books, for comparison? There are genre fiction awards, like for example the Hugo award for Sci-Fi/Fantasy: 

Mary Robinette Kowal - The Calculating Stars A cataclysmic meteor collision in 1952 causes an accelerated effort to colonize space, leading to a woman fighting to join the astronaut team in this alternate-history book.

N. K. Jemisin - The Stone Sky The third in a trilogy of post-apocalyptic novels about two women with the power to avert destruction of mankind.

Cixin Liu - The Three-Body Problem Against the backdrop of China's Cultural Revolution, a secret military project makes contact with aliens whose civilization is on the brink of destruction, leading them to plan a takeover of earth.

There’s also the Edgar Award, which is given to mystery fiction (it’s named after Edgar Allan Poe): 

James A McLaughlin - Bearskin A man on the run takes a job as a park ranger, but runs the risk of being found by the men he's hiding from when he tries to expose some poachers.

Walter Mosley - Down the River Unto the Sea After spending a decade in prison for a crime he was framed for, former-detective King works as a private investigator whose investigation of his own frame-up leads him to cross paths of a journalist with a similar story.

Sujata Massey - Widows of Malabar Hill In 1920s India, Bombay's only female lawyer investigates a suspicious will on behalf of three Muslim widows, a case that takes a murderous turn.

These aren’t the best summaries in the world, but there does seem to be a stronger sense of both plot and character in the story concepts. At least, when someone asks, “What’s that book you’re reading about?” the genre fiction ones will have a somewhat easier time explaining it. 

So What REALLY Separates Literary From Genre Fiction? 

There are a lot of battle lines drawn between genre and literary fiction. I’ve heard it argued that literary is about character while genre is about plot; that literary is about the quality of the prose while genre is about the story; that literary is about experimenting while genre is about adhering to formulas. That literary is about expanding horizons while genre is about escapism and comfort. That literary is about realism and genre fiction is about fabulism. 

I think there’s a nugget of truth in all of these, but I’m not really happy with any of them. 

So I’m going to toss out my own hypothesis: I think the difference between literary and genre fiction is the way tropes are employed. 

“Okay, great, but what are tropes?” 

I’m so glad you asked. Fiction tropes are a type of shorthand. They are things that we the audience have seen before, so we know immediately what they mean. Tropes exist in characters, plot points, settings, concepts -- you name it. Here’s a sampling of tropes you might be familiar with: 

The tough lady-cop whose dad was a police officer 

Thanks to a mix-up, two people with hidden romantic feelings book the last available room at a hotel but there’s only one bed 

A man goes on a quest for vengeance but destroys himself in the process

The wise old man who teaches the young hero valuable lessons but then dies before the pivotal battle

And so on, and so forth. Every genre has its own tropes -- a formula, if you will. In that sense, genre fiction is formulaic, but that doesn’t make it easier to write; actually, a big part of the challenge is in giving fresh twists to familiar tropes. Readers of genre stories demand certain tropes; the author has to deliver on those demands in a fresh way.

By comparison, I would argue that literary fiction does not rely upon tropes. There certainly are tropes and conventions that emerge in literary fiction -- a middle-aged academic struggling through divorce, for example -- but these tropes are more often than not met with irritation, not delight. Readers of literary fiction are looking for fresh insights and innovations, not familiarity. 

Tropes are powerful tools. They are the mythic seed of storytelling. They are the archetypes that pass down through generations. They are a sacred backbone of mythology and folklore. Genre fiction, at the end of the day, carries the torch for storytelling in a long and (ha, ha) storied tradition from our prehistoric days huddled around a campfire. 

Literary fiction, on the other hand, eschews tropes -- with their agreed-upon meanings -- in favor of assigning fresh meanings to things. Literary fiction is chock full of metaphors, but it’s the author, not convention, that determines what those metaphors mean and how they’re employed. Literary fiction reinvents the wheel. When it succeeds, it hits on depth and emotional resonance that can be life-changing for the reader. When it fails, it comes off like so much navel-gazing nonsense. So it goes. 

Fiction Wars and Gatekeeping

The problem with the literary vs genre fiction divide is that it never stops with “This is how these categories are defined.” The problem is that people will insist on ascribing moral significance and hierarchy to them. 

Literary fiction is viewed as being smarter, deeper, more meaningful or more valuable than genre fiction. If a genre fiction story manages to break out and gain wider appeal, suddenly people will start ascribing to it literary attributes (whether or not the book and many others in the genre had them all along). And that is all a bunch of nonsense. 

It’s the exact same thing that happens in horror fiction -- when a horror story goes mainstream, suddenly it becomes a “psychological thriller” or a “dark drama” or anything other than horror, because “horror” is an inferior genre. 

The fact of the matter is that literary fiction gets elevated over genre fiction for systemic reasons: 

Most MFA programs focus on writing literary fiction, which means that a lot of lit-fic authors come out of those programs, which means that literary fiction is often the domain of upper-middle-class, frequently white, people who can afford to graduate from those programs

A focus on dense prose and “difficult” writing means lit-fic books must be analyzed and interpreted; it’s hard to read, making it exclusionist to people who lack formal education 

Lit-fic dominates awards, gets pushed heavily onto book clubs, is talked about more often on daytime TV and so forth (because it is perceived as being better/more important, thus creating the ongoing cycle)

Basically, lit-fic gets held up as an example of Fine Culture. And any time something is designated as Fine Culture and High Art, it is subject to a completely arbitrary classist distinction meant primarily to keep out an undesirable element (women, BIPOC, poor people, you name it). 

That’s not a problem endemic to lit-fic itself. It’s really a problem of the culture surrounding it, and attempts to hold it to a higher esteem than genre work. 

Cross-Pollination Is Inevitable and Desirable 

How do tropes get made? 

Someone comes up with a new metaphor, concept, character, or idea that resonates so deeply that others who follow borrow that same thing and its meaning, and it gets repeated enough times that it becomes a stock trope. 

In other words, every single piece of genre fiction exists because someone writing in some other established tradition decided to experiment and go off on a tangent to create something really fresh and new -- and knocked it so far out of the park that people were compelled to follow. 

People like to pretend that the overlap and blurred lines between genre and literary fiction are somehow a new trend, but the fact is that this has been the trajectory of fiction-writing for the whole history of storytelling. 

Literary agents have a term for this: Upmarket fiction. Books that “transcend” genre definitions to appeal to readers on either side of the aisle. And those are highly sought-after books, because they have the potential of bringing in double the readers. 

So, snobby gatekeeping aside, is there any real reason to argue about the definition of literary vs genre fiction? 

I’d say...no. Not even a little bit. I’ve got a mix of both on my shelves. I incorporate a mix of both in my writing. And I don’t see that changing any time soon. 

A Final Note 

I mentioned above that lit-fic tends to be written by people in MFA programs, and I wanted to touch on that again as an MFA drop-out and someone who was once warned by a teacher not to bring “any more of that genre nonsense” into the classroom. 

I can understand, from a teaching perspective, why writer’s workshops would want to focus on lit-fic. From the perspective of learning how to write, forcing writers to derive stories from their experiences, to dig deep into themselves and ascribe unique meaning to things, to develop their own metaphors and hone their craft at the sentence level -- all of that makes a lot of sense. Banning genre tropes is a way to force writers to hone their craft without leaning on the work of generations of storytellers before them, and as a teaching tool I think that’s actually really valuable. 

But I think it’s pretty important that we keep that in context. The lit-fic focus in writing classes should be a teaching tool first and foremost. It should not be the end-all and be-all of writing classes.

This post topic was voted on by my Patreon subscribers. If you would like to vote for future posts and get early access to posts before they go live on tumblr, you can become a patron here: https://www.patreon.com/tlbodine

#writing #literary fiction #genre fiction #on writing #long post

[teeentyonepilots]

To preface: I am not here to speak over any black or POC fans and also that people are allowed to feel what they are feeling in regards to this situation.

tw suicide tw racism tw discourse

I wake up feeling like a truck has hit me, to be quite honest. From like 5pm onwards everything was like a slow train crash as everything snowballed. Stating now: BLM and mental health discussions can and must exist together especially due to the toll systemic racism has on the mental health of black persons AND subsequent impact on treatment. I see his tweet about one must “keep trying” to add more even if one cannot think they can and I challenge him that there must be a space for highlighting how being a person of color makes navigating an already broken system even more impossible and countless lives have been lost because of that.

This feels like a culmination of a low point and disconnect between the band and the fans. We are on completely separate pages and he lacked the context and understanding that everyone has changed this year and celebrities have to be smarter in how they approach their fan base. Every day someone else is called on to be accountable for their past words or actions, and being quiet in the face of human rights violations is considered to be, to use his words, violent. Everything has changed.

Tyler has spent a lot of time away from social media lately. I acknowledge his tweets about checking in on one’s mental health to realize you’re not doing well, followed by saying spending time off social media, which he has been doing. What he may not have realized is that he came back thinking we were in one place, and finding that in fact, his usual banter and joking with the clique is not going to fly.

