#Because it always come to that with cancel culture and bullying - social isolation as a punishment

[loser-female]

I'll not post what I'm referencing to, but hell, once you start recognising female bullying strategies you understand better certain kind of arguments where someone is clearly trying to triangulate someone by advising other (women) to not interact with them if they don't want to be a bad person as well.

[delusion-of-negation]

i don't really know if i can in good conscience agree with the last part, because there is functionally lots wrong with raising awareness in practice, because there's no way (especially in the culture that people have cultivated) to do it ethically, without causing a whole host of problems that we see today. so, i will give one example, there was a time a youtuber i am familiar with (as in, watched and had met) was just being cancelled for relationship drama (not abuse, i legitimately mean private relationship drama that is stupid to make public anyway), and i tweeted some basic advice in five to six tweets to him, completely without judgement or condemnation, and then later he made a video mocking the abuse he'd gotten as a result of the cancelling - it included a parody of me. took me longer than i'd like to admit to realise that i hadn't understood that it doesn't matter if you have gotten 10,000 nice messages in a day, 10,000 is and always will be enough messages to feel harassment from your perspective, and he was getting far more than that, and my thread wasn't being taken as nice messages that contrast the mean, but as additions.

there's also the social isolation that you endure next to the harassment, that isn't lessened by the fact it comes alongside millions of messages. and the fact that people lie, a lot, people get shit wrong, or teeny tiny exaggerations; really any attempt to raise those kinds of awareness will be taken advantage of as an easy way to isolate people from those who will very obviously want to isolate from somebody they think abused people, and as an extension people will then either believe everybody (and thus isolate anyone a bully or abuser asks them to) or dig for info, making personal lives of anyone accused by a bully hell in a different and similar way (still dehumanising to have people treating you like media to be analysed, and i think doubly problematic given nobody is actually a teeny tiny bit equipped to actually adequately do it, figure out who is guilty, or to do so without harming those involved, heck even the cops can't seem to be ethical in that regard). and that's not even getting to how suddenly everybody believes it's their right and moral imperative to decide what is right, who must change, what that change looks like, whether those people have met that standard, and if they deserve being put at risk and at the mercy of countless way more malicious strangers, and i just don't think it is your right to decide to sacrifice the safety of people because they haven't met your standards for being and/or changing into your standards of a good and moral person in your timeframe. there's making the polite disagreement on someone's post, and there's talking anonymously about being a survivor, and on occasion there's venting to a close friend who must be trustworthy to keep names a secret, but to make public callouts of even dumb relationship drama we usually would assume people could be chill about is dangerous, as with that youtuber and how much his whole world got turned into endless stress over that (let alone abuse allegations, a more emotive topic).

people don't even need to give a specific allegation, simply saying "they're abusive" is enough to cause a tonne of people to decide you're telling the truth, to harass the person, etc, no matter how much you say you're just trying to raise awareness and protect all potential future victims, and even when what little a person does provide seems sketchy or dubious, the act of saying so is taken as abuse apologia, and as i said, when it isn't, when people do accept the story could be less credible this time, the person either is forced to reveal a tonne of personal info, or has that info dug up. i'm reminded of the start of warmth by bastille, the "when the event happens, there is little time to think of those things that people would like to have remain private, getting caught up in the circus-like atmosphere, feeling less responsible to conventional ethical practices". i think this is simply unavoidable, no matter how much we appeal to the mob to be kind, it's always a mob, and it won't be.

i think the feelings of responsibility to strangers if a person hasn't met your standards of morality, even when demonstrable harm has occured, are not valid justification to put somebody in danger, and that is sticky because there obviously is still danger from a person who is causing harm, but that's why we have responsibility to change the systems that are there to protect people from danger, the systems that are supposed to keep dangerous people somewhere we can be sure they and others are safe, or the systems that figure out when somebody is lying to them as a way to frame an innocent person, rather than to act as though replacing those systems with mob rule is somehow better than police malpractice, when that beating will feel the same if it's a cop or a vigilante. i hugely disagree with prison and the prison systems as they stand, i think a homely environment and the focus on safety and care are essential for people, so there are ideas i have for how these systems would become something that provides that, but i am just genuinely not blinded by idealism enough to think a glorified form of gossip, especially on a huge stage, could ever be or should ever be salvaged in any way. systems can be held accountable for failure and for cruelty, that many faceless people just can't be held back by independent investigations and regulation.

the thing about "callout/cancel culture" that convinced me it's rotten to the core is the dehumanisation you face once you become the subject of a campaign like that. a lot of criticisms of callout/cancellation attempts appeal to the humanity of the subject, pointing out that it's unfair and unproductive to treat a person, a fellow human being, regardless of how much harm they've caused and how genuinely unlikable they are, like that. but unfortunately the reality of being the target of a mob mentality often means facing the very isolating and traumatising experience of realising that you've ceased to exist as a person in their eyes. you're a representation of your transgressions, an embodiment of harm that needs to be erased like a blemish, a spectacle for entertainment, a means of earning social approval by publicly condemning and humiliating you in what quickly becomes a competition to see who can strike the blow that knocks you down so you never get up again. nobody cares about who you are outside of what you did. people make mistakes and hurt one another, but there is always the capacity for change, for regret and reparations. you are an irredeemable monster. you can't change. the only way to make sure you can't cause harm ever again is to neutralise you entirely. to drive you off and hurt you so badly that you never consider coming back. and it often succeeds. but it doesn't make the world a better or safer place. it just tells everyone that certain behaviours will be punished, so you should conceal them, and harshly condemn them in others so that everyone knows where you stand; nobody will stand up for you if you're accused and brought out for judgement, so you shouldn't trust anyone, and always be on the lookout to take them down before they can do the same to you. you're not creating a safe, welcoming community. you're creating a panopticon built on fear and punishment.

[pochapal]

rank every year of the 2010s from best to worst i want some pochapal lore

[warning for discussion of my fucked up mental health and my myriad traumas. we’re really opening the pandora’s box here gang]

ok time for me to overshare on the internet again! super long post because i can’t shut up and you asked for it. anyway, by objective ranking: 

#1: 2012 - halcyon era, my personal peak. spent the whole year writing hunger games oc fics with my deviantart fanfiction besties whom i still think about all the time and always hope are having the best possible day. if you were here for this era understand i still hold you so closely and dearly in my heart <3. 

#2: 2013 - god i was such a good example of a human being back then. was the year my writing like actually took off and i had a healthy balance between creative stuff and a social life (said social life consisting of spending lunchtimes at school breaking into classrooms and discussing fandom shit with five other people. reading homestuck updates in the music room on one person’s really shaky mobile data...legendary). highlight of the year and maybe my life was in the april of 2013 when i got out of failing to submit a hard deadline essay by telling my english teacher i wrote a whole novel over the two week break and then producing said novel. god i wish i had that level of like. fucking confidence back me back then knew what i wanted and how to get it. 

#3: 2010 - the last year of childhood. i was 12 and played pokemon all the time with my friends and went places and had a moderately successful youtube channel and it didn’t matter that i was bullied so badly at school because i was basically high off life. summer of 2010 was so good specifically. i’d used to get the bus with a friend and go see movies and break into historical sites and get into normal childhood mayhem and maxed out my pokewalkers twice a month and i was buzzed because i had two (2) whole friendship groups to choose from and that was such a huge deal to me the terminal social outcast. it was so simple and carefree and even though everything and everyone involved in this era grew up to suck except for one specific person i kinda really miss it.

#4: 2018 - this was the first year i wasn’t depressed to the point of nonfunctioning. it was 20gayteen, i was on antidepressants, i was as close to thriving as i got at uni (going into town with people once a week, attending art and culture events, getting good grades across the board), i started to write for fun again, i got my cat whom i love dearly, i was exhibited in my uni’s city’s literature festival, GOD i actually nearly attended a pride event that year can you imagine. this year was basically my life’s second peak. miss getting the 8am train and daintily sipping on a cherry coke to keep me from passing out. wish this time could have lasted longer.

