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"I don't understand why poor white people would vote for/support someone who clearly doesn't benefit them!"

One of my favorite conversations is how racism is a cornerstone of classism and capitalism. The purpose and thus invention of the identity "white" has caused nothing but subjugation and destruction to those who do not fall under its category- and that outcome is not a side effect, nor an accident! So long as we're not willing to dismantle white supremacy, we are never going to be able to fully address the damage of capitalism!

(Book: Anarchism and the Black Revolution)

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Sliding in with this at the tail end of Mermay...

You usually see octopus mermaids with the torso the other way, but a friend pointed out that octopi have their beaks amid the tentacles, and I thought it'd be fun to play with. Imagine being welcomed into an embrace by all those limbs.

Prints available on Inprnt!

[Image Description: A digital painting of two mermaids in an embrace. The mermaid on the left has the body of an octopus which is black on top and a warm gold on the underside of the tentacles. She has light brown skin and wears a black hijab and long-sleeved grey shirt with a gold pattern. She is reaching around the other mermaid's waist while her tentacles swirl open around them. The mermaid on the right is a fat black woman with black natural hair. Her tail is that of a whiptail catfish and matches the brown of her skin, with a paler gold underbelly. She holds the face of the octopus mermaid in her hands. The two of them smile softly at each other. /end ID]

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Revenge for @hotimaginator :3

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I made my version of the Demon Hunters 🇧🇷(first generation)

I really loved this trend

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the aforementioned pepperbulb doodle i did 💛💜

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Cutey cutey romantic moment because I need the serotonin. And a hands insert shot because I apparently hate myself.

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Can I recommend an extremely underrated Black cosplayer? Her name is dandelion4 on instagram and her cosplays are the most creatives ones I’ve ever seen. She’s also disabled and sometimes uses her weelchair as part of her cosplays, which is AWESOME.

(Her Bill Cipher, Pinkie Pie and Mabel Pines cosplays respectively! Sorry for the poor quality images, my internet’s a little sketchy right now)

Cute!!!!!

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hey, quick q

i'm a writer and i'm admittedly struggling with how to write physical descriptions of people of color (i would rather die than say someone has "chocolate" or "caramel" skin), any suggestions?

My pinned post contains all my lessons, one of which is lesson 3 which refers to what you're asking.

I will say, I am not inherently against caramel, or using other food related shades of brown like coffee, cinnamon, nutmeg, etc. (though there are still plenty of non food related browns!!) I am a lover of the spices and there are so many beautiful shades within the spices, they're so unique that it lets me know that you actually had to think about what shade of brown you were talking about. There's a SPECIFICITY to it that lacks when you say "chocolate".

Definitely against "chocolate" by nonblack writers. And the reason I'm against chocolate is because 1) "chocolate" can still look like anything and 2) because people will use chocolate as "see he's BROWN" as if there's only one shade of brown to ever bother knowing. Dark hair, dark eyes, dark skin- "chocolate". 😐🙃 It's boring, lazy, effortless, with a dash of "we see Black people as something to be consumed (but only in a familiar form that we like!)" which is a deeper conversation held later in the lessons.

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tracy chapman, rolling stone #535 (september 1988)

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Pin-Up Doll [NeXus]

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So the server was talkin’ abt doin’ some characters as those pin-up girl calendars, and yk I had to do it to ‘em

This took a good few hours so I wanna just wanna test the waters w/ just one, I’ll most likely do the rest of the concepts they recommended later bc I loved drawing this eheheh

So have this terrible rough concept with the first contestant — the beloved water muse, Oscar for June (of 2026) !!

[Close up of his face below cut bc I’m proud of it vv]

He’s so gorgeous omgs, I’m foaming at mouth/vpos

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Polytrix cuddle pile? In this weather??? Yaes

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Sharing my Fantasy Forest getup because I'm happy with how it turned out.

This is The Person Divinely Ordained as Prince✨

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@liooxn_n_2 And something small about #Polytrix

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okay so I finished Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) by Harriet Jacobs, and here are my takeaways, because it was AMAZING and I can't believe all US students aren't required to read it in school:

shows how slavery actually worked in nuanced ways i'd never thought much about

example: Jacobs's grandmother would work making goods like crackers and preserves after she was done with her work day (so imagine boiling jars at like 3 a.m.) so that she could sell them in the local market

through this her grandmother actually earned enough money, over many years, to buy herself and earn her freedom

BUT her "mistress" needed to borrow money from her. :)))) Yeah. Seriously. And never paid her back, and there was obviously no legal recourse for your "owner" stealing your life's savings, so all those years of laboring to buy her freedom were just ****ing wasted. like.

