#about racism and society and prejudice and so on and so forth

[moonlitlex]

ok. final thoughts on doctor who season 14 (2024) (because maybe if i say all of this i will finally stop thinking about how much i hate this season)

short version: i'm this season's biggest hater. if this season has a million haters im one of them. if this season has 1000 haters i'm still one of them. if this season has one hater it's me. if this season has no haters it means i have left this world. if the world is against this season i am with the world

long & nuanced version (under the cut)

i'm just really, really, really disappointed. i've always said that good writing can redeem any project, and it kind of feels like they just took it in the exact opposite direction this time. there's so much that went wrong and like 99% of it is down to the writing. i did a rant on my youtube channel (which i'm not gonna link here because i want to keep these accounts separate) and it was like an hour long so i'm not gonna go into detail but i'll just go over my main issues with this season

fifteen lacks depth. i think he's a very generic doctor lacking his own eccentricities. after the first season the doctor usually has quite a distinct personality, but i don't think we got that with fifteen. just compare the kind of characterization fifteen has at this point to like... eleven in his first season. he was a lot more fleshed out. we got to see multiple facets of his personality. it seems like they tried this with fifteen but everything we got to see ended up being really surface level. the susan thing just kind of happens. the rogue thing just kind of happens. he faces racism and he's just kind of incredulous and then the episode ends. it's not explored. the show just moves on to the next thing and we don't get to see how he deals with it.

ruby lacks depth. similarly, i think ruby is a very generic companion. she's a young woman from present day london which isn't in and of itself a bad thing but it's not backed up by much. like, what do we actually know about ruby? she's adopted? she was left on a church doorstep by her biomom? she loves her mom but is still disappointed she can't find her bio parents? these are all plot relevant things. what do we know about her outside of the stuff that is necessary for the plot? job? friends? life before the doctor? there are a few tiny glimpses, but not enough to make her a developed character.

fifteen and ruby's relationship is boring. they never fight. they never disagree. they never argue. they're never angry with each other. they never challenge each other on anything. they're shown to have this amazing best-friend rapport but it's never developed or fleshed out. it just kind of happens. one second they're meeting and the next second they're bffs who never disagree about anything and are always on the same page. it's just not an interesting dynamic.

i found ten and donna to be a very compelling dynamic but that's because they actually have a real friendship and have to deal with conflict and challenges and disagreements. times when the doctor and companion challenge each other are interesting. this is a feature of some really beloved doctor who stories for a reason. dalek wouldn't be so well loved if rose just agreed with nine the entire time. the conflict makes the story more compelling. meanwhile ruby can't even muster an ounce of discontentment with fifteen for the entire season.

season finale payoffs were not compelling and are in my opinion a result of prioritizing shock and surprise and social media buzz at time of release over telling an interesting story.

sutekh is not automatically a compelling villain and the way that arc is written is so... bland. he appears and kills everyone and the next episode they just hit the reset button. fine, doctor who has done this before, but there was interesting character writing back then to distract you from the baffling story decisions.

the season 3 finale had flying jesus ten but it also had interesting character dynamics. this one had sutekh defeated in the most confusing way possible (if he got his power from the time vortex why is it killing him now....) but there's barely anything going on in the character department. it's rtd so i expected hamfisted deus ex machinas, but i didn't expect the lack of care on the character front.

the susan thing was just... it came out of nowhere, didn't really make much sense, and then it immediately disappeared. the doctor thinking it's his susan was just confusing for me and it didn't land. like why would susan.... do that? why would she be basically following him around the universe by weaving herself into the scenery everywhere he landed? this is never even addressed. they just get the tardis anagram and he immediately jumps to it being his susan and you're not really sure why he's so convinced and it's never really explained.

ruby's mom being a normal woman literally just doesn't make any sense. it's never explained. "we thought she was really important" doesn't just do all the inexplicable things. why and how is ruby able to make it snow if her mom is just a normal person? why does the song in his soul scare maestro so much? why is sutekh of all people unable to figure out who her mother is? the reveal is played as a criticism of the audience for building up ruby's mom to be this huge mystery, but it wasn't the audience doing this - it was the writers. these are the clues they laid out and they're never explained. "doctor who is more fantastical now" also doesn't make any sense. fantasy has rules too. you can't just do whatever you want. the world still has to be internally consistent. the reveal by itself is a nice moment but it's just disappointing that they decided to laugh at the audience for taking their show seriously.

