#to me it feels the same as when middle class people dehumanize poor people. like. you're the same. you're exactly the same | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

girls-are-weird · 2 years

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so i watched The Video (tm) lisa tweeted out and may have ended up with a full running commentary...

before i say anything else: i wanna make it clear that i'm not saying james somerton's take on the portrayal/gaze of the rich young royals is, as a whole, bad. there are actually a lot of points he made that i agree with, it's just the bringing together of those points to form an argument and derive a conclusion off of, as well as how he relates it to young royals, that i feel was a bit of a reach. so i just wanted to clarify that i do appreciate him for taking the time to put together this video essay, even if it didn't necessarily work for me. it did still give me lots of food for thought.

now, hold onto your hats. this is going to be long.

1. BEFORE WATCHING THE VIDEO OR READING ANY RESPONSES

first, for context, here's my immediate response to lisa's tweet, before i even watched the video. looking back on it after having watched the video, i think i still feel pretty much the same.

2. BEFORE WATCHING THE VIDEO BUT AFTER READING SOME OF THE RESPONSE

i also jotted down some of my thoughts as i started seeing the discourse around it online, again before i watched the video:

a comment from the video came my way implying... that portraying happy middle-class/poor people is somehow unrealistic... i don't think i can agree with that

i mean, yes, capitalism is absolute shit, especially to middle-class/poor people. that's not to say they're always thinking about the utter misery that is their lives?

plus we do see simon's family deal with the pressures of not having money, so it's not like they're pretending those don't exist

this is my main gripe with this entire thing-- the erikssons are just not poor. it's very privileged of US middle-class folk to think of ourselves as tragically oppressed by capitalism when there are people who have it so, SO much worse

(insert the whole "but just because my problems are not that bad doesn't mean they're not valid!" argument here-- yes, i know. that's not what i'm saying. it's just, rich people aren't the only ones who are privileged and people tend to forget that in their analysis, so it needs to be pointed out)

see that's my thing with the "why do we focus on the problems of the rich?" argument-- i find it equally dehumanizing. yes, capitalism predisposes us to put rich people on an aspirational pedestal that isn't real and it's fair to demand media focus more on the opposite end of the class spectrum. but i object to linking people's humanity, and the empathy we should have for them as fellow human beings, with the size of their bank account, whether it's because they have too much money or too little. rich people can also struggle, and i think it's fair (and sometimes necessary) to tell stories of that struggle, too. there's an argument to be made that we maybe focus too much on the stories of rich people, and i don't disagree. but picking on one specific show that does it like it's representative of all the evils of capitalism seems a bit much to me. wille (and felice, and august, etc...) is a human being regardless of his status and i'm sure his problems and struggles resonate with many viewers out there, even though most of us aren't royalty or are even rich. we all can relate to having to deal with our personal issues while navigating our privilege. i would never feel like that story shouldn't be told. and with simon there, we also get to see ourselves reflected on a character on the other end of the spectrum, as well. we get to see and empathize with both sides, because they're all HUMAN BEINGS despite their differences, which i think is something we really urgently need more of in this world.

(note that i'm not saying the video implies this. i actually haven't watched it yet, i'm just about to 😂 those were just the thoughts that came to my head as i read the responses)

3. RUNNING COMMENTARY AS I WATCHED THE VIDEO

and then i moved into actually watching the video and commenting live. you may be able to follow along as you watch, but it took me like two hours to get through it because i had to keep pausing/rewinding. 😂

watching the video now and... LOL it has like full-on opening credits 😂 i don't know why i found that so funny

i... am not sure i like the tone of this

"attending hillerska through scholarships" no 🙄 seriously, where do people get this idea??

okay yeah i'm not liking this. you have 43 minutes to change my mind about you, dude, tread carefully

did he just say simon doesn't deal with his own emotional ties and only struggles with wilhelm's??? DID WE WATCH THE SAME SHOW???????

i do like the flipped cinderella comparison, though

okay i'm actually getting a little bit angry now. it's rich to say the show doesn't delve into simon's own issues when in reality it's just this analysis willfully ignoring that YES, IT DOES

like, yes, the point of how portraying the wealthy/royals as flawed human beings is capitalist/monarchist propaganda is a good point. yes to that. but that doesn't necessarily imply that the PoV of the lower-class people is ignored in favor of making their lives seem perfect/happy to show that poverty isn't that bad?? that's a leap, my dude. maybe i can see that in the crown, but definitely not in YR

oh he did NOT just reduce the choir scene to a "service" simon is performing for wilhelm. THAT'S NOT WHAT IT WAS ABOUT *head explodes*

disagree about "poor people are better off because they have freedom." VERY much disagree with this.

the LAST thing simon would ever do is imply that people should feel grateful they are poor, omg what is this

i appreciate the deep dive into shameless but if he plans to compare shameless to YR i feel like that is a massively unfair comparison

the CEOs vs royals point is good, though

LOLing at the trump point because yep, i completely agree

i don't think the show is at any point trying to imply simon is "impoverished," though. he keeps making this point, and i don't think it's the flex he thinks he is. he's falling into the trap of seeing things from the rich people's PoV because that's what the rich people do in the show-- when that doesn't necessarily mean the audience sees him that way, or that the show is saying he should be seen that way. you're falling into the exact propaganda system you're trying to denounce, my dude

also that's not AT ALL what rosh and ayub's reaction to simon's aggressiveness to august was about, nope, hard disagree

.............................................i'm just sitting here laughing at the way he pronounced "august" 🤣

ok i'm about halfway through and my thoughts are: good points are made. most of the putting together of those points to make an argument is... a reach

also i am not entirely sure this person actually watched the show, or maybe that's just how people who only watch the show once actually manage to get from the show, and it differs from my experience having watched it at least a dozen times

i feel like he's trying so hard to be snarky. and usually i like snarky, but i feel it's wholly unnecessary for this topic. i'm having a hard time separating the content from the tone

love that he makes the point that intellectuals glorify dourness right after he went on a 10-minute spiel about how much better shameless is

basically saying that shameless focuses on the struggles of a lower-class family trying to make its way out of poverty while YR focuses on the struggles of a rich/royal kid being mildly inconvenienced

i'm not commenting on shameless per se-- i've never watched it, but i've heard it's very good. i'm just saying, comparing it to YR feels like apples and oranges to me... and then he goes into that whole section about dourness and the glorification of tragedy... my man...

YR is not a tragedy. tattoo that on my forehead and carve it on my tombstone

..................what was this point about aristotle and mitochondria, whut 🤨

yeah i was wondering why he was equating drama to tragedies... not the same thing, dude

okay, bonus points for quoting carrie fisher

i feel it's also a reach to say that all of wilhelm's issues save for the death of his brother are a product of his own choices. some are, sure. maybe even most. but i think he's ignoring the level to which wille's life is out of his control. i certainly don't think the sex tape being produced OR released to the public is something he had any control over, and (while certainly NOT to the level of how society limits lower-class people) the monarchy itself does exert some level of control over him, which generates his internal struggle. should the show be more balanced about this vs the struggles of non-rich people? sure, that's a debate we can have. but don't put the faults of the system on the individual character's choices. it's as much of a fallacy as saying we can fix climate change by recycling our day-to-day trash. wille is a pawn of the system as the rest of us are-- perhaps on a lower level than those of us less privileged, but he still is, particularly because he's a kid. he has very little choice in the grand scheme of things. could he, perhaps, make the choice of saying "to hell with this" and renounce his birthright and live the life he wants to live? sure. but he's sixteen. are we really expecting him to? at least the characters in shameless are mostly grown up.

"according to young royals, being poor is actually kinda great! MUCH better than being rich" he just said this. again. why.

it's a pet peeve of mine when people equate "working class" to "poor"-- they are not the same, and it masks the issues that the people who are legit poor have. this dude keeps doing it over and over again.

like, i could make an argument that, while simon is 100% much better off than actual poor people, that doesn't mean his life is perfect. which it's not, and we see that on the show. but i guess this analysis just misses that?

yeah, i was just thinking that... like, micke might be poor by swedish standards? the rest of them are not

i hate this. i hate this so much.

i feel like i don't understand what solution he's offering with this analysis, if any. like, what should we as a society do with our depiction of class in media, then? never write stories about rich people? write stories exclusively about poor people struggling in life and never being happy? i don't understand what the endgame of this is. yes, it's not necessarily good to frame lower-class people as "having a better life" than those "poor sad unfulfilled rich people" so the capitalist system can make sure the lower classes don't revolt against it. but the solution is not simply to make every piece of media be about the struggle. it's the same for LGBTQ+ people, for marginalized races or religions, you name it. there is SOME value in showing that a marginalized group can also achieve a happy life despite overwhelming odds against it, and without having to "escape" that group (ie getting rich, "passing," staying in the closet). the goal of these happier portrayals is not to uphold the oppressive system, but so that our souls are not crushed by the weight of the knowledge that we can't escape that oppression. i think that's valid. he's somehow intent on making it sound like a bad thing.

"we overinflate the freedom of poverty, and omit the ways that a lack of wealth fundamentally stifles individual freedoms" yes, of course, showing how the poor struggle with oppression, i can't believe no one's thought to make a show/movie/book about that ever 🙄

"the poor in general have to dedicate a lot of their time and energy to not being destitute" WHOA that's a sentence. my dude. i'm just sitting here staring at his jacket and his glasses like...

"it's not fair to expect the poor to liberate the rich when the poor cannot liberate themselves" THEY'RE SIXTEEN, JESUS

he is putting WAY too much on the kids on this show, i swear to god

why did he not make this video about the crown?? this video would've been SO much better if it was about the crown. and hell, even in the ONE segment he actually mentions the crown, the example he uses is... charles not wanting to go to a boarding school his family is requiring him to attend. hey, maybe next time more focus on the adults, perhaps?? y'know, the people who can actually make a difference with their choices??

"why do we obsess over rich people so much?" listen. i know people might not want to hear this, or accept this on a personal level, but knowing that people who have it better than us also have shitty lives makes us feel better about our own lives. and i know that's your point, but you keep avoiding the fact that sometimes we NEED that so that our own problems don't overwhelm us. the point is not to make us satisfied of our own lives; it's to make us not want to jump off a bridge when we realize how unsatisfying our lives are. let us have that, man.

"leave some of your favorite emotional support poors in the comments below" OH MY GOD, STOP IT

he does say at the end that he liked YR and he's not trying to put all of this on one specific piece of media. which, great. but also i just sat through 46 minutes of him doing exactly that 🤔

i am not socialist enough to enjoy this, i think that's where the problem lies lol

"but the part that frustrates me is that even while i'm condemning the use of emotional support poors in media... don't you kinda wish it would happen to you?" LOL NOPE. not even in the SLIGHTEST. 😂 i sometimes enjoy watching it on tv, though!

"there is a literal never-ending flow of media material talking about how miserable the rich are, specifically because they're rich" yes, because "poor" people don't need to be reminded every five seconds of how terrible OUR lives are, thankyouverymuch. we see it every day when we, y'know, live our lives. that's why it's called escapism.

it just occurred to me that he started this whole video essay making the point that he was talking about YR because it's not just "regular" wealth but has the royal component to it... and then spent like 3/4 of the thing speaking about YR solely in terms of wealth. and using it to make points about billionaires and other "regular" wealthy people. 🤔 maybe you should've spent some time talking about your head of state, my dude

i hated the ending. i mean i don't disagree. i just don't think it's fair to spend 50+ minutes talking about how YR glorifies the rich and then be like "but at least it taught me a valuable lesson!" no, my friend. that lesson is what the show was going FOR. you just missed that.

quoting myself here, i'm gonna say "good points are made. most of the putting together of those points to make an argument is... a reach" is still my overall conclusion, i think

oof, this has been a JOURNEY. 😂 idk, maybe someone will find my thoughts interesting. just don't come for my head if you disagree lol

#young royals #young royals netflix #royalty #royalty media #class conflict #james somerton #prince wilhelm #simon eriksson #media analysis #video essay #long post #sorry i went on a bit of a rant #or several of them honestly haha

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flying-elliska · 3 years

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one of the most impactful things I have read lately are two of French author Edouard Louis' books, Pour en finir avec Eddy Bellegueule and Qui a tué mon père (translated into English as The End of Eddy and Who Killed my Father). It's been two months and I'm still thinking about it.

The first book is an 'autobiographical novel' about the author's childhood growing up as an obviously gay boy in one of the poorest areas of France, until he leaves and reinvents himself as a writer. It's fraught with bigotry, abuse, bullying, violence, deprivation and social despair, and it's one of the most harrowing things I have ever read. It reads as many things as once : a recognition of trauma, an angry exorcism, a cry for society at large to pay attention, and to be honest, as a horror story.

It was criticized by some in France as portraying the working class in a manner that was too negative, which tells me they missed the point entirely...ironic for a book by someone who actually grew up poor - one of my least favorite things ever is progressives telling a marginalized person they can't talk about their own experiences because they don't fit the desired mold. (The French love to romanticize the working class and I'm pretty sure it's often an avoidance mechanism.)

The point of the book is so obviously not about 'look at how terrible and bigoted those poor people are'. Little Eddy spends a big part of the narrative trying to escape - himself at first, then his family/circumstances and the persistent homophobia everywhere. In the end of the book, he finally manages to get accepted into a fancy high school in the city on a scholarship and tries really hard to fit in. The last scene of the book is a bunch of his - educated, upper/middle class - classmates throwing homophobic taunts at him, starting the cycle anew. I can't think of a clearer way to say 'this is not a story about a sad gay boy escaping the evil bigoted countryside for the city and then everything was wonderful!!!! this is a story about a systemic, pervasive problem.'

One of the key arguments of the book, to me, is how homophobia, sexism and bigotry in general are both a product and a reproduction mechanism of social and economic exclusion. For instance, he describes how the norms around what it means to be a man in his village (being tough, disobeying authority, quitting school early to go work at the factory, drinking alcohol, neglecting your own health, fighting over women, repressing your feelings, etc) perpetuates the cycle of poverty ; but again this isn't 'oh these people are so stupid' and more 'these people are trapped'. Because he makes it evident how degrading and dehumanizing poverty can be, this masculinity reads as a desperate attempt to cling to a certain amount of dignity - it's an extremely dysfunctional coping mechanism. At the same time, anyone falling outside of the mold is violently ostracized (like Eddy, who tries and fails to fit in). So the system keeps reproducing itself.

In Who Killed my Father, the author makes his political argument clearer. This is more of an essay, centering on his father, arguably the most complex figure in the first novel. The man is an angry, bigoted alcoholic who makes his family miserable ; at the same time he is the son of an abusive father who makes a point of honor to never hit his kids or wife even though it's very normalized in this context. In this essay the author keeps talking about the moments of almost tenderness with his father that haunt him, the picture he has of him doing drag in his youth, the fact that the father tried to leave the village when he was young to find a better life for himself with a close friend but failed and had to come back - the moments of what-ifs, of trying to struggle free from the cycle, when the system appears almost fragile and not so unbreakable after all, that the son kept holding close like a sort of talisman.

