#I get part of it is that frankly American Jews and Jews on tumblr do not see the most rabid forms of Zionism

[bijoumikhawal]

only going "rape and torture are bad" when people defend Palestinians is pretty fucking scummy, speaking as someone who knows more than the average person on this site does about torture, and hates it real bad and knows a lot of people repeat torture apologia because it's deeply pervasive in modern culture

[blackcur-rants]

@noa-nightingale @strangesmallbard @carcosa-commune @cynicalclassicist

Just to be clear, I don’t think Jessie is a stupid person, far from it, in fact. She is a very smart, well-spoken person in all of her videos that I’ve seen.

However, what I do think is going on with her and this video is that she, like a lot of Leftists and Liberals across the internet, is suffering from what I like to call Star Wars Derangement Syndrome, a phenomenon which I will illustrate below:

Tumblr Jews: Calmly and logically explaining why the Jewish people felt the need to establish a nation state in their ancestral homeland after every other option had been exhausted and how Hamas cares more about destroying Israelis than saving fellow Palestinians

Tumblr Goyim: Oh I get it! Hamas is basically the Rebel Alliance and Israel is basically the Galactic Empire! 

Basically, Jessie is someone who, like a lot of online Leftists and Liberals, gets her politics less from reading actual philosophy and history books and more from her engagement with movies, TV shows, cartoons, comic books, anime, and/or video games. As a result of this, she tends to filter her thoughts and opinions on these complex phenomena like the Israel-Palestine Crisis through a lens of the pop culture she’s absorbed throughout her life + whatever history they vaguely remember from middle school and/or high school and/or poorly sourced, poorly worded Tumblr posts. And quite frankly, Americans of all political stripes have a bad tendency to see morality as a team sport where there’s a Good Team who only ever does Good Things and an Evil Team who only ever does Evil Things. And as far as they are concerned, the Western Powers like Israel and the United States and the United Kingdom are the Evil Team and the Third World is the oppressed Good Team who are a band of scrappy rebels fighting back against The Big Scary Evil Imperial Powers (let’s just ignore that Hamas is a billionaire-led organisation funded by a nuclear power in the form of Iran and the very wealthy nation of Qatar). And everyone is either on one side or the other. Like, you’ll notice she doesn’t specify what Ira Steven Baehr’s specific objections to Jonathan Glazer’s speech actually were, right? Like, it could have been as simple as “Don’t compare the Holocaust to the Palestinian Crisis, especially because part of what made the Holocaust so unspeakably horrific is that it was a mindless Genocide For Genocide’s Sake against populations that posed no threat to either the German People or the German State, whilst Hamas actually does and has done all manner of horrific shit, and the Palestinian War going on currently is horrific because innocent people who are already subject to all sorts of atrocities by their own government are now being subjected to even more atrocities from a foreign government and thus are suffering under two unspeakably awful authoritarian regimes”. I severely doubt a guy like Ira Steven Baehr is going to write that “Actually, Netanyahu and Likud dropping White Phosphorus on residential neighbourhoods and drone striking babies in hospitals is Great! It’s exactly what Mosheh and Eliyahu would have wanted in the Tanakh! How dare you question our Torah, Mister Uncomfortable Dramas with Great Sound Design! You just don’t get it, you villainous boged, you!”.

*Beleaguered sigh* I really hope that Jessie’s upcoming video that she’s releasing later this week lets her speak in a more nuanced manner about these issues and shows a more complex and whole understanding of all of these issues.

@dachi-chan25 @disregardcanon

Okay I... am maybe not the best person to talk about this but I have serious problems with Jessie Gender's new video, When Your Favorite Creator Turns Out to Be Zionist.

Let me first say - I like Jessie Gender. I watched many of her videos and I think she has a lot of very interesting, moving, important things to say about topics like queerness, humanity and such.

But this video just... irked me.

I do not like how she talks about Zionists and Zionism. I have seen how the word Zionist is used against Jewish people. I am not the best person to put it into words but I do not like it when it is used as an insult or implied to be inherently a bad thing.

She seems to use it to mean "person who supports Israel's actions" (implied to support what she calls a genocide throughout the video) and that... is not right.

There are other issues I have as well with the video, like comparing the I/P situation to the Holocaust. There are more things but I am honestly not qualified to speak on them.

Before someone accused me of "supporting a genocide" - I do not. I wish for peace and safety for Palestinians AND Israelis. (And since I have been called a Zionist in the past - I do not consider myself to be one.)

I am just generally disappointed by a creator I like tbh.

I don't think I got my thoughts across very well. I'll be on the lookout for posts made by Jewish people about this video.

