#And I really really feel the. Only the most privileged people from a marginalized group profit from quotas thing

[doppelnatur]

I'm wondering, thinking about quotas. This is something I've honestly always felt quite conflicted about. I think we need quotas. Desperately. We need support programs to get disadvantaged people into the jobs and positions they want and we honestly desperately need them in but that they but have a way harder time getting into. But I'm just unsure whether a quota is the best way? Especially since they're often so specific and do not address the reasons why and how people end up disadvantaged. The Greens party has a women's quota of 50%. Nice. But do they have a quota for people who, as the statistics say it, have a migratory background? Because in our city that would be 40% and I just don't think they do. What about trans men, inter people who are legally men and legally diverse people or those with no legal gender. Are they included in the women's quota? Do they have to out themselves to get access to benefits compensating their disadvantagement? What about disabled people who not only do not have a quota but who might need accommodations to do their jobs, or can only work part time? Is there are quota for people without college education, or are we still seeing that as a needed qualification instead of an institutional barrier. How is the party working to make politics safer for marginalized people who will experience way more and way more personal media harassment, as well as threats and physical attacks? And how are they communicating this to the people they are trying to reach who feel worried and hesitant!

Isn't a quota just treating one symptom of the problem and then you only get the most privileged people of the particular group that you created the quota for?

There's a quota in medicine for inclusion of disabled people. But people still get told that they can't study medicine cause the uni cannot accommodate them. So do we just have the quota to look good? I know I sound like I'm just saying let's change the system fundamentally and not do the small steps like quotas but that's not what I want. What I want is for individual people to receive whatever help they need to get into whatever job they want. If the uni cannot accommodate one person, move the classes into a building that can, give them more semesters time to finish, organize a driver. I don't care. And don't make them jump through hoops for it. Make it easy. Make it easier for degrees from other countries to count here. If someone who studied medicine/electronics etc 20 years ago here is still qualified to do their job with a few extra trainings, the same should be true for anyone else whose education was according to different standards than our current ones in this country. Idk. I don't have the solution but I'm frustrated u know.

[aishabellasbigblogofeverything]

Everytime I see one of those “oh don’t say you hate all men because that includes x minority men so you’re being a bigot!” genres of posts I feel like slamming my face or someone else’s face into the nearest wall. Like do you not realize the difference between being bigoted against a certain minority group and women having a justified rational logical hatred towards the gender/group that as a whole oppresses and mistreats us and sees us as less than??? Like it’s like if someone said that poc aren’t allowed to say that they hate white people because white gay people exist and therefore you’re being homophobic against white gay people. Like shut the fuck up, dumbass. This is clearly just a tactic to silence women for speaking out against misogyny in a way that doesn’t coddle or center men’s feelings like…if you can’t tell the difference between a woman saying that she hates men as a whole and bigotry towards a specific group of marginalized men then you’re a fucking disgraceful idiot and a misogynist lemme be the first one to tell you, don’t even pretend to be a feminist or anti-terf if you think a woman saying she hates men is saying that all men are bad or that she hates minority men in particular. Like

These two posts are the exact fucking same despite being written by two separate people. It’s like you can’t even conceive of the existence of marginalized WOMEN because your view of oppression starts and ends with men and “misandry is real you guys i swear 🥺” like do you think all the women who hate men are white cishet able-bodied perisex thin women and no one else lol do Black women brown women trans women lesbian/bisexual women fat women intersex women disabled women etc. even cross your damn mind? Are you completely fucking ignorant to the fact that all men have male privilege and are capable of using it against women and being misogynistic even if they don’t all have equal access to it/don’t hold systemic power against all groups of women or do you think that somehow only the most privileged echelons of white men can ever do anything wrong or sexist ever? “When you say all men you mean ALL men” yes I do, so? What’s your point? You gonna stop talking now or what? Like it or not there is no marginalized identity that shields a man from male privilege/misogyny or him being able to be called out for it lol there just isn’t and if you try to pretend that it is or that some men are above criticism(like how some people used to say that gay men can’t be misogynistic because they’re not sexually attracted to women) then you’re ignoring the women in those communities who are also oppressed not just by society at large but by the men in those communities who hold systemic institutional and social power over them. ALL men have hating women in common! Read that sentence again!!! Hating men as an oppressive class(which, let’s face it, is what they are) because the majority of them DO hurt or act sexist towards women in some way shape or form is not the same as hating men for their marginalized status because I can guarantee you that women with those marginalized statuses have it WAY way worse and hate men as well and are the vast majority of the people making these complaints about men to begin with, lol, so shut your damn mouths if you don’t have anything important or valuable to say.

They just hate to hear women talking about hating men because it upsets their fragile feelings so they look for any excuse to tell us that we’re the bad guys actually and dress it up under progressive thought when really they’re just the patriarchy’s asskissers, because before long they’re gonna start saying that you’re not allowed to hate white cishet men who are the most privileged in society. It’s just “not all men” in diverse dressing:

Like it never even occurs to these idiots that the women making these statements are also trans or poc or whatever other group and may very well have experienced misogyny and oppression from these groups and now they’re calling us “bioessentialist” and terfs for it as if we say we hate men because we think that they’re innately evil when really we KNOW they aren’t biologically hardwired to be that way! But the vast majority of them ARE that way because they choose to be, because of the social benefits they get from treating women as lesser, them being oppressed too doesn’t change that lol. These people don’t actually care about trans men or Black men or disabled men or queer men or whatever men they just want to pretend men as a whole are a victimized oppressed class just because some girl wrote “I hate men I wish they’d all kill themselves” in a Tumblr post once and they somehow think that’s the same as getting your rights violently stripped away but they want to look “progressive” about their Mra ideology so here you go. If you say you hate men then you’re a terf and gender essentialist! ‘Nuff said! I am very smart! 🤓

And one more thing, like…nobody who makes “I think all men should die” posts is like 100% serious about it lol. Like we all know that men aren’t going to all drop down dead because posts like these are being made lol. If they did then it would’ve happened a long time ago, and not just on Tumblr but on other social media sites too. These posts ultimately do nothing and have no power to hurt any man anywhere whatsoever. You’re all just angsting over literally fucking nothing. NOTHING, my darlings! Women are ALLOWED to vent about their anger they feel at the patriarchy because of what MEN(and it IS men) put them through without someone trying to make them feel guilty with some sort of gotcha to prove to them that they were secretly a hateful bigot all this time. Like I’m sorry if these posts offend you…grow up, maybe? Breathe some fresh air? Touch some grass? Interact with friends and family off the ‘net? You’ll realize pretty quickly how little some angry tumblr posts about how all men should be swept up in a storm cloud actually matter and effect people in the real world. Maybe instead of defending men and policing the way women complain about their oppression because it’s not nice enough for you you could instead work on combatting misogyny(you know, an actual real world problem??? 🙃🙃🙃) and making the women around you feel safe and treat them as equals so that they don’t feel annoyed at men enough to the point of complaining about how horrible men are to them. These posts aren’t made just for funsies they’re an actual legit response to the hostility men unleash upon women in every section of our lives every single goddamn day and I’ve had enough with a lot of you bitches trying to find any excuse to silence women when we talk about these things. Just scroll away or block us if it bothers you so much. It is so so free to do and takes very little effort, far less effort than actually getting up from your computer and taking a good long stretch which is what some of you fuckers actually need. That’s it I’m done here. Gonna go drink some water and eat a cookie.