The narrative is structured around the fact that his father injured his back working in a factory and that he had to keep doing physical labor afterwards for money, instead of resting to recover, until it completely destroyed his body. Now he finds himself bed-bound at 53. Louis inquires into who is responsible for this premature 'death'. After considering individual choices, he turns towards political decisions - the successive governments, left and right, who have been destroying the French welfare system for decades and accelerating inequality. The point is to step out of the neoliberal obsession with personal responsibility and who is guilty and who is a bad or good person, and look at systems.

An element that isn't focused on but hovers over the story constantly is that this village is one where the majority of the population consistently votes for the extreme right National Front party in most elections. The book is too angry and nuanced to be some stupid "it's not their fault that they're racist because they're poor!" argument. It doesn't make any excuses for how awful this is but instead illustrates how dehumanization replicates itself, how people being denied basic dignity leads to them wanting to deny it to others. If you want to really understand the rise of the far right you have to look at where the inequality comes from in the first place, and how easy it is for people in power to wash their hands of it by blaming the bigoted masses. (Just like you can blame societal ills on minorities ! Two for one strategy.)

Towards the end of the essay, the author talks about how proud his father is of his son's literary success - for a book who clearly depicts him as a horrible person ! And this is a man who has spent his life openly despising anything cultural, because it never showed him a life like his own. But maybe now he feels seen, now he knows people want to read about these things. Maybe there is a reclamation of dignity through looking at the horror head on. Maybe his son somehow slipping through the cracks of the cycle gives him more room. The man stops making racist comments, and instead asks his son about his boyfriend. Most importantly, he asks his son about the leftist politics he's engaged in. They talk about the need for a revolution.

I think what strikes me the most is this attitude of "wounded compassion" that permeates the book. What do you do when your parents are abusive but even after you grow up, you can't help but still love them, and you know they've been shaped by the system that surrounds them ? Recognizing, speaking the harm is essential. You need to find your own freedom, sense of worth, and safety. You need to dissect the mechanisms at hand so they lose at least some of their power over you. You need to find people who love and believe you. But then what? Do you dismiss your persistent feelings of affection and care for those who hurt you as a sign you're just fucked up in the head ? You could just decide to never speak to them again, and it would be justified, but is that really what is going to heal you the most? It's important to realize you have the choice. But there are no easy conclusions.

This makes me think of a passage I have just read in Aversive Democracy by Aletta Norval. The essential ethos of radical democracy, she says, is about taking responsibility for your society, even the bad parts, instead of seeing them as a foreign element you have to cleanse yourself of. It's too fucking easy for queer progressives, especially the middle class urban kind, to talk about dumb evil hicks, to turn pride into a simple morality tale, and forget that any politics that don't center the basic dignity and needs of people are just shit. The injury is to you and by you and you have a duty of care just as much as a duty of criticism. (And this is obviously not only applicable to class matters.) You can't just walk away and save your sense of moral purity. (This is not an argument that the oppressed are responsible for educating the oppressors ; it's about how privilege is not an easy simple ranking and it is too damn easy to only focus on the ways in which you are oppressed and forget the ways in which you may have more leeway.)

There is no absolute equivalence between political and family dynamics but the parallel feel very relevant somehow. Several truths can coexist at once : you needed help and it was not given. You were let down. It's important to recognize that people are responsible of how they treat each other. You need to call out what isn't ok and stand up for yourself. At the same time, there is a reason why things are like this. Making people into villains is often bad strategy (within reason!), and in the end, easy dichotomies are often an instrument of power. The horrors you have been through might have given you a very specific wisdom and grace you do not have to be afraid of ; you are not tainted by your compassion (it is very much the opposite of forced forgiveness ; it has walked through the fire of truth.)

To me these books fit into what French literature does best, sociological storytelling a la Zola or Victor Hugo - the arguments aren't new and they can come across as heavy handed, even melodramatic. But I'll argue that the viscerality is the point, how the raw experience of misery punches through any clever arguments about how exploitation persists for the greater good of society. Really worth reading if you can do so with nuance.

#edouard louis #french literature #france #queer culture #queer literature #lgbt books #bookblr #also just like the first book is a walking trigger warning in every possible direction so like careful #also the dude is literary buddies with ocean vuong and im curious to see if there are any parallels there #long post #poli sci

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kneel-begyourpardon · 3 years

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TVA = CAPITALISM

okay let me write this because the entire time mind was just TVA is such a good symbol of capitalism. i was so excited to write this and then everything went down and now im just broken. so here is what i could gather from my scrambled brain.

TVA reminds me of capitalism so damn much. the way it is structured, the way it's run is literally the way capitalism runs the world.

they treat humans like robots. idk who's in charge of TVA but their obvious goal is to control others. they gave the TVA hunters the idea that they were doing something good. this was the right thing to do and they should feel honored.

this reminds me of rich people. people do everything to get on top. if they think they have this purpose in life they will do anything for it. TVA hunters felt superior because they thought they knew what normal humans didn't. they thought this was the highest they could get in the universe. they thought this was it. that's how rich people are. capitalism wants us to believe that money is everything. and they turned the world into such a place where money is everything. our money is TVA hunters timeline. for us, money is everything for them timeline is everything. they are these rich people who think they have control over the timeline/life because they have money. but they don't.

and then comes middle class and poor people who are just these pawns. they are controlled, they have to live the way capitalism wants because that's how they made the world work. they normalized not having free will. and we see here that TVA hunters have no problem that others don't have any freedom because they think they do. and honestly, that remains me of rich people a lot. they close their eyes and turn their heads and try to forget how the world is suffering around them or they just forget it because they live in such comfort that they never think who's suffering outside their millions of dollars worth apartments.

and if you think about it TVA hunters were like middle-class people who became rich and suddenly they forgot who they were. now they are acting all prideful because they think they're on top. the highest they can get in the world. the most power they can have.

The way TVA has dehumanized humans is actually so sad and so real. they took away their memories, their names, their personalities. they made them into these hunters who have no idea in reality what they are fighting for and that's actually not that far from our reality because we fight, we live and we die for money and in the process, we forget who we are and we forget about our morals. that the other person we're walking all over is also a human. they might not take away your name but they still give you a number.

just like TVA is fighting for this one timeline bullshit is the way our governments are fighting for our future. they sacrifice us, our free will, and our happiness for the future and I'm sure in the future they'll do the same for the same reason. when will the future come? they always are thinking about the masses. better for the mass. we can't sacrifice 100 people for one. that was the TVA's reason. they killed millions for that one timeline. just one. because apparently, that's the 'right one'.

and that one person is no one until it is someone they care about. someone rich or someone popular or just someone. humans have this thing that we don't realize or care that something bad is happening until it happens to us. and that's what happened to b-15. we saw the way she was treating the variants until she realized that she was also a variant. and then suddenly her world changes, her views changed. i mean you can't blame her because she had no memories but you can blame humans that forget that others are also human.

the brainwashing TVA was wow. the poster b-15 was looking at reminded me of communist posters. the propaganda. they brainwashed people so hard that judge Renslayer even killed a man she loved. when she saw that the timekeepers were robots she didn't even blink and just killed loki like NOTHING. I'm still bitter.

in the end, I'm probably reading too much into it. also hopefully this made sense bc I'm still in shock. and idk man, I'm mad at capitalism.

#loki #loki spolers #loki series

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allthislove · 3 years

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I wanna come back to the affirmative action thing, because I’ve been thinking about it for a while and the shit bothers me, okay?

Racial intelligence is a myth. Positive or negative, this is not a real thing. I’m going to talk about the Model Minority Myth and bit here, and also how Black people, especially Black Americans, are seen as inherently stupider than other people.

On one end of the spectrum, you have Asian people, who do well academically. People talk about them like they’re inherently better at school, or smarter than other people.

On the other end, you have Black people, who are thought of as bad students, stupid, incapable of succeeding in school without the assistance of affirmative action.

Neither point makes much sense, because they ask the person listening to imagine that neither Black nor Asian students have individuality. They can’t succeed or fail because of their own merits, but that their success or failure is because of some thing encoded into their DNA.

In reality, this is socialization. Before I get into this, I wanted to remind the world that Black women are the most educated demographic in America, today, and so what I’m about to talk about is (thankfully) changing, but let’s take a look at what factors help create both of these myths.

Asian families, especially immigrant families, tend to push education. It’s almost a virtue. Getting good grades became important for some Asian immigrants because they wanted their children to have their best chance. Immigration is hard. Many immigrants (not just Asian immigrants) come here and have to completely start over. Degrees they earned in their home countries sometimes become useless, here, especially if they’re not fluent in English. They often came to this country and had to initially work very menial, hard labor or dirty task jobs that Americans didn’t want. So, they pushed for their children to do well academically, so that they could become something better when they grew up.

So, right from the start, Asian parents are pushing for their kids to do extremely well in school.

What happened to Black kids, then? People never seem to tell the full story, here, but when I thought about it, it was obvious. I’m working on a play, right now, about Black people in the American South around the time of the first World War. The main character is a young Black woman who “finished” school at the 8th grade level because there wasn’t a school that taught Black people after that in her area. This wasn’t just some random thing I made up for my play. This is the situation that Black people lived in for a very long time, after Emancipation. While some HBCUs were being founded (thought many of them were initially just seminaries or agricultural schools) many parts of the country just didn’t have places where Black people could learn after a certain point. Couple that with a country that really doesn’t give a crap if Black people get good educations and education just never really became the most important thing, for us.

Black people valued a lot. We valued our stories. We valued our culture, which we built ourselves because most of our original cultures were stolen from us. We valued music. But, we never got a chance to be socialized to value education, because education was not available to us. And then when it was, it was often subpar.

So, right away, you have two completely different situations. One group, largely immigrants who have everything to lose and access to education; education being one of the main reasons to even come here. One group, brought here on slave ships, enslaved, freed, and then kept from good education for decades, if not an actual century.

The other factor in Asian academic excellence is that, especially at the college level, you have the top students coming to the US specifically to study at American universities. So, already, you’re skewing the numbers.

Anyway. So, Black people weren’t socialized to treat education with the reverence that many immigrant families do. So, once we started to get better access to education by the mid 1960s, most Black people just didn’t find it to be a virtuous thing to have good grades. Good or bad grades are just a thing. Don’t get me wrong. Black parents still get happy when their kids get an A, and upset when their kids get an F. But it was never treated as this all-encompassing thing. It just is what it is.

Couple that with, you know... a lot of socioeconomic factors that a lot of Black people still live in, and grades and scores just aren’t that important.

The thing is, that is shifting. A lot. Like, almost the sharpest course correction Black Americans could have. As I mentioned before, Black women are the most educated demographic in America, now. Why did this happen? I’m not exactly sure. A lot of people credit the emergence of images of Black success on TV in the 80s with shows like The Cosby Show and A Different World with sparking this shift. More Black kids saw that it was possible and therefore more Black kids went to college. The thing, though, is that that’s still mostly Millennials and Gen-Z. Meaning barely 1 generation of Black people have started to become more educated. Which also means, like... we haven’t had the time to see what the impact of this is going to be.

The Model Minority Myth for Asians is decades old. Black people even being able to go to PWIs is shorter than the Model Minority Myth.

I guess what I’m trying to say is... Black people aren’t more educated because education went easier on us than other people. We’re more educated because we’re capable, and we never were not capable.

Again, affirmative action makes sure you’re not overlooked because of your race. It doesn’t magically create a spot for you just because you’re Black, and especially not because you’re Black in spite of you being undeserving. And the other thing Affirmative Action doesn’t do is change your grades. If a Black student earned a 4.0, they earned the same 4.0 as and Asian student with a 4.0. Black students succeed or fail on their own merit, not because they’re Black.

And as for poverty... poverty is incredibly difficult to escape, no matter your race. I’m not the best person to speak on Black poverty, because I’m not poor and I grew up comfortably middle class with two college educated and professional parents, so yeah, but I can say that because I grew up like that, it was far easier for me to go to any 4 year college and earn any degree I wanted than it will be for some poor kid living in the projects with a single parent with a GED. I’m not sure why people act like Black poor people are an example of why Black people are inherently bad or stupid. First of all, you can be incredibly good and incredibly smart and still live in the projects and be poor. Second of all, the existence of bad people in the Black race doesn’t mean that all or even most Black people are bad. Third of all, nobody is stupid, and if they seem “stupid” to you, something else is going on. A lack of education. A cognitive disability. Something. “Stupid”, like “crazy”, is a dismissive, and often ableist, word, and basically means nothing.

And since I brought up the Model Minority Myth, I think I should mention that it’s also very harmful to Asian people, especially students. One, it’s dehumanizing, and makes people hold Asian people to impossible standards that obviously every Asian person can’t meet. And two, it misses the experiences of Asian people who didn’t come here for academic reasons, many of whom don’t have the same “education as a virtue” thing that many specifically East Asian or Indian immigrants have. Like, people who came here as refugees instead of exchange students. Many of those people find that they get left behind by the myth, teachers offer them less help because they’re Asian and are supposed to be “smarter than everyone else”, and they end up falling into a sort of gap. Many of them drop out, and the cycle of poverty continues. And I guess a third, big problem is that it makes colleges and universities judge Asian applicants more harshly and hold them to a higher standard than everyone else, which means that unless you’re a high flying Asian overachiever, you might have a harder time getting into college than your white or Black friends.

So, anyway, what I’m saying is that assigning a certain intelligence level to someone based on their race is bad and like... America really has a big problem with race and we need to fix it.

Also, we need to do better, as a whole, about understanding why we have the misconceptions that we have. It’s really frustrating, for me, to constantly feel like I have to prove I’m not stupid to strangers because they all assume I am because I’m Black. Or at least less intelligent than they are. And to have to defend my two degrees constantly because old Duck Dynasty looking white guys think I didn’t earn them because of affirmative action. To have to constantly explain that a Black person’s A is the same A as anyone else in the class, because, while teachers do sometimes grade on a curve, it’s not given racially. And that if you answer a question correctly, it’s correct. And if you solve an equation correctly, you solved it correctly. And that the answer doesn’t change for Black people, and that the work isn’t easier.

And I think people know that it doesn’t make sense, because when you think about it logically, it doesn’t make sense that one group of people is inherently stupid or that another is inherently smart. We understand individuals. We know lots of people, each of us. We know someone who isn’t bright at all, we know someone who is incredibly smart, we know some people like this who are the same race as each other, and even the same race as us. We know they’re different because they’re individual people, and that they don’t represent our entire race. So, why, FOR THE LOVE OF PETE, can we not... as a society... yet understand that race effects our conditions, but does not dictate the type of person we are in the slightest?? Good, bad, smart, pretty, not smart, ugly, short, tall, funny, boring, brave, scared, energetic, whatever the hell... THESE ARE TRAITS THAT MAKE UP INDIVIDUALS, NOT RACES. Race is a lie we tell ourselves to explain why certain people share certain physically features and/or geography. Nothing more. We have built entire societies around this lie, and like... I’m not naive enough to think that race will no longer be a factor any time soon. Some people are far too hung up on their racism for us to truly move on as a society. But I also know that, for us to begin the process of moving on from it, we have to be honest about how it has shaped our society and stop this thing of blaming people for the conditions the society forced on them and how it affected them through the generations.