[egal-aboosta]

I’m putting this below the cut because I don’t want to make people have this conversation if they’re not in an effective state of mind, and would prefer comments to reblogs because...tumblr.

I’ve been reading anti-racist works and otherwise engaging with antiracist media. I’ve been doing this for a while now. But now other people are reading this stuff and acknowledging its significance, so it seems like now I’m allowed to bring up race and racism without people going into auto-shutdown. If only it were for less depressing reasons. But back to that, I’ve been reading about race and racism in addition to comparative religions works, global history that they don’t teach you in school, etc. So no one think I’m an expert on any of it; just trying to get what should’ve been in school and life’s curriculums.

A lot of the authors and other media producers talking about race (not to mention other subjects)...don’t know how to talk about Jewish identity and experience accurately. (JoC for one, are often forgotten, but also Hitler wasn’t the first or the last, and so many other things...) And I try not to hold this against them because, frankly, it’s complex and not only is it usually outside the field of these media creators who are themselves often highly specialized (got to love academia), but it’s outside the topic they’re trying to address. They are writing or speaking or commenting about some other specialized subject and this other thing the world is making them do just isn’t their job; addressing my identity or Whiteness shouldn’t be their job. At least not their job right then and there.

I’m typically looking to learn something else from them: about their own specialty or at least about that work’s thesis. I don’t expect them to adequately address my identity or even White people as a general group, and I am sad that we live in a world where all these speakers, writers, thinkers always have to be addressing Whiteness on White people’s behalf in palatable ways.

I wish we lived in a world where they didn’t all even have to address White people specifically. I’m not wishing for a world where they weren’t assuming that White people would be engaging with their work, but for a world that wouldn’t be required to molly-coddle, teach, and address White people's own Whiteness in order to make White people feel better while those White people are doing their own homework. These writers, thinkers, creators shouldn’t have to. White people should be able to read a book or listen to a podcast or read an article or watch a movie that doesn’t address how they fit in. And those points about White people, Jews not withstanding, are often one of the weaker parts of these works. Sometimes, because they’re not the creator’s specialty, but more often because it’s not the work’s thesis and you can tell it’s been forced in there.

But these sections and episodes or additions, as much as they pain and frustrate me, these are understandable for where we are now. What isn’t is tumblr posts critiquing the existence of books and articles written by (or not by) and for White people -- but endorsed by activists and academics of color -- that grapple with Whiteness. Because, clearly enough, White people engaging with other anti-racist works need opportunities to explore their Whiteness, and I’d rather that they seek it out independently rather than creating a world where what feels like every anti-racist thinker has to make space in every work to cater to guilt-ridden, clueless White people. Selfishly, I’d also rather not see these writers fumble about my own identity, and other identities that don’t fit neatly into America’s black-white paradigm (e.g. pale Hispanic-Americans, the whole spectrum of Asian-American experience, Indigenous people, Arab-Americans). I’d like to take them more seriously than these forced extensions and formalized footnotes (created with a societal gun held to their heads?) are letting me.

Anyways, if anyone would like to hear about the works or sections of works I’ve found helped my learning, hmu over messaging and/or I can try to make some posts.

[qqueenofhades]

So, it’s Friday evening, and it turns out I have more thoughts about things that happened this week. I almost never do Discourse on this blog, on whatever subject, but sometimes even your friendly local depressed historian gotta say things. If you’re not in the mood for a long-ass meta-y text post, just keep on scrolling, no hard feelings.

In the wake of the Notre Dame fire, which obviously a lot of us were upset about, and profoundly relieved that it did not end up being completely catastrophic, the usual spate of posts began to pop up, alleging that people only cared about Notre Dame because of the loss to Western/European/Christian history, that nobody had been this upset about the National Museum of Brazil or the outbreak of arson at three black churches in Louisiana in the same week, and so on. I don’t blame anyone for making those posts, because I know they cared about those issues and wanted to ensure that their importance was communicated, especially when something major like Notre Dame was getting all the airtime. However, I couldn’t help but notice how that followed the same pattern as all Woke Tumblr Discourse (tm). An event happens, people express reactions to it, and are then attacked or indirectly shamed for not expressing reactions to another event. Or there’s the usual cycle of “nobody will care about this because it’s not happening in America”-style posts, or passive-aggressive insinuations that “you don’t care if you don’t reblog this.” And -- I say this with the greatest kindness possible, because I know, I know you guys care -- it’s... not helpful.