#5: 2019 - kinda absolute middle of the road year not for lack of anything happening but because the overwhelming amount of good and bad things cancelled each other out. so like there’s the fact that i was at the top of my uni game this year, was basically making the first steps into a professional writing career (covid i will never forgive you for killing all that dead </3), finally saved up enough to buy myself a gaming pc, and the summer after the homestuck epilogues, but equally 2019 was the start of the Pochapal Gender Fiasco which is by far the most horrible thing i am still currently undergoing and i burnt myself out mentally about halfway through the year (being stuck overnight in a hospital for a panic attack absolutely horrible horrible irredeemable) and then got like super death plague flu that i was sick with for three months (literally recovered less than a month before rona hit. god’s cruel karma.). so like...it kind of averaged out? the good shit was good but not as great as other years and the bad shit was awful but nowhere near as terrible as it could have been. gotta give a shoutout to 90% of my current mutual cohort for following me in 2019...omelette route gang make some noise !!

#6: 2014 - oof. this year essentially marked the start of a four year long downward mental health spiral because everything fell into awful alignment. i’d just turned 16, finished secondary school, had all my friends up and ditch me at once, was home alone for a whole summer, and was hit with Sudden Intense Body Image Issues that i couldn’t explain until uh. after very recent developments lmao. this one goes out to the me of july 2014 who did nothing but lay in bed and listen to the same two marina albums on a loop because fuck i’m attracted to men and also my facial and body hair are really starting to come in and if i think about this for too long i will literally kill myself because oh god i can’t handle getting older which is clearly and definitely the issue going on here. my brain fucking broke super hardcore and it’s a miracle that an overeating disorder was like the worst thing i walked away with. 

#7: 2015 - downward spiral year two!! i was so volatile this year it was such a mess. i was totally socially isolated after a brief stint of falling in with a group of people at the start of my first year of sixth form until january where in quick succession a) it turned out every single one of these people was friends with the person who sexually assaulted me whom i obviously had a lot of complicated feelings towards and b) baby’s first crush came out as bisexual but in the “women and also trans women” kind of way which tore me up so terribly in ways i couldn’t begin to understand. no words for the experience of seeing a girl kiss a boy and crying so hard at night you threw up because you could never be her no matter how much you wanted it. actually kinda get the sense what was going on there was bigger than just some crush lmao. then after that i was so mentally ill i basically attended school less than half the time and it was the only year in my life i failed my exams. i ended up having to resit my entire set of first year a level exams because jesus christ was i in such a bad way it was a miracle i even showed up to them. all i did was either have anxiety attacks or enter bedbound depressive slumps for weeks at a time. but it’s okay because it gets worse.

#8: 2016 - downward spiral act iii: the spiralling. prefacing this by saying that i actually had two whole good months (april - may) in that i was functioning enough to do my exams and finish school with decent grades. the rest was super extra mega terrible. my school attendance for year 13 dipped below 65% and literally the only thing that kept me from being kicked out was the fact that i was naturally smart at the subjects i took and also because the school would have a lot to answer for after letting me get to that state despite having a hefty file on how damaged i was. keep in mind every single part of this was fully untreated btw - i was just floundering around and letting it all fester. i spent three solid weeks going to school but locking myself in the bathroom all day every day and having mental health episodes then going home like nothing else happened only to continue the breakdown that night. then things got kicked into fucked up overdrive when i moved out to uni and was cut off from what little support structures i did have. it was so bad all i did was cry all the time and never went anywhere to the point where three separate sources recommended me to the wellbeing and crisis counselling service that i stopped going to after two sessions because i was fucked up in ways cbt techniques could not even touch. at least i tried to make an effort for the first two months of uni which like. good for me?

#9: 2017 - what lieth at the base of the spiral. helltrench year. i was at literal rock bottom. i stopped going to class, i didn’t hand in a single piece of work. i lied to my parents and would book trains each day only to go back to my student flat and sit there and contemplate suicide. like i would just slump on the floor in a catatonic state and vividly contemplate one of four or so ways i could end my own life. i only didn’t because i wanted to wait until the summer to collect my last student loan and transfer it to my parents as an apology for my death which obviously didn’t end up happening. honestly i can’t remember much of the first half of 2017 that’s how bad it was. i remember taking a gender studies class and the teacher made it Weird that i was the Only Male Student in the room and then she sent me a scolding email after i walked out halfway through a class and never returned. apparently i got into a lot of online discourse in this year but i don’t remember anything other than being put on a blocklist by the milkfic author over ace discourse which is funny if you have the context. mostly i just baited terfs and weirdo freaks to get them to say horrible things to me as what i guess amounts to some kind of digital self harm. anyway breaking point came in late august when i got kicked out of university and then nobody could ignore it any more so there was no choice left but for me to seek out help and recover enough to function which luckily i did. i really Do Not remember 2017. you could tell me anything about that year and i’d probably believe you.

#10: 2011 - extra circle of hell for this little fucked up gem of a year. on the surface it wasn’t actually that terrible, until the Summer 2011 Domino Effect Of Bad Shit. up until like may/june it was a pretty all right year! i was 13 and had a surprisingly successful youtube channel uploading pokemon soundfont remixes to an audience of i think ~350-400 subscribers at my peak? anyway then i got hit with the early summer triple combo of childhood friends moving away, cute and quirky sexual assault at the hands of a person in my friend group, and then having some Really Great and Super Appropriate interactions with adults on deviantart. like obviously there’s the actual ptsd-inducing event which totally disrupted and killed the person i was right up until that moment and reshaped every facet of my life for better or worse (there’s an alternate timeline where that didn’t happen and i got into electronic music and/or coding instead) but really it’s the events that followed in its wake which were kind of more fucked up. so like all of a sudden i was super aware of my body and me growing my hair out and being mistaken for a girl in class suddenly became this Less Innocent thing and i ended up spending hours overnight going to transgender questioning forums and looking up hrt timeline videos and having the wikipedia article on tracheal shaving saved because it was a life raft to me whose voice was imminently gonna deepen and i was simultaneously reeling with constant trauma flashbacks and the whole thing was so so fucked up. then i was on deviantart and i don’t remember exactly how but a small group of furry guys ten to fifteen years older than me started messaging me and encouraging and requesting me to produce nonsexual fetish stuff for them and talking to me about stuff like if i’d ever thought about growing up to be gay and i didn’t think anything of it for a long while because they called me a very talented writer and it felt so good to have someone be nice to me after being so alone and isolated for months on end. anyway the only reason i got out of that before it got bad was because they invited me to one of the big furry sites and i was weirded out because i thought it was a porn site and thinking about sexual stuff was a huge trauma trigger so i just ended up blocking them all and pretending like it didn’t happen. at the time half this shit didn’t bother me but in retrospect holy fuck 2011 was such a damaging year. to think if like three events didn’t happen i wouldn’t be the fucked up mess you see before you today.

god fuck this turned out super long but i’m not apologising because this was a therapeutic exercise for me and also constitutes as one of the biggest pochapal lore dumps of all time. come get your food or whatever.

[ice-cream-nekogirl]

Amy Martinez (Character Sheet TV Tropes Style) F-J

Face of An Angel, Mind of A Demon: Amy has the appearance of a diminutive and harmless girl, but she’s actually a very powerful but hardly stable witch who’s not above ripping someone’s face apart or curse them with her magic.

Fake Cutie: Has a cute appearance and uses it for deception.

Fangirl: Of Stevie Nicks, Billie Eilish, Brendon Urie, Melanie Martinez, Lizzo, Selena Gomez and Demi Lovato. And also for the stars on Game of Thrones.

Fantastic Racism: Downplayed. Amy has nothing against humans with quirks, but since some of those humans were witch hunters who killed her parents (including her father who was a human with a quirk) she naturally prefers being among other witches or warlocks. And while she’s prone to claiming that witches are better than normal humans, it comes more from immaturity and a dislike of human cruelty than genuine bigotry.