This was a lot, and I’m not sure if it’s clear, but yeah. All of this shit is more complicated than you want it to be, and people don’t fit neatly into little stereotype boxes. You have to get that shit out of your head and learn to both see individuals AND understand how history shapes our present reality.

#racism #the dreaded affirmative action conversation #the model minority myth #BLM #BIPOC #BIPOC thoughts

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saltiestsoprano · 4 years

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I need to talk about something on here that I don't normally discuss. Buckle up, this is long.

After my daughter died and we moved to NYC, our finances and credit were so thrashed and ruined that we ended up homeless. Not "Oh, I'm staying with my mom" homeless, but we went to the PATH office and surrendered many of our human rights to stay in a city run homeless shelter. I can go into all the details of why we ended up homeless, but frankly, it doesn't matter... capitalism was the villain in this story and the details don't matter. We stayed in that shelter 7 months, during one of the coldest winters in NYC history without heat or hot water, without internet or any kind of distraction from the four cinder block walls in a room the size of a utility closet housing two adults and one special needs toddler. We had a curfew and if work ran over we would be given demerits that could lead to being kicked out of shelter. The city wanted to keep the money we earned to "save it for us" so that THEY could decide when we had earned too much and it was time for us to leave. Workers would open our door without warning any time of day, they would schedule appointments we HAD to attend or lose our housing in the middle of our work day - work we had to maintain or again lose our housing. We could not drink alcohol and they would search the rooms for ANY contraband. If you lost work you would be sent to a program where you would be offered work for half of what the job paid people who didn't come from shelters, and even if it was up in Connecticut you had to accept the work and if you didn't you were kicked out of housing. Volunteers would visit and stare at us like some kind of sideshow while providing some kind of charity service that we were both grateful for and resentful for being treated as a lesson for what not to so. It was one of the most dehumanizing and debilitating experiences of my life. AND WE WERE LUCKY. Our experience was mild compared with other families in the same system because we were white and educated and could advocate and navigate the system(we also had a great case worker who we're still friends with who told us how to talk to these people. Her off the record conversations probably cut our time in shelter in half), because we didn't have felonies that barred us from renting, because we were a family and not single people in first come first serve shelters. One of the worst experiences of my life, eclipsed only by burying my child, was MILD compared with what the majority of homeless people face.

After 4 months we became eligible for a program to offset the broker's fees and security deposits and helped with our rent for a set amount of time after we left the shelter. It took 3 more months to find a landlord that would even TALK to us or consider taking a city program. We got LUCKY.

April 1st 2015 we moved into our new place elated - but also traumatized from our experience in the shelters. We had money anxiety for years, that I don't think has fully gone away. We've kept this apartment for five years. We're again lucky. The same landlady that gave us a chance understands we just lost our employment and is willing to work with us on rent for as long as need be. We are not in danger of losing our housing. We're lucky.

So all my ranting about suspending rent doesn't affect me. I'm fine. I'm ranting about Cuomo's disregard for the poor for the people more vulnerable than myself because I KNOW what being homeless feels like. I know what is facing all of these working class/poor folks once housing court opens again. I know how the shelters are going to be overwhelmed and there won't be any net to catch the people who won't fit. I am advocating for those who cannot advocate for themselves because for ONCE I am in a position to do so. Don't mistake my rants as selfish panic for my own family - although that panic would be totally understandable considering my life experience - I am here trying to make everyone understand that what I went through no human should ever go through. And it's the job of our elected officials to FIX that. We don't need to reinvent the wheel in the USA, we have models for financial nets for citizens we could adopt if our "leaders" chose to do so -both of our own creation from our New Deal era and more modern ones our European allies have developed on their own.

Yes, you may reblog this.

#coronavirus #covid19 #quarantine #homelessness #governor cuomo #andrew cuomo

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iamjjmmma · 5 years

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“Number All My Bones: There and Back and There Again” Part 1, Chapter 4

Beginning: https://bit.ly/2NtGPgu

Previous: https://bit.ly/2H5dDej

Next: https://bit.ly/2tD9Q03

It’s only a taser; I know. I know the basics about these types of guns, although violence isn’t my main research preference. Still, I duck inside, my heartbeat still somewhat yelling at me, my head definitely yelling at me to get back to my work, that it’s probably just some sort of census. But the doorbell rang, and Papyrus immediately sprang out of his seat, with that golly-gee smile impressioned all over his face, and sprinted towards the door. Sans sprinted after him, and I after Sans, all of us except Papyrus seeming to remember the rule that no one was supposed to answer the door except for me. But the door opened before I could say anything, and there stood the one woman I would cry over just a few weeks later. Her name tag read “Ica Grey, Head of the Anti-Monster Department”, the “Jess” part obscured by a shadow for a little while, but I knew who she was. The streak of grey hair, the crossed arms, the badges on her blue dress told me everything. She was the one who had started the “MF” tag, the one who had started the monsters coming home without any sort of occupation, the one who had started the monster children not allowed to take the same classes as humans, the monsters being denied from the hospitals. The dehumanization process didn’t need to be done; it simply was, and it was since when we were born. My smile stretches until it turns taut. “Hello, Miss.” Her hand settles on her taser for a moment, but it stutters just before it settles by her side. “Hello, Doctor. I’ve heard a lot about you.” I nod. “I can say the same. Especially with your ‘MF’ endeavors. What does it stand for, though? I’ll take a wild guess. ‘Monsters Forbidden.’” She nods back, although I can practically see her teeth gritting. Her hand moves closer to the gun. Betty whimpers a little, and Sans and Papyrus hush the other children away before they get embroiled in the grown-up soup of politics and science. In another world, maybe I would have gone with them. But that world is faraway, much too far from now to even think of existing. Miss Grey put her hand by her hip. “Are we conducting the meeting or not?” I nodded, although I didn’t even think about giving her any more than that. I was prepared to send all of the children upstairs, thinking they went into the living room, but it was only Betty, reading a history book for her tutoring program, no doubt. I was about to say something, but one look at the scary lady behind me all in blue sent her tiptoeing away and making her way up the stairs. As we sat on the couches, the coffee in the pot cold by now after my morning cup, I made my move, even though I knew it wouldn’t work by a long shot. “Do you mind putting the gun away? I have four little kids here, and I don’t want them getting-” She laughed, ran her long fingernails through her hair once or twice. “Of course not. You’re the scientist, aren’t you? You should know by now that it’s only a safety precaution. Not that I’d willy-nilly fire at one of your kiddos, right?” I sighed, went into a conversation about geothermics I wouldn’t give to my students until it was May and the graduation caps were being shipped. I counted myself using the words “entropy”, “enthalpy,” “quasistatic”, “Carnot cycle”, and “calorimetry” at least twice each before she started to nod off before nearly bumping her nose on the edge of the couch. Science that would have gone over her head even if she had a fifty-foot mitt to catch it. She jerked herself up so quickly that she started falling forwards, and I almost stretched out my hands to catch her before she could regain her composure.“Well, Dr. Gaster, this was all very, very informative, but can you please focus on the effectiveness of your project?” I went into a slight smile. Finally. “Alright, Miss. The expansion of the Core will help to power our city by-” She put a hand over her mouth in mock shock, but I knew she was yawning underneath. A professor tends to notice these things easier. “So it basically makes our gas bills cheaper?” I laughed, and I almost put a hand over my own mouth. I shifted into a different language, one that politicians love to speak. “What-?! No. No, not at all. If the expansion is complete, you won’t even have to pay for electricity at all. Ever. And thanks to it, we’re starting to see a big change. Not only in the bills-” I stopped. I was getting a little preachy. I laughed again. Even if I was preachy, it wouldn’t ever stop me from loving the feeling. So I gave in when she asked how the Core worked. Just this once. “Well, it converts geothermal energy from the mountain to-” I couldn’t say “magical”, but there was another word for that. A word I could use. “-idiopathic energy by using the underground chambers. These chambers have magnets with turbines that allow the electricity to be transformed from idiopathic to-” She put her hand over her eyes, although I know they were closed underneath. “It converts electricity to heat.” “Oh, I see.” Huh. So she wasn’t asleep after all. “A non-polluting, unlimited, self-sustaining power source. Of course…” I stand up, and she puts her weight on her toes as if she’ll follow, but she stays right there where she is. People say I’m a good judge, even though I’m a better scientist, but in cases such as this, I can’t always pull out a clear verdict about someone. “...none of this would happen if you don’t sign the agreement tomorrow.” She nods, but puts her hand closer to her taser just in case. “Yes, but that doesn’t mean anything.” “What do you mean that doesn’t mean anything? I’ve just explained an energy agenda that I doubt you’ll find anywhere else, and-” “That still doesn’t explain the rest of your kind.” “Are you-?!” “Yes, Doctor. I am. You think that just because you’ve made energy out of the dirt means that you haven’t come from it. You come up here and steal our jobs, steal our money, all because you think you’re better than the rest of us. You-” I stretched out my hand, reach for anything looking vaguely like a door handle to push. “Miss Grey, I didn’t say any of that-” “Oh, just because you didn’t say it doesn’t mean it isn’t-” I saw her in the corner before I heard her. Betty had come back from upstairs, probably because of all the fuss we made down here, and was looking at me with some of the most terrified two eyes I’ve ever seen. “Excuse me, ma’am.” She didn’t bother me as I went over and patted Betty’s shoulder. Poor girl. Only a few minutes here, and already we’ve escalated beyond what I would ever think of doing if Jessica wasn’t… Jessica. “Betty, it’s alright. The both of us were just having a discussion, alright? It’s very important. So what I need for you to do is to go back upstairs and-” “Doctor.” “Just a minute. What I need for you to do is go back upstairs and tell the others that everything is fine. And even if it does escalate, I’m stronger than I look, huh?” I patted her shoulder again for good measure. “Doctor, please. You’re not talking to anyone.” “Miss, what do you mean I’m not talking to anyone? Betty’s right here, isn’t she?” Chara and Asriel have come back down, too. I suppose the conversation died just enough. “Isn’t she?” Chara shakes his head, while Asriel shrugs his shoulders. “She’s still upstairs playing puzzles with Papyrus. An’ I think she’s learning how to play chess, too.” I look to my right, and Betty’s gone. Anxiety can do more than you could ever imagine, I suppose. If it can keep me staying awake at night after a dream that only mildly alarmed me, it can do what it just did. Anxiety also kept me heading towards my room after Jessica left, after calling down the kids and getting Papyrus to help me fix a pizza and some chicken, telling them that dinner was probably right around the corner. And just as anxiety foretold, something’s wrong. One of my books on human-monster history has fallen on the floor, but even without any sort of education in physics, I can tell it doesn’t fall like that. It’s at least halfway across the room, my bookshelf still in place right next to the door, and when I picked it up, another eerie fact sent a chill down my spine, and I almost felt my coat shaking along with it. It was open only a few pages in towards the end. Experience has taught me otherwise. If books don’t fall flat on the covers, front or backs, it normally falls with the middle pages open and spread out. Meaning if it didn’t fall, someone had to have taken it. Was it Sans or Asriel or Betty or anyone being tutored by him, forgetting to pick it up after they’d left? Or was it Papyrus, who was trying to get his own little revenge for me not getting him the book at the library? Alright. Focus. It’s probably one of them. I put back the book, and I sighed, going out to fix myself another cup of coffee. Anxiety can do everything, I suppose.

#glitchtale #camila cuevas #glitchtale anniversary

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bitletsanddrabbles · 6 years

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Talk to us about the personality traits, layers, contradictions, unanswered questions, etc you find most interesting, intriguing etc. about each of these characters: Cora, Thomas, Edith, Mary, and Baxter :)

Alright, the short answers go here. There will be essays on a couple of these characters later (and if you can't guess which ones, you've not been paying attention), but these are the short ones.

Also, since this is a public answer, for the random goers reading this I would like to clarify something about the term "contradictions" as used here. Contradictions in character personality are frequently pointed to by a lot of people as a sign of bad writing. Given how fond people are already of blasting Julian Fellows's absolutely non-existent writing skills that they watched six seasons of, I feel the need to point out to anyone with that perception that, no, actually, when intentionally done, contradictions in a character are signs of good character development, because people contradict themselves all the bloody time. The world is too complex for us to avoid it.

And, of course, your routine reminder that there were only three members of the household who were around for more than an episode who I really disliked. Any other complaints about characters here are just recognizing flaws in my beloved cast.

Right then! That said, let's look at this.

Cora:

While Cora has many wonderful, admirable qualities, the first thing that pops to my mind when thinking of her is honestly how crazy gullible she is. I suspect this is a direct result of how utterly trusting she is of people. She's not the least bit suspicious of anyone. I mean, she slipped on soap after O'Brien told her it was under the tub, and still thought O'Brien was the best thing since sliced bread. Simon Bricker had to show up in her room before she realized he was trying to have an affair with her. Of course, all of this just makes one of my favorite scenes all that more memorable: Rosamund telling her that Edith wants to go to Switzerland to improve her French and Cora just absolutely dead straight faced "Why not go to France?" That was beyond beautiful! But yeah, that someone so intelligent and observant in other aspects of her life should be so easily lead around is a fascinating quirk. In a way it balances Robert who is generally unobservant, but tends to get a decent read on people who are up to no good (the Duke of Crowborough, Sir Richard, Simon Bricker, etc.).

Also, she hands down seems to be the person in the house with the best grasp on the concept of a punishment-reward system and the fact that it requires, I dunno, rewarding people for things? I mean, given the choice between punishing Thomas for lying about Baxter's past and rewarding him for running through a burning room to rescue Lady Edith, history shows that Carson would probably have sacked him for the lie, and even Robert probably would have just wordlessly not sacked him. Cora, on the other hand, had no problems going, "Okay, you know what? I have every right to be hacked off at you, because what you did was WRONG and I want you to know that, but damn. Saving my daughter deserves something nice, so as a reward, you can keep your job." It's not that she'll let him just get away with things, but she at least acknowledges his good behavior.

Thomas:

Everything.

Edith:

Probably a result of being a middle child and feeling that her sisters get everything and she gets nothing, the way to make Edith want something really is to tell her she can't have it. This extends to people. Sir Anthony is no longer a good match because his arm is injured and anyway, he's too old? Set a wedding date and don't tell me no. Michael Gregson is not an acceptable match because he get a divorce from his clinically insane wife? I will wait until the end of time for the situation to change, my darling. I'm not saying she's crazy clingy, it's just.....okay, yes, I love her, and I understand, but she's kinda crazy clingy. Fortunately by the time Bertie comes along she's starting to get over that a bit. I think having Marigold helped.