I just want to say that your mileage may vary on how you see everything and your eyes may not view something how someone else does. I’ve been reflecting on how I, and also a lot of what I see in the world of social media, that we want to convince everyone to have the same viewpoint and interpretation of information. It is exhausting and impossible to get everyone to agree with you. My therapist says you just have to understand not everyone can meet you where you are. There are things in life you can control and things you cannot— and to protect your own mental health, you should recognize that changing who someone is one of those things.

There are infinite perspectives on situations and emotions people feel depending on their own life experiences that guide to how they respond. I am trying to keep perspective on how I feel may differ from others and when it’s words said over the internet, when we cannot discuss face to face and have a deeper discussion and see context and intentions— all we can do is assume. Some may assume the worst and some may give the benefit of the doubt, but a lot of that comes down to perspective and projection of our own experiences. We have to understand we are all coming from different places.

The facts: Tyler tweeted a joke that missed the mark completely. He is used to joking with fans and fans are not at that point anymore especially after about a month+ of silence. (and I’m now even seeing some people explain that the joke was even self deprecating— goes to show how words can be interpreted in so many ways, since I hadn’t seen it that way at first. I take things personally a lot so I had assumed the worst from it). He said the joke and that was it for two hours. Everyone got riled up, myself being one of them, thinking he was shading the fans who have been asking him to speak up and use his platform for good because times have changed and saying nothing is not sufficient anymore.

Two hours later, after everyone had time to brew and steam, he began a disjointed (ie not in a thread, which then made the statements seem spur of the moment and reactive) discussion on mental health. Tweets were just coming in, and it appeared to be out of character for him— someone who watched every step they make and thinks things through. I was concerned about his mental health because I’ve seen many people have melt downs online and he was discussing suicide and not being in a good place. We can never assume where someone is in regards to their mental health, and again, we lose some context when we cannot look at someone’s face and body language and begin to interpret their intentions. We will project our own experiences onto words when all other context is lost.

I think when putting the discussion on mental health into a vacuum, there were some good points made that in a usual setting, people would have responded well to. I’ve been going through a lot over the past year, compounded by the pandemic and being a frontline responder. It would have been nice to have someone I admire telling me to make my mental health a priority, that it is tough but not hopeless, and I am not alone.

But this doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and at the end of the day, fans have felt unheard and trivialized, especially the BIPOC fans who are already facing so much. He is trying to choose one platform thinking he can stick to what he knows but the world has changed from putting platforms into boxes. Where mental health is stigmatized, it becomes even worse for people of color to live through due to systemic racism. I hope he educates himself and his next words and actions are to highlight that, and advocate for others.

He made another joke at the end and it felt like another slap in the face. There was more time for people to get angry and discourse upon his words. Mass confusion, concern were added to the climate. Another two hours passed before he apologized and said Black Lives Matter and shared a carrd, which was the basic course of action fans wanted him to take. Again, your mileage may vary on how you interpret his words in those tweets, either way, he dug himself a hole and there really was not good way to extract himself from it. There has been a disconnect between the band and the fans and this is a turning point.

It feels like everything is on fire, and what you choose to do is up to you. I’ve been looking at what black clikkies are saying and I found this tweet to be good to keep in mind: https://twitter.com/shlofolina/status/1301346529815539713?s=21

Where do we go from here? I don’t have that answer yet.

We will see where he goes in the future and what he says and does after this. At the end of the day, I am a fan because I saw good in the band and who they are as people. You may call me a fool for hoping that he continues to educate himself and reflect and will improve— but from what I’ve seen from being a fan for many years, is that Tyler engages in introspection and learning. Life has sucked a lot that having hope that the things and people I love will turn out to be good and positive— that’s what I have left. I want to keep a critical eye, recognize that no one is perfect, and understand I cannot put everything into a person who I do not really know. I need to keep perspective, but I also need to have hope. That is for my own mental well-being. I believe that the majority of people are, at their core, good. You may call me naive or pie-in-the-sky but that is what I believe. I need to believe that and believe things will get better because then what is the point and why even try

Your feelings are valid. My feelings are valid. Keep in mind everyone has different perspectives and contexts to situations. check the power you give to people over your life and emotions. Educate yourself. And always, take care of yourself. You are a special and important person. You are loved and cherished. If this becomes too overwhelming, please log off and find self care activities that help you. You cannot fix the world if you cannot help yourself. Caring for your mental health helps everyone in the long run because it prevents burnout.

If you have read through my ramblings, thank you. I still feel very all over the place in how I should feel and proceed. I am trying to seek out what black fans are saying to keep their perspective in the forefront. We all have a lot to process and I wish you all a good day and healing. Know that I love and care about you. You are worthy and enough.

#discourse #clique drama #(i know it’s not drama— thats just the tag i have told people i will use when there are upsetting things to discuss for their filters)

[xplrerdolan]

an analysis on and rant about what stan twitter did to grayson dolan:

as i mentioned earlier, i have quite a bit to say about the twitter stans trying to cancel the twins because of something they talked about on their podcast. not only do i have my own personal opinions on it, i also want to shed some light on the direction cancel culture has taken and why it’s so vile.

for context, here’s a transcription of what a very small but loud group of people are “upset” about: “people just want you to not be sober and not be on a diet, because, y’know, they-they kinda feel like shit that they’re not.” - ethan. also during the podcast, grayson mentions, vaguely, that he’s had an unhealthy relationship with food in the past, as did ethan. ethan later identified the problems as being eating disorders. from what i’ve seen on twitter, people mention either/or rather than both aspects when talking about why it should have had a trigger warning. for some people, the whole issue was the nine second clip of what ethan said. others said they were triggered by the mention of eating disorders.

let’s get into this, shall we?

first of all, let me identify myself as a fat girl who is the furthest thing from sober. my entire life, i have been criticized by my family and the world around me for my weight. i’m at a point in my life where i embrace being fat, and i am comfortable with it, which i constantly have to justify. i am directly affected by diet culture, fatphobia, and eating disorders. i personally struggle with disordered eating—different from an eating disorder in that i have a generally unhealthy relationship with food—and what they said does not warrant a trigger warning.

why? because they’re not talking about needing to be on a diet. they’re not shitting on people who aren’t on a diet. they aren’t forcing their diet & healthy eating onto us as an audience. they also didn’t talk about their eating disorders on the podcast; they said they might talk about it later. what they are doing is being condescending—but let’s unpack that quickly.

their condescension is not targeted or directed at us. it is directed toward people who try to pressure them to do things for instant gratification. specifically, other influencers and hollywood as a whole. not to mention, he’s clearly suggesting that people who try to get them to break their sobriety or their diets are the ones who probably feel shitty about themselves for not doing those things. idk about the rest of y’all but i’ve never seen any fans trying to pressure them into getting off their diet or drinking. so, it’s clearly not directed at any of us.

hollywood is hedonistic. the whole aesthetic of youth, the advertisement of satisfaction is rooted in indulgence. maintaining a healthy diet, just like sobriety, is the complete opposite of that.

the snark and the comparison to sobriety are there because he’s annoyed with others trying to pressure him into enjoying his youth “like he should;” a standard set by culture that he & grayson don’t want to participate in for personal reasons. let me remind you that we do not know what they hear from other influencers. we have not been surrounded by a group of other influential people—really influential, not your peers in high school—who are trying to get us to just have one little drink, or just have one little milkshake, or just eat one little burger. connections matter in hollywood. consider how separate the twins seem from other influencers—do you think that’s merely coincidental? i can almost promise you it’s not. they likely avoid people who pressure them one too many times or who put them at risk of disappointing themselves because they might succumb to peer pressure.

what i’m saying here is ethan was projecting. he was projecting his annoyance, frustration, and perhaps some amount of bitterness or general bad feelings in a way that protected himself. yes, it’s a little condescending because a lot of his fans—including myself—might struggle with diet culture or sobriety, or some of us might make choices in our lives that differ from theirs so it feels mildly offensive or just makes you feel bad. i’ll admit that when i first heard it, i was a little put off for a second. but then, i did precisely what so many twitter stans need to do: i got the fuck over it. because i’m not so unsympathetic that i can’t imaging that maybe their life looks a liiiittle different from mine, and i’m not so self-centered to believe that one passing comment applies to me or was ever intended to hurt me personally.

yes, delivery and effect matters more than intention. and if anyone was genuinely offended or triggered, yes, that warrants apology. but it doesn’t obliterate intention. intention matters.

onto my next point: responsibility. i believe people are responsible for correctly labelling potentially triggering information. BUT that doesn’t necessarily mean that you put a trigger warning on a podcast because of one passing comment and the mention of eating disorders. it’s not as though the twins were mocking them or carelessly talking about their experiences—which i note would be careless because eating disorders are a social disease and they get stronger with validation from others as well as through normalization of the disorder. by normalization, i mean saying things or making jokes that encourage one to restrict or to binge. knowing that they did none of that, and that people’s primary issue (what ethan said) was a major misunderstanding, it’s pretty clear that they were under no obligation to put a trigger warning.

now, let’s consider the following: the twins have recently been being more open with us about their insecurities, especially ethan. while talking about what helped him get to a point where he’s comfortable with his acne, he mentions that working out and taking care of himself physically played a huge part in that. in addition to the last two recent points of discussion on their platforms and channel, they have also been sharing their journey through veganism and are very excited about how great they feel because of it.