Fatal Flaw: Amy’s fear of abandonment is her ultimate downfalls that makes her her own worst enemy as she takes everything seriously from her loved ones, including criticism, believing it to be negative words towards her and a criticism of her character, which leads her to blaming others, whether they are guilty or not, and she lashes out at them violently which has created her unstable relationships with even people she loves and builds unspoken tension and resentment towards them, which further adds to Amy’s self-hatred and fear that those friends will want to abandon her. And when she senses this, she goes to desperate lengths to keep those friends close, even if it’s at the cost of her own happiness. Ironically, it’s this fear that actually drives people away from her which just creates this unhealthy cycle that she desperately wants to break.

Female Misogynist: Ironically but not intentionally, as Amy is actually a feminist who wants equal rights for women and for women to be treated with respect. However, she tends to disrespect and look down on other girls who don’t live up to her standards for women as she shows little to no respect for her female classmates and dismisses them as ‘weak’ or ‘soft’ and believes that they rely simply on being ‘cute’ and ‘nice’ and ‘having a pretty smile’. This is something that she eventually realizes to her horror and tries to work on. 

Fighter, Mage, Thief: Between her, Ashlen and Shinsou, she’s obviously the Mage, being the witch with several powers and ability to use 6 of the 7 wonders to Shinsou being the manipulative and sneaky Thief with the power of Brainwashing quirk and Ashlen being the Fighter due to her swordsmanship, combat skills and speed she utilizes for her Cancel quirk.

Fille Fatale: Even though she’s immature and youthful looking, Amy isn’t above using her feminine wiles to lure men into traps. As she pretended to be interested in some older men because she knew they were pedophiles and tricked them so she can later slaughter them when she had them fooled.

The First Cut Is The Deepest: Midoriya was Amy’s first real love, but when he rejected and dismissed her feelings, Amy broke down hard and even in the present day his harsh rejection whether he meant it or not, is still something that haunts her to this very day and she’s prone to falling into a depression whenever she thinks about it. 

Flight: The first power that awoken in her was her telekinesis which allowed her to float while she was sleeping one day and ever since learned how to use her telekinesis to fly. She even uses a broom!

Flying Broomstick: Brooke. Although it doesn’t actually fly as Amy uses her telekinesis to make it fly, but nonetheless has it as a means to fly around and also use it to carry people and take them for a ride. 

Foil: To quite a few others.

To Midoriya. They both grew up without a quirk, and were bullied by peers because of it however Amy gained her powers much quicker than Midoriya did, and as she gained her powers her confidence lead her to becoming arrogant and abuses her powers whenever she can unlike Midoriya who is much more responsible with One For All and retains his humble personality. Also, while Midoriya never received his quirk prior to getting One For All From All-Might, Amy’s powers only emerged later on when she was 9 years old due to having a unique and inborn heritage. Lastly, Amy’s powers are innate while Midoriya’s quirk was given to him. Similarly, as Midoriya’s several quirks develop at a slow rate, Amy picks up on her manifesting powers fairly quickly.

To Bakugo. They’re both extremely powerful students with very versatile powers and somewhat unstable personalities however Amy is a kinder person, able to socialize better with others and knows what it’s like to feel powerless and unwanted, contrast to Bakugo who’s abrasive and rude to everyone and doesn’t seem able to empathize well with other people. As far as their tempers go, Bakugo is almost always irritable but Amy’s temper is much more unpredictable as she can go from cheerful to pissed off in a snap. Lastly, Bakugo’s obsession with winning comes from a desire to prove himself to be the best, whilst Amy’s goes beyond wanting to be the best and instead is more her wanting to earn respect for both being a witch and a woman.

To Tokoyami. They’re more of the gothic students in the class with very powerful abilities that are fueled by their emotions, however Tokoyami doesn’t have complete control over Dark Shadow when it goes on a rampage beyond his desires, while Amy has exceptional control over her abilities and freely loses control during a meltdown with the full intent of hurting others. Also, while Tokoyami expresses the fear of hurting people with his quirk, while Amy is afraid of how much she enjoys hurting people when using her powers.

To Ashlen. They both have more than one power, grew up ostracized and had very little friends in their childhood and faced bullying from peers which led to them becoming distant from others. However, Amy has an optimistic, energetic, outgoing personality but is also crude and mean occasionally while Ashlen has a calm, collected and realistic personality and is always kind and respectful to her peers. Similarly, they grew up among important and reserved groups of people and were some of the youngest ones, but Ashlen had stable and moral guardians who looked after her the way normal guardians should, while Amy’s guardians and upperclassmen barely supervised her and let her get involved in things (murder, spying) no pre-teen should ever be a part of. Also, Ashlen’s sadistic side is purely from the effects of her second quirk while Amy’s sadistic side is natural. Lastly, Amy’s several powers manifested naturally while Ashlen’s second quirk was forcefully implanted into her.

Formally Fat: Played for Drama. She was a lot pudgier as a child, but after she lost her parents and went through more loss and trauma in New Orleans, Amy stopped eating as the stress kept her from having a healthy diet and she ended up losing some of her weight in the process.

Four Philosophy Ensemble: Amy is the Optimist, Bakugo is the Cynic, Shinsou is The Realist, Madison is Apathetic and Ashlen is Conflicted.

During her internship with Endeavor, she remains the Optimist, Bakugo remains the Cynic, while Midoriya is The Realist and Todoroki is Conflicted.

Four Temperament Ensemble: When she’s with Shinsou and Ashlen while being joined by Bakugo or Madison: Amy (sanguine), Bakugo (choleric), Shinsou (melancholic) and Ashlen (phlegmatic) and Madison (eclectic).

During her internship with Endeavor, she’s still sanguine, Bakugo is still choleric, Midoriya is melancholic and Todoroki is phlegmatic.

Free-Range Children: When she starts living at Robichaux, Cordelia and her sisters would often let her explore wherever she felt like it, although Cordelia made sure that Zoe or Madison would watch her, they didn’t really do a good job at it, mainly Madison, who claimed that Amy would need to grow up and learn how to find her own way back home. This led to Amy being a curious wanderer and an adventurer, but she did learn how to find ways back home. 

Freudian Excuse: Amy’s lack of moral restraint stems from feeling isolated by her peers due to a lack of a quirk (until her powers manifested) and then she had to watch her mother get burnt to the stake for being a witch and her father get lynched simply for marrying and being allied with the witches, and nearly burnt to the stake herself. And while she was rescued by the pro-heroes, neither of them wanted to take care of a young witch and instead had the New Orleans witches take her away from her former life and cut her off from Shinsou and his family, her only allies, and she experienced culture shock when she arrives in America which resulted in her feeling abandoned by her former society. To make it worse, she ended up being left in the hand of a barely functioning coven as she then had to experience betrayals within her new family, watched some of her sisters die, risked getting hunted by witch hunters again, learned how to kill at a very early age for the sake of survival and had to participate in a test that could have resulted in death. Is it any wonder that she ended up losing her sanity and no longer cared about good and evil when returning to Japan?

Freudian Trio: Of the Zombie Trio with her best friends Shinsou and Ashlen, she is the impulsive, emotional Id to Ashlen’s level-headed, gentle Ego and Shinsou’s logical, rational Superego.

Hilariously enough though, when it was her, Shinsou and Madison, Amy was actually the more laidback Ego to Madison’s rebellious Id as Shinsou remained the Superego.

And similarly, when she’s with her witch sisters Mallory and Coco, it is the childish and naive Coco who is the Id, with Amy being the more well-rounded Ego, and the kind but powerful and patient Mallory is the Superego. 

The Friend Nobody Likes: Amy’s not very popular in the Hero Course because of her attitude, but it’s also mostly out of fear because of her borderline psychotic personality. Her classmates are still very civil with her, but nonetheless do whatever they can do to avoid angering her. However, Shinsou, Ashlen, Todoroki, Kaminari and Midoriya like her just fine. 

