#(due to concerns over race and class solidarity)

[mercutiotakethewheel]

everytime i rewatch black sails, i find myself like vane more and more ngl. the first season really tries hard to trick you into thinking he’s just unnecessarily, banally, and uncompellingly an asshole (in the overwhelmingly compelling asshole show), whose one redeeming feature is that he’s kinda pathetic too. but geez s2 really nails home everytime that hes the best and the coolest and the most honest (maybe even most compassionate) of the mcs up until this point, barring anne of course. and on top of that i actually kind of think he has the best pre-s3 speeches. like obvs s4 flint is yknow s4 flint. and s3 max is so insane i actually cant handle it. but oh my god charles vane’s letter and his fuck your legitimacy eleanor speech and his hanging speech are so good. and fuck what i said earlier isnt even true. bc his s1 speech while hes looking in the eyes of the little boy he used to be is actually like the bestest. like fuck ok. charles vane is the best actually. #1 anarchist boy. 10/10 would want him in my commune. hed point blank refuse to help with the dishes tho so 😬.

[fairestwriting]

title: half doomed and semi-sweet

word count: 5308

summary: Idia's bad luck comes back to haunt him again, being dragged into physically showing up to class and being assigned a group project involving a student from a different year, courtesy of Mr. Trein. His... "best friend", Kero Tricarenia, sees his distress in the situation, and swoops in to save him, though that might be what actually ends him instead of the project...

commissioned by @chibichibisha  , available on ao3 here ! tysm for the commission, i hope you like it! you have no idea how excited i was to write kero asjkdfsf-

my guidelines for commissions are here, in case anyone else is interested !

Of course that in the day Idia is made to actually show up to class, something like this happens.

The fact that it’s Trein’s class just makes it somehow worse. Of course, it’s not all bad, he gets to see Lucius napping on the teacher’s desk—! ...but, he also gets to be pestered by Cater the second he’s walking in, and then the second he’s walking out, plus, just the presence of all these people… Idia shudders just thinking about it.

He pulls his hoodie closer to his face, trying to shield it in vain. He just wanted to go back to his room. Trein was the worst for making him actually show up. He’d been attending classes through the tablet for so long, what was the issue with today specifically? Why couldn’t he just do it the way he always does? He just doesn’t get it—

“Before class is dismissed,” Trein starts in that voice of his, commanding yet with a hint of a drawl that makes Idia want to delve into eternal slumber. “I have an announcement to make. Due to recent events, the headmaster has assigned the teachers the task of building… teamwork, and solidarity, between students, even the ones in different years, and I’ve been chosen to apply that, so your monthly History assignment will work somewhat differently this time.”

Great. Awesome. These were his favorite words in the whole world. As if today couldn’t get any worse.

“I’ll need you to gather a pair or trio with students from different years, to build a mockup representing a historical event of your choosing. You’re supposed to inform me of your groups until tomorrow's class, and the deadline will be held two weeks from now, on February 13th. You’ll be presenting your works the day after.”

Idia feels the clammy hands of dread on both his ankles, threatening to pull him under. Of course this would get worse somehow. He exhales a deep sigh, burying his face on his hands… he’d have to email Mr. Trein about doing the assignment by himself later. And it’d be such an unpleasant conversation, with how he insisted on having students follow all these traditional learning methods.

Really, why the hell were they getting group projects now, out of all things? They had one foot out of school, basically. Fourth year barely had any classes, most of the students’ times filled up with internships and research so what did they get out of trying to “develop teamwork skills” within their students? None of these people would be talking to each other by the time they graduate, anyways… they were wasting resources to max out a stat that didn’t matter.

He tugs the hood of his jacket over his face again as he walks out of the classroom, sneaking outside like he’s avoiding to get scolded — The blue glow of his hair insisting on sticking out, Idia feels his heart race and squeeze while he makes his way across the crowded hallways. He swears he hears Cater’s voice calling for him as he leaves, too… but maybe he’s just making it up, because of how especially cursed he feels today.

What an awful morning, really. At least locking himself up with that MMO he’s gotten hooked on recently would feel even more cathartic.

After the nerve-wracking walk, Trein’s words poking at him like imps with their tridents — Him trying to figure out how to convince that teacher to let him do everything by himself, no presentation included, without having to actually face the guy — Idia finally gets back to his dorm. Finally.

He releases a breath he didn’t know he was holding — Just like in the fanfics, geez — when he steps into the lounge, though even the mostly vacant blue and white space felt a little oppressive now. Sure, he cared about his dormmates, they were fine people, but they were still people, and what he really needed now, was…

“IDIA!”

...within one second of the click of his door being unlocked, Idia is reminded once again that he never will know peace.

“K-Kero!” He yelps, suddenly overwhelmed by a hug, arms around his entire body squeezing him tight, maybe too tight— It’s a second before he remembers this is in fact supposed to be his room. “W-Wait, what are you doing here? That’s my room!”

Unleashed from the mighty grip, red eyes meet Idia’s as Kero’s head tilts, a smile on his face flashing his sharp teeth.

“I know that! I was looking for you.” He just announces, following right behind with that skip on his step as Idia enters and locks the door behind them. He hadn’t seen Kero in… how long, now? It’d been a while, that much he knew. Idia had been busy lately, with… “You finished that tournament yesterday night, right? How did you do? I got you that cake from the cafeteria you like to celebrate!” His questions are rapid-fire, tail wagging as he rushes towards Idia’s unmade bed to pick up the little packaged treat he’d gotten.

“You don’t even know how it went yet, but you’re already getting your hopes up.” Idia grumbles, but the second the package is placed on his hands, he does gracefully accept it. “Well, my team did win, so…”

“Yes! I knew you would!” Kero cheers, grinning again as he sits on his bed. He’s… so full of energy it’s hard to watch, Idia would say.

But, well, that would kind of be a huge lie.

“Yeah, thanks for leaving me be for a bit so I could practice.” He mutters, moving to sit on his desk chair. The package makes a crinkling plastic noise while he messes with it, opening it to reveal a slice of strawberry shortcake — That has him glancing at Kero for a second, a fuzzy feeling taking over.

...because that’s just what his emotions do now.

It was stupid, Idia’s sighing tiredly just thinking about it — When it started was beyond him, but for some reason or another, something keeps pulling him towards Kero. It’s not exactly a big deal, some sort of soul-binding string of fate or something like that, but even when he’s not there physically, Kero lingers, flashes of sharp teeth and boisterous laughing in Idia’s mind. It’s not a big deal! But it’s like Kero had hanged around him so much he left a mark.

And Idia doesn’t really hate that. He stares at the cake in his hands, and thinks of Kero smiling as he got it for him, without any sort of request, just because he saw the cake and remembered that he liked it, and his mind stresses just how much he doesn’t hate that.

(...well, it was a sort of doomed thing, they would never move on from this strange affectionate friendship, because Idia isn’t going to… tell Kero he’s crushing on him, or anything like that. That’d just screw everything up. And what he has now isn’t actually bad at all. Really, it’s fine if Kero never understands. It’s fine. )

“Are you… good, though? Do you need anything?” Kero asks, snapping him out of the messy daydreams with another good natured tilt of his head — He’s a dog alright. “You… just look kinda gloomy and stuff.”

Idia snickers, shaking his head. “Yeah, like I ever look different.” He mumbles, and takes a bite of cake. It’s sweet, he thinks, making a surprised noise as he wonders when the last time he had it was… he licks some whipped cream off his fingers. “Mm, this time is different though. Something with a group project from Mr. Trein… tires me out just to think about it.” He sighs. But Kero’s ears perk up, pointing straight upwards.

“Oh! That, yeah. He told 2-D about it today too.”

“Yeah. This sucks. I’m just gonna… find a way to work by myself.” Idia shakes his head, sinking on his chair a little further. He bites into the cake again. “You think Mr. Trein knows how to read emails?” He snickers, but the thought of having to meet him face-to-face makes his skin crawl. “...ugh, I d-don’t wanna have to talk to him during office hours…”

Kero hums in slightly concerned acknowledgement, plopping down on his bed with attentive eyes. Idia finds himself in a weird wondering of how it felt like to sit down when you were a beastman. Did it hurt his tail or something? It’s wagging against the mattress, though. His ears point to opposite sides while he looks up vaguely. Idia muses about what he might be thinking about.

“Well, you could always do it with me! They said to get one of your underclassmen, right.” Kero suggests, and… Idia swears he sees his tail wag a little harder, but that could very well just be a trick of the light. “I can do the presentation too, and I’m good with building things, so…” He grins. “Plus, you won’t have to… talk to Mr. Trein.”

Idia hums through a mouthful of cake. Well, doing the project with Kero would certainly be better than with someone he didn’t know. However, it’s…

His eyes linger on Kero’s expectant form on his bed, smiling so cheerfully. He’s very aware of the couple feet of distance between them right now, and even like this, Kero’s presence does things to his heart… that’s bad, so bad, he thinks, it’s hard to ignore how his heartbeat is just a tad faster now, summed with this different flavor of nervousness that just seemed to simmer in his blood now… yeah, it’s no good.

“I m-mean, I guess I wouldn’t mind that.” Is what he stutters out. Kero beams.

Stupid cute Kero. This isn’t helping Idia convince himself none of this is a big deal.

“Yeah! If you’re doin’ a project you might as well do it with your best friend, right?” He says. Here he is again with the best friend talk… oh, if only he knew. “We can have fun with it too. Actually, I can have fun with everything as long as I’m with you, heh.”

Idia feels heat creeping up his neck. Stupid cute Kero! “Ugh, you d-don’t gotta be embarrassing about it.” He mumbles, eyes averted. The cake finished with one last bite, Idia places the empty package on his desk, licking leftover cream off his fingers again. “We’re just putting some annoying mockup together. It’s not a big deal. If we add some simple machines to it to make it cooler it’ll already be higher-res than everyone else’s, it’s just an easy A. Everyone else’s just gonna use magic, I bet.”

“Yeah, obviously. I mean it doesn’t have to be annoying, though.” Kero comments. “We’ve gotta choose a historical event, right? Do you have any ideas?”

“Uhhh. The industrial revolution of the Isle of Lamentation? That’s… pretty much all I paid attention to this year, anyways.” He shrugs. Trein’s classes were boring, naturally. And they were so early in the morning, too… his tablet may have been there most of the time, but Idia himself was passed out on his bed.

“I think that works! We’ll have to make a bunch of stuff for the machines. But that’ll be fun.”

Idia hums. He’s thinking about these machines, actually, the miniature factories they could put together. The blueprints begin to write themselves up rather quickly. “We’d blow their little minds if we just had some… smoke coming out of the chimneys, some gears spinning around. Fuhihi, our mockup might be the best.” With his head in the clouds — Or the laboratory, rather — he finds himself grinning, waving a finger in the air. “Hey, Kero, what do you th… huh?”

And Kero isn’t on his bed anymore. He’s right there, in front of him.

Before Idia can say anything about this (Kero right in front of him, leaning in closer, he feels so cornered, his heart might stop!) Kero leans in even further, a big hand coming up to his face and (He’s going to die, definitely, he’ll die right here.) and he wipes off some whipped cream from near Idia’s lips.

“You had some on your face! Heheh.” He chuckles, licking it off his thumb. Idia feels like his blood pressure has just plummeted, or… or maybe it just did the opposite, how is he supposed to tell? His face feels so hot there’s no way his brain is getting the proper oxygen at all, he can barely think—!

“G-Give me a warning before you do something like this!” Idia wheezes, high pitched like a squeaky toy, and Kero just laughs again, grinning with this hint of mischief. “I didn’t even see you move!”

“Yeah, ‘cause you were distracted? I’m happy you’re excited about the project, though. I think it’s cute.” He says outright, and Idia… Idia just puts his hands on his face, averting his eyes with intent. Why does Kero have to be... so... much? “C’mon, you can sit with me on the bed. We can talk better like this.” A strong hand grabs at his wrist, easily looping around it as he pulls at Idia, making him squeak again as he’s dragged towards the bed.

“This doesn’t even make any sense!” Idia complains, but Kero tugs him towards the bed with no effort at all, and he just accepts his fate, huffing like it’d ease the warmth crawling all over his face. “Ugh, a-anyway, I was talking about the factories we’d put on the mockup… I thought of having some machines with exposed insides, with the spinning gears would be good, and conveyor belts that function…”

As he launches into explanation, Kero nods, making this unbreakable eye contact. Idia has to stop and take a deep breath every couple minutes, the situation somehow overwhelming. It feels like his condition just got a little worse every day, huh.

(Well, it’s fine. He could just avoid him if things got bad. Though… he doesn’t like thinking about this, recalling the week before the game tournament even. It’s kind of stupid, if he’s just making Idia nervous why does he have this need to keep him around? As expected, emotions make little to no sense...)

“...so, basically that’s what I thought.” Idia ends the explanation. Kero still has his attentive look on his face, almost like it froze there. “Did you pay attention?”

“Nah. I was just looking at you while you talked, ‘cause you looked so pretty.” Kero leans in with a smirk (Can he please stop trying to kill Idia, he’s just gotten down to a normal-ish heart rate again!) that then turns into one of his usual friendly smiles. “Kidding! I did, yeah. Do you wanna start it tomorrow?”

“You…! Uh, um, I don’t know. I wanna play my new game.” He stumbles with speaking, but it still comes out. At least. “We could probably finish that in, what, two days at most? If you don’t mind going to the lab late at night.”

“Roger that. For Idia, I’ll go to the ends of Twisted Wonderland!” He declares, fist thumping against his chest with a proud grin. “I’ll get us your snacks too. Can’t have you going hungry. But now I gotta go to track.”

Idia blinks. Already? He remembers that club meetings do in fact exist. He’d been skipping on his lately so he ended up kind of… forgetting them. Seeing Kero go, though, it’s…

“R-Right, I hope you, uh… enjoy yourself.” He stutters. Then he wants to hit himself on the face, really, what kind of stupid farewell was that? Just say bye and go back to your games, idiot. Luckily, Kero doesn’t seem to mind it.

“Yeah, yeah, I will!” He chimes, getting up from the bed — Leaning down a little, he puts a hand over Idia’s flaming hair, ruffling it to his surprise. “I’ll see you, okay? Literally. I’m coming over again later, ‘cause after all this time I’m not leaving my best friend alone!”

Idia feels frozen in place while Kero pets him, eyes zeroed in on that grin — Before he leaves, and he exhales. Again. That breath he didn’t know he had been holding.

He doesn’t play the game yet. Instead, he lays face down on the bed and screams into the pillow, whatever feelings had been simmering while Kero was around just exploding the second he leaves. Great Seven, he was so stupid. Both of them, actually.

Kero was stupid for not seeing how much this crush was clearly consuming him, and Idia… Idia was stupid for getting involved in any of this at all, in so many ways and for so many reasons, but he just can’t bring himself to stop now.

He swears it’s not that big of a deal. But it’s a lie, obviously. Clearly.

. . .

Once he’s back into his room after practice, Kero shuts his door behind him, and he laughs.

He feels the strain on his body from the running, sure, but every bit of it is somehow also filled with so much energy — With his hands on his face like how Idia does when he’s shy, he grins so much his cheeks hurt with the pulling. His heart won’t stop racing.

Who let him be so adorable!

He knew they’d end up doing this project together, of course. When Trein mentioned it’d involve students from different years, Idia was the first person Kero thought of! But the reality still makes him so giddy. To think he’d have a chance to do a project with him! He’s really been too lucky these days. Trein was… something else, to him, but with something like this, he might be willing to overlook the fact that the guy was absolutely terrifying.

Well, what matters is that he gets some more time with Idia — Even better, they’d be alone together! — The tournament week sucked, straight up. Kero ran some errands for him but it just wasn’t the same! Though he didn’t mind this sort of caretaking either, Idia barely took breaks. He didn’t even tell him much about the game he was playing, actually. Kero was basically crawling up the walls with how bored he’d gotten.

But that’s irrelevant now.

Still grinning and laughing to himself with all that burst of energy running through his skin, Kero hops over to his desk — With how he was, Idia would probably have some blueprints for the machines ready soon, but this was a nice chance to impress. He gathers some parts and tools, and gets to work.

...work that takes longer to complete than it usually does for him, but as expected, through the following days, Idia texts him vague guidelines on what their mockup should be like, ideas and half-baked blueprints that they discuss both through the phone and when he shows up at Idia’s place, and when the fated day of getting together at Ignihyde’s laboratory arrives, he has all those trinkets on his desk. He’s so ready.

ill see you there at 2, Idia’s text reads, bring the stuff i told u to make

Yes, yes, right away! Kero smiles bright as he gathers the miniature machines into a shoe box he’d gotten for them. He can feel his tail wag with excitement even as he carries it through the gloomy late-night corridors.

The door opened with a bang — Oops, he definitely handled it too roughly — Kero chimes as soon as he sets foot into the lab. “Idia!” He calls when he arrives. “I’m here!”

“Eek!” Idia, who was already leaned over the table, spreading scratchy blueprints and machine parts on it, is startled in a jolt. “D-Don’t sneak up on me like this! Geez…”

“Heheh, sorry, sorry.” Kero laughs, setting the box near the other items on the table, which Idia eagerly turns to inspect, complaints or not. Well, if that was the case, he’d inspect Idia for a bit too. He was looking unusual today, after all! Without that heavy jacket of his, wearing his lab wear and striped shirt. Kero’s heart leaps. “You’re looking good today, huh! ‘s unusual to see you looking like this, like… one of these R cards from your gacha games, or something.”