[whereserpentswalk]

It’s fascinating that you think trans people’s names come to them like wands in Harry Potter, you can’t just culturally appropriate bc you’re trans

Ok, this is about comments I made like a year ago on a comedy bit. While I stand by my feelings that the bit was bad and transphobic, my reasons why are a lot diffrent.

When I first wrote the comments my arguments were very thermian. I treated the story the comic was telling as if it was real and objective. Which feels right for most people, because stand up comedy is often presented like conversation, where we do treat stories like that as real things. But that's not how comedy works, comedians don't tell stories the way we do in conversation, they're creatives, the stories they tell are basically fictional, the art form might look like real conversations but it's not.

Comedians want to make you laugh, and sometimes want to send a message or make you think about things in a new way, but they have no reason to want to portray events accurately. They might be basing some things off of real experiences, but that's true for everyone, Tolkien might have chosen to explore his experience in world war one in lord of things, that doesn't mean we have to argue about orcs as if they're real entities when we're talking about if those books were racist.

So let's actually look at the skit, and analyze its outlook on trans people keeping in mind its a story that a cis man is telling, and not actual events: So the summery of the skit is that a white trans man comes out to his to his family, and he picked a name you'd expect a black person to have. He has older black relatives (who are implied to fully accept him, which would make him possibly the only trans person on earth with a fully accepting family) who refuse to use this name, and instead call him "the boy". The sketch ends with the comedian saying he should pick a name like Kevin, because even if he's trans he's not interesting (keep your thoughts on that last one).

Now, ignoring how this would play out in real life, what does this as a peice of fiction say about trans people:

First off: it's creating a plausible but unlikely situation where the woke thing to do is to not respect a trans person's identity. A lot of political humor exists to call ideas into question with hypotheticals, and the idea being questioned here is the idea that trans people's identities deserve respect.

Second off: it's creating a situation where a trans person is entitled and arogent for wanting his identity respected. In the fiction this trans person is that. But it's promoting the idea that they are in real life. Transphobes will show you a lot of spooky examples of trans identities that are unreasonable to respect, but that's not useally ever what it's like in real life. (An otherkin robotgirl isn't going to demand you communicate with her through beeps and boops, she probably just wants you not to laugh at her.)

Third off: it's pitting minorities agaisnt eachother. Conservatives love this, but it's super common when people try to convince progressives to a specific group from their advocacy. It shows us a world where trans rights and poc rights are at odds with eachother, in the real world they aren't, in the real world they're part of one larger struggle and diminishing one is diminishing the other. A lot of people do this with different identities, lgb types do it with gayness, terfs do it with womanhood, class reductionists do it with class, trscum do it between trans people. But it doesn't help one oppressed group when you shit on a diffrent oppressed group in their name. It's white conservatives who love it the most when trans people and poc at pit agaisnt eachother, and it's trans poc who suffer the most.

Fourth off: it's feeds into a very old myth amoung queerphobic progressives, which is the idea that queer people are privileged people looking to pose as the marginalized to get special rights. This is a myth we really have to get over, because its been internalized by a lot of people, and we get these hunts for fake minorities. This is why the "you're not interesting" line sticks out to me. Most trans people don't give themselves appropriative names, but trans people as a group constantly get accused of trying to steal other people's struggles. This is a myth that preys on the fact that white skined white colar queer people are more visible, and its one that is based on treating that disparity in visibility as a fact. We have to cut this out, nobody fakes minority status to get privileges because minorities aren't privileged. It's not true for queer people, even the queer people other queer people hate like bi people and ace people. It's not true about mentally ill and ND people, or converts to non Christian religions, or East Asian people, or anyone who gets accused of this. Stop it dearly.

Fifth off: this entire sketch is based in the idea that families can accept their trans kids, but only conditionally, only if they prove themselves to be doing it for the right reasons, and they please their family's whims. This is a transphobic idea, it's a transphobic idea most neolibs hold. Comedy bits are a lot like story books (no shade at either) where a problem is presented at the beginning, and a solution at the end, that the audience is expected to take for their own problems. And the solution here is a form of transphobia, the idea that trans people aren't owned acceptance, they need to earn it. I've seen a lot of trans people tormented by their families over that idea. And when a person of color goes and stage and wraps that idea in racial justice, it's young trans poc who get hurt by it the most.

Sixth off: not a huge point, but I feel like a cis black man, of all cis people, should be the most likely to understand that calling a trans man a boy is dehumanizing and insulting. I guess this goes to show he's not interested in thinking about how trans people's struggles are like his, he stands alongside a lot of marginalized trans people there.

Finally I kind of don't know how to end this. This is long. Really long. I don't know whose going to read this, because its a lot. Hopefully you got a bit of media literacy from reading all of this. Early on in my tumblr career, when I had just moved from Brooklyn to Manhattan, I had read an essay by @wifelinkmtg about a concept called the ditch. The idea was we often argue about media wrong, talking about things in hyper literal cannon obsessed terms, and that was the ditch, the ditch we dig for ourselves when we ignore things like themes and audience experiences. Hopefully this series of words dug less of a ditch than my words did a year ago. Sorry I don't have the actual sketch on hand. Mabye I'm wrong, but if someone wants to prove me wrong I'd rather they do it outside of a ditch. Mabye the ask wasn't even about that post. Mabye I'm tired. Maybe you should be tired too.

Sorry for the long post. Media literacy matters. Black trans lives matter. Goodbye, enjoy your night well.

[silvermoon424]

I've always felt a lot of connection, and admiration for the commitment to hope in media like sailor moon, pmmm, mlp, so much more. the same ways that you've described, I'm in my early 20's for reference idk. I'm really struggling with questioning these concepts with certain things going on like genocide. Is it selfish for me to tell someone going through such war to believe in hope? How do I deserve to say that from my privileged safety? I understand if that's too deep. I should probably ask a therapist but it's just been on my mind a lot. I felt like you might have some insight to offer. Thank you 🥲😅😵‍💫

This is such an interesting, important ask and I'm honored you felt like I would have a good take on it!

I'm like you. I live in a comfortable, safe environment and I have never known the hardship so many other people know. But I believe with a burning intensity that hope is probably the best, most important thing humanity has (aside from love, of course). And that it's at its most important in the bleakest of circumstances.

Honestly, getting right down to it, I would argue that not only should everyone hope, we all must hope if we want things to get any better. Hope is everything, even when there’s nothing else. Especially when there’s nothing else.

We're all only alive today because our ancestors believed enough in hope to keep going, often in the face of insurmountable odds. I feel like this is especially important to remember for marginalized groups. Your ancestors fought like hell so you could have a better life. They survived and endured. They wouldn't want you to give up hope. They would want you to carry that torch of hope into the future.