Friend to All Living Things: Amy absolutely adores animals and has made several animal friends, in fact, she became friends with Kouda due to their love for animals and it’s also why she was very close to Misty since she was an animal-lover too. In fact, Amy’s stated that she has more empathy for animals than she does for humans and it shows through several of the animal friends she’s made such as her beloved dog Dakota, the coven’s new raven Athena, an elephant she befriended in Thailand named Missy and her new orca friend she named Kasumi.

Friendly Enemy: She and Toga are still very cordial with each other and consider each other as friends as they tend to chat like girls do even as they’re supposed to be fighting each other. Amy and Twice are also pretty chummy with each other.

Friends With Benefits: Before she and Bakugo officially started dating, she notes that she and Kaminari would indulge in some making out without it being serious. 

From Nobody to Nightmare: Due to not gaining a quirk by the normal age, Amy was believed to be quirkless and nicknamed ‘Powerless Amy’ by her classmates in elementary school, but when she turned 9 years old she instead discovered her witch powers and had to conceal them. At least until she transferred to Robichaux to harness those powers and eventually returned to Japan much stronger than before. As she entered UA, she is now currently one of the most powerful, and feared students of the Hero Course as many of her classmates agree that she’s the last person they want to be fighting against.

Gasshole: Can rip very powerful, unladylike burps and even gets dubbed as the ‘best female belcher’ of 1-A, she is very proud of this.

Generation Xerox: She serves as one for Fiona while Midoriya is All-Might’s. Fiona was the only known person who ever defeated All-Might even during his prime, as Midoriya enters his prime, so does Amy as she becomes as powerful as Fiona as she’s currently the only person who can match Midoriya in terms of power and is currently the only person who’s been able to defeat him through matching power.

Genki Girl: EXTREMELY energetic, optimistic, upbeat, hyperactive and practically psychotic. Possibly deconstructed though, as she’s optimistic to a fault by blocking out the more horrible things she’s seen in New Orleans and acts upbeat and cheerful even when there’s bloodshed and horror involved as a means to keep herself from breaking any further.

Girlish Pigtails: She wears a pair of low pigtails to signify her somewhat childish and upbeat nature.

Girly Bruiser: She’s upbeat, wears pink and other frilly dresses and hats while also expressing a deep love for cute things, but she’s also a very powerful witch who’s more than capable of inflicting serious harm towards an opponent as her classmates know better than to underestimate her.

Girly Girl with a Tomboyish Streak: Although she’s shown to be quite feminine (in her own way) , she’s also not afraid of getting dirty, spending time outside with animals, happily sparring with Bakugo and the guys as well as showing no shame in burping or making vulgar jokes.

Glass Cannon: She’s a very powerful witch, but she’s ultimately not the most physically powerful student as she relies primarily on her magic and telekinesis for defense and offense. Then uses too many of her powers at the same time drains her rather quickly, which can leave an opening when she’s using mainly one power. In fact, all someone needs to do is break past her magical defenses and deliver one good hit to bring her down and although Amy knows how to fight back, she’s really not all that powerful without her magic.

The Glomp: Amy loves to hug-attack her best friends Ashlen and Shinsou, but also her boyfriend Bakugo, and friends she adores such as Mallory, Misty, Midoriya and Todoroki, as well as Hagakure and Kaminari. 

Going Commando: Of the bra variety. As it’s shown at the Sports festival when she openly flashed the crowd, that Amy doesn’t wear a bra because she says they’re ‘too itchy’.  

The Greatest Story Never Told: She went back in time with Mallory to prevent the Apocalypse from occurring by redeeming and giving Michael a better life, but no one other than Amy and Mallory remember what happened in their original timeline and swore to keep it a secret from their friends.

Groin Attack: Amy says that the coven trained her in combat for 4 years, but that combat is apparently centered around this trope as whenever she’s in a physical fight with an opponent or classmate (male or female) in sparring, she proceeds to kick, punch and smash whoever it is in the balls and crotch with karate moves. 

Gun Nut: Amy’s learned how to be proficient with a gun and gets a little too excited when she gets to use one during her New Orleans trip with Midoriya against a cult of Satanists.

Hair Contrast Duo: Her dirty blonde hair definitely contrasts with Shinsou’s purple hair. And also with with the black-haired Ashlen. Helps that Amy’s excitable and outgoing nature perfectly contrasts with the more low-key and reserved Ashlen and Shinsou. 

Hair of Gold, Heart of Gold: Zigzagged, Amy’s a troublemaker and perfectly capable of being cruel, but she does have a big heart underneath it all and isn’t afraid to show how much she cares for her loved ones.

Hair Trigger Temper: Although she’s usually excitable and perky, she’s got an unpredictable, volatile temper that’s VERY easy to set off and she quickly resorts to violence when provoked.

Ham and Deadpan Duo: Again, she’s the Ham to the Deadpan Shinsou since Amy’s always loud and cheerful, while Shinsou’s is quieter and sarcastic. 

Harmful To Minors: She accidentally taught Eri two swears “fuck” and “asshole”, however, although Amy finds it both shocking and hilarious she tells her to not say them in front of adults. Justified though, as Amy was only 11 and exposed to vulgar, foul-mouthed witches such as Madison, Queenie and Fiona and thus sees little issue with this, but does try to at least keep children like Kota and Eri from learning adult concepts.

Has A Type: Sort of. Amy notes that she tends to be subconsciously who have as much anger issues as she does. (i.e Bakugo, Madison, Darcy, etc.)

Hates Being Alone: Amy can’t stand being alone, but then she also has her moments where she feels that she’s better off alone when reflecting on her worst crimes.

He Who Fights Monsters: After what she’s been through, Amy resolves to fight for all other witches and wizards, even if it means killing those who hunt and prosecute other witches. She also kills and tortures rapists, pedophiles and child abusers for hurting innocent people. 

The Hecate Sisters: She’s the childish but vulgar Maiden to Ashlen’s level-headed and sweet Mother and Madison’s cynical and bitter Crone.

Heroic Self-Deprecation: For all her bravado, Amy actually has an extremely low opinion of herself to the point of isolating herself because she feels like everyone would be better off without her.

In fact, she even attempted to erase everyone’s memory of her (but it backfired by hitting her and Shinsou) because she wanted everyone to forget about her since she felt that she had done more harm than good to everyone and came to the conclusion that she didn’t belong with the Heroes. 

Heterosexual Life-Partners: She and Ashlen very quickly hit it off online and then become best friends in real life who love each other and always have each other’s backs.

Hidden Depths: While Amy seems flighty and carefree she’s actually very knowledgeable about politics, reads a lot of works by female, POC, queer and trans authors and is very much an activist when it comes to feminism, knows all about racism and intersectionality as she frequently spouts them as a reason for her heroism. She also knows a lot of facts about wildlife, endangered animals and the issues of climate change and animal poaching.

She’s also very eclectic when it comes to her music choices, being fond of and well-informed about groups and singers from the 70′s, 80′s and 90′s. And has shown to be an actually pretty good singer and poet. 

Amy’s also a good baker as shown where she happily spends time with Satou when it comes to baking desserts and likes to watch the Food Network with him.

She also knows an awful lot about drag culture, drag queens and aspires to be a judge on Rupaul’s Drag Race one day. 

Hikikomori: When she’s really depressed she tends to hide away and lock herself in her large mansion without coming out and instead just has all of her groceries left outside so she can bring them in later. In fact, after what she did to Midoriya and Aizawa, she quit UA and stormed off from Heights Alliance for those many months and  mostly remained in her mansion and refused to come out as she spent her days with Madison or Mallory and Shinsou even started staying over just to keep her company by watching TV, eating junk food and sleeping. 

His Own Worst Enemy: Her major insecurities are the biggest fuel to the bubbling rage inside of her which is what makes her even more of an unstable, self-loathing individual. She’s trying to break away from this, but is prone to relapsing into bouts of depression or lashing out at others. 

