#you know. class. race. and all that critical theory stuff.

[earlgraytay]

I'm constantly fascinated by Sayers' worldview because in a lot of very important ways it's a lot closer to mine than most other authors, of her time or since

and in a lot of very important ways it's wildly different, and those differences are mostly Products Of Her Time

[askgothamshitty]

One of my biggest gripes is the weird romantiziation of non western feminist who are really just terf reactionaries.

One of the core aspects on modern terf indoctrination online is this trauma porn approach where they bombard with horrific stories of women suffering (not even necessarily because of the patriarchy) and they use it as a way to dismiss any other form of commentary. The biggest and most egregious examples are femicide and fgm. They use these very tragic and horrifying stories to scare you into abiding by their policies and blocking any more nuanced discussions.

Non-western feminists are key in getting this done. A lot of it has to do with racism and orientalism. People view the people from these countries and regions as backward and primitive but also raw and natural. The idea is that no one in those countries are educated enough to have legit political beliefs, and they all act on instinct and tradition. They represent a pure form of patriarchy and feminism free of Western liberalism and a lot of western terfs cling to them for their horror stories and indoctrination.

Their activism isn't based on theory but real-world experiences. They don't have time to discuss optics and terminology since they're in the heat of the moment. Why should we, privileged Western liberals, criticize them for not discussing our nonsense niche issues like racism and transphobia? When the 4b movement started picking up steam out of sk there were naturally a lot of calling out the more problematic elements in the supporting ideology but they were immediately shut down because "korean women didn't think about that stuff" and "they have bigger problems".

But the majority of these women aren't educated (in feminist theories) and are just speaking from a position of observation. They notice the trends and harms in specific traditions, but they never really did the work to dig any deeper. They're reactionaries that are being given priority over educated experts in feminism. Their experiences are valuable and but they lack actual contextual analysis. And the excuse that western feminism doesn't include them is bogus when you realise there are normal a lot of well spoken feminist from their countries that co-sign the stuff the privileged Western feminist do even with their lived experiences.

I know what it's like a woman in [retracted for anonymity], but I still think trans people are people, and that class is an important detail to consider when discussing the experiences of women in my region. I am also black, which means I know how race affects women's experiences. These issues are global and should concern feminists globally. The only reason these women don't seem to care isn't because she's too focused on the current situation. It's because they never cared to learn.

Tldr: Stop automatically assuming these women are feminist.

Kinda falling asleep so this is all for now. Enjoy your tomorrow

I think I know what you mean, a common way TERFs dismiss accusations of transphobia is by saying “most TERFs are women in the global south”. Like, one, that’s not even true, they’re just pulling that out of their ass, and two, being of a certain identity or position or class doesn’t suddenly make bigotry excusable.

Some also seem to claim that LGBTQ issues are “first world problems”. While it is true that capitalism is what allowed queer identity to take shape in the global north, that doesn’t mean that gay and trans people don’t exist in other places. They’re just more likely to be in the closet. It’s like TERFs forget that extreme patriarchy also means extreme homophobia and transphobia.

Also - something that happens so often in radtwt is TERFs who claim to be the voices of third word women end up getting outed as part of their country’s comprador class. Like, one time a TERF let it slip that her family employs migrant women as servants. That’s just one example but it happens a lot lol

Love everything you have to say!

[pricklypear1997]

I am so tired of tumblr pushing gender ideology into my feed lol. I don’t even follow any of that kind of crap. All this queer theory nonsense is simply that; nonsense. Same goes for all the critical race theory stuff. Tumblr is an art corner. I use it so that I can find talented artists who focus on their passions. Being obsessed with telling people about gender delusions or your obsession with telling other racial groups how to think and that they must accept you for no other reason than diversity!!1!1!1 are not hobbies. That shit ain’t healthy. It’s regressive. Y’all are so brainwashed and don’t even know it. Not a single thought of that right brained/pseudo-leftist crap is original. Actually look into this stuff. All of this is just upper/middle class academia nonsense. It’s not even philosophical. It has nothing to do with morality. It’s anti morality. It’s about serving oneself and making the world revolve around their own hedonistic and voyeuristic tendencies.

[redladypaige]

@shonpota asks what I learned in Israeli school

What I learned in Israeli school is..

WHAT I LEARNED IN ISRAELI SCHOOL IS

honestly you're going to be disappointed

tl;dr it's not explicitly hateful, it's much more about emphasizing certain facts and ignoring others to create a narrative and lie by omission.

I don't think it's very different than other western education, but you'll be the judge of that.

I'll try to explain if it makes sense.

First of all, I studied in public school almost a decade ago (jesus), so things might have changed.

So this is the least religious education you can get. More religious schools have been caught with more explicitly hateful material, but that I can't tell you first hand.

Arabic class

From seventh to ninth grade you have mandatory Arabic in school.

Since it's such a short time you really only learn the basics.

The class doesn't really count towards your diploma grade, so you just have to pass it, so most people don't really take it seriously.

There are optional advanced classes to take later on, which in my case were took by Arab Israelis, people with interest in languages and people who wanted to be translators in the IDF.

Civics class

Mostly dry stuff about the system of government, how democracy works, elections, rigjts, stuff like that.

There is big talk about equal rights, mostly mentioning that women had equal rights by law since the founding and that Arab Israelis are regular citizens with equal rights.

Gaza and the west bank weren't mentioned at all, at least when I learned. This is stuff you learn from the news or from your parents.

And of course nothing about systemic racism or anything like that.

You can say that the class shows the ideal clean version of the vision of democracy without actually diving down to what's happening.

Putting "politics in school" is a very controversial subject over here, which I found similar to what's going on with the critical race theory thing in the USA.

Right wingers are in power for a while (and it's getting worse), and for them anything that puts Israel in not a great like is political and should be removed, though it is sometimes used against them too.

It constantly changes and stuff gets added and removed.

Tanach class

It might surprise you that even in secular schools you learn the Tanach (the old testament for you Christians) from first to twelfth grade.

It might surprise you more that we learn it not as a religious text, but much more of an historical one.

It was one of my favorite classes because it actually felt like it encourages skepticism and analysis.

There is talk about how the Torah was probably written by different authors because of contradictions which is literally sacreligous

We talked about which stories are or aren't corroborated by history, how to know about the author by the perspective of the text, events written on from different points of view, etc.

History class

You learn history from first to twelfth grade.

It's very very western.

Starting from Greek to Rome to the middle ages, enlightenment, the French and american revolutions and world wars.

Colonialism is displayed as neutral I guess - just an event that happened. Remember that they don't want opinionated teachers.

We gloss over stuff like slavery and native American genocide when learning about the us, its mostly the revolution and stuff.

Sometimes history from a specific place rotates in, but the rest of the world is mostly reserved for the optional advanced classes.

Of course, there is a big emphasis to ties to Judaism throughout.

Within those periods you learn about what the Jews were up to, usually under the lens of how the current ruler abused them.

World war 2 and the Holocaust obviously is a huge chunk of the material.

You don't get to modern history until like the 10th grade.

And then it's mostly the narrative of the creation of Israel, again viewed neutrally.

It starts from the Dreyfus trial, which had a Jewish officer been accused for a crime he didn't commit.

That caused a reporter named Herzel to think Jews will always be persecuted and to start the Zionist movement with the idea to find a homeland for the Jewish people.

We learn about different proposals for where it could be, raising money, the first Alyot (people who came to Israel to live there).

The Alyot are presented as good things generally, saying that the lands were legally bought and that the people wanted to live side by side with the Palestinians.

Of course the reality is more complicated than that.

We get the Balfour statement, explaining how it's the first time Jews got international recognition for a country but also how it's really non committal.

We learn the efforts to get a country against the British, both the diplomatic and the terrorist actions the early Israeli organizations did.

We learn about the UN division plan, with saying that the Jewish people were happy to share but Palestinians won't come to the negotiations table.

We talk about the declaration of independence when the British left, and how we were immediately attacked by the casus belli of killing all jews by all surrounding countries and still won at the end.

The atrocities of the war aren't mentioned at all.

The Nacba is mentioned, with the word it self constantly getting in and out from the books every year, but it's mentioned subjectively.

As in, "the Palestinians see the events of this war, when Israel took territory in a defensive war and people had to leave their houses as a day of tragedy with the intention to one day return" or something like this.

We learn about immigration after the Holocaust and Mizrahis from Arab countries (like me),surprisingly not shying away from the racism.

The narrative is "there might have been racism then, but now we are all a melting pot of a single culture" or something.

It gets as far as the Six Day War and Yom Kippur war at 1973, anything beyond that is not covered in school.

The main narrative we see about Palestinians is that most of them do want peace and are happy to live side by side with the Israelis, but every time their radical leadership hated their own people, and won't take any compromise.

They want to kill all Israelis and take everything, and Israel is only defending itself.

You can say that's the most radical narrative we learn.

There is little exploration of why, the assumption is anti semetism.

Every war is presented as justified and as part for Israels quest for peace, while being the constant victim.

Inner Palestinian politics aren't discussed, we don't learn their history, their views etc.

That's it I guess?

Feel free to ask anything and I'll try to remember

[zevranunderstander]

im really tired so i hope i can explain this well but when conservatives say "schools and teachers are indoctrinating our children", they kinda mean something else than leftists think?

because what most leftists understand (and wrongly try to counter-act) is 'i dont want gay stuff in that book because itll make my kid gay', but that is not really the fear they are having, the fear is 'i dont want gay stuff in that book, because if my child accepts that being gay is okay, they arent agreeing with my worldview anymore and creating a disconnect in a family that was previously perfectly fine'

because they think that the goal of the all-powerful evil deep state government is first and foremost to alienate their children from them (thats what they mean by 'agenda'), like, of course it's worse if their kid actually IS gay, but just their kid accepting gay, trans, disabled and black people and believing in women's rights is already really fucking horrible to them.

because for them, they previously were a happy family, but suddenly, around the time of high school, their kids became more and more distant and arguments happened more and more often, and then their kids started calling them racist and bigoted and there suddenly was antagonism coming from their children. but it can't possibly be that their children started forming their own political ideas around that time, it clearly must have been the fact that they went to school every day, where teachers in depth analyzed structural racism with them in history class (im ofc being sarcastic) and because the government wanted that to happen and had all of that planned

thats why these people are against critical race theory without knowing what that even is and dont want gay teachers anywhere near their children, because they think all of these are evil schemes by some all-controlling higher evil

you can't counter-act these arguments by saying "kids books with lgbt content only make your kids realize these things are normal, and it doesn't "turn" them gay", because 1. "these things" are not "normal" to them in the first place and they think you are "the agenda" talking when saying that, and 2. they arent only afraid of their kid being gay they are afraid of their kid thinking differently than they do, so generally this argument really doesnt do that much for them, you know?

