#systemic injustice

[intersectionalpraxis]

Defend and Protect Black Women!!

Misogynoir medical bias is KILLING Black women disproportionately. If you know even a little history of how Black women have been systematically dehumanized and objectified in the medical industrial complex -you'd know this is FAR too common and it's despicable. These medical professionals should be losing their licenses to practice medicine.

"Black women are three to four times more likely to experience complications during pregnancy and childbirth and die from these complications compared with white women. Additionally, infants born to Black women are two times more likely to be born premature (<37 weeks of gestation) compared with infants born to white women."

"In the 19th century, J. Marion Sims performed experimental surgery on enslaved Black women without their consent to develop a cure for vesicovaginal fistula. These experiments facilitated the generations of two key health care scripts about Black women in the context of reproductive health care: (1) it is acceptable to perform procedures on Black women without their consent; and (2) Black women have a high tolerance for pain."

"Although there is a plethora of research documenting Black women's experiences of racism and discrimination while navigating perinatal care, much less has been reported regarding the relationship between racism and clinical care through the lens of clinicians' caring for Black women during pregnancy and childbirth."

[neuroticboyfriend]

i want justice for all disabled people. i want us to be able to live freely, to be loved, to have rights, to not be hurt and discarded. i want a better world for us all so deeply. this includes you, whether you think you deserve goodness or not. a life free of oppression is not something to be deserved in the sense of needing to do something to be worthy of it. you inherently need it. you have an inherent right to this and i am sorry we don't live in a better world. but one day we will. we have to.

[anti-zionist-jew]

Perfectly said. Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu are not the sole problem. They are a symptom of the problems

[alwaysbewoke]

true, and they know it. it’s by design.

[philosophicalconservatism]

"We must reject the idea that every time a law's broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions."

Ronald Reagan (1911-2004) U.S. president.

Here President Reagan targets the very popular notion of collective guilt. This is a critical component of the modern concept of "systemic" social evils

[koetree]

“dark academia” pt.2

[crazycatsiren]

Fat women deserve better.

Fat disabled people deserve better.

Fat trans people deserve better.

Fat people deserve better.

[nokingsonlyfooles]

The Future is Allistic?

Murderbot is the best thing about All Systems Red, and I think the author knows that. That's cool. The humans don't need much for development, this isn't their story, they're just another thing Murderbot has to deal with. We've only got about 150 pages for this, and it's book one, so we're going to gloss over some aspects of the world to focus on the character.

Murderbot does not wish to exist in the sort of well-meaning institution where the humans would put it, a place where being "cared for" means a loss of autonomy. Murderbot would like the ability to get up and microwave a burrito at 0100 hours. ...Or whatever "passing the burrito test" means in the future, for a robot. So would we all!

But, uh, where are "we"? Where are the autistic humans who would read a book about Murderbot, go "oh, it me" and then talk about it with other humans, autistic and allistic both?

There are "humans," who may be well-meaning but clueless or openly hostile towards Murderbot, and who produce media with happy robots coexisting with humans and some level of personhood. (Either robots do not produce media in the future, most robots are not like Murderbot, or we just never see robot media or robots like Murderbot. Not much time for world-building!) There are robots, all of whom have no autonomy and are hostile cannon-fodder - although Murderbot doesn't feel great about that, it'll still kill them and move on. And there's Murderbot, who appears to be the only autistic thing in the universe.

And, I get that. I get how that feels. I get how someone in the YA audience who masks and passes like Murderbot probably feels like the only autistic thing in a hostile/clueless universe. It was like that for me and often it still is. For a book of limited scope, maybe that's enough. An author can't fix everything, and sometimes you gotta play the ball where it lies. But the real world is so much bigger than how it feels: there are lots of us, we have communities, we are seen, and we talk about ourselves.

We are human beings! We don't have to be created autistic like a robot, because we are naturally-occurring, and you would need to do some serious fucking eugenics to make us go away. (Even then, it probably wouldn't work. Eugenics hasn't been the society-purifying, scientific success so many people wanted/still want it to be.) It's not like you could just stop vaccinating kids, or abuse them a bit less, or abuse them a bit more - just until they're normal! - or any of these other "solutions" that have been floated to deal with us. You'd have to change how we function on a fundamental level as we develop in the womb, or shortly thereafter, or kill us, but I repeat myself.