Kero feels proud of himself for the comment — Hey, Idia, look at me, I pay attention to your rambling! But Idia makes an offended noise instead.

“T...The R cards are the common ones, stupid.” He scoffs, giving him a narrow eyed look, but there’s still a soft flush of pink over his cheeks. “Ugh, I can’t believe I let you spend time with me when you don’t know that.”

Well. Kero tried, all he can do is laugh about it. At least he didn’t miss the compliment entirely! “Ehh, you do it ‘cause we’re best friends and you love me!” He says. “C’mon, we should get started on this already.”

“...y-yeah, yeah, whatever.” Idia shakes his head, but when he turns his face towards the table to look at their work in progress, there’s a slight smile on his blue lips that Kero couldn’t possibly miss. “Did you make the conveyor belts? I think I forgot to send you anything on these, couldn’t decide what material would be better for them…”

Moments like these are just so… so everything. Kero can’t find the words to describe how happy he is to be around Idia and be able to say things like that! Though, he feels it’s not exactly enough… even if all of this does feel nice, and he’s grateful for it.

(Well, he has a crush on Idia, that much he knows, so he guesses that’s something to be expected, in a way? He’s heard his classmates talking about the being unable to get enough related to someone so it was just part of it, probably. What they have now is good, straight out of his dreams even! Just… feelings are weird, aren’t they? He keeps wanting more, though he doesn’t know exactly what would sate this hunger.)

“Oh, I did rubber on the top and some of that light metal for the parts. I thought it’d be better if we don’t make it too heavy!” Kero replies, digging around for his own lab gear he’d brought. They might have to do some welding today, so it was always good to be careful.

(Plus, they got to match outftits!)

Idia nods, focused gaze on a miniature engine. “Ohh… huh. That’s good, actually. I think this might be easier than I thought.” He mutters. “We have all the parts to build the interior of the factory… I guess we could put that together tonight, and tomorrow we can get the rest? For the outside, I guess. If we just focus on the factory instead of the, uh, social repercussions or something like that, Trein might deduct points.”

He feels his ears deflate just a little at the teacher’s mention. “Tell me about it.” Idia passes him the engine, a silent command for him to get to work linking it with the other right parts. “Do you want me to get the stuff for the scenery from the store?”

“Yeah, sure. Would be helpful.”

Kero smiles at him, and for a single silent moment they’re putting the machine parts together. Engines and gears and a seemingly endless stretch of conveyor belts, wires and such hidden on the inferior part of the styrofoam slab the mockup was being built on.

“...hey, is that the battery?”

“Yup! Just gotta charge with magic whenever you wanna see it working.”

Idia turns it around on his hands, looking at it from every angle, making a humming noise to himself…

Huh, Kero is suddenly very aware that they’re all alone in that laboratory.

Maybe it’s because of how Idia looks at the small object, or how he touches it with this utmost care one wouldn’t think he has. It’s weirdly easy for other people to assume Idia was lazy, Kero recalls, and it was something he never really understood. He was such a diligent person, actually, but people couldn’t see it right because he didn’t put effort into things people commonly worked hard in. That makes him feel sort of bitter inside, he thinks, but also proud in a way.

He’s the only one who knows Idia this closely, it comes into Kero’s mind, and a smile sprawls across his face.

“...w-what? Why are you looking at me like that?” Of course, Idia notices. The pinkish glow on his face before turns into something more like strawberry red, and… agh, what the hell, Kero’s smile gets bigger.

“It’s ‘cause you’re so cute, of course!” He says without missing a beat. How many times has he called Idia cute now? Far too many to count. But he can’t stop, and it never feels like enough to show just how god damn adorable Idia was to him. It was such a crazy feeling, really.

“Gh… and you’re e-embarrassing, as always.” Idia responds as he averts his eyes. “We’ve gotta finish this as soon as possible, y’know, now’s not the time for...t-this.”

“What do you mean with this?” Kero asks amidst a laugh. Idia looks at him with this cranky sort of expression and his heart feels like it’s about to take off and fly, wow. “You asked me a question and I answered it!”

“Yeah, you answered it while being a jerk.” Idia mumbles, getting back to unscrewing something. Kero doesn’t get what he mean with it exactly but, well, he always says stuff like this.

“I mean it, though! I think you’re really cute.” He says, it’s so easy to say things like that, they end up just coming out on their own, even when he’s trying to put his brain cells back into work like Idia wants him to. “I tell you that all the time! D’you not think you’re cute?”

Idia glances at him with wide eyes. “I...n-no? What in the Lord of the Underworld makes you think I’m c-cute?” He asks, voice almost an octave higher.

Something about this strucks Kero differently. Is that a rhetorical question? It doesn’t matter. He wants to answer.

“Well, do you want me to tell you?” He suggests, and his heart is racing. It takes just a little bit of effort to ask something like this, it’s not quite having to hype himself up for it, but… well. What’s with this mood anyways? Idia’s hands are on his flushed cheeks, gloved fingers ready to cover up his eyes, like he usually does when he’s flustered — And here’s something to add to the list already, wow.

“I-I, um.”

“If you don’t say no I’m gonna tell you.” He looks straight into Idia’s eyes… such a nice shade of yellow, an amber-gold. Kero doesn’t always mean to tease, but now he does. He has a strong impulse to do it, a determination like he’s rushing towards the finish line in track — What sort of face would Idia show him if he told him everything? “Three, two, one…you lost your chance to say no! I’m gonna tell you.”

Idia squeaks like he got jumpscared, but he doesn’t object to any of it. Kero’s excited — He takes a step closer, and takes it upon himself to touch Idia’s hair again, because he absolutely couldn’t get enough of how it didn’t burn him.

“First of all, I know you hate it since it sticks out so much, but your hair is really cute.” He says, tucking a lock of hair behind Idia’s ear, feeling him shrink and tense under the light touch — Would he do that if Kero touched him more? If he wrapped his arms around Idia’s waist and held him close? “It’s so bright and pretty, and the bangs look so nice on you, they’re kinda messy and long but in a way that’s adorable.”

Indulging himself a little further, he lets his hand ghost over Idia’s bangs, brushing them to the side and watching them fall back into place. Idia’s face is fully red now. The hair doesn’t feel like much to the touch since it’s fire, actually, but, something about it…

“Second! You have a cute smile!” Kero chimes. He’s supposed to retract his hand now, but — It just stays on Idia’s cheek. And he finds that he really doesn’t want to take it off there. “When you talk about the things you like, and you get all excited about them and start grinning… it’s really cute, actually. I like it when I see you all full of energy.”

Idia’s eyes dart around. Are his hands shaking? Kero eyes at them briefly, before taking one into his — Unable to stop himself again — and the latex of his glove meets Idia’s, watched by wide amber eyes as he laces their fingers together. Shaking, indeed, but he was able to steady them.

“Third… related to that, how your hands move when you’re rambling. I stare at them a lot. That’s how much I love to see you all excited about stuff.”

His voice had fallen softer. The coldness of the laboratory seems to just fade. Kero’s heart feels…

“Fourth...” He starts, but no words come to him. He just stares at Idia’s face, his eyes, the blue tint of his lips. There’s more to say, obviously, but he can’t think of it, and he— “...can I kiss you?”

Somehow there’s no recoil time, no surprised noise on Idia’s part, and though he loves his shyness and how it shows through, he finds that he loves it even more when he’s expecting something like this, when he wants it. The shaky, uncertain nod is all he needs to give a name to that hunger he’d been feeling.

Ah, he was in love, everything be damned.

Kero doesn’t hesitate. One hand on his cheek and the other holding his, his lips meet Idia’s, his heart now soaring completely. If he looked back on it now he’d probably find it sort of awkward, Idia’s lips are chapped and the sharp teeth felt strange against each other, but none of this matters when he feels so euphoric, when Idia just melts into his kiss, eyes fluttering shut.

He doesn’t know how long it lasts. The brief pauses to breathe aren’t enough to actually do so, but neither of them seem to mind. The held hands unlace, Idia’s coming up to Kero’s neck to urge him closer, Kero’s on Idia’s waist like he’s dreamed.

When they pull away, both breathless, Kero is grinning, and Idia looks dazed, his eyes glossy, at least for a moment before he seems to realize what they’ve just done.

“O-Oh my...we.” He squeaks, freezing in Kero’s embrace. “W-We, we just…”

“Hey, it’s cool!” Kero assures, and he pulls him a bit closer, now causing a small shriek. “I love you, you know.”

“Y-You…” Idia stutters. How long would it be until he was able to string sentences together again? Kero doesn’t have an exact estimate, but, well, this was fine too. Especially as his tension drops, and he hides his warm face on Kero’s shoulder. “...you’re the worst? You’re so embarrassing I could die.”

“That’s a quick recovery, huh.”

“S-Shut up!” Idia whines, but he stays. He stays, and Kero holds him so close that his happiness feels like it’s overflowing, and the cravings from before are just slowly satisfied. “I… I, um.”

“Tell me.” A hand on the side of Idia’s face, he pulls his face upwards, making him look into his eyes again — Would he ever get enough of this, though? They’re so close. “Do you love me too, Idia?”

Idia hesitates, an embarrassed noise leaving him.

“I… I do.” He mutters — And he smiles. “You idiot.”

Kero smiles, his feelings actually overflowing in how he hugs Idia even tighter, and he laughs.

The project could be finished tomorrow, anyways.

[pumpacti0n]

guide for attempting to transform ableist/oppressive language

I’ve been doing my best to avoid using language that unintentionally suggests that certain abilities are normal and universal for all people -- this language can mistakenly make people’s presence feel isolated or unacknowledged, which isn’t my intention.

I believe it is important for all people to feel as if their abilities aren’t hinderances to their personhood, only features unique to their experience. to this end I'll be doing my best to try to catch when I use language that normalizes ableism and I encourage you to do the same if you have the same concerns, not out of a sense of political correctness, but out of respect for a community of people who have historically been pushed aside as lesser individuals unworthy of our time, love and consideration.

this is not a comprehensive list. I am still unlearning my ableist habits and may still make errors, despite my best intentions. Feel free to add on or provide even more alternatives. This list is a living document.

“I stand for/with xyz.” ...can be replaced with: “I believe in/am in solidarity with xyz.”

why?

not everyone is able to “stand”. colloquially, people might be able to understand what you mean when you say this, as it often doesn’t entail actually “standing”, but it might come off as insensitive for people who can’t relate to this action but would still otherwise align with an idea or action

“I saw/see/heard/hear you/xyz” ...can be replaced with: “I understand you/xyz”

why?

this one also might be tricky. it has to do with the habit of making “hearing” and “seeing” analogous to understanding some thing or someone.

not everyone has the same ability to processes audio and visual phenomena, but they may still understand information if it is presented in another format, such as sign language or dictation or kinetics.

there are nearly infinite ways to “understand” information, but less ways to “hear” or “see” it, specifically. unless it has to do with the literal act of hearing or seeing something, and if it makes sense to substitute with “understanding”, I will avoid using it for this purpose.

[dilligence in omitting words that stigmatize people experiencing chronic mental disorders]

why?

there is no shortage of phrases used to describe people who act outside of the expected behaviors of “normal” society -- and this includes people with various mental faculties. most of the connotations for these words are overwhelmingly negative.

given how difficult it can be for people who have any number of such conditions to access certain spaces and care, the continued use of these words have historically been used to separate people into less advantaged social classes from the rest of their communities, sometimes leading to unavoidably tragic ends.

rather than stigmatize people based off these conditions, we can be more specific about the  actions they’re performing or how they make us feel without employing language that has been used as a justification to harm, torture and kill others.

instead of suggesting that someone is “crazy” (for a very mild example), we can focus on what actions they’re doing and what impact they  have without making assumptions about their mental state, usually with limited information and no close relationship with the individual.

we might ask: is what they are doing actually harmful to me or anyone else? is it reasonable to ignore them, if we can? what information about them do we have access to? do they need help? can I, or are there any others that could help them? what would de-escalate the situation?

[diligence in omitting any slurs or insults regarding intelligence]

why?

“intelligence” as defined by scientists, the state, private organizations and institutions under capitalism is not exempt from influence. how we come to understand and acknowledge the intelligence of other beings is absolutely affected by politics and immoral hierarchies of race, gender, skin tone, anatomical features, physical and mental ability and species. given this history, to insult someone based of their assumed relationships to knowledge often aren’t fair criticisms to lobby against someone.

what we may really mean when we call someone any of these insults directed at their intelligence, is instead that they are bigots, ignorant, inconsistent, boring, selfish, liars, rude, violent, racist, ableist, transphobic, hateful, obnoxious, unwelcome, or simply awkward. 

we must take care not to associate “low intelligence” with any or all of these qualities, even accidentally. people with mental disabilities might share with you their experiences of having their disabilities used as leverage against them in their social relationships, or used as a way to deny the aid they need. we should judge people’s actions that they choose to perform, not attack qualities about themselves that they have no control over.

[omitting speciesist language]

why?

oddly, this might be the more controversial point, given that non-human animals are often omitted from discourse about liberation and respect for marginalized individuals, which is precisely the point. humans have consistently not taken the lives of non-human animals seriously, and it has resulted in mass extinctions that threaten our ecosystem in irreversible ways, due in part to speciesism and anthropocentrism, which shows up in the language we use daily.

when we use language that suggests that non-human animals are inherently inferior, evil, unimportant, and lesser-than their human counterparts, it directly encourages animal abuse and the bigoted belief that animals are here specifically for human use as products to buy and sell under capitalism, rather than being unique individuals with their own values, bodies and communities worthy of respect and admiration, and contributors to the environment we all share.

this language is even common among people along the “left” end of the assumed political spectrum, who might call cops “pigs”, compare snitches to “rats”, cowards to “chickens” and depict their enemies as being similar to infestations of roaches, locusts, or other such insects and “pests”.

this is concerning. these words function to dehumanize the targets of their insults, transforming them into “beasts”, therefore making their lives forfeit, and justifying any violence directed at them. it also implies that the problems that they cause are not of human origin, placing the blame of failing systems and relationships on “less human” elements, as if non-humans are the ones who are responsible for the atrocities that other humans created.

[magaden]

Why Are Progressives So Illiberal?

By Victor Davis Hanson January 31, 2021

Progressives adopted identity politics and rejected class considerations because solidarity with elite minorities excuses them from concern for, or experience with, the middle classes of all races.

One common theme in the abject madness and tragedies of the past 12 months is that progressive ideology now permeates almost all of our major institutions—even as the majority of Americans resist the leftist agenda. Its reach resembles the manner in which the pre-Renaissance church had absorbed the economic, cultural, social, artistic, and political life of Europe, or perhaps how Islamic doctrine was the foundation for all public and private life under the Ottoman Sultanate—or even how all Russian institutions of the 1930s exuded tenets of Soviet Marxism. 

Pan-progressivism

To be a Silicon Valley executive, a prominent Wall Street player, the head of a prestigious publishing house, a university president, a network or PBS anchor, a major Hollywood actress, a retired general or admiral on a corporate board, or a NBA superstar requires either progressive fides or careful suppression of all political affinities.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, 98 percent of Big Tech political donations went to Democrats in 2020. Censorship and deplatforming on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media companies is decidedly one-way. When Mark Zuckerberg and others in Silicon Valley donate $500 million to help officials “get out the vote” in particular precincts, it is not to help candidates of both parties.

Google calibrates the order of its search results with a progressive, not a conservative, bent. Grandees from the Clinton or Obama Administration find sinecures in Silicon Valley, not Republicans or conservatives.

The $4-5 trillion market-capitalized Big Tech cartels, run by self-described progressives, aimed to extinguish conservative brands like Parler. Ironically, they now apply ideological force multipliers to the very strategies and tactics of 19th-century robber-baron trusts and monopolies. Poor Jack Dorsey has never been able to explain why Twitter deplatforms and cancels conservatives for the same supposed uncouthness that leftists routinely employ.

Silicon Valley apparently does not believe in either the letter or the spirit of the First Amendment. It exercises a monopoly over the public airwaves, and resists regulations and antitrust legislation of the sort that liberals once championed to break up trusts in the late 19th and early 20th century. As payback, it assumes that Democrats don’t see Big Tech in the same manner that they claim to see Big Pharma in their rants against it.

Wall Street donated markedly in favor of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden in their respective presidential races. Whereas conservative administrations and congressional majorities are seen as natural supporters of free-market capitalism, their Democratic opponents, not long ago, were not—and thus drew special investor attention and support from Wall Street realists.

The insurrectionist GameStop stock debacle revealed how “liberals” on Wall Street reacted when a less connected group of investors sought to do what Wall Street grandees routinely do to others: ambush and swarm a vulnerable company’s stock in unison either to buy or sell it en masse and thus to profit from predictable, artificially huge fluctuations in the price.

When small investors at Reddit drove the pedestrian GameStop price up to well over a hundred times its worth, forcing big Wall Street investment companies to lose billions of dollars, progressives on Wall Street and the business media cried foul. They compared the Reddit buyers to the mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6.

One subtext was: Why would nobodies dare question the mega-profit making monopolies of the Wall Street establishments? The point that neither the Reddit day-traders nor the hedge-fund connivers were necessarily healthy for investment was completely lost.