The culture of Tumblr and other left-wing sections of social media often rests on enacting performative wokeness, on showing that you care about the most Progressive (tm) issues, or that you have thoroughly scrutinized your fandom tastes or political beliefs for anything Problematic and/or can prove yourself to an imagined moral standard (and there have been some great metas written on how this essentially replicates conservative evangelical purity culture, with the goalposts switched). This is why we keep having to circulate (and doubtless will have to do so with increasing frequency) those posts reminding the left not to eat its young and flame all prospective Democratic challengers to Trump in 2020 to a crisp before the right wing, which is only too happy to let us do the work of sabotaging ourselves, even gets a chance. This is also why you see the posts responding to said angry “nobody cares about this!” posts, in which people mention the fact that not visibly reacting to all the (vast and terrible) injustice in the world does not mean they don’t care. The world is a big place. So is the internet. I can guarantee you that people do care, and just because you didn’t see immediate evidence and response to it when you opened up your Tumblr dash is not proof of a collective nefarious conspiracy.

Take me, for example. I am a thirty-ish academic and historian who considers myself well-informed and literate in current events. I read national and international news every day to find out what’s going on (because I live in England, the answer is Brexit, and the status is Failed). And yet, there are plenty of things that I only hear about for the first time on Tumblr, often attached to one of those “nobody cares about this!” posts. And you know what? I do care. I care a lot. And I’m guessing that most other people do as well, because no matter how it may feel, the majority of individuals are fundamentally decent people with basic empathy for others, even if our whole system is a nightmare. But the urge to demand why nobody is Discoursing about this issue (again, among a vast and exhausting sea of them) needs to take a few fundamental things into account. 

First, the American media (as a large portion of readers are relying on) simply does not report this stuff. Look at what’s happening in that godforsaken country right now; does it really seem like the kind of place that’s eager to tell you about Brazilian museum fires or black-church arson? I’m someone who makes a conscious effort to read the news no matter how depressed it makes me, and I still miss tons of stuff, because it’s not there. The Western media reported on Notre Dame, people knew about it, and were upset. But when those of them who did not know about the National Museum of Brazil learned about it, they were also upset. We can definitively say now that the National Museum was a bigger and more irreplaceable tragedy in terms of what burned. But we were also apparently 15-30 minutes away from losing all of Notre Dame. You can be upset about both these things. You can express empathy for the history lost in both cases. There is not a greater moral value attached, and you’re not racist for caring about Notre Dame if you heard about it first (unless you’re only upset about Notre Dame for reasons related to race or perceived cultural superiority and are peddling vile conspiracy theories about Jews and Muslims intentionally burning it down, in which case you are a racist). Almost everyone who learned about the National Museum fire was just as horrified.

2019 is a hard and monstrously unfair and tremendously difficult place to live. The internet has made exposure to both all the information and no real information at all simultaneously possible. Not everyone can display active engagement and empathy with every tragedy everywhere. People have jobs, lives, kids, work, school, other commitments, mental and physical health to look after and even when they read the damn news, there’s no guarantee whatsoever the news is going to report it. If they haven’t made the conscious effort to search out every scrap of terribleness that exists in this hellworld, they.... really should not be shamed for that. If they don’t care even after they learn, that’s another debate. But again, in my experience, most people do. But if they are first exposed to it by someone claiming they won’t care, that makes them less likely to engage with it, and to want to enact meaningful change. Firing wittily sarcastic takedowns at easy targets on echo-chamber liberal Twitter is one thing. We all enjoy a good roast and venting our frustration at times. But as a long-term engagement strategy, it’s going to actively backfire.

I talk a lot about being a teacher, and my experiences with my students, but it’s relevant again, so here goes. The kids in my classes come in believing some pretty strange things, or they flat out don’t have a clue even about what I consider basic historical knowledge. If my reaction was to shame them for not knowing, when they have expressly come to me to learn better, I’m pretty sure I’d be a bad teacher. My strategy, whenever a student can actually be nudged to answer a question, is to pick out whatever correct thing they said. Even if the rest of the answer is wrong and we need to work through it, I start by highlighting the part of it that was right, and to build their confidence that I’m not just going to tear them down when they respond. Freshmen are scared of not knowing things and to be made to look like an idiot, so I try to assure them that I’m not going to do that and I will constructively engage with their contribution and treat it seriously. You can then move to dealing with the other parts of it that may not be right, or even Mmm Whatcha Say side-eye. It is a long and often frustrating process and sometimes after reading their essays, you wonder how much of an impression you made. But if you actually want to get people to care about things, you can’t mistake Ultimate Wokeness or Look How Progressive/Anti-establishment/Enlightened I Personally Am for the simple requirement of being a decent person. You can have the greatest and most necessary beliefs or value systems in the world, but if your response to people is to lash out at them even before they begin the conversation, you’re setting yourself back. And I know that’s not really what you want to do.

