#class ;;

[andysuriano]

Big News! i'll be a guest speaker at the Static Fish comic club at Pratt Institute!

From 8:30-9:30 EST, you can join us via zoom while I talk about some of my work and upcoming projects, a Q&A session and drawing demo will also be available!

This event is also open to students outside of Pratt, who can join via the zoom link. Fill out the form below if you are interested in joining online!

[crimson-and-clover-1717]

Yes, it’s brutal, but within the pirate world of the show it’s nothing out of the ordinary.

We’re told in this scene that if a white man insults another white man, the insulted white man might well direct his retort at the brown man present.

Stede - ‘I’d love to show you some saucier spoons, but there seems to be a distinct lack of those on this, supposedly, first class vessel.’

French Captain - ‘My apologies. I hadn’t imagined we’d be hosting your kind’. This cannot be directed at Stede as ‘your kind’ is the same as the French Captain’s, unless he’s referencing something else entirely. It’s directed at Ed. The Captain didn’t realise he would be ‘hosting’ someone who needed tutoring in fine dining. Not all necessary silverware is present. At the very least this is a class put-down.

Ed seeks clarification, very calmly: ‘My kind. What’s that supposed to mean?’

French Captain - ‘It means a rich donkey is still a donkey’.

This is when it very clearly becomes about race. We have the dehumanisation of a man of colour, compared unfavourably to an animal. Ed is not recognised as human. Not innately so, and he cannot even earn the status of being human. Money, new skills, achievements, learned social graces…nothing will ever allow him an equal status in the white man’s world. It’s similar to insults said about Othello by Iago… black ram, Barbary horse. Othello, a celebrated war general, poetic story-teller, peacemaker… Not White™

There’s possibly an argument that Ed has invaded the French ship and deserves the ire and insults of the French Captain. But what this scene does is try to explain why someone of Ed’s background feels the need to invade the French ship in the first place. Criminal subcultures are often (not always) born of inequality. Ed could almost never have garnered the reputation, riches and relative safety he has by honest means. He’d be his indigenous mother, defeated by the inequality in the world. Or his working-class father, drunk, and violent, and bitter at not being able to provide. What else is there for those who are never given a legitimate path to be anything other? Accept your lot, or fight back.

Ed fights back. He’s been fighting back his whole life.

Yes, the French Captain’s on the ropes. As an individual his days are done. But sociologically, the French Captain is punching down here, and he knows it. Even with his life at stake, he continues that punch down because he feels entitled from birth to do so. He’s going to die with it on his lips, that’s how entrenched it is. Whilst Ed’s punching up. Always punching up in a white man’s world. On a wider scale, this is not an equal fight.

Ed has been made painfully aware of his race and class. He subverts this to make sure the French Captain is painfully aware of his race (skin) and class (snail fork). It’s an anti-colonialist fightback.

‘Skin him first. And use the snail fork’.

It’s cruel, but it really is a genius line.

[thoughtportal]

[one-time-i-dreamt]

Bill Nye the Science Guy was my science teacher. When he came into class we'd all chant, "Bill Bill Bill" but also, "Science Science Science". Then one day I went to class and Bill wasn't there and it turned out he was fired. I found his apartment in a massive monolithic block and we had a heart to heart chat. He broke down into tears saying, "I really liked being your science guy".

[an-admiring-bog]

Things my extremely Italian physics professor has said:

“If you are walking in the woods nearby Chernobyl, you will probably be fine. But if you pick something up off the ground and eat it, you will die of radiation poisoning. Of course you may die if you eat things from the ground in other places, also, but likely not of radiation.”

“Unfortunately there is nothing I can teach you that will prevent you dying if there is on your house a hydrogen bomb. That is a politician problem. If any of you are president later, please do not hydrogen bomb my house.”

“Radioactivity could perhaps be used by terrorists, but it has not yet. Likely this is because terrorists do not study much physics.”

“Why is it that physics graduate students cannot make a nuclear bomb? It is not that they do not want to. They simply have not the money to buy the materials. Or anything else.”

[classpectanon]

hello homestuck kinnies that live in my computer

i finally went ahead and made a classpect quiz based on my personal conception of how things work. that means it's probably one of the more accurate classpect quizzes out there. consists of two parts. 20 questions total. go take it, share it, argue about it, whatever. have fun.