Surveys of “diverse” university faculty show overwhelming left-wing support, reified by asymmetrical contributions of 95-1 to Democratic candidates. The dream of Martin Luther King, Jr. to make race incidental to our characters no longer exists on campuses. Appearance is now essential. More ironic, class considerations are mostly ignored in favor of identity politics. “Equity” applies to race not class. The general education curricula is one-sided and mostly focused on deductive -studies courses, and in particular race/class/gender zealotry that is anti-Enlightenment in the sense that predetermined conclusions are established and selected evidence is assembled to prove them.

We are also currently witnessing the greatest assault on free speech and expression, and due process, in the last 70 years. And the challenges to the First and Fifth Amendments are centered on college campuses, where non-progressive speakers are disinvited, shouted down, and occasionally roughed up for their supposedly reactionary views—and by those who have little fear of punishment.

Students charged with “sexual harassment” or “assault” are routinely denied the right to face their accusers, cross examine witnesses, or bring in counterevidence. They usually find redress for their suspensions or expulsions only in the courts. What was thematic in the Duke Lacrosse fiasco and the University of Virginia sorority rape hoax was the absence of any real individual punishment for those who promulgated the myths.

Indeed in these cases many argued that false allegations in effect were not so important in comparison to bringing attention to supposedly systemic racism and sexism. In Jussie Smollett fashion, what did not happen at least drew attention to what could have happened and thus was valuable. It was as if those who did not commit any actual crime had still committed a thought crime.

Almost all media surveys of the last four years reflect a clear journalistic bias against conservatives in general. Harvard’s liberal Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy famously reported slanted coverage against Trump and his supporters among major television and news outlets at near astronomical rates, in some cases exhibiting over 90 percent negative bias during Trump’s first few months in office. Liberal editors can now be routinely fired or forced to retire from major progressives newspapers if they are not seen as sufficiently woke.

No major journalist or reporter has been reprimanded for promoting the fictional “Russian collusion” hoax—and certainly not in the manner the media has called for punishment, backlisting, and deplatforming for any who championed “stop the steal” protests over the November 2020 elections. The CNN Newsroom put their hands up and chanted “hands up, don’t shoot”—a myth surrounding the Michael Brown Ferguson shooting that was thoroughly refuted. Infamous now is the CNN reporter’s characterization of arsonist flames shooting up in the background of a BLM/Antifa riot as a “largely peaceful” demonstration. BLM, of course, has been nominated for a Nobel “Peace” Prize. After the summer rioting, one could better cite Tacitus’s Calgacus, “Where they make a desert, they call it peace”.

A George W. Bush or Donald Trump press conference was often a free-for-all, blood-in-the-water feeding frenzy. A Barack Obama or Joe Biden version devolves into banalities about pets, fashion, and food. The fusion media credo is why embarrass a progressive government and thus put millions and the planet itself at risk?

Andrew Cuomo’s policies of sending COVID-19 patients into rest homes led to thousands of unnecessary deaths. Still, the media gave him an Emmy award for his self-inflated and bombastic press conferences, many of which were little more than unhinged rants against the Trump Administration. Anthony Fauci’s initial pronouncements about the origins of the COVID-19 virus, its risks and severity, travel bans, masks, herd immunity, vaccination rollout dates—and almost everything about the pandemic—were wildly off. Yet he was canonized by the media due to his wink-and-nod assurances that he was the medical adult in the Trump Administration room.

It would be difficult for a prominently conservative actor or actress to win an Oscar these days, or to produce a major conservative-themed film. Bankable actors/directors/producers like Clint Eastwood or Mel Gibson operate as mavericks, whose films’ huge profits win them some exemption. But they came into prominence and power 30 years ago during a different age. And they will likely have no immediate successors.

Ars gratis doctrinae is the new Hollywood and it will continue until it bottoms out in financial nihilism. When such ideological spasms contort a society, the second-rate emerge most prominently as the loudest accusers of the Salem Witches—as if correct zeal can reboot careers stalled in mediocrity. Hollywood’s mediocre celebrities from Alec Baldwin to Noah Cyrus have sought attention for their careers by voicing sensational racist, homophobic, and misogynist slurs—on the correct assumption their attention-grabbing left-wing fides prevents career cancellation.

Hollywood, we learn, has been selecting some actors on the basis of lighter skin color to accommodate racist Beijing’s demands to distribute widely their films in the enormous Chinese market. Yet note well that Hollywood has recently created racial quotas for particular Oscar categories, even as it reverses its racial obsessions to punish rather than empower people of color on the prompt of Chinese paymasters.

Ditto the political warping in professional sports. Endorsements, media face time, and cultural resonance often hinge on athletes either being woke—or entirely politically somnolent. A few stars may exist as known conservatives, but again they are the rare exceptions. For most athletes, it is wisest to keep mum and either support, condone, or ignore the Black Lives Matter rituals of taking a knee, not standing for the flag, or ritually denouncing conservative politicians. Those who are offended and turn the channel can be replaced by far more new viewers in China, who appreciate such criticism directed at the proper target.

Again, what is common to all the tentacles of this progressive octopus is illiberalism. Of course, progressivism, dating back to late 19th-century advocacy for “updating” the Constitution, always smiled upon authoritarianism. It promoted the “science” of eugenics and forced race-based sterilization, and the messianic idea that enlightened elites can use the increased powers of government to manage better the personal lives of its subjects (enslaved to religious dogma or mired in ignorance), according to supposed pure reason and humanistic intent.

Many progressives professed early admiration for the supposed efficiency of Benito Mussolini’s public works programs spurred on by his Depression-era fascism, and his enlistment of a self-described expert class to implement by fiat what was necessary for “progress.”

Even contemporary progressives have voiced admiration for the communist Chinese ability to override “obstructionists” to create mass transit, high-density urban living, and solar power. Early on in the pandemic Bill Gates defended China’s conduct surrounding the COVID-19 disaster. Suggesting the virus did not originate in a “wet” market was “conspiratorial”; travel bans were “racist” and “xenophobic.” In contrast, had SARS-CoV-2 possibly escaped by accident from a Russian lab, in our hysterias we might have been on the brink of war.

So it is understandable that progressivism can end up as an enemy of the First Amendment and intellectual diversity to bulldoze impediments to needed progress. To save us, sometimes leftists must become advocates of monopolies and cartels, of censorship, or of the militarization of our capital.

The new Left sorts, rewards, and punishes people by their race. And some progressives are the most likely appeasers of a racist and authoritarian Chinese government and advocates of Trotskyizing our past through iconoclasm, erasing, renaming, and cancelling out. San Francisco’s school board recently voted to rename over 40 schools, largely due to the pressure of a few poorly educated teachers who claimed on the basis of half-baked Wikipedia research that icons such as Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Washington were unfit for such recognition.

Absolute Power for Absolute Good

There are various explanations for unprogressive progressivism. None are necessarily mutually exclusive. Much of the latest totalitarianism is simple hula-hoop groupthink, a fad, or even a wise career move. Loud progressivism has become for some professionals, an insurance policy—or perhaps a deterrent high wall to ensure the mob bypasses one for easier prey elsewhere. Were Hunter Biden and his family grifting cartel not loud liberals and connected to Joe Biden, they all might have ended up like Jack Abramoff.

More commonly, progressivism offers the elite, the rich, and the well-connected Medieval penance, a vicarious way to alleviate their transitory guilt over privilege such as a $20,000 ice cream freezer or a carbon-spewing Gulfstream by abstract self-indictment of the very system that they have mastered so well.

Progressives also believe in natural hierarchies. They see themselves as an elite certified by their degrees, their resumes, and their correct ideologies, our version of Platonic Guardians, practitioners of the “noble lie” to do us good. In its condescending modern form, the creed is devoted to expanding the administrative state, and the expert class that runs it, and revolves in and out from its government hierarchies to privileged counterparts in the corporate and academic world.

Progressivism patronizes the poor and champions them at a distance, but despises the middle class, the traditionally hated bourgeoise without the romance of the distant impoverished or the taste and culture of the rich. The venom explains the wide array of epithets that Obama, Clinton, and Biden have so casually employed—clingers, deplorables, irredeemables, dregs, ugly folk, chumps, and so on. “Occupy Wall Street” was prepped by the media as a romance. The Tea Party was derided as Klan-like. The rioters who stormed the Capitol were rightly dubbed lawbreakers; those who besieged and torched a Minneapolis federal courthouse were romanticized or contextualized.

Abstract humanitarian progressives assume that their superior intelligence and training properly should exempt them from the bothersome ramifications of their own ideologies. They promote high taxes and mock material indulgences. But some have made a science out of tax evasion and embrace the tasteful good life and its material attractions. They prefer private schooling and Ivy League education for their offspring, while opposing charter schools for others.

There is no dichotomy in insisting on more race-based admissions and yet calling a dean or provost to help leverage a now tougher admission for one’s gifted daughter. Sometimes the liberal Hollywood celebrity effort to get offspring stamped with the proper university credentials becomes felonious. Walls are retrograde but can be tastefully integrated into a gated estate. They like static class differences and likely resent the middle class for its supposedly grasping effort to become rich—like themselves.

The working classes can always make solar panels, the billionaire John Kerry tells those thousands whom his boss had just thrown out of work by the cancellation of the Keystone XL Pipeline. It is as if the Yale man was back to the old days when the multimillionaire and promoter of higher taxes moved his yacht to avoid sales and excise taxes and lectured JC students, “You study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don’t, you get stuck in Iraq.”

There is no such thing as “dark” money or the pernicious role of cash in warping politics when Michael Bloomberg, George Soros, and Mark Zuckerberg, both through direct donations and through various PACs and foundations—channeled nearly $1 billion to left-wing candidates, activists, and political groups throughout the 2020 campaign year.

In sum, the new tribal progressivism is the career ideology foremost of the wealthy and elite—a truth that many skeptical poor and middle-class minorities are now so often pilloried for pointing out. Progressives have adopted identity politics and rejected class considerations, largely because solidarity with elite minorities of similar tastes and politics excuses them from any concrete concern for, or experience with, the middle classes of all races. The Left finally proved right in its boilerplate warning that the “plutocracy” and the “special interests” run America: “If you can’t beat them, outdo them.”

Self-righteous progressives believe they put up with and suffer on behalf of us—and thus their irrational fury and hate for the irredeemables and conservative minorities springs from being utterly unappreciated by clueless serfs who should properly worship their betters.

https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/31/why-are-progressives-so-illiberal/

[queeranarchism]

On Class and Climate Struggle: Decolonising XR

So XR Scotland just did a surprisingly awesome thing, publishing the statement On Class and Climate Struggle: Decolonising XR. I’m gonna copy paste the whole thing because it is so good that this is happening and to be honest, I would not be at all surprised if someone else at XR tried to make it disappear.

Oct 19th 2019

In the last week, two widely-shared images have summed up deep-rooted problems at the heart of the Extinction Rebellion movement. One, a white man wearing a suit jacket being pulled off the top of a Tube train by people needing to get to work. In Canning Town, a mostly working class area of London that has been hit by years of austerity.

The other, a card and a bunch of flowers sent to police officers by an XR arrestee, thanking them for their ‘professionalism’. Brixton police station, where black men have died in custody.

These scenes have shown nothing new—XR has long been criticised for failing to connect with marginalised communities. But they have shown how urgently XR needs to openly address these issues.

A core message of XR has been ‘we are all in this together’. That climate catastrophe is coming for everyone, whatever class, race or creed, we can all be united by a common cause in the face of a shared threat.

BUT: – People in the Global South are already experiencing floods, drought, famine and unbearable heat that won’t affect the North in same way. – They have been robbed of the resources to be resilient to climate change by the economic system that benefits the richest 1%. – People living in poverty, in both the Global South and North, due to structural injustice (often people of colour and disabled people) are and will be adversely affected in ways the rich are protected from. – Migration caused by impacts of climate and ecological emergency is met by hostile border policies that leave people to drown and keeps them in indefinite detention.

Yes, the crisis will come for everyone. But there are massively unjust ways this is damaging some people more than others. And when we erase that, when we ignore the voices of those on the frontlines and who have the most at stake, when we focus only on ‘our children’ and not the people who are dying now, we risk leaving space for eco-fascism. By refusing to name the causes of both the climate crisis and other social injustices–colonialism and capitalism—XR will continue to alienate the people who are already living at the sharp end of the system that is ultimately killing us all.

In the run-up to the October International Rebellion, members of XR Scotland chose to highlight these issues, and to respond to the concerns of women of colour in our group being dismissed by key figures in XR UK, by creating banners reading ‘DECOLONISE XR’ and ‘CLIMATE STRUGGLE = CLASS STRUGGLE’. Many people, and other groups in XR such as Extinction Rebellion Youth, Global Justice Rebellion and XR Internationalist Solidarity Network, applauded these banners. Others in XR UK questioned this ‘messaging’.

At last week’s roadblock action targeted at the Government Oil and Gas conference, protestors from groups other than XR Scotland began singing the chant ‘police, we love you, we’re doing this for your children too’.

A woman who was with the XR protest started to shout: ‘Say that to Stephen Lawrence and Mark Duggan’s family; say you love the police to the people of Tottenham. Say that to my friends whose lives are ruined by this system. Listen, if the people on that road were all people of colour they would be getting charged at with riot gear. My black and brown friends get stopped and searched EVERY DAY’. Other XR members told her off for raising her voice and talking about something that was ‘unrelated’.

While some Scottish rebels went around asking people individually not to sing that chant, another XRS rebel—a young woman of colour—took the megaphone to ask ‘please don’t sing that—it’s really alienating to people from marginalised communities’. A middle-aged white woman then took the megaphone away from her, to say that she does love the police, that she is doing this for their children, and her own children. A woman of colour’s critique was very literally silenced by the concerns of the white woman.

Narrating this incident is not to individually blame that white woman—her actions were a symptom of something systemic in both XR and wider society. But what it reminds the white, middle-class people that dominate our movement is to stop taking the megaphone. To be quiet, and listen.

After listening, what comes next is more difficult. How can XR use its resources in genuine solidarity? How do we shift from being an overwhelmingly white and middle-class movement to centring those who have been excluded? And without tokenism, or requiring disabled, working class and people of colour to do the work that those with more privilege should have done long ago? But taking the time to listen, absorb, and reflect, is the essential first step.

Recommended recent critiques of XR:

– Athian Akec, ‘When I look at Extinction Rebellion, all I see is white faces. That has to change’ https://www.huckmag.com/…/you-cant-have-true-climate-justi…/ – Minnie Rahman, ‘You can’t have climate justice without migrant justice’ https://www.theguardian.com/…/extinction-rebellion-white-fa… – James Poulter ‘Extinction Rebellion’s Tube Protest Isn’t the Last of Its Problems’ (including interview with XR Scotland’s Mikaela Loach) https://www.vice.com/…/extinction-rebellion-tube-disruption… – May Fraser, ‘The Police Line’, https://bellacaledonia.org.uk/2019/10/16/the-police-line/ – Kevin Blowe, ‘It’s Not Just a Bunch of Flowers’ https://medium.com/…/it-is-not-just-a-bunch-of-flowers-bc50… – Hannah Dines, ‘The climate revolution must be accessible – this fight belongs to disabled people too’ https://www.theguardian.com/…/climate-revolution-disabled-p… – Kuba Shand-Baptiste, ‘Extinction Rebellion’s hapless stance on class and race is a depressing block to its climate goal’ https://www.independent.co.uk/…/extinction-rebellion-climat… – Bae Sharam ‘What are you doing to dismantle your middle class white privilege when participating in XR protests? https://medium.com/…/what-are-you-doing-to-dismantle-your-m… – Karen Bell, ‘A working-class green movement is out there but not getting the credit it deserves’ https://www.theguardian.com/…/a-working-class-green-movemen… – Sharlene Gandhi, ‘Extinction Rebellion need to focus on the fact that climate displacement will largely impact communities of colour’ http://gal-dem.com/extinction-rebellion-need-to-focus-on-t…/ – Aranyo Aarjan, ‘It’s time to add global justice to XR’s demands’ https://www.redpepper.org.uk/xr-global-justice/ – Damien Gayle, ‘Does Extinction Rebellion Have a Race Problem?’ https://www.theguardian.com/…/extinction-rebellion-race-cli… – Wretched of the Earth Collective, ‘Our House Has Been on Fire for Over 500 Years’ https://worldat1c.org/our-house-has-been-on-fire-for-over-5…

[shesgottawatchit]

Eve’s Bayou (1997), dir. Kasi Lemmons

The 1990’s saw a transition in African American filmmaking when Black Female Directors started to emerge in the industry.  One Director in particular, Kasi Lemmons, rose to critical acclaim with her directorial debut Eve’s Bayou (1997) which met to extremely positive reviews and remains an important and influential text concerning themes of race and black feminist ideologies.

When examining feminist texts within African American Cinema, it is crucial to study the representations of Black Womanhood throughout the history of Black filmmaking, especially texts derived from female directors.  Early representations portray the black female through the use of stereotypes (discussed previously) in the form of the Mammy, the Mulatto, the Jezebel or Sapphire.  The black female identity is often linked to the body, presented as exotically intriguing or erotic; she is hyper-sexualised which contrasts the more passive white female character.  Kasi Lemmons’s Eve’s Bayou manages to connect these ideologies of Black Womanhood, while simultaneously subverting them to approach such concepts on a feminist level, discussing the mistreatment and misrepresentations of Black Womanhood on the big screen.