This should not be interpreted as some wishy-washy “everyone just needs to be nice to each other!!!” kindergarten-playground-rule. I frankly think the whole system could use a good nefarious dismantle, and you sure as hell don’t get there by mistaking insipid moral equivalence for necessary action. But accepting the existence of people different from you, and considering how you want to engage with them, and understanding that issues are complicated and people are flawed, is a fundamental part of being a mature adult (and this has nothing to do with chronological age; there are 15-year-olds who are plenty more mature adults than 50-year-olds). I honestly do love the desperate desire to make people care, and that, for the most part, is why people who identify as liberal or left-wing do so, because they want to (and they do) care. But it’s also why they can be bad at winning elections and getting into meaningful positions to enact this change. The right wing stays on message and sticks together. Even if they absolutely hated Trump, plenty of Republicans held their noses and voted for him anyway. The left did not do that. The greatest virtue of liberal thought, i.e. its determination to include multiple perspectives, has increasingly reduced it to smaller and smaller camps where only the purest survive, like some kind of ideological Hunger Games. It might be great for making yourself look good to your hall of mirrors, but.... not so good for actually doing something long-term.

Once again, this is not to blame anyone for being upset and worried about things, for wanting people to know about them, and so forth. But I am gently-but-firmly suggesting, in my capacity as old, salty, queer spinster academic aunt, that perhaps you consider how you start the conversation. Once again, it’s my experience that most people want to know and want to care, but there are countless factors that mean not every bad thing in the world will be acknowledged everywhere by everyone at all times. You can care about different things for different reasons. That is okay. You can care about something because you have a personal connection to it. That is also okay. You can not care about something because you just don’t have the capacity and are emotionally exhausted and there’s so much shit in this world that you have to compartmentalize and set boundaries. That is also okay.

For example, I was obviously very upset about Notre Dame, and still am, though I’m relieved it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Am I happy it’s going to be restored? Yes. Am I unbelievably angry that a half-dozen of the elite uber-rich could just suddenly throw billions of euros at it for its restoration, when it had to struggle for years to get funding for crucial renovations? Yes. Do I feel as if that if the vaults have suddenly been opened to restore one major European Christian landmark, it’s incredibly heartbreaking that that level of instant capital just won’t be addressed to actual endemic, long-term issues like global warming and social inequality and the Flint water crisis and whatever else, and that this is a sad and troubling message for our society in many ways? Yes.  All of these things exist together. And I imagine most people feel the same way.

In short: I realize this is the internet, and therefore just is not designed to do that, but maybe we can give each other a little bit more of the benefit of the doubt, and think about how we would like to educate and engage those we come in contact with, whether virtually or in reality. We can do it wherever and whoever we are, with anyone that we meet, and I wonder what it would be like if we did.

[themiscyra1983]

The Elephant In The Room

Let me preface all this by saying I do not have time for assholes. If you come at me with insults and contempt, I will block you.

The other day on Twitter I said the Harry Potter books aren’t good. I said this to a friend but I guess some people just keep an eye out for whatever Harry Potter shit pops up on Twitter and/or the algorithm just likes to spit in people’s eyes because hoooo boy people saw and lost their minds. I blocked two people over it because they decided to be assholes, and had a somewhat terse conversation with someone who was more politely insistent before going, finally, “I’m glad you find joy in something I no longer care for” and putting an end to the conversation.

It’s no particular secret that I’m in the fandom, and prior to J.K. Rowling going full, ‘no plausible deniability here’ transphobe, I’d bought my share of official merch. Frankly I should have stopped that sooner, but it took getting figuratively slapped in the face multiple times before I finally admitted Rowling’s ignorance carried a distinct air of willfulness and malice. Anyway I still HAVE the stuff I bought before, the Ravenclaw crap, the wands I was collecting (no more of that, I fear, though I’d hoped to pick up Tonks and Ginny’s wands at least before I brought an end to it), the Ravenclaw goblet I was gifted from a friend who bought it before JKR passed the plausibly just clueless horizon. There is still much in the world that I love, but much of that love comes now from the creations of others, and I cannot in good conscience spend money in ways that directly benefit Rowling’s financial empire.

And the Harry Potter books are not, in my view, good books. I’ve felt that for a while now. I’ll go a step further: I think they’re dangerous stories to tell children; I think I would be uncomfortable reading them to any children I might have. They are not stories that should be viewed without a critical eye. I loved them as a teenager. I’ve grown more uncomfortable with them - and, as with Twilight, far more comfortable with how critically thinking fans have transformed the work - as time has passed.