Speaking of Marigold, I've come across people out there who really, really like to rag on her for how she handled that situation, particularly where the Drewes were concerned. I wold like to point out that the entire arrangement with the Drewes was Mr. Drewe's idea, Edith's behavior was perfectly acceptable within the terms of the agreement, and the whole thing fell apart because Mrs. Drewe wasn't in on the scheme (and I understand why Mr. Drewe wanted to seriously limit the number of people who knew about it, but really, that was a major screw up right there, and by the end he knew it). If you want to point fingers about poor, abused Margie, point them at her husband, not Edith. Edith was just trying to find a way to be a good, responsible, supportive young single mother in an age and class where all Miss Manners had to say on the subject was "I don't care if you're engaged and he's willing to walk through fire for you, don't sleep with him until you're married, you light skirted hussy!"

(Fortunately, Robert and Cora are actual human beings with hearts and souls, unlike Miss Manners who can be reasonably determined to be the world's first automated character generator, invented by Charles Dickens to turn out overly moralistic antagonists for his novels.)

Baxter:

Most of the things I want to know about Baxter (outside of "how long is it going to take before she and Molsley actually get married? No hurry, just curious") relate to Thomas in some way, but that's because their stories are kinda super entwined. I'd like to get a better idea on her age (I'm a terrible judge, and you can't go off the actors). I would like to know more about her growing up - not in detail, exactly, but a bit more about her relationship with Thomas's sister - how did they meet? The past tense implies they're no longer friends. How did that happen? Then there's her family's standing. At least one comment made to Molsley suggested that they weren't overly respected (at least that didn't feel like just the prison thing), but Thomas's father was kind to her. I'd also like more of an idea on her actual relationship with Thomas. For instance, how did he even know she needed a position? Did she contact him? If so, why him? A lot of fanfiction authors cash in on their super-duper close relationship as kids, but she tells Cora she was his sister's friend, not his, and I know I was never terribly close with my friends' siblings. I mean, yes, we interacted a lot, and it was not bad interaction. I can certainly see her having babysat him or that sort of thing, but I don't see her having practically raised him herself.

Basically I really want a firmer grasp on how she got to the point where we meet her. One of the major flaws of serialized film as a medium is that it can limit your chances for backstory development, particularly when you have a cast as large as Downton.

Mary:

The more I work with Mary as a character, the more I'm interested in her relationship with Downton itself. Robert refers to the estate as "his third parent and his fourth child" and I kind of feel like Mary feels the same, but it's not always in a positive manner. She loves her family and her home, beyond any shadow of any doubt, but at the same time I feel she genuinely resents the pressures and responsibilities it puts on her. It makes her feel trapped and at points, I think, particularly in season one, a bit dehumanized. Her half of the "your grass is greener" syndrome she and Edith share is that Edith isn't continually being told "to marry the man she sits down with at dinner." She's permitted to fall in love with whoever she pleases (within certain societal standards), she has fewer responsibilities as far as behavior and protocol and all of that, etc. Also, since Mary is the oldest, it's probably been an expectation throughout her life (particularly when younger) that she set a good example for her younger sisters and make sure they stay out of trouble. That would be one thing with the significantly-younger Sybil, but Edith is only a year younger than Mary. That's not a huge maturity gap, so I feel that probably fosters a bit of Mary's resentment toward Edith herself.

I also find it interesting that in a lot of ways, Mary’s the member of the family with the best understanding of the servants. Sybil paid attention to them, of course, and was nice and helped Gwen and all, but Mary understands them. She apologizes to Bates for being in the men’s quarters in episode one. She’s the one who sent William to see his mother when she was dying. In season two, she recognizes Thomas’s ambition and - honestly - discontent. There is a level of observation and, in many ways, respect there that no one else quite gets.

I could, of course, go on a bit longer on everyone, but I think this covers the most important points.

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sinrau · 4 years

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Storm Troopers on the Streets. People Being Disappeared. A President Dismantling Democracy. Where Does America Go From Here?

Masked men armed with machine guns. Abducting people in unmarked cars. No warrants, no explanation.

Here’s the navy vet who reminded them of their oath — and got his hand broken for it.

Here are the Moms who were gassed — attacked with chemical agents — for not obeying.

Here are peaceful protesters being beaten and tear gassed.

Here are the masked, armed men in question. Take a hard look. Does the term “stormtroopers” feel appropriate?

Here’s the part where the president announces that all that’s coming to city after city. Those armed men, those stormtroopers — are going to be in your town, too, shortly.

Is it fascism yet?

I ask that for a reason. Not to be snarky. Even at this late, late juncture — almost too late — there seems to be far too small and weak of an understanding of what’s happened to America. Sure, people like me have been trying to explain — and predict — it for years now. But by and large, the price we paid is being ignored and marginalized. The moment I started talking about American fascism being a real danger — whoosh — there went my book deals, columns TV appearances. Don’t cry for me. I never wanted them. I like making music. But you should have listened, or at least been able to hear the warnings.

Because now America, its democracy, its future, its present, faces a very real existential threat.

Fascist implosion.

How did I know that a fascist implosion was on the way? Why was I so certain of it?

The answer to that question is: “everyone — and especially intellectuals — should have.” Because that is what the socioeconomic data pointed to, in no uncertain terms.

Fascism happens when a society falls into sudden, fresh poverty. In particular, when it holds debts it can’t repay — and the result is widespread economic stagnation. A feeling of discontentment and hopelessness become pervasive. Social bonds fray. Trust collapses. A society is hanging together by a thread. Elites, whose status and prestige will be lost if they admit they’ve mismanaged society, don’t — and so the vicious cycle of poverty and despair simply thunders on.

Soon enough, in the vacuum, a demagogue arises, who blames the economic woes of the true and the pure on those its easiest to scapegoat. Long-hated, powerless minorities. “We will be Great Again!,” he cries. “All you must do is annihilate the subhumans.” His flock — long ignored and derided by elites as the cause of their own problems, now have someone else to blame, to demonize. Those who they’ve hated for generations, usually, anyways. Bang! The fascist spark is lit. The rest is history.

How did I know that fascism was coming, way back when? How did anyone not know, is the better question. We all know — or should know, roughly — the story above. It should have been as plain as a tornado heading your way on a sunny day. Why?

American wages have been stagnant for half a century. That suggested fascism. How did Americans make ends meet — considering prices of basics, from healthcare to food to education, are always skyrocketing? They went into debt. America became a debtor nation. That suggested fascism, too, this time strongly.

The debts Americans held were unpayable by the 2010s: the average American began to die in debt. Americans give me a blank look — “so what?” — when I say that, but to an economist, there should be almost no more devastating statistic — it means people don’t earn, save, or own anything. They’ve become neopeasants again. Germany owed money to France and Britain — Americans owed it to their own super rich. Different faces — same toxic economics. These toxic economics didn’t just suggest fascism anymore. They practically shouted it.

Finally, as a result of these ruinous trends, the American middle class became a minority in 2010 or so. A nation had fallen into fresh poverty. Sure, it wasn’t the absolute crushing poverty of, say, the Congo. It was something different, stranger, precisely because it’s so rare. It was poverty in a nominally rich society. It was people in the world’s largest economy forced to choose between their lives, that crucial operation, and their life savings. America’s middle class became a minority, its working class disintegrated — everyone except the super rich and their minions became one giant, amorphous class of new poor, perpetually indebted, living right at the edge. All this didn’t just shout fascism was coming — it screamed it.

America’s economic statistics by this point — the mid 2010’s — were shocking, breathtaking, surreal. At least to those who were paying attention. How many of us was that left, though?

80% of Americans lived paycheck to paycheck. A similar number couldn’t raise a tiny amount for an emergency. Half of Americans now worked “low wage service jobs.” All this screamed — screamed — fascism was coming like a wounded animal crying for help.

At least to anyone who knows the story of how fascism happens, which should be all of us, but especially intellectuals. America’s intellectual class, though, has never been much of one. It’s made, mostly, of pundits — men who look good in suits, but haven’t read a book since grade school, it seems. And so nobody — nobody — with any real influence or power warned Americans what was about to happen. What was now inevitable, inescapable, because in America, the 1930s had begun to repeat themselves.

What was about to happen, as sure as the sun sets, or the stars rise? Fascism was.

Right on cue, as if according to a script, Donald Trump emerged. Remember when I said “a demagogue arises, who blames the woes of the true and the pure on hated minorities?” Trump played that role with eerie, stunning precision. He called immigrants and refugees animals and vermin. He mocked disabled people. He demonized and dehumanized black people, Mexicans, Latinos, women. He threatened to build a wall, and promised that the true and pure would be Great Again.

You’d think at this point, Americans would have gotten it. Here was fascism. It was happening here. Just as had been foretold by anyone thoughtful enough to pay even cursory attention to history. Poverty, despair? Check. Demagogue? Check. Threats, intimidation, hate, dehumanization? Check. Blaming hated minorities for all a society’s problems? Check. Check. Check.

Trump was likely to win — because the historical deck was stacked for him. Fascism was on the cards now. That much should have been lesson one, and the opposition should have been fierce and furious both.

Instead, the very opposite happened. The New York Times “but-her-emailed” Hillary. Wait, what? Emails versus fascism? What the? Today’s “anti-Trump” brigade was squarely for him — folks like Morning Joe. And instead of taking the possibility seriously that he might win, and do, well, the things fascists do — anyone who tried to warn of that was dismissed, mocked, marginalized, scorned.

Nobody was allowed to say fascism. At least not if you wanted to be serious and grave and respected and all the other accoutrements of American punditry. Me? I’ve always cared more about telling you the truth than accolades. So I warned as sternly as I could, and swiftly lost my columns, book deals, TV appearances, and so forth.

Part of me was relieved. I never much liked any of that stuff. I wasn’t made to be a pundit. I’m a lover, not a fighter. But part of me was also horrified. Because I knew that now the final element in the recipe of fascism had arrived, too. What was that?

Demagogue? Check. Idiot army? Check. Hate and violence? Dehumanization and demonization? Scapegoating long-hated minorities? Check, check, check. All those are necessary for fascism to seize power. But to keep it, exercise it, abuse it? For fascism to really reach its brutal, grim culmination?

The final element is the most dangerous one of all, and yet it’s the hardest to see, too.

Denial.

Now Americans went into four long years of denial. They baffled the world. They felt like an eternity to people like me. Four long, terrible years.

Concentration camps were built. Nope, no fascism here.

Kids were “separated” from their families, and thrown in them. That’s a form of genocide by the way. Nope, no fascism here.

People were caged in the camps. Fascism? What fascism?

Entire ethnicities were banned. Fascism? Where?

Entire government agencies were purged, and “Acting Directors” — extremists, crusaders for the project of a racially pure “homeland” — were installed. Nope! Still no fascism here.

Oval Office advisors were revealed to be literal white supremacists. What’s it called when racial supremacists seize control of the government? Nope! Not fascism!

Hated minorities hunted by shocktroops in the streets. Papers checked. Fascism? Where?

The New York Times, among others, did fawning profiles of…Nazis. Fascism? Don’t be ridiculous! There’s no fascism here!

Four long, long years. Four stupid, terrible, idiotic, painful years. Of polite denial, quiet complicity, and flat-out cowardice. During which the Trump Administration checked literally everything off the textbook fascist checklist we learn in grade school, then high school, then college — concentration camps, bans, raids, paper-checking, dehumanization, hate, purges. While there were three kinds of Americans. One, the American Idiot, who supported all that. But two, the good American — who was in denial as deep as an ocean about it. And three, the American intellectual, politician, leader, who pretended not to get all that was fascism, or worse, actually didn’t.

The world was baffled, disturbed, bewildered, horrified. Were Americans really that dumb? They didn’t know fascism when they saw it? What the?

Didn’t they get that literally every item on the fascist checklist was now being ticked, save one?

The world hadn’t seen such a level of denial since the 1930s, either, as the one that swept America over the last four years.

That is why the fascists were so stunningly successful — to the point that now Americans have to ask: “will they steal the next election?” Their very own denial paved fascism’s way down the abyss.

I said one element was left on the checklist of fascism — what was it? Can you guess?

The old saying goes. “First they came for the Black person, and I did nothing. Then they came for the Mexican, and I did nothing. Then they came for the refugee, and I did nothing. Finally, they came for me.” I’ve modernized it a little.

The last checkbox on the list of fascism was all those institutions of fascism which had now been built — Gestapos, paramilitaries, concentration camps, cages, dehumanization, raids — being turned against white Americans themselves. The “real” ones, the ones who thought, foolishly, they were safe.

Nobody was safe. Nobody is safe when fascism ignites. Especially not the good people. They are either drafted into the fascist cause — or they are abused and intimidated into silence and submission. What was happening to the Mexican, the Latino, the Black — it was always a foreshadowing of what was to happen to all. Everyone was to be brutalized, in the end. Those shock troops were always going to hunt you, one day, in the streets, too.

That’s why fascism is so dangerous. It’s like a plague. It consumes a society whole, or not at all.

So what happens now? After these four long terrible, idiotic, painful years of shocking, incredible levels of denial, complicity, and cowardice, which let fascism flourish?

What happens now is this. The fascist institutions that Trump built get used against Americans, brutally and relentlessly and remorselessly. Camps, Gestapos, raids, bans, purges, shock troops, cages. Not just again Mexicans and Latinos and Blacks, who happen to be Americans. But Americans, meaning the whites who’ve thought they were above such things. Now fascism reaches its endgame, which is that the fascists use the institutions they’ve built to control and dominate a whole society through terror, brutality, and violence.

Now the shock troops march down your pleasant streets. They intimidate and frighten you from voting, protesting, organizing, marching. They scare your children and terrify your neighbours. Now the fascists do everything they can to steal the next election.

And if they win, then critics, opponents, dissidents — all get disappeared by those armed men. Thrown into camps. Put into cages. Who knows when they’re ever seen again. They’re enemies of the state now. Those shock troops stay on the streets forever. Your kids get recruited into the fascist machine, seduced by promises of glory. The Trumps stay in power for a lifetime. The great fascist goals of racial purity, ethnic cleansing, genocide, violence, holocaust — they begin in earnest.

That’s what happens next.

How do I know?

The real question is: how the hell don’t you still know? The entire world knows.

Night falls.

The leaves quiver.

The wolves bay, and the frightened animals scurry.

Is it fascism yet?

Umair July 2020

#IFTTT #WordPress

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yespoetry · 6 years

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What ‘Lady Bird’ Got Wrong — And What It Got Right

By Joanna C. Valente

In a movie about growing up, you can expect a lot of pains. You can expect those silent traumas to happen without the main character fully realizing how a seemingly ordinary moment, like a slapdash comment from your mom about weight or losing your virginity to someone who is indifference to you. When you watch any movie about growing up, you know it’s going to be uncomfortable – which Lady Bird was, even while it made you laugh.

