#the sole arbiter of racism

[kawaiimunism]

the second half of Uri Berliner's takedown of NPR contains some of the most loser shit I've read recently (as expected from someone whose problem with NPR is that it's too progressive lol)

gee, if only there was some way to reference existing research on systemic racism in the so-called u.s.

you're right, uri, grassroots employees shouldn't have a say in editorial standards. if you want diversity of viewpoint, editorial standards should be the sole purview of the editorial board. can't believe SAG-AFTRA would advocate for the interests of workers' groups like that

(/s lol)

this dude trying to play dumb about Don't Say Gay "oh but the law doesn't even have 'gay' anywhere in its text you're misrepresenting it!" as though he doesn't know full-well why everyone called it that (hint: the NPR articles you're mad about explain the nickname)

and speaking for myself, the Latine folks I know are actually pretty divided on "Latinx"—some like it, some hate it, others don't care. and didn't you just say NPR has an internal Latinx advocacy group? do you know their position on the topic?? do you know Latine NPR employees who disagree with Mi Gente that you could discuss this with before going straight to the execs? why do you feel comfortable being the arbiter of this issue? what the hell man

Okay, so this one is variously disgusting:

Dude tips his hand right away by calling it the "Israel-Hamas war."

"jumped from the faculty lounge to newsrooms" lmfao universities have been wildly hostile to Palestinian liberation advocates how are you this out of touch?

When I do a site-search of npr.org for "hamas", the first three articles are all about the October 7 attack. NPR's reporting on rising antisemitism has been kind of lopsided in focusing on accusations of antisemitism while keeping fairly quiet about actual incidents/attitudes thereof, but I suspect accurate reporting on the topic (that is, existing antisemites attempting entryism into Palestinian solidarity movements) wouldn't please this guy.

NPR has tried to be neutral about the Gaza genocide in a way that I think is revolting, but Uri and I obviously disagree about why that's revolting.

The bird names piece is an article about the lack of diversity in bird-watching as a hobby. The bulk of the article talks about how the bird-naming convention of "[discoverer's name] [type of bird]" has led to a lot of birds that are named after horrible racists, and the ensuing conversation within birdwatching about whether/how to change those names. That's it. That's all it says. EDIT: I guess "discoverer" should be in a second set of quotes here, because English-language names for "New World" birds are generally going to be derived from the first settler to decide to name it.

The article "justifying looting" is an interview with Vicky Osterweil, the author of In Defense of Looting. The headline of the article literally calls it "One Author's Controversial View."

Fears about crime are racist and NPR was right to report on it lmao

When he says "suggesting that Asian Americans who oppose affirmative action have been manipulated by white conservatives," the way the story in question "suggests" that is quoting Asian-Americans who feel manipulated by white conservatives.

I haven't read the Beatles story he's talking about. It's kinda long and doesn't really interest me, so I won't comment on it.

I think this bit is the most revealing part of the whole piece. It kinda lays bare the exact ways that Uri is full of shit. He spends most of the latter half of the piece talking about how NPR's push for diversity of identity has coincided with a decrease in diversity of opinion, and that more ideas should be given a seat at the table, but he clearly doesn't actually believe that. Sure, bring in the MAGAs, bring in the Republicans, let the right have a say. But defending looting? Shining a light on racism in hobby spaces? Discussing racism in American attitudes towards crime? Well that's obviously beyond the pale! Obviously those ideas don't get a seat at the table.

Berliner clearly believes that some ideas are dangerous or ridiculous and shouldn't be platformed on that basis, but his main criteria for deciding which ideas shouldn't be platformed seem to be (1) how far outside the mainstream they are (e.g. the Defense of Looting piece) and (2) how ~divisive~ they are (e.g. the stuff about racism). Bringing on Republicans to explain why diversity sucks and trans people should be put in camps? Totally fine, I guess.

This little spiel reveals Berliner for what he is: A status quo warrior burned that the future is leaving him behind. NPR isn't alienating American society, it's embracing the vaguely-progressive left-lib attitudes that are becoming increasingly mainstream across the so-called U.S, paying occasional lip-service to more radical ideas while being very careful to avoid endorsing them.

#he makes some okay points in the first part of the piece tho #the mueller report russiagate shit was embarrassing and dismissing the lab-leak hypothesis for c19 out of hand was premature

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Pamela Paul

Published: Oct 5, 2023

The recent turmoil at Ibram X. Kendi’s Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University, with more than half its staff laid off and half its budget cut amid questions of what it did with the nearly $55 million it raised, led to whoops of schadenfreude from Kendi’s critics and hand-wringing from his loyal fans.

He had become a symbol of what was right or wrong with America’s racial reckoning since the police murder of George Floyd. To some, Kendi was a race-baiting grifter; to others, he was a social justice hero speaking harsh truths.

With little administrative experience, Kendi may simply have been ill equipped to deal with a program of that magnitude. He may have been distracted by a nonstop book tour and speaking engagements. Or maybe he just screwed up.

More interesting is that many major universities, corporations, nonprofit groups and influential donors thought buying into Kendi’s strident, simplistic formula — that racism is the cause of all racial disparities and that anyone who disagrees is a racist — could eradicate racial strife and absolve them of any role they may have played in it.

After all, this reductionist line of thinking runs squarely against the enlightened principles on which many of those institutions were founded — free inquiry, freedom of speech, a diversity of perspectives. As one Boston University professor wrote last week in The Wall Street Journal, that academia backs Kendi’s mission amounts to a “violation of scholarly ideals and liberal principles,” ones that betray “the norms necessary for intellectual life and human flourishing.”

Yet Kendi’s ideas gained prominence, often to the exclusion of all other perspectives. He was a relatively unknown academic when his second book, “Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America,” was a surprise winner of a National Book Award in 2016. It helped catapult him from assistant professorships at State University of New York campuses and the University of Florida to a full professorship at American University, where he founded the Antiracist Research and Policy Center.

In 2017, The New York Times Book Review, which I was then editing, asked Kendi to create a reading list, “A History of Race and Racism, in 24 Chapters,” for our pages. I interviewed Kendi, who is a very charismatic speaker, about the essay on the Book Review’s podcast and again, about his reading life, on a panel in 2019.