taking all of that into account, if you know that you’re at such a sensitive point in your recovery or your disorder (which is nothing to be ashamed about, i’d like to note) that someone mentioning their own diet, their view of their own diet, or just the general existence of eating disorders is enough to trigger you, you have to understand that you have a responsibility to avoid potentially triggering content. excluding their eating disorders, we all knew about their recent healthy vegan diet and their devotion to maintaining their physique. i mention this because it seems as though the people who are upset would’ve been triggered by the latter two things regardless—it’s not the words “eating” and “disorder” that suddenly break you like a hypnotic command, it’s the whole premise of two guys talking about how physically fit they are and how healthy they’ve been eating. since this is what they’ve been talking about recently and this is what’s going on in their life, you have to be responsible enough to not seek out or engage with something that could be triggering to you. you need to step away from those things yourself and come back to them when you are capable of hearing about someone else’s healthy choices without internalizing that information and inflicting it upon yourself.

i find it also incredibly important to note that the language ethan uses is very clearly a way to defend himself and ward off anyone who disagrees with his dietary choices. it’s his way of validating himself. which, if you’ve been paying attention, is a sign that he’s insecure about his diet to begin with; if you have more than three brain cells, you should be able to figure out from that fact alone that even if he didn’t have an eating disorder, he clearly has issues with eating. which is why i think nitpicking a nine second clip out of a 45-50ish minute episode of a podcast is absolutely disgusting to me; look at what’s happened now. in their lack of consideration for what he might be going through, despite them literally telling us that they have struggled with eating disorders in the past, they essentially ended up “outing” him. at least, i’ve spent enough time listening to that clip and typing up this analysis of the situation to see it that way.

the last overarching thing i’d like to talk about here is the how this whole situation demonstrates the dangerous and frankly disgusting turn that cancel culture has taken in recent times. cancel culture is no longer expository; it has evolved to be exploitative. people take any opportunity to cancel someone in the hopes that they get attention and validation from others. i believe—and i urge you to read this part carefully and to not misconstrue my intentions or meaning when i say this—that we have pushed the idea that we should support, trust, and listen to the disenfranchised to a degree that we no longer allow any space for critical thinking and analysis of a certain claim. LET ME BE PERFECTLY AND COMPLETELY CLEAR. this does NOT mean that a white person can analyze a BIPOC’s experience with racism to dismiss it, it does NOT mean that nonvictims can analyze a victim’s allegations against someone to disprove it, and thus, it does NOT mean that any oppressor of any kind can apply their ignorant, blind assumptions to any oppressed person’s claims to disqualify what they have said.

with that being said, the reason i mention this is because there are going to inevitably be people, like whoever started this whole mess, who make claims that are either false, dramatized, or that are based on misunderstandings. a part of me wants to believe that the person who initially claimed to be triggered by what ethan said misheard him or took what he said personally when they should not have. if we encouraged people to have discussions about these things, then perhaps someone would’ve pointed out to them that no where in that statement does he shame people for not being on diets or for not being sober. rather, he was projecting his feelings of being criticized onto those who criticize him.

now, the other possibility (that i would rather not believe) is that this person—the first person to say something—picked out a nine second segment of the podcast where ethan said something less than positive and went out of their way to make it seem like an issue. still, the same problem ensues: we’ve created such a culture that if you challenge the position of the accuser then you’re simply brainwashed by the accused and you’re part of the problem.

i can say with utmost certainty that even if the first person to complain about the clip hadn’t intended to make something out of nothing, a fair 90% of them who said blatantly disrespectful things to ethan and grayson DEFINITELY just wanted to hop on a bandwagon. there was one girl who replied to grayson several times, claiming that what they had said was VERY triggering to a lot of people, but within her frantic outcry for an apology from him, she admitted that she herself wasn’t triggered and didn’t even struggle with an eating disorder, before proceeding to tell someone else who does have an eating disorder that if they weren’t triggered it’s not their place to say the twins don’t have to apologize.

......................since the girlies from the bird app like to lurk here, let me spell that one out for y’all:

✨stop demanding apologies that you cannot accept✨

hopefully that gets through to them. because this is the second time in a row that they’ve gone ahead and demanded apologies from the twins that they cannot accept. the heteros were down their throats about the f-slur (which i use in reclamation as it has been used against me personally but i won’t repeat here on the off chance that someone is hurt by it).

it’s so painfully obvious that they’re doing it for likes, retweets, and replies. whether they want people to argue with them or just want attention, they’re hiding behind the guise of caring about a very serious issue and speaking FOR the people who might be offended. i believe people like this noticed a pattern under celebrity tweets when BLM was the center of discussion on twitter. if a celebrity wasn’t talking about BLM, people were under that tweet demanding that they did. those tweets would often get a lot of interactions from people who agreed that someone with a platform should speak up. and since local stan twitter does nothing but regurgitate what’s “trending,” they’re trying to find any reason to be the social justice warrior precisely no one asked them to be and absolutely no one needs them to be.

i don’t think that anyone really needs me to explain why they should be ashamed of themselves, but in case one of them is floating around: it’s because when a bunch of people demand an apology for a non-problem, gang up on that person, flood their replies with nothing but those demands in hopes that someone with as much sense as them on twitter-dot-fucking-com will engage with it and maybe join their futile efforts, it leads to people having to expose a part of themselves that they wanted to keep private. it’s a violation not only of their privacy, but of their emotional consent and the boundaries they had set up.

i’d like to leave anyone guilty of contributing to this situation with this to consider: they start to open up to us more, they start to be more honest with us, they try their best to show us their appreciation for support, and as soon as they mention having an eating disorder it’s a personal attack on you and they need to apologize for it? or worse—someone else said that it was a personal attack on them so you reply five separate times even though it’s not your apology to accept and therefore is not your apology to ask for. it’s bitches like you who make them keep everything vague and private. i don’t even want to consider what they’re going through right now; it breaks my heart to imagine how badly they’re hurting. all for likes and retweets on the fucking bird app. let me know what that gets you in five years.

#pers #rant #the dolan twins #ethan dolan #grayson dolan #podcast 23 #deeper with the dolan twins #tw: eating disorder mention #tw: eating problems #tw: ed mention #tw: ed #tw: eating disorder #tw: diet culture

[the-final-straw-blog]

Palestine and Challenging Settler Colonial Imaginaries

This week on the show, we’re airing a portion of our 2018 interview with filmmaker and activist Yousef Natsha about his film about his hometown, Hebron, and the Israeli occupation of Palestine. We invite you to check out our full interview with him from March 25, 2018, linked in our show notes and we’re choosing to air this right now because of the flare up in violent evictions, home destruction and the assassination of around 100 Palestinian residents of Gaza by the “Israeli Defense Forces”. Podcast image by Yousef Natsha. [00:10:24]

Then, we’ll be sharing a panel from the 2021 UNC Queer Studies Conference called “No Blank Slates: A Discussion of Utopia, Queer Identity, and Settler Colonialism” featuring occasional Final Straw host, Scott Bransen alongside E. Ornelas and Kai Rajala. This audio first aired on Queercorps, on CKUT radio in Montreal. If you’d like to engage in this project, reach out to [email protected] [00:24:05]

Also, Sean Swain on aparthied [00:01:48]

No Blank Slates: A Discussion of Utopia, Queer Identity, and Settler Colonialism

Presenter(s)

Scott Branson, E Ornelas, Kai Rajala

Abstract

Under the neoliberal regime of multiculturalism, the settler colonial project has relied on the assimilation of certain subaltern communities into its project for the effective dispossession and control of indigenous lands. This discussion will present ideas from a book project we are collaborating on in order to invite conversation around the intersection and tension around ideas of liberation and forms of appropriation and oppression. Our main challenge for radical queers is to rethink the kinds of futures we try to include ourselves in, and how our liberatory work can subtly replay exclusion and erasure. How do neoliberal utopian gay politics perpetuate settler colonial erasure and genocide? How do politics that seek inclusion and representation--in other words assimilation--disavow the work by indigenous self-determination movements, which are also poised on the frontlines of planetary self-defense? The workshop will be divided up into short presentations by each writer, followed by a structured discussion facilitated by the presenters.

Description:

The utopian project that underwrote the Canadian/American settler colonial states that still exist today was eventually transmuted into a neoliberal utopian sense of identity. The entire concept of space and self that we inherit is imbued with utopian longing for a time and place that we can fully be ourselves. This kind of rhetoric is largely at play in mainstream identity-based movements, like gay rights. But this longing often works in favor of the regime of violence and dominance perpetrated by the modern nation state. We can see how the attempt at inclusive representation of queer cultures leads to assimilation and appropriation. What gets included in regimes of representation ends up mimicking the norms of straight/cisgender heteronormativity, in terms of class aspirations, behaviors, and family structures. This therefore contributes to systematic erasure of Black and Brown queer folks, who are still the most targeted “identities” for state violence and its civilian deputies. With images of diversity that appeal to bourgeois urban gays, businesses and governments can pinkwash their violence.