This actually has very little to do with the fact that, well...Rowling is not the best writer. Listen. I’m a Power Rangers fan. I’ve watched every incarnation of Star Trek, and every single movie. I have no problem with trashy fiction. You will find me rooting around in the garbage with the finest raccoons. But that is part of it, yes; there are flaws in the craft of it, and I don’t feel that, inherently, we needn’t judge children’s fiction by adult standards. I would argue that the very BEST children’s fiction is also excellent by adult standards. But this is the least of my concerns.

Here are my actual concerns.

Rowling wants credit for declaring Dumbledore gay after the fact, for saying Hogwarts is a safe space for all students in ways not reinforced (and in fact actively contradicted) by the text, for cheering the fan-created same-sex marriage of Dean Thomas and Seamus Finnegan, but she doesn’t want to take the creative risks that go along with that. When she had the opportunity, with the Fantastic Beasts movies, to make that subtext text, she and her cronies outright declined it. At every opportunity she has shied away from actually putting her high-minded ideas to the page. This is a cowardly choice at best.

Further, Dumbledore’s only canonical love interest (and it is not clear whether the love was requited) was a pretty fascist with whom he fell in, politically, for a time. I get it, we’ve all had crushes on terrible people. But this is literally his one and only love, requited or not, and after he defeats Grindelwald he is left to pine away for the remainder of his days. The one gay love story in the books - if you tilt your head, and squint, and accept Rowling’s word for it - is a tragic one that leaves one man in prison and another celibate and alone and, increasingly, a manipulative bastard who upholds the status quo.

There’s nothing wrong with a tragic love story. I’ve enjoyed quite a few. But when this - THIS - is what you hold up as a triumph of representation, in the absence of ANYTHING else...no. No cookies for you.

Let’s also talk about how I don’t feel Rowling wrote Dumbledore or approaches him with a critical eye. There is NO excuse for leaving a child in an abusive home. No, fuck your blood wards. You’re telling me that Albus Dumbledore - ALBUS DUMBLEDORE - could not devise protections better than leaving Harry with abusive relatives who despised him and everything he stood for? Then, too, when Dumbledore did intervene in Harry’s life, he did so with full knowledge that he was setting Harry up to be a sacrificial lamb, AND WITH THIS SPECIFIC END IN MIND. None of this is acceptable. Dumbledore is a fucking manipulative, abusive bastard who uses people and throws them away, and the fact that it WORKED OUT for Harry does not absolve him of his crimes.

Moving on, and bear in mind I’m still getting my steam up on this whole rant: Seamus Finnegan. Seamus Finnegan is the one canonically, obviously Irish character in the books, named quite stereotypically, but more importantly, in the books and movies, is shown to be interested in (a) liquor and (b) making things explode. He’s REALLY GOOD at making things explode. Do I need to explain why it’s problematic for the one Irish character to blow things up all the time? He also does this in defense of UK wizardry’s status quo, so, you know, even if you were all IRISH FREEDOM FIGHTER YEAH, I assure you he is not that guy.

There is an entire species of sapient magical creatures who exist solely to serve witches and wizards. Hogwarts is run on slave labor and most of the finest wizard families hold slaves. But it’s all right! Only one of them has ever, in the context of the books, wished to be emancipated, and everyone else views Dobby as a weirdo for wishing to be free, and paid for his labor. Dobby, incidentally, later lays down his life for the wizarding savior who tricked his master into freeing him. The only other emancipated house elf we see in the books, Winky, spends her time in a state of drunken depression, rendering her useless and scarcely capable even of caring for herself. She wished to remain enslaved, do you see, and was helpless without the benevolent guidance of her master.

There’s fan work that has tried to address this by exploring a mystically symbiotic relationship between house elves and wizards and witches, and yes, yes, J.K. Rowling is drawing on European folklore here, but let’s not give her credit, okay?

Goblins. Goblins! Goblins have a long history of being antisemitic stereotypes to begin with (hence why I have seen multiple Jews on Tumblr push back HARD on ‘goblincore’), but J.K. Rowling just...right. They’re short, ugly, have hooked noses, generally look like antisemitic cartoon figures. They are locked out of power but control all the wizarding world’s banking, and do so in very usurious ways, for example charging wizards to hold their money, etc. Now this might be an interesting commentary on how Jews have historically been oppressed and forced into fields that goyim felt themselves too ‘pure’ to work in, were it not for the fact that Rowling’s fantasy Jews LITERALLY AREN’T HUMAN, and more, ARE ACTUALLY GREEDY, CONNIVING, AND WILLING TO BETRAY YOU AGAINST THEIR OWN SELF-INTEREST FOR PERSONAL GAIN. FUCKING GOBLINS, MAN.