Horrifying The Horror: Other witches are afraid of her, including her wicked friend Darcy Delaney, who specializes in creating living shadows and summoning demons, states that Amy is intimidating when angry. And then Todoroki becomes mildly alarmed by her display of power against him during the Sports Festival. Then Bakugo of all people starts to fear her, although this might have to do with the fact that he witnessed her snap a man’s neck and threaten to maim Endeavor without even blinking or showing emotion, and then Endeavor himself was visibly unnerved by her threat because he knew she meant it.

Hot Blooded: She’s VERY high-strung and VERY energetic and thus VERY loud and VERY passionate about whatever it is that piques her interest.

The Hyena: Prone to giggling and cackling often at anything she finds funny, even at inappropriate times.

Hypocrite: She gets upset with Midoriya for leading Todoroki, Kirishima, Yaoyorozu and Iida on the rescue mission to save Bakugo and herself and thus disobeying what the pro-heroes told them to do, even though Amy constantly goes against authority herself. Although this has more to do with Amy not wanting anyone to risk their lives just to save her, but her hypocrisy is still present.

She also calls Camie a “Skintight Slut” despite Amy constantly saying that she dislikes the word and disapproves of Slut-Shaming.

Similarly, despite preaching sisterhood, Amy is not above gossiping with Madison and talking smack about other girls behind their backs especially if they’re talking about Uraraka or even Yaoyorozu despite being fond of the later.

Hypocritical Humor: She states that “snitches get stitches” despite the fact that she often threatens to tattle on Aizawa to Cordelia and also tattles on her other classmates to Madison for gossip. 

Hypocritical Heartwarming: Amy can be mean to her classmates, especially Iida, Ojiro and Midoriya, but she won’t tolerate anyone else (not even Madison) being mean to them. Also, while she might express her frustration towards Bakugo, she doesn’t stand for Madison regarding him as just a ‘dog’ and tormenting him with her powers as Amy quickly stops her from belittling him.

I Just Want To Be Loved: Because she felt rejected and outcast by her peers growing up, both in Hero Society and even among her own coven when it grew, Amy’s developed a desperate desire to be loved by people, especially people she knows. In fact, she later decides that one of her reasons to become a hero and a powerful witch is so she can be loved and admired.

She also wishes to have a legitimate healthy relationship as she laments that she’s been unlucky in love because her first boyfriend used her and abused her, her first love Midoriya spurned (unintentionally) her confession and then her on-and-off relationship with Bakugo sometimes doesn’t always have a happy ending. 

Amy: (in tears) Why is that every single man that I’ve ever loved has treated me like shit?!

I Just Want To Have Friends: On the same notion, Amy desperately wants to have more friends as she lamented being outcast from both young kids in Japan and other witches. In fact, it’s implied that the reason why Amy tends to spend excessively on all her classmates is because she wants them all to like her. 

I Lied: Amy knows how to lie, is good at it, and does so frequently, but especially when she and Bakugo were captured and Shigaraki tried to sway her into joining as she promised that she would do whatever he wanted. When Bakugo calls her out on this later, Amy quickly states that she only said she would do what he wanted, but had no plans to actually live up to what she said. 

I’ll Kill You!: Much like Bakugo, Amy is fond of saying this, however, unlike Bakugo, Amy tends to mean it whenever she threatens to kill someone and it’s genuinely chilling because she almost always says it in a calm tone complete with a eerily calm disposition.

Amy: (to Endeavor, calmly with little emotion) On a day when you won’t expect it... on a day that will be your last... should you ever do anything to Shoto again, or any of your children, or Ms. Rei... I will personally jam my knife into your eye-socket, through your brain, and out your skull and turn it into an ash tray. I swear it. (Endeavor is visibly unnerved) 

Impaled With Extreme Prejudice: Her first death was at the hands of a witch hunter with a ‘Perfect Aim’ quirk as he tossed a spear into the air while she was flying and shot her out of the air and into the ocean. She gets better though as Cordelia retrieves her body and Misty revives her.

Intergenerational Friendship: When Amy becomes friends with Todoroki, she meets his mother Rei, and the two almost immediately hit it off with Amy’s blithe spirit cheering up the depressed woman. In return, Rei finds Amy both delightful and beautiful and is always happy to see her, and talk with her about new things Amy’s introduced her to. 

She’s also best friends with Coco St. Pierre Vanderbilt who’s almost 10 years older than her but ironically Amy looks after her and takes care of her, especially when online bullies are being mean to her. 

Interspecies Romance: Amy (a witch) and Bakugo (a human with a quirk) ultimately count as this due to Amy’s heritage being genetic.

Ironic Name: Sometimes. Amy means ‘beloved’ or ‘love’, but Amy at times shows a very resentful, hateful and cruel personality on her worst days.

It Amused Me: She pulls pranks on her classmates, especially Iida and Bakugo, all for the sake of her own amusement.

It’s All About Me: Has a habit of making things about her, makes sure to get instant gratification and loves hogging the spotlight if it means she’s the focus and generally enjoys being the center of everyone’s attention and thus explains why she acts the way she does if it means it can be about herself. Even when she knows it’s not about her, she often tries to put herself back in the focus.

Jerkass: While not quite at Bakugo or Madison’s level, Amy CAN be just as cruel and aggressive as them when in a foul or bitchy mood and is considered the second most hostile student of the Hero Course.

Amy: “I’m a bitch, I can’t help it.”

Jerk With a Heart of Gold: She’s rude,  inconsiderate at times, a lunatic and something of a jerk who does things for her amusement even if it’s at the expense of her friends and can even be cruel, but deep down she’s a sensitive, emotional and loving girl who does truly care for and love all of her friends and is VERY protective of them as she will do literally anything for them, stand up for them and support them. And when they are distraught or upset, Amy becomes sweet and comforting and does everything she can to make them feel better.

She’s also shown to be able to be very considerate as she always makes sure that Ashlen is comfortable and happy during her stay at UA, as well as making sure to avoid triggering Todoroki when she senses that something is troubling him.

[clinicalsurgery]

Work Harassment: Psychological Bullying in the Workplace of ICU in Open Access Journal of Medical and Clinical Surgery by Evangelia Michail Michailidou*

WH: Work Harassment

Harassment at work is an issue that - if we think about it seriously, knowing the consequences it can have on its recipient - will certainly not leave us indifferent, if not shocking. But it is not just a personal problem that one may face in the workplace. It is a social phenomenon, not only because it concerns the social isolation of one, because more than one person is involved, but also because it occurs in too many workplaces, in all countries of the world and also has socio-economic components, both in terms of etiology and its consequences.

The Harassment at work is not a new phenomenon. It simply began to be discussed and studied as a social problem for the first time in the 1960s. For several years now, the phenomenon of psychological violence, mainly in the workplace and in schools, seems to have grown. avalanche, often having very serious consequences and, several times, even for the rest of the life of its recipients. Anxiety, depression, various physical and mental problems (abdominal pain, headaches, insomnia, hypertension, various phobias, etc.) as well as post-traumatic stress disorder are just some of the possible consequences of a workplace harassment.

But what are the reasons that so many people around the world, minors and adults, individually or in groups, become so sadistically cruel and painless towards other people with whom they coexist daily and who have never harmed them in the slightest? What does this kind of behavior represent? Why does it continue to exist and what can we do to, if not eliminate, at least reduce its incidence? [1-6].

What is considered work harassment?

Workplace harassment or bullying is considered to exist when a person is harassed, threatened or exposed, systematically and for a long time, to various forms of psychological, mainly violence, by another person or a group of people [7,8].

The Harassment at work can be done:

1. verbally, e.g. through ridicule, threats, dissemination of false information in order to reduce the person's reputation, imitation, etc.

2. of course, e.g. through pushing, hitting, destroying personal items, etc., and

3. tacitly, through a complete ignorance of the person, exclusion from common activities, grimaces, sighs, ironic smiles, etc.