Closing this out, I would just say that cynicism and nihilism, while understandable, never helped create a better future. The future and progress as a whole have always been driven by those who refused to give up, who got beaten down again and again but still always rose to their feet. It's fucking hard to do that. I know it is. But you never know how your words and actions, however small, will fling a light into the future that will help those who come after us.

[olderthannetfic]

A lot of these discussions about colonizer romance or slave fantasies or similar just feel like the race version of the way certain feminists keep wringing their hands about rape fantasies and the “problem” of them. Like, sure, there are certainly people in the “privileged” group in question who enjoy those in the more “problematic” way that might speak to something concerning about how they view any real-life partners or sex (“might” being a key word here)… for instance, the slavery isekai anime trend seems to be most popular with gross dudes who really do think having a slave woman who waits on you hand and foot and also has sex with you is desirable and wish they could have that irl. But I think the bigger reason these “problematic” fantasies persist is that a lot of people in the equivalent “marginalized” group also really like it in their own ways. They like eroticizing that experience that is so troubling irl. It’s clear some of the people who like these “colonizer” romances are colonized people just as a lot of women love rape fantasies.

Idk, I don’t think the discussion is as simple as saying that what porn or romance you are into has *zero* effect on your IRL sexuality. I think it’s hard to argue that if you’re getting off to something a lot, it doesn’t impact the rest of your life in at least some way, the brain doesn’t draw firm walls around these things— and there’s just the objective fact every young straight woman I’ve known has observed that a lot of younger straight guys have had their expectations of women and sex warped by the unrealistic stuff they’re seeing in porn. But I think like with any other “how does the media affect us?” question: it’s almost never an exact 1:1. Different media deals with these topics differently, and even the same media can affect different people different ways, or even the same person different ways at different points in their life. That’s the issue with “anti”-style thinking, not that fiction can never affect real life. It’s that it’s never as simple as just making a list of bad things no one can like. One person’s trash is another’s treasure and v.v., and what can be irredeemable hateful garbage to one person can be cathartic to another. Just like how the kinks that your abuser used to justify abusing you can be used by another person as their lifeline to help them enjoy sex again after abuse. Rape fantasies or racial fantasies that may seem objectively bad when framed around how privileged people view them… well, that’s not the only framing (and maybe we should stop centering privileged people all the damn time?)

So like even aside from the fact that “colonizer romance” does not have a single objective definition and that people are putting a wide swath of stuff into that label, and it should be used as the start rather than end of a conversation… are we even sure that everyone is coming at it from the POV of the colonizer? Are more people really viewing themselves as John Smith or as Pocahontas? And so when looked at that way, isn’t it really more another version of the eternally-popular-among-women “I can change/fix him!” narrative? (Which itself can be critiqued, particularly in how often patriarchal media sells that to women and why… but that’s a different conversation from the usual “colonizer romance” conversation.)

Or maybe some people are just inherently drawn to cross-cultural romances in general, and those people also like ones that don’t have a colonizing aspect to them?

Like, there’s a lot to unpack here that isn’t in these conversations. We can’t just make this the new buzzword, thought-terminating cliche.

--

[goddessofroyalty]

Fandom: Final Fantasy VII

Can you believe it’s finally canon confirmed that the Shinra Infantry is Co-ed?

Anyway, if Cloud’s an omega he’s rooming with Tifa and Aerith when there's only 2 rooms available. They decide that for him. (And I'm starting to play around to re-remember how I write everyone's voices)

Tags: omegaverse

-------------

“I’m very sorry,” the Innkeeper says, looking up at the group of them after closely checking over his records. “We only have two rooms available.”

Cloud winces at it because he knows he’s the reason two rooms would be a problem. It not considered appropriate for omega men to sleep in the same room as either men or women that aren’t their family or mate.

Even Shinra would always sleep them separately. Which often left Cloud rooming alone when out on missions. Something he would have been grateful for if not for feeling like he was being kept segregated from the rest.

At least once he made SOLDIER the separate room felt like a privilege not a punishment.

“That’s okay,” Aerith says.

Cloud expects her to say that he can share with Barret and Red XIII. It may be improper and dangerous in the eyes of most for an unmated alpha and omega to share a room even if they both are men but Cloud feels completely comfortable with the idea of sleeping in the same room as Barret. If the situation was really pressed he would be comfortable with the girls sleeping in the same room as well. He knows Barret would never even think of taking advantage of them.

Hell, Barret is always the most offended when people misinterpret their group as him being a very lucky alpha.

Arranging the rooms that way will save them some gil as well.

“Cloud can room with us,” Aerith continues in the exact opposite of what Cloud expected, grabbing hold of his arm and grinning up at him when he turns on her to argue.

“Wha-?” is all he actually manages to get out in protest.

“Uh – if you’re sure,” the Innkeeper says, looking awkwardly at them.

Would he have handled Cloud’s idea that he share a room with the alpha of their party instead better?

That thought doesn’t matter now as Tifa steps forward to grab hold of Cloud’s other arm. He has yet to figure out a way to escape when the two girls agree on an idea no matter how much he doesn’t want to take part.

“Yep, we’re sure,” Tifa informs the Innkeeper with a sharp nod. Her and Aerith’s grips feeling like shackles on Cloud’s arm.

“We’re all omegas anyway,” Aerith says. And Cloud knows she isn’t ignorant of the well-documented differences between omega men and women. She’s just choosing not to care in this instance.

He opens his mouth to try and protest the decision but only manages an Uh before Barret is slapping their gil onto the counter and the Innkeeper handing over the keys. The girls all-but frog-marching him up the stairs to the room they’ve decided is theirs. Barret’s laughter trailing after them.

“Don’t look so unhappy,” Aerith chastises, poking at the side of his face. “It’ll be fun – just us omegas.”

“You agreed to be our bodyguard remember,” Tifa says before Cloud can say anything. Not that Cloud understands how that fact has anything to do with the situation at hand. “Just think of it as part of that. Staying with us to keep us safe.”

That argument does make it marginally better.

“Fine.” He’s not going to change their mind anyway. Might as well stop wasting his energy fighting it.

The girls grin at each other around him before shoving him first into the hotel room.

Of course once they discover there’s only two beds they quickly decide he gets the couch.

[liskantope]

Back in late 2020 I made a post which mentioned as a side comment the impression I get from a lot of the more aggressive SJ people that writing/saying a lot (e.g. writing long, nuanced, qualifying, and/or perhaps defensive-sounding responses) is seen as evidence in and of itself of being wrong in the argument, specifically the type of wrong that comes from a position of privilege (I thought a little later I wrote a short post focusing only on this, but I can't seem to find it now). The example in the above-linked post is in the strangely-proportioned screenshot, where someone who is being attacked for not bowing down to the Correct political opinions keeps responding with lengthy, articulate, nuanced comments (which include some acknowledgment of her own weaknesses) and is met only more vehement attacks declaring checkmate explicitly on the grounds that her comments are long. The end of the exchange happens when she leaves a comment raising her eyebrows at being attacked for long-windedness, and the entirety of the response is "...you and your privilege". It's a finale that's stuck with me.