Then there’s the travesty of Magic in North America, which disrespected the intelligence of Native Americans (none of them figured out you could point a stick at something to make the magic go until white people showed up to help, apparently, but don’t worry, they’re really CLOSE TO NATURE and GOOD AT NATURAL MAGIC), disrespected the beliefs of specific peoples (no, skinwalkers aren’t just misunderstood shapechanging wizards and witches smeared by the greedy and ignorant, you’re whitesplaining actual mythology to the people who hold it sacred), made the ONE wizarding school in America white with an appropriated Native veneer, and generally just...Did Not Get America. As bad as the UK Wizarding World is, Rowling demonstrated complete IGNORANCE regarding the long history of what we now call North America, ignorance of even modern American culture (there’s a reason why American fans particularly tend to ignore the idea that wizardry is locked down tight behind a wall of secrecy here), ignorance and disrespect toward Native populations, and an unwillingness to do the research necessary to do this shit right.

There’s more. There’s blood purity, and gender politics, and Severus Snape’s portrayal, and all kinds of shit that grates, and I’m just tired.

Writers make mistakes. it happens. But Rowling does not recognize her mistakes. She does not seek to make amends. She just barrels on with her shitty opinions, regardless of who she hurts.

it is at the point where I am no longer even willing to thank her for graciously allowing us to play in her sandbox. We don’t need her blessing; the OTW has done far more for fanfic than she has. And it is, indeed, beginning to grate on me that people constantly try to apply Harry Potter metaphors to real life and real politics. As my friend Doc often says, find another book.

I love butterbeer (or at least the knockoffs available outside the Universal parks), I still read fanfic sometimes, I still like to play with ideas like the Harry Potter movies as performed by Muppets, with Dan Radcliffe as Snape and Tom Felton as Lucius. I’m glad the movies brought us a generation of actors, mentored by performers like Alan Rickman and Maggie Smith and so many others, who have gone on to bigger and better things. Much of my merch is packed away, but I still hold on to some of it because it has new meaning for me in light of fanwork, or because (in the case of my Ravenclaw hat and scarf) it’s warm, winters here are cold, I don’t want to buy new shit, leave me alone.

I am accustomed to seeing fans turn trash into treasure. I’ve tried to do it myself. But I feel, quite strongly, that the original text in this case is trash. it is radioactive, stinky trash. You won’t persuade me otherwise, and I’m done apologizing for it. If Rowling wants me to respect her and her work again, she’ll have to earn it, but I’m very trans and she low-key hates my kind, so even if I weren’t a random reader I wouldn’t be holding my breath.

And I really, really need to emphasize to you all that it is okay if people don’t like a given work of fiction. It is okay if people HATE that piece of fiction. You don’t need to change the minds of everyone around you. You absolutely will not succeed in doing so. Please, I’m begging you, make peace with that - and please, I’m begging you, even if you like something, try to consider it critically.

[kamiyu910]

"everything not black or tan as demonic" have you...have you ever watched American TV, movies, or ads? Have you not seen the white actors playing at least 75% of roles? Have you not seen decades of PoC being cast as thugs or magically wise non-characters? Have you not seen reality TV capitalizing on the most stereotypical "black behavior" they can find, editing it to look more extreme when necessary? What reality do you live in

I’m not really sure what post you’re referencing, but…

“at least 75% of roles”

Well looks like they’re under represented then, since white people, including white Hispanics, make up around 79% of the population in the US. (it’s more if you go by Tumblr definitions of white…). If you go by actual stats, black people are over represented based on percentage by population, but Asians, Hispanics, and Native Americans are very under represented. If you go by the UK, I believe their white population is over 80%.

Have you noticed that Germans are portrayed as evil villains? Irish are typically low lifes in the mob scene along with the Italians. Don’t get me started on Russians or Greeks. What about people who have really curly hair, freckles, wear glasses? Typically portrayed as the geeky nerd who is good at homework and is forced to change their appearance (like straighten their hair, get contacts, wear makeup). 

Over 90% of the population looks nothing like that Hollywood look, and Hollywood bases everything on stereotypes. Hot blond chick is usually a stupid spoiled brat type, jocks are constantly stereotyped, everything is a stereotype in the majority of things put out. Most things put out are trash.