In “Stamped From the Beginning,” Kendi asserted that racist ideas are used to obscure the fact that racist policies create racial disparities and that to find fault with Black people in any way for those disparities is racist. People who “subscribed to assimilationist thinking that has also served up racist beliefs about Black inferiority,” no matter how well meaning and progressive, were themselves racist. In Kendi’s revisionist history, figures who were previously hailed for their contribution to civil rights were repainted as racist if they did not attribute Black inequality solely to racism. Kendi accused W.E.B. Du Bois and Barack Obama of racism for entertaining the idea that Black behavior and attitudes could sometimes cause or exacerbate certain disparities, although he noted that Du Bois went on to take what he considered a more antiracist position.

In 2019, Kendi took the ideas further, pivoting to contemporary policy with “How to Be an Antiracist.” In this book he made clear that to explore reasons other than racism for racial inequities, whether economic, social or cultural, is to promote anti-Black policies.

“The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination,” Kendi wrote, in words that would be softened in a future edition after they became the subject of criticism. “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” In other words, two wrongs do make a right. As practiced, that meant curriculums that favor works by Black people over white people are one way to achieve that goal; hiring quotas are another.

Among the book’s central tenets is that everyone must choose between his approach, which he called “antiracism,” and racism itself. It would no longer be enough for an individual or organization to simply be “not racist,” which Kendi called a “mask for racism” — they must instead be actively “antiracist,” applying a strict lens of racism to their every thought and action, and in fields wholly unrelated to race, in order to escape deliberate or inadvertent racist thinking and behavior. “What we say about race, what we do about race, in each moment, determines what — not who — we are,” Kendi wrote.

Kendi’s antiracism prescription meant that universities, corporations and nonprofits would need to remove all policies that weren’t overtly antiracist. In the Boston University English department’s playwriting M.F.A. program, for example, reading assignments had to come from “50 percent diverse-identifying and marginalized writers,” and writers of “white or Eurocentric lineage” had to be taught through “an actively antiracist lens.” Antiracism also requires a commitment to other positions, including active opposition to sexism, homophobia, colorism, ethnocentrism, nativism, cultural prejudice and any class biases that supposedly harm Black lives. To deviate from any of this is to be racist. Either you’re with us or you’re against us.

Yet, as the psychologist and author Jonathan Haidt pointed out, Kendi’s dichotomy is “incorrect from a social-science perspective because there are obviously many other remedies,” including ones that address social, economic and cultural disparities through a fairer distribution of resources.

When a Minneapolis police officer murdered Floyd in May 2020, Kendi’s book, with its propitious, here-is-what-you-must-do-now title, became the bible for anyone newly committed to the cause of racial justice. Schools and companies made it required reading. So many campuses made it their class read, all-school read or community read that the publisher created a full set of reading and teaching guides for them. (Employees at the publishing house, Penguin Random House, were told to read it as the first “true companywide read” to begin “antiracism training mandatory for all employees.”) Universities used Kendi’s antiracist framework as the basis by which applicants’ required diversity statements would be judged.

His vision of antiracism had considerable influence in shaping the national conversation around race. As Tyler Austin Harper wrote in The Washington Post last week, “No longer a mere ambassador for academic antiracism, Kendi became a brand.”

Yet the same year “How to Be an Antiracist” was published, Henry Louis Gates’s “Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow” presented a more nuanced assessment of the relationship between past and present. With its vivid examples of crude prejudice (the photos are not for the fainthearted), Gates’s historical excavation allows the reader to see a clear line between the pervasive bigotry of the past and the kind of ugly but marginal brand of white supremacy on display in 2017 Charlottesville, Va. In contrast to Kendi’s contention that racial progress is consistently accompanied by racist progress, numerous memoirs, firsthand accounts, biographies and histories of the civil rights movement also document clear progress on race.

Contra Kendi, there are conscientious people who advocate racial neutrality over racial discrimination. It isn’t necessarily naïve or wrong to believe that most Americans aren’t racist. To believe that white supremacists exist in this country but that white supremacy is not the dominant characteristic of America in 2023 is also an acceptable position.

And while a cartoon version of colorblindness isn’t desirable or even possible, it is possible to recognize skin color but not form judgments on that basis. A person can worry that an emphasis on racial group identity can misleadingly homogenize diverse groups of people, at once underestimating intraracial differences and overemphasizing interracial ones. The Black left-wing scholar Adolph Reed, for example, decried the emphasis on race-based policies. “An obsession with disparities of race has colonized the thinking of left and liberal types,” Reed said in an interview with The New York Times. “There’s this insistence that race and racism are fundamental determinants of all Black people’s existence.”

In short, a person can oppose racism on firm ethical or philosophical or pragmatic grounds without embracing Kendi’s conception of antiracism. No organization can expect all employees or students to adhere to a single view on how to combat racism.

Kendi asserts that whether a policy is racist or antiracist is determined not by intent but by outcome. But the fruits of any efforts toward addressing racial inequality may take years to materialize and assess.

In the meantime, the best that could come out of this particular reckoning would be a more nuanced and open-minded conversation around racism and a commitment to more diverse visions of how to address it.

[ Archive: https://archive.md/haAI7 ]

==

Six months ago, an article like this from the New York Times would have been unthinkable.

We seem to be into the Emperor Has No Clothes moment.

#Pamela Paul #Ian Rowe #Ibram X. Kendi #kendi is a racist #antiracism #antiracism as religion #woke #wokeism #cult of woke #wokeness #wokeness as religion #religion is a mental illness

[lesenbyan]

Anyway, I know I don't talk about race/racism well bc of many reasons so I'm not sure the clarification on the Lyse post made sense and i'm not wholly sure posts i make in the future on it will make much more sense.

But like disclaimer that i'm Just One Guy and also Just Some Guy so i'm by no means declaring myself sole arbiter of anything. But I am a person of color with a lot of thoughts on Lyse and how her arc was handled so i'm not gonna shut up about it.