A radical queer politics that relies on unquestioned utopian and dystopian visions risks aligning itself with a settler colonial imaginary of terra nullius or “blank slate” space. On the one hand, dystopian and apocalyptic visions perpetuate the unquestioned assumption that a societal collapse is impending, as if the continual degradation of human and more-than-human communities has not already arrived. Particularly dangerous in this assumption is the kind of crisis rhetoric that fosters opportunities for settler colonial sentiments of insecurity and, in the face of this insecurity, assertions of belonging and sovereignty in land and lifeways. Furthermore, visions of radical utopias as-yet-to-be-realized (or, as-yet-to-be-colonized) discount the ongoing presence of Indigenous alternatives to the current settler colonial dystopian reality, and instead preserves a view of geographic and social space as blank and ready to be “improved” with a “new” model.

Here we have a problem of erasure of the oppressions and resistances that have been ongoing in different iterations, in favor of the blank space of the utopian frontier. We argue against these linear progression narratives of societal and environmental collapse which promise to bring about a future idealized world of rainbow-diverse identities. Instead, we propose ways for radical politics, particularly those espoused by non-Indigenous people, to disavow such settler colonial mindsets. There are a few ways to offer a glimpse into the lived realities—what we might still call utopian moments—that make up the non-alienated, revolutionary life: queer and indigenous histories of resistance, rituals and moment of community care and mutual aid, and science fiction revisions of the world. We argue that this other world does in fact exist—has existed and has not stopped existing—if only in the interstices or true moments of communing and inhabiting the land alongside friends and family.

This is not an argument in favor of utopia, but one that seeks to bypass the utopian/dystopian divide. The world we inhabit is clearly dystopian for most, and utopian for some, and in many estimations, constantly on the verge of ending. The disaster scenarios, repeating the puritanical eschatology that helped settle the colonies in America, perpetuates the history of erasure of ways of life that aren’t in fact gunning for that disaster. We still argue that the purpose of dreaming, of envisioning alternatives, is to make action possible today, through recognition of the power we do already hold. Our discussion will interrogate the settler-utopian impulses that get hidden within apparently liberatory movements, such as radical queers and strands of environmentalism, as well as the way these identities and politics are represented in narratives of liberation that rely on the same logic they claim to oppose.

Bios

E Ornelas (no pronouns or they/them) is a Feminist Studies PhD candidate in the Department of Gender, Women, & Sexuality Studies. As the descendant of a survivor of the Sherman Institute, a Native boarding school in Riverside, California—and therefore robbed of cultural, linguistic, and tribal identity—E’s research interests focus on the continued survivance and futurity of BIPOC communities, particularly through the use of literature. E's dissertation illuminates community-based, abolitionist-informed, alternative models of redress for gendered, racialized, and colonial violence by analyzing Black and Indigenous speculative fiction. When not on campus, E can be found reading feminist sci-fi, making music, baking vegan sweets, and walking their dog. [00:45:06]

Kai Rajala (pronounced RYE-ah-la) is a queer, nonbinary, white-settler of Finnish and mixed European descent. They are a writer, and an anarchist anti-academic working and living on the unceded territories of the Kanien'kehá:ka peoples on the island colonially referred to as Montréal, and known otherwise as Tiohtià:ke. They are currently pursuing studies as an independent researcher and are interested in sites outside of the university where knowledge production occurs. You can find Kai on twitter at @anarcho_thembo or on instagram at @they4pay. [00:57:28]

Scott Branson is queer trans Jewish anarchist who teaches, writes, translates, and does other things in Western so-called North Carolina. Their translation of Jacques Lesage De la Haye’s The Abolition of Prison is coming out with AK Press this summer. Their translation of Guy Hocquenghem’s second book, Gay Liberation After May 68, is due out next year with Duke University Press. They edited a volume of abolitionist queer writings based on two iterations of the UNC Asheville queer studies conference, due out with PM Press next year. They are currently working on a book on daily anarchism for Pluto Press and researching a book on the institutionalization of queerness in the academy. They also make books of poems and artwork. You can find Scott on Instagram @scottbransonblurredwords or check out sjbranson.com for more of their work or on twitter at @sjbranson1. [00:30:41]

. ... . ..

Featured tracks:

Dabkeh Melody by Mecky from The Combination Soundtrack

Born Here by DAM from The Rough Guide To Arabic Revolution [00:20:21]

Check out this episode!

#anarchist #podcast #interview #feminist #antifa #anticapitalist

[themageiboline]

Rant Time and PSA - Equating symbols of minority faiths with a racist vocal minority that share them is NOT okay.

It’s come to my attention that a vocal segment of the online left has taken, just as I feared, to equivocating the many ancient symbols of Norse faiths with racism without exception after the storming of the capitol and the very high profile appearance of the so-called Q-Shaman. And if you speak out as a leftist or progressive such as myself on the harmful nature of this attitude, then clearly you must care more about symbols than POC. This attitude is harmful, divisive, and dare I say in a certain sense racist in its own right. The following rant is a bit long but I implore you to read it in its entirety before you make any judgements should you think you’ve found any part of it to be objectionable at first blush.

This particular rant largely stems from a thread in a private group about someone’s local Canadian news station, though I wish I could say this was the only such instance I’ve seen of this rhetoric. The news station was labeling Norse symbols such as the valknut and the Mjolnir - the latter of which being the primary symbol of the Asatru faith - as symbols of white supremacy, as if they were made by and for white supremacists, and laughing off and ignoring the OP when they called to correct them. Now unfortunately the OP didn’t link to this coverage but the thread carried on with the assumption it was as OP claimed. Under this assumption, there was a worrying amount insistent that there is no other way to raise awareness on the use of these symbols by racists, and that us pagans should just “shut up sit down and stay in our lane” and let the racists appropriate these symbols as their own. 

As if there is no other way, as if BIPOC are too stupid and primitive to know a racist when they see them without being instructed to discriminate based on religious affiliation, and is if white and white-passing pagans are just selfish for not taking kindly to being labeled like this. One went so far as to say it was impossible for white pagans to be marginalized in any way to begin with. I suppose my own eyes and ears must have been lying to me every time I witnessed the hate and discrimination my wiccan friend faced then.

Well I for one refuse to sit down and shut up. I refuse to let anyone try to tell me how I am or am not marginalized as a closeted bisexual neopagan living in the deep south. I refuse to hand over our symbols on a silver platter to racists, and to the religious right who will undoubtedly happily jump on the chance to have ungodly scapegoats to blame the crimes of their ilk on. 

I am reminded of a quote from the iconic Black Panther Fred Hampton: 

“We've got to face the fact that some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out best with water. We say you don't fight racism with racism. We're gonna fight racism with solidarity.” 

I think we have to face the fact that our social movements are as of now plagued with those who would look at the words of the late Fred Hampton, organizer of the Rainbow Coalition and victim of assassination in 1969 by the FBI and Chicago PD, and scoff at them. They would simply say “racism is prejudice plus power, no you can’t be racist against white people,” and use these semantics - however technically true or false they might be - as a poor excuse to ignore prejudice against others. 

There truly does exist a faction within leftist and progressive movements in general that I can only describe as racial reductionists. They pervert the very good and crucially important concept of intersectionality as an excuse to play Oppression Olympics with different marginalized groups, and refuse to acknowledge and address some discriminatory acts as if one cannot address one without ignoring another. 

Let me be abundantly clear on a few things, which I think I can say with a decent amount of certainty as a closeted bisexual cis-male white skinned neopagan living in the deep American south. Yes, we absolutely can and are discriminated against and marginalized by society. There also exists those on the religious right who would be overjoyed to include us among their scapegoats for what transpired at the capital, and love to have reckless media agencies aid them in doing so. I can also say that I’m absolutely sure this pales in comparison to what BIPOC face, or most other marginalized groups such as ciswomen and trans persons in general. 

We still nevertheless are victim to prejudice, and you don’t fight prejudice with more prejudice. The fact that one group is more oppressed does not excuse ignoring the prejudices faced by another. In doing so you only aid white supremacy by allowing them to continue to appropriate the symbols of minority faiths as entirely their own, while also painting a target on any white or white-passing members of the said minority faith, whom will naturally not take kindly to that. By extension and tactically speaking most importantly, this also means you help push moderates further to the right as they’ve seemingly had the accusations that the American left is anti-white confirmed to them. You even alienate would-be allies in the process, people like me who are generally all about anti-authoritarian progressive and leftist movements, all about the idea of punching Nazi’s in principle, now given a great amount of pause. Am I to be labeled a Nazi for the crime of wearing the Mjolnir pendant my father gave me? Am I now at risk of being assaulted by misguided so-called anti-fascists, whom I might have otherwise fully supported, were I to wear it again? How is it okay that I now might one day soon have to fear violence were I to ever publicly wear a pagan symbol so dear to me again, just because I am of Caucasian ethnicity? 

While the intent may well be simply to “protect” BIPOC I posit that the actions of the online leftists claiming this can only be done by labelling all Norse pagans as racist white supremacists is itself highly offensive and racist of them. BIPOC are not so stupid as to need to be infantilized as if they’re a mass of primitive minds totally incapable of understanding nuance, and can only defend themselves by tribalistically latching onto religious imagery as an enemy. The victims or descendants of victims of cross-burning Klansmen are more than capable of grasping the concept that not everyone among a religion are like that of their vocal minorities, while still being weary of those that might be, I assure you.

