#black people shouldn't have to be the ones educating their oppressors

[secretgamergirl]

Remember folks, "political correctness" is just bigotry with extra steps.

Stuff that horrible bigots love to gripe about overlaps with stuff that doesn't exist anywhere in the world beyond the imaginations of those bigots almost completely, and I could give countless depressing examples of this, but right now the one I'd like to focus on is the concept of "political correctness."

See, a bigot would have you believe that their very real, not at all made up oppressors, passed this draconian law back around, I dunno, the early '90s sometime, that says there is a Correct term for everything, and that you can only refer to a given thing with that Correct term, or you will be sent to prison. Also the list of Correct terms is constantly being changed and updated and you really have to stay on your toes to make sure you're up to date, and isn't that a huge pain?

Everything about this is, of course, complete horseshit. Nobody is oppressing them, no such law was ever passed, and there is not, I can't stress this enough, even a loose socially enforced list of "the words you're supposed to use for things." I also don't believe there's anyone out there who actually believes any of this exists, but feel free to get into it with your racist uncle or whatever and start pulling on those threads about where the list is, who maintains it, and what law it is that you break if you don't stick to it.

That said, there absolutely IS a habit held by bigots trying to look respectable where every few years they change their whole vocabulary up, generally keeping all the code-switching in lockstep with each other, and huh, if they AREN'T actually being pressured to do that by outside forces, why DO they keep doing that? And the answer is simply that it confuses people who aren't paying enough attention. When you hear people using new, more scientific/specific/cumbersome sounding language to say something, you might think "oh hey, this is someone who's way better educated on this subject than I am, because I've never heard these terms, so I should pay attention." And no, you shouldn't, because it's the same exact baseless crap they were saying before, they're just substituting whatever word it was enough people realized they were explicitly using as a slur.

Usually, to sell the "enlightened" image, the new terms they pull out tend to be initially pulled out of some actual academic/progressive sort of context. Never with any sort of actual acknowledgement of how the term was being used in that specific instance of course, just, "hey, I saw someone say this, it's the new 'politically correct' term for what I'm talking about, that means you can't get mad. See, I touched home base!" And I could give so very many examples here, but since I'd rather not step on anyone's toes, let me just stick to one I'm pretty sure people have moved away from more or less completely, then a couple recent trans things.

So, there was this period where people were constantly talking about "African-Americans." The original idea someone presumably had was that it was weird how we talk about people being "black" when for anyone else we tend to talk about in terms of the country they're from, maybe also the country most of their ancestors are from. Like you'd maybe call someone French, or French-Canadian, and wouldn't ever try to zero-in on some visible trait by which to identify people with roots in France. And like, sure, that's not a bad basis to start off a conversation about self-reflection and so on. And of course I'd like to hope the first time someone busted this out someone immediately chimed in with how Africa isn't a country and that really should have been something more specific.

But the context where the term first came up really doesn't matter. What does matter is some bigot caught it, and went "aha! There's something I can say to make it less obvious I'm a racist!" and just kinda did a quick find/replace on all their propaganda. Suddenly talking about how "65,000% of all violent crime is committed by African-Americans!" or how they took a vacation in, I dunno, Australia and "wow that whole country has just been completely taken over by African-Americans!" or whatever other racist gibberish they want to shout.

And of course this strategy DOES tend to work well enough to consistently get big swaths of the broader population on board and all pleased with themselves for keeping on top of things and being sure to use "more accurate" terms even when that leads to, you know, referring to the original inhabitants of Australia with a hyphenated term composed of the name of two countries they've never lived in nor can they trace their ancestry back to. And that in particular (along with being just too long, and completely failing to address the whole problem that caused the term to come about in the first place) is why these days you only ever see people saying "African-American" if they're particularly old and out of touch, or if they're just kinda openly being a racist scumbag and saying it with a sneer.

Here's another example. Earlier today, I saw someone who I know meant well talking about gender reveal parties and saying we should really call them "sex reveal parties," and I had to sit down and explain how no, that wouldn't help anything, and also it totally plays into TERF propaganda.

See, if you're talking about a person/animal/plant/whatever being, for example, male, you can either say "the sex of this here goat is male" or "the gender of this goat is male." These are synonymous terms, in this context. Use them totally interchangeably. The only time there's a distinction between the two is that we also use "sex" as a term for the act of banging/boning/gettin' down/getting laid/etc. etc. and you simply wouldn't ever say "see that woman in the red dress there? That's Sandra, we had gender last Saturday" and "gender" gets used to explain why like if you're speaking French and you're pointing out a particular chair you end up going "that's her." The whole language just kinda arbitrarily uses masc and femme terms for literally all nouns because neutral ones don't exist, but like you're not gonna cover a kid's eyes when someone stacks a bunch of chairs up, so it'd be weird to say the sex of those chairs is female.