#critique: Lyse Hext; #<- new tag for her specifically bc i have a lot to say on her #critique: ffxiv 4.0/x; #personal; #like i've not experienced a lot of blatant racism in my life but i can tell you what makes me uncomfortable #either as a poc or as a mixed race person #and i FOUND a lot of those trigger bc of SB #esp bc SB is when i had to rewrite Eve's story and Eve has always had my issues with not belonging baked in #so she ends up playing opposite Lyse on a lot of things bc Eve was ALSO born in Gyr Abania and left as a Baby #and she does identify as Ala Mhigan in a weird way tho she doesn't bring it up OFTEN #(she identifies as Xalea more than Ala Mhigan but she doesn’t mention that either bc then she'll have to explain bc miqo) #but like yeah! i have a lot of very personally nuanced ideas i don't say well #and i distract myself from my own point constantly

[theliterateape]

History is a Puzzle Box of Rashomon

by Don Hall

I’ve often said that the scariest thing to ever come out of my mother’s mouth was the declaration “Let’s go on an adventure!”

For my mother an adventure must include a lack of preparation, potential for danger, and a sense of I can’t believe we just survived that! She once decided she wanted to do a charcoal sketching of a gravestone from the grave of one of our Appalachian Baptist fire-and-brimstone preacher ancestors. My dad drove her up into the mountains and they started seeing patches of purple paint on trees and rocks.

Turned out that was the locals’ way of telling outsiders they'd get shot if they trespassed. My dad clutched his pistol the rest of the way.

Mom got her charcoal sketch. I can’t believe we just survived that!

When I was a kid and we lived in Arizona, mom decided we were going on adventure. My little sister, mom, and I loaded up in her brown Gremlin, a bag of sandwiches, some sodas, and all of our swimming gear and headed out for an afternoon at Lake Pleasant.

All was copacetic until she thought she saw a shortcut to he lake. It was not a shortcut. It was simply desert. It started out as a bit of a dirt path that sort of petered out about an hour into the drive. We were driving in the open desert in the vehicle equivalent to a Pinto.

Of course we blew a tire. Of course we didn't have a spare.

Being a melodramatic kid, I went into a full-blown faux-survivalist panic. After a few minutes of wailing about our imminent demise I set out to figure how to get water out of cactus, the thorny testaments to the heartiness of desert foliage fending off my un-callused hands and delivering exactly no water.

This being decades before smartphones, we were stuck. We had no clue where we were in terms of the comforts of civilization and while mom put on a brave face (and occasionally got the giggles at my histrionics) our fate was sealed. Unless someone miraculously drove into the middle of the desert to save us, we were doomed.

And then the miracle occurred. A beat-up red Ford pickup truck coming from the other direction popped up on the horizon. I shrieked in relief; mom flagged the truck down.

We were about a mile from a highway but we couldn't know that. The driver of the pickup was taking a shortcut from the highway.

Here's where the story gets odd. To this day, my mother's version of this adventure and mine are identical. Word for word the same until we get to the driver of the Ford. On my life, I swear it was an older Native American man who stopped, hitched up the Gremlin to his vehicle, and towed us the mile to the highway and on to a gas station. 

My mother will go to her grave insisting it was a family of four Mormons.

What?!

We’ve had family arguments about this story. Both my mother and I are intractable in our insistence of our specific endings of either Native American man or family of Mormons. We both were there. We both can see ourselves in the tale. The endings are as different as could be.

There is conclusive scientific research that demonstrates how the memory of an event subtly changes the actual memory as it is retold. The more you tell the story, the more it transforms into something similar but wholly different in the margins.

If my mother and I can have such divergent differences within a memory of an event we both shared, how many splinters are there in a collective re-telling of a larger event encompassing many more tellers? How many completely incompatible versions of the attacks on New York on September 11, 2001 are there? How many versions that don’t quite line up with one another are there of the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941?

Moving forward and backward in history, if we are to accept (and I do) that our memories are more Silly Putty than Lego Bricks, how much does film, television, books, and social media come into play in the constant morphing of objective truth to the collection of subjective memories and finally commonly accepted reality?

There is conclusive scientific research that demonstrates how the memory of an event subtly changes the actual memory as it is retold.

Back in the olden days when one could watch something horribly incorrect in the political sense without it becoming a ringing endorsement of your personal "brand" or a scathing indictment on who you are as a fellow human, I went to a screening of Griffith's The Birth of a Nation. It was at an esoteric video shop/screening theater on Fullerton Avenue in Chicago called Facets Multimedia and there were six or seven others in attendance. I was the only white person in the room.

Historically, Griffith's opus is significant in several ways. 

First, it was among the earliest epic uses of film. Released in 1915, it was the first blockbuster Hollywood hit. It was the longest and most-profitable film then produced and the most artistically advanced film of its day. It secured both the future of feature-length films and the reception of film as a serious medium.

Second, it was the first modern popular culture example of an artistic achievement attempting to force a certain perspective on the larger culture (the idea that the KKK were the heroes of the Civil War) it was initially released with the title "The Clansmen" and reframed the war, Reconstruction, and white hooded sheets in tandem with lynchings as the preferred story of American history.

Third, while propaganda has been around since men could talk and write, it was the most pervasive use of a medium that communicated on a newfound mass level to promote a horrifying ideology and was embraced by President Woodrow Wilson as a personal favorite.

Following the three-hour screening, there was a sense of discomfort as the lights came back up. My guess at the time it was the other viewers in the room wondering if I, the sole white person in the room, was as offended by the revised perspective the film espoused as the rest in the small cadre. I suppose I wasn't as offended because I wasn't black and I knew what I was getting into when buying my ticket. I can imagine seeing the film without some context would be like a slap in the face.

One of the things I learned doing stage combat around the same time was that a slap in the face never hurt as much as you'd think. It wasn't the pain of the blow but the surprise of it that gave it impact. Going in cold to see the KKK presented as the true patriots wouldn't hurt but the surprise might be a shock.