I reiterate this again: you do not beat prejudice with more prejudice, you only divide and make enemies out of allies. If you’re truly against the ruling classes, if you truly stand opposed to all systems of oppression then do not aid them in dividing and conquering. Recognize the varying degrees of harm and prejudice all lower class marginalized individuals face and oppose it all. That doesn’t mean in any way we have to treat much lesser acts of discrimination as equal to hate crimes against BIPOC, it only means we must acknowledge it and not allow any of it to continue on our watch if we’re truly about helping and protecting the marginalized.

This is sheer insanity. It is divisive, hurtful, and downright dangerous rhetoric to allow a minority faith to be smeared in the media or anywhere else like this just because a large number of them might happen to be of white or white-passing skin complexion and I refuse to stand for it.

#nazipagansfuckoff #thishammersmashesfascists #asatru #heathenism #pagan #neopagan #paganism #neopaganism #antifascist #antifa #druid #druidry #heathen

[equisetumspn]

Finale take

It took me a few days to finally put my feelings on the finale and how it impacted me into words. It actually helped a little bit to write some of it out, cathartic almost. 

It hurts.  I found this ridiculous show and its fantastic, remarkable fandom many years ago. It helped me to cope when I was feeling at my very lowest, struggling with my depression and my anxiety. It helped. I didn't feel so overwhelmingly alone. It actually did help. 

A big part of that was due to the characters and their constant determination to go their own way, to keep fighting against destiny. I found bits and pieces of myself in them. 

Sam and his studiousness, his thirst for knowledge. 

Cas. Castiel. His awkwardness. His always trying to find a way to follow his heart. To do right. His struggling to accept himself. His want of finding a place to belong. 

But Dean. Oh Dean. I could, or would, never claim to share all of his traits, but I don't think that I've ever seen so many sides of myself in a fictional character, at least there is none other I can think of right now. His stubbornness. His dorkiness. His silliness. His sarcasm. His trying to find joy in small things. His compassion. That soft, caring heart so deeply hidden. His ability to love so intensely, but not really express it in words. How much he hurts. How deeply tired he is. His intense feelings, and the reluctance to put them into words. His ability to hold a grudge for so long. His bisexuality, though never truly canonicaly expressed in words, it was still so obviously there for those of us who saw ourselves in him, and seeing that helped me to come to terms with my own, to realise it and see my self in a different way, and to start to tell others about it. His protectiveness and the need to take care of a younger brother, to protect him from family conditions that were less than ideal - my situation far from Dean's, or what many others have to go through, but it was still more than a young child should have to bear. 

I have always become incredibly, and perhaps overly, invested in characters and stories. It has always been my way of escaping when reality became overwhelming, frightening, or just too much for me to handle. There have been so many characters and stories that have made an impact on me, that have helped me cope through my most difficult and lonely times, so many that I have cared for and loved. But these three? These three with their fighting for themselves, each other and the world; these three with their personalities, with all their quirks and faults; these three with their perpetual struggles and their found family? They hit differently. When I had the most difficulties of even liking myself, I liked and loved and wanted better for them - and that in turn somehow helped me believe that I could actually be allowed to feel a little bit better myself. That seeing parts of me in them and still love them, could possibly mean that perhaps I could deserve to feel better and perhaps could leave the flat lined, grey limbo my life had become. Eventually I got help and could get my life back on track again. But this ending hurts. Of course it hurts. 

Underneath the soul crushing sadness and the furious anger, I just have a feeling of betrayal that has been seeping through every aspect of my life in the past week. It is unfathomable to me that could do this. To end the show like this. It is a betrayal to the actors who have lived with these characters for so long. It is a betrayal to the crew who throughout the years have worked to bring this show to the screen and to give it life. But most of all it is a betrayal to the characters who fought so hard to live life on their own terms and to us. To all of us who have ever seen any part of us in them, whether that be the main characters or in someone who only showed up a few times. And that is because representation matters. 

Representation matters and heaven knows that Supernatural has had its fair share of problems with diversity, regardless of if you think about it in terms of women, BIPOC, queerness, physical disabilities, or mental health issues. I'm not saying that other shows don't have these issues, because they do and there is probably no such thing as a perfect, unproblematic show. I'm not trying to negate the feelings or experiences of fans of other shows (or even that of the people who actually enjoyed the ending of Supernatural - good for you). I know what it is like, I have been here before, burned before. 

It is a gigantic problem that television in particular, and media in general, has failed to fix. Progress has been made, but we are still a far way off. Ultimately I do believe that the majority of the problem lies with the networks that somehow fear of no longer appealing to the general audience and thereby advertisers, of being seen as niche, of fear of losing money. That they don't realise that they are more likely in the long run to lose audience and money when long-term fans are less likely to rewatch anything they dislike the ending of, and of fewer new people tuning in for something they've heard others be discontent with, why would they be wanting to see something where they aren't able to see themselves represented. Why waste all of your precious time and money on something that in the end are likely to leave you feeling disappointed and / or unseen? 

Stories and shows are still allowed to have an unhappy ending. Of course they are. For some it is even necessary, an unhappy ending can still be a good ending to the story. That's not the point here. The point is that the story of Supernatural did not have a good ending, no matter whether you see it as happy or unhappy. It was, in my opinion, illogical and went against everything that they had built towards for years. Perhaps I am too naive or maybe I have read too much meta on this show and analysed it too much over the years, but I chose to trust what my eyes saw and my mind was telling me. I chose to believe what I have learnt about storytelling through all the movies and TV I've seen and all the books I've read. After all that fighting and doing everything to break free from being a spiteful and bored god's playthings to in the end saying "screw free will, it is impossible to escape your destiny"? That is an illogical ending that doesn't care about its story's legacy.  So here I am. A grown woman upset over the ending of a long running TV show and the fact that the characters who brought me some kind of joy when I was feeling my lowest and whom I saw myself in didn't get resolutions that made sense. Can you really blame me for being hurt?

#supernatural #spn finale #sam winchester #sam winchester deserved better #cas #castiel deserved better #dean winchester #dean winchester deserved better #we deserved better #representation matters #family don’t end with blood #spn analysis #suze says #long post

[wormprint]

hey guys! my commissions are officially open once again!

my prices have been updated-- it is now $9 (3 Ko-fis) base for 500 words, adding $6 (2 Ko-fis) per 500 words following. nsfw works add $6 as well! All of my examples are on my AO3 @ kickthematt !

I WILL write:

- Fluff, angst, soft sm/t - m/m, f/f, and some m/f ships. I am selective when it comes to m/f. - Light gore (battle scenes, some blood and cuts and bruises)  - platonic/familial relations

I WILL NOT write:

- Hardcore sm/t - Intense gore - children in romantic/sexual relationships, incest, general nastiness 

I have the right to deny any commission without explanation.

Click on the link to go to my ko-fi! I have a goal on there that’s pretty important, and there’s a blog post about it on there, but I’ll put the details of it under a read more on this post.

The gist of it is that I’m a gay, neurodivergent, transgender man who is escaping a toxic environment, and I need every penny I can get. (CW for under readmore: white supremacy , bad family relations , bad mental health , mentions of racism)

Thank you so so much if you read, and thank you doubly if you reblog!

(this is just pretty much copy/pasted from ko-fi) Hey everyone!

So, as the title of this post suggests, I'm going to highlight some of the things I am currently dealing with, and shed some light on the goal that is currently on my page.

CW - White supremacy, bad family relations, bad mental health, mentions of racism

Since the beginning of the year, my parents have been going down an incredibly scary path. As white supremacy and alt-right groups have begun gaining traction and rearing their ugly heads, they have dragged my parents with them. My parents were never hateful in the past; it was only recently that they began to feed on the harmful toxicity that is radical conservatism. As a gay, neurodivergent, transgender man, this is incredibly scary for me, and it has been for a while now. Things have gotten exponentially worse recently.

My mom has begun trying to push her propaganda onto me and my brother. She defends people who want me dead. She tells me to read the literature from those who feel that I threaten the "sanctity" of the United States. She pokes and prods at me to "discuss" politics with her, despite my requests for her to not do so. She claims that I'm being tormented and brainwashed by "terrorists" and that I've grown "intolerant" in the past few years, even though all that I've been doing is being assertive in telling others to not argue with me about politics. My family watches Fox News and PragerU quite loudly, and it permeates nearly every corner of the house. Almost every hour of the day I am bombarded with calls to action to harm people I care about, with statements that are flat-out false and "facts" that I must "accept".

This has gotten to a point where I dread seeing any member of my family. I dread leaving my room, which leads to me isolating, which leads to me not taking care of myself in fear that if I leave my room once more, another "debate" will spark. It's impacted my sleep schedule, as they watch and listen to alt-right propaganda late at night. It's hard to sleep when you hear the constant rallies to harm BIPOC in the late hours of the night.

My mental health has plummeted. It's gotten to scary lows, lows that I haven't felt in years. And I need out, or I fear that I won't make it to the end of the year.