[glorbo-from-your-evil-show]

This kind of ideology (that x group’s rights should be taken because they’re Bad™) is used countless times throughout history and every single god damn time it ends horribly. Because even if it comes from a place of good intention (e.g. wanting to castrate every convicted pedophile) IT WILL END BADLY. Why? Someone will abuse it. Someone will find a way to class a different group as x group. It’s happening now!! People are classifying trans people as predators so that they can treat them the same as predators!

And no. You are NEVER safe from this. Because, surprise surprise, the leopards eating people’s faces party will in fact eat your face given the chance.

It’s actually happening in the uk right now - i’ve met many people that the Reform Party are the absolute picture of who they despise (if you don’t know, Reform UK (a right wing political party) are literally fascists. I’m not joking.) and yet vote for them, despite the fact that the party would happily declare them illegal and ship them off to france.

If you don’t know their policies, whether you’re not from the uk or are but don’t care about politics, here you go! reform uk wants to a) return ALL asylum seekers and refugees that cross the English Channel illegally back to France.

I’ll reiterate, they want to turn away asylum seekers and refugees.

b) they want to scrap the net-zero target. They want to completely move away from renewable fuel.

c) they plan to pay interests on bonds held in the Bank of England. This means that any people and businesses borrowing money will have a much higher cost.

Here comes the big ones!

d) they are banning critical race theory in all and any schools. They state any education on slavery MUST include a ‘non-european’ incident to counterbalance it.

e) they will ‘ban transgender ideology’ in schools. Any changes children make to names, pronouns or gender identity would force the school to tell parents of the child.

f) they will completely replace the Equality Act, and would scrap diversity, inclusion and equality rules. (You… you see how that’s bad, right?)

g) they uh. They want to leave the european convention on human rights.

This is the main stuff. They do have SOME good ideas, i.e. more support for the nhs and scrapping the tv license fee, but im sure you can tell the bad outweighs the good here.

ANYWAY. These proposals in the Reform UK manifesto are very obviously BAD. ESPECIALLY for poc. And even more so for immigrants. But, i ask you this honestly. Do you think they will not target people past immigration? Do you think they won’t class who they dislike as an illegal immigrant? As a danger?

And yet, the people this party very evidently hates, are voting for them!!! Why? Because they believe it could never affect them. That the leopards eating peoples faces party would never turn on them.

You are not one of the good ones in their eyes. You’re just someone to be dealt with later. Allowing them to go after people and treat them as below human will eventually be turned onto you. Because they see no difference. They’ll find a way to classify you as that same group of below human. And the fact that you allowed someone’s human rights to be stripped is coming back to you.

Allowing any group of people to have their rights stripped is always wrong. Because it is a slippery slope.

why do i have to explain to grown ass adults that human rights r called human rights bc every single human is entitled to them bc they r human, n they should never b taken away no matter who they are or what they did. and that advocating for the removal of human rights, nomatter who the target of it is, is not only incredibly cruel but will eventually spiral and lead to oppression. didnt we learn that shit in like 5th grade.

[rad4learning]

My feminist-related reading progress

My thoughts on different texts I've read

Most recent: The Second Sex

For all of these I'm not going to point out everything wrong or that I disagree with in them; I assume you'll be reading critically, taking value and discarding other stuff. I'm writing these from memory of my impressions and key points. I may get things wrong - please feel free to lmk if I do :) The Second Sex - Recommended reading - Highly influential in second wave feminism - Dense, technical language - can be a difficult read - Check which translation you read - I love her style of analysis, focused on how neutral biological difference is not neutral within society and results in different attitudes between men and women.

Feminist Revolution - Recommended reading - Produced by Redstockings (radical feminist group) - Radical Feminism Theory text / collection of writing from various authors - Redstockings are well known for the pro-woman line "woman are messed over, not messed up" (don't focus on conditioning or sex roles, focus on power imbalances, women cannot opt out of misogyny via individual changes) and for consciousness raising (learn about women's condition through analysis of lives of women in the group and their struggles) - I love the focus on power and agree with many of the critiques of lifestylism - However I also think some of the authors were guilty of overgeneralising what women in general want from what women in the group wanted and pedestalling heterosexuality - Each section is a pdf only a few pages long (from their website) and the language is not convoluted, so it's easy to read a bit at a time or pick out essays of interest to you

The Book of the City of Ladies - Not knowing much European history I struggled with placing a decent chunk of the names (she draws extremely heavily on examples) - As can be expected from a book from the 1400s it is not a radical feminist theory text - It is a moral defense of women and the author is a Christian woman, which is clear in the text - You really do get that sense of "she was commenting on that then and it's still a problem now" Women, Race and Class - Recommended reading - I particularly liked the discussion on wages for housework - It offers what the title says: examination of the intersection of women, race and class - US focused - feminist history and theory text The Dialectic of Sex: - I really wanted to really like this, my expectations were very high so that may well be part of why I feel underwhelmed by it - I think it is worth reading - although I expect other readers to also object to components of it - even if for no other reason than to interrogate her assertions about the requirements for womens' liberation - Straight after this I read women race & class which briefly criticises this text for perpetuating myths irt black men sexualising white women - I agree with Firestone's claim that the condition of women and children are highly linked and I support children being able to have more autonomy. I cannot agree with the idea of removing childhood entirely (she is explicit about this including irt sexuality) & I think the treatment of children's vulnerability was unfortunately shallow - which is especially unfortunate given her recognition of the links between childhood and women's liberation - Explicitly radical feminist theory text

Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982: - Short read, fiction - This is an easy, quick read suitable for women without background in feminism - It's great at identifying the "little" (or not so little) everyday misogyny that permeates women's lives - Don't expect it to give you direction or theory knowledge - Focus on South Korean women, the focus of the book on pointing out the unfairness of what typical resonates cross-culturally

Daring to be bad: - Recommend reading - Can be a bit difficult at the v. start if not familiar with US 1960s history to keep track of the groups but soon becomes easier - Provides information about US radical feminism, how it started and how it went from a focus on gender abolition up to political lesbianism & idea of men and women having innately different natures - Explicitly radical feminist history text focusing on 2nd wave (author's views are also apparent) - Self aware about it but focus again on the stereotypical group The female eunuch: - I mostly read this because it was recommend to be by an older self-identified radical feminist who talked about how influential it was at the time - Still relevant today - I thought the concept (something like: women being used for sex and yet having our sexual desire/energy stripped from us) was interesting and worth reading - Explicitly radical feminist theory text focusing on 2nd wave - Very much focused on the stereotypical feminist group - white, western, heterosexual etc. Talkin' up to the white woman: Indigenous women and feminism - Wayyy too postmodern for me - difficult read -- I particularly hated how she comments on some Queer Theory authors including bestiality in "Queer" -> without criticising that - Aileen Moreton-Robertson wrote this based on her dissertation - Relevant criticisms of white feminism and discussion of Indigenous understandings

Who cooked the last supper? The woman's history of the world - I mostly read this because of how much a woman whose blogging I respect hypes it - don't get me wrong there were good bits (and I certainly wouldn't take back reading it) but it wasn't that groundbreaking for me - You might like it more if matriarchy is smth you get hyped about - Expect mentions of other groups but still a relatively stereotypical focus The hidden face of eve - Recommended reading - Nawal El Sadaawi is socialist feminist, not radical feminist, still read the book - If you're not convinced search her name up, learn about her, then read it - Discusses feminism in an Egyptian context and provides guidance to readers on not using feminism as an imperialist bludgeoning tool Gyn//ecology - This book should not be recommended for beginners - Seriously, I cannot emphasise the above point enough. - The ways she uses language requires adjustment -- Including being like "Lesbian is for women-identified-women, not mere female homosexuals, for whom I'll use lowercase 'lesbian' " (I'm paraphrasing from memory but that is the gist / it is really THAT bad) - quote from Audre Lorde's An Open Letter to Mary Daly "As an African-american woman in white patriarchy, I am used to having my archetypal experience distorted and trivialised, but it is terribly painful to feel it being done by a woman whose knowledge so much touches my own." - There are some useful criticisms of patriarchy in there but the above should make it clear I consider the text highly flawed - Part of the "Lesbian Feminism" branch (read: political lesbianism)

Invisible women - Good "look how feminism is still relevant!" text, recommended for that (yes, including to radblrians), - Easy read & good book to loan to other women in your life - I really liked it but don't expect it to challenge or deepen your ideological understanding that much - Recent feminist text, focusing on statistics Sexy but psycho - imo: some good some not so good in there - this book may mislead you if you are not familiar with the relevant subject matter & there's alleged dodgy ethics stuff with the author - Dr Jessica Taylor openly describes herself as a radical feminist. She does have a PhD in psychology (not in clinical psychology) - I disagree with her thesis that all mental illness should be viewed through a trauma lens & imo the handwaving away of the biopsychosocial model as bio-bio-bio is intellectually lazy - recent feminist text focusing on (poor) treatment of women in psychology & psychiatry The beauty myth - good text to read if you're trying to care less about your appearance, particularly if you are white and western - Naomi Wolf treated some of the statistics poorly so be aware of that (take any stats she lists about anorexia with a grain of salt, there's a research paper on this). She's also a conspiracy theorist, so makes sense I guess? - Feminist text form the 90's Ain't I a woman - Recommended reading - Illuminating text focusing on how Black women in the US have faced the double burden of racism and misogyny as well as overlapping misogynoir - Explicitly discusses feminism and Black women's roles in it

Right wing women - Recommended reading - Very radblr friendly - don't expect much ideological challenge - Radical feminist theory text focusing on why right wing women would work against their own liberation

I read I think 6 Sheila Jeffrey's books in the span of less than a week so they've blurred together - can't provide much useful commentary but those were my first intro to feminist theory books I think Abdullah Öcallan's ideas on needing to restructure the family to restructure society & his ideas around what that society would look like are interesting to read. (If unfamiliar look up who he is before diving into Jineology research) Honorary shout out to why does he do that? - also recommended reading I also recommend looking up statistics for women in your area (including dis-aggregated ones for different groups of women) & of course talking with and learning from women irl.

There are maybe, 5ish others I've read that are on feminist drives and that sort of thing but I can't be bothered writing any more rn and at first I forgot them for inclusion so clearly not the biggest deal (they're not key theory texts or anything).