In a very different way but in the same vein, I remember being the only white face in a crowded theater in Fayetteville, Arkansas at the opening night of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. The looks of inquisition for my reaction to the film from the predominantly black faces followed me out into the lobby and into the parking lot.

I read recently that one of the reasons the scars of that Civil War in America have never fully healed is that we’ve never, as a nation, agreed on a single narrative of why we fought the goddamned thing. The subjectivity of truth in the re-telling of that dark period is confounding and subsequent attempts to force one perspective or the other or multiple angles on the causes of the War of the States has only confused the issue. Thus the recent beheadings of statues glorifying Southern generals and the re-naming parties of public schools to eliminate anyone associated with slavery.

I understand and empathize with this impulse to reverse the whitewash of history from our streets and schools. So much of our literature and symbols in real life have been created with, maybe not a D. W. Griffith subjectivity, a revisionist historical perspective that paints over the ugliest parts of our history to re-tell the narrative and erase those most subjugated by it. I expect over-correction (like the New York Times 1619 Project which casts our history as steeped in nothing but racism and slavery without acknowledging the contributions set apart from those stains) and, after reading that San Francisco schools are eliminating Abraham Lincoln's name, I decided to re-watch Spielberg's Lincoln.

I don't know if it was actually Lincoln or screenwriter Tony Kushner who came up with the following analogy but I found it instructive in the push to reframe the story today.

A compass, I learnt when I was surveying, it'll... it'll point you True North from where you're standing, but it's got no advice about the swamps and deserts and chasms that you'll encounter along the way.

If in pursuit of your destination, you plunge ahead, heedless of obstacles, and achieve nothing more than to sink in a swamp... What's the use of knowing True North?

The film paints the fight for the 13th Amendment as a dark political game, cajoling and persuading the legislators of the day to codify in the Constitution a formal revocation and rebuke to the forced enslavement of other human beings. It also portrays Lincoln as a deeply pragmatic leader. The speech is one he gives to Thaddeus Stevens, a zealous abolitionist, who rightly sees true north but, up to that point, would rather be righteous than successful in abolishing slavery.

Both men are long dead so the question of whether both men would tell the same story, in their re-telling of those pivotal moments leading up to the vote, or if their stories would radically diverge, is wholly academic. That’s where the trappings of art collide with authenticity. This is the version Spielberg and Kushner decided upon and it will be the version millions who watch the film and decide to simply accept it as the one true version.

This is not to say there is no objective truth. It is to suggest that our inability to separate fact from our subjective fictions makes us pretty fucking lousy arbiters of that fact.

On the other hand, we have celebrated author Mark Manson, whose book Everything is F•cked: A Book About Hope is being banned in Russia by Putin because it speaks directly to atrocities committed by Stalin. Putin is looking to re-write Stalin's history. 

There is a big difference between revising a history shown to diminish the effects of overt racists in one country and purging a country’s history of established monstrosities but the mechanism remains the same: reframe the story and tell it enough times that the meaning changes over time. Keep pushing the new narrative (right or wrong) until the soft memory of an entire nation bends to the will of the teller.

That’s all history is, after all. A slew of stories we tell over and over to indoctrinate a sense of national pride. It grows more perilous when those revising the stories weren’t present. The source of the tales becomes less reliable and the reframe more suspect. When the source is a film or video of an event, we feel as though we’ve experienced it but our perspective is entirely subverted by what the camera shows us and the narrative promoted when we watch it.

One of the techniques that Griffith practically invented was the camera’s use to tell the story from his view. Frame things in a certain way, in a certain order, and our very eyes are deceived, our minds accept the deception, and we believe.

In 1950, Akira Kurosawa gave the world the reigning example of individualized subjective point of view. Rashomon shows us three different perspectives on one specific event. The film makes the point so clearly that the term used popularly to label the he said/she said/they said dilemma is a rashomon.

This is not to say there is no objective truth. It is to suggest that our inability to separate fact from our subjective fictions makes us pretty fucking lousy arbiters of that fact. Show me someone absolutely 100% certain of the sort of events they've only seen on an iPhone video moderated by Faceborg and spun by both the media and some random stranger and I'll show you someone deluded and quite probably dead wrong.

Even when we're there to witness events in person we get it wrong so the concept of getting it right through the mediation and manipulation of amateur videographers and activist pushing a narrative is nothing short of lunatic fringe.

Bizarrely, we all know this to be true.

We know that social media is almost entirely unreliable. We know that film is a highly manipulative art form. We know that Robert Downey, Jr. never flew in a suit of armor, that Keanu Reeves is not Neo, that as much as he embodies who I hope Abraham Lincoln was like, Daniel Day Lewis is an actor and couldn't possibly know what the man was actually like in person.

We know this to be true but we need to be right. We need to believe and so we take that leap of faith, that gut level adherence to what makes some sort of sense in the story and run with it. More so, if the fiction supports things we already have chosen to believe in, we are adding it to the arsenal of defenses against any other sort of view of our story.

We know there's more to the story of the Antifa takeover of Seattle. We know there's more to the January 6th breach of the Capitol. We know there are more sides to the story of Michael Brown. We know that with everyone filmed in a Walmart screaming about her right to forego a mask there is something else before and after that moment that may demonize her just a bit less.

We know but we don't care. Context and considering the framing takes too much work. Too much time. In an existence flooded with too much information, too many stories, too much video, too many opinions, it's just fucking easier to settle on the story that suits you and roll with that.

That's why—no matter what my mother says—it was definitely not a family of Mormons and I'll go to my grave with that.