The W.H should not be confused with isolated or accidental misunderstandings between two people. Workplace harassment presupposes a very clear power difference between those involved [9-12]. The person being harassed is almost always powerless against him or her or those who are harassing him or her, unable or unwilling to defend himself or herself. To talk about W.H , there should be, as mentioned above, a timelessness in the negative actions against the harassed person that have serious consequences, such as: lack of ability to communicate with others and create social contacts, the collapse of the image and external harassment as well as various negative effects on the workplace, life as well as his physical and mental health. Shame is a key word in cases of work harassment. The harassers aim to make the victim feel ashamed to the point that he or she becomes even more vulnerable and vulnerable to the violence [13-16].

The Role of Group Processes

Studies on how different groups work have shown that in each type of group there are latent processes that largely determine its function and behavior. Two interesting theoretical approaches to understanding group processes are:

The theory of rejection

According to her, the members of each new group that is created need a common idea / perception for that group. During this process, there is almost always someone or someone who does not share the common idea / perception of the group or who wants to leave it. Such a person is experienced by the "team" as a threat to its common effort. Initially, efforts are made to "deviate from the instructions" of the deviant person. When this is not possible, then the "non-compliant" is either rejected or will have to cancel or leave the group or change the group itself, which is very rare [17,18]. The same thing happens every time a new member joins the team. The old members, consciously or subconsciously, take the responsibility of initiating the newcomer in the common values ​​and the rules of operation of the group. The initiation effort can take many forms and intensities, depending on the degree of response of the new member who will either comply or be canceled or, if necessary, expelled. Such efforts aim only at the "survival" of the group, that is, at maintaining its cohesion, as perceived by its own members [19-21].

The Theory of the Scapegoat

The idea of ​​this theory is borrowed from the Bible and wants to describe the rejection of an individual by a group. Targeting someone as a scapegoat - who is ultimately expelled from the group - involves transferring a common guilt to someone else, which relieves the group of the burden of that guilt. The "teamwork" displayed in this case, as well as in that of work harassment, absolves the team members from any kind of individual responsibility. Group action enables each participant to do things they would not even think of doing on their own. In this way, we can understand, on a social level, the various prejudices that exist and that from time to time - especially during difficult socio-economic crises - are reinforced. The aggression then accumulated is, to a large extent, the answer to the fear that prevails and which is transferred to an innocent and, as a rule, harmless target or victim.

At the level of small groups, what usually happens initially is the appearance of various latent behaviors or actions such as: "We do not greet the victim", "We do not inform him of important information", etc. In some cases, things get more serious by hiding important instructions or joint decisions that will seriously expose the victim but possibly the patients also. The common denominator of a group operating in such a destructive way is that this destructiveness is determined by various paranoid latent fantasies that distort reality and create in the group a sense of threat, even of its very existence. Therefore, it begins, in essence, to defend itself against more or less non-existent enemies, such as e.g. a scapegoat.

Who is being harassed?

Harassment at work can occur in any workplace, affect anyone - regardless of age, gender, professional competence or position in the hierarchy - and anyone can be found, either in the position of the perpetrator or in that of the victim. However, there is always some explanation as to why some are affected and others are not. A general complaint is that anyone who differs, in one way or another, from the rest of the group is at greater risk of being harassed at work. Personal characteristics and behaviors, which are blamed and often observed in victims of work harassment, fall into two categories:

1. In passive, low-key and submissive individuals with personality traits such as: wariness, insecurity, physical weakness, low self-esteem and poor self-image, and

2. To victims who cause and have personality traits such as: hyperactivity, irritability, explosiveness and provocation. Such characteristics are considered as easy to irritate and provoke the environment, which facilitates the targeting of these individuals [22-24].

Who is Harassing?

As mentioned above, everything that applies to a victim also applies to the perpetrators. We all felt at some point the need - or maybe we did - to "put in our place" someone we thought "deserved", and we probably all gossiped, consciously ignored or spread a rumor that existed or did not exist for someone. This is by no means synonymous with harassment at work, but it could potentially be a prelude to it. Those who harass are considered to have a more positive attitude towards the use of violence, they want to dominate and impose themselves on others, their point of view should always prevail and there should not be the slightest doubt about their face. They are also experienced by those around them as dynamic people who, however, rarely show feelings of sympathy for others, do not experience guilt, need the admiration of others, lack empathy, easily envy and exploit others and, finally, find it difficult to take initiatives and decisions. In other words, they have personality traits that exist in people with antisocial or psychopathic personality. From the moment, that the W.H it is, mainly, a group phenomenon, it presupposes the existence of companions who are influenced by someone who has a leading role and whom, in some way, they admire or fear. Acceptance of the leader-perpetrator behavior by those around him reinforces, legitimizes and perpetuates work harassment.

How is Work Harassment Expressed?

As mentioned above, the W.H can occur in any workplace, but is more likely to occur in cases where major changes occur in the workplace of ICU, where there are harsh working conditions, stress and dissatisfaction or where there is a lack of organization, ambiguity of roles or insufficient management. It can also arise on the occasion of the conflict between different work cultures, where everyone wants to maintain the routines and the way of working that they know well. It can also occur due to the recruitment of a person who comes from another country, etc. Under such conditions, it is much easier for one or more people to be used as scapegoats or boxing bags. The W.H focuses and concerns, usually in the following two areas:

1. In the object of work of the individual, ie in the burden of his working conditions, e.g. by depriving him of responsibilities for no reason, hiding information about patients, assigning him difficult or unpleasant obligations, etc.

2. To acquire personal character through personal attacks, humiliation, dissemination, sexual harassment or implication, etc.

The Consequences of Work Harassment

Any consequences of a work-related harassment are affected by the victim's personality, personal relationships, workplace relationships, and similar past experiences. The consequences on the victim's self-esteem and self-confidence are serious, usually accompanied by elements of anxiety, depression, despair, difficulty concentrating, intense mood swings, insomnia, fear, various psychosomatic symptoms (abdominal pain, headaches, headaches). shortness of breath, dizziness, hypertension, heart problems, allergies, kidney dysfunction, fatigue, etc.), and even the onset of post-traumatic stress disorder. Some come out of this kind of hell with difficulties that they can manage, while others may have many and serious problems that need the help of specialists and that, in some cases, may even last for the rest of their lives.

It is really "sick" for someone to claim that the exercise of psychological violence is something inevitable in human relationships and that a major cause is some characteristics of the victim. Every adult should be able to manage similar situations in a different and more mature way and, if he cannot, then it is not the fault of the recipient of his personal shortcomings and repulsions. Such arguments have no research support. The personality of the victim does not play a special role in his choice as a recipient of psychological violence. What is happening is the exact opposite, that is, the personality of the victim is disturbed, due to the psychological violence against him.

Some argue that victims of work harassment are often people who are strongly opposed to certain choices of the workplace management, to its authoritarianism and who, in general, do not easily submit to its authority. If the management of a workplace first makes an employee a scapegoat or openly targets him, then this is primarily the reason why this employee is subjected to psychological violence by the rest of the staff, and not his attitude towards the management.

Other causes include the following

Reorganize the team or hire a new manager.

Someone who can be favored or appreciated by the management.

1. Someone who refuses to do something that is asked of him and that he considers to be -or / or that may be- immorally correct.

2. Someone trying to protect a co-worker from being harassed at work.

3. Someone who has pointed out the existence of injustices, bad conditions, unacceptable behaviors or abuse of power in the workplace.

The Silence and Tolerance of Colleagues

People say that "Fear guards the ballast", and fear, in the case of work harassment, often leads to "Silence of the lambs", that is, of colleagues. In this way, the victim remains usually helpless, which often creates feelings of guilt and shame in the non-participating colleagues. One way to get rid of these torturous feelings is to blame the victim as solely responsible for the ordeal he or she is experiencing, which further strengthens his or her isolation and exposure to the perpetrators. The situation becomes even more tragic for the victim, when the passivity of his colleagues turns into an active applause of the psychological violence that takes place. We could say that the colleagues, in this case, become the audience of a Roman arena that with its applause determines the limits of the victim's punishment.