[we-are-inevitable]

Your ask box is my kingdom, I am taking it over

But anyway I so badly want your thoughts on Jack and Davey in my college prof au please please please I know I haven't spoken about it on tumblr yet except from a little bit but I love your Javid so yeah

-has watched high school musical thank you very much

ok ok @roideny obvi this is your au but here are my Very Important thoughts bc i love them Very Much ugh. in love w them

David Jacobs-Kelly:

44 years old, born in ‘79

Undergrad: majored in English, minored in Creative Writing

Masters: Poetics and Theory AdvC- NYU

Doctorate: English and American Literature, thesis is over gender and sexuality in Shakespeare

he’s been Dr. Jacobs-Kelly for about seventeen years by the time the story takes place!

as a prof, he teaches a comp class, an honors comp (Critical Analysis and Writing), and some creative writing/poetry courses! he’s a very busy man.

he meets Race, Albert, and Finch because they’re students in his comp class!

when he’s not teaching, he’s really involved in the local queer scene. i feel like he’s a staple at drag brunches and pride celebrations; he’s not a huge club fan anymore but he still loves being Involved. growing up during the aids crisis is traumatizing at the least, and im sure he lost a few friends, so he stays up to date in the queer stuff to sort of honor them.

he marries jack in 2011 when gay marriage is legalized in new york!

he’s a huge shakespeare fan, as seen by his phd studies. he has a hamlet-inspired tattoo because he’s gay

tbh he probably has a cat named after shakespeare (they have two cats im calling it now. shakespeare and bryan, name courtesy of jack)

he and jack don’t have any kids, but he’s a loving fun uncle for Les and Sarah’s respective kids!

Jack Jacobs-Kelly:

45 years old, born in ‘78

Undergrad: Studio Art! but he dropped out after a semester <33

he just decided that college wasn’t for him. why pay money for something he doesn’t need?

he goes straight into a set design apprenticeship that medda helps him get! medda is his adoptive mom, so he’s been around queer spaces and theatre since he was around 15. he loves it, it’s his home

that being said he probably sells his own paintings and maybe does mural work on the side, he likes to keep busy and is invested in the art scene, and he meets davey when davey moves to New York for his masters! he’s the reason davey stays in NYC <33

he’s very eccentric, and very much doesn’t give a fuck. he’s a black queer man- the universe already nerfed him, so why worry about anything else? i can see him being the really go-with-the-flow husband to davey’s more tight-strung academic vibe. they really balance each other out

again, they don’t have kids, but i feel like this jack is very much For The Youths? i can see him volunteering a lot, working for organizations that help troubled kids get into the arts— i feel like it’s his passion project that makes him feel better when davey is busy at the university all day. in another life he’s a foster parent, but he and davey just don’t have the lifestyle to foster, so he focuses his energy elsewhere!

whenever davey “adopts” some freshmen he’s always on board. he really hits it off with Albert!

not as involved in the queer scene as davey, but his career is literally in musical theatre set design, so even if he’s not in the queer scene he’s In The Queer Scene

i don’t wanna talk about him losing medda but i can see him eventually inheriting the theater!

he loves his nieces and nephews! he’s a big family guy

Extra Thoughts:

jack and davey are a pair. they rarely go anywhere outside of work without each other, and they’re so, SO in love.

jack pretty regularly comes to see Davey while he’s at work; he’ll bring him lunch to office hours and pop in to watch him lecture from time to time.

davey attends the opening night of every show jack works on <33

their apartment is always a mess LMAO. davey has papers and books everywhere, there’s paint on the floor, brushes all over the place— it’s what happens when you cross a tired academic and an adhd creative. shit happens.

they actually stay pretty hip and on-trend? idk how it happens but jack is rlly good with youth culture and davey is on top of gay culture so like. yeah they work.

over summers and breaks, they travel a lot! not anything crazy expensive— they love international travel, but they’re also a big fan of road trips and rental cars!

they are my FAVORITES and i love them so much

[rametarin]

generally there are two people freaking out about this:

1.) People that unironically think the US is a white supremacist default country where we’re only JUST. NOW starting to fight against that hegemony, which is absolutely not true, hasn’t been true since the country was founded, and has made progress decade by decade in the reverse of oppression. They believe affirmative action, a process and mentality that argues the only way to equalize a group is to give them civic backed and taxed advantages on the basis of their race, religion, identity or etc. that the majority do not enjoy for being that demographic or class, is the only way to overcome the disparities of income and wealth. They genuinely believe taxing everybody to explicitly help people for their race is necessary.

2.) People that KNOW affirmative action doesn’t help those things, but does help affirm demographic-as-culture bolshevism, because it’s exactly what they want. They WANT the US to adopt more class consciousness based policies. They WANT Critical Legal Theory to be the way we define justice and equality. They WANT that arbitrary Marxist bullshit to be law of the land, that states the default state of the US and European countries is, “white supremacism,” that must proactively be worked against. Even things that are not in any way conspiracies of white supremacy must be considered to be affiliated or signing off to it if they aren’t actively working to advance black, Asian, Native American and etc. demographically and prosperity. They do it because they see empowering the mentality and organization based on minority demographics as a way to defeat liberalism and individualism and private property and personal wealth.

So. Emotional children Vs. people that see non-white people as foot soldiers for their war on capitalism and private property, and a way to use stuff even liberally defined as disparity in context they create, as a way to justify redistributing wealth bcause the state says so.

Which is bad enough, except they don’t even argue they just, “love the poor so much and want to help...the poor!” They explicitly hate all the poors that aren’t black, Hispanic or Asian, and comprise the biggest voting bloc and largest demographic in the USA. While demanding they pay the taxes that make exclusionary social programs possible. Almost explicitly for black people.

Affirmative Action is an alternative to vying for programs to help the poor (universal) and explicitly make sure white people don’t get any bowl in the soup pot. Instead of going by depressed and economically starved regions and organizing based on locale, they argue exclusively based on demography. And tell the whites, ‘your demographic is not only not important, but actively harmful to your neighbors’.

When you live in a system where you do not benefit from “privilege” in measurable terms such as employment, wealth or opportunity, you do not receive government aid or benefits, and you objectively have to pay into a system that DOES use your tax dollars EXPLICITLY to help people on the basis of their demography and class, and otherwise have as much opportunity as a supposedly ‘racially and economically oppressed’ person, that is society exploiting you for the benefit of another. So they argue the abstract idea of privilege, just the very idea of it, means on paper you are as advantaged as an upper crust WASP with a big mansion and 5-10 generations at a big university. Affirmative Action just becomes a political statement and commitment based on saying some races matter, others are unimportant, or a political tool to keep blocs opposed and indivisible, not unified and at neither prosperity or peace.

So those that champion affirmative action and other ways to make sure that not just the poor reap the benefits of social service finances, but people reap the benefits specifically due to their racial identity and hereditary affiliation, will likely desperately go back to arguing for the general universal poor if they can’t exclude the poor whites. Oh no, the horror. We’ll all have to benefit from social service allocation and programs from tax dollars, instead of just picking and choosing winners  and people based on our preferential demography of choice. The fucking horror. Equality in poverty!

The problem was never "mediocre white people can't get into college", it was "good white students or great asian students can't get into college while mediocre black or native american students can"

Don't tell that to the people who are freaking out about this.

[jechristine]

would it be okay if you would expound more on the subject of queer theory and how it isn't inherently a performativity of "performance"? do you have any good books on queer theory i can read as it's pride month?

I have passing knowledge from grad school where I took a critical theory class, a Victorian sexuality class, and a Shakespeare & masculinity class, in which we read lots of queer approaches to reading texts, themes, plots, and characters. I’m not a queer theorist myself by any stretch, and I didn’t end up using queer theory in my own doctoral work. I’d say I’ve been exposed to it in an official setting, but that’s it. You could use this very hasty and simple sketch as a starting point if you’re interested—

So as I learned it queer theory grew out of linguistics.

The linguistic stuff is complicated, but the gist is a guy name Ferdinand de Saussure said that, even though things may exist in the natural world, they don’t exist for us before we name them. And then the things that we’ve created through naming only exist in relation to the other things that we’ve created through naming. This was called Structuralism because it described how language was a structure in which words and thus things that we know only exist in relation to other words and thus other things that we also know. Every one thing is “not” the other things.

Anyhow, another French guy named Michel Foucault (History of Sexuality) wrote a history of sexuality that built on this idea and others, too. Here and separately he worked out a whole theory of power (ideology) as productive, which holds that power keeps creating categories and words in order to know and control things. The thinking is that if something isn’t named, it isn’t known, and that unknowability is potentially dangerous to power. Foucault applied this idea to sexuality. He said that we tend to think of sexuality as having become less and less repressed over time, but what really happened is that sometime in the 20th century power started to take this big, broad category of threatening-to-power non-normative sexuality and started breaking it into parts, knowing and naming more and more categories of it, thereby bringing non-normativity under its control. (Norms have of course always been under its control.)

Simultaneously linguists developed theories around performative speech utterances. Performative speech is speech that is action, speech that makes reality. The most canonical example is the “I do” at wedding ceremonies. Two people say the words, and the words themselves make the union.

So Judith Butler (Gender Trouble) and some other theorists applied these ideas to gender and then to sex. They say all genders are performative not in the sense that there is something “real” underlying the performance but in the sense that there is nothing without the performativity, nothing that exists apart from it. Like Saussure said that there are no things that exist for us without a name, Butler said that there is no gender and no sex without our millions of performstive iterations of categories that we ourselves and our ancestors have created, and they’ve been known, named, and created by power so that they can be controlled.

Those are some very broad outlines of some key thinkers. There have been thousands of voices of all races and backgrounds departing from Foucault and Butler in all kinds of different, extremely productive, and often empowering ways. Those two aren’t foundational because they were 100% right but because they paved the way for new ways of thinking and new questions that didn’t really exist before them.

[96thdayofrage]

What is Critical Race Theory?

Basically, Critical Race Theory is a way of using race as a lens through which one can critically examine social structures. While initially used to study law, like most critical theory, it emerged as a lens through which one could understand and change politics, economics and society as a whole. Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic’s book, Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, describes the movement as: “a collection of activists and scholars engaged in studying and transforming the relationship among race, racism, and power.”

Kimberlé Crenshaw, one of the founding members of the movement, says Critical Race Theory is more than just a collective group. She calls it: “a practice—a way of seeing how the fiction of race has been transformed into concrete racial inequities.”

It’s much more complex than that, which is why there’s an entire book about it.

Can you put it in layman’s terms?

Sure.

Former economics professor (he prefers the term “wypipologist”) Michael Harriot, who used Critical Race Theory to teach “Race as an Economic Construct,” explained it this way:

Race is just some shit white people made up.

Nearly all biologists, geneticists and social scientists agree that there is no biological, genetic or scientific foundation for race. But, just because we recognize the lack of a scientific basis for race doesn’t mean that it is not real. Most societies are organized around agreed-upon principles and values that smart people call “social constructs.” It’s why Queen Elizabeth gets to live in a castle and why gold is more valuable than iron pyrite. Constitutions, laws, political parties, and even the value of currency are all real and they’re shit people made up.

To effectively understand anything we have to understand its history and what necessitated its existence. Becoming a lawyer requires learning about legal theory and “Constitutional Law.” A complete understanding of economics include the laws of supply and demand, why certain metals are considered “precious,” or why paper money has value. But we can’t do that without critically interrogating who made these constructs and who benefitted from them.

