#by which i mean posting privilege

[maulfucker]

racism in star wars will have wikis saying shit like "this species that is inspired on a real life non-white people is just too stupid to use the Force"

[redysetdare]

every time i see a post that is like "ughh why cant we have aspec characters who aren't aroace for once" I have to do a double take like "is the aroace rep in the room with us right now?" because genuinely....where is all this aroace rep y'all are complaining about? Why cant i find it yet it's apparently the only aspec rep we get?? You admit that TV never says the word aromantic so where is the aroace rep. So far I've pretty much only seen canonically asexual characters and not much else buddy.

[guideaus]

Not to talk about this again, but i still think the initial response to shuro's introduction was crazy, but also the fact that some people who hated shuro saw others analyzing his character to defend against them, but chose to keep participating in a baby fight fictional characters did (but the difference is the fictional characters make up in the same episode), and then people still are like "I see you're giving me reasons why I shouldn't follow my gut instinct reaction, and allegedly this character is complex, but, also, I don't care." like i don't think you really acknowledge shuro's role if you hate him bc you like laios so much...

these comments and likes dont exactly sound like they're acknowledging shuro's complexity as a character at all. its so clear when people refuse to even consider thinking about him when they keep saying things like this. theres also kabru hate in the notes and it feels so clear what the anime fandom's pov is for our newly introduced poc in the show. they are mad that shuro was mean (they view it as ableism), but ignore laios' racism, it is incredibly biased and kinda concerning so many people agree with the "yeah, yeah, he's apparently got a purpose 🙄 but my innocent baby did nothing wrong". it genuinely sucks that the fandom is like this now.

[maddy-ferguson]

using intersectionality to discredit feminism and downplay its reach and essentially weaponizing it when it was coined to describe black women's experience of racism and sexism is nasty work...

[tenrose]

I hate living in this world.

[swordfaery]

anyway my favourite thing about dead men fanfiction is the wildly different characters we all write. like. not even the ones who have been dead for years and have so little actual characterisation but even the ones who were alive in canon were probably very different one hundred, two hundred, three hundred years ago. also theyre under characterised in fiction. also we are all just having fun

[wild-at-mind]

Had a really stupid conversation via minor emotional breakdown with a queer friend about what makes an LGBTQ person 'assimilist'. From what she said I'm kind of forced to draw the conclusion 'if you say you're not assimilist, then you're not'.

[indigochromatic]

...you know what, I don't think I've ever seen someone talk about this, so why not. Sometimes it feels like a lot of the queer community sees any relationships that happen to be m/f as only capable of, like, shitty walmart-brand knockoff queerness, instead of Real True Queerness. It's "boring". It's "doesn't really count as bi/pan/omni rep", in media. So many posts and essays out there still have to constantly reiterate that 1) bi people exist, and 2) they're still bi and queer even if they're in hetero relationships--just the fucking baseline concepts! And I'm tired of having to defend or be expected to apologize for relationships like mine, instead of being able to actually...y'know, celebrate them. So, here: I actually fucking love being a bisexual guy in a hetero relationship. (Especially with someone who's also mspec.) -> I love that we get vicarious joy from each other's wildly different genders and ways of of experiencing attraction. -> I love that she thinks my attraction to guys is something to cherish, and something she's always trying to learn how to be a better ally for. I love learning about her aceness, and what attraction to femininity looks like for her. -> I love that she also knows what it's like to adore and be attracted to guys, even if her experience of it is different from mine, and I love that she knows firsthand how it feels to have a lady take your breath away, because it makes it all the easier for her to believe me when I tell her that's how I feel about her. -> I love that it kinda feels like we're a whole bunch of different types of relationship all at once: we're gay as fuck, we're disgustingly straight, we're sapphic as hell, we're so far off the screen that we've wrapped all the way around and become straight-but-genderswapped all over again. To put it as simply as I can: I don't feel erased, I feel seen.

[fiapple]

repeat after me: if you are the descendent of colonizers living on stolen land, you do not get to judge the methods of decolonial resistance movements.