I was reminded of this today when an unexpected spurt of activity showed up on my Tumblr: an activist with whom I got into a contentious exchange well over two years ago for some reason chose now to abruptly reblog a several of my lengthy responses with pithy remarks (okay, plus one which includes a link to her own independent blog post about it which I don't think I'd seen before), and a minor flurry of likes and replies followed. I don't care to reblog any of this now, or even link to it, because my getting into that debate is something I'm really not proud of: the topic is not a hill I want to die on, and I dislike my awkward defensiveness and repeated apologies and semi-retractions. If I'm going to spend time and energy arguing something really controversial, I would rather it be a discussion where I can be really incisive and not catch myself arguing carelessly and sloppily and feel the repeated need to step back and clutter everything with caveats and apologies. But, if you are curious, I was defending a YouTuber I respect from being cancelled for being Problematic, and this exchange happened in spring of 2021.

The one new bit of substantive information for me coming from today's activity is the link to a separate blog post written at the time, which further confirms that there's no point in me continuing to defend that YouTuber to this activist: apparently among the list of things that makes this YouTuber's case worse and confirms their guilt are (1) publishing an earlier video which made all of the exact right points but which (surprise, surprise) got noticed by more people than a written article by a lower-profile person from the Relevant Marginalized Group making essentially the same points, (2) acknowledging that the Relevant Social Justice Cause is a good one and including a link to a fundraiser, and (3) momentarily sighing with a slight look of exasperation when first bringing up the accusation of being Problematic in a video. (Sorry I'm continuing to be vague here.)

Continuing to argue with this activist would be a waste of time, since our rhetorical values and norms are clearly too far apart for us ever to reach each other. Looking at it makes me grateful to have found a part of Tumblr that does share my basic notions of how discussions should work.

But what strikes me most of all is how my lengthiness itself is somehow treated as evidence of my guilt or wrongness or privilege or something. One of my lengthy reblogs got met today with a single sentence mocking it as a "dissertation" and managing to weirdly characterize my thesis without explanation, while another later one got met with "Have you considered just.... never talking again? Because you are not good at it." Again, these little zingers were fired off probably within a few minutes earlier today, in response to things I wrote back in spring of 2021.

That's the exact same kind of back-of-the-hand dismissal that I mentioned above having witnessed done to someone else (with the "...you and your privilege" comment). It reads like "This person talks too much, that's how you know they're in the wrong, so no need to address any of their points, if I smack them with a one-sentence response saying 'Haha that just further confirms you're wrong!' then I win."

And it's like, usually I consider my ability at cognitive empathy to be quite good, but it's hard for me to figure out what the other party is actually thinking in a situation like this: I can sort of get my head around not respecting nuance in certain selective situations and thinking the ability to feel nuance is a sign of privilege or something, but I can't quite figure out how they justify these one-sentence blanket dismissals on the grounds that the other person's comments are too long without imagining that they must be aware on some level that they're just being domineering-in-an-internet-way and deliberately going for a cheap and empty slam-dunk. This isn't very charitable, but honestly I have a hard time understanding such people's motives any other way.

[sawthatmountainburn]

I haven't watched the barbie movie and don't really plan to, I just have a problem with some arguments people have been making in its defense, as they are weak arguments regardless of what piece of media they're defending. specifically it's the "this is just feminism 101 for kids, it doesn't have to be a whole manifesto!" type of dismissive arguments.

first of all, if a movie is marketed as feminist and the fanbase praises it for its feminism, people who go see it will have certain expectations based on their own idea of feminism, since feminism is an umbrella term for different ideologies whose common trait is that they want rights for women. who counts as a woman, what specific rights they should have and how we should get them are all points of contention, without even getting into intersecrionality just yet. (very broad generalization, also some leftist feminists disagree with the 'rights' framing) there's only so many grains of sslt you can take, before you decide this is just too far away from what it was presented as and clearly, many women feel this way about the movie.

second of all, regardless of how a piece of media is marketed, it is always fair game for critism, whether that be from a feminist perspective, an anti-racism perspective, a leftist perspective or whatever else you can come up with. to demand that people simply not bring up these critiques because it's ruining people's fun or it's not that serious (but still serious enough that you call people misogynists for criticizing it?) is blatantly reactionary. it's the same thing angry geek boys do when you point out their funny little sci-fi and fantasy shows have weirdly few POC in them. you can say a criticism is in bad faith or based on a misreading of the text (I've seen this about the gynecologist scene, for example), sure, but what I'm seeing more commonly is just a total dismissal of these critiques and perspectives, as if the movie simply isn't subject to it for whatever reason.

expounding upon this, the "feminism 101" part of the argument is similarly reactionary. to reiterate what i said in my last reblog about this, the way people talk about this movie gives me the impression that it's way more suited to the ~2012-2014 pre-gamergate era of tumblr feminism, when people said stuff like "eyeliner so sharp it could kill a man" and feminist criticism was treated as more of a checklist of good and bad tropes. we're almost a decade past that era, with many events that changed the political and pop cultural landscape in the meantime, so what was passable back then might not be such now. we've talked extensively about intersecrionality, issues of race have been brought up time and time again, especially in light of the BLM movement and anti-Asian racism in the COVID era, queer issues have also been gaining more and more traction, etc etc, I can't and won't recap the last decade of political development. my point is, if you're a feminist in 2023 (or any other type of left-leaning politically active individual, but the barbie discourse is about feminism, so that's what I'm talking about specifically) you cannot simply ignore these issues and say multiply marginalized women will have their time, but they need to wait for the privileged women to go first. actually, it was always unacceptable to demand marginalized women support more privileged women while getting nothing in return, but it's even more obvious and ignorant in the current era, after we've been trying to make people understand intersecrionality for years.

it's also insidious how the implication is that feminism needs to be dumbed down for kids (a dubious claim in the first place) and for some reason, that dumbing down involves flattening everything to being about the most privileged women possible. why shouldn't young privileged girls learn about the issues that face their less privileged peers face? why should girls of marginalized groups have to sit and listen about the issues facing their privileged peers, but never being given the tools to discuss their own issues? whom does this dynamic serve exactly and why is it not only acceptable to continue to exist, but it also important to so vehemently defend?

I'm not trying to tell people not to like the barbie movie, that's really not what I care about. I'm saying the types of arguments being made reveal a failure of intersectionality and a dismissal of multiply marginalized women's issues, coupled with a self-centeredness which should be unacceptable to any serious feminist. stop making excuses for a hollywood blockbuster funded by a multi-billion(!!) dollar toy company and start giving a shit about the women in need right in front of you!

[alpaca-clouds]

I'm really interested in alternative economic systems and systems of ownership.

I think capitalism needs to end. That the goal is profit and not to meet people needs. Makes it inherently explotativ and also so wastefull. But you know this so let's move on.

What is the alternatives? What could actually work, the criticism that comes up again and again is if the state control too much that makes it prone to corruption.