Conclusion

The truth is that the W.H It has much larger dimensions - I would say scary - than many of us believe and it will not, of course, be eliminated by itself. The issue needs to come to a wide public debate in order to sufficiently highlight its serious consequences both on a personal and socio-economic level, but also to make appropriate proposals for the best possible response. All researchers on the subject agree that the responsibility lies not with the victim but with the way a workplace is structured and operates. When people feel insecure, anxious, stressed and afraid, they easily look for a scapegoat to shoulder what is unbearable for them and, thus, maintain an illusion of internal and external balance. It is necessary to have an effective legal framework that protects the recipient of psychological violence, but also each employer to ensure a framework of employment relations that prevents as much as possible the occurrence of such phenomena. The responsibility of each administration is great. Because knowledge is always a prerequisite for any optimization and change, discussions and open dialogue in the workplace before and / or when there is an W.H. It is especially important that they are done, if possible, even with the assistance of an external expert.

Regarding our Journal: https://oajclinicalsurgery.com/ Know more about this article https://oajclinicalsurgery.com/oajcs.ms.id.10010/ https://oajclinicalsurgery.com/pdf/OAJCS.MS.ID.10010.pdf

[hermosilla-ignacio95]

03 - 09 - 2020 There's a hidden epidemic of racism in UK schools – but it's finally coming to light

the two biggest stories this year are coronavirus and Black Lives Matter, and one of the places they meet is on a cul-de-sac in Romford, Essex, silent on a weekday afternoon apart from the thrum of lawnmowers. Inside one of those tidy houses lives Intisar Chowdhury, with his wide grin and big glasses and life story that you partly know.

He’s the son of Abdul Mabud Chowdhury, the hospital doctor who even while sick with coronavirus wrote an open letter to Boris Johnson pleading for more masks and gowns for NHS colleagues. When he died three weeks later, 18-year-old Intisar was thrust into the headlines. This was early in the course of the pandemic, when each evening brought news of hundreds more Covid-19 deaths. As the adults in power tore lumps out of each other, a grieving teenager spoke with poise about the government’s lack of consideration for black and Asian carers. Of the more than 30 doctors the British Medical Association knows to have died in this pandemic, around 90% came from ethnic minorities, it says.

When we met earlier this month, Intisar showed podcast producer Mythili Rao and me the garden where his parents threw parties, the conservatory where his dad’s tablas sit silent. He has had more life pushed into the past few weeks than most schoolboys should have to live over 18 years. He could, maybe should, have taken a rest. Instead he is doing something extraordinary.

Outraged by the police killing of George Floyd, he wants to use whatever attention he has gained to battle racism. Along with his friend Clara, he appealed last month for other teenagers to recount the racism they face at school. As the call-out spread across social media, dozens of stories flooded in, from Lincolnshire to Surrey to Kent. Assembled into a dossier and reported exclusively by the Guardian, they comprise a horrific indicator of the abuse and even assaults dished out to black and Asian children by their peers and sometimes teachers in English schools.

And they crack some of the orthodoxies around race. Those big-name commentators fretting they could be silenced by “cancel culture” would do well to listen to these children who usually have no voice. Those who affect to believe that the Black Lives Matter movement is all about rusty statues or that the UK is a “post-racial” utopia should read the accounts from black schoolboys told by teachers to stop hanging out together “because we looked threatening in a gang”, or the Muslims warned by staff not “to congregate in large groups” – supposedly to prevent terrorist radicalisation.

Then there’s Appy, a black girl who goes to her Midlands grammar with natural hair, only to be told by senior staff it’s against “governmental regulations”. She is frogmarched to a storeroom, given a roll of navy blue fabric and ordered to sew her own headscarf.

In a different classroom, a teacher interrupts his presentation with a slide from a Ribena ad ­­– a cartoon of a fat, purple blackcurrant with outsized facial features. He spends the next five minutes calling the only two black students in class, “the Ribena boys”. When one of them writes “the entire class laughed”, you feel the heat of his shame.

Doctor who pleaded for more hospital PPE dies of coronavirusRead more

We entrust our children to teachers, telling them that doing well in education helps you do well at life, believing that classrooms teach tomorrow’s adults to live together. But what many kids learn is that there isn’t the same tolerance for them as for others, whether on the syllabus or in the playground. Nor do their teachers necessarily get it: while 25% of pupils at English schools are from ethnic minorities, 93% of heads are white British.

This dossier doesn’t pretend to be science. It is a self-selected sample of students telling their side of the story, although no school we put allegations to denied them. As a gauge of the scope or scale of racism in schools, this collection is useless ­­– but so is everything else. Academics at the University of Manchester note that the only record is those incidents that schools log with police as hate crimes. What this collection gives instead is rare indeed: a record by minority-ethnic students of their daily humiliations, the sort of thing that teens don’t tell their parents, out of guilt or a sense of isolation.

I remember that feeling. I started school at my mother’s primary in Hackney, east London, until she fell badly ill and I was moved to my local primary in Edmonton, north London. It was topsy-turvy: from holding my mum’s hand to being handed to a childminder, from multicultural inner London to (then) white-working class outer suburb. As almost the only Indian-origin kid at the new school, I went out on that first break into the playground to find what seemed like every single boy in the school hanging off the fence and chanting “rubber lips, nigger lips” ­– and worse. I was friendless, helpless. This continued day after day, so I went to a teacher who shrugged that they’d eventually get bored. Again, the helplessness.

It actually stopped on day four, thanks to a spelling test where I got top marks. From then on, all the boys with skinhead brothers wanted to copy my answers. So: good marks equalled not getting your head kicked in. It was my introduction to what meritocracy meant for the likes of me.

That was back in the 1980s, and I’d assumed things had got better. In many places I’m sure they have, but to read this dossier is to see why in a poll published by ITV last week, 62% of black Britons agreed that the education system had a culture of racism. It is also to see just how school communities can punish their non-white children.

Black girls are still policed for their physical appearance; Asian kids are laughed at for having strict parents. In the whiter areas or the better schools, there is often a sense that the minority-ethnic children are lucky just to be there. Naomi told me about starting primary in Chelmsford, Essex, and being the only black girl in her class. Kids called her “poo”, said she smelled and laughed at her hair. “I felt very, very ugly,” she said. One bully physically assaulted her.

Raised a Christian, she would ask God “what I did wrong for me to be black … Like, my whole life is a mistake”. She was six and this was 2010, just two years before the Olympics ceremony celebrated multicultural Britain.

For Naomi, as for me, being the target of racist abuse was an intimate shame, something that followed us home from the school gate and made us wonder what was wrong with us. Yet to see so many similar stories gathered together at first provokes sadness, then anger, but finally a strange optimism. Because in their collected weight, these testimonies show that it wasn’t our fault at all. The responsibility always lay with our tormentors and the society that enabled them. And for an 18-year-old boy to achieve that, in the depths of his own grief, is a remarkable feat.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/22/racism-uk-schools-teenager

[biofunmy]

Tales From the Teenage Cancel Culture

1.

A few weeks ago, Neelam, a high school senior, was sitting in class at her Catholic school in Chicago. After her teacher left the room, a classmate began playing “Bump N’ Grind,” an R. Kelly song.

Neelam, 17, had recently watched the documentary series “Surviving R. Kelly” with her mother. She said it had been “emotional to take in as a black woman.”

Neelam asked the boy and his cluster of friends to stop playing the track, but he shrugged off the request. “‘It’s just a song,’” she said he replied. “‘We understand he’s in jail and known for being a pedophile, but I still like his music.’”

She was appalled. They were in a class about social justice. They had spent the afternoon talking about Catholicism, the common good and morality. The song continued to play.

That classmate, who is white, had done things in the past that Neelam described as problematic, like casually using racist slurs — not name-calling — among friends. After class, she decided he was “canceled,” at least to her.