Thankfully, one of my close friends was also looking to leave their house, and we have applied for an apartment that we can move into as soon as November, as well as a grant from my local LGBTQ+ resource center to help cover the security deposit. I have the funds to get me through the next month and a half, but once moving day comes, I'm going to need everything I can get to ensure I have everything I need for being on my own. That is where the commissions come into play.

My current goal is $250 that I can use to get the essentials after moving-- groceries, cleaning supplies, hygiene products, etc. I work two other jobs as well, which definitely helps supplement what I'll need when I move, but it would be greatly appreciated if I could get some more as well.

Anything that I get through here will go straight towards those moving costs.

Thank you so much, even if you only just read this post. All I ask at this point is to be heard.

#matt says #matts writes #commissions #dragalia lost #Cygames

[arcticdementor]

In the summer of 2014, I gave birth to a baby boy. He was born with a perfect Apgar score, after a very easy delivery. But my labor had not been smooth—in fact, throughout the day and a half of contractions, I believed there was something decidedly wrong. I also felt that way as I held him for the first time, and he writhed violently under my hands. In a video taken about 10 minutes after he was born, he can be seen lifting his head up off my chest. “Ooooh, look at how advanced he is!” someone can be heard trilling in the background, before her voice is overtaken by my own. “Don’t do that, love,” I say. Then, to the camera: “Does he seem like he’s in pain to you?”

It took my husband and me three years to understand that in fact I was right that day in the delivery room. Our son was hurt. And it will take him years to heal—longer than it should have, and that is on top of the injustice of the original wound—though I thank God every day that we figured it out.

The first breakthrough came when my husband David remembered a book about brain science he had read a decade earlier, by a doctor named Norman Doidge. It changed our lives, by allowing us to properly understand our son’s injury (and to understand why we couldn’t manage to get a straight answer about it from any of the “experts” we had seen). It’s been a tough road, but from that moment on, we at least knew what to do—and why.

A year or so later, we met Doidge and his wife, Karen, for dinner, and it is here that the story may become pertinent for you.

After we ordered, I told Norman I had a question I’d been wanting to ask—and that I wanted his honest answer to it, even if it meant that I had done something wrong. I proceeded to relay to him the entire tale, from the very beginning to that very moment, of what felt to me like our Kafkaesque medical mystery journey.

How was it, I then asked, that it took my husband and me—both children of doctors, both people with reporting and researching backgrounds, among the lucky who have health insurance, and with access through family and friends to what is billed as the best medical care in the country—years to figure this out, and that in the end we only did so basically by accident?

Norman looked at us sympathetically. “I don’t know how else to tell you this but bluntly,” he said. “There are still many good individuals involved in medicine, but the American medical system is profoundly broken. When you look at the rate of medical error—it's now the third leading cause of death in the U.S.—the overmedication, creation of addiction, the quick-fix mentality, not funding the poor, quotas to admit from ERs, needless operations, the monetization of illness vs. health, the monetization of side effects, a peer review system run by journals paid for by Big Pharma, the destruction of the health of doctors and nurses themselves by administrators, who demand that they rush through 10-minute patient visits, when so often an hour or more is required, and which means that in order to be ‘successful,’ doctors must overlook complexity rather than search for it ... Alana, the unique thing here isn’t that you fell down so many rabbit holes. What’s unique is that you found your way out at all.”

I had barely started processing this when Norman moved to change the subject: “Now, can I ask you two something? How come so much of the journalism I read seems like garbage?”

Oh, God.

David and I looked at each other, simultaneously realizing that the after-school special we thought we were in was actually a horror movie. If the medical industry was comprehensively broken, as Norman said, and the media was irrevocably broken, as we knew it was ... Was everything in America broken? Was education broken? Housing? Farming? Cities? Was religion broken?

Everything is broken.

…

For seven decades, the country’s intellectual and cultural life was produced and protected by a set of institutions—universities, newspapers, magazines, record companies, professional associations, cultural venues, publishing houses, Hollywood studios, think tanks, etc. Collectively, these institutions reflected a diversity of experiences and then stamped them all as “American”—conjuring coherence out of the chaos of a big and unwieldy country. This wasn’t a set of factories pumping out identical widgets, but rather a broad and messy jazz band of disparate elements that together produced something legible, clear, and at times even beautiful when each did their part.

…

This was the tinder. The tech revolution was the match—one-upping the ’70s economy by demanding more efficiency and more speed and more boundarylessness, and demanding it everywhere. They introduced not only a host of inhuman wage-suppressing tactics, like replacing full-time employees with benefits with gig workers with lower wages and no benefits, but also a whole new aesthetic that has come to dominate every aspect of our lives—a set of principles that collectively might be thought of as flatness.

Flatness is the reason the three jobs with the most projected growth in your country all earn less than $27,000 a year, and it is also the reason that all the secondary institutions that once gave structure and meaning to hundreds of millions of American lives—jobs and unions but also local newspapers, churches, Rotary Clubs, main streets—have been decimated. And flatness is the mechanism by which, over the past decade and with increasing velocity over the last three years, a single ideologically driven cohort captured the entire interlocking infrastructure of American cultural and intellectual life. It is how the Long March went from a punchline to reality, as one institution after another fell and then entire sectors, like journalism, succumbed to control by narrow bands of sneering elitists who arrogated to themselves the license to judge and control the lives of their perceived inferiors.

Flatness broke everything.

…

Today’s revolution has been defined by a set of very specific values: boundarylessness; speed; universal accessibility; an allergy to hierarchy, so much so that the weighting or preferring of some voices or products over others is seen as illegitimate; seeing one’s own words and face reflected back as part of a larger current; a commitment to gratification at the push of a button; equality of access to commodified experiences as the right of every human being on Earth; the idea that all choices can and should be made instantaneously, and that the choices made by the majority in a given moment, on a given platform represent a larger democratic choice, which is therefore both true and good—until the next moment, on the next platform.

…

“You might not even realize you’re not where you started.” The machines trained us to accept, even chase, this high. Once we accepted it, we turned from willful individuals into parts of a mass that could move, or be moved, anywhere. Once people accepted the idea of an app, you could get them to pay for dozens of them—if not more. You could get people to send thousands of dollars to strangers in other countries to stay in homes they’d never seen in cities they’d never visited. You could train them to order in food—most of their food, even all of their food—from restaurants that they’d never been to, based on recommendations from people they’d never met. You could get them to understand their social world not as consisting of people whose families and faces one knew, which was literally the definition of social life for hundreds of thousands of years, but rather as composed of people who belonged to categories—“also followed by,” “friends in common,” “BIPOC”—that didn’t even exist 15 years ago. You could create a culture in which it was normal to have sex with someone whose two-dimensional picture you saw on a phone, once.

You could, seemingly overnight, transform people’s views about anything—even everything.

The Obama administration could swiftly overturn the decision-making space in which Capitol Hill staff and newspaper reporters functioned so that Iran, a country that had killed thousands of Americans and consistently announces itself to be America’s greatest enemy, is now to be seen as inherently as trustworthy and desirable an ally as France or Germany. Flatness, frictionlessness.

The biological difference between the sexes, which had been a foundational assumption of medicine as well as of the feminist movement, was almost instantaneously replaced not only by the idea that there are numerous genders but that reference in medicine, law or popular culture to the existence of a gender binary is actually bigoted and abusive. Flatness.

Facebook’s longtime motto was, famously, “Move fast and break shit,” which is exactly what Silicon Valley enabled others to do.

The internet tycoons used the ideology of flatness to hoover up the value from local businesses, national retailers, the whole newspaper industry, etc.—and no one seemed to care. This heist—by which a small group of people, using the wiring of flatness, could transfer to themselves enormous assets without any political, legal or social pushback—enabled progressive activists and their oligarchic funders to pull off a heist of their own, using the same wiring. They seized on the fact that the entire world was already adapting to a life of practical flatness in order to push their ideology of political flatness—what they call social justice, but which has historically meant the transfer of enormous amounts of power and wealth to a select few.

Because this cohort insists on sameness and purity, they have turned the once-independent parts of the American cultural complex into a mutually validating pipeline for conformists with approved viewpoints—who then credential, promote and marry each other. A young Ivy League student gets A’s by parroting intersectional gospel, which in turn means that he is recommended by his professors for an entry-level job at a Washington think tank or publication that is also devoted to these ideas. His ability to widely promote those viewpoints on social media is likely to attract the approval of his next possible boss or the reader of his graduate school application or future mates. His success in clearing those bars will in turn open future opportunities for love and employment. Doing the opposite has an inverse effect, which is nearly impossible to avoid given how tightly this system is now woven. A person who is determined to forgo such worldly enticements—because they are especially smart, or rich, or stubborn—will see only examples of even more talented and accomplished people who have seen their careers crushed and reputations destroyed for daring to stick a toe over the ever multiplying maze of red lines.

So, instead of reflecting the diversity of a large country, these institutions have now been repurposed as instruments to instill and enforce the narrow and rigid agenda of one cohort of people, forbidding exploration or deviation—a regime that has ironically left homeless many, if not most, of the country’s best thinkers and creators. Anyone actually concerned with solving deep-rooted social and economic problems, or God forbid with creating something unique or beautiful—a process that is inevitably messy and often involves exploring heresies and making mistakes—will hit a wall. If they are young and remotely ambitious they will simply snuff out that part of themselves early on, strangling the voice that they know will get them in trouble before they’ve ever had the chance to really hear it sing.