But anyway somewhere over the years bigots got it through their heads that they kinda lost the fight on shouting about the pure sacred inflexible nature of gender and how impossible it is that someone might make inaccurate assumptions about it and so a lot of them just noticed this alternate term and started going "ah OK! It's sex then! Sex is the thing that's all holy and ordained by god and must never be questioned! Gender is this totally fake thing people made up to pretend otherwise!" Again, this is just complete horseshit. Sometimes they'll try and get clever and pretend they aren't just synonymous terms by shouting about genitals but like, no, I can say the sex of this tree outside that blasts me with pollen every spring is male, and I am fairly certain the tree in question does not in fact have a penis, thanks.

Others of course try to stay more current with things. They read someone talking about trans people being "assigned male/female at birth" in like, some academic context where someone was trying to explain how nonbinary people don't have one size fits all medical transtion needs or whatever and went "mwahaha! People know I'm a bigot when I point at women who happen to be trans and shout 'men' but I bet I can say this event I'm holding is for 'AFABs only' and people will think I'm enlightened!" Tumblr is full of them!

Anyway, point is there are not in fact any sort of magical words that make it OK to say bigoted garbage. Also there's no word police. Also I kinda got sidetracked but gender reveal parties suck because basically this one woman ended up getting an article written about the party she threw a few years ago when after a whole bunch of miscarriages she got a pregnancy far enough along to have visible gonads on an ultrasound, and a bunch of terrible people didn't really read past the headline and got this immediate weird competitive "keeping up with the Jonses" bug up their butts and prompted started having this weird competition to outdue this random woman's party through ever-escalating pyrotechnics displays, and those keep starting wildfires and seriously injuring people.

There's kind of a secondary concern too where they're on the ever-growing list of weird things parents do to really try and push their children into whatever boxes they want them in before they can get a word in edgewise, like how people don't let their daughters touch any toy that isn't explicitly a fashion doll, or would rather gouge their sons' eyes out than let them even behold the color pink. And, I dunno, I feel like part of the reason people are so gung-ho about the whole gender reveal thing is that they are in fact, very aware they are taking up arms in culture war there and they're pretty convinced they're somehow sticking it to trans people in doing so. But, eh, it's really more just generally being a weird creepy control freak treating children like property? There's a whole list of reasons you maybe don't want to do that before we get to the slim chance that it turns out your kid is trans, frankly.

[thelittlepalmtree]

Maybe it's just me but like every time I get a job or get a position I assume that I didn't deserve it and that I need to like work really hard to keep it. And I think about this in the context of like everyone being upset about affirmative action. Because I have definitely used my Egyptian heritage as lake a plus in Interviews because I am really passionate about culturally responsive education and I talk about how being Egyptian and be the only person I knew with this heritage had me thinking about race from a young Age. And on the one hand it's really good that I'm passionate about Is culturally responsive education, But on the other hand my experience being white passing going to a primarily white institution and being mixed race with a race that is not black, Is incredibly different from the experience of my students going to a primarily black school that is underfunded in a primarily black area and experiencing poverty in many cases. Like I don't think either experience should Be seen as more important than another, But I do not have the same experience as my students and I'm very open eyed about that.

But of course when you're in the interview they're like ooh we can check this Box. You can be added to the list of teachers of color we hired this year. Which I do feel like is the definition of a Diversity hire. And that's fine I don't care. I'm a really good teacher.

The only time however I was ever accused of only getting the job because of my race, Was when I applied for a job at a call center in college and one of my roommates also applied for that job and I got it but she didn't. And she was black. And she said well it must be because You're white. And then I said actually they said that when they saw my name they thought I wasn't going to be white. Or something to that effect because this was like 9 years ago. And then she goes oh then they must have filled the diversity quota with you. Or something to that effect. Which I think the only difference was just that like I come off really good in interviews. And she was fucking rude.

I do think that some people are so used to seeing things through the lens of like well if it wasn't me then that means that I'm being attacked in some way, That they don't really just like step back and say like oh well I didn't get it. And I definitely think about race all the time I don't shy away from talking about it it is an important part of my life, But I'm also able to recognize that it is just a facet of who I am and it is not my entire being. I have been treated way worse by people telling me that my experience are not valid because I'm not visibly Brown enough then I have by like 90% of people who supposedly fit the demographic of like awful oppressors. Which Hey maybe that's just because I'm white passing. Typically not to racists but I'll give you that one. And often the people who do this the most are white people. Like the supposedly woke white person who Has some other feature of themselves that they consider to be oppressed is almost always telling me that I'm not allowed to talk about racism or have an opinion about racism that is different from theirs because I'm not Brown enough.