One can’t understand the political, economic and social structure of America without understanding the Constitution. And it is impossible to understand the Constitution without acknowledging that it was devised by 39 white men, 25 of whom were slave owners. Therefore, any reasonable understanding of America begins with the critical examination of the impact of race and slavery on the political, economic and social structure of this country.

That’s what Critical Race Theory does.

How does CRT do that?

It begins with the acknowledgment that the American society’s foundational structure serves the needs of the dominant society. Because this structure benefits the members of the dominant society, they are resistant to eradicating or changing it, and this resistance makes this structural inequality.

Critical Race Theory also insists that a neutral, “color-blind” policy is not the way to eliminate America’s racial caste system. And, unlike many other social theories, CRT is an activist movement, which means it doesn’t just seek to understand racial hierarchies, it also seeks to eliminate them.

How would CRT eliminate that? By blaming white people?

This is the crazy part. It’s not about blaming anyone.

Instead of the idiotic concept of colorblindness, CRT says that a comprehensive understanding of any aspect of American society requires an appreciation of the complex and intricate consequences of systemic inequality. And, according to CRT, this approach should inform policy decisions, legislation and every other element in society.

Take something as simple as college admission, for instance. People who “don’t see color” insist that we should only use neutral, merit-based metrics such as SAT scores and grades. However, Critical Race Theory acknowledges that SAT scores are influenced by socioeconomic status, access to resources and school quality. It suggests that colleges can’t accurately judge a student’s ability to succeed unless they consider the effects of the racial wealth gap, redlining, and race-based school inequality. Without this kind of holistic approach, admissions assessments will always favor white people.

CRT doesn’t just say this is racist, it explains why these kinds of race-neutral assessments are bad at assessing things.

What’s wrong with that?

Remember all that stuff I said the “material needs of the dominant society?” Well, “dominant society” means “white people.” And when I talked about “racial hierarchies,” that meant “racism.” So, according to Critical Race Theory, not only is racism an ordinary social construct that benefits white people, but it is so ordinary that white people can easily pretend it doesn’t exist. Furthermore, white people who refuse to acknowledge and dismantle this unremarkable, racist status quo are complicit in racism because, again, they are the beneficiaries of racism.

But, because white people believe racism means screaming the n-word or burning crosses on lawns, the idea that someone can be racist by doing absolutely nothing is very triggering. Let’s use our previous example of the college admissions system.

White people’s kids are more likely to get into college using a racist admissions system. But the system has been around so long that it has become ordinary. So ordinary, in fact, that we actually think SAT scores mean shit. And white people uphold the racist college admissions system—not because they don’t want Black kids to go to college—because they don’t want to change admission policies that benefit white kids.

Is that why they hate Critical Race Theory?

Nah. They don’t know what it is.

Whenever words “white people” or “racism” are even whispered, Caucasian Americans lose their ability to hear anything else. If America is indeed the greatest country in the world, then any criticism of their beloved nation is considered a personal attack—especially if the criticism comes from someone who is not white.

They are fine with moving toward a “more perfect union” or the charge to “make America great again.” But an entire field of Black scholarship based on the idea that their sweet land of liberty is inherently racist is too much for them to handle.

However, if someone is complicit in upholding a racist policy—for whatever reason—then they are complicit in racism. And if an entire country’s resistance to change—for whatever reason —creates more racism, then “racist” is the only way to accurately describe that society.

If they don’t know what it is, then how can they criticize it?

Have you met white people?

When has not knowing stuff ever stopped them from criticizing anything? They still think Colin Kaepernick was protesting the anthem, the military and the flag. They believe Black Lives Matter means white lives don’t. There aren’t any relevant criticisms other than they don’t like the word “racism” and “white people” anywhere near each other.

People like Ron DeSantis and Tom Cotton call it “cultural Marxism,” which is a historical dog whistle thrown at the civil rights movement, the Black Power movement and even the anti-lynching movement after World War I. They also criticize CRT’s basic use of personal narratives, insisting that a real academic analysis can’t be based on individually subjective stories.

Why wouldn’t that be a valid criticism?

Well, aren’t most social constructs centered in narrative structures? In law school, they refer to these individual stories as “legal precedent.” In psychology, examining a personal story is called “psychoanalysis.” In history, they call it...well, history. Narratives are the basis for every religious, political or social institution.

I wish there was a better example of an institution or document built around a singular narrative. It would change the entire constitution of this argument—but sadly, I can’t do it.

Jesus Christ, I wish I could think of one! That would be biblical!

Why do they say Critical Race Theory is not what Martin Luther King Jr. would have wanted?

You mean the Martin Luther King Jr. who conservatives also called divisive, race-baiting, anti-American and Marxist? The one whose work CRT is partially built upon? The King whose words the founders of Critical Race Theory warned would be “co-opted by rampant, in-your-face conservatism?” The MLK whose “content of their character” white people love to quote?

Martin Luther King Jr. literally encapsulated CRT by saying:

In their relations with Negroes, white people discovered that they had rejected the very center of their own ethical professions. They could not face the triumph of their lesser instincts and simultaneously have peace within. And so, to gain it, they rationalized—insisting that the unfortunate Negro, being less than human, deserved and even enjoyed second class status.

They argued that his inferior social, economic and political position was good for him. He was incapable of advancing beyond a fixed position and would therefore be happier if encouraged not to attempt the impossible. He is subjugated by a superior people with an advanced way of life. The “master race” will be able to civilize him to a limited degree, if only he will be true to his inferior nature and stay in his place.

White men soon came to forget that the Southern social culture and all its institutions had been organized to perpetuate this rationalization. They observed a caste system and quickly were conditioned to believe that its social results, which they had created, actually reflected the Negro’s innate and true nature.

That guy?

I have no idea.

Will white people ever accept Critical Race Theory?

Yes, one day I hope that Critical Race Theory will be totally disproven.

Wait...why?

Well, history cannot be erased. Truth can never become fiction. But there is a way for white people to disprove this notion.

Derrick Bell, who is considered to be the father of Critical Race Theory, notes that the people who benefit from racism have little incentive to eradicate it. Or, as Martin Luther King Jr. said: “We must also realize that privileged groups never give up their privileges voluntarily.”

So, if white people stopped being racist, then the whole thing falls apart!

From your lips to God’s ears.

[tomtenadia]

A Little Braver  - Chapter 12

Here we go. As promised i did not keep you waiting too long and chapter 12 has finally landed by gentle concession of Whitethorn airlines. 

Be ready for angst, fluff and our Rowan in full fuss mode. I swear the man invented fussing. Also, our Iceman this time loses it. Even Fenrys is shocked by how much. 

EDIt: forgot to say ATC is Air Traffic Control.

-----------

Rowan had finished his class and went back to his office. He had given those spoiled brats a very intense training and he had taught them how a real pilot flew and was quite satisfied of his level of evilness. 

He sat at his desk, grabbed his phone and noticed a text from Aelin and a smile tugged at his lips.

Not even two hours back. Crash at the airport. I guess those civilian pilots are as bad as you claim.

He laughed to start with but then terror took him. He switched on the computer and tried to find some news about Orynth. He found a newspaper and read the breaking news. There was a video taken by probably some reporters on an helicopter and he almost fell sick at the images. The article mentioned two aircrafts but he could see only one. He had a bad feeling of what could have happened. The crew zoomed in and he spotted Aelin’s engines but he could not tell apart who was on the ground. Then he saw it. The collapse. A cloud of dust and fire lifted in the sky and he hoped that none of the guys were inside.

His heart raced and pure undiluted terror as he never felt, spread through him.

Once inside Aedion had to navigate through debris and remains of the collapsed structure. The dust raised by the collapse had somehow reduced the fire and he could see around him. 

“Aelin,” he called out. He walked and walked and he knew he was getting further and further from the entrance.

“Aelin… answer me, damn it.” He shouted over the silence. A few electric cables flew over him and he ducked just in time to avoid electrocution.

Then he heard it. Her PASS alarm. The one that activated when it did not sense motion for a certain amount of time. He hated that sound because it meant that one of them was in danger.

Eventually he saw her body and flames too close for comfort.

“Chief, lieutenant. I have her. Have EMTs on standby.” he shouted over the radio.

“Lieutenant, Chief, we have two water lines coming in now.”

He ran to her and fell to his knees working to clear the debris from on top of her and once free he rolled her over and noticed she was not breathing and not wearing her mask which lay abandoned at her side. His finger went to her neck and found a pulse albeit weak “She is not breathing, I need the medical team inside. Now.” He shouted over the radio with panic thick in his voice.

He gave her a few rescue breaths “please… please… don’t do this to me. Please, Aelin.”

He put his mask on her face, trying to pass some oxygen to her.

Voices broke the silence but he was too busy helping Aelin to bother to look who it was. 

In a moment the rest of the team had followed inside and they were putting off the remaining fire around them, allowing the medical team to do their jobs safely.

Lysandra was on her knees in an instant. Elide was at his side and Dorian was towering over them he was the one who had taken the two women inside.

“She is not breathing and her pulse is weak.” Said Aedion, his voice cracking “Help her, please.”

Lysandra did some checks with experienced efficiency.

“I need to intubate her, Aedion remove the mask when I tell you so.”

Lysandra got ready with all her gear “now.”

With the skills of someone who had done it a million times she intubated Aelin very quickly and Elide started to press the balloon to send air in her lungs and oxygen to her body. Lysandra did a quick check and noticed her right arm bore some bad burn marks. She wrapped the wound as best as she could with temporary bandages.

“Dorian, pass me the backboard.”

Within minutes Aelin was loaded on the board and carried outside. The remaining team stopped, staring at their captain unconscious.

Rowan was following the livestream of the accident when he noticed Dorian’s holding a board with someone on and on the other side a tall blonde man: Aedion. He looked a bit better and his heart sank. His eyes recognised the body on the gurney. Her blonde hair, her long braid.

All of a sudden he forgot how to breath. He just stood there watching as the gurney that carried her was lifted into the ambulance. Aedion jumped in as well and he saw Lysandra and Elide climb in the ambulance and drive away with crazy speed and sirens wailing.

He stood slowly, as in a daze, grabbed his stuff and left. He went home, packed all his belongings and drove back to the base. As quickly as possible he filed a flight plan and not long after he was in the air. He would explain everything to the school commandant but he had to go. He had to be with her.

The flight back to Orynth seemed to last forever. He swore loudly when on approach to Orynth he was told that the airspace above the city was closed. He was furious, the airbase was so far away from the airport that it was stupid.

“Orynth main, Typhoon FF9762, I am requesting clearance for landing at the airbase, not at your stupid airport. So you let me land this plane or when I ran low on fuel I will land in the middle of the motorway and then you can deal with that.”

A moment later he got clearance for landing and when his landing gear touched down on the runaway he quickly taxied inside the hangar.

When he opened the canopy, Lorcan was there waiting for him “don’t. I don’t fucking care about the school or anything else right now.” He grabbed his bag and quickly told his engineer to perform his post flight checks. It was totally against the rules but he had no time to lose.