Born February 24, 1961 in St. Louis, Missouri US, Kasi Lemmons made her acting debut in television movie 11th victim (1979).  She went on to star in Hollywood hits such as Spike Lee’s School Daze (1988) and Academy Award winning The Silence of the Lambs(1991).  In 1997, she emerged in the industry when she wrote and directed her first feature length film Eve’s Bayou, starring renowned actor Samuel L. Jackson and upcoming actresses Jurnee Smollett-Bell and Meagan Good.  Eve’s Bayou centralised on Black family life, narrated through the main character Eve, the youngest daughter of the Batiste family.  Bayou delivers themes of adultery, sensual eroticism, supernaturalism and witch craft, all of which are tied together in black ancestry and history; depicting the more social and family oriented problems faced by middle class Blacks, situated in 1960’s Louisiana.

Eve’s Bayou

Lemmons’s opening party scene immediately sets up an idealised Black middle class life and emphasises the centrality of Bayou’s female led cast.  Matty Mereaux is dancing with her husband Lenny Mereaux, close up shots of him groping her buttocks are shown; her body parts are immediately fetishized.  Moments later she dances seductively with Roz’s husband Louis Batiste; she pulls up her dress to reveal her stockings and places her head around Louis’s groin area.  This sultry depiction of Matty’s character becomes problematic when applying Laura Mulvey’s work: Visual and Other Pleasures of ‘The Male Gaze’ to the text.  Here, Matty is seemingly objectified by the male viewer to be offered as none other than a placement of sexual desire for the male viewer.  However, Bell hooks, a pioneer of  her work on Black spectatorship, in particular Black female spectatorship, challenges and attempts to deconstruct Mulvey’s theory of ‘the gaze’ stating Black audiences can “both interrogate the gaze of the Other but also look back, and at one another, naming what we see”.  Black female spectators have thus since been able to adopt anoppositional gaze, placing white womanhood in the eye of the phallocentric gaze, enabling them to not “identify with either the victim or the perpetrator” (hooks, 1992)

Not only does this opening scene construct themes of erotica and woman as objectified beings.  Lemmons’s overall set up, choreography and mise-en-scene is a huge movement away from previous African American depictions, seen in early 20th century texts.  Here, the Batiste family, are portrayed as a well-mannered, well-spoken middle class family, with lavish clothing and a large country home.  A huge contrast to the savage and uncivilised representations of tribal African Americans portrayed in early Black Cinema.  As the majority of the cast is formed of Black actors and actresses, this idyllic family unit provides the ability for white audiences to identify more closely with Lemmons’s characters.

“the representation of the more perfect, more complete, more powerful ideal ego of the male hero stands in stark opposition to the distorted image of the passive and powerless female character”

                                                                       Laura Mulvey, 1975/1989, p. 354

Mulvey theorises that male characters play a dominant, powerful role within the narration, while the female characters must submit to a more passive, powerless position in cinema.  Mulvey argues that the audience adopt ‘the gaze’ as we constantly view texts through the dominated male lens of the industry, although “the power of the gaze is not invested in all men, but in White men, and the object of the gaze is not all women, but White women” (Hollinger, 2012, p. 194).

Roz comforts her three children after Mozelle’s vision of a child being hit

One way Lemmons subverts this idea is to centralise her female characters.  Eve, the youngest daughter of the Batiste family and her adolescent sister Cicely play a vital role in the progression of the narrative and it is they who hold the power over there adulterous Father Louis.  Alongside their Mother Roz and Aunt Mozelle, together provide a primary example of female solidarity.  Mother Roz is shown to empower the family unit, unlike Louis, whose Fatherly absence only heightens Roz’s empowered status.  hooks states that “once black folk had gained greater access to jobs, revolutionary feminism was dismissed by mainstream reformist feminism when women, primarily well-educated white women with class privilege, began to achieve equal access to class power with their male counterparts”  (2000, p. 101).  Black women and black feminist ideologies were pushed aside once White females started to benefit from feminist movements – “working class white females were more visible than black females of all class in feminist movement”.  However Black women were the voice of experience, “they knew what it was like to move from the bottom up” (hooks, 2000, pp. 103-104).

White women primarily benefited economically from the reformist feminist gains in the workforce, “it simply reaffirmed that feminism was a white woman thing”

                                                                           bell hooks, 2000, p. 107

Although she is subject to notions of patriarchy, (she stays home while Louis works to keep their home) this is quickly dismissed by the audience due to Louis’s controversial actions of adultery against his wife.  His affair with Matty (stereotyped as the Jezebel) interwoven in the plot, highlights mistreated stereotypes of Black Woman.

Cicely is slapped by her Father after she attempt to kiss him

Although these women initially appear empowered in Bayou,it is needless to say that Lemmons still intersects themes and ideas already imposed on black women in film.  Firstly Eve adopts the role of the maid, who does the family chores and cleans the house; several of her costumes reflect this and she is even seen with a feather duster cleaning.  Alongside this, Matty is presented as the whore, who endeavours in a relationship with Louis.  Despite the period setting, for such a contemporary text, these representations still manage to surface in contemporary Black Cinema as a constant reminder of the painful history of Black colonisation and slavery in early 20th century America.  Another character devise that Lemmons utilises to explore Black history and the mistreatment of female slaves is through character Cicely, who we believe is abused by her Father.  It is not until the end of the film that we are told it is her who instigated an incestuous relationship with her Father.  “The elusive qualities of truth are given attention in the film… Lemmons provides two sequences of the same event, each bearing the narration by a different character…  both Eve and the audience have to deal with two versions of a truth that each character professes” (Donalson, 2003, p. 190)  From her actions, she is muted throughout the film; powerless and unable to reveal what really happened.  Cicely’s powerless state can be seen as symbolic of the mass rape that occurred on plantations to multiple slaves across America.  In narrative form, this becomes complex due to Cicely’s initial confession and the film’s final twist.  Either way, the audience is still partial to the implied rape of an adolescent by her Father.  The final shot we see of her as she leaves the Batiste family home is her signalling to Eve to keep quiet.  This can be seen to parallel the voiceless African American Slaves, especially the abused woman who could not fight for their rights as slaves, let alone their civil rights amongst a prominent  patriarchal society.

[thempoetry]

“There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé” by Morgan Parker

This book had been years coming in my collection. Its name rang out inside me when I felt its titular sentiment — that the popular worship of Beyoncé is overblown — and whenever I thought of it, I felt a spark of solidarity.

Of course, this is not a book about Beyoncé — and in fact, this is not even a book that is very critical of Beyoncé. Instead, Beyoncé acts as a literary device throughout — a mouthpiece, an amulet, a proto-idea that shapeshifts to meet Parker’s endless need to talk, sing and moan about race, class, democracy, depression, music and drugs. It’s a brilliant move.

I’d like to start more broadly by commenting on Morgan Parker, because she strikes me as an outsider among insiders. In my head, Parker is of the generation of contemporary poets that includes Danez Smith, Franny Choi, Ocean Vuong etc. … she’s decorated with a Pushcart, she co-curates a reading series, she performs with Angel Nafis as part of The Other Black Girl Collective. Her poetic career is bedazzlingly active — so why don’t we talk about her more?

By which I mean: there seems to be a kind of halo around young poets like Ocean Vuong, who — and I say this with admittedly limited experience of his work — turn the harrowing vine-tangle of identity into a kind of rhapsodic experience: a thing worth looking at because it is beautiful. (Here is an example, from Vuong’s “Tell Me Something Good”:

Snow on your lips like a salted

cut, you leap between your deaths, black as a god’s periods. Your arms cleaving little wounds

in the wind. You are something made… )

There’s no arguing that Vuong’s poem is beautiful; my issue is with how the beauty is used. Vuong’s poem here seems an extension of the (frankly depressing and oppressive) idea that “foreigners” can make their stories worthy through pathos, pity and craft — i.e., hard work and relatability. If the sentiment sounds familiar, just tune into the way mainstream conservatives these days talk about immigrants: I don’t have a problem with immigrants writ large, I just prefer immigrants who work hard, keep their heads down, are pleasant to my children, are generally agreeable…

Anyway, it’s not fair for me to pass such a blanket judgement over Ocean Vuong’s work, and that’s for another review. But insofar as Morgan Parker is concerned, she parses the work and space of otherness in an entirely different manner. Similar to Claudia Rankine of Don’t Let Me Be Lonely, her argument is this: I won’t “fix” myself for you. I won’t try to make myself beautiful. I will tell the (magical, insatiable) truth as it is, and you will have to try to keep up. Because I am too tired to bow down, to construct something for you, to micro-manage. Parker’s poems are for haters of micro-management; they offer big gestures in small bottles.

Consider the opening lines of the opening poem, “All They Want Is My Money My Pussy My Blood”:

I am free with the following conditions.

Give it up gimme gimme.

Okay so I’m Black in America right and I walk into a bar.

With this bold opening, Parker’s commitments are clear: she will demand things of the reader (“give it up gimme gimme”) and she will clearly demarcate what commands her attention and respect (“I’m Black in America right”). And with this begins what I can only describe as a chimeric collection, more warm-blooded fantasy animal than diorama; more occult message written in glitter than typeset monolith. She scrounges from jazz, RnB and pop to fill her pauses. She is unrelentingly new instead of subtle. I like it:

I am a dreamer with empty hands and I like the chill. I will not be attending the party tonight, because I am microwaving multiple Lean Cuisines and watching Wife Swap… (“Another Another Autumn in New York”)

—and the sincerity of her materials shine through. (To continue this silly dogfight I’ve set up, compare the above with Vuong: “Air of whiskey and crushed / Oreos.” Parker’s allusion to pop culture delights; Vuong’s seems like an add-on, a sprinkling of something inappropriate on top).

But wherefore is the source of all this magic? I would say in what Sun Ra called “liquidity.” For example: Parker was best when R and I read her aloud on a grassy slope on Belle Isle in Detroit. There we were, in a historically Black city, in what I can only describe as a “public paradise.” Ducks waddled by and folks of all stripes strolled in front of us beside a small man-made lake. As we read Parker aloud, we laughed with her and from within her work — as though her words gave us the ability to access our inner performers, delivering punchlines (“I don’t know / when I got so punk rock”) and casting personal spells (“I breathe / dried honeysuckle / and hope”). We felt for her. And we wanted to continue feeling for her. All things told I had a moment of genuine orality with her work — a glimpse of what poetry must have felt like when it was shared, sung and social by default. This is a book that radiates the energy of the collective, that asks you to recognize it — and does not over-demonstrate.

So, in this false dichotomy, one might pose:

LIQUIDITY: ORALITY, SOCIALITY, LONG STANZAS SHORT LINES

against

SOLIDITY: WRITTEN, INWARDNESS, SMALL FORMAL STANZAS LONG LINES

In the former, you have the world of most popular songs, particularly jazz; in the latter, you have sculpture and “high art.” Perhaps this is why Ocean Vuong’s work has garnered him endless praise and attention, and most of us look askance at Morgan Parker’s messiness, silliness and genuine emotional bravery. She rambles, yes, but her rambling challenges the very idea of boundaries — of “discipline” as a set of limits, of borders we set for ourselves, however beautiful.

Finally, I will say this, as it’s becoming a theme in my reviews. Parker’s poetry feels affectively liberated. She is funny as well as ashamed. Take, for instance, this amazing section of “RoboBeyoncé”:

The reason I was built is to outlast some terribly feminine sickness that is delivered to the blood through kale salad and pity and men with straight-haired girlfriends […] Nothing aches in here It’s a quiet, calculated shame

Part of the power in these lines is the fact that despite the sprawling, messy energy of Parker’s poems, formally they are incredibly demanding due to their short lines. Parker does not give herself the liberty of overusing the form that has, frankly, become a meme among young poets — the poem composed of long couplets, like Vuong’s poem above — and instead prefers her poems one long connective muscle. The result is propulsive and exciting, like watching a figure skater do tight turns on the ice. She is insightful but also — I dare say it — entertaining. But in the wry, dark way that comedians have that communicates, “Look, I don’t care if you don’t like me. Most of the time, I don’t like me either.”

Which is not to say that Parker’s work is perfect — like the aforementioned figure skater, she does often fall short of her ambitions and can write poems that don’t hold together — often using the couplet form above. I think her work is best when it acknowledges its liquid merits, and doesn’t try to stand with too much air around it.

Overall: 9/10 for sheer spillage of fantasy radioactive plasma

Read If You: -Think it’s lame that Beyoncé talks so much about her “rock” -Miss the energy of cities like Detroit -Have friends you want to read with and you are all getting tired of the bone-dry landscape of contemporary poetry which is really just about “passing” politics and making pain beautiful and omg what if pain is NOT beautiful what if it is just pain motherfuckers what if leaving the party is political too goddamn

Further Reading

Don’t Let Me Be Lonely by Claudia Rankine -- deep classic, prepared the soil for Parker

BONUS: Things To Do In Life That Are Not Poetry

Inspired by Morgan Parker, try:

1. Starting a flashy project then abandoning it on purpose 2. Making a cocktail after a song by a Black American musician 3. Getting in a tub of ice cold water and listening to Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN. while doing one’s nails without shivering

Feverish and anything but lonely, Michu

P.S. A last thought while in the shower. Morgan Parker’s poetry is relentlessly self-aware. But I think what we mean when we say “self-aware” is actually not “being aware of the self” but “being aware of everything but the self” -- i.e. seeing one’s pronouncements as part of a larger (in Parker’s case historical) context. When Parker sits down to multiple Lean Cuisines and Wife Swap, the irony she projects comes from a deep rootedness in the idea that this is a thing that people do: skip parties to self-indulge in everyday, consumerist ways that our higher selves disapprove of. It’s not that her sentiment or self-report is inauthentic, but rather that it is aromantic -- it doesn’t presume that her experience hits on some prized singularness about being human. And I like that; I find it smart and honest at the same time, which is a rare combination -- not just in poets, but in people. 

[frantzfanonarchives]

Fanon at Ninety

Christopher J. Lee

In no way is it up to me to prepare for the world coming after me,” Frantz Fanon writes in his classic first book, Black Skin, White Masks(1952). “I am resolutely a man of my time.” Yet, over sixty years later, the presence and influence of Fanon appears to be everywhere, from student movements in South Africa to racial violence in Ferguson, Missouri, and other parts of the United States. Fanon’s interrogation of racial attitudes—white and black alike—and his commitment to the Algerian independence struggle—a country not his by birth—continue to offer lessons for our political present. His arguments speak to the persistent problem of racism, but, more significantly, the importance of activism beyond our own, often self-imposed, limits. I want to stress this last point in particular. Fanon remains vital not only for his bracing anti-racism and anti-colonialism, but equally for the less-recognized, empathetic politics of solidarity he cultivated and exemplified.

Born on the island of Martinique in the French Antilles, Fanon died from cancer at the age of thirty-six in 1961. This year marks his ninetieth birthday. Despite its brevity, Fanon lived a full and complex life, studying under the famed Negritude poet Aimé Césaire, serving in the French resistance during the Second World War, earning a medical degree at the University of Lyon, and circulating with esteemed intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. He completed three books, most famously The Wretched of the Earth (1961), which detailed his argument for anti-colonial revolution based on his experiences serving the Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) during its long struggle against French rule. Published just days before his death, The Wretched of the Earth established Fanon’s reputation.

But Fanon has remained a polarizing figure for many precisely because of his advocacy for armed struggle. His rationalization of anti-colonial violence has served as a source of inspiration and condemnation both, with Hannah Arendt, among other critics, remarking on the “rhetorical excesses” and “irresponsible grandiose statements” of Fanon and his supporters like Sartre, who wrote the preface to The Wretched of the Earth. Violence has consequently been a troublesome topic for Fanon’s admirers—an issue intrinsic to his politics, yet one often handled carefully. Many have correctly pointed out that Fanon defined violence in a specific sense, as a distinct response to the sheer violence of French colonialism. Anti-colonial violence was, in a Sartrean manner of speaking, an anti-violence violence. The colonized of Algeria were faced with a decisive choice: either accept continued dehumanization by a colonial power or fight for their dignity.

But this focus on violence also obscures Fanon’s other contributions. Indeed, his critics often overlook his practice as a psychiatrist in Algeria and Tunisia and his deliberate inclusion in The Wretched of the Earth’s penultimate chapter of medical cases regarding the physical and psychological trauma of total war. Fanon was all too aware of the costs borne by both Algerians and the French, combatants and civilians, women and men, and adults and children, as his diverse set of patients attested.

This recognition of a shared dehumanization is first explored inBlack Skin, White Masks. Less appreciated when it first appeared, this book has arguably surpassed its famed successor. As examined by Lewis Gordon, Ato Sekyi-Otu, and Reiland Rabaka, Black Skin, White Masks is primarily concerned with the limits of French citizenship—the fact of blackness in the face of French nonracial claims to the contrary. Though citizenship had been granted to all Martinicans, regardless of race, following the abolition of slavery in the nineteenth century, Fanon understood, similar to his African-American contemporaries like Richard Wright, that equality was not possible due to his “epidermal” condition.

It is on this point—the juridical promise, yet social limits, of citizenship—that continuities can be drawn between Fanon’s world of the 1950s and our world today. Indeed, the problem of race cut both ways for Fanon. Similar to the mutual dehumanization that resulted from colonialism, Fanon emphasized the mutual dehumanization that resulted from racism. “The black man is not. No more than the white man,” he declared, underscoring the illusory, damning qualities of race, whether as a source of imposed inferiority or feigned superiority.