But also! Her grandmother met a lot of white women by selling them her homemade goods, and she cultivated so much good will in the community that she was able to essentially peer pressure the family that "owned" her into freeing her when she was elderly (because otherwise her so-called owners' white neighbors would have judged them for being total assholes, which they were)

She was free and lived in her own home, but she had to watch her children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren all continue to be enslaved. She tried to buy her family but their "owners" wouldn't allow it.

Enslaved people celebrated Christmas. they feasted, and men went around caroling as a way to ask white people in the community for money.

But Christmas made enslaved people incredibly anxious because New Years was a common time for them to be sold, so mothers giving their children homemade dolls on Christmas might, in just a few days' time, be separated from their children forever

over and over again, families were deliberately ripped apart in just the one community that Harriet Jacobs lived in. so many parents kept from their children. just insane to think of that happening everywhere across the slave states for almost 200 years

Harriet Jacobs was kept from marrying a free Black man she loved because her "owner" wouldn't let her

Jacobs also shows numerous ways slavery made white people powerless

for example: a white politician had some kind of relationship with her outside of marriage, obviously very questionably consensual (she didn't hate him but couldn't have safely said no), and she had 2 children by him--but he wasn't her "master," so her "master" was allowed to legally "own" his children, even though he was an influential and wealthy man and tried for years to buy his children's freedom

she also gives examples of white men raping Black women and, when the Black women gave birth to children who resembled their "masters," the wives of those "masters" would be devastated--like, their husbands were (from their POV) cheating on them, committing violent sexual acts in their own house, and the wives couldn't do anything about it (except take out their anger on the enslaved women who were already rape victims)

just to emphasize: rape was LEGALLY INCENTIVIZED BY US LAW LESS THAN 200 YEARS AGO. It was a legal decision that made children slaves like their mothers were, meaning that a slaveowner who was a serial rapist would "own" more "property" and be better off financially than a man who would not commit rape.

also so many examples of white people promising to free the enslaved but then dying too soon, or marrying a spouse who wouldn't allow it, or going bankrupt and deciding to sell the enslaved person as a last resort instead

A lot of white people who seemed to feel that they would make morally better decisions if not for the fact that they were suffering financially and needed the enslaved to give them some kind of net worth; reminds me of people who buy Shein and other slave-made products because they just "can"t" afford fairly traded stuff

but also there were white people who helped Harriet Jacobs, including a ship captain whose brother was a slavetrader, but he himself felt slavery was wrong, so he agreed to sail Harriet to a free state; later, her white employer did everything she could to help Harriet when Harriet was being hunted by her "owner"

^so clearly the excuse that "people were just racist back then" doesn't hold any water; there were plenty of folks who found it just as insane and wrongminded as we do now

Harriet Jacobs making it to the "free" north and being surprised that she wasn't legally entitled to sit first-class on the train. Again: segregation wasn't this natural thing that seemed normal to people in the 1800s. it was weird and fucked up and it felt weird and fucked up!

Also how valued literacy skills were for the enslaved! Just one example: Harriet Jacobs at one point needed to trick the "slaveowner" who was hunting her into thinking she was in New York, and she used an NYC newspaper to research the names of streets and avenues so that she could send him a letter from a fake New York address

I don't wanna give away the book, because even though it's an autobiography, it has a strangely thrilling plot. But these were some of the points that made a big impression on me.

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl also inspired the first novel written by a Black American woman, Frances Harper, who penned Iola Leroy. And Iola Leroy, in turn, helped inspire books by writers like Nella Larsen and Zora Neale Hurston. Harriet Jacob is also credited in Colson Whitehead's acknowledgments page for informing the plot of The Underground Railroad. so this book is a pivotal work in the US literary canon and, again, it's weird that we don't all read it as a matter of course.

(also P.S. it's free on project gutenberg and i personally read it [also free] on the app Serial Reader)