The criticism I hear against commons and similar smaller groups is that conflict resolution is hard and break most small communities trying to work together.

Overall the pro capitalism crowd will tell you that all other systems are too prone to being exploited by bad actors.

I want to hear your thoughts, what system would your dream solarpunk society have? 💚

Im very newbie in this area I hope this ask made sense 💚

Thank you for sending in the ask! :)

So, I personally am falling completely on the anarcho-communism side of things. I think that any system that does not have the means of production in the hand of the people, who can equally share in their output, is unconscionable. And I do think that anarchism (aka no hierarchies and equal voice for everyone) will do a good job at stopping the exploitation.

That is of course not to mention that as it is right now, capitalism gets exploited by bad actors and always has been exploited by bad actors. (For anyone who is gonna argue with it, so not you, macfire: Child labor and slavery happened under capitalism and are still happening right now.)

Admittedly, though, I do not have any idea how to get there from the current point in time, because those in power did an amazing job at preventing class solidarity from occuring. They have very much managed to bring up the poor workers against the better-of workers. And the privileged workers against the marginalized. And for us to change the system, we absolutely do need class solidarity.

The thing that has gotten lost in translation for so many (mostly because schools do not teach on the issue) is, that the entire idea of the economic systems is defined around who owns/controls the "means of production". With "means of production" it refers to basically anything that can produce value of any sort. Originally they were talking about stuff like factories, but these days offices and servers and of course also programs that are used for creating value would be part of these.

And basically there is only so many different ways for those things to be owned. Basically it is privately or publically - and if it is owned publically either under a central or wide spread control. Sure, I mean, I guess these days we are not that far off from a version, where an AI could just control the means of production but... Let's better not think too much about that.

See, Marx coined this one phrase that I like a lot: From each according to [their] ability, to each according to [their] needs. And I think that is something we should strive for and that would be a good way to build a community around.

Again, I do not know how to get there. I assume the most peaceful way would be all the workers striking. I do think the more likely way would be a revolution.

But I think that everyone should get an equal say in what is done with those means of production. And that no single person should be able to own basically everything within a given industry.

If any of you have any other question, feel free to send in an ask. You can find more information here.

[sokkastyles]

On some level, I can understand where Azula stans are coming from, and I mainly blame the recent shows and movies that have been released. For a long time villains have just been evil with no remorse as presented in media, but recently we have seen movies that are like "hey actually this guy isn't that bad and they are a prodict of their surroundings and its not their fault they are evil" like the movie malefecent or alice into the looking glass. Not to mention, redemption arcs are super popular like Loki, kylo Ren, catra, and the diamonds from Steven Universe. I specifically named these character because i feel like they have done so much bad that it will take a lot more than just a sorry and a tragic backstory to make up for all the bad they did. Maybe Loki is okay, but he did some really terrible things, and i am on the fence about him. Not to mention the joker sympathy that has been rampant for a while because of the movie blaming society, and that is someone completely irredeemable except for the Harley Quinn show, apparently, but that is a comedy.

What im trying to say though is that there doesnt seem to be just straight up villains now and consatnt blaming of outside forces for a the bad villains do saying it's not there fault because they only blew up a children's hospital because they were hurting, not to mention medias constant depiction of toxic relationships and friendships that keep getting talked about like they are completely normal. I know some Azula stans are just kike that but some i fell are misinformed and seem to surround themselves with so many like minded individuals that they truly believe what they think is true and are hard pressed to change their opinion. (Also, pretty privilege exists)

Well, redemption arcs and villains with complex stories are hardly new. I haven't seen the most recent MCU stuff but has Loki been redeemed? In the comics, and in Norse mythology, he has always been something of an antihero, a character who would be good or bad depending on the occasion. I grew up on comic books and those kinds of characters frequently occur there. Magneto is another example of a character who would sometimes side with the good guys but also inevitably go back to being a villain. They're complicated characters with sympathetic pasts, but their pasts don't excuse their actions. And there's an important distinction there that I think is lost on a lot of people. Another example that comes to mind is Billy from Stranger Things, who I often see idolized on tumblr as if he had become a hero by the end of the story, or should have, just because he had a sad background and then sacrificed himself for the heroes. His death, and life, were tragic, and we understand by the end why he was the way he was, but he was still an awful, unpleasant person, and the show never suggests that we should see him as good now, nor should it.

A lot of the examples you mention with female villains I blame on the rise of liberal "girlboss" feminism. That goes with what you say about pretty privilege. Pop culture "feminism" wants to convince you that being pretty is empowering, the weaponized femininity thing, eyeliner so sharp you can kill a man, etc. When in reality, we're still catering to patriarchal ideas of desirability. And what's especially insidious about this kind of feminism is that it's often other women or other marginalized groups who are the targets of it. Pop culture puts this stuff out to pander to women by presenting a "feminist" ideal that is still non-threatening to the status quo. The idea that Azula or Harley Quinn, who in her first appearance in BTAS was a character who became a villain due to being manipulated and abused by a man, are empowering female characters is bananas. That's not to say they are bad female characters, and Harley is another comic book character who has always been likeable for her propensity to gleefully straddle the line between hero and villain, but I despise the girlbossification of these kinds of characters the same way I despise people making them into poor widdle innocent victims.

The heroization of the joker comes from red pill weirdos primarily, and those have also existed for a long time. See Fight Club for another example, but anyone with a brain knows that Tyler Durden is the bad guy, and that the stuff he's spewing about being woke and masculine is all just nonsense in the end. So I don't necessarily buy that it's all media's fault that people don't understand the point of these characters.

And there are absolutely still just "straight up villains." The obvious answer just by looking at ATLA is Ozai, but even then, the show still does a lot to tell us why he is the way he is, and implies he was once a victim of his family not unlike Zuko or Azula. People often ignore that, especially Azula stans who make such a distinction between Ozai and Azula in order to prove that Azula deserves redemption. I'm not saying that Azula and Ozai are the same in terms of how much sympathy the narrative gives them, by the way, just that I think it's odd that one is seen as so much more redeemable than the other, when their backstories are so similar. Ozai often gets labeled as one dimensional not because he is less complex than Azula, but because people don't want to see him redeemed and are uncomfortable with the idea, so they want to see him as less complex and more villainous. Which to me misses the point of the fire family dynamic and how the cycle of violence was perpetuated in that family.

[runthepockets]

Idk. People will be like "if trans men have male privilege it's entirely conditional" and it's like well the same can be said of many marginalized cis men under white supremacist capitalist patriarchy (poor dudes, gay dudes, black dudes, Jewish dudes, etc get the fucking shaft all the time) but we're all still men. Sure, we're not a monolith, we're not all cishet white guys with millions in the bank, but come on.

I guess my experiences are pretty distinct. I'm both consciously and subconsciously a very binary male. I grew up with a lot of brothers and a lot of male friends, even if people weren't "directly" ingraining male socialization into me, I still noticed and retained a lot of it. I felt pretty empowered by most historical figures and popular authors being male and I liked how my action figures ingrained images of toughness and manliness in me from a young age, I never really felt out of place in male dominated spaces like anime forums or Hardcore shows or anything, I don't even feel out of place being the only trans dude in a big group of cis dudes, cus we're all just dudes. I have my chauvinist moments cus, like many straight men under patriarchy, I lash out at an easy target when I feel weak. I know most trans guys can't relate but I'm not gonna deny what I am.