The abuse we see in Lady Bird hurts – and it’s dangerous. And what’s most dangerous about it is the fact that it seems so ordinary, so glossed over by the fact that it’s done with the best of intentions – that the abuse is done out of love. This is something we tell ourselves, as humans, everyday: If something is done out of love, it isn’t abuse. That isn’t true.

Lady Bird's mother, Marion, is often the culprit of this kind of “silent” abuse, whether it’s focusing on Lady Bird's bad grades (although you question how bad they could really be if she’s on scholarship), how she walks, what she wears, etc. Really, Marion picks on Ladybird just to pick on her, and takes any opportunity to belittle her.

It’s never necessarily what an outsider could call severe, or even abusive, since it seems like motherly nagging on the surface – but when you truly take a deeper look, especially into the fact that it’s unending, it really is abuse. Lady Bird never gets a break, as Danny pointed out. In many ways, her unhappiness and self-centeredness and need to lie, stem from the fact that she’s often told, even if by implication, that she’s not good enough. And she won’t ever be good enough.

The telling scene is when Lady Bird asks her mother if she likes her, and if maybe, this is the best version of her she can be, and her mother ignores the question, even makes a face. That says it all. That is abuse—and it’s the kind of abuse that teaches girls to ignore their desires, to feel small, to silence themselves.

Another telling moment in the film is when Marion stops talking to Lady Bird because she applied to New York schools (as if that is also a crime). Employing the “silent treatment” on your own kid when they live in your house, even after they plead with you and apologize profusely, is abuse. Considering Marion is a psychiatric nurse with a husband who takes medication for depression, she should also know better. She’s the adult in the situation, whereas Christine is not. Marion desires control, regardless of how it affects others.

This is what the movie does well: It portrays ordinary abuse, the kind of ordinary abuse so many of us have endured that we usually deny it’s abuse at all. Because it’s hard to admit when loved ones belittle us in ways that become part of our psyche. Yes, Christine is thoughtless and selfish (she is a teenager, too), and her treatment of Julie illustrates this, but she is never intentionally cruel.

When she realizes she has ignored Julie for her richer, cooler friend, Lady Bird promptly tries to right it. Lady Bird, despite her flaws, is not full of the kind of pride that prevents you from taking accountability. Her empathy for Danny is indicative of her openness—and her kindness. She could be upset Danny lied to her about being gay, but she also realizes it’s not about her. There’s more going on.

The thing is, many abusers understand what they do is abuse—and know what they are doing as they’re doing it. Marion, for instance, must understand she is mistreating her daughter, especially when she tells Lady Bird her own mother was an “abusive alcoholic,” also implying that anything less extreme must not be abuse, which is a way for her to rationalize her own actions. This rationalization is merely that, though, and not logical or ethical. As Paul Bloom wrote in his recent New Yorker piece on cruelty, “The truth may be harder to accept: that our best and our worst tendencies arise precisely from seeing others as human.”

Marion isn’t unintentionally dehumanizing Lady Bird when she refuses to use her chosen name (as opposed to her birth name, Christine), she is intentionally doing so – and because she knows this will hurt her. In order to actually hurt someone, you acknowledge their feelings because you can understand them, a kind of reverse empathy. If being cruel meant you actually didn’t view the other person as a human with emotions, you would probably miss the point of cruelty.

The fact that Lady Bird chooses a name for herself clearly proves all of these points: She is trying to find her identity, she is trying to shine like a radiant star in the same way she and Danny named their star Bruce, she is trying not to feel like a failure, she is trying to rise above the abuse and see herself as a survivor, not a silent victim. She merely wants to carve her own identity.

When she chooses not to use Lady Bird at the end, it’s a signal – both for Lady Bird's nostalgia for home (and her mother) and a way to show gratitude for the life her family gave her, but it’s also a strange sign of defeat. When she uses her birth name, we see her after one of the most isolating moments of her life, probably: Waking up alone in a New York City emergency room after having alcohol poisoning within her first month or so in college. That is not exactly a triumphant moment, and is also the result, perhaps, of her trying to cover up her loneliness and isolation, both from her family and her new surroundings.

Wherever she is, she doesn’t seem to “fit in,” and most of the film centers around Lady Bird trying to find her niche. In many ways, she romanticizes New York City, thinking she will find her place there, and in many ways, is disappointed she hasn’t – and perhaps begins to feel homesick for a place she couldn’t wait to get out of. This journey felt real because it was real.

For me, as someone who attended Catholic school for 13 years who often felt not good enough (and also dealing with feelings of queerness), who was the "poor kid" in a rich school, Lady Bird's world echoed mine in a lot of ways. I often found myself in the homes of other students, homes so unlike my own (and many of those students liked to point it out too), and felt out of place. Feeling out of place also means you can become silent, and try to blend in, or you have to find your real, authentic self. I chose the latter, as Lady Bird was also trying to do, but often struggling to (because who doesn't?).

Finding yourself is not an easy task. It’s not something you can simply do by moving, but by being honest and allowing yourself to fail. When we find Lady Bird at the end, in a bittersweet moment, we find her at the cusp of change, of potentially finding who she is. This is what the film does well – of not necessarily giving us everything we want in a neat bow.

But, in many ways, it’s also the film’s downfall, because we often do get what we want. The film is still portraying ideas of privilege and whiteness, with room for little else. While Lady Bird is definitely not rich, and often mentions how she’s the “poor one” who grew up on the wrong side of the tracks, she is still much more privileged than most: She’s white, in a middle class family who is sending her to a private Catholic high school. Beyond that, she’s also conventionally attractive, talented, and smart. While she is struggling like any teenager struggles with sex and identity, her struggle is also not unique. The American Dream (one of whiteness, wealth, desire) is there, but the film is not exactly a commentary on its toxicity either.

And really, the film, in a lot of ways, can be boiled down to this: She’s an attractive middle class white person who gets into college. And whose parents refinance their home to make that happen in a private New York City school, nonetheless. Going to college at all is a privilege, but an expensive one even more so.

And that’s where I felt disappointed. What about kids like Miguel or Julie or even Danny? What about the kids who aren’t privileged in the same way Lady Bird is? Lady Bird does suffer abuse, but her story has also gotten told over and over and over again in other films. Rarely do films focus on characters who are kids of color, kids with disabilities, queer, or even “unattractive” without a makeover at the end.

I left the film feeling disappointed that Julie, for instance, was relegated to a side character role. While this is part of the point of Julie’s character (she is the “nice fat friend” who gets ignored and silenced, whose depression is rarely explored), it’s also fulfilling the same vicious cycle, the same male gaze. Her story is never told—even though it’s a common one, it’s just a common story hardly told. At least, not common when there isn't a makeover at the end. The same goes for Miguel, who is Lady Bird's older brother. The same even goes to Danny. While Danny is incredibly privileged (he lives in one of the fancy houses), he reveals that he’s gay, letting us into the fact that he has a huge struggle of his own (especially at a Catholic school)—a struggle not commonly explored in coming-of-age films.

What would the film look like if the character was transgender or non-binary, having to choose a new name and pronouns—and watching as the people around them chose to react and welcome or not welcome that kind of change. While I loved the idea of Lady Bird choosing her name, especially in a time where choosing names and pronouns is especially relevant, I also felt this was a missed opportunity to explore more.

While the film doesn’t judge the characters, falling away from the easy stereotypes of jocks and popular girls and anarchy-loving boys that many 80s and 90s films do, it also doesn’t dig deep enough. It could choose to highlight more marginalized people in Lady Bird’s small Sacramento community, but it doesn’t. Perhaps that’s not what this film is about, and that’s fine, but I can’t help but wonder, why not?

The film so artfully deals with abuse, depression, classism and homophobia, even if below the surface, I wished it dug even deeper, into the parts of American life that everyone knows to be true, but rarely wants to explore past the picture perfect life with the happy enough ending. Because, let’s face it, the end of the movie is “happy enough” and the struggle all seems to dissipate, as if the abuse can be stifled in a travel bag. Perhaps, of course, that’s what Lady Bird wants to believe, and so we want to believe it too. And that, of course, is the magic of the film.

Even so, we can all go a little farther.

Joanna C. Valente is a human who lives in Brooklyn, New York, and is the author of Sirs & Madams (Aldrich Press, 2014), The Gods Are Dead (Deadly Chaps Press, 2015), Marys of the Sea (The Operating System, 2017), Xenos (Agape Editions, 2016) and the editor of A Shadow Map: An Anthology by Survivors of Sexual Assault (CCM, 2017). Joanna received a MFA in writing at Sarah Lawrence College, and is also the founder of Yes, Poetry, a managing editor for Luna Luna Magazine and CCM, as well as an instructor at Brooklyn Poets. Some of their writing has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Brooklyn Magazine, Prelude, Apogee, Spork, The Feminist Wire, BUST, and elsewhere.

#film #review #gender #lgbtq #art

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aleatoryalarmalligator · 7 years

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My life story, Part 42

I was beginning to have a poor attitude towards society in general. I had always been a little off, a girl who walked around imagining things that weren't there, dazing off, obsessing over small interests, talking to myself just a little. I had been bullied in small ways, belittled by teachers and abused by my family, but I had more or less kept this sense of innocence about me. I think late 2004 was the year that I became resentful. I used to keep a journal for instance, and I would chronicle the lives of my fellow students, noting if they had had a rough time that I had noticed, or if they were dating someone. I never dehumanized anyone, no matter who ridiculous or mean to me they were as a person. This was starting to change around then. I would see society as this towering feeling of oppression, and the people around me as one choreographed mass of human-tools, sucking up whatever was given to them, be it the top 20 radio hits, television shows, what people wore or dressed like, religion, political parties. It seemed homogeneous and empty to me now, and people around me were smiling slaves working for whatever force it was that Zack had always told me about. It was baffling to me that I had once been somewhat taken in. I had never of course succeeded in fitting in because I was already been too weird to belong to these people truly, but I had more or less gone through my entire life unquestioning.

It was hard for me to smile. I truly felt alone and opposed to almost everything around me as I walked down the halls. There was a thick skin between me and everyone else. I had been shamefully open with high school jocks who had always looked to making me perform my silly ideas out in the open. I had always trusted that the world made sense, your friends were really your friends, society was mostly good and also not worth thinking about, and the latest fad was popular because of it's merit alone. Now I was guarded, and slightly on the attack if anyone intruded my space, and willing to tear anything apart to find something not to like about it. I suffered from black and white thinking, and a need to dismiss people, places, things and ideas without truly studying them. The things that were good were almost religious to me in nature, my aesthetic taste had transcended to a moral objective truth. The bad was corrupting, evil and by it's very existence, an insult to me personally and everything I loved and found worthy of defending. I didn't see a lot of middle ground.

As I am much older now, I know my way of thinking at the time was largely due to fear and a lack of trust. I was beginning to develop a set of defense mechanisms, and one of those defense mechanisms was a very oversized ego about my own opinions and what I liked and what moved me being better than the fake feelings that were sold to the masses. I didn't think I was great or anything personally – as I was very insecure in all reality, and I would not say that it really developed into true narcissism in the DSM sense. I was giving myself certainty I believe. I was setting up an enemy to confront my own pain really. The modern world was too confusing and I was rejecting it in some way to embrace a cultish tribal feeling against the rest of the world as a whole. The enemy was some force that I didn't understand. It seemed to dictate the lives of every seeming adult I had ever known, and every aspect of the society I lived in, and yet it didn't have a face. Zack of course, in his cliché' things he had read or heard called it The New World Order. So I blindly clung to that feeling of an impending need to cling to the art I held dear, in much the same way a Christian might cling to their faith and be willing to die for it.

The only person that I emotionally felt open to was Zack. And I was bent on keeping him around. But I had chased him away. I had some luck with him after I had used Noah to make him jealous and then changed my mind, but in a sense he never quite sat at the lunch table with us. I remember one day quite vividly. Zack and the rest of us had snuck into the small seldom used basketball court. Zack had taken his shoes off. He was talking about love, and about how loving people was the one thing that the freemasons couldn't stop us doing. He talked about how he had this deep painful and profound love for everything in the entire world. I admired him, and wished I could be more like him. He somehow convinced me to take off my shoes and hippie dance with him. And then he told me, looking me straight in the face, that 'Everyone deserves to be loved, Renee'. I really felt blown away by this statement. It kind of tore down the defenses I was making. And it felt good, even for a moment, to escape from the inner prison I was living in. The notion that everyone deserved love rehumanized everyone. The hordes of mindless jocks and popular girls no longer seemed like empty shells, but uncertain souls trying their best to maneuver and often stumbling through life trying to find meaning and love in some form just as I was. Of course, Zack was also the same person who told me that the entire school had been replaced by robot replicas. I had never bought into it, much as it seemed right to agree with whatever Zack believed. So I cannot entirely verify that Zack knew what he was really talking about. But I held onto that statement, and for many years of my life, I think it kept me sane, and I held it near to my heart, like a psychological locket I wore under my clothes.

There was also a day where Zack introduced me to a very strange and odd technique for 'waking yourself up' when you were beginning to feel like you were dying inside and becoming 'one of them'. He walked out of the school, ran and leaped as high in the air as he could and forced himself to land on his knees. He threw his entire body into it. His knees were scraped and bloody and stung. At first I was hesitant, but I took a deep breath and did the same thing. We must have looked insane to onlookers. We started doing it over and over again till our knees were bloody. Sarah tried it but didn't care for being in pain, and Samantha probably thought we were morons. There was something addictive about the pain of jumping and falling. You were throwing yourself to the winds, using yourself as a weapon and at the same time accepting that you were your own weapon. The stinging pain was surprising and addictive. Both of us had bloodied knees by the end. There were times when I wondered if Zack was trying to start a cult. He talked about the world very much like a cult leader at times, and liked creating barriers between the world and a small following.

Ava showed up midfall one random day. She now had a license and wanted to drive around. She took me in her car and instantly put on Manic Monday by The Bangles and driving the car in sharp circles till we were both sick. Typical Ava. We were all mad about the war in Iraq, but none of us understood why. It just seemed like something an evil corrupt group of powerful men decided on arbitrarily. Honestly, I was mad for the sake of being mad. I didn't care about war on a grand scale, nor could I really comprehend it. I just felt strangely against it at the time. Ava was probably more aware of what was happening than I was. She had a friend named Emily with her, who was a quiet mousy girl. Ava, Sarah and I got in her new vehicle. She bragged about her never ending gas card. She could basically drive around however she liked, with nothing stopping her. We got in her car, and throughout the afternoon, went through our town, and all the neighboring towns looking out for Support Our Troops magnets. I guess we felt that stealing these magnets was the ultimate act of defiance against the government. I think we stole twenty or more. The only time any of us got caught was when Emily got caught. They called her to come to the car, and she got chewed out. But she was small and mousy and they chastised her but left her alone.