Black Skin, White Masks is undoubtedly a complex work—his most psychiatric by far—and he does not call for decolonization in the direct manner of his final book. It marks an internal civic critique of France, in a manner akin to Wright and his fellow expatriate James Baldwin toward the United States. Fanon, though fully aware of systemic racism, believed in classic psychiatric fashion that change should begin at the individual level—a point later embraced by Steve Biko, also a former medical student before founding the Black Consciousness Movement during the late 1960s.

Yet Fanon would move beyond this early position as reflected in his personal movements from France, where he studied medicine; to Algeria, where he worked as a psychiatrist; and, finally, to Tunisia, where he spent the rest of his life, except for a brief stay in Accra. By the time of his death, he believed that revolution, at the societal level, was the ultimate solution to the ills introduced by colonialism. But to conclude that Fanon thought violence alone would bring change is both a misreading of his writings on violence, as well as a reductive take on his personal politics.

A less addressed, if conspicuous, aspect of his political life is how Fanon identified with a cause beyond his own background. He was not Algerian, nor an Arab, nor a Muslim by birth. Indeed, he was middle class, received an elite education, and was a French citizen, as cited. Fanon was not of the wretched of the earth. Yet he developed a deep sense of solidarity with the Algerian struggle, based on a mutual history of racial discrimination and colonial chauvinism. An outcome of his contingent internationalism, this radical empathy not only had practical effects on his life direction. This solidarity also forcefully disrupted a politics of difference—by race, nation, culture, and class—established by colonialism. This form of empathetic politics that was grounded in his medical work, informed by his readings in philosophy, and expressed in his political journalism and diplomacy for the FLN actively undermined a colonial order that sought to divide and circumscribe the free will of colonial subjects. Radical empathy thus provided a subterfuge for problems of difference and inferiority introduced by colonialism, beyond the tactics of armed struggle alone.

Fanon did not use the expression “radical empathy.” Though this ethic implicitly emerges in his later writing, its most meaningful expression appears in “actional” (to use a word of his), rather than written, ways. Indeed, philosophy, African and otherwise, too often privileges the written text. Yet this unspoken practice supplied a foundation for Fanon’s understanding of a “new humanism”—a recurring expression in his work that pointed to a world without social distinctions, whether on the basis of race, class, culture, or nation.

In this sense, Fanon’s project remains unfinished—and still relevant today. While some may dismiss such politics as utopian and, thus, too impractical, such criticism neglects the price of non-action, as well as the acute severity of political alternatives—whether violence in its oppositional or institutionalized forms. From Ferguson to South Africa, we can see the continued effects of political indecision, how tragic events that initially appear isolated and contingent can form part of a pattern, become part of a dehumanizing routine. Transcending differences by empathizing with one another—not simply embracing pre-given solidarities of soil or descent, which are often deeply colonial in their inception—provides a different option. Among many principles, perhaps this is Fanon’s most enduring lesson.

[brandym20]

*Tumblr 3 Rewrite*

The critical question that I am focusing on is: In what ways does this artifact (media article) depict a productive or unproductive (or both) framing/representation of the narrative of a counterpublic, and why does it matter?

The rhetorical artifact that I am evaluating is a CNN article from 2015.  The article focuses on the growing prominence of the Black Lives Matter movement and their several tactics that have been used in order to gain political traction.  CNN frames the Black Lives Matter in a way that is productive, as it highlights areas of improvement that must be made with group cohesiveness, as well as describing the promising Campaign Zero that BLM is working on.  This is important because while the article does criticize certain areas of BLM that could use improvement logistically, it also praises the great progress that the movement has made since it has begun and looks to the future of the group.

This news article was written in 2015, in the wake of several infamous acts of police brutality against the Black community.  After the 2012 police shooting of Trayvon Martin, a Black teen from Florida, the hashtag “#BlackLivesMatter” was born on Facebook, originating in a small group (Sidner and Simon).  The emphasis on social media is very weighted, as the creation of a hashtag in turn can unite an entire group of people across the nation.  Patrisse Marie Cullors-Brignac, one of the founders of the Black Lives Matter movement, stated that “There is a network and a hashtag to gather around. It is powerful to be in alignment with our own people” (Sidner and Simon).  The movement in turn creates a more consolidated identity for Black people in the U.S., and calls for African-American people all over the nation to take action and become involved in protests in order to raise awareness of police brutality and racial violence. 

Catherine Squires explores the Black counterpublic in her chapter “The Black Press and the State” in Counterpublics and the State.  She begins by highlighting the several attempts of the U.S. government to oppress the Black public sphere, such as through heavy surveillance, infiltration, and physical violence (Squires 111).  She specifically focuses on the censorship that took place from 1917-1945, after the Great Migration of African American people to the Northern states from the South.  After this migration, the Black press emerged in order to establish a new, positive identity to unite Black people all over the country.  The Southern press began to refute this group of people, claiming that the Black press was advocating for racial violence, and ultimately blamed the Black press for “heightening racial tensions between Black soldiers and whites” during World War I (Squires 121-122).  Squires describes the Red Summer that came after WWI due to race riots that were initiated by the Whites, yet the media in turn framed this violence to be as a result of the Black community.  She concludes by mentioning Randolph’s 1942 March on Washington Movement, in which it was made apparent that action needed to be taken in order to get anything accomplished by the federal government (Squires 123).  This is one of the first examples of the Black community really utilizing public assembly as a means for political persuasion, and this translates over to the current Black Lives Matter movement as well.

CNN highlights several positive aspects of the BLM movement in a way that I argue is productive for readers.  The creation of the Black identity is essential to the growing popularity of the group, as “It is about much more than each individual death of an African-American man or woman, it is about what it means to be black in America” (Sidner and Simon).  Through uniting such a vast group of people, the movement highlights just how prominent racial issues are in the country, and shows us how many people this is effecting on a daily basis.  The article has a hopeful tone for the future, through anticipating impact on policies that could be accomplished through Campaign Zero, a part of the movement that several members created in order to make real policy change when it comes to “police contracts and misconduct records; investigations of police; community representation; “militarization” of police; use of body cameras” (Sidner and Simon).  The majority of news articles do not go into details of Campaign Zero, but rather solely focus on instances of violence within the group.  Through mentioning the areas in which movement is focusing on improving, this article is unique in that it gives the reader more specific information regarding the movement and progress being made.  Direct political action would be the ultimate end goal for this movement, and CNN frames this movement productively in this article.

Michael Dawson’s A Black Counterpublic?: Economic Earthquakes, Racial Agenda(s), and Black Politics highlights some of the differing opinions that may arise within the Black counterpublic.  He quotes Toni Morrison, who stated “It is clear to the most reductionist intellect that black people think differently from one another; it is also clear that the time for undiscriminating racial unity has passed” (Toni Morrison, quoted in Dawson 200).  This notion that there will be varying political and social standpoints within the counterpublic is inevitable, and it is seen through some of the areas of conflict within Black Lives Matter.  Dawson lays out some of these conflicting opinions, such as:

 “the relative importance of race and class; the relative efficacy (or inadequacies) of political versus economic strategies for Black advancement; how Black feminist groups help of harm Black efforts to improve conditions within the Black community; whether the special problems of Black women deserve more, less or the same amoutn of attention as those of Black men; and how to respond to the critical lack of state responsiveness to Black concerns and interests during this period” (201).

This is a good example of how counterpublics are multifaceted and include many different issues that are not always aligned across the board.  Dawson suggests implementing a community study, in which a survey would be conducted in Black communities to “make public for critical debate the issues that different social forces among African Americans argue are central to social, economic and political progress” (222).  This study would be an effective first step in unifying the counterpublic and addressing issues that may arise.

Through applying Dawson’s article to the CNN artifact, it is helpful to take note of the disparities of BLM that CNN does mention.  Dawson describes how counterpublics may face issues with group cohesiveness, as there are various other factors playing a role in how a person fits BLM into their identity (Dawson).  Along with the group identity that is being further curated by BLM, there are also many different issues between socioeconomic class, gender, etc. among group members, and CNN does a good job at highlighting some of these conflicting standpoints.  One of the founders of BLM, Patrisse Marie Cullors-Brignac, discussed this issue of group cohesiveness in the CNN article, stating “Disagreements about tactics are totally normal. We have differing opinions. This happened during the 60s in the days of Martin Luther King, and the Black Panther movement. It is just that our disagreements are often displayed to the public in real time on social media” (Sidner and Simon).  Dawson’s viewpoint would be that these differences are to be expected in such a vast group of people, and CNN discusses this issue in a productive way that leaves readers feeling hopeful for improvement.

The issue of Black Lives Matter is very important to examine, as police brutality and cases of racial injustices are still prominent in the U.S. today.  The CNN article is effective in that it is written from a pretty unbiased standpoint, which explores some of both the positive and negative aspects of the movement.  This is a productive way of exploring BLM through viewing the more specific policy goals of Campaign Zero and emphasizing the fact that this movement is so much more than just the protests that have, in some cases, led to violence.

In summary, the narrative of the Black counterpublic is framed productively in this CNN article, as the authors get statements from key leaders of the movement and discuss the inner workings of the group and where they are looking to go moving forward. This matters because the relevancy of the issue of racial injustice has persisted for so many years, and the BLM movement could really make a difference in the long run.  The issue of solidarity within the group should be addressed in order to ensure that the strength of the movement is unified and more effective.

Works Cited

Dawson, Michael C. “A Black Counterpublic?: Economic Earthquakes, Racial Agenda(s), and Black Politics.” The Black Public Sphere, The University of Chicago Press, 1994, pp. 195–223.

Sidner, Sara, and Mallory Simon. “The Rise of Black Lives Matter: Trying to Break the Cycle of Violence and Silence.” CNN, Turner Broadcasting System, Inc., 28 Dec. 2015, www.cnn.com/2015/12/28/us/black-lives-matter-evolution/index.html.

Squires, Catherine. “The Black Press and the State.” Counterpublics and the State, State University of New York Press, 2001, pp. 111–136.

[bluewatsons]

Elena Comay Del Junco, Cool Women, The New Inquiry (February 21, 2020)

When the apparently hard-edged rejection of identity betrays a hidden sentimentalism

In Margarethe von Trotta’s 2012 film Hannah Arendt, the protagonist paces back and forth in her apartment, cigarette in hand. She lectures about the banality of evil amidst a halo of cigarette smoke. She stretches out on a divan in a grey wool dress, eyes closed, perfectly still. She looks as if she were sleeping, but we know that she is thinking, furiously, perhaps about how to mount a defense against accusations of self-hating Jewishness, perhaps about what to serve at her next party. Ever since sitting in the theater watching that scene, I have wanted a daybed of my own.

The fantasy of cool female intellectualism has stayed with me for years. Soon after I began to talk for the first time about what kind of woman I wanted to be, the initial movement of my thought made a grasping lurch at Arendt—or, more accurately, the actress Barbara Sukowa as Arendt—reclining, smoking, and thinking. In a close second was Peter Hujar’s famous 1975 portrait of Susan Sontag: stretched out on a bed in a turtleneck, arms behind her head, thinking. Arendt and Sontag are both arch, cool, impenetrable, intelligent, well-educated, dark-haired, Ashkenazi Jews. (My Upper West Side psychoanalyst immediately replied, “Like me?” in a two-for-one flash of transference and countertransference.) I lived for a couple years around the corner from Arendt’s apartment in upper Manhattan, and every time I passed it I wondered about trivial things: How did she commute downtown to The New School—did she take the 1 train? A taxi? Maybe she drove herself. Should I learn to drive? Arendt and Sontag are undeniably glamorous but also, as objects of identification, safe. At least for someone of my class and social location—highly (or over-) educated North American Jews—to take Arendt or Sontag as a model of femininity is a way of ensuring that, despite the public spectacle of transitioning, it is still possible to be taken seriously. That is, they allow one to defensively respond, “Yes, this is what I’m doing, but please, let’s talk about something more interesting.” That this was not a recipe for happiness should come as no surprise.

My own identification was not a result of Sukowa’s performance or Hujar’s abilities as a photographer. Rather, it is a sign that I am very much of my time. Von Trotta’s movie anticipated the recent growth—becoming most visible around 2017—of interest in mid–20th century women intellectuals. Writers like Arendt, Sontag, Diana Trilling, Mary McCarthy, Joan Didion, and Renata Adler have been making a comeback. There is, for example, Deborah Nelson’s Tough Enough, a book on “unsentimental women” that came out in 2017 and whose cast consists of Simone Weil, Arendt, McCarthy, Sontag, Didion, and Diane Arbus. Michelle Dean’s recent book Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion is a collection of biographical anecdotes about the same group plus a few others. As a kind of synthesis, both Nelson and Dean’s books seek to redeem a certain style of female intellectual that, it is implied, has been largely lost. Articles reveling in the allure of seriousness appear in the New Yorker, the Nation, and the New York Review of Books—the publications in which the central figures in this canon themselves published—as well as later additions like the Boston Review, and the London Review of Books. (Sontag seems in a class of her own, having generated an endless stream of hagiography since her death 15 years ago. The latest addition, Benjamin Moser’s new biography, is 800 pages long).

The fascination today with these women is part of a more general reaction against the sentimentalism of identity politics and a nostalgia for the intellectual rigors of a lost public sphere. It was not coincidental that increased interest in these women occurred around the time of the 2016 election, the Women’s March, and the emergence of Me Too, as well as earlier growing skepticism toward liberal feminism—ranging from substantive concerns about due process in Title IX processes to derision toward leaning in. Whatever the cause, however, the Apollonian, in general, is back, and its female adherents are particularly potent avatars.

The reevaluation of individual writers has happened over a longer and more sporadic time frame, and some, like Didion, have never had their public profiles fade. What is new is the understanding of “serious women” as a category and the writers in question as a group. The “seriousness” in question proclaims itself to be a matter of good writing and a rigorous analytical frame, a move away from narcissistic sentimentalism. Merve Emre, reviewing Nelson’s book, finds in the cool women an antidote to a “vision of the world [that] is totally apolitical, bereft of any common political or ethical position.” Tobi Haslett describes Sontag wielding seriousness like “a flashing machete.” Most recently Lauren Oyler, though she does not mention any of the cool women by name, has tapped into precisely the ethos in question when she faults Jia Tolentino for representing a brand of writers that make “any observation about the world lead back to their own lives and feelings, though it should be the other way round.”

Yet it is worth pausing to consider what this leaves unsaid. I do not mean to dismiss any interest in these writers—or in seriousness generally—as inherently reactionary, but they are a profoundly limited group, and these limits are too often ignored. First, the writers undergoing a renaissance are, to a woman, white. But it is not primarily the individual racial composition of this group with which I am concerned. Rather, it is the way race—and gender—are subjects of anxiety, sometimes explicit but just as often unspoken. It is hard not to suspect that appeals to their ideals of “seriousness,” at times at least, disguise an anxiety about the supposed excesses of identity politics, the way that personal grievance, in particular, is supposedly mistaken for injustice.

Second, and more specifically, it is perhaps even harder not to detect in these authors’ writing an attitude toward gender that sits uncomfortably against the basic contours of contemporary feminism. Theirs is a brand of seriousness that demands impersonality, the banishing of any sentimental attachments that might interfere with the autonomy of one’s critical faculties. Does this not undercut the bonds of solidarity necessary for a feminist politics? Does “thinking for oneself” not limit the degree to which one can identify with a collective? I am not so sure that one needs to identify with a collective in order to support collective struggles (Or: Does solidarity require identification?), but it is clear that all of the major figures of this canon, to some extent or another, thought this way.

These female intellectuals would have reacted with some degree of displeasure at being classified as “female intellectuals.” But in 1950s New York, the typical—maybe the only—frame of reference for understanding a woman who was also an intellectual was one that made recourse to a thinker’s gender: She was a “woman writer” or a “female intellectual.” This sort of public reception would seem profoundly limiting, even insulting. A sense that such a classification ignores what is serious and substantive about one’s work, reducing one instead to one’s gender, surely would have shaped the self-fashioning of woman intellectuals in the middle of the last century.

In 1967, Carolyn Heilbrun, one of an early generation of feminist literary critics, summed up this straitened state of affairs in her account of interviewing Sontag for the New York Times: “How short the world is of famous intelligent women: one per country, per generation.” In a 1989 interview with the New York Times, Sontag echoed Heilbrun, arguing against the “grotesque” pattern of thinking that “the next woman to come along that has a bit of pizazz and authority, [is] going to be praised beyond her merits because, look, she’s finally arrived.” For her own part, despite all the attention lavished on her appearance and personal life (which continues unabated with Moser’s new biography), Sontag resented the framing and swore that it had not affected her work.

In their work, it seems that displeasure about being classed as a woman writer, in many ways understandable, gives way to ambivalence toward feminism, or even outright derision. Sontag is the most sympathetic and published one essay entirely devoted to women’s liberation: her little-known 1973 essay “The Third World of Women” (whose now outrageous title was typical of contemporary internationalism). The essay offers a full-throated defense of women’s liberation, and even includes a glancing criticism of Arendt’s unthinking disinterest in the status of women as such. But even Sontag never became identified as a “feminist writer,” and, in an exchange with Adrienne Rich the following year, declared, “Like all capital moral truths, feminism is a bit simple-minded.” There is a note of distaste: Despite her sympathy with the political aims of the movement, feminism stands accused of narrow moralism that ignores the complexity and subtlety of human life.