Back around the 1980′s, I believe it was, this strange idea started infiltrating the black community that doing anything that could be considered white was bad. These days, we hear “education is for white people” all the time being told to these intelligent kids who want to learn. They get picked on for wanting to be taught, or for liking music that isn’t “black” enough. It’s considered bad to be well spoken, even. I watched my friend get ridiculed by his own sister for not speaking “ghetto.” She said he sounded too “white.” He also got picked on for liking poetry.

That is a mindset that yeah, Hollywood kinda has, and it’s hard to say whether or not it’s a product of Hollywood, or that Hollywood is just reacting to it (I think we can make a case for the hip hop, gangster rap culture being a big part of it). There used to be great shows, like Fresh Prince, Family Matters, Big Al, stuff like that, things that encouraged kids to learn and grow and avoid the street life. I don’t know what happened. 

I try very hard to avoid TV these days. I went to college and studied the entertainment industry. I wanted a job in it… but it’s trash. Reality TV is utter tripe. Most of those shows are scripted, even if they pretend not to be. There isn’t anything good and wholesome on. It’s just drama and the more drama the better ratings, it seems. Every show I liked was canceled so I just watch the old stuff like Star Trek, Stargate, Beauty and the Beast (1987), etc. Where people were treated like people, like individuals with their own personalities and not just copy pasted pandering bullshit. Where they had faults and didn’t have to be perfect to be loved.

Movies are recycled garbage. Hollywood has lost its originality. Shape of Water is just Splash. They even brought out Ben Hur again, and it flopped. I hope Hollywood dies. I frankly hate it. It’s full of nepotism, corruption, and greed, with some good people still trying to do right, but that’s hard. Everything is pandering to a very specific crowd, which happens to be a minority, a very privileged minority no less, and they sit in their fancy mansions patting themselves on the back for pretending they’re putting “representation” out there when all their doing is shitting on people.

It’s also very in vogue to shit on white people. I haven’t seen so much racist bullshit in years, and it’s being called “progressive” and shit, like No, my parents fought against this shit, and now y’all are bringing it back like it’s perfectly fine? People are supporting segregation again, so long as it’s white people being excluded. I have a folder that’s full of anti-white headlines where if you change out “white” or “male” for something like Jew, it sounds like nazi propaganda. They’re changing real historical people’s races just to fill a quota, as if that’s somehow cool, instead of showcasing real non-white people who fought against the odds and made something of themselves in history. There are tons of people they could be focusing on, but instead they’d rather erase white people.

They claim they fight for non-white people, but they don’t. They claim to try to make all their precious characters perfect (because if someone ain’t perfect, there’s a shit storm that follows! Oh no, a Valkyrie was portrayed as a raging alcoholic? Heaven forbid!). There is so much hypocrisy, I’m just fucking sick of all of it. I’m sick of people claiming bad stereotypes are good so long as the people are a certain skin color/race. I’m tired of people claiming it’s ok to demonize a certain race, while you can’t even criticize others without a blacklash, I’m tired of the inequality. 

People should treat everyone the same. That’s the world I grew up being told I’d get to live in, and seeing it on TV with everyone treating everyone else like just one of the family, not caring about skin color. I watched shows and read books that had great strong female characters, though the only people who were really ever like me weren’t like me in looks, just the way they acted, their personality… (like Data from Star Trek… sigh). The one show I really related to, the main character was a white male, and they utterly ripped my heart out and stomped on it with how they ended it, and with Michael Clarke Duncan dying shortly after… (the Finder). 

I hate TV. I hate Hollywood. I hate the media and the news. I hope it all burns to the ground and gets replaced by something actually worthwhile. All those privileged untalented fucks shitting out garbage need to go to make room for people who have great story ideas and actually well written characters. Get rid of the shitheads who think they can just dump out some poorly written character and get kudos because oh noes, the character is some sort of minority! Like the fucking Ghostbusters 2016 that they tried to shove down my throat as if it wasn’t a horrible disgrace to all the strong female characters of the past. They can fuck right off. 

[menfenced]

I heard this story on NPR the other day that I feel like EVERYBODY, especially everybody in my generation and MOST especially everybody in my generation who has strong feelings about politics. I think that we, as a group, tend to get very cut and dry about what is good and what is bad and unfortunately tend to miss a lot of the complexity that actually exists in our world. On tumblr, I see this a lot when it comes to politics or race and, while I think that people are constantly bringing up really important talking points, it also seems like these points are brought up to STOP discussion, not encourage it. And unfortunately, most situations in life are not so cut and dry that one true statement is enough to settle the question of what is actually happening. 