[jaggedwolf]

okay so I've been binging CSI: Vegas, because I used to watch a ton of CSI as a kid, and it's alright background television but I keep thinking of it as worse NCIS: Hawai'i. I swear I'm not just saying this because NCIS has Lucy/Whistler. Like,

both shows are 2021 spinoffs of long-running CBS procedurals

whose original shows had lily-white main casts but are now clearly trying to be more diverse

boss lady is a woman of color everyone respects and thinks is a badass, she's divorced with at least one kid

there's an asian woman who is the friendly, spunky one, relatively newer while still being on the A-team

more senior white dude agent who is tight with boss lady

unfortunately, csi is a sequel, and is weighed down by its legacy characters (who I mostly like! Grissom was a childhood fave, and I like listening to Sara's accent), and has 10-12 episode seasons which is a hard spot for a procedural. insufficient to care about the newbie's personal drama while dealing with OGs' as well.

....also no Kai with good shirts and T-shirts. No one on NCIS: Vegas has good fashion. No one.

[22degreehalo]

We talk a lot on this site about the intoxicating pleasure of using fanfic to make our blorbos kiss and/or fuck raw,

But nothing will ever come close to the sheer self-indulgent satisfaction of seeing a character finally realise how badly another character has had it all their lives, coming to view them with new and horrified sympathy if not outright guilt over how badly they have treated them due to their lack of awareness of this so very tragic backstory!!!!

[britneyshakespeare]

Another Thing Wrong With The Former Gifted Kid Discourse, Since I Can't Stop Thinking About It:

people have such an unhelpful tendency to universalize their own experience when talking about the plights and struggles about Gifted Kids™—and what they are talking about is not necessarily invalid, but they're more often talking about their individual responses to their particular schools' policies. This Is Not A Systemic Analysis. it's helpful; i sympathize with you. But You Are Not Dismantling The Inequities by saying this or that happened At Your School when you were a child, and it affected you this or that way because of Who You Are.

example. i always see people talking about neurodivergence in this conversation, which is actually helpful in spotlighting how the Gifted Kid discourse often glosses over such complex intersectional issues. you can talk about how you were Gifted & Neurodivergent and how those experiences lead you to future disappointment. this is, i must stress, valid. but your analysis of your own life Is Not A Systemic Analysis. your experience alone will never speak for how the educational system and trends in policy among schools across the united states affect ALL neurodivergent people negatively because there are neurodivergent people who are Different From You. not to mention that when people point out that very often "Gifted Kid" usually correlates with some degrees of privilege, people push back and go nooooo I'm neurodivergent. people across all other marginalized identities who are systemically disadvantaged by the educational system can be neurodivergent. this does not make you, initially, when you were as a young Kid determined to be Gifted, NOT also in fact privileged.

if you are not ready to discuss experiences that were different from your own growing up, you aren't really engaging in the discourse of how to improve public education in the united states. it's a diiii-verse country we live in. not only in the ways we traditionally think of. when we think of "marginalized" or "oppressed" people, some specific and historically significant groups come to mind. when it comes to advantages that set up a child for future educational success, these broad categories often leave gaps because they lead people to generalizations, and ultimately, fatalism.

but there's really so much hope in early childhood education if we were to make things more equitable, ie like i always say UNIVERSAL PRE-K. these kids who are determined as "gifted" more often than not were just from more enriched home environments that prepared them for learning how to read, write, and do math. it's often not special innate abilities that leads to differences in outcomes for different students, but That's How The Kids Interpret It When Some of Them Are Called "Gifted." they're more often than not, not doing something that's truly exceptional or precocious for their age. they're displaying signs of age-appropriate development, when often, the kids who may be lagging behind them skill-wise just Haven't Practiced Those Skills As Much.

so yes, that's why there's a correlation in things like upper- and middle-class white kids being seemingly more successful in school (and more commonly deemed "gifted") at a young age. it's from privilege. it's not even just the implicit biases of their educators already working in their favor for their race and class. it's the fact that being more privileged, generally, means their family and parents had all of their basic needs provided for. they had more time to read with you. they could buy more development-promoting toys. they probably had better mental health to cope with the demands of child-rearing. if they suffered chronic or sudden physical health issues, they were insured. privileged children are usually less exposed at a younger age to the harshnesses of this world, as every child should be. ALL of these little advantages build up, in terms of what a child can be provided with before they go to school. anything that's going wrong in a child's family system can negatively impact them without them even being old enough to understand it.