[princessnijireiki]

what were the details of nk & mepoc? i rmbr smth happening but cant rmbr details

medievalpoc had just gotten a book deal so ppl were basically pointing out how that was ridiculous since she's not a solid researcher + doesn't have enough of a bg in history or art history to accurately describe art in the context of what was actually being communicated, or who its subjects were, or even like a solid understanding of how definitions & delineations of what race IS or how it's depicted change over time & based on setting, esp for art depicting people the artist had never seen before, or for example treating textbook orientalist art as a positive thing when it's meant to dehumanize subjects either as exotic objects or stand-ins for conceptual "foreignness," etc

and on top of that it was suggested that m.poc's work was basically cribbed together from other people's blogs, esp since her own page took (maybe still takes idk) submissions & she was (allegedly) including submissions + reblogs uncredited in her book

and on top of THAT, she was also inconsistent abt her own ethnic bg on her blog, which is a common enough thing (esp for mixed people of color & the fact that it's… a personal blog on tumblr dot com) that it's nbd, EXCEPT that she claimed a position of authority based mostly on being a PERSON OF COLOR due to a lack of academic credentials & like based on "oh I see this bc I'm coming at art history from a lens outside of the white hegemony" or whatever.

so it suddenly made those inconsistent claims BECOME a big deal & an actual issue when "random blogger gets book deal" didn't HAVE to turn into "random blogger gets book deal on sole 'credential' of ethnicity," esp when iirc she alternately claimed mixed romani or mixed native american heritage— neither of which are like uncommon or inherently suspicious things to be or lack 'documentation' for! just that they are also HIGHLY common choices for self exotifying white people to feel ethnically special™️ and as "get out of jail free" cards re: defending against accusations of racism… and so ppl began scrutinizing her to see if she was faking, and if she'd conned her way into a professional opportunity by claiming a diff race.

nk got pulled into it bc she either had just gotten an award or was publishing a new book around the same time, and they were gonna be presenting together on a panel abt authorship as people of color (iirc), and people were like, "damn, they're apparently friends & if nk doesn't address this that just gives tacit approval to everything going on," which is ofc stupid bc nobody weighs in on coworkers like this in real life or needs to judge others in their field, bc like… obviously that's not her job.

m.poc's angle, iirc, was to not address anything but the racefaker claims to be like "damn that's hurtful wtf" (which: fair if true! but also conveniently & deliberately sidesteps every other issue at play), which in turn made it seem like nk was being asked to be the racial arbiter & be like the black woman designated as a race cop and gatekeeper to bully or quiz or reject someone she'd seen as another person of color, and erased ppl's other legitimate complaints into sth like "this person only got their job bc of affirmative action."

which is calculating regardless of m.poc's actual ethnic bg, bc that cherrypicking makes ppl outside the context of this tumblr baggage see her as a victim of racial bullying, and shuts down folks' willingness to listen to anyone's critiques as a result, bc then those people are CLEARLY just looking for ANY kind of way to tear poor medievalpoc down in this moment.

and then basically the public spotlight passed, talk died down on its own, people are still defensive of m.poc bc Mean Ethnic SJWs AND ~racists who don't want to see poc in the arts~ tried to tear her down.

and ppl who were here for the whole thing are left to be like "yeah they're a con artist & frustrating as all hell if you have ANY academic training in the fields they've finagled their way into a professional place in. but mostly m.poc is an annoying crybaby who definitely DID use race (their own or faked) as a stepping stone towards success, but since they will also milk any controversy for attention, there's nothing to be done for it bc she's liable to spin it for another book deal + call on friends to yell back at you & bully you if you do."

that's how I remember it anyway, there were ppl paying closer attention to it all than I was, but it was mainly just a whole fucking mess.

[syntymatitahna]

TO CONSIDER BEFORE FOLLOWING

🔹 I welcome a-spec people in the LGBT community.

🔹 I consider "queer" a great self-identifier. I disagree with attempts to de-reclaim "queer" while respecting a person's wish to not be called queer for personal reasons.

🔹 I find straight-passing privilege a laughable concept. The words for this phenomenon are "heteronormativity" and "erasure".

🔹 I support feminist action.

🔹 I support the fight against the aspects of sexism in our patriarchal society which are harmful to men. I understand words for these concepts are necessary for efficient discussion.

🔹 I consider it important to listen to and support sex workers. I find it appalling how people would treat sex work as a moral failing on the workers' part and try to diminish their agency.

🔹 I believe there exists such a thing as ethically produced porn and ethical consumption thereof.

🔹 Leather and kink have always been part of Pride.

🔹 I believe xenophobia, racism, antisemitism and islamophobia must be fought on a personal and broader level. I strongly disapprove of the sealioning of Jews about Israel.

🔹 I find antitheists as distasteful as the religious individuals who think their beliefs are the only valid ones. (Atheists who are normal about it are fine.)

🔹 I'm also not fond of preachy vegans. Decent ones are cool. Have any great recipes?

🔹 I have reservations about veganism as an ethical and ecological stance, as it is frequently rife with disinformation and a desire to eradicate traditional ways of living.

🔹 I have nothing against a diet that limits or eliminates the consumption of animal products. I frequently use plant-based alternatives to both meat and dairy products myself.

🔹 Neopronouns and xenogenders are harmless. Is there something wrong with trans people feeling good about themselves?

🔹 I consider "transtrender" to be a transantagonistic term.

🔹 My stance on seemingly incongruous identities is that the individual with said identities will always have a better understanding of their own identity than some rando online.

🔹 The way I see it, transmedicalism perpetuates the idea that people must medically transition to be trans, thus enforcing the troobie nightmare of people transitioning only to realise it wasn’t what they wanted, it adheres to pericis notions of gendersex, it blames other trans people for cis people’s transbigotry, it imposes an individual's notions of gender on other people, assumes that they and their peers are the sole arbiters of gender, and infringes on other people’s agency and right to define themselves.

🔹 I’d rather live in a world where anyone can change their pronouns and other gendering in a given language, even those people who ID as cis, than in a world where people have to feel bad about the way they’re being addressed and referred to because some people think it’s their right to assign other people terminology on basis of what they think their gender should be.

🔹 I have a handful of problematic ships, which I may occasionally talk about on this blog. I will not "defend" them; either trust my judgment or don't.

(last edit 8/2023, added leather&kink@ pride (sorry about the ping, mb), incongruous IDs and removed the dead link from the ethnic/religious bigotry bullet.)

[beforeiselfdestruct88-blog]

LGB no T.