On some level, in general, I think we do know that "curing" someone of autism, even if nobody physically dies, is a type of murder. Here, I am thinking of another future where autism doesn't seem to exist and nobody knows how to deal with it. Julian Bashir, in Star Trek: DS9, is the closest thing we get to an autistic human being who has a regular job and just gets to exist and interact like another person. And he's the illegal result of eugenic experimentation! His parents didn't like that he was underperforming in school, so they did some eugenics on him, and he calls that murder. That plotline is criminally underdeveloped, but it is there. It was there in the 90s, when the general view of autism was a nightmare disease with no cure that ruins children. We still knew that rewiring someone's brain to make them more convenient was wrong.

(Funnily enough, we do grab children who are underperforming in school and force them to mask better, like Julian. But it involves putting them in a Skinner Box and training them like Pavlov's dogs, with punishments for acting autistic and rewards for acting less so. It doesn't make them stop being autistic, but it makes them easier to deal with. And in so many cases, that's all we care about!)

If the public at large figured out that Julian was created autistic (because autism doesn't just happen), if he didn't mask like Murderbot, he'd go in an institution like the Jack Pack. Like where they wanted to put Murderbot. He clearly doesn't need to be there, but that's where society has decided he belongs, because he should not exist. He's only like that because someone made him that way, and they shouldn't have.

Just recently, I got smacked with the realization that people with complex intersections can't just happen in fiction. If I knew a queer, deaf person, I would write them the funnest queer and deaf character to play. It wouldn't be hard to write that character! They would fit into Hyacinth's house or the Black Orchid just fine! Calliope could've been deaf (along with being GNC, and multiracial, and autistic), instead of just growing up where there's a deaf school with a deaf friend whom we only meet briefly. ...So why didn't I do that? Why didn't that occur to me in the first place? I'm trying to create a diverse world like the real one, but we don't see that person.

Part of it is that I didn't see media with that person. But the reason it's hard to see that media is, it's hard to justify that character. We, the audience, have a default "blank" character in our heads (it's not blank at all, it's cis, het, white, male, and a lot of things the usual protagonist is), and the artist needs to tweak that into an individual with words or paint or a performance or something. The more tweaks someone has to do, the more likely the audience will get bored or confused and wander off. Beyond the privileged default, everything that makes a character has to be relevant, and stay relevant. That's why they say "murder your darlings." The worst sin is boring the audience, so don't involve them in unnecessary shit. Pare down the story until it bleeds.

Now, think how much space explaining something complex like "queer AND deaf" would need. And how much research from someone who isn't both of those things, or doesn't at least have a patient queer and deaf friend. And if, say, they were Black too? In the real world, a person like that can just exist and be seen. Probably they just live their lives without including you, it's not about you. But maybe they sit down next to you on the bus, you say hi, they speak with a specific accent or sign or hand you a card, and they have dark skin and a rainbow flag pin. Existence confirmed! In writing, I have to do pages and pages of work to get you to see them as a whole person, because they need me to create a place where they fit. If they don't have a place where they fit and we need them, why are they there? Real people don't have to justify themselves, they just are, and everyone else better fucking work with it. Everyone doesn't, but they should. You can't just ask someone why they're Black! But in fiction, you do, you must, you're supposed to, and if there's no reason, well, maybe they ought to stop being Black.

So, if I'm going to write a story in which Murderbot is autistic, especially if it's a short and simple one, it fucking well better be ABOUT Murderbot being autistic, or else why spend all these pages explaining what it's like to be autistic? "Autistic people exist" isn't a plotline, that dull and preachy. I need something better than that... Ah! "Murderbot hacked its chip and became autistic!" Yes! That's relevant for the plot and lets me do all kinds of worldbuilding about robots and how they work and how they are seen! There's my elevator pitch and a significant portion of the jacket plot summary right there!

"Autistic people exist in a community" isn't relevant to "autistic robot fights society and other robots." It should be, inasmuch as autistic people are part of society, but it would add pages to the story if the humans who are so clueless and stress-inducing weren't also the nice humans who live with robots and treat them like disabled people. Why add another type of human when we've already got the corporation and the other surveyors and the evil surveyors and a whole world to explain? There's no room!

But that means that, somehow, a group of scientists (!!) living in human society haven't met an autistic person and have no clue how to treat one. There can't be an autistic scientist who goes, "Why the FUCK would you look at someone to PUNISH them, what is WRONG with you?" That would make it less likely Murderbot will wander off to explore the galaxy and find itself! This is Book One! Where's the story if Murderbot finds a community right away and hangs out? That's boring!