you may not think of yourself as Privileged. you might prefer to think of yourself as Gifted. Gifted is so nice, even if it's demoted to Former Gifted. at one point you were told you were superior and it felt really good. and You, reader, i do not know You. i'm not calling You privileged, even if you are! hell, everyone's privileged in some way. i am at the point in the post where for transparency's sake i think i should say I Could Be What Some People Call "Former Gifted". i was called smart as a kid and given special homework sometimes etc. i'm not calling any Former Gifted people stupid for not realizing this either. what i mean is that this kids Are Not Usually Actually Gifted. this is a compliment given overwhelmingly to children who were just simply not deprived. when people say they were once Gifted, they're more often than not saying I Had The Early Opportunities To Learn Everyone Should Have, But Doesn't. this doesn't make you an outlier. It Might Just Be A Sign of Privilege.

[citrineghost]

I think about this a lot...

I just want you all to know, even if you don't see any people in your area with pronoun pins or bright, queer clothing, or with clockable traits, there's a very good chance you're surrounded by queer people who are blending in with the cishets. You're not alone.

Ever since I've started passing, I've had this repeated thought... I'll be in a public place and I'll see someone who's almost definitely queer, and it makes my day, but then I wonder, do they see me? Do they know I'm here? Do they understand that I'm one of them?

To be passing is what a lot of trans people see as the end goal, but, if you're not trying to be stealth but simply not going out of your way to display that you're queer, it can come with a profound sense of sudden exclusion - like you're too passing to count anymore, or like you'll be unrecognizable to your queer siblings

So, for everyone's benefit, I just want to say, remember that there are those of us who don't stand out. Don't assume every person that you don't clock as trans is cis. Don't assume every person that you don't clock as gay is straight. We speak out against cisheteronormativity, but to protect ourselves and remain in the safe bubble of those we expect to be safe for ourselves, we are often times perpetuating it

[lena-in-a-red-dress]

I just watched a documentary called "The Rachel Divide" about Rachel Dolezal and the aftermath of her being "outed" as white and it was, uh.

Interesting?

Overall, as a documentary I'm not sure I would have gone the route the filmmaker(s) took. There were some aspects I think could have been explored more, and while they did give black activists room to speak, I think they should have been given more screentime.

Literally no one has asked me, but I have a knack for reading into things that weren't meant to be read into, so here are some thoughts.

One thing that stood out to me, good or bad (bad, in my opinion, but hey), is that she was utterly unapologetic. She listened to people tell her how they felt about her deception and the problems with her self-coined identity, but she didn't hear them. You could literally see her shut down when anybody spoke against her. While it was almost certainly also a coping mechanism in the face of conflict, any true resolution would have had to come from a place of open and honest vulnerability on her part, which was visibly not a place she was at during any of the panels/interviews they featured.

It turns out she actually wrote a book about herself, which I did not know. But I did notice that she chose a white man as her co-writer. If I was her, and if I was trying to actually be heard and accepted by the black community, the most sensible thing to do would be to find a black voice to join mine, for better or worse. That would just be common sense. Then again, maybe she did try to find one and just no one wanted to do it. But I do think it's telling that it was a white man. Privilege compounding privilege right there.

Furthermore, as the documentary progresses, I could see how progressively uncomfortable her kids were about the whole situation. Her kids are black, and from the beginning they were seemingly both honest about the effect the debacle has had on them, but also very careful in how they phrased any answer regarding their opinion on what their mom has done. They were defensive of their mom, but they chose their words very carefully to avoid actually having an opinion. By the end of the documentary, and this could be entirely wrong, but I got the sense that they were pulling away from it-- and her-- entirely.

But really the icing on the cake was that apparently one of her paintings that was featured in the documentary (she's actually a fairly gifted artist, to my untrained eye), was actually an unacknowledged replica of an existing piece of art. They put that little revelation a few tiles into the end credits.

I also noticed a typo in the credits, so there's that.

[thompsborn]

me, 30 minutes ago: its 1 am and i should sleep <3

me, immediately after: refreshes tumblr, decidedly does not go to sleep

[bitter-sweet-coffee]

when will people cough north americans stop generalizing the entirety of continents as one entity? europe is culturally diverse, so is south america, and asia, and africa, and all the little places inbetween like countries in the caucasus?

i’m sure it’s real easy to generalize a whole lot of culturally rich places to make your point, buddy