“Elide texted me. They took her to Orynth general. It was the closest one. She says it’s bad.”

Rowan ran out of the hangar and to his car not even bothering to change out of his jump suit, threw his stuff in the back seat and drove like a madman to the hospital. Once inside the A&E he spotted some familiar faces. Her squad was all there, waiting for an update. Rowan stopped. Then his gaze crossed Aedion’s. The man walked to him and Rowan was sure he had been crying.

“How is she? Where is she?” His voice was shaky.

“We don’t know. They took her in urgently. When I found her, she was not breathing and her oxygen tank was dead. She was unconscious when we brought her in, and with some horrible burns on her right arm.”

Rowan sat down heavily on a chair, his hands shaking visibly. They had just found each other. He could not lose her. 

“I thought you were in Doranelle.” Aedion’s voice was flat and his eyes fixed on the doors where they had taken Aelin.

“Aelin sent me a text saying you guys had a call at the airport.” His hand ran nervously through his short hair “then I checked the news and there was a livestream of the accident. And I saw it. All. And when I saw you and Dorian carrying her out… I left everything and flew here with my jet. Bloody ATC almost prevented me from landing.”

“This is always the worst part.” Said Aedion sitting beside Rowan “the waiting.”

The whole group remained in silence and Rowan did the same until a doctor went to them and Aedion stood, followed by Dorian.

“I have an update on the captain. Her condition is critical. She suffered serious internal injuries from the collapse and they are being treated now. Her right arm has some severe burns and again they are now being treated to avoid infection. Her oxygen levels are still below the normal parameters. During surgery she has coded twice, but we got her back. As soon as the team is done with her we will move her to the ICU. We need to keep her under strict control. She could still develop acute respiratory syndrome. She will stay intubated and heavily sedated.” Then the doctor turned to Aedion “I will let you know when you can see her.” And with that he walked away.

“Everyone, return to the station. We are still on duty.” Aedion ordered his men. They gave him a hug and asked to keep them posted. He knew that it had been very hard for them to obey him. They all wanted to be there for her but slowly they filed out leaving him alone with Rowan.

Dorian patted his shoulder “I will stay with them at the station.” And he left with the rest of the squad. 

“The scene at the airport seemed terrifying.”

“It was,” said Aedion in a flat tone “the small plane got reduced to smithereens. How the fuck that happened?”

Rowan sighed, he had an idea “possibly a mistake by ATC. They probably directed the smaller aircraft on the wrong runaway and the big plane landed and just crashed on it, then lost control, probably lost its landing gear and just slammed into the hangar bay.”

“How do you know?”

“Watching the live of the news. You could see that the bigger aircraft was on a landing trajectory from its heading. Also, it was on the runaway that Orynth airport uses for landing. The smaller craft was totally in the wrong runaway.”

“Well, it was a mess.”

“Did you manage to save anyone?”

Aedion nodded “all the people in the big aircraft. As soon as we arrived Aelin told us to keep an eye on the wings for fuel. The aircraft exploded but not before we managed to evacuate the passengers. Manon and Asterin saved two of the civilians by hiding in the cockpit.” He sighed “Aelin saved four.”

Rowan chuckled “she took two of my books one on flight theory and the one on airplanes in general.”

“That is why she knew about fuel being in the wings.”

Rowan nodded with pride “Aelin and I… we are working on things. On us. I…” he lowered his head “I care about her… a lot.”

Aedion leaned back on the chair and removed his fire jacket, remaining in his t-shirt “she can be difficult and believe me there is no one but me who knows just how much. I grew up with her. She is my cousin after all, but I always loved her like a sister. But Aelin has the bad habit of saying what she thinks and we had so many fights because of that. She can be a brat, but together with Lys they are the two most important women in my life.”

Rowan smiled briefly at Aedion’s description of Aelin. It was perfect.

“I proposed to Lys.” Confessed the blonde man.

Rowan slapped him hard on the shoulder “that is an incredible news. Congratulation, man.”

“I thought it was time. Lys and I have been together for three years and I love her.”

Rowan was about to add something when they saw the doctor approach them.

“Aedion, you can see her now.” The man stood and gestured to Rowan to follow him.

“Family only.” Said the doctor when he noticed Rowan stand.

“He is coming as well, Sorscha. And if anyone has any problems, they can take it up with me.”

The woman lifted her hands in yielding gesture “She is on the sixth floor in the ICU, room 46.”

“Thank you.”

“Are you all this friendly with doctors?”

“We visit hospitals a lot.” He added sadly.

Aedion walked to the stairs and Rowan chuckled “not you too…”

“What?”

“What’s with you guys and lifts?”

Aedion laughed “you posh boy can take the metal trap. I am walking.”

Rowan huffed and followed Aedion up the stairs. He was not letting an army guy beat him. He had pride.

Rowan pushed to keep up with Aedion and by the time they reached the sixth floor his legs were killing him, the man in front of him had kept a brutal pace, probably on purpose.

In silence they reached the room and Rowan pulled aside “you go in first, you are family.”

Aedion nodded and Rowan sat down on the chairs outside the room. Thing was… he needed time. He was scared of what he would see on the other side of the door. He was terrified.  She was the one with the scary job. He was the one who knew how to fly away from danger and avoid being shot out of the sky. She, on the other hand, she would willingly face a fire to save people. Getting involved with her meant going through the hell he was living now. He fought it for as long as he could. But somehow along the way he had fallen for her pretty badly. He closed his eyes and leaned his head against the wall.

Much later on he felt a hand on his shoulder “you can go in now.”

Rowan turned his head to the door and his heart sank. Then he stood and mustered all the courage he had to open the door and step in.

The room was silent apart from the steady beeping sounds of the machines monitoring her heartbeat and the hush sound of the ventilator pumping air in her lungs. He froze and closed the door behind him. He stared at her immobile body. With all the cables and tubes and machinery, she seemed so small in the hospital bed.

He finally took a step closer and sat down on the chair beside her.

“Hi,” his voice broken as he felt tears streak down his cheek. Gently he brushed the tip of the fingers on her right hand and noticed the heavy bandaging on the whole arm.

“You scared the shit out of me.” He whispered, his head leaning on the bed near her hand “A part of me wants to bolt because I am not sure I can take it. But the other side tells me not to. Tells me that the recklessness, you fierceness and bravery are why I am so damn crazy about you.” He stood and paced back and forth “the idea of losing you paralyses me with fear.” He took a step backward with fear gripping his heart “I can’t do this. I am so sorry. I just can’t.”

He ran out of the door but Aedion blocked him “that was quick.”

“I can’t…”

Aedion’s face morphed into pure rage and grabbed Rowan’s jump suit by the collar “oh yes you can. I told you before, posh boy. You break her heart and I break you.”

Rowan collapsed exhausted on the chair and took his head in his hands “I can’t… I can’t go through that hell a second time.”

“What to you mean?” Asked the blonde man.

Rowan looked up and met Aedion’s eyes. So much like Aelin’s. They could have easily been twins.

“The pain…” he paused “I can’t deal with that pain again. Losing Aelin would break me definitely. And at the same time I can’t leave her for the same reason. I need her in my life. She might be infuriating but at the same time I am mad about her.”

“Then you have your answer.” Said Aedion flatly.

Rowan stood and Aedion placed his body in front of him.

“I am not bolting. I need to go home, shower, clear my head and I will be back.”

“You bolt, and I will find you.”

Rowan raised his hands and walked away in silence.

He got home, dumped his bag near the bed and shed his clothes on his way to the bathroom. Opened the water and dove under the jet, the water hot to the point of being painful. He stood there. Eyes closed and head bowed. Realising that the water would not be able to wash away the shame of him almost walking out on her like a coward. Again. He was not as brave as he thought. When it came to his feelings he was a disaster. But there was deep terror in him, to a level that he never experienced not even with a missile trained on him. He had almost lost her and at the thought he struggled to breath for a moment. He leaned against the wall and allowed the tears to flow, he allowed himself to cry and let his fears go for a moment. He could not believe that in a matter of few months she had become so important that the thought of losing her would break him this much. He breathed deeply and tried to regain some focus.

Quickly, he washed himself and then walked out with a towel around his waist and padded to the bed to grab his phone. He called the commandant of the school in Doranelle and explained him what happened, why he had to leave all of a sudden and most of all why he was not going back. The man was not happy and he was going to catch hell from Lorcan as well but he did not care. He had given up too much of his life to the force. Now it was his turn to be selfish and put his life before duty.

As expected Lorcan called him not long after and he was now on his way to see his CO in nothing but jeans, a polo shirt and a black leather jacket and a pair of sunglasses. If he had to piss off Lorcan better do it properly.

He knocked once in front of his door and the grumpy tone of the man of the other side told him to enter. He saluted lazily and definitely did not miss Lorcan’s stare of disapproval at him appearing in front of his CO in civilian clothes.

“You seem to have misplaced your uniform.”

“No sir, definitely at home in my wardrobe.”

Lorcan growled his disapproval “I got an interesting call from the commandant of the school in Doranelle. He says that you resigned your post. That you have no intention of going back.”

“That is correct,” and Rowan sat down although Lorcan did not give him permission to do so.

Lorcan threw a folder on his desk “and I got a complaint from ATC saying that you breached airspace lockdown last night and threatened to land on a motorway if they didn’t let you land.”

“That was bullshit on their part. The airbase is on the opposite side of the city compared to the airport. There was no risk for me to get anywhere close to the airport. They were aware of my flight plan and my heading. It was total bullshit.”

“Well, now I have to deal with an irate traffic control supervisor and an outraged commandant at a school with which we have been cooperating for years.”

Rowan shrugged in challenge “not my problem.”

“No Whitethorn, you are the fucking problem.”

“Then suspend me, like I give a fuck.” Rowan leaned back in the chair and stared outside ignoring Lorcan’s tantrum.

“You broke aviation rules with that stunt of yours last night and before that you put your personal life before duty.”

Rowan bolted on his feet “I am so fucking tired of sacrificing my life for duty. I did it so much that when my wife died I was on the other side of the continent and I was given a couple of days of leave to go to her funeral and then was ordered to haul ass back to my post as if nothing happened and like the good obedient soldier I was, I even thanked you all for giving me two days to mourn.” He shouted, not caring if he was being disrespectful to a superior “I gave the airforce twelve years of my life, no questions asked. And all of a sudden I am not sure if I want to keep doing it.”

“Is she really worth it? Is that woman really worth giving up on your career?”

Rowan moved dangerously close and leaned on the desk with his hands “she is worth more that you cold-hearted bastard can ever imagine.”

Lorcan stood “get your arse out of my office, captain Whitethorn. You are suspended for a month.”

“Good.” Said Rowan and walked out slamming the door not bothering saluting Lorcan or add anything.