In history class one day, one of the classes I paid no attention in still, I was randomly called upon in front of the class to explain what I thought what the government was for. I immediately told everyone that the government was there to push people down and make them subservient and submissive to the real masters of the world. Mr. Bradley looked at me surprised. He told me I was wrong, but seemed amused overall. The rest of the class looked at me like I was crazy. At some point, a preppy girl named Mary stood up and explained that people like me didn't belong in America. She said that if I didn't like America, she would like to see what they would do to me in Saudi Arabia. I was annoyed, but I didn't get much of an opportunity to defend myself. But this was by and large how people in the school felt about me. If I didn't like it, they would just assume that I disappear.

At this point in my life, I was very invested in my sort of self-righteous atheism. I think this is probably fairly common with first-year atheists in middle and high school. It wasn't enough to have my own personal developed sense of the world – I had to make sure others knew they were wrong in their faith. I still have retained many of the beliefs I had back then, but honestly, half of my reasons for not believing in a higher power were more based on a mistrust for church, and an incredibly limited historical look at Christianity specifically. I knew next to nothing about Islam, Judaism, any of the beliefs of Asia. My thinking was so all or nothing in those days that I scoffed at anything that didn't hold up to my version of reality, or didn't seem obvious to me. Basically, I was beginning to turn into Ayn Rand, though I didn't know who she was at the time. This is why, in the present, I kind of understand why some people gravitate towards objectivist thinking, towards believing in 100% free will, anarcho-capitalism, and a more traditional libertarianism (I was never a tea-party or Obama is a Muslim type of person). I have retained nearly nothing of this former belief system of mine, and I chock it up more to having to personally try to rationalize what I had personally grown up with. You don't want to believe that the world has failed you, or that the people in your life have let you down. There is a strange satisfaction in believing that you are 100% in control of your own destiny, that your life doesn't belong to anyone else but you – unaffected by society or anyone around you, and that if everyone behaved as free and openly selfish creatures than there might be something honorable to derive from that.

The truth about it was that I was actually dealing with a combinations of realizations about the world, and an enormous amount of emptiness and grief. It was easier and more favorable for me at the time to see the world as an eat or be eaten kind of world, where my value was only as good as the amount of my own dreams that I could make happen. It was easier for my to divorce myself from being a victim in any way. It also made it a lot easier for me to judge other people and condemn them when they did and said things I didn't agree with. It was a way to keep myself guarded from trying to love and understand others. And honestly, the only thing that I held dear that I kept an open mind about was that one time Zack and I hippie danced and he told me that everyone deserved to be loved. It undid the belief, but I couldn't seem to live on the day to day with that understanding. It's a tall order for anyone to buy into for one, and so much easier to live in a world where you can dismiss the pain of others as being self made.

So in history class, I sometimes, in a very arrogant manner, would question and harrass Mr. Bradley, about his Christianity. He was of the belief that the world was only 6000 years old. He went to church every Sunday and had always been very religious. It was obnoxious on my own part. I wasn't trying to learn anything new, as much as I was demonstrating that I was smarter than him, and could mentally overpower him. I tried to tell him that religion was invented for people like him to be ruled over. I at times accused him of being a puppet of those in power. I mocked him, and eventually made jokes that he was secretly cheating on his wife to date a man. It was incredibly rude of me. He took it well all things considered. I eventually pissed him off though, and he called me up to his desk one day and told me to knock it off. Which I definitely had coming. It would have been one thing had I paid attention in class and known to question what was being taught in that class. I could have used our lessons in history to question his logic on bigger things, in a respectful manner that would have given us both something to take home and think about in a bigger context. But attacking him because of his religion, however scientifically in the dark his beliefs were, was really messed up on my part.

I still was babysitting more than ever. I started seeing my position in a different way however. For the last several years, I had helplessly fallen into a sense of distress, self pity and resignation about what my parents forced upon me every weekend. But at fifteen I started seeing my position as a blessing in disguise. One of the realizations that came to me was that Allison and David were people. I hadn't really treated them like they were, but I was beginning to clearly see that now. Secondly, I felt excited that I might have the potential to mold them into cool people. I looked over my empty childhood, mostly siphoning through bad music, movies, styles, searching for something meaningful and falling short always – lucky when I found a small seed of something valuable in the garbage of the mainstream. I had no one to guide my thoughts or beliefs. My father and mother didn't think people had many layers and didn't acknowledge any of us as individuals outside of their understanding. They had no concern or curiosity for what any of us kids believed or what we felt about things personally, or how they impacted us. My father had some strong opinions and he would often tell us about it, but this was very much a one sided discussion. I started seeing myself as being responsible for improving Allison and David's life.

I also started seeing this as a power grab, mainly against my father. He had belittled me and pushed me down in any way he could and made me feel like nothing. There were elements to how he knocked me down that I would never recover from, but I could start taking the power back in increments and he would not even know. His kids could slowly become decreasingly his children and more my own. All I really had to do was befriend them and gain their respect. Before this time, I had never been able to appreciate or differentiate the difference between fear and true respect. For my father, he saw no difference. For both of them really – mother and father, this rule held/holds true. They would do what they could get away with. They had no respect for anyone save themselves.

But what they did seem to respect was anything that put fear into them. And likewise, when either of them wanted to feel loved or validated, they would do something mean. They were criminal in this sense of the word. And it was strange, but even with all the influence they had over me, even underneath my own power trips, I had more class and benevolence towards the world. I saw the beauty in being kind when there was nothing to be gained. I could see the value in being patient and open – even when I was having difficulties getting by without my own personal closed off nature. Obviously, I still retained some of their opportunism, but I didn't generally see my friends and family as tools, even when I considered myself to be some kind of libertarian. It was strange, but there was something about that previous year that had really opened my eyes. I understood how to love people because that person was who they were and not because they offered me anything. I appreciated what pain had taught me and the finer details of what it meant to be a person. I accept that the world wasn't meant to be easy. And unlike them, I quite defiantly decided to live my life with a sense that I was going to try to be honorable.

I also saw the value of making friends out of both Allison and David so that I could have friends. I wanted to include them in my struggles, and perhaps this was a little selfish, but given they were growing up in the same homes that I was growing up in, it felt necessary to start seeing the three of us as being able to help one another out in some way. I wanted to reach them emotionally and make them understand me. I didn't want to admit it, but even with Sarah, there were things I just never felt understood for. She didn't seem to care about anything. She didn't get mad, or feel motivated. She loved dreaming about being a rock star, but what I wanted to see was anger and passion and I saw very little of that. Sarah had this void in her personality, and she often times would cave to whatever felt easiest. She was more interested in being comfortable than making her dreams come true, and she wasn't as readily ready to fight for a cause like I was. It bothered me, but at the same rate, she seemed to understand me in a way that people can't understand about themselves. Like, she seemed to perceive when I was going to feel hungry, or how I was feeling even when I myself didn't quite know. But in other ways, she simply didn't seem to understand. And that's what I felt Allison and David could be good for.

I started reading to them every night. I started to read A Child Called It one day to them after school. I remember reading it in one go. I knew the book, having read it a year previous, and the story was very painful and sad. Allison and David's faces were both streaked with tears by the end of the evening. Especially David, who was particularly sensitive. I warned them about never trusting authority or the government in any way. This did little to no good naturally, since I didn't know what the heck I was talking about and believed every website I came across that had some conspiracy theory to spread. A lot of it was lies. Some of it was downright detestable. I really just didn't know. In an attempt to 'see through the bullshit' I was myself just as naive as I had been before, and maybe even more so.

One thing that was most memorable was my starting a home tape of something I called The Clown Show. Allison had this karaoke machine with a tape deck in it. It was the same one used to tape I'm A Big Man that summer. There were knobs that I could control my voice with. I distorted my voice to where I sounded like this clown voice. It wasn't quite male, nor was it quite female. It sounded like me and it didn't. I was able to create this weird echo, and I was this character, a clown, who ran this fucked up insane talk show that you could listen to on a weird broadcast that was hard to get on an AM station. I had this insane chanting audience, and I made these awful dissonant jokes that I would laugh at. I wanted it to be creepy and upsetting, but not like an overt and obvious killer clown in a cliché sense. It reminded me an awful lot of what Tim and Eric sometimes was if you watched Adult Swim late at night. Or more specifically, it reminds me an awful lot like the work of this really bizarre lo-fi musician that has been around since the 70's named R. Stevie Moore. I really could never explain that to anyone unless they listened to it, and it's incredibly unlikely that anyone would know unless they heard. There is a lot of random singing, random vintage commercials, psychotic sounds. Very strange tape music.

Allison and David were several characters. I had David make these weird impromptu car commercials, Allison would sell soap in a soft voice. Then I would have them be guests on the show. I would interview them for the audience, and they would come up with these insane answers that they perceived adults would say. David was Billy Idol, except he clearly wasn't. And Allison was Britney Spears. Then they would sing a song that Allison or David made up on the top of their head that they perceived a musician like Billy Idol or Britney Spears would sing. I made these tapes, and I would show them to people. Most of the time people said it made them feel really empty, disturbed and slightly nauseated. They were funny, and horrifying at the same time.

Zack and I were just starting to get close again. It had only been about six weeks or so since school had started. I had managed to drive him away, had to contend with his girlfriend for awhile, and then had to win him back. I seemed to be doing it. I came to this sense of calm about him. I just had to accept that I was still very much in love with him and always would be. I wasn't going to worry about the future, or worry about the attention I was being given. I was simply going to love him, for whatever that was worth. I had to forgive him. I had to forgive everyone. I was not going to give up my own sense of identity, but I wasn't going to try to hurt him to prove something petty to myself about who I was. I was going to expect nothing, and just be happy to have him around.

And then one day we were in health class. He sat next to me and scooted his desk up next to mine. Earlier that day he had come to me and explained that there was a school assembly last hour. He wanted to make sure that I was sitting right next to him. I was very happy. It felt like maybe things were going back to normal. So in health class, we were just waiting for the bell to ring and the intercom to sound so we could go to the gymnasium together. I remember people looking over at us strangely, perhaps judging us as the class freaks, trying to figure out if we were dating. I felt this soft sort of confidence inside.

Then the intercom came on and we all assembled to the gym. As Zack and I were walking together, Cody Smith – Ava's ex (It might be worth mentioning that the Smith household left him in Kendrick even though they had moved), came up to Zack and told him to come with him. Zack looked at me, and then looked at Cody. He smiled and told me to save a spot for him. I felt really rattled and confused. I went into the gym and saved a spot for him, but as everyone piled in, Zack didn't show up. I looked around. And then I spotted him, though just barely. He and Cody, were running out the back door by the boy's locker room, going out the secret way through the weight lifting room. Zack had been quickly convinced to skip the assembly. And he had forgotten all about me. And I had this really bad feeling that he was never coming back to school again.

Two weeks went by, and he didn't come to class. There was no word of him at all. Samantha knew nothing. Soup hadn't heard anything. I kept telling myself that he was just skipping for a few weeks like he had last time, but something about this felt a lot different. For one, he had been seen skipping the assembly, and if he returned they were waiting and ready to put him in several days of suspension. So why would he even want to come back? Secondly, he had just turned sixteen and he was legally able to leave school now. He never liked school. He liked playing music and smoking pot all day. So why would he want to be here?

I had troubles smiling. Noah was now talking to me all the time. He was friendly enough and I liked him. But he was incredibly engaged in trying to get my attention now. He wanted me to read his Invader Zim comic books, and I didn't really get into them. He wanted everyone to listen to Ween. I didn't like Ween that much. He wasn't pushy or anything. But he bothered me for some reason. And I mostly just missed Zack. I started comparing Zack to Noah, and finding that Noah annoyed me. I felt like Zack had been taken away from me and been replaced by this other person. I didn't want Noah. I wanted Zack. Eventually, one day at lunch break, as I was sitting in the parking lot, Zack and his father drove up unexpectedly in his father's red pickup. His dad didn't look too happy. But he was there to sign Zack out of school. Zack was quitting for good. He ran to us briefly, but his father didn't want to wait around. He was only able to explain what was happening, before he was called back to the truck and they drove away.

I was despondent and I felt empty. It was one thing when I had felt betrayed, or broken. But this was another thing altogether. I was somehow going to have to make it through life without him. Somehow, a big portion of my life had just floated away, and left this big empty space. I avoided everyone around me. I was short tempered with Sarah when she asked what was wrong. Noah came up to me at one point and offered me chewing gum and tried to be nice to me in a very Meyers-Briggs INTP kind of way. I took it resentfully. And yet, the world went on, and for the most part nobody paid too much attention. Nobody really seemed to understand what I was going through. And I had set it up that way. I hadn't been honest about how I felt. Which was of course what kept me safe, but also kept me trapped.

PART 41 - http://tinyurl.com/y84kmttv

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PART 5 - http://tinyurl.com/msnz4am

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PART 3 - http://tinyurl.com/mwp9atx

PART 2 - http://tinyurl.com/lbt6xq2

PART 1 - http://tinyurl.com/l8xbvg8

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soyosauce · 5 years

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How Want Is More Subversive Than You Think

Taipei in an alternate near future.

Mei: without; pronounced “may.”

You: to have; pronounced “yo.”

Cyberpunk has roots in horror. The loss of agency is supposed to evoke a sense of terror such that we give pause about the technological advances. Want subverts this. Climate change is arguably too far gone in Taiwan. There’s dense pollution that strips away one of the most heralded benefits of technology: the advancement of the human life span. People in Taiwan in the future now can only hope to live to 60. Hope. They breathe in pollution, their apathy literalized in the fiction. Killing them. The anxiety we should have around climate change is the focus rather than the technophobia of the late 80s and early 90s. Unless you’re rich, of course.

The disparity in the wealth gap has gone rampant. No more middle class. It’s just the haves and the have nots. The super-rich traverse the city in gilded cages. There are galas and events. The biomod trends of the week flaunted by dilettantes at fancy events are confined to indoors, away from the pollution. Outdoors, they navigate life in 20 million dollars suits that feed clean air and create proprietary, insulated, social networks.

“She was pretty in a way I wasn’t used to. Not like most you girls bowing to the latest beauty trends, indulging in temporary body modifications from reshaping their noses to plumping their lips, or hips, or rears, depending on what was in. You boys kept pace with pec implants and by buying new, chiseled jawlines. But fads came and went, and the yous altered their looks as often as the seasons. The meis, lacking the funds for such drastic changes, resorted to painting their faces in bright colors, using semipermanent tattoos, and dyeing their hair.”

This too is a subversion. Where cyberpunk usually has a microworld navigated, invoking the “new world” notion of Westerns, this instead turns the trope on its head, moving past the microworld exploration. Considering that’s a very western perspective that also comes along with colonial aspects you see in cyberpunk, it’s a very important and satisfying subversion.