I think it's just important to remember that like systemic issues are systemic not individual. There's very little that you can do with an individual person that will make a difference. And it's way more important to spend your time organizing or going to events that have been organized by others and working on systemic change then it is to like call someone that you know racist. Or to tell someone in your life that they are not as woke as you. And being oppressed is not something cool and it's not a contest and at the end of the day everyone's experience is important and worthy of uplifting. There's not limited time there's not limited space. Everyone's voice can be heard if we choose to hear it. And the Limitations are created by the oppressors so you shouldn't be beholden to them.

[stabbedinthenameofscience]

The Radical History of Black Panther(s)

"Black Panther's" United States setting isn't Oakland just by chance.  Setting the rise of the miliant Black Panther in this city is deliberate and historically significant.  Though many people (read, many white people) don't even acknowledge this history, sigificant strides in black liberation were made in the city in the 1960s.

In 1966, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party for Self Defense.  The purpose of this organization wasn't the pacifist aim as Dr King, in fact, it ran counter to it.  The party formed after assassinations- one of Malcolm X, a pioneer black leader who demanded equality "by any means necessary" and the execution of an unarmed black teen, Matthew Johnson (and I say execution because these police murders are executions, no matter how you shake it- #BlackLivesMatter).  By 1968, the Black Panthers would have 2,000  members across the United States.

For those entirely unfamiliar with the philosophy of the Black Panthers, I refer you to their Ten-Point Program, a manifesto of their beliefs and goals.  

In response, the Black Panthers decided to take up arms and patrolled their community streets, guns in hand, to confront officers who would abuse their power and gun down their fellows (copwatching).  They had enough and they were determined to, like Malcolm X, stop the violence with countermeasures if necessary.  To this end, they protested the Mulford Act in 1967 that was specifically aimed to criminalize carrying loaded weapons openly in public and was a response to their community patrols.  This act was supported by Ronald Reagan, who stated he could see no reason why a rational citizen would carry loaded weapons in public.

Though we don't know his age at the time of "Black Panther," I'm going to hazard a guess that N'Jadaka (Killmonger) is likely in his 30s.  Given that it is set in the general present, his birth would have been in the 80s.  His father, N'Jobu, was in Oakland long enough to say leadership in the black community had been assassinated, though we don't know when he arrived.  It is entirely possible he has been in Oakland for a decade or more, though this is not necessary for the assassinations of Dr King and Malcolm X to be still reverberating through that community.  It is also entirely possible he's speaking of the murder of Huey Newton in 1989, killed as a part of a gang initiation in order to try to gain control of a crack ring.

N'Jadaka is born into this environment and into this philosophy- "by any means necessary."  He makes sense, a product of his environment, but also as one of the philosophies of the Black Panthers themselves.  He becomes the embodiment of this one specific aspect.  And yes, the Black Panthers did have a history of violence, both towards outsiders who threatened their community and within the organization.  They were not perfect.  But yet again, they were standing up at a time when Black Power was fighting back against a system of Jim Crow, Redlining, Segregation, and the legacy of slavery that kept black people still in economic chains.  Their actions were not occurring in a vacuum.

Black nationalism was not merely a small part of this movement.  Many within the Black Power movement as a whole believed that the black community had been so wronged and so dehumanized by the dominant white culture that they had to isolate and take care of themselves first and foremost- create black businesses, support black families, create their own economic centers and community programs.  This is what Wakanda itself does.  It isolates, it helps itself, and it is representative of an uncolonized centre of black power.  Wakanda is what the Black Power movement often sought, the society that doesn't rely on the colonizers/oppressors for their support and protection.  Shuri herself calls Ross "colonizer" when she first meets him and he has to learn to sit down and listen, to be an ally, not a leader, in a community that isn't his to dominate.

But T'Challa adheres to another value system, one that also was represented within Black Power and within the Black Panthers themselves.  They did not only respond to the colonized United States with violence, but also with social programs- with free clinics, with educational opportunities, with free programs to feed the children within their community.  They had a vision of a world where they could depend on one another in solidarity, black communities united to decolonize the minds of those around them, to uplift their fellows, and to see hope in a world that sought to destroy them and strip them of their heritage and blackness.  Black Power led to the resurgence of traditional African fasion within the United States and a movement towards natural hair and "black is beautiful," movements that still exist today (and I will say sadly so, because our culture still doesn't believe in the value of blackness).  