Arendt, too, was a target for Rich, who criticized The Human Condition as a “lofty and crippled book,” embodying “the tragedy of a female mind nourished on male ideologies.” But unlike Sontag, Arendt was genuinely contemptuous of feminism, avoiding the “woman question” almost entirely in her work, although her biographers and later interpreters make her personal opinions clear. As the editor of a recent anthology on feminist reappropriations of her work put it, “Arendt was impatient with feminism, dismissing it as merely another (mass) movement or ideology.” Arendt’s hostility is largely a matter of anecdote. Dean reports a scene of Arendt pointing at one of her students’ Women’s Liberation Union pins and intoning—“in her thick German accent”—that it was “not serious.”

But if any single work embodies the distance between this group of women writers and feminism, it is Joan Didion’s 1972 essay titled simply “The Women’s Movement,” published on the cover of the New York Times Book Review. From her opening sentence’s deployment of scare quotes around the word “oppressed,” she excoriates contemporary American feminism, then in full efflorescence, for in essence rendering women weak, infantilized: “everyone’s victim but her own.”

The list of books printed with the essay as forming the basis of her critique is instructive: Simone de Beauvoir, Shulamith Firestone, Germaine Greer, Kate Millett, Vivian Gornick, Juliet Mitchell. It is tempting to see the group as a kind of feminist pendant of the cast assembled by Dean and Nelson: serious, unrelentingly intellectual, but also unambiguously feminist authors. At one level this would be right. The Dialectic of Sex, Sexual Politics, and The Female Eunuch, whatever their flaws, certainly can stand up in sheer force of argumentative power to Didion, Sontag, or McCarthy. But seriousness is not only determined internally to a work. It is also a matter of being taken seriously, and despite an author’s best efforts, this sort of recognition is never distributed equally.

So the question no one, then or now, seems to be asking is whether there is a connection between how cool—in both senses—a writer is and her attitude toward taking gender as a topic worthy of serious writerly attention. Does the cool, impersonal distance that allows for unemotional apprehension require, from a woman writer, a disinterest in gender or feminism? Is an interest in gender inevitably going to be seen as the expression of a personal grievance? Or, more bluntly: Is it just cooler not to be a feminist?

There is a temptation—to which Dean, at least, appears to succumb—to make the following sort of argument: that this rejection of feminism can itself be redeemed as the expression of a certain strain of feminist values or at least of women’s empowerment (Dean speaks of “taking away a feminist message”). The thought amounts to a parody of liberal feminism: that not only should women have the autonomy to choose how to live their lives, but whatever the object of choice happens to be will become imbued with feminism, including an anti-feminist stance. This is, in effect, a political stance that takes its opponent to be no better or worse than itself, and whatever their views of feminism, none of the “sharp” and “tough” women would fall for the idea that this could be it.

Something similar to these women’s skepticism about feminism holds about their political orientation globally. None of them descended to the level of conservatism that their male Partisan Review colleagues did, but all of them bear the traces of cold-war liberalism. Didion, in particular, is famous for her critique of late ’60s counterculture and expressed a more broadly conservative Weltanschauung. In her essay on the women’s movement, she makes a charge against anti-racist politics similar to the one she makes against feminism, with the accusation that the civil rights movement had failed to treat “the integration of the luncheonette and the seat in the front of the bus” as means to a higher purpose rather than ends in themselves. Arendt had a similar—frankly racist—contempt for an earlier moment in the American civil rights movement. Her “Reflections on Little Rock,” published in 1959, condemned the NAACP project of legally enforced school integration and, to many readers, the broader aims of the civil rights movement. Her comments about Arabs—Jewish and Palestinian—are similarly notorious.

At the same time, Arendt’s repudiation of group belonging in the case of her Jewishness is often received by many readers—among whom I have, at least at times, included myself—enthusiastically. To the charge that her description of Jewish complicity in the Holocaust in Eichmann in Jerusalem amounted to heartlessness, a lack of affection for “her” people, she replied, “I have never in my life ‘loved’ any people or collective—neither the German people, nor the French, nor the American, nor the working class or anything of that sort.” This stance, which often resulted in accusations of internalized anti-Semitism, is responsible to a great degree for the power of Arendt’s writing not just about the Eichmann trial but about the Holocaust and its aftermath more generally. She sets aside group loyalty for the sake of thinking clearly about what really happened, describing Eichmann as blandly human, rather than monstrously evil, an detailing the role of the Judenräte in the destruction of the European Jewry. Arendt’s critique of Zionism has a similar aura: She resists the collective impulse in favor of facing the facts.  

What then of her similar repudiation of group identity in the case of feminism? Unlike her rejection of loyalty toward the Jewish people in the form of Zionism, her anti-feminism constitutes, in tandem with her analysis of American racism, the weakest spot in Arendt’s thinking. In both of these latter cases, though, she goes wrong not out of a commitment to avoiding sentimentality that has been taken too far but out of a lapse in her anti-sentimental stance.

In her Little Rock essay, she intensely identifies with the parents of the Little Rock Nine and what she imagines to be their intense attachment to protecting the intimacy of the private sphere from politics. It is this emotional identification, undergirded by a profound naivete about the reality of American racism, that prompts her, explicitly at least, to reject the overall shape of the civil rights movement. That is, sentimentality—albeit of a perverse sort—leads to an inability to think straight with regard to race. Similarly, Arendt’s easy dismissal of feminism has as much to do with a surfeit of sentiment as with its deficit.

This dismissal may be presented in terms of feminism not being serious. But understood dynamically, Arendt’s hostility toward feminism also works as a defense: silence on the topic as a calculation, not necessarily conscious (defense mechanisms usually aren’t), about being taken seriously in the undeniably misogynist intellectual scene of the immediate postwar period. It is also a way of not letting anything get to you. Sexism is rampant, and morally and politically repugnant, and while you will certainly condemn it wholeheartedly when it comes up, it’s not the sort of thing that you are going to allow to interfere with either your life or, more importantly, your thought.

I am willing to speculate that part of the reason my desire to transition took on the urgency it did—or finally felt permissible—at the moment it did had to do with the fact that the end of my doctorate was finally a real, if not imminent, possibility. A PhD became a license for me to become a woman, a way of inhabiting womanhood and intellect at once. At one level, this is simply yet another iteration of the double bind in which women tend to find themselves, having to embody ideals that are commonly taken to contradict one another. But in this case it means not just navigating an undeniable tension but confronting a choice that can, at least at times, seem tragic: one in which femininity and intellect seem to find themselves through an implicit “despite.” Beautiful and yet intelligent, yes, but also intelligent despite being beautiful, serious despite being feminine, an intellectual, ultimately, despite being a woman. The result, of course, is the implicit equation of beauty with stupidity, femininity with frivolity, and intellectuals with men.

But there is a particular kind of triumph in being taken seriously despite the distraction posed by one’s captivating charms or, indeed, one’s devastating beauty. Hence the endless fascination, nearly 60 years after her death, with Marilyn Monroe’s intellect: her interest in psychoanalysis, the marginalia in her books, her consultation in London with Anna Freud.

In her eulogy for Arendt, Mary McCarthy captures something of the fascination that beautiful yet (the choice of conjunction is important here) serious women seem to hold over public consciousness as well as over themselves. She described her dead friend as

a beautiful woman, alluring, seductive, feminine. . . . She had small, fine hands, charming ankles, elegant feet. She liked shoes; in all the years I knew her, I think she only once had a corn. Her legs, feet, and ankles expressed quickness, decision. You had only to see her on a lecture stage to be struck by those feet, calves, and ankles that seemed to keep pace with her thought.

Speaking from the pulpit of Riverside Church, what McCarthy seems to say is: Hannah was smarter than all you men, and she was more beautiful too—essentially the far too often repeated line about dancing backwards in heels, but applied to writing philosophy.

On the surface, Sontag did the best at squaring the circle of beauty and intellect. No writing about Sontag fails to mention her appearance—her glamorous combination of beauty with inattention to appearance. Dean writes about how beautiful she was, but also, like Moser, about how she sometimes neglected her looks and how her habit of wearing all black was a “strategy of those who don’t want to have to think about what they are wearing,” rather than a strategy to make other people think you are the kind of person who doesn’t think about what she is wearing.

But like all circles, this one cannot really be squared. In my case, an unsentimental stance about gender simply resulted in alternating exhortations not to bother transitioning at all or, in more charitable moments, just to get on with it. My own case is particularly absurd—genuine indifference does not typically lead to embarking on a multi-year process that will almost certainly be a great deal of trouble, cost too much money, and considerably increase one’s odds of social and economic alienation. That is, however unsatisfying the sentimental narratives of always knowing one’s “true” gender, of being trapped in the wrong body may be, no one transitions out of indifference and without thinking that it is a serious undertaking. And I cannot imagine that such self-imposed indifference about one’s own situation is intolerable only for trans people. The impulse to downplay one’s own vulnerability to the oppressive social forces under which one suffers is perfectly understandable. But taking too ironic a stance toward oneself nearly always risks turning into self-punishment. That is just the personal aspect. Beyond the costs such rigor imposes on its subjects, a strategy of self-protective disavowal has distinct social and political costs as well. If everyone adopted such a position—all the more so if they did so successfully—the effect would be that no one would make a big deal out of precisely those things out of which a big deal ought to be made.

And, my own stance has also been precisely the opposite of an unsentimental one. It is an avoidance of turning to face the facts: ignoring a painful reality for the sake of self-protection, both material and psychic. It is not a product of unsentimentality but of its contrary. Unsentimentality is not a position of invulnerability. It marks a reckoning with the world, painful as it may be, and it is a far more fragile position than the comfort of familiar emotion. But to turn away from a painful object cannot make the object disappear or even weaken its hold, and nor can dismissing such an object as, in fact, simply not a big deal. The problem is that gender in general, and femininity in particular, is a big deal, whether one loves it or hates it or, as is more often the case, both at the same time. To disregard an object of attention, to dismiss it as “not serious” either in the personal or in the political sphere is a temptation that can only lead to disappointment.

More concretely, the failure of liberal feminism, however manifest it may be, cannot be rectified with a dismissal of feminism tout court. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater is an overused expression. But, like many such figures of speech, it is overused for a reason. Doing so with feminism may work for any one individual woman, but, as with any problem of collective action, what seems good for one person may not be so good for everyone. But I am not simply calling for the sacrifice of one’s own comfort for the greater good, although there are times when that may be what is required. Because, in general, the tension between the individual and the greater good is overstated. The strategy of disavowal used by a figure like Arendt or Sontag may seem comforting, but ultimately it risks leaving one in a position of insecurity and fragility. Such disavowal, it turns out, not only results in a political failure but, to put it simply, feels bad.

[theaspiringpsychologist-blog]

Komal Naqvi on White Privilege and Islamophobia

“I've always believed that the best way to make change is through political advocacy and I feel that standing up for issues that affect our student body is an amazing place to start. I want to be there for the people I represent.” 

Politics and activism are a huge passion in Komal Naqvi’s life. As a full-time undergraduate student at Rutgers University, Komal was recently elected as Senator at the Douglass Residential College through Knights for Change. Knights for Change is a student body government organized by Rutgers students. I was lucky enough to discuss her experiences with racial bias, how it affected her mental health and how we can prevent this. Here, I recognize the privileges I was afforded as someone who is white and has received more opportunities, due to my race. Education has failed us.  I admit, that I, too, can be very ignorant on these issues and need to further educate myself, regarding history and Middle Eastern studies. In fact, I learned more about history through Komal than I have in any history class I have taken in middle and high school. Hate crimes have increased exponentially.  Systemic oppression is prevalent everywhere, and now that our current president is reinforcing Islamophobia...it is crucial that we provide a safe space and educate the public.

So what were your experiences growing up in Pakistan?

Komal: So I actually wasn’t born in Pakistan. I grew up in Brooklyn and I moved from NY in 2001. So basically my experiences aren’t strong examples of Islamophobia. I know my sister dealt with it a lot more. Like, she would be asked, “Oh, are you Osama Bin Laden’s daughter? Is he your uncle?” Basically, asking her, are you related to the terrorist and things like that. For me, it was very common to not tell people you’re Muslim. They felt like it was a lot easier to avoid anything and not have people ask you questions and go on their merry way. I remember one time, my brother was asked from an older white man, “are you Muslim?” to my brother who is in preschool! It’s kind of like, why are you asking that? What’s your purpose and intent? And it kind of just gives you anxiety already. I’m not sure if this relates to Islamophobia or just xenophobia in general, but when we were first buying our house, the people we were buying the house from were really nice. They were really working with us because my dad couldn’t afford the amount they were asking for. They lowered the amount of the house so we would be able to afford it. It’s pretty big, it’s a nice area. But my neighborhood is very Catholic and there are many churches in my town and it’s very religious. And they had a meeting. It was a bunch of white old ladies to discuss whether or not we should even be living there. They called this woman and said, “We don’t want you to sell this house to them because we don’t want brown people living in our town.”

Wow, I am sorry to hear about that. I also apologize for assuming that you were born and raised in Pakistan. I might have gotten confused with someone else. But, how do you think these experiences have affected your mental health?

Komal: I’m really anxious living in my town. Even though were located in Central Jersey, my town is very Republican. So growing up, I was always concerned for my black friends. People had blatant, Confederate flags on the back of their pick-up trucks and I didn’t really understand. I’m always concerned for them because it wasn’t too long ago where we had a Confederate flag flying in our town hall. When my best friend moved there, that’s when she told me that her father had asked if they could take it down, otherwise they didn’t want to move their family there. It obviously made them feel unsafe. I used to be really scared to go outside. As a person of color, you’re just very aware of everything because you see yourself as the person who’s being discriminated against, as you’re growing up. Even in class, things that people would say, you could understand that people were mocking you. When I was younger especially, I didn’t have the language to talk to these people to say, “Hey, what you’re saying is really hurting me. It’s effecting how I view my own culture.” I remember kids would make fun of Indian culture and then, just blatantly group us all into one category. So, I’ve been made fun of for wearing henna. Growing up in a community like this, you kind of have to take a step back and analyze everything. The way I grew up, I just had to realize things weren’t in my favor. There were also opportunities I didn’t get because people saw me as the model minority, Smart Asian, quote on quote, “Indian kid,” even though I’m not Indian…it still kind of made me think that there are opportunities that I’m not getting and why are they so hard to reach? One thing I’m thinking about right now is Honors Society. Most of my friends were black, from South America. We were all really smart and all of us tried REALLY hard in school. But the kids who were always chosen for Honors Society were the white kids, who were like the teachers favorites. It was so obvious that none of my teachers wanted to give me or my group of friends a letter of recommendation for Honors Society. I was in the top 25, but since our high school was so small only the top 10 were chosen.

So, this leads me to my next question, how would you describe white privilege to someone who isn’t familiar with this issue?

Komal: One thing we talk about in a class I’m taking, called Feminism, Policy & Poor, is that some people aren’t going to have the same opportunities or life chances as somebody who is white, just because the system generally favors white people. It’ s easier for white people to get jobs. It’s easier for them to get access to opportunities. For example, there are people of color who come into bankruptcy and are unemployed, simply because they’re colored. As opposed to a while person who is unemployed or coming to bankruptcy because of a financial issue within a company. They lost their home because of their financial decisions. A black person could lose their home because they refused to give them the same extensions as they would a white person. They wouldn’t trust them as much. They can be in the same situation for different reasons. That’s why there is this disparity. There are white people who struggle the same way as black people do, but not because of their race.

Absolutely. But, how can we make people more aware of this issue?

Komal: Education. We need more workshops in the local level. I really believe in a big government and I think they should take responsibility in having cultural education, cultural advocacy. We need to be supportive in the community and let other people know that other cultures exist. One thing about white people is that as a person of color, this can be very difficult to talk about. White people need to call out other white people. It’s hard as a person of color to constantly see that you’re systematically oppressed and then call them out on it. It affects your mental health.

So, how are you and your family coping with our current president (even though I should just refer to him as #45 because I refuse to acknowledge him as a President)?

Komal: My parents have gone through different presidents in this country, so they’re not as concerned. They were concerned about Medicaid. My dad always keeps up with politics, but he’s been through so much shit that he can handle anything that comes his way. He’s strong. Me and my sister were very distraught and effected. I took a couple of days off from class because I was crying. I had to watch political satire shows just to find humor in this situation. My personal belief is that if you want to fight something, do it politically, which is why my major is Political science and Women & Gender studies. I feel like local and state politics are very important. No matter what happens on the federal level, as long as our state is strong. I want to find an internship that deals with state work and local districts because I feel like that’s very important. We have to take it one step at a time. My brother, Sean is like a little firecracker. He’s 13. I remember when I first started telling him not to tell people he was Muslim. I knew that when I was growing up I didn’t have that kind of language so how was he going to know? The thing is, he has that language and I think it’s because my sister and I have that influence on him. He’ll talk to kids about being Muslim and educate them. I’m a little anxious because kids are very mean and they regurgitate everything. Little kids are really influenced by their parents. One girl told my brother’s friend that he was going to have to leave the country because he was Mexican. Their parents don’t care. My brother is learning not to internalize things. I did when I was a kid.

Well, I feel like that has to do with gender roles too. Females are more likely to internalize and ruminate over our emotions and men tend to distract themselves. This is just how society has been for so long. What kind of advice would you give someone who is currently facing oppression and Islamophobia?