On his way out he met his squadron “what are you doing back in Orynth?” Asked Gavriel surprised.

“Getting my arse suspended for a month apparently.”

“What the fuck?” Fenrys stared at him in disbelief. That was something that he would do. He could not believe that Lorcan had just suspended Rowan. The man was a stickler for protocol and rules to a fault.

“Broke aviation rules last night by landing during an airspace lockdown. Ticked off ATC big time. And before that I left my post in Doranelle without telling anything to anyone.”

“Who are you and what have you done with Iceman?” Asked Connall.

“Aelin.” Was his answer “she was at the disaster at the airport last night. She is in bad condition. I had to come back.” He sighed “then Lorcan gave me a dressing down for putting a woman before duty and I might have pissed him off to historical levels. I would stay clear of him today.”

“And he suspended you.”

“Yes,” confirmed Rowan and the rest of the team almost noticed relief in his eyes.

“But you are coming back, right?” Rowan noticed sadness in Gavriel’s eyes. The two had been friends for a long time. And although he could not care less about Lorcan, he felt as if he was betraying his team mates.

“I don’t know… I might.” He said not convinced “A month away might do me well. I am not sure right now.”

“How’s Aelin?” Vaughan had the guts to ask the question no one could voice.

Rowan’s hands fisted “she is in bad shape. Intubated and sedated. When Aedion found her she was not breathing. She has bad burn on her right arm and plenty of other injuries. She was buried under the collapse of the hangar after she tried to save some people trapped inside.”

“Damn, the woman is badass.” Fenrys patted Rowan’s shoulder “when you go to the hospital, tell her that we are rooting for her too.”

He covered the young man’s hand with his “will do.” Then he straightened “now I better go, before Lorcan comes through and punishes all of you just for speaking with me.”

“Keep in touch, please,” added Gavriel.

Rowan winked and left and once he finally stepped outside of the perimeter of the airbase his soul felt lighter.

He reached the hospital not long after and found her room empty, her team was probably at work and he was glad he could have some time with her.

“Hi menace,” Rowan sat down and brushed a kiss on her forehead “are you enjoying your nap?” His finger gently flicked her nose and he sat back down “I got suspended for a month… I guess I broke a few rules to be with you.” His finger brushed hers emerging from the heavy bandage “and I epically ticked off a few people, but it was so worth it.” He squeezed her fingers “you are totally worth it.” He then stood and started walking around the room making adjustments. He fixed the blinds so there was some sun in the room, he tucked her properly in bed, almost afraid she could be cold. He fixed the flowers on her nightstand and made sure they had water. And finally he sat down on her bed and slowly undid her braid, brushed her hair and braided it again.

“I am sorry I left this morning, I… was overwhelmed.” He sat back down on the chair “I am not leaving. Not unless you want me to.” He grabbed her hand again but then he heard the door open and he sat straight.

“Hi,” said Lysandra and Elide in unison.

“We just dropped off some patients and we came in to see her.”

Rowan stood and with his hand he offered his spot to the two women.

“I thought you were away.” Said Lysandra, walking close to her friend and depositing a gentle kiss on her forehead.

“I was, and then I saw the disaster and I flew back and got myself suspended for it, but I don’t care.”

Lysandra was about to comment but he stopped her “I had to be here for her. I have no regrets.” His head then turned to Elide “you might want to stay clear of Lorcan for a few days. I ticked him off big time and the man might be a bit furious at the time.”

“Oh, okay,” the woman said timidly.

“I am sure that one of your smile will fix the mood of that poor old bastard.” Lysandra’s comment made him laugh.

“She just went in…” Lysandra’s voice was now a whisper and she sniffled turning her back from the other two occupants “she always does this type of crazy thing. Dorian was furious.”

A memory appeared in Rowan’s mind and his words were out before he could stop them “are they involved?”

He heard the woman chuckle “No. Dorian is in love with her and that is no secret. He was her captain when she was at west. But she always saw him as nothing but a friend. Also he is the chief and she a captain, so nothing can happen. They are really good friends, but no, nothing ever happened.”

A selfish part of him relaxed.

Lysandra’s radio went off and she groaned “come on Elide, back to work.”

Rowan waved them goodbye and went back to his chair.

***

Ten days had passed and the season had slowly turned and spring was now in full force.

Rowan was standing at the hospital window, looking outside towards the Staghorn mountains. The tops had officially lost their snow. He inhaled the fresh air and closed the window again. That room had become his new home in the past ten days. He had left only to go home and get changed and washed, but apart from that he had kept a tight vigil on her. They guys at the station had to work and he had been more than happy to keep her company. He was out of a job for the time being, anyway. He turned around and walked to the bed. Nothing had changed. She was still intubated and still unconscious. The doctor had raised concerns with regards to the damage her lungs had suffered and a neurologist had confirmed that her responses were within normal parameters and that they were expecting her to wake up soon. In the last few days they had noticed an increased cerebral activity which according to the doctors was a good sign. He sat down again beside her and went back to the book he had been reading to her. As a joke between the two of them he had started reading flight manuals, or any of any of his books about flying. He had read her other books as well and all the possible articles about their amazing rescue at the airport. Rowan had spent so much time at the hospital that all the nurses knew him and helped him every time he had a request for them to make her more comfortable. He had brought more comfortable pillows, had decorated the wall of her room with all the cards she got from the different fire stations and from west, together with the ones of the four people she save in the hangar. With his mobile he had played classical music for her and a few times he had played an opera as well and joked that they finally got that date after all. His past ten days had been dedicated to nothing else but her. He was humming away a tune from the last opera he had played, while tucking her bed sheets properly when he brushed her hand and felt it move. It was a subtle movement but he felt it. Rowan kept humming and this time the motion was much clearer.

“Aelin…” her middle finger lifted by a fraction and Rowan laughed.

“Are you giving me the middle finger even when you sleep? You are such a brat.” He leaned forward and kissed her forehead “Can you hear me?” He whispered near her ear.

His gaze returned to her hand and this time he noticed her clearly trying to bend her fingers.

Rowan sat down beside her and stroked her cheek once more “Aelin… it’s me.”

A tiny flutter of her eyelashes had his heart race madly in his chest. And when her blue eyes finally set on him he gave her a big smile “it was abut time, there was no need to get into a fire and almost get yourself killed if you needed a nap.”

Aelin groaned and he noticed the middle finger in her left hand rise sightly. Rowan roared in laughter. Then she lifted the same hand and went for the tube in her mouth.

“Hold on, you are still intubated. Let me go and call the doctor.” He disappeared outside of the room and came back with her doctor a moment later. He extubated her and the procedure looked very unpleasant. Aelin coughed heavily but the doctor reassured him it was normal and then left the two alone.

Rowan grabbed a glass of water on the nightstand and helped her. He lifted her a bit and pressed the glass against her lips “drink a little.”

She drank eagerly and then collapsed back on the pillow exhausted. Rowan sat at her left side and brushed her head gently with his hand “are you in pain?”

With a small movement she shook her head. Rowan looked at the bags with liquids hanging behind her and noticed they still had plenty of stuff in them. She was hooked on painkillers and antibiotics and had a feeding tube down her nose.

“You… here.” She managed with difficulty. Although she was breathing on her own the doctor had warned him that some issues might take longer to heal. The smoke and the fuel fumes had battered her lungs pretty badly and that it was why after extubation, the doctor had placed small oxygen tubes in her nose.

“That I am.” he took her hand in his “after your text complaining about civilian pilots I had a look at the news and they were showing the inferno at the airport.” He stopped, he would never forget that horrible scene “when I saw Dorian and Aedion carrying you out I realised I could not stay there any longer. Long story short, I broke a few rules, pissed off a few people and got suspended, but I am where I am meant to be.”

“Suspended?”

Rowan nodded solemnly “Turns out that even if he has a girlfriend, Lorcan is still a cold-hearted bastard. I have no regrets.”

Aelin sighed and her breath came out ragged “squad.”

“They are all fine and they miss you. Aedion has been playing captain and he hates it and Dorian has been helping a lot as well. They are on shift now but they came and visit a lot.”

She was about to say something else but a brutal cough hit her and she was left exhausted and wheezing and he pulled her to him. It destroyed him seeing her like that.

He shifted the pillows behind her and allowed Aelin to be in a semi sit position, hoping that would make breathing much easier than lying down. He sat beside her, pulled an arm around her shoulder and dragged her closer to him “Aedion proposed to Lys.”

“Know.”

“There is no pleasing you, young lady. I assume Lys has told you.”

Aelin smiled at him and nodded.

His phone buzzed in his pocket and when he removed it he realised it was Lorcan. The man had tried to phone him all morning but he had refused every single call.

Rowan sighed heavily and Aelin looked up at him with a worried expression.

“I almost resigned.” His forehead touching hers “then I didn’t because of duty and all that shit. When they carried you out I lost it. Nothing else mattered but being here for you. Screw rules and regulations.”

She turned her head and deposited a kiss on his lips “thank you for being here.” She managed with great difficulty.

***

With spring in full swing, Orynth was covered in colours from flowers all around the city. The air smelled sweet and warm.

Aelin inhaled the fresh air and after almost a month in the hospital she felt alive again. Rowan lifted her in his arms and slowly carried her to her house. Her legs were still shaky and she was still weak. Her recovery was taking longer than expected. The doctors had put her through a respiratory therapy, but at times she still felt short of breath. Rowan dropped her off on the sofa and went to get their stuff. He had made a deal with her and he would stay with her until she was better. He still had four days before his suspension was over. He had been at her side since she woke up and the nurses had told her that even when she was still unconscious, Rowan had barely left her side.

Her mind went back to when he told her he could be very caring for the people he loved and he had showed her that over and over again.

“Here we go.” He dumped all the bags in the living room and then went to the bedroom and Aelin had a feeling he was preparing so that it was up to his standards.

“The bed is ready, your highness.”

He fussed. He fussed a lot but she realised she had started to love that side of him.

“Does it meet your standards, captain?”

He grinned “I don’t think is grandiose enough.”

“I will make sure I’ll upgrade my living standards to accommodate a posh boy like yourself. I doubt an army guy will fuss. Aedion never did.”

“They have no standards to begin with.”

Aelin threw a pillow at him but Rowan ducked in time and an instant later she was in the air and he dumped her on the bed with little ceremony.

He leaned forward and kissed her “now get changed,” he ordered and threw her her bed clothes.

“Yes, sir. At your orders sir,” she mocked him with a funny salute.

He shook his head “you civilians really have no respect for rank.”

She stood on her knees in bed and shed the top she was wearing and removed her bra as well, remaining bare.

He was busy emptying her bag that when he turned and saw her semi naked he almost tripped on the dropped top.

“My girls here feel lonely,” she palmed her breasts in a very sensual way

Rowan ignored her and passed her the pyjama top “It seems like you are doing a good job at keeping them busy.”