…

I’m not looking to rewind the clock back to a time before we all had email and cellphones. What I want is to be inspired by the last generation that made a new life-world—the postwar American abstract expressionist painters, jazz musicians, and writers and poets who created an alternate American modernism that directly challenged the ascendant Communist modernism: a blend of forms and techniques with an emphasis not on the facelessness of mass production, but on individual creativity and excellence.

Like them, our aim should be to take the central, unavoidable and potentially beneficent parts of the Flatness Aesthetic (including speed, accessibility; portability) while discarding the poisonous parts (frictionlessness; surveilled conformism; the allergy to excellence). We should seek out friction and thorniness, hunt for complexity and delight in unpredictability. Our lives should be marked not by “comps” and metrics and filters and proofs of concept and virality but by tight circles and improvisation and adventure and lots and lots of creative waste.

And not just to save ourselves, but to save each other. The vast majority of Americans are not ideologues. They are people who wish to live in a free country and get along with their neighbors while engaging in profitable work, getting married, raising families, being entertained, and fulfilling their American right to adventure and self-invention. They are also the consumer base for movies, TV, books, and other cultural products. Every time Americans are given the option to ratify progressive dictates through their consumer choices, they vote in the opposite direction. When HBO removed Gone with the Wind from its on-demand library last year, it became the #1 bestselling movie on Amazon. Meanwhile, endless numbers of Hollywood right-think movies and supposed literary masterworks about oppression are dismal failures for studios and publishing houses that would rather sink into debt than face a social-justice firing squad on Twitter.

#tablet magazine #alana newhouse #read the whole thing

[plexxable-reads]

REVIEW: Some Laney’s Died by Brooke Skipstone

✪✪

Update: The author/publisher DM’d me on Goodreads after review was posted to tell me my opinion was wrong. 🙃

----

Read: 8/11/20-8/13/20

Yeahhh— I really wanted to like this And truthfully, it’s not that I didn’t, per say... the concept itself is right up my alley, so I truly enjoyed the parts that were heavy on dimension “skipping”, as this book calls it. I’m a big fan of multiverse stories, paradox theory, all of that. I also love YA— when they’re good. But... (And it’s definitely a large qualifier) At ~25-40%, the author really started to let her biases show. The following dog whistles went off: — kink/sexuality shaming; I was a pretty prudish 16 year old, but I didn’t have the kind of utter disgust and horror that Laney does for discovering her mom’s toy drawer. Like, I get it, it’s always a weird event when you’re a teenager and you have the revelation that your parents fuck, but the way in which the character is written really rubbed me the wrong way. There’s actually an entire part of the plot that centers Laney and two other girls from school filming each other masturbating with a vibrator— which in and of itself is absurd and just not something that actually happens???— but the way it’s written, has so much shame in it, that I was not only frustrated with the fact that this was (an “important”, nonetheless) part of the plot in the first place, but also frustrated that the author was suggesting that young women should be ashamed of their sexuality. It was just weird, y’all. Definitely made me uncomfortable. It could be very possible that this was the author’s intent, but I kind of doubt it. — addiction shaming; they seemed particularly focused on weed for some reason, despite its legality in many places, and there being little evidence to support it being addictive in the way that actual substance abusers struggle with. Laney’s father’s girlfriend struggles with addiction issues, but the only substances that the author names are alcohol (totally valid) and weed (why???). She has miscarried in the past, according to the author, due to this substance abuse. She was also fired because she smoked weed at her job inside... who does that? And look, weed, like other things, is not for everyone, and that’s fine. But to have it be the main struggle for someone who’s supposedly an addict was weird. It’s just silly. If she’s an alcoholic, say she’s an alcoholic. There’s not nearly enough scientific research to suggest that weed usage during pregnancy causes miscarriages, and there certainly is enough research out there for the consensus to be that weed is no more addictive than caffeine (technically caffeine is more addictive...) The way that Laney’s perspective on these issues is written really gives off the impression that the author is letting her personal feelings on the subject of sexuality and cannabis usage show, which is fine, it’s her book, but it really alienated me as a reader who both has some kinks in her sexual preferences, and also, to be transparent, uses a lot of weed both recreationally and medicinally, someone who also worked in the legal cannabis industry for many years. — casual racism; Laney’s friends flash “gang signs” ( the author’s words 😒🧐) in photos. She also goes out of her way to describe a black or brown (we don’t know because Laney literally describes him as something to the effect of, “could be African-American, could be middle eastern”) boy working at the camping/outdoors store. It’s just always a bad look when all of the white characters are not described exclusively by the color of their skin and then the one BIPOC shows up and that’s their leading descriptor. There are trigger warnings at the beginning of the book which is so, so, so, so great! Seriously, more authors/publishers need to do this. What’s strange is that some of the bigger triggering themes were not listed in this warning, and in all honestly, the trigger warning is strangely broad. Like, if you’re going to warn us, you should be specific. “This book contains scenes of violence, sexual situations, and suicide.” Really doesn’t cover it, imo. There’s a sexual assault scene that will honestly probably haunt me and it would’ve been nice to get a heads up. Listing both ‘violence’ and ‘sexual situations’ is not enough, nor helpful. If you really care about a reader being triggered, say what it actually is, don’t beat around the damn bush... not to mention the, ya know, incest.... why on earth is that not listed? I know that this is an ARC and hopefully enough people will talk about these issues, but this overall, these were big negative marks for me that had me, mid-read, docking it from 4 stars to 3 within the span of maybe 20 pages. Overall, I just really didn’t connect to a lot of the writing style. The dialogue felt particularly forced. Never at any point did I feel I was being narrated to by an actual teenager. It gave me, “I’m a cool, hip 30-to-40-something who totally knows how teens interact nowadays,” vibes, but they really, truly don’t. Like, at all. It’s a 4/5-star concept with 2/3-star execution 🤷🏻‍♀️ **Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the ARC**

#some laneys died #brooke skipstone #netgalley #book blog #book review

[teresatranbooks]

Dear Blog,

Prompt: This week I am going to have you read two articles on young adult literature that show both how we can use YAL to consider how adolescents are taught reading, and also how YAL can be used in traditional literary analysis expected in secondary English classrooms. 

Write a blog post where you react to the two articles you read this week. You can do separate sections or even separate posts to reflect on what you read. Do they change your thinking or reinforce what you already thought? 

In “Reconsidering the Hypothetical Adolescent in Evaluating and Teaching Young Adult Literature,” by Mark A. Sulzer and Amanda Haertling Thein, the authors conduct a study to evaluate how the “pedagogical practice of asking preservice teachers to read and evaluate YAL by imagining the needs, desires, abilities, and experiences of their future students...rhetorically structures preservice teachers’ stances towards adolescence/ts” (Sulzer and Thein 164). In other words, how does a pre-service teaching class where future ELA teachers read YAL books frame and position young people -- and how might these frameworks and positions turn out to be false compared to the current reality of who young people actually are and what they care about? 

According to the study’s findings, one of the rhetorical strategies that the authors located was called “the matching strategy” where future ELA teachers “articulated a vision of adolescent needs and matched those needs to the message or lesson of the novel” (Sulzer and Thein 166). They found that the preservice teachers would read a book, interpret its content/themes, and evaluate it based on its potential of teaching a young person the lessons that a “typical” young person would need to learn, given that the young person was a straight, middle-to-upper class white American, among other privileged identities. Content/themes that deviated from the “normative (white, middle class, heterosexual, and able-bodied) adolescent experiences were both rhetorically and pedagogically marginalized, as were textual themes that might speak to a wider range of questions and experiences” (Sulzer and Thein 166). 

I found this finding to be really interesting, because I have definitely seen it occur a few times in the discussion posts and zoom calls in our YAL class. Due to the fact that most of the people in our cohort are white, middle to upper class, presumably straight American Christian cis women, there’s a limit to the kind of analysis of themes and content in the diverse YAL books that we’re reading. While everyone seems to have good intentions and are coming to these books with an open and empathetic perspective, I have noticed that what preservice teachers deem as “relatable” for adolescent readers are the kind of adolescent experiences and feelings that seem “universal,” but are actually very individualistic, selfish white American experiences and feelings that in reality, a lot adolescent readers who are BIPOC can’t relate to. There’s a presumption that there’s a set of “universal” feelings, if not experiences, that everyone goes through, some examples include feeling insecure as your body and emotions develop, finding love and new relationships, developing confidence as you become a young adult, becoming angry at your parents and realizing that they’re people too, etc. But not everyone can relate to that. Not everyone experiences that during their adolescent years. Truly. And I think some of that blame has to be put on students being taught in K-12 American school about the “typical” hero’s journey by Joseph Campbell (who is actually pretty racist...) -- and the “typical” narratives, archetypes, and motifs you’d find in Western stories. And some of the other blame can be put on the not-very-diverse makeup of our cohort and our faculty. 