i've seen a lot of people compare ruby's mom thing with clara's impossible girl thing. i would like to point out 2 differences that make clara's impossible girl arc superior. first - clara's impossible girl arc never tries to weasel its way out of the mystery. the point is that who clara is is more important than the mystery surrounding her. ruby's mom mystery tries to erase the mystery entirely. second - clara's impossible girl arc is resolved the way it is because of clara. clara is a person who takes an action because of who she is. it shows courage and selflessness and care for her friend. ruby's mom mystery is solved by ruby and the doctor finding a database where they can match ruby's dna to her mom's. it doesn't say anything about her character. her character is irrelevant to the resolution.

i've also seen it compared to the hybrid thing from season 9, but with the hybrid there was never anything unexplainable happening in the first place so "it was just the characters obsessing about it all along" makes sense because it literally is just the characters bringing up the hybrid all the time.

the individual episodes are not... good. here are my opinions on each of them

church on ruby road - ok introduction, weird pacing, the goblin song was just tonally off compared to the rest of the episode

space babies - genuinely makes the doctor seem like a sadistic asshole at times like he keeps laughing at the literal babies for being scared of the monster and this is played for laughs (???), boogeyman reveal thing literally came out of nowhere there was no setup and it made no sense and was never really explained, a lot of tonal whiplash in this episode, poor exposition choices at the start

devils chord - maestro was a fun performance but nothing else about this episode is interesting, there are no beatles, the 4th wall breaks are tonally inconsistent with the rest of the season

boom - ruby gets sidelined but making ncuti act without being able to move any of his body slaps as a concept and while it was too on the nose, the thematic messaging aspects of this episode are coherent and don't talk down to the audience, some side characters get to be relevant to the story and moderately developed (mundy, splice, the dad), splice's actor was far too old to be delivering those lines and it didn't land well, the dad ai defeating the ambulance ai was a bit too much but was in line with the power of love and faith theme so i'm conflicted on how i feel about that

73 yards - did nothing right. there are a few minutes of good welsh folk horror at the start before that aspect of the story is undermined by those people in the pub. ruby gets no character development. the horror atmosphere is abandoned at the start and the horror concept is abandoned entirely partway through the story in favour of the political stuff with roger ap gwilliam, which is kind of resolved in a really anticlimactic scene which doesn't matter anyway because everything just gets undone at the end of the episode. there are no answers.

it's not a good horror story because 90% of it isn't horror. it's not a good political drama because nothing happens. it's not a good character study because we don't get to know anything about ruby's character. i genuinely think rtd has forgotten the kind of stuff he's written because he called this the best thing he's ever written and it's literally not even in the top 10 doctor who episodes he's ever written. like midnight is right there. the waters of mars is RIGHT THERE. this episode is all setup and no payoff.

also - i might just be autistic, but the "can i pay with my phone" joke doesn't land because not everyone can actually accept digital payments yet! it's like... an extremely normal question to ask. i literally ask all the time unless i see an "apple pay accepted" sign because sometimes the answer is "no, we only take cash or card". i know it was supposed to be something about how ruby thinks she's in the past or welsh people getting wrongly stereotyped for being backward but maybe rtd should've come up with a line that would actually be offensive and not just a completely normal thing to ask in 2024.

dot and bubble - this is probably my most controversial take. i hate this episode. i think it's a poorly written bad episode. and furthermore i think only people who are disconnected from all discussion around racism think it's got genuinely good commentary. for MOST of this episode, it's a "kids be on they damn phones" thing. like, genuinely. lindy can't even WALK without her phone. there's nothing in the episode to tip us as the audience off to the idea that the dots hate them because they're racist. everything in the episode is pointing at "the dots hate them because they're stupid as fuck because they're always on that damn phone".

lindy at first seems like a flawed but sympathetic character, and this could genuinely have worked with the racism commentary. if it's about them being racist cause they're sooooooo fucking stupid, maybe don't have lindy be an irredeemable extremely racist character who kills someone. maybe she's repeating all the rhetoric she's heard her entire life without ever thinking about it. maybe trying to convince her racist friends to give the doctor a chance gets her socially isolated. maybe it's about echo chambers and social bubbles. maybe lindy as an individual has no malicious intent either way but she still behaves in a racist way and still ends up siding with the racists because they're her friends and she wants to fit in and be part of the in group and trying to not be racist because the doctor seemed kinda nice got her socially ostracized so she perpetuates racism regardless. but none of this is what happens. this is a reading you can get out of it if you're really dedicated to reading into a story written by a guy who doesn't give a shit about racism.

lindy and all her friends are stupid and bad and racist and the doctor is still desperate to save them for some fucking reason and he doesn't even get to SAY anything to them, he just laughs incredulously and that's his entire reaction. the commentary in this episode is baby's first lesson on racism. it's a message of "racism is bad and stupid" tacked onto an episode with a message of "being on your phone is bad and stupid".