I am so sick of this. The black community has worshipped dick and centered black men in everything since day 1. Now silly handmaidens and black men who 'identify' as black women want to speak over actual black women to prop themselves up. How dare you disrespect our existence and use patriarchy in a dress to make yourselves the focal point of female oppression. It's called SEXISM not genderism for a reason. Being female has been the sole basis of our abuse and you have the nerve to pretend all of that can be redirected to being about your "mentality". Get the hell outta here. You don't get to redefine things to suit your agenda. Now you're out here peddling the lie that "black trans women" face the highest level of violence. Bull fucking shit. Black women have experienced more violence than ANYONE ever, especially if we are dark skinned. Black people have been enslaved by other black people, whites, arabs and Natives, all of whom raped black women . Some even forced us to breed in astronomical numbers and take care of all the children regardless of color because all we were good for was production. Black women have suffered FGM, have been forced into marriages as children, our bodies have been placed in human zoos for people to gawk at our 'unusual' figures, our bodies have been used against our will to advance science. Present day black women carry those scars with us because trauma against our humanity for daring to exist while black and female is generational. Not only are we missing and trafficked at ridiculous rates but we are also raped, assaulted and killed under the radar. We have become the punchline for black 'entertainers' and black men everywhere from our skin tone to our character to our mannerisms to our genitalia to our diction. We get cervical cancer more than anyone but we better not say it because "not all women have a cervix." 😑 We are the poster children for everything wrong in society. When society talks about welfare queens and single motherhood, they're not thinking of 'trans' black women. When we get blamed for "destroying the black community with our feminism", they're not thinking of 'trans' black women. When society talks about black women being ugly and ghetto they're not thinking of 'trans' black women. When people approriate our culture and style to give themselves an edge, they're not taking it from 'trans' black women. Black women have attitude. Black women are fat. Black women are raising thugs. They're not talking about 'trans' black women. Day in and out, black women are society's scapegoat while all you care about is being able to use the bathroom you prefer and being able to date straight men without opposition. That is what we call a First World Problem. Your identity crisis and the elective surgeries you get to appease it do not take precedent over the global and never ending disrespect of black women. We didn't have to alter ourselves and go out of our way to be oppressed like you. Just by existing as is, the world has told us that is enough reason to take endless craps on us. Stop acting like black men haven't always found it ok to fight black women like men because our blackness allegedly discounts our womanhood. Stop acting like black men haven't embedded it in their mind that black women are not human but their mules to take care of them when life is hard, only to be discarded when they become successful. Stop acting like black girls aren't constantly robbed of our innocence with assault and dubbed 'fast' so our pain is overlooked and our fault. Stop acting like people haven't always called black women, men because we are the antithesis of white beauty standards. Stop acting like every woman doesn't get an ego boost on our backs. We are woman enough to be raped, trafficked, called bitches and hoes but too 'manly' to reap the finances, protection and reverence patriarchal society's claim to give women. Stop acting like black women are not abused physically, psychologically, emotionally and financially and haven't always been by white society, black society and everyone in between. Acting like you have it so hard when we have always been treated like an other just for being born. "The most disrespected and least protected person on the planet is the black woman." - Malcolm X He said black woman. Not black 'trans' woman. Cis privilege my ass. You think because you've been feeling for the last year what black women have been feeling since FOREVER, that you have it worse? You are only experiencing a sliver of what we get anyway. It's just that typical fragile masculinity you were born into that has you thinking you are the peak of oppression. You went your whole lives ignoring and/or capitalizing on the degradation of black women because your maleness allowed you to put it on the back burner. Your internal issues with gender did not negate the external privilege you received. But now that you 'identify' as one of us, we need to make you a priority or you slander us with poor reverse psychology. How narcissistic can you get? Womens rights are only worthy of attention when you are involved? "TERF" is not a thing btw. Stop using racism, sexism and homophobia to make yourself valid. You cannot compare white privilege, male privilege and straight privilege to this nonsense. Women have never had privilege. Or do you just wanna ignore the last thousands of years? You were born on the side of privilege and into the dominant oppressing class. Now you want access to a marginalized group with no questions and throw tantrums when we say no. It's almost like your male privilege conditioned you to force yourself onto women at any cost and taught you how to play victim when women don't fall for your shit. You want equal footing in womanhood but won't hesitate to remind us you "have it worse". You want to call lesbians bigots if they exclusively like women and vagina... because hey, how dare some women not want penis in any way, shape or form. Blasphemy! You have no concern for women in shelters fleeing abusive men. You invade their spaces and tell them to suck it up if they don't like your dick and masculine energy. You say nothing when born males use their advantages to dominate female sports. But you're the victim, right? I will say it again. It's called SEXISM, not genderism for a reason. You don't get to keep playing the "being born in the wrong body is not a privilege" card to ignore your advantages and complicity at our expense. Gender identity issues are low priority in comparison to everything else. Every day black women leave our homes, we are subjected to antiblackness and misogyny just for being ourselves. Doesn't matter how we dress or speak, it is hurled our way just for being in a female body via a black package. It will be a cold day in hell before those born male and their delusions get to define womanhood but those of us born female and our realities that came with it don't. Yes, we are the arbiters and gatekeepers of womanhood and it pisses you off there's nothing you can do about it except rally your naive liberal handmaidens and scream TERF. Interestingly enough, there are countless instances of 'trans women' raping, assaulting and killing women but not ONE woman has done that to you. Yet here you all come... into our spaces IRL and on the internet to force yourselves onto us. Why don't you go after the men who fuck you in private but don't want to publicly be seen with you and take your lives with the same gusto? Is it because you have no privilege over them and instead, it's easier to gang up on the 'weaker sex'? It's almost like you devalue women so much, you wanna speak over, redefine and attack us all while blaming our words for violence against you... well what do you know, patriarchy strikes again. We will not give into your demands. We don't negotiate with terrorists. (If misgendering you is 'violence', well propagating existent violence against us is indeed terrorism.) 😊

#blackfeminism #feminism #womanism #womenfirst #saynotopatriarchyinadress

[mrmichaelchadler]

"You Were Expecting Someone Else?" Why a Non-White James Bond is the Franchise's Logical Next Step

On the heels of false rumors that Idris Elba was next in line to inherit James Bond's license to kill, arguments for the inclusive casting of the character and against a non-white actor playing Bond have landed like thunderballs. This makes sense. For going on 60 years, audiences have only ever seen Bond as white. Now it finally appears that, per director Antoine Fuqua, producer Barbara Broccoli has concurred that “it’s time” for a non-white Bond. A non-white Bond appears an easy choice in 2018, when a culture once dominated by straight white men has started making room for once-marginalized voices. Casting a Bond of color would indeed change the franchise. 