Her decision didn’t stay private; she told a friend that week that she had canceled him. She told her mother too. She said that this meant she would avoid speaking or engaging with him in the future, that she didn’t care to hear what he had to say, because he wouldn’t change his mind and was beyond reason.

“When it comes to cancel culture, it’s a way to take away someone’s power and call out the individual for being problematic in a situation,” Neelam said. “I don’t think it’s being sensitive. I think it’s just having a sense of being observant and aware of what’s going on around you.”

2.

The term “canceled” “sort of spawned from YouTube,” said Ben, a high school junior in Providence, R.I. (Because of their age and the situations involved, The New York Times has granted partial anonymity to some people. We have confirmed details with parents or schoolmates.)

He talked about the YouTuber James Charles, who was canceled by the platform’s beauty community in May after some drama with his mentor, Tati Westbrook, also a YouTuber, and a vitamin entrepreneur. That was a big cancellation, widely covered, that helped popularize the term. Teenagers often bring it up.

Ben, 17, said that people should be held accountable for their actions, whether they’re famous or not, but that canceling someone “takes away the option for them to learn from their mistakes and kind of alienates them.”

His school doesn’t have much bullying, he said, and the word carries a gentler meaning in its hallways, used in passing to tease friends. Often, the joke extends beyond people. One week, after students were debating the safety of e-cigarettes and vaping, some declared that Juul was canceled.

[Here’s what Barack Obama has to say about cancel culture.]

3.

It took some time for L to understand that she had been canceled. She was 15 and had just returned to a school she used to attend. “All the friends I had previously had through middle school completely cut me off,” she said. “Ignored me, blocked me on everything, would not look at me.”

Months went by. Toward the end of sophomore year, she reached out over Instagram to a former friend, asking why people were not talking to her. It was lunchtime; the person she asked was sitting in the cafeteria with lots of people and so they all piled on. It was like an avalanche, L said.

Within a few minutes she got a torrent of direct messages from the former friend on Instagram, relaying what they had said. One said she was a mooch. One said she was annoying and petty. One person said that she had ruined her self-esteem. Another said that L was an emotional leech who was thirsty for validation.

“This put me in a situation where I thought I had done all these things,” L said. “I was bad. I deserved what was happening.”

Two years have passed since then. “You can do something stupid when you’re 15, say one thing and 10 years later that shapes how people perceive you,” she said. “We all do cringey things and make dumb mistakes and whatever. But social media’s existence has brought that into a place where people can take something you did back then and make it who you are now.”

In her junior year, L said, things got better. Still, that rush of messages and that social isolation have left a lasting impact. “I’m very prone to questioning everything I do,” she said. “‘Is this annoying someone?’ ‘Is this upsetting someone?’”

“I have issues with trusting perfectly normal things,” she said. “That sense of me being some sort of monster, terrible person, burden to everyone, has stayed with me to some extent. There’s still this sort of lingering sense of: What if I am?”

4.

Alex is 17, and she hears the word “canceled” every day at her high school outside Atlanta. It can be a joke, but it can also suggest that an offending person won’t be tolerated again. Alex thinks of it as a permanent label. “Now they’ll forever be thought of as that action, not for the person they are,” she said.

“It’s not like you’ll sit away from them at lunch or something,” she said. “It’s just a lingering thought in the back of your mind, a negative connotation.”

During a mock trial practice a couple of weeks before a big competition, the song “Act Up” by City Girls was playing. One of Alex’s teammates, who is of Indian descent, rapped along with the lyrics, which include a racist slur.

The students, who until that point had been chatty because their teacher wasn’t in the room, went silent. “I was the only black person in the room,” Alex said.

Alex and another friend on the team explained to their teammate why he shouldn’t have used that word. “We’re a team, so we can’t have tension exist there,” she said.

He said he understood why they were uncomfortable but that it wouldn’t necessarily prevent him from using it again when singing along. He wouldn’t take it back.

“You’re canceled, sis,” her friend told the teammate. It was partially to lighten the mood, but also partly serious.

“It’s a joke, but still, we understand you have that opinion now and we’re not going to get closer,” Alex said.

Despite his initial tough stance, the teammate didn’t rap the word again, and Alex said that he had remained respectful during practice. The team took ninth and 11th place at the competition.

5.

It was orientation day for freshmen at Sarah Lawrence College, where one new student was unnerved by a social justice group’s presentation. The presenters discussed pronoun use and called on the entering freshmen to “‘battle heteronormativity and cisgender language,’” the student said.

Even if you accidentally misgendered someone, the new students were told, you needed to be either called out or called in. (“Called in” means to be gently led to understand your error; call-outs are more aggressive.) The presenters emphasized that the impact on the person who was misgendered was what mattered, regardless of the intent of the person who had misgendered them.

The freshman thought back to a time when her father had misgendered a friend of hers. Her father had asked her to apologize on his behalf. She did. “‘I only get mad when people intentionally try to misgender me because they feel like they have to correct who I am,’” she recalled her friend saying.

Sarah Lawrence has fewer than 1,500 undergraduates. One upperclassman she became friends with said that she had been canceled in her own freshman year.

But, this upperclassman said, the politics enforced through cancellation don’t always fit neatly into the social dynamics of college.

“I think where it loses me, we’re taking these systems that are applying huge abstract ideas of identity’s role and we’re shrinking it into these interpersonal, one-on-one, liberal arts things,” the upperclassman said.

Among the upperclassman’s friend group now, the idea of cancellation is “basically a joke.” Too many people had been canceled. At a recent party the upperclassman had attended, one guy said, “‘If you haven’t been canceled, you’re canceled.’”

6.

One night during Mike’s freshman year at a New York state college, he and a group of friends were headed to a party downtown. As they were waiting for their Uber, someone cracked a political joke, and then the casual conversation turned confrontational. One of Mike’s friends asked his roommate, D, if he was a Trump supporter.

D had a history of making the group uncomfortable. Mike and their mutual friend Phoebe said that he would made sexist, homophobic and racist remarks in past hangouts.

D said he did support the president — an anomaly in their liberal friend group — and “blew up” at the friend who asked the question. When the friend tried to change the subject, he became more upset. Mike stepped between the two to defuse the situation. “He got in my friend’s face, and that was the last straw,” Mike said.

He tried to cool D down; it didn’t work. D called Mike a homophobic slur, multiple times. The group split up. Mike didn’t return to his dorm that night, staying at a friend’s place instead.

“Even before this, we could tell, if I weren’t roommates with him, we wouldn’t have been friends,” Mike said. “So that was the breaking point for me, him saying that when I was sticking up for him.”

D left an apology note on Mike’s desk, which mostly tried to “justify his actions,” Mike said. “That set in my mind that he didn’t really feel bad about what he did,” he said. “He just felt bad for himself, that he would be looked at in a different light.”

A couple of days later, Phoebe, Mike and D sat down and D repeated the apology. Phoebe and Mike heard him out but said it didn’t clear him of wrongdoing and that he would have to demonstrate that he was different now. Both said that while D appeared sad about losing his friends, tearing up during their discussion, he didn’t show remorse.

Other friends didn’t accept the apology. “We wouldn’t tolerate it anymore, we cut him out of our lives,” Phoebe said.

Thus canceled, D moved from sadness to frustration and anger, Phoebe said. He grew “very bitter,” Phoebe said. She noticed that he had unfollowed and blocked the group on Snapchat and other social media a few weeks later.

“He did feel bullied by this whole canceled idea,” she said. “But in this case, no one felt bad doing it, because he didn’t really take responsibility for a lot of the things he said.”

Mike, though, still lives with D. He had signed on to live with him before the ordeal. They don’t speak. D has stopped acknowledging Mike and most everyone from their old group. “I’m definitely not living with him next year,” Mike said.

Phoebe managed to keep things civil. “Every time we see him, I still say hi,” she said. Sometimes, but not always, he nods or says hi back.

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