She slapped him with her t-shirt and got dressed again “I’d better get covered again, I don’t want to traumatise you.” She was about to add something else but a fit of coughing stopped her. Rowan was at her side in a moment and held her, knowing that it would usually leave her spent. The fits had become less frequent as she improved but the occasional one was enough to leave her breathless and this one seemed to be one of those. She grabbed his arm and squeezed it “hurts,”Aelin complained fisting her hand in his chest while concentrating on breathing. Rowan grabbed the inhaler she had been prescribed to use during an attack. She did as she had been shown by the doctors and then melted in his arms.

“Lie down.”

“Open…” she started but the coughing resumed and her hand fisted in the bed sheets this time. She grabbed the inhaler and breathed its medicines again, feeling air rushing back in her lungs. Eventually she collapsed in bed exhausted “Window…” she finally finished.

Rowan moved with speed and did as told. Aelin loved the spring air and even at the hospital she often asked him for the window to be open. It made her feel as if she could breath.

He moved her to the centre of the bed and covered with the blankets “do you feel like eating something?”

“No,” she said weakly and he knew she was not well. In the short time he had known her, Aelin had never refused a meal “Sleep,” his hand brushed her hair and she was asleep within minutes.

Once he was positive she was asleep he walked out and gently closed the door and went to the kitchen to make a phone call. Lorcan had been pestering him almost every day but Rowan had ignored him.

“The dutiful captain finally decides to phone back, or should I call you nurse Whitethorn now?”

Rowan growled and almost closed the call again, then decided to count till ten and listen what he had to say.

“Say your piece Salvaterre and let me go.”

“I want you to march back through these doors in four days.”

Rowan pinched the bridge of his nose. How could he leave her alone?

“A please from time to time doesn’t hurt.”

“Whitethorn, I don’t give a fuck if your firefighter woman made you a well mannered soldier. I am your superior and if I give you an order I expect you to answer with yes, sir. Another peep from you and you get your arse written up for insubordination and you can kiss your career goodbye.”

Rowan had to punch something, but a loud noise could wake up Aelin and he wanted to avoid that. So he just hung up the phone without giving Lorcan a reply then he grabbed a pillow and screamed into it. Once he was done he grabbed his laptop from his bag and set in motion his next plan.

TAGS:

@rowaelinismyotp​

@jlinez​

@swankii-art-teacher​

@courtofjurdan​

@whimsicallyreading​

@tillyrubes10​

[mitigatedchaos]

On Having “Whiteness”

(~2,200 words, 11 minutes)

Summary: A metaphysics of “Whiteness” has overtaken actual sociology in the Democrats’ popular consciousness - blinding them to racial interventions that might actually work and taking them off the table of political discussion.

-★★★-

Donald Moss - On Having Whiteness, Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (emphasis mine)

Whiteness is a condition one first acquires and then one has—a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which “white” people have a particular susceptibility. The condition is foundational, generating characteristic ways of being in one’s body, in one’s mind, and in one’s world. Parasitic Whiteness renders its hosts’ appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse. These deformed appetites particularly target nonwhite peoples. Once established, these appetites are nearly impossible to eliminate. Effective treatment consists of a combination of psychic and social-historical interventions. Such interventions can reasonably aim only to reshape Whiteness’s infiltrated appetites—to reduce their intensity, redistribute their aims, and occasionally turn those aims toward the work of reparation. When remembered and represented, the ravages wreaked by the chronic condition can function either as warning (“never again”) or as temptation (“great again”). Memorialization alone, therefore, is no guarantee against regression. There is not yet a permanent cure.

So both @arcticdementor [here] and @samueldays have linked me to this allegedly “peer-reviewed” article.  The Federalist has a bit more context, but it doesn’t really make the situation better.

Race Theory Problems

Obviously, this is a work of sloppy thinking.  The categorization of “white supremacy culture” or “whiteness” used by people like this is vague handwaving that describes being bad at management as “white supremacy culture,” and which in general labels universal human problems, like organizations being resource-constrained, or people being impatient, as somehow uniquely “white.” 

But this sort of article is really what I mean when I say that social justice’s approach to “whiteness” is about “spiritual contamination.” 

Samueldays called it “the ‘I’m not touching you’ of inciting race war,” and I may cover more of his response to it later.  Suffice it to say, it has the same general kind of problems as “stolen land” arguments (where an entire present population’s living area becomes undefined), unbounded “reparations” arguments where no amount of transfers by the designated oppressor are considered to clear the debt, and so on.

This is exactly the sort of material that conservatives are seeking to remove government funding for and prohibit from use in employment training.  This is the kind of material that the Trump Anti-CRT executive order prohibiting racial scapegoating was meant to cover.

Race Theory Definitions

This kind of stuff is, of course, not really defensible, so usually at this point people will argue that 1), “that’s not real critical race theory,” and then 2), “it’s just a few weirdos.”  For those, I would say...

1) If it’s not real “Critical Race Theory,” then what is it?

We can’t measure or disprove Moss’s proposed “Whiteness,” and this malevolent psychic entity said to “deform” white people obviously isn’t based on a comparison with other human populations or historical periods.  When it comes to “insatiable” appetites, one study argued that the Mongol invasions killed so many people that it showed up in the carbon record.

At best, it’s sloppy race science as practiced by an amateur, like twitter users idly speculating whether whites have ‘oppressor epigenetics’ - but with the veneer of official status.  And it has similar risks to proposing that there is such a thing as biologically-inherited class enemy status, and other collective intergenerational justice logic.

Presumably, the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association is intended as a journal of science, or at least serious scholarship, and not of bad racist poetry with no rhyme or meter.

Moss provides a relatively pure example of whatever-this-is. I need to know what it’s called, so we can get rid of it.

Race Theory Prohibitions

2) If it’s just the product of a few race-obssessed weirdos, then it won’t hurt to get rid of it.  So get rid of it.

The actual text [PDF] of the Trump Anti-CRT order does not ban teaching about the Trail of Tears, or Jim Crow, and so on, and both of those topics were taught in school before this recent wave of whatever-this-is was popularized.

Trump’s order banned teaching that any race is inherently guilty or evil due to the actions of their ancestors, and the level of resistance to this has been bizarre.

These teachings don’t seem to provide gains in relatively objective metrics like underrepresented minority test scores (or at least that’s not something I’ve seen - and the continued opposition to standardized tests suggests proponents do not expect it to), so it’s unclear just what of value is going to be lost here. 

Collateral Damage

Samueldays wrote,

Because right now the conservatives talking about "critical race theory" as they fire in the direction of Moss et al. are very important in preventing another race war and you have a moral duty to help them aim, not throw smoke for Moss.

Right now Conservatives are assessing just how much stuff they’re going to have to rip out to make “standardized tests are racist” and “it’s impossible to be racist to white people” stop.  While this may not be the message that Liberals are intending to send, it is the message that many people are receiving.  (I discuss problems with both, and some alternatives to handle them better, in another post.)

Liberals need to get out in front of this.  Sooner is better.

If Conservatives think that they have to gut hostile work environment law in order to avoid their children being taught that they’re permanently morally contaminated by their race, and Liberals have no means to actually close race gaps within a 4-8 year period (and right now it’s slim pickings on that front), Conservatives are just going to gut hostile work environment law.

Aether

From their perspective, why not? 

Everything in the world is only six degrees of separation from something racist.  Anything in the world can be tied to something racist.  (So can anyone.)

But nowhere in this pervasive atmosphere of tying things to racism are there solutions.  There are guesses based on correlations.  Proposals.  But usually when you reach out to grab them, to really get a grip on whether it’s correlation or causation, they dissolve in your hands.  The few that do have any solidity to them are moderate in their success (such as Heckman’s involvement in the Reach Up & Learn study in Jamaica) - and don’t appear to be based on the same style of thinking as shown by Moss and others.

It isn’t just that trying to turn combating an invisible, non-measurable, unfalsifiable, parasitic psychic force into an actual political program would inevitably be oppressive and totalitarian.  It isn’t just that articles like Moss’s are an in-kind donation to the 2024 DeSantis Presidential campaign for that very reason.

It isn’t just that unfalsifiable Metaphysics of Whiteness content like White Privilege Theory has been found to lower sympathy for the poor, and that present diversity training doesn’t work...

Race Content Crowding

This stuff is crowding out legitimate scholarship.  I don’t just mean in terms of funding, tenure track positions, or high-flying magazine coverage - all limited by their nature.  I mean among the base.  I have been interrogating Democrats on Twitter for months, and not a single one has been able to cite a strongly-demonstrated intervention that’s being held back, or even a past one that was conclusively demonstrated to be effective.  They can often recite a list of racial grievances on cue.

Tucker Carlson could run boomer_update.exe on a list of every educational failure since the 1970s, and they would be reduced to sputtering accusations of racism against people who increasingly don’t care.  He could do this tomorrow.  The only thing that prevents this is Tucker Carlson’s conscience.

I discovered the Reach Up & Learn program through Glenn Loury - described as a ‘conservative.’ Scott Alexander, attacked by the New York Times crew, brought some success with multivitamins to my attention.  When I first heard about the Perry Preschool program, I believe it was from someone well to the right of him.

About the only one brought to my attention by the Democratic establishment constellation proper was lead removal, and the gains on that are probably getting tapped out.  The frame it was proposed in was not Critical Race Theorist, as this was likely in 2012. 

As it stands, I’m more likely to find something that works from someone the New York Times would disapprove of than someone they wouldn’t.  Or, as Wesley Yang wrote,

Reality has been contrarian for a while.

Succeed Early

Even if we suppose that Conservatives are inherently racist, Liberals have a duty to support interventions that work.  In fact, the more that Conservatives are a seething, undifferentiated mass of uniform racial hatred, the more important it is that Liberals stick to racial interventions that work, because nobody else is going to fix the problem if Liberals get it wrong.

It isn’t just a matter of resources per year.  It’s also a matter of time.

From Heckman’s website,

Although Perry did not produce long-run gains in IQ, it did create lasting improvements in character skills [...] which consequently improved a number of labor market outcomes and health behaviors as well as reduced criminal activity.

Even if we propose an unlimited amount of funding (which is not the case), people and politicians only have a limited amount of time and attention each year.  Newspapers only publish so many issues with so many pages each week.  Television programs only cover so many hours for so many viewers each day.  Even the dedicated can only read so many books in a year.

Even though the Perry intervention was imperfect, and the sample size was not as large as desirable, every second Democrat I talked to should have been able to answer the question “can you name an effective intervention?” with “what about Perry Preschool?”

Every year that we have entire cottage industries working on and popularizing contentious, ineffective, and backlash-provoking Metaphysics of Whiteness content, based on oversimplified oppressor/oppressed binaries, or theories in which power is held collectively by races as monolithic blobs (rather than modelling power as a network of relations between individuals, in which an individual of any background might be destroyed by the racialized relations in their environment), is another year we haven’t spent that energy on finding or implementing something that actually works.