it's shallow. it has nothing to say. it's very clearly a story about racism written by a white man who has never had to even think about racism. the entire writer's room for this season was white as well. rtd didn't even think he should maybe consider giving the racism episode to a black writer. he just wrote a full episode where the message is "racism is bad you guys" and patted himself on the back for his social commentary. i think it's embarrassing that people praise this episode for opening their eyes to racism in the real world and helping them understand it better. literally all that tells me is they've been closing their eyes and covering their ears every time a person of colour talks about racism. like black fans have literally been talking about racism in doctor who for decades and clearly none of you listened to any of them because you're here watching an episode with an "omg racism is bad guys" message going "wow, i never though about it like that!" that's because you're an asshole.

"wow i didn't even notice that everyone in this episode is white!" that's because that's not out of the ordinary for doctor who. or for television in general. this isn't revolutionary commentary. it's an indictment of the season 14 writer's room that they thought they could write this episode without even taking a look around their own writer's room and thinking "huh, everyone here is white too. maybe we should try to change that." this show has been predominantly white for MOST of its history. i'm a huge critic of the chibnall era but at least that guy hired poc to write for the show. at least the bad racism commentary in rosa (which was, to remind you, "the future racist is wrong. racism is bad. also the entire civil rights movement was basically a happy accident") was written by a black woman. at least the weird british empire glorifying shit in the partition episode was written by an indian man (to be clear, stuff written by poc also deserves to be criticized. my point is just that at least chibnall had the basic common sense to hire people who knew more than him to write these stories). rtd didn't even consider this. not even a cowriter.

it's just embarrassing to watch white fans falling over themselves analyzing how this episode is soooo deep when it's simply not. racism isn't silly goofy stupid. it's dangerous. it gets people killed every day. it's even more ridiculous that the racism is addressed in the future episode but not anywhere else! fifteen goes to 60s england and... nothing. he goes to 1800s england and nothing. sure, future people are racist. whatever. are we seriously sanitizing the real, actual, real life racist past of britain? and then patting ourselves on the back for it? and ricky september being considered not racist? like, reading a book doesn't suddenly make you not racist. racist people aren't necessarily idiots. plenty of highly educated people are racist. making ricky explicitly racist while also a clearly smart character would have added nuance to this episode, but rtd didn't do that. watching a black man beg and plead with rich racist white kids to please let him save their lives is just... ridiculous.

there are countless (and i do mean countless) works by actual people of colour that discuss racism in a far more nuanced way. that go beyond "racism is bad and racist people are stupid". there are specifically black british shows you can watch that actually address racism and have real commentary on it outside of what you would expect a toddler who has just learnt about prejudice to say. shows that aren't about coddling while people. watch shows made by and for people who aren't white. read books written by and for people who aren't white. and don't just watch and read this stuff to "educate yourself" on other people's experiences. watch it because it's art. because it's entertaining or funny or interesting or dramatic, just like stories that are about white people are allowed to be. and stop praising an episode with a racism is bad message for being good racism commentary. seriously. we already know racism is bad. this is embarrassing for you.

dot and bubble was a "kids be on they damn phones episode" with "racism is so bad guys" tacked onto it and white fans fell over themselves explaining how it opened their eyes and it was so deep and meaningful and powerful and it was none of those things. it was bland and shallow and honestly really boring they spend WAY too long hitting us over the head with how the kids are so stupid cause they're on their damn phones. you should be embarrassed. if this episode was the first thing that made me realize racism exists and is bad you couldn't waterboard that out of me. grow up.

rogue - rogue was an underdeveloped jack harkness ripoff, there's no development of the relationship between him and the doctor, ruby got nothing to do, the proposal came out of nowhere, the chuldurs were an interesting concept but they literally didn't even do any of the larping they were there for apart from the one who was lady emily. murder is not a prominent part of bridgerton or similar regency era romances that they were supposedly there to cosplay

legend of ruby sunday - this episode is literally 99% exposition. like i'm not joking. there's exposition and exposition and exposition for the whole episode and at the end sutekh appears and kills everyone. also "i will kill everyone" is like. not a compelling motivation. doctor who is full of guys who want to kill everyone. there's nothing making sutekh particularly scary or compelling apart from the fact that he thanos snapped the whole universe and that's also not particularly scary or compelling because he spares the main characters AND because you know they're gonna hit the comic book reset button next episode. sutekh being attached to the tardis since pyramids of mars is unconvincing personally (it would've made more sense if it was since wild blue yonder)

empire of death - ??????? ruby's mom is just a normal woman. they leash sutekh like a dog and drag him through the time vortex which kills him for some reason and also hits reset on his kill switch for the whole universe and that just fixes everything. ruby calls her biomom her real mom instead of carla which just really rubbed me the wrong way. she exits the tardis to stay with her family and it's... fine. you never see why ruby and the doctor were attached to each other so them saying goodbye doesn't hit home. nothing happens and then suddenly everything happens. the fact that the reveal is unconvincing makes the whole thing worse.