There is essentially no physical connection for those people living their lives in these suits and this extrapolates out into the fiction to communicate the lens of the super-rich who miss what is happening to the majority of the population in the city. They compartmentalize their lives such that they can be apathetic about the troubles that don’t affect them directly. Their long lives and voluntary isolationism are meant to augment their lives parallels the current anxieties regarding technology and the ways in which people now are using social media networks to isolate ourselves into specific groups. Curating the content we consume so that we can dismiss anything we are not interested in.

“This is what it meant to be a you, to have. To be genetically cultivated as a perfect human specimen before birth—vaccinated and fortified, calibrated and optimized.”

It’s in this world that Zhou and his crew hatch a plan to save their city by way of radical action. He kidnaps a young woman (with the “richest” suit), ransoms her, and uses a “sleep spell” drug to erase this memory. After pulling off this kidnapping he infiltrates high society with their newly garnered 300 million. New apartment in a highly sought-after building. New suit; a new life. Using his purchased social status, he’s to gain the confidence of Jin Corps’ CEO’s daughter: Daiyu.

But…when he discovers that she’s the one he kidnapped and starts to play the part of the rich boy a little too well, things start to get complicated. The more time they spend together the more he finds out she’s not what he expected and begins to fall for her.

Zhou is not an anti-hero and he’s not anti-social. He does have a directly actionable plan against the major problem in Taiwan: Jin Corp. Which is in line with a lot of cyberpunk fiction. They manufacture the suits and without them the super-rich will have to confront the world they live in, ostensibly putting their resources into cleaning up the environment. The city’s economy is very much tied to this megacorporation, but the morality and ideals outweigh the possible economic problems for this group.

“…feathered wings, like swans, or transparent wings, gilded in silver and gold. The love for all things supernatural, fey, and demonic was the current rage among Taiwan’s youth, and the yous took it to the next level, surgically altering their physique, adding horns and tails, scaling their skin, be it mermaid or dragon. They were same-day walk-in alteratios at the physique surgeons, and the changes cast off in a week or two, replaced by some other trend.”

Not to mention, the destruction of the headquarters is more of a call to arms for everyone in the city than something that would actually destroy the company. But there is a tangible sense of hopelessness for the poor in Taiwan. Nothing can really be done, aside from making your life as comfortable as possible in a world where catching the flu could kill you because you can’t afford health care. It’s pretty solidly a group of punks trying to disrupt the status quo.

Interestingly, young adult fiction in itself is a subversion of cyberpunk motifs and tropes. It grounds this story in a different kind of emotion than those found in the genre if we generalize it. There is often anger that is directly implemented to hinder a corporation. But most of the fiction humanizes all of the characters, even the super-rich and this is not typical at all. Often the rich barely resembles humanity, and the anti-hero embodies some of those characteristics in order to have agency and strike back. Here, there is a palpable ignorance attached to the rich… but no sense that they’re evil for being born into privilege.

The thick, stagnant air reeked of perfume, cigarettes, and exhaust. Everyone was barefaced, wanting to flaunt their features instead of hiding beneath blank masks. To be able to flirt with their lips, to be able to kiss. But I wasn’t fooled by the dark—the air was still poisonous. Even if we couldn’t see the brown haze, it smothered our city lit in neon.

The romance weaved into the story also makes for a very different feeling fiction than most cyberpunk; it was very refreshing. There is a certain detachment in cyberpunk fiction that is usually associated with the isolationism we have anxieties about is contrasted well in this fiction with this notion that a young man puts everything on the line to blow up a company doing real evil to the world is conflicted because his socialization with people he has dehumanized his whole life no longer gives him that easy alibi of dehumanizing them. The natural way our own lenses are restricted in reality makes it easy to empathize and invest in Zhou’s experiences. His mission and his heart are at cross-purposes and that’s hitting a trope, sure, but it’s a satisfying one because it doesn’t come loaded with the other tropes you usually find with it. His target is no damsel in distress, for instance.

“Employees who would be out of a job if our plan succeeded. I knew that in order to bring about a revolution, not only would yous be hurt in the process, but many meis as well. It was something else I had to learn to live with.”

The dialogue is also great. The prose, especially surrounding emotional moments, are particularly great and memorable. The heist angle coupled with the YA tropes and subversions put me on my toes, never sure what might happen next as expectations were set only to be discarded. The closest thing I can think of in the sub-genre is The Summer Prince and that just makes me think I’d like to see more YA in cyberpunk.

“It was so easy to be you. And to lack and want were the complete opposite: hard, cold, unrelenting, and hollow.”

What knocks it out of the park is the insertion of climate fiction anxieties. It’s relevant, interesting, emotional and in the news all the time now. It’s an emerging sub-genre. Ecopunk, solarpunk, climate fiction, eco-fiction, etc. There’s neon, stun guns, evil corporations, futuristic technology, pervasive pollution, and a pretty damn fun heist. I also have to imagine that it must have been more than cathartic for Cindy Pon to write characters that look like her in a genre that sometimes uses marginalized identities to telegraph edginess and dehumanization of societal structures. It turns out that life on the edge is just as riveting when the characters are believable and marginalization is handled from a non-white lens.

Granted, I don’t know much about young adult fiction… but I think that cyberpunk isn’t going anywhere. Of that I’m sure. Authors with the ability to connect some of the larger and more intrinsically important aspects of the genre in new ways will end up displaying how far the genre has come and its future. It makes a certain kind of sense that one of the more recent and thoroughly enjoyable additions to the sub-genre stems from this partnership with young adult fiction. Who else is a new kind of cyberpunk for than the younger generation living with old anxieties?

“Truth is, reality always crushes your ideals…Just wait and see.”

#YA #Young Adult #cyberpunk #post-cyberpunk #Cindy Pon #cli-fi #Climate Fiction #subverting cyberpunk

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spanlish-blog · 7 years

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White Privilege as a Western Student in China

When some friends of mine came back from an exchange program in Beijing, each with a wad of $1,200 in cash they'd received from the Chinese government, my response was, "Um, what?"

The cash was their scholarship money, given to them in crisp 100 yuan bills after class one day.

Turns out you don't need a 4.0—or even a 2.5—to get that kind of money. After interviewing several more exchange students about their experiences in China, I learned that even if your grades are "shit," you might still be offered a scholarship, free accommodation, and a monthly allowance to study in the Middle Kingdom.

You may also get free booze, free entry into clubs, and professors who won't care if you skip class or use your phone during an exam. These are tough things to resist when you're a broke college student who'd rather explore the city than actually attend your lectures.

"Foreigners enjoy a very favorable situation in China, for sure," says Jon*, who worked at a Chinese university as a liaison between international business students and the staff. "If you go to a club, yes, you'll get free drinks, and you'll get in for free. Whereas Chinese people still have to pay."

These perks are a way for China to make itself more appealing to foreigners, who, Jon says, are still viewed by Chinese citizens as "super powers" and also enjoy advantages like higher wages and better job opportunities than locals.

But according to students I spoke with, not all exchange students are treated equally. While white skin awards you near-celebrity status, black skin might get you spat on outside a McDonald's or labeled as "dangerous." You might also be sized up according to your assumed race and gender at clubs, then treated in accordance with that value.

Hello again, white privilege.

For the purposes of global education, VICE has included six stories about what it's really like to live and study in China and why being treated like a VIP can either be wildly fun or weirdly dehumanizing.

Ashton*, 25 Exchange Student From: Germany Program: Marketing

In 2015, I went on a six-month exchange program to China. I really had no restrictions at the university. You're late? It's fine. You want to change your exam date? Fine. It's easy to use; "this is how we do things in Germany" as a justification for anything. Even bringing your phone to an exam. I'm actually going back there for my master's degree because it'll be easy for me to get good grades. I tried to find a program in Germany or the Netherlands, but it was really difficult because my grades are shit. When I asked my old university in China if they had any programs in management, they said: "Yes, of course, we'll give you a scholarship." They're also giving me free housing, an allowance per month, and no tuition fees. So I said, "OK, yeah, I'm coming back." But all this makes you feel pretty weird because while a lot of non-white foreigners are just so fucking happy to have the chance to come to China, you're only there because it's free. For example, I'm in a WhatsApp group with 40 people who have applied for scholarships in China. There are three Westerners and 37 people from either Africa, Bangladesh, or Pakistan. The only people who got replies from the university were the three Westerners.

Before my trip, I'd heard China preferred foreigners at clubs, but I didn't understand the racism until I went there. My ex-girlfriend was a promoter at one of these clubs—she sold guest list spots to people—and got paid according to what types of people she brought in. Non-Western foreigners were level one and worth nearly nothing to promoters. The second level was Western foreigners, and the third level was pretty girls. So there was a man at the door checking "is she pretty or not pretty?" and if she was pretty, the promoter would get more money for bringing her in. The last level was models—like real models, ones staying in Beijing for shoots and stuff. Promoters would get about $20 for bringing them in.

It's also normal to get free drinks the whole night if you're white. For my farewell party, we went to a club, and there were ten people, six of them blond girls. We got two bottles of Grey Goose—worth about $300 in that club—all for free. I felt like a king at first, but it was also really weird. They were catering to our every need, and we didn't pay a thing.

It's hard to enter certain clubs if you're with black people. I have a friend from Mozambique, and once we went to a really nice club and booked a table in advance. We all met at the entrance—five Westerners and one black person—and the promoter was like, "Yeah, you cannot enter." When we asked why, he told us it was because my friend looked dangerous, which was just crazy. We argued with the guy for about 15 minutes and told him that if he didn't let us in, we'd post on WeChat that the club was racist, and so he finally let us in. From there, it was open bar all night.

Sami, 25 Exchange Student from: Finland Studying: Law

I studied international and Chinese law in Beijing, and the first night I was there, I went out with some master's students, and they took us out to a street filled with different clubs. We got in free to all of the clubs; all the alcohol was free, and we got VIP tables. That first night I was like, "Woah, what is this?" I'm not sure if it felt wrong, but it felt weird. There'd be big lines of Chinese people waiting to get in, and we'd walk right by. Also, we went to this pretty famous club in the center of Shanghai—it's called M1NT, they've got sharks in the dance floor—and again, we just walked past this huge line, got VIP cards, and also free alcohol the whole night. Just because we were European. All the free stuff and better treatment was fun in the beginning, but in the long run, it felt... it didn't feel good.

I got preferential treatment outside the party scene, too. When my parents came to visit, we went to a restaurant that was a little fancier. I didn't book a reservation, and so there was a two-hour wait when we got there. We thought, Well, that's OK, we'll go shopping for a bit. But when we left, the staff came running after us and said, "Wait, we have a free table for you." We thought that since it was just the three of us, maybe a small table had opened up and that's why we got in, but inside there was a whole other room full of Chinese people still waiting. Throughout the meal we had four waiters serving us, people taking photos of us, and the whole experience was very strange. In China, you're often perceived as super rich if you're Western. They think you have a lot of money and you're there to party, and that's it. It gets annoying because in reality most of us are there because of grants, scholarships, and wanting to travel; we even take out loans to do it.

Erin*, 24 Exchange Student from: Canada Studying: Law

My boyfriend and I chose to study abroad in Beijing this past summer through a program where Chinese government scholarships are available for Canadian students. Being fairly poor law students who love to travel, we were pretty intrigued by the idea of government funding.

We didn't know when we would be getting our scholarship—$1,200—or even how it would be given to us. We didn't get anything when we arrived, which we thought was a little odd, but then during our last week, a Chinese student came to the front of the class and was like, "Hey, everyone, your money's here!" Everyone cheered. Then the next day they brought in cash—stacks of freshly printed 100 yuan bills, all put into envelopes and stored up in the program administrator's office. So, 80 students lined up in the hallway, all waiting for their $1,200. Considering you can buy lunch for the equivalent of $0.80, it was a ton of money to have in cash.

Edson, 21 Exchange Student from: Africa Studying: Accounting

There aren't many black people in China. I didn't want to study abroad there, but in recent years China has been investing a lot in Africa, so our government has started giving scholarships to students. From the moment I got there, things were just really different. I walked out of the airport, and my nose just started itching. There was so much pollution. I thought instantly: This place isn't good for me. Then came the stares on the train. People look at you as if you're really, really different; they've never seen someone like you, and so they take pictures.

China is growing economically, about 6 percent every year, but I don't think it's a good place to study. Some foreigners really like it because of all the free stuff. I mean, I still got the free drinks and free entry into the clubs, but it would depend on what kind of club it was and who I was with. I was with a bunch of friends from the Netherlands most times, and so I was viewed as part of their group. Actually, most people would assume that since I'm black and speak English, I must be American. And if you're American or European, Chinese girls love it, but I didn't like the attention because I'd rather be liked for who I am. The fact is if you tell them you're African, you're viewed as poor, like you don't know what an iPhone is, etc.

There were only two black people in the entire university, which was a problem for me. I would invite people in my class to go to clubs, or I'd say, "Hey, let's grab a drink or something," because I wanted to make friendships with the Chinese students. But they'd say they had to go to the library. Every time it was the same: "I have to go to the library." I tried to make friends, but they didn't let me in. Eventually, I met some people from Europe and just hung out with them. And so I didn't go to a lot of classes. My teachers never gave me a hard time about it because I think they knew it was difficult fitting in. I could do whatever I wanted. In that way, I was treated basically the same as the white students.

I remember one very sad day in particular. In China, they have a habit of spitting on the floor, and so one day I went to McDonald's and bought a Big Mac. As I was leaving, there was a Chinese man who spit on my shirt. I don't know why he did it. Anyway, I thought maybe it was a mistake, but when I looked at him, he didn't say sorry, just gave a look like "I don't like you" or something. I was sad but also angry. I didn't do anything, just walked away. And that was when I thought, You know, I can't put up with this bullshit anymore. It's too hard. I wasn't OK with myself over there.

Jackie*, 26 Exchange Student from: Canada Studying: Law

I went on a summer exchange program to China, and afterward, I got an internship at a big law firm in Beijing. At the firm, some other interns and I would get invited every week or two to go have dinner with a group of lawyers from the firm. They'd bring us to these fancy restaurants, and they'd pay the bill, and you knew it wasn't the type of dinner they were inviting their Chinese colleagues to every week. We got invites because we were international interns. And even though I was the only white person in this particular group of interns, I was the only one they invited personally, and from there, they allowed me to bring friends. Once, during dinner, the woman who invited us was really making sure we were having a good time. She even started to dance and sing. Often, my friends and I would go out as a big group, and night after night our table would be given several bottles of spirits, solely based on the color of our skin. Some people in my group would abstain from drinking because it was discriminatory, like white privilege at its finest. That's the kind of racial privilege caucasian people have access to in Beijing. That said, we always hear that China is taking a bigger place in the world and its economy, and so it's good to go there and see what's behind these great firewalls that prevent us from exchanging with them.