I was also raised by a single mom and had a lot of female friends, however, I knew being a girl wasn't a walk in the park and the way the girls around me talked about womanhood and their experiences seemed a lot more challenging than me and my maleness. Growing up I never really got catcalled or sexually harassed or told I was too dumb or weak or ugly or whatever to do anything, I never really worried about bad shit happening to me at night, that stuff came as kind of a shock to me when I heard about it. Idk even as a marginalized dude and all the baggage that comes with that there is just a lot of shit I don't have to deal with to the same intensity as women and that is a certain degree of privilege, or at least a lack of violation of human rights that a lot of women straight up are not afforded in our society. Like I'm not gonna deny that just cus I've had personal hardships or cus of society's bias toward's my race and its intersection with my gender. I think a lot of things can be true at once, men can be at very blatant disadvantages but still benefit from the system and mindsets that keep us down, it's kinda how patriarchy works, that's the male role in keeping it alive, is the rat race aspect. We're all pawns. Like it just is what it is bro.

[the-lincyclopedia]

A mark of privilege that I don't hear people talking about much is being, like, institutionally trusted. This goes along with a lot of axes of privilege/oppression--white people tend to be more institutionally trusted than people of color, men more so than women, etc.--but I think it's worth addressing as not just a manifestation of racism, or a manifestation of sexism, or a manifestation of some other form of prejudice.

I'll define what I mean by "institutionally trusted." I mean doctors believe you about your symptoms and don't assume you're seeking out drugs. I mean your boss believes that you're doing your job and doesn't micromanage you. I mean you aren't stopped for "random" extra screenings every time you pass through an airport.

Now, obviously anyone can be institutionally trusted, and anyone can be institutionally distrusted. Anyone who works can have a micromanaging boss. Anyone who sees a doctor can have the bad luck to wind up with a doctor who's a jerk. This isn't something that one group of people experiences 100% of the time and that another group of people never experiences at all. Few things are that binary, in my opinion.

But I do think that in general, on average, privilege puts people in places where they're more institutionally trusted, and belonging to a marginalized group (or several) reduces the amount of institutional trust you receive (again, in general and on average).

And I think it's worth talking about as one thing that happens across types of oppression and across settings and situations. I think a large part of why it's worth talking about is that being regularly treated as untrustworthy can really mess with your head and your sense of self and confidence in your own perception of reality.

I think about this a lot in relation to my experience in high school.

Now, I'm quite privileged in some ways, and the ways in which I'm not were less apparent when I was younger (i.e. before I realized I'm queer and got my autism diagnosis, etc). I'm white, I can pass for cishet, I'm mostly able-bodied, and my parents have money.

But I went to an underfunded inner-city public high school that was about 70% students of color, and although I certainly was treated differently and more favorably from my peers of color in a variety of ways, the policies of the school as a whole were very punitive and treated the student body in its entirety as probably being up to no good.

There were no mirrors in any of the bathrooms, and the story was that students had smashed mirrors to make shanks, hence the mirrors being removed (though I'm guessing it was probably actually just a matter of not being able to keep the mirrors clean). There were, similarly, no paper towels; the story there was that students had been lighting them on fire (this feels more believable to me).

I can't imagine having an open campus lunch policy--the only two places we were allowed to eat lunch were the cafeteria and the music hallway. We were most certainly not allowed to leave or return during the day. I genuinely can't wrap my head around what it would have been like to be trusted to go off-campus midday. We didn't even have plastic knives in the cafeteria.

And again, I was a white, cishet-passing student from a family with money. I was absolutely treated better by the school than many of my peers were. And I still felt thoroughly distrusted, pretty much constantly. And me being me, I concluded that this must be because I really wasn't trustworthy. It took five or six years after finishing high school to start believing that actually, I could be trusted after all.

Obviously there are people in the world who will game systems and take advantage of loopholes, and there are also situations where people need supervision, not necessarily because they mean to do anything bad but just because a situation is dangerous or they're inexperienced/impulsive/etc. So I'm not saying we should trust everyone at all times without any checks or balances.

I don't have a perfect solution, but I do know that "assume people of color and other marginalized folks are lying in most situations, because better safe than sorry" is definitely NOT it.

[cowboylikedean]

Loved your asshole prof post.

Story about me. In a 4th year psych seminar in undergrad I felt really uncomfortable around my prof. He made me nervous. He challenged me and the rest of the class, but it didn’t feel like in a good and healthy way.

His opinion was the only opinion. His opinion was fact. I would like to emphasize again that this was a psychology class. Considered a science course by the university’s standards. I couldn’t tell you one paper i read for research in that class. Our research was having the honour of being in his presence, apparently.

I remember him being really strict about never using ‘he or she’ in our papars. Singular ‘he’ was the only acceptable pronoun to be used in formal writing. Don’t even get him fucking started on ‘they.’

Oh, and also, this prof was Jordan Peterson.

So yeah. I agree that who the prof is makes a difference.

Thanks anon for sharing your experiences! Jordan Peterson is fucking crazy!!! that's insane that he was your professor!!!

I think, honestly, the field of psychology attracts assholes. I was a psych major when I started undergrad and switched to sociology because psychology is SOOOO backwards. When I took psych classes to finish my minor, I was astounded again by how backwards psych classes are. My social psychology class, for instance, taught us about the Harvard Implicit Bias tests and studies. However, the textbook fucking lied about the results and said that the results showed that people of all demographics favor their own demographics. This is simply untrue. I knew it was untrue because we studied this test in every sociology class I was in and I learned in each one of those classes (across multiple schools and professors) that Harvard's results had shown that even those in marginalized groups had implicit preferences for dominant and privileged social groups. When I emailed the teacher to call out this complete untruth with sources, I might add... he told me that the difference is that sociology and social psychology study related but different concepts. I told him that while, yes, that is true, it doesn't change the results published and reported by Harvard. He insisted that this was a non-issue.

This teacher has stated that she believes that despite the fact research has refuted this claim and there is no scientific evidence to support this, that weed causes schizophrenia. This is untrue. Straight up, a lie. That she admitted is refuted by science... And she still told us that this is how she treats her clients. She also bragged about beating her daughter at her 17th birthday because her daughter had a friend who had a joint and said that research supports her behavior.

This class is psychopathology, the last abnormal psych class I had was in 2014 shortly after the release of the DSM5 and this lady refused to use the term Gender Dysphoria, despite the fact that's the current and correct diagnosis, and also refused to use my pronouns stating that I was "a silly girl." I had to take it to the dept head and quote the DSM at her to get her to acknowledge that non-binary genders existed within the field. If the DSM states non-binary genders are real, as a psychology teacher specifically focusing ON diagnosis, have no business pretending that non-binary genders are fake!