Komal: I would find a community. Find a place to talk about what has happened to you with people who are similar to you. You need solidarity, no matter what level it is. If it’s with your family, or other Muslims in the community or people of color, you need to find other people you can trust and talk to about. Even that small aspect of organizing, I feel like you can take it to a lot of places. You don’t always have to be political but you can organize a club, if you want. I know people in different high schools who have had a social education class. You can’t just be ignorant. Most of the things people say stem from people not knowing or not understanding, and that results in fear.

Where do you see yourself in 5 years?

Komal: My dream goal would be to run for something, whether it’s Board of Education or working for non-profit organizations. I want to work for Grass Roots Activist Work. That’s what I’m really passionate about because I feel like we can accomplish a lot on the state level. One of my passions is domestic violence work in the South Asian community.

What are some of the stigmas that people have about the Middle East?

Komal: So Pakistan actually isn’t part of the Middle East. It’s part of South Asia. We used to be one country with India. The construction of the Middle East is very western. I don’t call it the Middle East. I call it Arab States or Gulf States. But, yeah I’m south Asian because I have south Asian cultures and practices. And then Afghanistan onto the west is considered the Middle East.

Okay, so that’s a stigma right there, how I assumed Pakistan to be part of the Middle East!

Komal: A lot of people say that just because it’s an Islamic- Republic. I’m Shiam-Muslim and I face A LOT of oppression. Shia’s are 20% of the Muslim population and Sunni’s are 80%. In Pakistan, we’re seen as not being Muslim, even though our belief system follows the prophet-Mohammed’s family. Basically, what the Taliban target are Shia’s. We have very limited political leadership in Pakistan as well. My personal experiences have more to do with living in America. What people expect with living in Pakistan is that it’s all impoverished, it’s in ruins, there’s no education for women, but that’s just a stereotype, honestly. Like my mom has a Bachelor’s in Education. My dad has a Mechanical Engineering bachelor’s and he got a Master’s in International Relations. To think of Pakistan as an impoverished country is something that the Westerners have made it out to be.

So before you get offended the next time someone tells you to “check your privilege,” think of the racial remarks and stereotypes that persist. Put your own beliefs to the side for a moment and empathize with those, like Komal and her siblings, who have been victims of racial inequality. Next time you hear a racial slur or joke, I encourage you to take advantage of your privilege and raise your voice to shed light on this topic. Even though it may not be affecting you specifically, it can be detrimental to someone who faces this bias on a consistent basis. Creating a safe space and empathizing with those who are less fortunate than us is extremely important.

 If you’re interested in learning more about privilege, I highly recommend taking this Buzzfeed quiz here. 

[thisiswhatwereupagainst]

X-Men First Class Hellfire Club Re-Design

I was going through some old stuff of mine and found ideas for a version of the Hellfire Club in First Class that would be more comics-accurate and enjoyable for me. I think I might have posted it before, but in case I didn’t, here it is! In this version, the Hellfire Club has the same history and origins as its comicverse counterpart: Founded in the 18th century as a society for the most wealthy and elite, and is so to this today. However, while most of its members see it simply as a social club for them to enjoy mingling with fellow people of their status, it has a secret Inner Circle made up of some of the most powerful and influential people on the planet, who seek to dominate the world economically, politically, and socially through wealth. And now, that Inner Circle is made up of mutants. Their goal is the one that Sebastian Shaw originally espoused in their early appearance in the comics, but never quite seemed to get around to: Owning the mutant genome. Mutants are emerging, and the Hellfire Club sees in them the potential for profit if they can get there first. They want to get their hands on every mutant they can and use them for the development of bio-weapons, medicines, anything and everything that could be done using the literally endless potential abilities of mutantkind. They don't care about mutant rights or human acceptance or any of that---they care about profit, and they will happily put other mutants on the dissection table for it. They're also equally happy to profit from human bigotry, which they are already preparing for, developing and testing anti-mutant weapons so that when humankind becomes aware of mutants and panics, they'll already be ready to sell them the goods before anyone else. As with the original move Club, they're also doing the whole "trying to start the next world war" thing, justthey're instigating it for profit rather than propagating the mutant species. Unlike their comic book counterparts, their image should not evoke the 1700s/1800s or BDSM themes. Instead, they should be dressed in chic corporate business-wear most of the time; in combat, however, they switch to one-piece battle uniforms like the X-Men have. However, their uniforms should have a sleeker, more regal look, and admittedly a little on the sexier side too. They should just look 'cooler' than the X-Men, somehow; it fits with their 'better than you' attitude. Also unlike the comics, the Inner Circle are not named after chess pieces, but their comic book codenames are alluded to by being given these names (Black King, White Queen, etc.) in something like a government file, or over a secret radio transmission, something like that, either by themselves or by the government or by the X-men (ex: “White Queen incoming, over” or the like)

Hellfire Club Members:

Sebastian Shaw - Definitely not Kevin Bacon, definitely never a Nazi. Sebastian Shaw has the same background as his comicverse counterpart---born a poor steel worker, became a billionaire industrialist--and has the whole "tall muscular guy with sideburns and a ponytail" thing going on, as he should. He also is going to rip his shirt off at least once. Shaw should basically epitomize the "all business, nothing personal" approach. Profit and power are his first/only concerns, and he openly sneers at Erik's beliefs as much as he does at Charles'. Like Bacon!Shaw, he initially offers the X-Men the option to join him, but unlike Bacon!Shaw he makes no pretenses about being unwilling to "harm another mutant" if they don't. He should be a brilliant strategist, and incredible in physical combat (and not just because of his mutant abilities either) as well as classy as fuck (although there should a scene where he loses it and his poor Pennsylvania miner accent slips out and he looks mortified because he worked so hard to lose it) His big weakness, and the weakness of the Hellfire Club on the whole, is an inability to understand or trust people; he has recruited others based only on their powers and use to him, but he doesn't trust them or vice versa. Any of them would sell any of the others out in a second, in contrast to the solidarity between both the X-Men and, eventually, the Brotherhood. As with Bacon!Shaw, he has the prototype anti-telepathy helmet, invented by his labs and Dr. Essex, which both he and Dr. Essex wear (and which Magneto will take from Dr. Essex like he did with Bacon!Shaw, see Essex's section below) Emma Frost - Unlike Shaw, Emma doesn't come from a working class background, but was instead born into upper-crust society. However, she didn't coast by on her family's cash, but instead chose to build a fortune of her own as a businesswoman. While her mutant abilities are what made Shaw recruit her, it's this work ethic that gained his respect. Like Shaw, she's incredibly classy and intelligent, but she understands people much better he does because of her telepathy, and this makes her far better at manipulation. He makes battle strategies, she makes people strategies. While she lacks the physical combat skills of Shaw, her diamond form helps her make up for it, making her pack a hell of a punch and be immune to almost all physical assaults. She speaks with either a British accent or a posh WASP-type one, and she is very clearly equal to Shaw, not subordinate to him (in other words, no, she does not get him fucking ice for his drink, and if he dared ask, the movie would end a lot sooner BECAUSE SHE’D KILL HIM) Tessa/Sage - Their living version of Cerebro, the movie-verse Sage's abilities are limited to being able to detect other mutants. However, she also displays incredible combat abilities, which could either be the result of a super-human physique or simply of very dedicated training. Like the comicverse Tessa, she's the usually-silent assistant/secretary of Sebastian Shaw in both business and super-villainy (which, for him, are the same thing), rarely speaking or displaying personality, virtually a flesh and blood robot. She's practical to the point of ruthless, but also lacks any cruelty or sadism. Cold, detached, polite, but never mean, and even attempts to warn the X-Men away from messing with the Hellfire Club for their own sake. Selene Gallio - An eccentric heiress from Rome, she possesses telekinesis and pyrokinesis. She's secretly scheming to eliminate Shaw and Emma so as to put herself in the most powerful Inner Circle position, and uses the conflict with the X-Men to do so. Shaw and Emma, meanwhile, are also secretly trying to bump her off too! Again, this ends up being a big part of the reason that they're defeated by the X-Men, who use the backstabbing and manipulative nature of the Hellfire Club to play them off each other. Shaw also personally dislikes her for having only inherited her money, never worked for it, while she looks down on him for the reverse reason. While Shaw and Emma seem to see things as a business venture, she views it more as a game, and is less concerned with profit, more concerned with fun. Her opinion of mutantkind is that they have evolved to be predator upon humans, since humans have not had any natural predators for too long a time and nature abhors a vacuum; she is quick to note, however, that she herself is equal-opportunity in her selection of prey and thus happy to kill mutants as well, just like the rest of the Club.

Additional Hellfire characters:

Dr. Nathaniel Essex - Obviously, Magneto's story was the most powerful one in the First Class movie, so I of course want to keep it. But how, since this Sebastian Shaw won't have had anything to do with his past or Nazis? Well, Dr. Essex will take his place! Many fans have noted that movie!Shaw is much more like Mr. Sinister (Dr. Essex)--fascinated with mutants from a scientific POV, amoral, heartless, all about experiments and outcome, and worked as a Nazi scientist in the concentration camps (young Magneto even met him!) And since he also was affiliated with the Hellfire Club in the comics too, yeah, it fits perfectly. Just take the plot with movie!Shaw and Erik and stick in Essex in movie!Shaw's place. Movie-version Dr. Essex is originally from England but joined the Nazis in order to enjoy more "scientific freedom" regarding the experiments he was allowed to perform. He agreed with the idea of a master race, just one other than Aryans: Mutants, who he had become aware of through his work in England. At an unknown point after this, he is hired by the Hellfire Club to work in their labs. He himself is human when he works in the camps and puts young Erik through the torments that awaken his powers, but by the time Erik encounters him as an adult, he has used science to alter himself with mutant DNA, equipping himself with a regenerative healing factor, metahuman strength, endurance, reflexes, and resistance to injury. He lacks the strange appearance of Mr. Sinister, and is never referred to by that name, just as Dr. Essex. Donald Pierce - A human who was deposed from his spot in the Inner Circle by Shaw due to not being a mutant...and lost all his limbs in the process to Sebastian Shaw, nearly dying (he now relies on prosthetics) He is a prominent industrialist as well as very good with machinery/robotics, and he lends both his company and his own hands to the government in addressing the problem of the Hellfire Club. He's supposed to work together with the X-Men, but the moment the Hellfire Club is defeated, he turns on them, claiming that what the Hellfire Club did to him is what all mutants are going to do the moment they get the chance and "I won't give you that chance." Magneto kills him with his own machinery/weapons/prosthetics, but in the end credits, his severed head is seen in the labs of his company, attached to wires and cords, and the eyes open. Jetstream - A young mutant taken in by the Hellfire Club, he fights Banshee and Angel in aerial combat. Like his comic-book counterpart, his powers destroyed his lower body, and so he uses prosthetics built for him by Pierce prior to Pierce being ejected from (and nearly killed by) the Hellfire Club Catseye - Another young mutant basically adopted by with the Hellfire Club, she's a felid shapeshifter. Her comic book counterpart took the form of an enormous purple cat, but since that's a little goofy for the big screen, this version instead becomes a sort of human/black panther hybrid, and functions as a counterpart to Mystique and Beast, both of whom she fights Roulette- A young mutant with luck powers who works for the Hellfire Club. She is shown briefly during a montage that shows how the Club is using various mutants for their own profitable purposes; in Roulette's case, she uses her luck powers to manipulate the stock marker in favor of the Inner Circle. Benazir Kaur- A mutant who works for the Hellfire Club, shown in the same montage as Roulette. She can causes sickness and disease in people, and is used in the medical labs. A few other mutants will be shown in the montage too, I just haven't picked which. I'd ideally like for them to have been associated with the comicverse Hellfire Club instead of just random people like Riptide, though. I'd especially like to get in a cameo of Harry Leland. I don't see him as needed for the plot, but since the other members of the original comics Inner Circle---Shaw, Frost, Pierce, Tessa---are included, it seems unfair to leave him out entirely. We could also keep Riptide and Azazel too, if you want. I'm neutral on them. A teleporter is useful, but the comics canon Hellfire Club has two we could pick from (Lourdes Chantal and Trevor Fitzroy) and while I'd prefer Lourdes, I guess Azazel keeps the whole nod to Nightcrawler's parentage. Of course, I don't really care about that either, so whatever.

Story differences:

So, FC ends with Erik embracing the ideals of Shaw and the Hellfire Club, and taking over the latter to make it his Brotherhood of Mutants. Obviously, in this version, that won't happen because the ideals of Shaw and the Hellfire Club aren't what Magneto believes in at all. Instead, what happens is that the Hellfire Club and their exploitation of mutants shows Magneto the danger that mutants are in, and he agrees with the Hellfire Club that when humans realize mutants exist, they are indeed going to react with panic and want to wipe them out (which he points to Donald Pierce as evidence of). And like the Hellfire Club being prepared to sell anti-mutant weapons to the masses, Magneto wants to be prepared too. The Hellfire Club also shows him the danger of what will happen if mutantkind isn't united, if they don't come together---it will become mutant on mutant, selling each other out to the humans just to save their own skins. That's why it's so imperative to him that Xavier and every other mutant agree with him, because there can be no room for division in their ranks or else this will happen again. So he still walks off and takes Angel and Mystique with him, as well as possibly some Hellfire-affiliated mutants that like his ideals better than being exploited for profit by the Inner Circle (which could include Riptide and Azazel, and/or some of the ones from the brief montage). He kills Essex just like he did originally with Shaw, complete with helmet and Charles screaming and mind-linking and all...obviously Essex doesn't have Shaw's abilities so he wouldn't have the "absorbed nuclear bomb level power" situation but I'm sure there could be something else set up. As for the Hellfire Club themselves...they're a worldwide organization, they can't be eliminated. It's more like they just get defeated in whatever they were trying to do, but they still succeed to some degree too through cleverness and backup plans, and it's very clear they're still around and going to come back again. This still has a lot of the flaws of the original (namely, that Magneto hating humans doesn't make as much sense when the first danger to mutants he runs into is OTHER MUTANTS, but at least it fixes the fact a mutant killed his mother in FC, which is really stupid story-wise/for his character, imo) but it has a Hellfire Club that I would have much preferred to see onscreen. If the canon FC version of the Hellfire Club worked for you, hey, great, I'm glad, this is just for me and what I would have liked.

[atlanticcanada]

'There is no place for racism:' Dal student slams 'anti-Canadian' motion

HALIFAX -- A student at Dalhousie University is speaking out against what she calls an "anti-Canadian" motion passed by the school's student union, saying it has ignited racial tensions on campus.

Mehak Saini said Monday she's standing up for voices silenced during an acrimonious debate that engulfed the Halifax university after the student union pulled out of Canada 150 celebrations in solidarity with Indigenous Peoples.

"As an immigrant, I celebrate this country and its values and the freedom of speech," said Saini, who immigrated to Brampton, Ont., from northern India when she was nine years old. "I'm proud of this country."

Student leader Masuma Khan tabled a motion to opt out of Canada Day festivities, calling the celebration an act of ongoing colonialism.

In response to criticism, the student council executive said on social media she would not stand with "privileged white people," or be proud of "over 400 years of genocide," with the hashtag "whitefragilitycankissmyass."

Khan's comments sparked controversy and prompted a complaint against her, which the university has since dropped, in part due to concerns about violent and hateful messages she was receiving.

Many people on campus and beyond defended Khan's freedom of expression and political speech, including the Ontario Civil Liberties Association and a group of 25 law professors from Dalhousie's Schulich School of Law.

But Saini said some students disagreed with Khan but refrained from voicing their dissent out of fear of being labelled a racist.

"She's using discrimination and power as a tool to silence us," she said in an interview. "There is no place for racism, period. Not from a minority, not from a majority."

Saini added: "We should criticize the past and colonialism. But to criticize a whole race and say they can kiss your ass is not the way to go about it."

The second-year physics student is calling on the Dalhousie Student Union to hold a new election for the position of vice-president academic and external, which Khan currently holds.

Saini has penned an open letter to the university ombudsman entitled "Not My VP," which now has 42 signatures.

The letter outlines her position against Khan, who she says "blatantly insulted the entire race of white people."

"Not only did she disrespect the student body by suggesting an anti-Canadian motion, but also she then attacked an entire race of students by implying that all white people are fragile in nature," Saini said in the letter.

"Being an immigrant, I found the ban on celebrating Canada Day a violation of the rights of students to celebrate the country that has provided them with a great life, an excellent education, world-class facilities, and their individualistic freedom of expression."

Khan said she already went through an impeachment process in September and the council voted to keep her.

"I'm not going to say a student can't do this because I want to encourage students to hold their representatives accountable," she said.

However, Khan said she is baffled that the student union's support of Indigenous People could be construed as "anti-Canadian."

"Standing in solidarity with Indigenous People is the last thing from being anti-Canadian," she said. "What I have said is anti-white supremacy."

As a daughter of immigrants, Khan said she recognizes that she has been afforded privileges in Canada and that "this land has given me so much."

"But it's important to recognize that immigrants themselves are given more privileges than the Indigenous People of this land," she said. "We flee from war, we flee from unsafe places. We come here to find safety but there is a whole community that doesn't have safety."

While Saini said she is open to criticism about Canada's past, she said she worries that the tone of the debate could legitimize racist speech or create division between students of different backgrounds.

"There is no compassion, there is no unification, there is just division between us," she said. "I want to be on the side of love and compassion and unification. I don't want to be on the side of division and hatred and bigotry or discrimination."