And if you look at how Bond and the franchise have evolved over the last two decades, you'll see that this wouldn't be an arbitrary change, but an evolutionary one. You could even say that it's what the Bond series has been building towards, as it strove to infuse stories with political details drawn from recent headlines while making Bond seem like even more of an outsider than he did already.

We should begin by enthusiastically stating that, in the character's earliest incarnations—on the page as well as in the first few decades of films—it made a world of sense for Bond to be white. Although reflexive resistance to casting Elba, or any non-white performer, tends to be rooted in racism, it's not accurate to say that it doesn't matter whether Bond is white. Bond’s race is indeed a part of the character, and a key bit of context necessary for understanding how he functions. As opposed to Bond’s race being a neutral character—or Bond’s actions not being motivated by race, as Matt Miller asserts—it seems fairer to say that Bond’s whiteness was inevitable, considering the era and culture that birthed him. 

Bond debuted in Casino Royale, published in 1954 by former British Naval Officer Ian Fleming. Fleming's politics were written into the books: rather than appearing as apolitical, Bond explicitly works for Her Majesty’s Secret Service, and is born out of Cold War paranoia. His enemies and allies often are associated with the respective international relationships that the United Kingdom had with such countries as the United States, Russia (formerly the USSR), China, Japan and Germany. First played onscreen by Sean Connery in 1962's  "Dr. No," Bond is not just an action hero with good taste in cars and shoes. He is an arm of of state politics and an emblem of midcentury British imperialism. 

"You Only Live Twice"

Once you realize that Bond’s actions are never apolitical, you start to understand how deliberate the political subtext (or super text) in these films can be. 

International tensions and cultural stereotypes and resentments are all over the series from the start. They grow harder to ignore in later films. And they're largely shaped by the point-of-view of the Hollywood-adjacent British film industry which, like the British government, is run by white men, and has been slow to cede ground to other points-of-view. 

Bond appears in yellowface for nearly a third of the running time of "You Only Live Twice," and the tense relationship the UK and Japan is discussed in dialogue. When Bond strolls into a hotel room sopping wet in "Die Another Day," the Chinese manager declares decisively, “Hong Kong is our turf now, Bond,” just before he goes to face the film's bad guy, a North Korean dictator's son who has had cosmetic and DNA surgery to become white. In "From Russia with Love," Bond … well, you get the picture. The appeal to the Bond movies implicitly is its geopolitics, even when it’s we're simply reading it as "Bond fights the Russians," and even then, Bond represents certain ideas. (SPECTRE, the recurring terrorist organization that Bond battles against across multiple titles, is fascinating because they are bound not only by ideology, but by the awareness of fraught international relationships: see "You Only Live Twice.") 

But Broccoli is right to say its time for a different kind of Bond. Every entry in the series has, to varying degrees, had to justify the necessity of existing, but that urge became more overt as the distance between Bond and the Cold War turned into a chasm. The Pierce Brosnan films, which kicked off with 1995's "Goldeneye," were already referencing the Cold War in faintly nostalgic terms, as a conflict that was at least more clearly defined than the chaos the character had to deal with after the USSR broke apart. The context of Bond had to change again for 2006’s reboot/origin story "Casino Royale." The shadow of September 11th and the international War on Terror hung over the character, who was now angsty, angry, gritty, and world-weary. Daniel Craig became an emblem of post-9/11 trauma and frustration, even ambivalence. 

The Craig films (consisting of "Casino Royale," "Quantum of Solace," Skyfall," and "Spectre") do what the rest of the franchise don't do: they constantly interrogate Bond’s relevance to the world. Craig's version of Bond is shaped by the brokenness of the society and politics around him. His struggle to “become Bond” in a definite, easily communicable way, as Sean Connery or Roger Moore did so easily, is indicative of how stunted and fractured the world has become. He’s worse at his job (he barely succeeds at missions anymore), and his relationship with his license to kill has soured. His masculinity is starting to bend. Maybe he’s starting to realize the world doesn’t need him anymore. 

In "Spectre," Bond returns to the exotic locales the movies were once iconic for, and encounters little else but rubble and ruin: the result of British Imperialism and colonialism. The film begins somewhat pretentious (in a delightful way): “The dead are alive,” it tells us. Does that makes 007 the ghost of the British Empire? What does Bond even mean in the 21st century? We already know he's a relic of the Cold War—and as M [Judi Dench] calls him in "GoldenEye," “a sexist, misogynist dinosaur”—and he knows it. So now what?

Such questions are central to the Craig films. The answer so far has been implicitly argue that Bond doesn’t need to exist in a world where warfare and espionage are no longer on-the-ground affairs—a curious example of a wildly popular franchise arguing against its own existence. 

All of which brings us to the first reason that a non-white Bond would be not just fresh, but sensible and necessary: casting Bond as non-white would make the franchise's politics a lot more sophisticated and challenging, without contradicting anything that it has shown us in the past. 

The Bond franchise has, over the course of its run, turned increasingly inwards; in its last decade or so, it’s been hard to argue that Craig’s cycle of films demonstrated unwavering support of the British government and its implicit heroism, crimes, and misdemeanors.  "Quantum of Solace" showed us that Bond, often a stand-in for British imperial powers, could rampage. "Skyfall" and "Spectre'"s pair of Shakespearean monologues from M (Dench) and Blofeld (Christoph Waltz) confirmed that if the Empire hasn’t already fallen, the series is critical of its nihilistic need to keep going no matter what. 

A non-white Bond would push international audiences to realize that the world view and behavior represented in Bond moves aren't just a white thing. White people are no longer sole arbiters of colonialist attitudes or actions, on the ground or otherwise. 