[brewerssupplies]

Hello all! Here's the Cartographer! A class about wandering the world in pursuit of its wonders! You are able to see and speak with the spirits of places and ask them to guide you. I really enjoyed making this class, so I hope you enjoy it as well!

[DRIVE]

[HOMEBREWERY]

[lonelyzarquon]

When something goes missing, you can always recreate it by the hole it left.

[incognitopolls]

We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.

[oxfords---notbrogues]

[upsettingandunfortunateclasshate]

[radicalgraff]

“The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal their bread.”

Anatole France quote sticker seen on an anti-homeless sign in Victoria, British Columbia

[one-time-i-dreamt]

I really hated this girl in my class and we kept exchanging notes with various threats of violence on them but then on a Zoom call I saw that she kept a bunch of them pinned on her wall with little hearts around them and I got the biggest crush on her after that.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Working class Dems who campaign on economics beat Trumpists in elections

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me FRIDAY NIGHT (Mar 22) in TORONTO, then SUNDAY (Mar 24) with LAURA POITRAS in NYC, then Anaheim, and more!

The Democratic Party Pizzaburger Theory of Electioneering is: half the electorate wants a pizza, the other half wants a burger, so we'll give them all a pizzaburger and make them all equally dissatisfied, thus winning the election:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/16/that-boy-aint-right/#dinos-rinos-and-dunnos

But no one wants a pizzaburger. The Biden administration's approach of letting the Warren/Sanders wing pick the antitrust enforcers while keeping judicial appointments in the Manchin-Synematic universe is a catastrophe in which progressive Dem regulators (who serve one term) are thwarted by corporatist Dem judges (who serve for life):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/14/making-good-trouble/#the-peoples-champion

The Democrats – like all parties in two-party systems – are a coalition; in this case, a "progressive" liberal-left coalition with liberals serving as senior partners, steering the party and setting its policies. These corporate dems like to color themselves as "neutral" technocrats with "realistic, apolitical" policies that represent what's best for the country:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

This sets up the left wing of the party as the starry-eyed, unrealistic radicals whose policies are unpopular and will lose elections. But for a decade, grassroots-funded primary challenges have made it possible to test this theory, by putting leftist politicians on the ballot in front of voters, especially in tight races with far-right Republicans (that is, exactly the kinds of races that the corporate wing of the party says we can't afford to take chances on).

The 2022 midterms included enough races to start testing these theories – and, unlike traditional midterms, these races enjoyed high voter turnout, thanks to the unpopularity of GOP positions like abortion bans, book bans and anti-trans laws. Jacobin teamed up with the Center for Working-Class Politics, Yougov and the Center for Work and Democracy at ASU and analyzed those races:

https://images.jacobinmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/11134429/CWCP-Report-2024.pdf

Their conclusion: candidates from working-class backgrounds who campaigned on economic policies like high-quality jobs, higher minimum wages, a jobs guarantee, ending offshoring and outsourcing, building infrastructure and bringing manufacturing back to the US won with a 50% share of the vote in rural and working-class districts. Dems who didn't lost with a 35% share of the vote:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-03-18-how-actually-existing-democrats-run-for-office/

In other words, in the kinds of districts where Trumpist politicians are beating Democrats, running on "left populist" policies beats Trumpist politicians.

That's the good news: if Dems recruit leftist, working class politicians and put them up for office on policies that address the material reality of voters' lives, they can beat fascist GOP candidates.

Now for the bad news: the Democratic establishment has no interest in getting these candidates onto the ballot. Working-class candidates, by definition, lack the networks of deep-pocketed cronies who can fund their primary campaigns. Only 2.3% of Dem candidates come from blue-collar backgrounds (if you include "pink-collar" professions like nursing and teaching, the number goes up to 5.9%):

https://jacobin.com/2024/03/left-populists-working-class-voters

All of this confirms the findings of Trump's Kryoptonite, an earlier Jacobin/CWCP research project that polled working-class voters on preferences for hypothetical candidates, finding that working-class candidates with economically progressive policies handily beat out Republicans, including MAGA Republicans:

https://images.jacobinmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/08125102/TrumpsKryptonite_Final_June2023.pdf

Since the Clinton-Blair years, "progressives" have abandoned economic populism ("It's not a burning ambition for me to make sure that David Beckham earns less money" -T. Blair) and pursued a "third way" that seeks to replace half the world's of supply white, male oligarchs with diverse oligarchs from a variety of backgrounds and genders. We were told that this was done in the name of winning elections with "modern" policies that replaced old-fashioned ideas about decent pay, decent jobs, and worker power.