So, in the future, there isn't a community among the "free" robots that we just don't see, because it would derail the plot if there were. The world wouldn't look like that if the robots alone talked about their way of being and the humans who lived with them listened. If there were also human beings who existed like Murderbot and they added their voices, it would blow Murderbot's adventure to find itself out of the water, and the point of the story is the adventure. It's not as fun to watch an autistic person look for friends by paging through websites and social media, and then they have lunch and go back to work. That's not a YA novel, that's just life.

If I pick up this series, and I'm not sure I will, I suppose there's room for a Planet Autism. Perhaps as a happy ending, or perhaps as just another place Murderbot doesn't fit in (this would be more realistic, it's hard for us to connect with each other, but much less happy). But they're not out there producing serials and saying they exist and shaping society. They probably hide, so Murderbot has to find them. As one does! One does have to find a community where they fit, and that's hard. But there are lots of us who don't hide, and can't hide. The first time Murderbot mentions a popular serial in a public forum, we ought to come running. Regular autistic people, who are not institutionalized, and who work regular jobs and have lunch. I'm almost positive we won't, though. There's no room. That "darling" needs to die.

It's systemic and it sucks. Like must systemic problems that suck, I've had to spend paragraphs just beginning to unpack it, and probably no one will bother to read it because I don't get seen. If I wrote a whole doorstopper about this, I couldn't get it published because I'm too autistic to navigate the system and too anarchistic to want to anymore. And Tumblr ain't gonna care because they're primarily concerned with short takes that get likes, just look at their app. The world doesn't elevate Murderbots and listen, that much is true, but we find each other and are seen, regardless.

If we want to change what we see in media, we have to change how media works. "The correct way to tell a story is to get from A to B as efficiently as possible and we must create everything that way" is a darling that will have to die, so other darlings can live, and people can just exist as they are without having to cough up a reason. I have no idea how to fix this, but that's how it seems to me.

And this is probably full of typos and awkward phrasing because I got distracted by it and needed to find some way to say it. I'm not gonna go back and edit it until it looks shiny, smooth, and efficient. I exist like this, messily. You may not see me, but I'm here.

[civanticism]

[antifatabi]

[intersectionalpraxis]

Ryan was also a cross-country running enthusiast who aspired to study engineering. He was murdered heartlessly -lynched by a cop, who are now trying to carefully justify this by saying HE was the violent one... Ryan was on the spectrum of autism, and he was triggered by something before his killers arrived -and although he was being calmed by his father, he became very understandably upset when the cops arrived -and instead of LEAVING Ryan alone and calling in for additional mental health support -and attempting to de-escalate the situation a cop shot him at least 3 times. WTF can a garden tool have on a fucking gun? And not only did these cops LET Ryan bleed to death on the ground, the Sheriff's department has yet to release a full, unedited bodycam video to the family.

The cops have been called a handful of times previously, so they knew Ryan had autism. These cops need to be held accountable, and there needs to be better interventions with mental health crises. Cops should NEVER be on the front lines for this. They're not educated, trained, or have the abilities to help people -especially kids and youths in vulnerable situations.

Ryan, may you rest in peace and power.

[neuroticboyfriend]

do you have "treatment resistant depression" or are you just fundamentally living a life that would make anyone depressed?

are you just dealing with abuse, poverty, and oppression? are you just dealing with a lifetime of trauma? do we just live in a society where peoples basic needs are neglected, and the completely understanble response to that is pathologized? on purpose? so that it's just an individual problem and people arent Trying Enough... so nothing about the system has to change?

...do you have "treatment resistant depression," or do you just need real community, support, resources, and protection?

[rickmctumbleface]

[virgo-moonlight]

Hello hello! Please help a journalism graduate student out!

I’m currently writing an article for class regarding environmental racism, waste colonialism, and the impact of polluting facilities/waste being intentionally positioned closer to minority and low-income communities.

I would love to hear from anyone currently in or who has spent time in affected communities about their experience, any concerns that have been raised, if those concerns have been ignored or listened to, and anything else that you find important to speak about.

Please DM me if you can offer any comment on the issue, I would greatly appreciate your time!

Just a heads up as well that I would need your name, age, pronouns, profession, and contact info (at least an email) to list as a source. If you are not comfortable with giving your real name, you can give a pseudonym to be quoted with. Your personal information will NOT be published anywhere, that is purely for my source list which will only be seen by my professor.

Thank you in advance to anyone who can help! :)

[thepeopleinpower]

Stone me to death if I’m wrong I guess but I really feel like any privilege comes with the responsibility to distribute that privilege downward any way you can and not hoard it exclusively for your own benefit. but idk who am I to say