The program I'm in is a rehabilitation counseling program, which is counseling for and about disability. However, the field exclusively focuses on career counseling for disabled populations. Counseling for and about disability is reduced to only employment. Everyone says it's about "all aspects of life, especially work" but we're not taught how to help people in other aspects of life, NOR ARE THERE JOBS!!! as a field, we reduce ourselves to little more than career consultants and case managers. I just did a paper/project on why this is reductive and all of the research from rehab counseling professionals about this says that the most research on why this is harmful comes from sociology. Because psychological fields have yet to recognize how harmful oppression of disabled individuals can be to psychosocial outcomes.

So I think a part of it is just simply psychological fields are regressive. The rest of the social sciences (minus economics) has surpassed them. Psychologists hide behind unscientific nonsense and refuse to follow actual science. The basis of psychological movements, for instance, were created by some random dudes... Just a man who says something like it's true.... And then people just like... treat it like it's true. It's like if philosophy pretended to be science. And then people treat those random dudes like they're scientifically established and in order to discredit them, you have to have SOOO much evidence. Super's psychosocial career development theory is a good example of this... Almost all career counseling developmental stages are based on Super's theories... but Super's theories are just Some Guy Said Something and they make sense to us because we can see them repeated, BUT THEY DON'T TAKE INTO ACCOUNT THE FACT THAT WE SEND KIDS TO SCHOOL AND THEN TELL THEM WHAT TO DO. Like it's such a glaring issue with his research... Can you say that kids have "met a developmental milestone" when they do something after they are assigned to do it in school? Or can you say that that's when we tell them to do the thing? And yet, discrediting his work would require SOOO much work and would also discredit the entire last 70 years of work in the career development field! So no one does it! Erikson is a similar example. Dude was just a man talking.

This is why Peterson didn't make y'all read research and just spouted his nonsense. Because this is how the field functions

[runninguplenorahills]

i don’t want to make that post any longer so 😅 i think you’re really oversimplifying what i’m saying. i’m not saying mike’s arc is just the surface level “mike gets a gf and it doesn’t make him happy,” it’s also that his relationship with el is symbolic of him conforming to what he believes he’s supposed to do, and him realizing that by doing this, he’s doing himself and everyone around him a massive disservice. my most recent tiktok video goes into more detail. i do think that his arc also includes his queer journey. but if you don’t agree that he’s not interesting without being queer, you’re well within your right to do so without telling me that my opinion that he is is illogical.

Hey, yeah, I totally get your point but I personally don’t believe that this arc makes sense if Mike is not queer. Having a character force himself to conform to society and get a girlfriend because he’s supposed to etc. does not make sense if there’s nothing about him that inevitably makes him not conform to begin with. It doesn’t make sense if the thing he thinks he’s supposed to do doesn’t stand in conflict with what he wants to do! If Mike actually liked El romantically then dating her would not be forcing conformity. Their relationship would not be a symbol of Mike trying to conform because by dating El he’d do something he actually wants! He wouldn’t be forcing himself to do something just to please society. Mike being queer is crucial to his character. You can’t take that away but keep the forcing himself to conform arc! Those two things go hand in hand and you can’t have one without the other.

And I’m really not trying to be mean here but your take on this is illogical. It’s immensely illogical from a writing perspective because you simply don’t write a story about a character that forces themselves to conform to a society that they conform to anyway!!! In your scenario Mike dated El in s3 because he thought it would make him happy which then again means that Mike had no motivations to act the way he did other than that he wanted to, and that. Does not. Make sense! This whole concept of the character that you created by taking away his queerness literally does not work in itself! The arc is completely illogical if you take away what makes Mike different. What makes him not conform! Mike would act out of no actual, reasonable, deep running motivations and that’s one of the most basic indications that a character is badly written!

Having nerdy interests be the only thing that makes Mike not conform to Hawkins’ society would be very anticlimactic and once again immensely bad writing since all the party members are outsiders of Hawkins’ society! But while Will is poor and gay, Dustin is disabled and Lucas is black, Mike would be……a nerd. A white, straight, wealthy, male nerd….

You see what I’m getting at here, right? He’d basically be Steve Harrington + dnd. And the only thing Mike would be insecure about is something he shares with all party members! Something super trivial at that! Realistically, yeah, people get bullied for their interests and they can feel insecure about them but apart from the fact that Mike was canonically never generally insecure about being a nerd and the fact that the bullying was never about Mike’s interests, from a writing perspective you do not put a person with the only difference being having nerdy interests in a group full of people that are marginalized by society!!! Will, Dustin and Lucas face real hardships while Mike would just be a nerd. A white, straight, wealthy, male nerd. He’d be one of the most privileged people on the whole show. Along with Steve he’d be the insider in a whole show of outsiders and the fact that there’s a huge focus on Mike in s1 and s2 would make this so much worse! Creating a show full of outsiders for outsiders but choosing to focus on the character that isn’t that…

If liking dnd is the only thing that makes Mike not conform to Hawkins’ society and his whole arc is about trying to get rid of that and happily going into a relationship with the girl he actually liked, only to realize that she is a superhero and makes him feel even lesser than he felt before, then Mike would be a very flat character with an arc that doesn’t make sense, and quite frankly, he’d be an insult to what the message of Stranger Things is supposed to be!

Furthermore it gives off the impression that it’s El’s fault that Mike doesn’t want this relationship with her (because El simply being herself makes Mike feel bad about himself) and that’s clearly not what they’re going for (“But it doesn’t change anything. I care for you. So much!”). It literally isn’t compatible with canon!! And it also does not cover all of his behavior! It’s not an explanation to everything Mike did in the last two seasons and if a character‘s behavior can’t be explained then that’s once again bad writing!

Your take on an alternative arc for Mike is illogical because it loses its validity and credibility the more you analyze the show and that’s simply not what happens with good hypotheses! If you have a good hypothesis it will gain validity and credibility the deeper you look into the topic and that’s just not the case with your take! Your take is incompatible with the mere concept of Stranger Things, it’s completely illogical from a writing perspective, it doesn’t make sense in itself, it contradicts and ignores canon and it overall has the result of Mike as a character and his plot being badly written because there wouldn’t be any nuance to it! It would be an anticlimactic, flat character and story line!

Once again, I am not trying to offend you as a person. I’m not saying your way of thinking or your opinions are generally illogical. I am pointing out to you that this specific take of yours on this topic is illogical and that’s objectively the case! This is not me telling you that I personally don’t like your take. This is me pointing out to you the obvious flaws and inconsistencies in your take that are objectively there! Of course you have every right to still like Mike and find him interesting if he ends up not reciprocating Will’s feelings but that’s your own subjective opinion which doesn’t change the fact that he’d objectively be a badly written character.

[bookofmirth]

hi! i was thinking of giving cc a go, but i really really don’t want to get invested if its another repeat of acotar’s issues (sa and the excuse of it, character assassinations, rampant retconning and exhausting ship wars), and was wondering if you could give me some general insight without spoilers? on both the books and the fandom? if thats okay, of course!

Hello!