This isn’t just an individual failure by Democrat voters, who typically have day jobs to focus on - it is a failure by the institutions who are supposed to inform and guide them.  This institutional failure likely contributed to the popularization of Metaphysics of Whiteness content in the first place.

Okay, now what?

Donald Moss is a crackpot.  Metaphysics of Whiteness content is unfalsifiable.  The idea that there is a psychic parasite of “Whiteness” is not a legitimate field of study; it’s parasociology.  The idea that “a sense of urgency” is “white supremacy culture” isn’t much better. [1]

We already tried isolating this content to obscure corners of academia, where individuals with high racial attachment could write about it.  It leaked out. 

We need to get this stuff out of the popular consciousness to make room for stuff that might actually work.  The best way to do that may be to cut off the source.  Since Donald Moss is a crackpot, perhaps it’s time we started treating him, and everyone else like him, as what they are.

People involved in Metaphysics of Whiteness content, like Donald Moss, need to be (figuratively) grabbed by the shoulder, and firmly, but politely, told to stop.  Society has been recklessly handing out race-colored glasses to the general population since around 2014, resulting in a rise in amateur race science, of which both right-wing Twitter users memeing about Italians and Metaphysics of Whiteness participants like Moss are examples.  If they do not stop, they must be stripped of institutional authority.  Metaphysics of Whiteness content is unfalsifiable and we should not be certifying it.

If institutions refuse to reduce the authority of Metaphysics of Whiteness practitioners, those institutions must have their accreditation penalized, and their government funding reduced or eliminated, just as if they insisted on producing study after study on magic or ESP which failed to yield results.  If they do not comply, they must be replaced.

It’s possible that Metaphysics of Whiteness content might have had some obscure, niche function in terms of the exploration of the idea space. 

However, as it has displaced popular knowledge of interventions that might work, and the attention given to them in the political system, Liberals should seek to surgically remove it, at the very least until some more effective interventions see the political light of day.

If not, Conservatives will attempt to remove it with a bludgeon.  "They described an entire race as ‘voracious, insatiable, and perverse,’ and here’s the citation for the exact page where they did that,” is perfect material with which to abolish entire departments.

-★★★-

[1] If we go a bit farther out, scholars of “Decolonization” argue that the field is wholly unconcerned with “settler futurity,” a phrase not much less ominous than describing “whiteness” as “incurable.”  It seems that their entire job should be to answer the very difficult questions they have decided not to.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

Life was good to me. America was one of the friendliest countries I've ever been to.

But then college was like, you know, it taught Critical Theory, it taught Critical Race Theory when it came to like, sociology and stuff like that. It was dark.

The trouble is when you learn from that lens, and that's really kind of what some classes took - it wasn't like, oh “this is a theory” or “this is a school of thought.” It was this is how you have to look at life, these are the tools and that's it, this is actually what reality is.

I had that framework kind of begin to get embedded in me but - pay attention to the feeling - I didn't feel good about it.

I remember the one day, it was raining outside, it was almost Halloween, I think it was 2014, and we were learning about symbolism [..] and it just felt dark. I literally felt like my heart was opening and darkness was coming inside. From that moment, it was dark.

As I adopted that lens through college, my outlook of the world was dark and hopeless. Little did I know my outlook of the world would then come back to affect my look and the way I saw myself, who I was, the value that I brought, how people saw me, all just deteriorated, because it was like I had to take all these factors into consideration.

I came out of college with that worldview. I came out of college thinking, as a black woman, opportunities for me are so much less likely to happen or be given because of my blackness. That I was very much so hyper-aware of microaggressions.

I was very aware of just the way the world is, the way you're taught that the world is. So it's like everything's working against you. Literally, you walk out of the door and everyone is conspiring against you. So whereas from the beginning, I would just kind of walk down the street and say hi to people, if they didn't say hi back I was like whatever. It was like every look that I got was it was racist. It was just racist. And it was also racist-sexist, it was more than just one thing. It was everything you are is everything someone else hates.

Like literally, walk down to the store and I'll not pay attention to all the people who walked by me and who were just normal. I would walk by, say, 10 people, and if one person gave me a bad look, or you know they didn't move out of the way, like they're walking and then, you know, it's oh what do you do and they just keep going... I interpreted that as it's an act it's a microaggression. Like, that is an act of racism.

So, regardless of all the other interactions that was fine, that one thing would ruin my day. I remember I felt like I would have a dagger in my heart. But it wasn't just that, see that's just going to the store.

Now you have to go through the whole day, and if you ever get anything of someone treating you like crap, or if you ever get someone who like, opens the door right, for maybe their family and then like, you're far away off and they don't open the door for you... actions like that I would interpret all of that as microaggressions against me.

So that would make me so fragile that by the end of the day, I'm literally, I'm filled with so much darkness, I'm filled with so much anxiety, I'm filled with so much stress, that I can't even do my normal work.

I can't live my life like that right. I can't live and actually work and give a hundred percent of the task because I'm kind of under stress and duress. So yeah, that's what life was like, honestly that's what life was like when you are hyper-aware of all these kind of Critical Theory notions and ideas, especially the neo-Marxism stuff.

[..]

Wokeness was literally crippling me. Literally crippling me.

==

For reference, the above mentality is called “Critical Consciousness,” and it’s an explicit goal of Critical Theory. The intent is what you could think of as “seeing the code of the Matrix”; finding and identifying the carefully hidden power dynamics CRT mythology declares - on faith, not evidence, naturally - exist within every human interaction, and are the “normal science” upon which reality itself is socially constructed.

It looks a lot like neurosis and paranoia.

This is why Woke and the doctrines of Critical Theory, particularly Critical Race Theory, are sometimes called Reverse Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. All the worst unhealthy thinking styles - catastrophizing, mind reading, disqualifying the positive, emotional reasoning, over-generalizing - that CBT helps you overcome are all not just present, but encouraged, in the pursuit of Critical Consciousness. Download the card and tick them off as you watch the video, because they’re identifiable in Kimi’s description of her day under the cloud of Woke ideology and dogma.

Critical Race Theory isn’t just profoundly racist, it’s extremely bad for mental health.

[deathvsthemaiden]

if this isnt too late.. top 5 non-fiction books? 🌷❤️🌺

Def not too late! 🌹🌷💐💜❣️💖

1) I mention this book so much but qgxjshshs I rlly love it so! The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s Eye View of the World by Michael Pollan, I’ve rarely had soooo much fun reading nonfiction! It’s about apples, tulips, marijuana and potatoes and while I don’t particularly love or care abt some of those, I was gripped by the book the whole time + ended up feeling more respect for every plant covered when I was done cheesy as that sounds wgshwhs 😓😳🤭 also it should be noted that this book may not be as objectively thrilling as I may unintentionally be making it out to be, I’m just very into plants and if I had the brain for science and my uni offered it I think I’d have enjoyed studying botany just as much as my current major 🤔🌱

2) What We See When We Read by Peter Mendelsund. Don’t rlly remember the specifics of this book (other than cool graphics + that I rlly enjoyed it!) but the title is self explanatory and I remember thinking the content was illuminating 💡

3) 221B: Studies in Sherlock Holmes, edited by Vincent Starrett (theres a bit of fiction in this too, it’s like a series of writing by various ppl on Holmes and I thought almost all the essays were fascinating! Some wild theories in here (of extremely varied quality + believability) ranging from “Sherlock was part American!” to extremely overconfident and implausible (imo) guesses abt the identities of some of Watson’s alleged several wives. Reading this was a fun time + I liked the variety even if not every individual essay and story 🔎

4) What Editors Do: The Art, Craft, and Business of Book Editing, edited by Peter Ginna. When I decided I not only wanted to eventually work in editing and publishing but that I’d be good at it I found this book, and while I’m sure it’s somewhat outdated considering the speed of tech evolution and how industries race to keep up, I remember it just confirming my desire to pursue this occupation/field even when, if not especially when, it discussed the drawbacks and challenges involved. Like 221B it’s a bunch of essays by different ppl, so you get glimpses into the life of a textbook editor vs a children’s book editor etc etc. 📚

5) Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men by Lundy Bancroft. It’s like the nonfiction equivalent of Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns for me in terms of how seen it made me feel and all the things it affirmed for me when no one and nothing else would. I honestly think everyone should read this or similar studies/literature so that like. Common misconceptions about the nature of abusers and abusive situations eventually become.... less common. I think misunderstanding these issues exacerbates them so much, you know? :/ and it’s so avoidable! Not to mention how many cycles of violence we could nip in the bud if we could sense earlier on what people’s real motivations when they act out are!! Very readable book + lays things out very clearly, there’s good reasons tumblr is/was very in awe of it, imo 📖

Honorable mentions:

I’m looking forward to the release of Crying in H Mart by , the lead singer of Japanese Breakfast! I read some excerpts and what can I say but wowza and this is going to hurt my child-of-immigrant-parents’ ❤️

I also have fond memories of reading parts of Joseph Campbell’s The Power of Myth in a high school mythology class with one of the nicest teachers I’ve ever had, and later seeking out the audiobook and walking around looking at autumn leaves as I listened to it (the book in both formats is a long interview basically, and it felt very cozy) so the book itself makes me very nostalgic, I only recently came across those criticisms of Campbell for labeling concepts like The Hero’s Journey universal when he really only looked at European myths? (Or smth along those lines idr exactly atm) so I wanna revisit those criticisms and this book+finally read all his other stuff too someday!

[ablogofnature]

As an indigenous Mohawk, I can say that it likely comes from.the immense divide and split education we get. Most americans do not know about the genocide and slavery that built this country until teenage years and even there it is sprinkled more than explained. The ignorance does not seem caused by a flaw in the education system's design, it seems like a conscious omission across american society. I mean american history classes in high school spend more time on their wars than any critical event that created the country they live in. People don't know the reason why places are called a certain way. Native Americans have to teach everything regarding our culture to each other, otherwise the culture dies. We learn early on a lot about the creation of this country and it's political parties and ideologies. It is intertwined with our struggles and the differences that separates us from other americans. The cultural difference is immense because the information is far more global on indigenous sides than in the school system. They skip a lot of stuff or just diminish the impact of something bad. Most schools still justify all the wrongdoings, native americans do not. We talk about america's wrong, but also our own wrongdoing very early. So there you go.

This is why I say I blame the education system. Because they choose to not teach critical race theory. And in recent weeks some states have chosen to NOT teach crt and, instead ban it. If the American education system chose to teach the in-depth genocide they committed to many groups of POC, ignorance wouldn’t be rampant. A lot of it’s history is so far from the truth as well, for example the recent holiday thanksgiving. So I agree with what you said, I believe if ACTUAL history was taught a lot of people would be conscious of how this country was built. And also be educated on other countries. I do know some countries outside the USA teach about other countries besides their own. The USA seems to only teach about themselves. And barely correct information at that.