We can teach as much culturally relevant pedagogy as we want and include as many diverse YAL books as we want, but if we do not address the very real systemic issues present within the individual demographical makeup of the English Education cohort and faculty, and actively create an environment where more BIPOC students and teachers feel welcomed and safe to be included and voice their perspectives, as well as be able to enact change, then we’ll never be able to adequately address the apparent disparities in how preservice teachers evaluate YAL books with their questions that are used to frame their interpretations, and thus, adolescents.

In “What YAL Tells Us About Learning, Schooling, and Teaching,” by T. Hunter Strickland, the author conducts a study on the traditional narrative arc of the “young nobody as protagonist, who, under the guidance of a wise mentor, comes into possession of a symbolic object of power, and then must complete a quest or series of quests with their loyal companions, where they will come across many obstacles before ultimately facing their downfalls because of the protagonist’s character flaws” (Strickland 18). More specifically, Strickland evaluates how new YAL stories that use this narrative arc speak to the types of learning, schooling, and pedagogy present in the teachers, students, and curriculum in our real life schools. What are the parallels? How can we understand learning and teaching in schools in the US by what is being shown in the YAL texts we’re reading? What is being valued and/or prioritized in schools in the US given what we see of the mentor and mentee relationship reflected in so many of YAL books read throughout time? What is not being valued and/or prioritized? 

According to the study, “examining how learning and teaching are represented in texts that our students engage with is important because we want our students to know that learning is not perfect, and then help them to be critical examiners of the pedagogical spaces that surround them” (Strickland 19). I really agree with this point. While I have not read Scythe by Neal Shusterman, I have read plenty of YAL stories that incorporate a narrative arc where the young nobody upstart protagonist at first idolizes their wise mentor and follows every single lesson that is being taught to them, believing their mentor to be someone who has all the right answers...only for them to realize that their mentor is an imperfect human just like them with hopes, dreams, and flaws, and only has so many answers that are more often than not, incredibly biased. The protagonist must then challenge their mentor and seek their own answers, in order to become their own person -- and perhaps become a mentor to someone else. I have found this experience to be especially true when we’re young and more impressionable. We tend to look up to the adults in our lives, teachers especially, and put all of our hopes and dreams in their hands, praying they’ll guide us safely to the answers we want -- but, not necessarily need. How old were you when you realized that the adult and mentor figures in your lives were imperfect humans and didn’t have all the answers? I was probably 15/16 years old, but it definitely crystalized for me when I was 18/19 years old. And that’s when I grew up. 

In the article, Strickland discusses the idea of this old/new binary and how it can lead to some interesting thoughts on education. “We would be lying if we did not think that education has a problem with new fads versus traditional pedagogy” (Strickland 21). In other words, much like it is presented in YAL novels, there is a tension in the education world between old and new methods of teaching and learning. “The problems in education can be solved, so some would have us think, with the next new teaching method...or students would learn if only our countries would invest in the new education-in-a-box kit...” etc (Strickland 21). Which is better? The old ways of the wise, but imperfect mentors? Or the new ways of the hopeful but naive new generation? Where is the balance between those two? Should there be a balance? Is the binary between old/new teaching and learning styles actually a binary -- or is it more complicated and fluid than that? 

Given all of this food for thought to chew on, I immediately think of activism, particularly modern young activists looking to create some real change in the world. Especially given the Black Lives Matter movement, I think about how it is important that we root ourselves in the works of liberation and radical thinkers and the histories of liberation-focused movements. Following only on headlines and news will have us swimming in despair or stuck in an intellectual drought. There were people before us. There were Black revolutionaries, scholars, activists, thinkers who have written works on anti-racism and how to combat white supremacy. Mistakes on the left have been learned. We must read them, listen to them, and learn from them. 

I also think about one of my favorite “YA” movies: Star Wars: The Last Jedi (a story about an adolescent Rey learning under the guidance of the famous Luke Skywalker and becoming the new leader of a new generation of Jedi)-- and one of my favorite quotes from that movie, spoken by arguably the most iconic wise mentor of them all, Yoda: “But weakness, folly, failure also. Yes, failure most of all. The greatest teacher, failure is. Luke, we are who they grow beyond.” It’s honestly one of the most emotional moments in the movie for me because it articulates a lesson many of us teachers sometimes refuse to accept -- and the kind of potential many of us learners do not realize we possess. 

As future teachers, we have to acknowledge that we are always learning and are not perfect, and that the future students that we teach will one day surpass us and not only pass on the the parts of our knowledge that resonate with them, but also learn from our mistakes. In addition, as preservice teachers, we have so many great mentors to learn from and we must respect that there are people who have gone through what we’ve gone through and can help us. But also as simply students, we have the responsibility to ourselves and to the new generation to take what we’ve learned, critically examine it for its flaws and gems, and form our own pedagogical stances and teaching practices. 

So, to summarize, the binary between old and new teaching and learning narratives present in so many YAL stories is actually less of a binary, and more of a complicated case-by-case situation -- and this is a good thing! Because the real world is so much more diverse than we will ever be able to perceive, with so many lessons we have not yet had the privilege of learning, that it should comfort us to know that what is being valued in many YAL stories is this idea of teaching and learning as something fluid and organic and emotional and complex and very very very human. 

#YAL SU20

[rebgarof]

[This is where I’ve been, what I’ve been working on. Appreciated this writing.]

But the problem with performative allyship is not that it in itself damages, but that it excuses. It excuses privileged people from making the personal sacrifices necessary to touch the depth of the systemic issues it claims to address. If you hashtagged #sayhisname, you’ve done your bit, right? You’ve publicly declared you stand against racism and therefore can check that off your to-do list. Wrong.

Looking through the Instagram stories of apparent white allies shouting for justice, my heart broke to see their posts immediately followed by photos of what they had for lunch or something similarly unrelated. This kind of allyship is transient. A passing story. A repost. For the ’gram. It’s cheap and inauthentic.

How do you spot performative allyship?

On social media, there are four clues:

[1] The post is usually simple—a few words, an image or whatever the going hashtag is (in the aesthetic of their personal brand, of course). Performative allyship refuses to engage with the complexity below the surface or say anything new.

[2] It almost always expresses itself as outrage, disbelief, or anger “at the injustice.” But your outrage isn’t useful — if anything, it’s a marker of your privilege, that to you racism is still surprising. Trust me when I say this is not so for black, indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) for whom racism is an everyday reality.

[3] It refuses to acknowledge any personal responsibility for the systemic issues that provided the context for the relevant tragedy. Instead, it looks at a villain “out there” — a crooked police officer or a heartless conservative. It separates you (good) from them (bad).

[4] Perhaps most noticeable, it’s usually met with praise, approval, or admiration for the person expressing it. That is its lifeblood.

(...)

Act with your wallet

This, I believe, is the greatest thing you as a white person can do to support BIPOC. If you are disgusted by the centuries of state-sponsored theft from black, Asian, and indigenous people’s lands, then support BIPOC-owned businesses. Initiate your own program of reparations by actively looking for products and services you use regularly and finding alternatives created by BIPOC. And if you’re heartbroken by the exploitation of people of color in some of the poorest countries in the world, refuse to buy from the fashion and technology companies that continue to shamelessly exploit adults and children in their labor practices.

Call out people in real life

It’s easy to call people out when you’re hidden behind a keyboard. You know what’s hard? Calling out your boss when he routinely mixes up your two Indian colleagues, or facing off with your racist relative when they start talking about “immigrants taking our jobs.” If you can’t yet speak up, that’s okay, but recognize that fact and commit to doing your work so that, one day soon, you can.

Inform yourself

It’s all too easy to focus on the people ���out there” — the evil ones, the KKK, the neo-Nazis. Almost every sensible person believes these people and their views are deplorable. But because they are marginal and few in number, they have little power and influence over the mechanics of society. You know what does have mass influence? Systemic white apathy and privilege. And I’m sorry to say, if you’re white, no matter how nice you are, unless you’re doing serious and sustained personal anti-racism work, you are a part of the machine. Ask your BIPOC friends about their experiences of racism and listen. Engage in ways to confront your own biases. Read books on the history of racism in your country. (This reading list is a great place to start.)

Do something that no one will ever know

As Lil Wayne said, “Real Gs move in silence like lasagne.” This is never more true than in activism. Sometimes real activism requires us to step up and shout. But far more often, it requires us to carry out simple daily acts that no one will ever see. If, on reflection, everything you do is public, it’s likely you’re a performative ally. Challenge yourself to do things quietly, like changing the things you buy, giving your platform to a BIPOC, or educating yourself on the history of racism without telling everyone about how educated you now are. That way, you know you’re really down for the cause — and not the cause of looking like a woke person.

Simply “saying stuff” is easy. You know what’s hard? Not buying stuff you want because the supply chain is violent. Turning down a job because the company employs child labor in Africa. Calling out other white people when they say something clearly racist. That shit is hard. But if you want to be a true ally to BIPOC, you have to be willing to do it. Anyone can post hashtags on social media. And the fact that this is seen as an act of activism is deadly.

So this is a call. For all of us. To get honest and real. To look at how much we really care. To understand that when our allyship does more for ourselves than for the people it professes to help, we have a problem. Be an activist who actually acts. It’s too late in the day to be anything but.