There's also a local version of Tinder, it's called Tantan, and if you're a foreigner, this app can really open some doors if you're looking to meet new people. Some of the people in my group were using it, and every single time they'd swipe, they'd get a swipe back in return. If you're white, it just isn't the same game.

Shaun, 26 Exchange Student from: Canada Studying: Law

During my exchange program, I was photographed quite often. I remember being approached three distinct times, and each time it happened at a pretty big tourist attraction. I'm tall and caucasian, and from what I heard, Chinese people are interested in photographing someone like me because by doing so they can show their family and friends that the places they're visiting have such a high status that they attract white Westerners as well. It's like, "Look, this place is so cool, even this white guy went there!" I just kind of went along with it because I didn't feel like it was doing any harm, but it always felt a little awkward. It's like, why me? It's uncomfortable to be this, well, image of beauty or whatever. But I also think it's learned behavior culturally. One time my girlfriend and I were approached by a family, and the mother and grandmother were super into getting a picture with us, but their six-year-old daughter wanted nothing to do with it. It was like she hadn't learned the rule about wanting photos with white people.

*Names have been changed.

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Source: White Privilege as a Western Student in China Source: White Privilege as a Western Student in China

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chrisgis4680-blog · 7 years

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Black Power

Malcolm X. I feel like he was taught badly in my school as a kid. I mean to be fair I grew up in Virginia in a predominantly white lower middle class neighborhood, so really I shouldn’t be surprised. But as I grow older and take classes in college that talk about people like Malcolm X and the Black Panthers, I realize that the pictures painted in my mind of them are not pretty. They were always just talked about as the violent part of the Civil Rights movement, and I have come to realize how not so true this is. Okay obviously they were more violent than Martin Luther King Jr, but really I think they were described to us in not so positive of a way as I think they should have been. Also I was never taught that the Black Panthers worked with poor whites who had similar problems they were having with poverty and how this collaboration helped bridge the gap just a little between the lower class whites and the AAs at the time. In Malcolm X’s Bite the Bullet (actually it may have been an article talking about the speech, I honestly cannot remember) it is mentioned that a lot of people think Malcolm is racist against whites. And though it was mentioned in class that it is impossible, I have to agree that he really is not. In the speech he mentions specifically something to the effect of, “if white people want us to not be anti white then they need to stop doing being anti segregation, pro exploitation and pro oppression”. I think that makes a really great point. People often say that they do not hate a person, they just hate what they do, and I think this is what Malcolm is going for here. Honestly I think if I was AA I wouldn’t be so pro white either. Hell I am not actually all that pro white anyway. We suck, let's just put that out there. He goes on to talk about how AAs are not actually Americans, and they feel like they are not Americans because of they way they are not only treated but depicted in the media. I have to say I can really see where he is coming from. America is kind of mostly white, and even though it’s getting to the point where non whites outnumber the whites, whites still have all the power. So even now you have pictures of white people everywhere, in TV, on the internet, billboards, everywhere. I remember reaching a book once, Bud Not Buddy I think it was, about a young AA kid trying to find his parents and how he talked about a billboard with a perfect looking happy white family on it, and how he felt like it was fake because he never saw black families on those billboards. There is really just so much to talk about here, I know I am all over the place with it, but there is too much to cover really. I just understand how a race can feel like they are not American when it seems like most of that country hates them for being that race. This being especially the case when that race is target by the police and segregated by the government.

Dubois asks a pretty interesting question at the beginning of his writing, “How does it feel to be a problem?” A pretty heavy question in fact. It made me think a lot about how lucky I am. Don’t get me wrong, I am pretty aware of my white privilege, and I like to think I know at least a little about discrimination because I am not a male. But I think the patriarchy does not really compare to the problems of racial issues. Yeah women are often put on the back burner, ignored and forgotten about, but with the whole police brutality part, being dark skinned right now must just be scary. I do not know what it is like to feel like the problem, but I think that this question really does help to put things into perspective about how things were and still mostly are in America when it comes to race.

He moves on to talk about the difference between being “Negro and American”, which is similar to what Malcolm X brought up about not being an American. I know I have really only read two points of view so far, but this theme seems to be coming up a lot so it probably does hold some truth to it’s points. I often think that this is what immigrants, Mexicans, and Muslims feel right now and especially during the election.

I was actually first introduced to Basquiat’s art this semester actually in my Contemporary Art class, so I was pretty excited to talk about him. Basquiat’s art was looked down on because of it’s distinct “tribal” look and street art vibe, as well as probably the plain fact that he was not white. He explored issues such as race and identity consistently and these paintings are no different. I love his use of colors to grab your attention. They seem to be placed in such a way on purpose to grab the viewer’s attention, like “look here, this is important and what I am telling you”. His use of a black background really enhances that feeling. I also like that he challenges the typical art style by simplifying the figure. His art is not technically abstract because you can tell that he is drawing figures, but at the same time they are simplified. He really obviously wants to portray the message more so than show off his technical talents, which was not usually the case of the high class art world. I especially liked that in “Untitled History of Black People” he included history elements from all over the world.

Though I was excited about Basquiat, I must admit I was really impressed with Douglas’ work. The first thing I thought about when looking at his work was actually Kara Walker. I wonder if she had been inspired by his work when she first started, because she is a silhouette artist as well. Though her work is more so about slavery specifically rather than race, and is um quite a bit more graphic than Douglas. But I love his colors and the layering of the light and colors, its just so beautiful and his work is easy to read. Not to mention, the visual symbols with the combination of the titles pretty much spell out the message he is going for. I find the silhouettes to be powerful because on one hand you can tell they are humans, but on the other hand they are kind of dehumanized. They are no longer people they are just shapes, which is the way slave owners saw them as well as whites in general. I am not sure if that was why he picked to paint in this style, but in the very least it accidentally added to the story line.

I must admit I was a bit surprised by the music. I tend to enjoy instrumental music anyway so obviously I liked the instrumental pieces a lot. I especially liked Mingus Big Band and just found it to be smooth and relaxing. Plus the more so dramatic ending was interesting. I think I see the political aspect of the instrumental music a lot. When most people think about politics, and radical politics at that, they think of hard violent, in your face kind of stuff. I even thought about that really. I kind of expected everything to be like “Fuk da Police” but the mix was more than that. There were more calming and just simply soulful pieces that celebrated the AA culture. Protests and politics can be about celebrating culture, though I think the lack of a governmental reaction is what leads to music like “Fuk da Police” and “Cop Killer”. It is the desperation of the face that nothing has really changed and they are just so freaking tired of being swept under the rug as if there is not a racial problem that leads to more forceful kinds of music and protests. Though I didn’t particularly like the newer rap and hip hop music, I do see where it is coming from.

I realized that due to my taste in music I also really enjoyed some of the older artists, such as Nina Simone and Sam Cooke. Though I wouldn’t put them on my every day play list, I just love the passionate way they sing. It is so full of emotion and at the same time just beautiful. I think when listening to Nina Simone I realized that her song seemed a bit angry for her time, which may be why it stands out a lot. It is angry in a still entertaining and not in your face kind of way like the language in “Fuk da Police”

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noblelake-blog · 7 years

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Trump and the people

The fireworks started around midnight on the west coast, they were probably the most depressing fireworks I’ve ever listened to in my life. I hadn’t seen any Trump signs around the ‘hood but it wasn’t too shocking. This stretch of deep Southeast Portland backing up to Powell Butte is in the old school white working class vein of town, though it’s had a thrush of new blood in the last decade, as the few remaining communities of color have been pushed out this way. I sat at my kitchen table feeling like a bad acid trip was coming on. I was about to turn 40, and my 20 year old self would probably have been surprised that something like this had taken so long. I remember sitting around with a bunch of degenerate punk clowns in Austin watching the returns the night Bush “won” in 2000, and feeling the same kind of despair while my girlfriend and I consoled each other in ‘04. But beyond that, it had felt for a long time that a country rapidly overrun by oligarchs was gonna run itself off the cliff sooner or later. Now that it’s done, I feel utterly alone and terrified a lot of the time. I don’t know if that’s a valid reaction or not. It is certainly one of fear, and that fear is by no means ungrounded. I write this not so much the 20 year old anarchist who went to anti-globalization protests but a self-employed carpenter father and partner of a teacher. Working people, raising our child with the same working class values our parents instilled in us: do your best, and take care of each other.

I had to think of the time, 8 years before, when I rode my bike drunk on a warm November night in Brooklyn, fist pumping anyone I saw on Myrtle Ave and yelling “Obama!” on my way to a victory celebration with a bunch of friends. The restaurant was run by a lesbian couple, it was a diverse crowd, and the sense of elation I felt that night was potent. I’ll never forget the way I felt when the president elect verbally reached out to queer community, it seemed so strange to hear that from the man who would be president, the first black president, so improbable and unstoppable at once. And it was stranger still because I hadn’t even voted for him. I had voted in the first presidential election of my lifetime in ‘04, although I was old enough to have voted in the two previous ones, solely out of sheer terror at the prospect of another Bush term. When Obama came onto the scene, I liked him, but perhaps it was the way in which so many of my friends had become involved in elevating him to such a high stature that they weren’t able to see that much of his politics were firmly rooted in neoliberalism and, even if he were able to embrace his more progressive tendencies, he would certainly be hamstrung by the political establishment, more so because he is black. I did not vote for him or anyone in that election, but I was three sheets to the wind a fair amount in those days, and I couldn’t remember if I had updated my registration since I moved to New York. It was the last presidential election I would ditch, I voted happily for Obama in 2012, even though by then the dream was dead and the Tea Party racists were half unhinged over a black man trying to tell them what to do with their health insurance. I voted for him partly because I felt a little ashamed of not voting for him in ‘08, and partly because I hate stiff rich white guys like Mitt Romney as much as most Americans.

But Donald Trump is no Mitt Romney. The now famous picture of the two of them dining together may speak to their shared cartoonish robber baron natures, but the similarities end there. Mitt Romney is the stuffed shirt blue blood with the weird religion, Donald Trump is the macho TV star whose antagonism has been saturating the market of our daily lives for two generations now, his kind of sales pitch is safe as milk to a lot of us. The picture of the two of them is terrifying, his dominance of Romney broadcast so viciously.

It’s no coincidence that he came out of the same 80’s culture that made guys like Vince McMahon rich and famous, his antics are right out of the WWE playbook. Trump is the classic heel, in wrestling terms the villain you love to hate, the guy who doesn’t mind fighting dirty to get the job done. In the working class neighborhood in Baltimore I grew up in, more kids idolized Rowdy Roddy Piper, the heel, than Hulk Hogan. To draw further comparisons between Trump and the Hot Rod would do a disservice to the memory of the latter, but Trump is indeed cunning in his abilities. His racism is well documented going back to the 80’s, as is his treatment of women and outright powerlust, but it was not within his grasp to become a politician, for that he would have to wait until 8 years of living under a black president had created such an apocalyptic mindset in the voters of white America that he was able to seize his opportunity. And he held fast.

Count me among those who believed that his candidacy would fizzle after the initial blast of profane assaults, but once his momentum gathered I felt like we were in for it. I was canvassing neighborhoods for Bernie Sanders but I knew he was never going to be given a serious look by the Democratic establishment. White folks in our neighborhood who were for Trump would give lip service to Bernie, and that kind of sentiment fueled the idea that he might be the only one who could beat him. We’ll never know how that would have turned out, unfortunately. But one thing that’s clear is that the Trump phenomenon is a vindication of the power modern media domination, and, to put a finer point to it, mind control. The Apprentice gave rise to its titular character’s aura of invincibility. Here we have the lavish billionaire, the picture of wealth and power, thronged by beautiful elites and backed by ominous music, dangling the sword over outstretched necks of would be sycophants, buoyed by the immense drama of those two famous words…..

And in the end that’s all it took. The rich and middle class Republicans by and large fell behind him like we all knew they would, but much ink has been spilled in these last months about the rest of his voting block, those poor racist white people, and how could they be so stupid to vote for someone who so obviously doesn’t give a shit about them? Did they feel wounded and left behind by 8 years of a “reverse” racist-in-chief, or were they simply sick to death of the status quo and willing to vote for the flamboyant playboy because he at least doesn’t seem like such a phony? I suspect it’s more than a little of both, and more than a lot of decades of misinformation and subterfuge clouding the waters for working people of all colors, leaving the talk shows and comment threads with nothing but vitriol and bad analysis. Given the alternative of a candidate like Sanders, would people see that his brand of populism gave some beef to the airy promises Trump made to bring back manufacturing, or would people just see him as a far out Jewish commie? If Hillary Clinton had not been Hillary Clinton and instead been a woman more in the mold of Elizabeth Warren, would poor white folks have given her more of a shot, or is the horrid sexism she endured a true barometer the attitudes towards women among the working class?

And then there is the whole issue of the term itself. Working class. Working poor. White working class. Blue collar. While there are fairly clear indicators of where we all fall on this ladder based on income, the past few generations have indeed muddied the usage of the term in a variety of ways. One’s upbringing and exposure to media and education may preclude them to a different outlook than those they share an income bracket with. As a child of college educated socialists I certainly viewed politics through a different lens than an old carpenter I once worked with, who thought that global warming was a hoax to sell more textbooks and hated Hillary Clinton not on the basis of her corporate, imperialist worldview but because she had the gall to be an assertive first lady instead of “knowing her place”. And there are certainly those who argue that the working class doesn’t even really exist any more; in the same way that people talk about the vanishing middle class, the attacks on unions have all but eviscerated the ability of working people to organize for their mutual benefit, to the point where working poor is perhaps the only appropriate term.

I am working poor. I live paycheck to paycheck and I was raised by a single mother who lived that way too. Under President Obama, I had health insurance, medicaid for sure but it was enough to get me to the dentist every once in awhile. I also had hope. Not hope in the utopian sense that was broadcast large back in 2008 but hope in a more cautious, realist sense. I have long understood that I was born into the later stages of a cancer. We are abusing the earth at an alarming rate, and the world cannot hold up under the excesses of capitalism for very much longer. I do believe that, for all of his drone strikes and fracking advances, President Obama understood this too. I felt some measure of comfort in the thought that at least he could pilot the sinking ship of neoliberalism with some care and perhaps mercy. For the next four years, I will abandon that hope as he hands the wheel over to a narcissist lunatic. But I will most certainly not give up.

This Friday they will be installing the madman at the White House, and the following day, thousands will march on Washington to demand that their voices be heard above clamour of those who would normalize the denigration of women, the dehumanization of immigrants, and the destruction of resources for poor people the world over. In the coming years some of us may have to make difficult choices about putting our own privilege on the line to help stem the tide of abuse that will undoubtedly fall hardest upon our more vulnerable brothers and sisters. I was raised to think these kinds of actions can not only make a difference, but can be what makes us human. I can only hope that I will be able to find the courage and determination to see that through.

-JS

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