Saini added: "This fight is for equality for all regardless of your colour, ethnicity or religion."

from CTV News - Atlantic http://ift.tt/2xAZ9LV

[todaynewsstories]

NATO views Vostok with both a shrug and a show of force | Europe| News and current affairs from around the continent | DW

Last year the word “Zapad” was on everyone’s lips, just as the Kremlin surely wanted with its drills practicing an invasion of the Baltic states from a stone’s throw away. But Vostok 2018, despite being billed by Moscow as its largest exercises since the height of the Cold War, isn’t setting NATO’s pulse racing — nor prompting reinforcements to its eastern flank.

“Monitoring” is the term used both by alliance spokespeople publicly and NATO insiders privately to describe the posture being taken during the week-long exercises with China. That’s due in large part due to the fact that the Vostok training ground is way over in eastern Siberia, so there’s not the same fear as there was with Zapad in Belarus that Russia will simply leave some forces in a place too close for comfort.

Read more: Things to know about international military exercises

Elisabeth Braw, a deterrence expert with the London-based Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies (RUSI) said it’s understandable that NATO isn’t particularly concerned, but she believes China’s new chumminess with the Kremlin is nonetheless notable.  “It sends a signal that the two of them are teaming up and we, the West, don’t have a strong ally in either of them,” she told DW. “I think we had the expectation that China would side with us — maybe not on every issue but us on some issues.”  Braw says that longstanding presumption perhaps can’t be taken for granted anymore.

“Showing military strength has several purposes” for Russian President Vladimir Putin, explained Roland Freudenstein of the Martens Center in Brussels. “It’s certainly showing military strength also to his own people and a distraction from all the domestic crises, starting with the pension reform, which is very unpopular.” But, Freudenstein added, “It’s part of the game that Putin is playing with the West … to scare NATO countries, especially the smaller ones.”

Airborne assurance

But those countries are getting ever more reassurance from above, from NATO’s eyes in the skies, the air-policing program that keeps fighter jets on alert 24/7 at nearly three dozen air bases throughout NATO territory. Initiated in the Baltics in 2004 and continually expanded all the way to Montenegro, when it joined NATO last year, the program overseen out of Ramstein Air Base in Germany has ensured there’s been no major violation of NATO airspace.

NATO fighter jets are on duty around the clock, ready to scramble in case of unauthorized entry to alliance airspace

That’s not for lack of trying, as statistics show the alliance scrambled jets 250 times last year to respond to Russian aircraft coming close to NATO airspace. That’s just a third of the incidents in 2016, when there was a major spike up to 780 occurrences.

More menaces than Moscow

Beyond this Russian “buzzing,” which has almost become routine, these forces are also on standby in case of civilian aircraft losing communication with air-traffic controllers for any reason, ranging from technical failure to hijacking.

Read more: US General Ben Hodges: ‘Russia only respects strength’

“Our mission is to protect the borders. Anything that approaches a border and is not authorized to cross that border is an incident for us,” explained Spanish Air Force Lieutenant General Ruben Garcia Servert, commander of NATO’s southern Combined Air Operations Center in Torrejon, Spain.

“It’s true that today many cases are Russians, but we can expect anything,” he told DW. “We are there, we have solidarity, we have integrated our system to make sure that our borders are protected from anything.”

Lt General Servert worries terrorists could take advantage of instability in the Mediterranean region

DW was invited to join a training flight this week, which officials say was only coincidentally being held during Vostok. Nevertheless, the demonstration of NATO’s powerful air defense is surely not an unwelcome image to project. In an unprecedented exhibition flight, a Belgian Air Force plane posed as a “renegade” intruder, flying from Brussels to Spain.

Read more: NATO in Baltics learns from Ukraine’s mistakes

Shortly after take-off in the simulated COMLOSS incident — where there’s no information coming from the plane to air-traffic controllers on the ground — two German Air Force Eurofighters appeared tight on the wings of the Belgian Airbus, switching from side to side, penning it in. As ground borders were crossed, fighter jets of almost a dozen nationalities zoomed in to escort the flight, JAS-39 Gripens flown by the Czechs and Hungarians, MiG-21s and -29s from Croatia and Slovakia, the British Eurofighter Typhoon.

In a real interception those pilots would be using internationally-recognized hand signals to try to communicate with the Belgian pilot to figure out why he’s not in touch with ground control, whether he’s in trouble — or making trouble. In this case, even the experienced Belgian pilot was so enthralled with the private air show that he was taking photos from the cockpit each time a new breed swooped alongside.

Even the pilot of NATO’s simulated ‘renegade’ aircraft couldn’t resist admiring the fighter jets coming to escort his plane

Taking stock since 9/11

Servert revealed that his biggest concern currently is not the Russians: It’s the unpredictable threats emanating from the Mediterranean region where non-state actors, meaning potentially terrorists, can find safe haven in unstable countries and then take aim at NATO allies.

“For us it’s extremely dangerous,” Servert said, “because it’s not, in today’s world, only states who can launch an aircraft that will make harm in our area. This area of uncertainty that is developing in the south … we keep an eye on that area.”

At the same time he maintains a high degree of confidence in the range of tactics available to NATO pilots. Servert emphasized that, regarding potential misuse of civilian aircraft, the first line of defense is on the ground, as dangerous people should never make it onto a plane. However, Servert explained, the 9/11 attacks in the US were such a turning point in understanding these threats that if something like those hijackings were attempted again in the airspace NATO monitors, he believes it would be possible to thwart them.

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[clereviewofbooks-blog]

Interrupting the Myth: A Review of Elizabeth Catte’s “What You are Getting Wrong About Appalachia” (the Editors)

What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia by Elizabeth Catte

Published 2/6/18 by Belt Publishing

146 Pages

In What You are Getting Wrong About Appalachia, public historian Elizabeth Catte, who hails from Eastern Tennessee, is very angry and out to disprove pernicious misconceptions about the region she feels so tied to. When you are from a certain region, be it Appalachia or the Rust Belt, you know that there are an unlimited amount of perspectives and narratives that exist within that region. It can’t be reduced to some easily digestible narrative that reduces the multiplicity of stories and peoples into one homogenous bloc, a narrative that is typically consumed by urban cosmopolitans who exist in a “higher,” more enlightened realm than those who dwell in Appalachia or the Rust Belt. Catte is out to deconstruct these myths and common misconceptions that are used to define and explain Appalachia to cosmopolitan elites. It is a work of interrupting and deconstructing specific myths which are operative in our culture that tend to benefit certain people in power who aren’t from Appalachia at the expense of the people who are purported to be represented in these narratives and characterizations.

As Catte points out, there was a revived interest in Appalachia leading up to the 2016 election. Donald Trump was a monstrous figure to liberals and “Never Trump” conservatives alike. He violated generally accepted rules of decorum and civility, and appealed to the hopes and dreams of people from certain “forgotten” regions of the country that are typically glossed over. One is reminded of the infamous “flyover country” New Yorker cover: from the perspective of New York, the center of American culture, there isn’t much that exists outside of their own bubble when looking West, except for a few notable spots like Chicago and Los Angeles. While Appalachia isn’t on the cover of the magazine, it’s certainly one of the spots that would be glanced over. Or, to take it one step further, Appalachia wouldn’t merely be glossed over: it would be, according to Catte, highlighted as being “other” to America. It’s not even on the same level as the rest of flyover country.

In any case, a sudden interest in Appalachia from cosmopolitan, educated, and mostly elite liberals emerged leading up to the 2016 election. Trump just kept on gaining steam, and it didn’t make sense to liberals how somebody like Trump could possibly be gaining the support he was garnering. They needed to find and study these Trump supporters, who, whether from Appalachia or the Deep South, were certainly not visible to liberals in their day-to-day lives. The forgotten America needed to be remembered and put under a microscope if Trump was to be truly reckoned with.

Hence, the introduction of pieces chronicling, as Catte dubs it, “Trump Country,” which in many cases meant Appalachia. These articles popped up everywhere, from Vanity Fair to the New Yorker. The goal of the press in these pieces leading up to the election, as Catte describes in the introduction, was “to analyze what it presented as the extraordinary and singular pathologies of Appalachians, scolding audiences to get out of their bubbles and embrace empathy with the “forgotten America” before its residents elected Donald Trump.” After the election, commentators gave up on Appalachia, proclaiming that they could “reap what they had sown.” But the main problem with all of these pieces, to Catte, wasn’t necessarily that the attention given to Appalachia by the press was disingenuous, but rather that they deliberately portrayed Appalachia as a monolithic region of people sharing the same ethnicity and heritage with certain essential characteristics, which were presented as “other” to any characteristics someone from anywhere else in the country might have, in order to explain the region’s behavior. Appalachia became a scientific object of study, to be dissected and understood by educated elites, without any sort of concern for the people themselves. If they were to show empathy to Appalachians, it wasn’t about solidarity with people who, while not exactly the same as non-Appalachians, largely had similar problems in regard to economic exploitation and, yes, even identity politics (as Catte rightly points out, many of the problems that seem uniquely Appalachian are in fact shared universally throughout the rest of the country). Liberals showed empathy to the extent that they could perhaps keep Trump from getting elected by showing Trump Country residents that the Democrats, if they could just look at things from a rational rather than emotional point of view, were the ones who truly represented their interests.

Catte’s book comes as a response to this renewed national interest in Appalachia, and proclaims that there are two main objectives to her study. On the one hand, she aims to uncover who is benefitting from the popular narratives told about Appalachia while she is simultaneously poking holes in those narratives. On the other hand, she makes it a point to highlight and celebrate the people whose voices are almost universally omitted from the discourse surrounding Appalachia. She discusses people who have done noteworthy and heroic things who aren’t white, Scots-Irish, coal miners. There is actually a rich tradition of activism and community organizing in Appalachia that carries on into the present, and their concerns aren’t always related to coal. Further, as Catte reminds us over and over again, many of these people are Hispanic, African-American, and female. If J.D. Vance, the author of Hillbilly Elegy, is allowed to remake Appalachia in his own image for specific purposes, then so is Catte, who writes, “This (her) image of Appalachia does not deflect the problems of the region but simply recognizes the voices and actions of those who have struggled against them, often sacrificing their health, comfort, and even their lives.”

The book is divided up into three parts. Part one, “Appalachia and the Making of Trump Country,” is about the renewed interest in Appalachia leading up to and after the 2016 election. One of the most interesting points in the book is that if there actually was a genuine interest from the national public to learn about Appalachia, why is it that there was only one media narrative being produced and consumed? As Catte points out, “If it is appropriate to label a small but visible subgroup as unambiguously representative of 25 million people inhabiting a geographic region spanning over 700,000 square miles, then we should as a number of questions: Where were the “Bernie Country” pieces about Appalachia? There are more people in Appalachia who identify as African American than Scots-Irish, so where were the essays that dove into the complex negotiations of Appalachian-ness and blackness through the lens of the election?” The list goes on.

Part two, Hillbilly Elegy and the Racial Baggage of J.D. Vance’s ‘Greater Appalachia,’” discusses perhaps the most blatant example of misrepresenting Appalachia, a misrepresentation that directly contributes loads and loads of money to the pockets of the one doing the misrepresenting, namely Vance himself. Of course, Vance became famous due to the publication of his memoir Hillbilly Elegy, which was voraciously consumed by people outside of Appalachia as a way to understand the essence of Appalachian decay. The point Vance makes that Catte takes special exception to is his description of Appalachia being made up of a homogenous bloc of poor, white, Scots-Irish people, who, being part of the white working class, should be treated as a unique minority in their own right. The danger of Vance’s discourse is that we can brush off a discussion of race and identity politics at the expense of class politics. Part of Catte’s point is that we shouldn’t sacrifice one form of analysis for the other: they are both important. Furthermore, it is inherently problematic that Vance can be purported to represent an entire region in the national political discourse. As Catte quotes Vance as saying to the Washington Post, “It’s an indictment of our media culture that a group that includes tens of millions of people is effectively represented by one guy. I feel sort of uncomfortable being that guy.” But Catte rightly points out, he can’t be that uncomfortable being that guy, given how much he has personally benefitted from his status as a man both above and of Appalachia, able to translate their problems to cosmopolitan elites in order to make them easier to understand. To be honest, though, I don’t see Vance as being intentionally malicious or deceitful. Rather, it is, as Catte says, inherently problematic who gets to have the privilege of being an authority on a specific topic or region. Their views have a huge impact on public perception and indeed reality itself, and there are great benefits to be had for the one with this power.

Finally, part three, “Land, Justice, People,” tells the stories of, for the most part, present day activists and community organizers in Appalachia who both don’t fit in to the conventional stereotypes about Appalachians and who are rarely covered by the media. Catte discusses topics and people such as the Highlander School, a project by a local radio station to connect prisoners to their loved ones through “audio postcards,” the continued battle for Blair Mountain, and present-day organizers using tactics learned from their anti-coal predecessors to protest different things, like the prison-industrial complex. Through telling these stories, Catte makes the point that there are a ton of people and narratives in Appalachia that don’t conform to the traditional myths and narratives that are used to portray it, and these could be the bases for very different stories about Appalachia. This section is about solidarity, and directly counters the books and articles by figures like Vance.

What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia reminds us that the fight over representation has huge implications concerning power, both culturally and politically. It is impossible to paint a complete portrait of any portion of reality, whether it be a group of people or a region. But that doesn’t stop people from both doing so and making impactful decisions based on these portraits. This phenomenon is why a book like Catte’s is so essential. It is a very practical form of deconstruction that pokes holes in the operative myths and narratives that define Appalachia and determine how those in power make decisions concerning it. It has the power to make these conventional narratives less dangerous, and can potentially lead to the promotion of narratives that are less homogenous. This book is an act of resistance, both as a work of deconstruction and positive assertion of different narratives that get no coverage. On top of that, it is also an easily digestible but well researched cultural history and genealogy of how a region has come to be defined over time. It is very practical knowledge, and makes the larger, crucial point that we should be conscious of the myths and narratives that underlie our political and cultural discourse.

Written by the Editors

Images

Cover of the book, taken from its Amazon page.

Cover of the March 29 1976 issue of the New Yorker, from this link.

From Roger May’s “Looking at Appalachia” project. Dennis Savage. May 24, 2015. Cabell County, West Virginia.

Purchase the book here.

[ixvyupdates]

We Participated in #NationalWalkoutDay to Show How Gun Violence Affects Chicago Students

The clock strikes 9:50 a.m. as I sit in physics class. My teacher has given a momentum equation, but that is the least of my concerns.

Tick…tock…

The clock drags on and on leaving many of us anxious. At two minutes to 10 a.m., five students start to walk out, leaving the remaining 24 students to work on their equation.

As we leave, the teacher exclaims, “Leave with a purpose, not just for fun.”

We race down to the first floor, I can hear security guards speaking into their walkie-talkies, “Students have left their classes and it’s not even 10 o’clock yet.”

On a late-winter Chicago morning, nearly 300 seventh- through 12th-graders packed in front of Kenwood Academy’s Door 6 exit.

One day prior, a student activist club member released a statement via Twitter informing Kenwood students of the logistics of the walkout and warned us that after the 17-minute mark they would no longer be affiliated with the SAC and would face repercussions from the school administrative team.

The administration had been very clear that if students extended the protest after the allotted 17 minutes they would be marked with an unexcused absence.

Standing atop a platform in the courtyard, a group of young ladies from the student activist club held notes and a bullhorn. For about 10 minutes many of my peers shouted shocking statistics to the crowd.

“169 children have been killed in the last four years!”

“Mass shootings are almost always done by White men!”

“Men, alone, make up 98 percent of mass shootings!”

Although the walkout was to honor the 17 victims of the mass shooting at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, many students made it known that more than 7,000 children have died from gun violence since Sandy Hook in 2012. And, according to Gun Violence Archive, there have already been 48 mass shootings in 2018. Mass shootings, as defined by Gun Violence Archive, includes four or more people shot or killed at the same general time or location.

It’s In Our Own Backyard

Over the course of the protest, students shifted their focus from the national issue of mass shootings in America to a local problem. They began shouting about problems in their Chicago neighborhoods.

“What about Englewood?” a student shouted.

Amaris Buford began to comment on the impact of gun violence on Chicago neighborhoods, the proposed public school closings in Englewood, and the gentrification happening all over the city, even right here in our beloved Hyde Park.

Buford stated, “I’m walking out for Black people because if I don’t, who will?”

This was powerful and true. It is up to us as young people to make a change for our nation.

“Say it loud, I’m Black and I’m proud!” we shouted.

This display of solidarity soon turned into a Black Lives Matter protest, getting students even more fired up. With a rainbow crowd of Black, Brown and White students, we were all forced to consider the real issues at hand. Gun violence is a reality for us. Many of us have lost friends and family because of it. We are dealing with trauma and are expected to come to school, get an education, and act as if everything is OK.

But, clearly, we are not OK.

Most would believe every student in Chicago, a city known for violence, would fear for their safety. However, as a transfer student from a private school, I certainly feel safer here at Kenwood, due to the increased number of security personnel. Students, faculty and staff are also required to wear identification to ensure everyone belongs. At Kenwood, we also have lockdown drills each year.

But despite how safe I feel on a day-to-day, there is never a way to fully be prepared for a mass shooting.

Although we don’t want to take away the right to bear arms, there does need to be some change to gun laws. We all have a part to play in order to create a safer world.

After Tuesday’s walkout, teens all over the nation are getting ready to lead the way.

Photo by Joe Brusky, CC-licensed.

We Participated in #NationalWalkoutDay to Show How Gun Violence Affects Chicago Students syndicated from https://sapsnkraguide.wordpress.com