These policies have delivered a genocide-riven world on the brink of several kinds of existential catastrophe. They're a failure. The pizzaburger party didn't deliver safety, nor prosperity – and it also can't deliver elections.

Name your price for 18 of my DRM-free ebooks and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the Humble Cory Doctorow Bundle.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/20/actual-material-conditions/#bread-and-butter

[writingwithcolor]

Diversity Win: Is "Crazy Rich" POC Representation Necessarily Empowering?

sodapopsculptor asked:

I’m writing a story with two sets of protagonists: A trio with a Black girl, a Latino, and a Vietnamese-American boy who all come from middle-upper class to ridiculously rich families, and a pair of white working-middle class sisters. They’re all heroes of this story. I’ve seen way too many rich white people and poor poc people in fiction, and I’m kinda getting sick of it, but I’m worried that by having the poc kids be rich and the white girls not so much, I’ll be reinforcing the idea that poc somehow rule the world. The only time the rich kids use their status as leverage is when the Asian threatens to sic his cop dad on a bully (race unstated but I imagined him as white) picking on a freshman, and during the Black girl’s birthday party, when she pays the biggest jock there fifty bucks (And later says offhandedly that it was just what she had in her pocket) to chase off a creep hitting on her.

OP, have you ever seen the “diversity win!” meme before?

I understand that your motivation for these narrative choices is to give POC a chance, if you will, to be the rich characters. But it is evident from this ask that you have not asked yourself what this entails. I want to ask you to critically examine the race and class intersections you’re creating here, as well as these kids’ roles in oppressive systems.

You explain that these rich POC are heroes and only have righteous reasons for leveraging their power.

But is your Black girl character aware of the potential disciplinary and/or legal consequences her jock accomplice might face while she has the resources to keep her hands clean? Are you?

Is your Asian character aware of how much of an abuse of power it is to “sic” a cop on someone, and the sheer amount of harm a criminal record or incarceration does to a juvenile with behavior issues? Are you?

So you want to put POC in positions of power for #representation.

Does it resonate with the group you’re representing?

Do you research and portray the unique ways race, ethnicity, class, and majority vs. minority status come together?

Or are you putting these characters in oppressive hegemonic roles for the sake of a power fantasy, on behalf of a group you're not even in?

To your question, you're not reinforcing the idea that "POC rule the world" because such a generalized belief does not exist. Instead, you're reinforcing:

The idea that society has “winners” and “losers.”

The idea that the problem with disproportionately powerful people is the lack of “equal opportunity” as opposed to the power imbalance to begin with.

The idea that those in oppressive positions of power need only have the right intentions to justify their use of it.

To be clear: that is not to say that you can't have jerk aristocrat billionaire millionaire crazy rich POC. Evil or mean rich characters are fun! I have some myself! You can even have rich characters who are gentle-hearted and well-intentioned, but you have to know the ways in which they’re privileged and decide how aware of that your characters are. That’s no problem.

But if you think that wealthy and powerful POC would have the same values and priorities as their poorer counterparts, you’re deluding yourself. There’s a reason why the quote “power corrupts” exists. There’s a reason why no matter where you look on the globe, there are historical dictators and tyrants.

If you want bratty rich POC who lack regard for the consequences of their actions, because you want bratty rich characters, great! If you want them because it would be uplifting or empowering representation? You’re doing it for the wrong reason.

~ Rina

I fully agree with Rina, and truly want to emphasize the last paragraph.

If you want bratty rich POC who lack regard for the consequences of their actions, because you want bratty rich characters, great! If you want them because it would be uplifting or empowering representation? You’re doing it for the wrong reason.

I don't think you need to aim to subvert or purposely make all the BIPOC rich and powerful and the white people poor and suffering. Add diversity and include upper class rich and class privileged BIPOC, sure thing! And you can avoid your fears of intentional subversion message by including rich and powerful white characters as well, even if they're not the focus of your story. Just their existence helps. You could also include middle-class characters of Color as well.

More reading: Black in upper-class society

~Mod Colette