In that sense, a non-white actor playing Bond would not so much be a subversion of Bond’s politics, but an admittance that those politics are bound to statehood and institution, not always just to race. 

"Quantum of Solace"

However, it would not be sufficient to cast an actor of color as Bond and not change anything else about the movies. 

A non-white Bond would not be a one-dimensional representational win if the franchise continues to make only minor tweaks. A white Bond doesn't demand that we reconsider the politics of the entire franchise. Pretty much any other race or ethnicity would compel it. 

Imagine an Asian Bond after having witnessed the character’s (and Britain’s) relationship with Asian countries in such films as "You Only Live Twice," "Man with the Golden Gun," "Tomorrow Never Dies" and "Die Another Day." A black Bond would make us to think about Britain’s slave territories, represented onscreen in "Live and Let Die," essentially a blaxploitation movie with a black villain and a white hero. What thoughts would be inspired by an Indian Bond, considering the colonial history so glancingly referenced in "Octopussy"?

More to the point, Bond is, in effect, a very handsome supercop. “You are just a stupid policeman,” Dr. No derisively says to him. He has, as Patti LaBelle is want to sing, a license to kill. And while he’s more inclined to work with other government agencies, local and state police are technically his allies. “As lawless as his actions may appear to be, underneath it all Bond really believes in Goodness and Order and Freedom and Democracy and, yes, even Law. Scratch the tuxedo and and you’ll find a police uniform,” writes scholar Greg Forster. 

Considering white-dominated police forces' typically unstable relationship with nonwhites, a black Bond would complicate our racialized understanding of Bond and law rather drastically. As recent films like "Crime + Punishment" are exploring the complicated racial dynamics at play for black police officers, it would be irresponsible for the Bond series to not confront a nonwhite Bond's feelings about being a part of an institution that routinely exercise force against people who look like him. 

None of this should be daunting to the people who hold the keys to the Bond franchise. They should see this moment as an opportunity, in between car chases, gunfights and seductions, to explore new dramatic as well as political territory, and even tackle questions of race and institutional power.

That institution is England. 

"The Spy Who Loved Me"

Bond is so representative of Great Britain and all that she stands for that the series that its self-awareness began to mushroom as early as 1973, when Roger Moore slipped into Bond’s shoes in "Live and Let Die." Only a couple films later, he would he ski jump off a mountain and reveal that his parachute was the Union Jack in "The Spy Who Loved Me" (1977). That was a statement, joking yet serious, that Bond was the UK. 

Politically, the history of the UK is a history of whiteness.

What would it feel like to drop someone like Elba or "Attack the Block"'s John Boyega into Bond’s suit in, say, "The Living Daylights," which takes place in Afghanistan? Could he make jokes about sex and England, about other national cuisines or customs like in "Octopussy"? Would that feel natural, or would there be something off and unusual about shoehorning in a black Bond without somehow addressing those racial implications? 

And what about "GoldenEye," and the line “For England, James?” Alec Trevelyan (Sean Bean) asks that question of Bond, bookending the film, wondering if they still believe in what they’re doing. The answer is different both times. At the end, Bond is allowed to be a little skeptical. Could Boyega be skeptical of England’s ultimate goal, the implication that their version of goodness and lawfulness should be the standard for the rest of the developed world? Would we laugh at the very idea of a black Bond agreeing with the sentiments of a character like Alec Trevelyan? In "Casino Royale," M remarks to Bond, “Any thug can kill.” Could an actor like Daniel Kaluuya shrug off that kind of casual designation of the hierarchy of killing? Or would the moment be more pointed, barbed? Could Idris Elba unquestioningly wear a Union Jack that’s shot out of one of his gadgets, or would doubt begin to inform his character? 

Whiteness is also what allowed Bond to come and go from the institution that employs him. Bond has left MI6 or has gone rogue a number of times over the decades, only to be welcomed back. Only someone who was white who could be part of a white dominated institution, doubt it, leave it, and return without much fuss. 

Of all the iterations of the Bond franchise, it's Craig’s films that pave the way for a non-white bond. They have a different understanding of Bond altogether, beyond a broad “grittiness.” Daniel Craig's Bond is alienated. 

"Casino Royale"

Jokes can be made about the one dimensionality of Bond’s character throughout most of the series, but "GoldenEye" nodded to unlocking his psychology and how he felt about the destruction he’s left in his wake. Trevelyan sneers, “I might as well ask you for the vodka martinis that have silenced the screams of all the men you've killed ... or if you find forgiveness in the arms of all those willing women, for all the dead ones you failed to protect.” The Craig Bond films go further, suggesting that you have to be a bit dead inside in the first place to work for an institution like Bond's employer. In "Casino Royale," Vesper Lynd (Eva Green) asks, “You can switch off so easily, can't you? It doesn't bother you? Killing those people?” Bond retorts, “Well, I wouldn’t be very good at my job if it did.” There is unsureness on his face  after he says this. Through Craig, we understand how Bond became a shell. 

If the Craig films are implicitly arguing that Bond has not, as we have assumed, been able to assimilate into the role of a Double-O agent, working for Her Majesty’s Secret Service, what if that extended into a metaphor about how people of color struggle with assimilation on a broader level? 

A non-white Bond could be portrayed as someone who's wearing a white mask in order to survive. That's an intriguing and potentially powerful step beyond the already considerable alienation that Craig brought to the part. 

The most wonderful thing about the Bond franchise is its malleability. The character has been played by many actors. The films constantly morph to fit within whatever genre or style is popular at the moment. And has become increasingly intricate as a character. 

It would be a level up for Bond to confront what it actually means to be Other, not just alienated or ambivalent. 

A non-white Bond could articulate a struggle to assimilate into a broader national or governmental politic, and better establish the push and pull of the character's own agency, and his often unknowing role as a pawn. The unsureness that Bond already exudes, via Craig, would be grounded in psychological and concrete reality. Subtext would become text, but in an electrifying way. A nonwhite actor would make a lot of things official, and turn Bond into something besides a spectre of the past.

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