conclusion: i think rtd ran out of ideas for doctor who. i think he shouldn't have come back. i think the 60th specials were season 4 fanfiction. i think they should've given the showrunner position to a different writer entirely. i think 8 episodes is far too short for a doctor who season (flux being an exception because it was one ongoing story). i think the bigger budget and better production value can't save a show with poor writing. i think gatwa and gibson are acting their hearts out and i wish they had better material because i really like both of them in these roles. i'm also kind of sick of murray gold's music at this point. he won't let emotional moments just sit and it's really annoying how every time anything happens there's a swell of music. i think rtd should give up on racism commentary and just hire someone else who can do it justice if he really wants it to be in his show. i think rtd should shift focus back to the characters and their interpersonal relationships because that's what he's good at and his plot resolutions have always been underwhelming deus ex machinas. i think they should give this show more episodes. i think they should change the broadcasting times to be a better slot in the uk and the episode should go up on streaming at the same time or after it airs. this season has little glimpses of potential (some of boom, first few minutes of 73 yards, episode concepts in general are quite interesting, more fantasy in doctor who is a fun concept) but squanders all of it with flat characters. i started dreading watching the next episode after a while because i kept hoping it would be good and then i would hate it.

but i still care too much about doctor who to not watch the show so i guess i'll be here this time next year picking season 15 apart. woo.

[blorger]

On discrimination in the wizarding world

When coming up with the concept of blood purity JKR who, as a cis white woman from a 1st world country only has a second hand experience of oppression (if one doesn't count the constant yoke of the patriarchy, and she does), managed to create a hybrid term, collating different types of prejudices:

A mudblood is not visibly a mudblood like one is visibly a person of colour but a mudblood is inferior by deterministic reason just like one's race to a racist (you are born a mudblood for reasons beyond your control); one's blood status can be hidden, just like one can hide one's religion and, most importantly for our purposes, one is recognisable for their blood status by virtue of being an outsider, i.e. new to the wizarding world.

There's an obvious element of classism in the concept of blood purity: the established wizarding families are not only rich but generationally rich (save some notable examples) and they are part of the status quo by virtue of just how long they've been an integral part of the wizarding world.

To a pureblood, who is nobility-coded, a half-blood is a bourgeois trying to rise in status while a muggleborn is nothing but a dirty peasant. Historically, the nobility has always been greatly preoccupied with trying to retain its place at the very top of society and a key component of stopping the lower classes from rising in station is convincing them of their innate inferiority. You are part of your social class by virtue of your birth, the thought goes, and as such it is an immutable fact.

To purebloods like the Malfoys, the muggleborn represent a threat when they try to rise above their station, when they don't conform to the Order of Things. A muggleborn, coming from a modern society where social mobility is seen not only as normal but as desirable, does not hold the reverence for purebloods that they feel they're owed; they don't look at purebloods and feel inferior, like they ought to, they just see someone higher in the social hierarchy and a particularly ambitious muggleborn may even think, well, I can do that too.

I see someone like Bellatrix or Walburga as closer to a true racist: the very existence of muggleborns is an affront to them for they befoul the places they enter, they taint bloodlines, they are freaks of nature. To someone like Lucius Malfoy, who derives his self worth from his position at the top of the social hierarchy, muggleborns are just people; they are inferior people, yes, but as long as they know their place they are ultimately harmless.

One could argue that that is just different flavours of racism, and they would be absolutely correct if we were talking about the real world, where thoughts like these enforce well established systems of oppression. In the world jkr created, though, these systems do not exist, I'm not sure wether by design or ignorance (but I can hazard a guess). There is no wizard equivalent of the transatlantic slave trade, wizards don't follow a unified religion that can be easily perverted to justify systemic oppression, the magical world has always had prominent members who didn't follow this world-view and so on and so forth... (jkr herself doesn't seem to understand the concept of intersectionality, which plays a huge part in real-world oppression).

In the fandom we often refer to the ideology of blood purity as wizard racism and, while that is a very succint short-hand, I've always felt like it's not entirely accurate.