So as far as fandoms, imo the CC fandom is pretty chill! The only thing though is that the acotar fandom has set up camp and it might be annoying, if you're trying to escape. People have feelings about ships and certain characters, but not in a vehement acotar-fandom way, from what I can tell. Most of what is vehement and angry is... based on what the acotar fandom is doing lmao

The issues you listed above aren't issues in CC, in my opinion. Bryce is quite sexually objectified which icks me out so much, and there is an SA situation in the second book that is very obviously questionable and you are meant to feel bad about it. But that's it. There is nothing like Under the Mountain.

The characters feel quite consistent from one book to another. I can't think of any retconning offhand. And shipwars, like I said, the acotar fandom has done that to them but it's probably easy to avoid. The worldbuilding is intense and the climaxes/action are great!

That's not to say that CC doesn't have any issues! If it weren't connected to acotar, I might honestly give it up. I really dislike the MC and there is some is some mishandling of marginalized groups/privileged groups that really has me scratching my head. It's just a very different series, in tone and content.

You could always get it from your library and give it a try! Get through the first hundred pages. I think that would give you a good sense of the world, plot, and characters.

[reasoningdaily]

How Microaggressions Relate To Systemic Biases

Inclusion, like privilege, is invisible: we only notice it when we don’t have it. As a fully privileged White man, it is extremely rare for me to feel excluded, and when I first started working in the Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) space, it was not easy to recognize (or acknowledge) the telltale signs of the privilege that impacts virtually every aspect of my life.

As I embarked on my new career, I first began noticing some of the more blatant examples or racism, sexism, ableism, ageism, and all the other -isms that impact individuals because of various personal traits: the men who would never let women get a word in during a meeting; the Black women who were mistaken for servers and asked to get coffee for a business meeting; the careless people who parked in front of a curb cut that someone in a wheelchair needed to get to their home; I even witnessed police brutality at the expense of two young Black students.

But just as our sensitivity increases when we learn a new skill, it didn’t take long to start noticing more and more situations in which perfectly nice people—often inadvertently—said or did things that, while seemingly harmless, revealed a lack of caring or awareness about people from different backgrounds. These are often referred to as microaggressions, “brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative attitudes toward stigmatized or culturally marginalized groups.”

I must confess that, when I first learned this term, I found it hard to believe that microaggressions could be as pervasive as some people suggested, or that they could really have a significant negative impact on those who suffered them. But as I heard stories from more and more individuals and read about the material, negative toll that microaggressions exact on their targets, I began to understand why it is so important to become aware of microaggressions and to know how to react to them.

Recently I had the opportunity to spend a couple of days at a large medical facility near New York City, accompanying a family member who needed a surgical procedure. While waiting in the pre-op area, our nurse, a White woman, was also helping a patient directly across from us, who happened to be a Black woman. After asking us several standard questions for the admission process, the nurse started the same procedure with the other patient. One of the questions was to confirm the patient’s address, which we overheard to be in New Rochelle. Next, the nurse asked for the name and address of the pharmacy. After the patient mentioned the pharmacy and gave a street address, the nurse asked “so, that’s in the Bronx?”

If you are not from New York, you may not realize that New Rochelle is a very affluent suburb just north of the city, boasting some of the most expensive real estate in the area and a high median household income, with about 65% White residents. The Bronx, although geographically close to New Rochelle, has less than 30% White residents, and ranks among the lowest in terms of both median household income and real estate values.

The nurse actually seemed like a nice, open-minded person, and I suspect she was completely unaware that she had said anything inappropriate. And if someone had pointed out to her the bias implicit in her comment, she probably would have shrugged it off as a simple mix-up. The fact that the nurse subconsciously associates Black people with low-income neighborhoods, does not mean that she is racist; but it does mean that she is unaware of her biases and of the negative impact that her careless mistake probably had on that patient. Would you want to feel insulted just before going into surgery? What other mistaken assumptions might the medical staff make based on the patient’s gender and skin color?

It is useful to ponder the relationship between the type of microaggression we witnessed in this specific context, with the staggering racial disparities that exist in America’s healthcare system. It is common to ascribe these healthcare disparities to “systemic racism,” but what is systemic racism? And what is the relationship between microaggressions and systemic racism?

I suggest that systemic racism is not a cause, but rather an outcome, and that microaggressions and other subtle forms of bias are the visible symptoms and, often, the cause of the disparities we observe at the systemic level.

Systemic racism is what we observe when we compare healthcare outcomes across the population and find, for example, that the pregnancy-related mortality rate for Black women in the U.S. is three times as high as it is for white women, a gap that increases with age and, perhaps surprisingly, with the level of education (the ratio jumping to a factor of five for college-educated women). But what causes these disparities in outcomes? In a recent video for the series Real Talk, Real Change, host Carlos Watson interviews a number of experts and people who have been impacted by racial inequities in healthcare. What is clear from the poignant experiences shared by Watson himself and by several of his guests, is that it is often the (consciously or unconsciously) biased behaviors of individual healthcare providers that leads to individual problems, which, aggregated across populations, contribute to the observed racial disparities.

Of course, there are other factors that contribute to healthcare disparities, such as the small number of Black doctors. But while increasing the number of Black doctors would be great, it would not eliminate the problem that exists today—and much of that problem arises from a lack of cultural awareness and appreciation that leads healthcare workers sometimes to be dismissive of Black patients, or to fail to understand some of the cultural norms that are reflected in the way Black people, and people of color in general, interact with the healthcare system.

In the two days during which my family member was hospitalized, we witnessed other examples of microaggressions and cultural insensitivity, targeting not just people of color, but women in general. For instance, in one case we saw two male surgeons react very dismissively to a female nurse’s concerns about some bleeding from a surgical incision. Although the issue was probably inconsequential from a clinical standpoint, the surgeons’ dismissive attitude is another example of microaggression that can have significant ramifications: making nurses feel disrespected can only have negative consequences on their ability to care for their patients or to speak up about other problems they may notice.

While these particular examples were in the context of healthcare, the same kind of reasoning can be applied to other contexts, including corporations. In any organization, microaggressions and other negative experiences have a deleterious impact on individuals. When aggregated across a company, we see these as systemic biases, such as women and people of color having lower promotion and retention rates than their White, male counterparts. Here, too, systemic biases are the outcome, not the cause.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t systemic biases in organizations, such as the way performance evaluations are performed, which can be prone to bias. But even in those cases, it is often the individual biases, when they are allowed to accumulate and impact individuals, that lead to the inequities we observe at the macroscopic or system level.

Failing to recognize that systemic biases are the effect rather than the cause is, in itself, very dangerous: managers and leaders can always shrug their shoulders and point out that they are not racist or sexist, that it’s the system. In other words, blaming systemic biases as the cause of disparities essentially creates an excuse for individuals to behave inappropriately, and it blinds us to the true causes of the disparities that plague so many organizations.

Only by learning to recognize microaggressions, acknowledging their impact on the entire organization, and putting measures into place to prevent these biased behaviors from impacting others, will we be able to achieve greater inclusion and equality in our organizations and in our society.