Case in point: that NPR story that I mentioned. It was an episode of This American Life, which you can listen to here or, if you want the shortened version (yes, surprisingly, this is the short version), just keep reading this post. 

The story is about a school board just north of New York. The community has a significant Hasidic Jewish population and most of their children go to Hasidic private schools. In fact, they live primarily in a closed community as adults and as children. However, they also own property within the district boundaries for a public school. Like most public schools, this public school’s budget mostly came from property taxes. So, you have the Hasidic population paying for public schools their kids don’t attend, as well as the private schools that they do attend. But wait, because the situation gets worse for them. 

You see, there were certain Hasidic children who did not attend these Hasidic schools. Federal law requires that all public schools accommodate special needs for students with disabilities. It has no such law for private schools. The federal government does provide money to the schools for these additional expenses, but requires those students to be placed in “main stream” educational facilities, aka public schools. The reason behind this is a pretty horrible history in the U.S. of warehousing kids with special needs and keeping them isolated from the rest of the population. So, to avoid that, Congress passed a law that basically makes it impossible for that money to go to private schools, especially private religious schools. 

From the point of view of the Hasidic community, this was ridiculous. They weren’t going to do that and having to put their children in schools outside their own community where the children were far less comfortable seemed to be a greater evil to the children than this non-existent evil for their community. In fact, that was more isolating for these children. Unfortunately, the law is not always one size fits all and it did not fit this community. So, they decided to do something about it. 

Gradually, Hasidic community members started to run for the school board and they started winning. A lot. By 2008, Hasidic school board members outnumbered non-Hasidic members 2 to 1. And remember, this was a school board to determine the budget of a school that none of these board members had children in. So I’m sure you can guess what came next. Budgets started getting slashed in order to facilitate reducing property taxes. Extracurricular and Arts programs were dropped and two schools were closed. One of these schools was specifically sold to make room for a new Yashiva school for Hasidic students and their growing population. 

Now, I’m sure you can imagine how angry this made public school parents. Their schools were being taken over with the express purpose of taking away those schools’ money. From their point of view, the Hasidic community was targeting non-Hasidic children and their education just to save a few bucks. 

Now, if you’ve got some red flags going up in you’re head, you’re not the only one. As soon as you start throwing around accusations of Jewish people being pre-occupied with money, you’re treading on dangerous territory. You’re treading on territory that was used to imprison and execute millions of Jewish people. Millions. That is no small thing and it can NOT be ignored, no matter how inconvenient that makes your argument. And... it did make this argument inconvenient, because the crux of the issue for this school board and for this school district was, in fact, money. And the issue on both sides was money. 

The non-Hasidic community felt trapped because their voice had been silenced. They had no other school options to fall back on and now they had no money for the only schools their children could attend. You can imagine the harsh sentiments directed at this community. And though many in the non-Hasidic community tried to keep religious and racist sentiments out of the debate, they couldn’t be squashed completely. Adults and children could be heard saying that they hated Jews and other antisemitic remarks. And though those protesting the Hasidic controlled school board insisted that the accusations of antisemitism were NOT the source for their objections, the Hasidic community was not wrong in saying that they were a part of their objections. 

But the problems with race don’t actually end there because because this story has another surprise for you. The non-Hasidic members of this community? Mostly non-white. The Hasidic members? Mostly white. Based on the history of race relations in our country, this paints a very different picture. Now you have a white community working to actively take away resources used to educate a mostly brown community. Now you have a mostly brown community facing arguments from the other side that they’re just looking for handouts and that they just want to be given money without having to let the people who are giving them money have any say in it. That boarders on some serious racist history (and some pretty serious racist present arguments) and that can’t be ignored either, no matter how inconvenient that makes the, frankly, true argument that they money they’re complaining about not getting for their schools was coming form the Hasidic community this entire time. 

Now, you may have a pretty clear idea in your mind about what solution is correct or most important for this conflict, but I’d like you to consider something other than the school board solution. Think about the community itself. Think about the problems and the struggles that led each side to this conflict. Think about the problems and struggles that will continue in this community completely separate from any solution. And think about what problems might persist in response to your solution. Think about that. That is important. You might have an idea of what the right path is to take, what the most just, most considerate, most pragmatic, most whatever solution is. But no matter what you choose, it won’t be perfect because this situation is just too complex. 

What I want people to take away from this is that all those ideas you have about how simple the world is, how wrong the other person or other side is, and how right you are, I guarantee that it’s more complicated than you think it is. And you can still believe that you’re right, that your solution is best, while acknowledging that. This isn’t some call to ask people NOT to be opinionated. It’s a call to recognize the complexity of situations and approach them with compassion rather than contempt.