The Black Panther Party fell when outside influences, as well as infighting, brought them to a halt.  No small contribution was made by the FBI, J Edgar Hoover calling them, “one of the greatest threats to the nation’s internal security.”  The FBI sought to undermine the social programs in addition to contributing significantly to a Chicago Police raid, the result of such being two party members shot dead in their apartment, asleep.  The police would later describe the resulting firefight as one in which hundreds of bullets were flying, but forensics would later determine only one bullet came from the Black Panthers.  Is it any wonder, with this history reflected in the title of the Wakandan king, that they do not want outside influence?  This is the story of black communities in the United States- one of violence and of a dominant culture seeking extermination of nationalist and self-determinist movements.

T'Challa approaches the world as the other end of the philosophy of the Black Panther Party- he does exactly what they did in the end of the film.  He creates a social welfare program to better the lives of Oakland residents exactly like those children fed in the 1960s by the Black Panthers to strengthen community and bring pride in their heritage.  Wakanda reaches out to prove what a black nation can be, what one is when it hasn't been colonized and stripped of its identity, its resources, its people.  

N'Jadaka isn't entirely wrong.  This is the beauty of how this film frames his death.  While his violence seems senseless, to him, it isn't.  It is a reaction and a reclamation of his right as a prince, a king, a man looking out for oppressed people everywhere by pulling down his oppressors to make them take him and his fellows seriously.  I can't find fault in this in principle.  He has been hurt, he has seen his community in poverty, violence, addiction, and going nowhere, and he is determined to fix it by putting his force where he finds blame.  In his mind, this is how to fight the powers that have destroyed the black community worldwide.  

T'Challa takes a different approach, but he respects his opponent.  As N'Jakada is dying, he still seeks to show him the beauty his father saw in Wakanda, in the land of his birth, a place where he was free and thriving.  There is a peace in N'Jakada's death that seems unique in this genre of film, as there is a depth of history and philosophy here that I really find inspirational and refreshing.  It isn't just two men fighting for the sake of fighting or power.  They are there with purpose, two counterpoint histories that can understand one another, even if they don't agree at all in their approaches.  They both, however, share one thing- they know they can't stay isolated while they watch their people die of starvation, execution, economic strangulation.  

I didn't think I would ever see a superhero movie that was this well made, this well cared for, and this well written.  It is clear that the writers, actors, directors, and designers put their souls into this film, making something truly special that was inspiring to all people and also incredibly moving to those who knew this history.  To me, it is utterly profound and stunning that a big studio actually allowed this to be produced.  Black history is largely ignored unless it is Dr King or the occassional black entertainer like Aretha Franklin, or a writer such as Toni Morrison or Maya Angelou, especially that history that cannot be sanitized to be nonthreatening to white audiences.  I left the theatre in awe of the boldness of this story, the history embedded in it, and the strength that was gifted to both the hero and the antihero (I won't call N'Jakada a villain- he does some dark and despicable things, but he deserves better than such a dismissal of his motives and perspective).

References: https://www.history.com/topics/black-panthers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulford_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huey_P._Newton http://www.sacbee.com/news/local/history/article148667224.html

[724fc]

i don't know who this is or if they're new here, but the audacity for you to come into MY ask box and say it's difficult to address people who are "easily volatile" has got to be a joke. you're afraid of telling middle aged men and women who paint other men on their faces that it's wrong to attack children? to your family and friends that they shouldn't start sending monkey emojis and using slurs against people? and want me to what? agree?????? one thing you need to know about me is that i have fought for the betterment of black lives BEFORE it was a hashtag and have stood chin up against too many authoritative figures. so excuse me if i don't give a fuck that YOU'RE having a hard time telling your neighbor that it's bad to hurt other fans. if you're a coward, say that! but do not come into my ask box saying no dumbass bullshit like this.

a lot, and i mean A LOT of stupid shit was said in this but "talking and educating is pointless"??? is there a singular frozen baked bean rattling around in your head??? your privilege is showing and causing me to go blind in my left eye. in case you missed it, the oppressed have no way of "rectifying" racism nor is it our job. racism is a system put into place by oppressors that can ultimately only be dismantled by said oppressors. don't say "nobody" wants to rectify because black people and other bipoc have been TRYING for HUNDREDS of years. it is not a problem we created and we cannot be the sole solution. you are the unfortunate & weird you're talking about. please reply, but let it be known now that you've been blocked and won't be able to do so on anon. say it w your chest or shut the fuck up.