I've always felt iffy about treating blood purity as a type of racism because the truth is that real life racism is magnitudes worse. It's a many headed hydra endlessly changing and regenerating, it has a dark and sordid history, it's baked into our society, it's a stain on our collective consciousness. Better authors than jkr have produced more fitting analogies for it in their works whereas what she created, in my opinion, doesn't even come close to the real thing.

By borrowing from her own experience as a lower-middle class woman in a country with a monarchy and a very distinct class system, jkr has managed to create something that to me is closer to classism, except classism doesn't sound bad enough for the type of story she wanted to tell so, when she wanted to escalate the stakes in her story, she added on elements of anti-semitism (the events of book 7 are clearly based on Nazi Germany and WWII in general) and, less successfully, white supremacy.

I think this is partly why, as a fandom, we are able to so successfully rationalise the actions of the harry potter villains: when push comes to shove, their beliefs are but a pale imitation of what we see in the real world.

[silversiren1101]

9, 16, and 18!

Oc Asks Game

Hey Spyri! Thanks for the asks! I'll do them for both Mino and Moro!

9. What is your character's trigger point? What makes them angry, sad or makes them go off?

Minovae: Pointless cruelty, abuse of the law, injustice, and selfishness.

Pretty clear-cut, Mino has a bleeding heart as much as she has a sense of righteousness about lawfulness and the "intent" of a laws versus how they're literally interpreted. Her vision for lawful society is one where the laws apply to all equally and consider intent as much as action; where laws more abused than not are stricken from the record and abusers subjected to the hammer of justice; and happiness and health and prioritized far more than any sense of productivity.

Instances of cruelty without point and the law being twisted to hurt the very people she's given her life to serve are enough to draw forth the "Little Linnorm" side of her: expect little mercy.

Other hot-button issues for her are of course racism and classism and other types of prejudice for what someone is rather than who. She's been subjected to much her entire life (and people she cares about!) and has no patience or tolerance for it. She will only ever care about a person's actions in terms of judging them.

Morolai: Disrespect and feeling powerless

Morolai is simple: treat her like she's a goddess on this earth and also make her feel powerful and in-charge. Anything else is going to turn her into a clawing, biting, acid-spitting beast.

Part of that goes into respecting extensions of herself, too, though: her chosen companions and her nation! A dragon is nothing without their hoard, no? Well, things she cares about are part of the hoard. Any disrespect against them is against herself, and she takes such slights incredibly personally.

16. What do they look for in a friend? A love interest?

Minovae: Mino makes friends easily! In fact, it'd be more accurate that people start out as Friend-adjacent to her and are then downgraded when she finds out more about them that she doesn't like, lol. She loves mortals and just the experience of being alive with others and coexisting, that sharing of experiences and stories and knowledge... She values having a varied friend group so she can share in as many lives and experiences as possible! That being said, she looks for friends that aren't pointlessly cruel or maliciously evil.

As for love interests, Mino makes a ton of friends easily because she's demiromantic. It takes a LOT for her to actually fall in love, not really developing any crushes or anything. Her love interests are almost always based on qualities she lacks but subconsciously wishes she had herself. Her first relationship was with a Desnan cleric that was very carefree, didn't quite follow the rules and just did what they thought was 'right', and was very proud of their brightly colored hair and other unorthodox features... Said cleric also left her to die to ghouls, too scared to fight to save her only to perish to them anyways, but... well first loves don't often go that well do they?

With Regill: she admires his ability to be completely unaffected by any prejudice and complete acceptance of himself; wishes she had even a fraction of his finality and confidence in herself; and, believe it or not, did wish she was a little bit more ruthless! She also adores his passion (which most people don't understand since he seems so stoic but she'll go off on it let me tell ya lol) and drive and ability to admit his mistakes and faults (which plays into his confidence) and complete and utter selflessness of course.

Morolai: Friends... I suppose Morolai would consider her companions her friends. It takes, uh, a long time for that to happen. Basically anyone that has stuck with her through life and death situations, have proven they will die for her or suffer on her behalf, and actually care about her will earn the coveted title of "her friend"... give or take a few years!

For love: first off I'm not sure if she's capable of such a genuinely selfless feeling. Her 'love' is entirely toxic and selfishness, a possessiveness of someone body and soul such that they are devoted entirely to her. They must be entirely subservient to her, worship the ground she walks on, and yet also have the intuition of what they can and cannot do with/for/around her (with the drive to do what needs to be done if she does not expressly order or request it). It's a tough job, but let's not call it entirely thankless.

She does take care of her beloved toys/tools/pets.

18. Describe your character through a Brooklyn 99 gif or line.

omfg love this question.

Minovae:

Morolai:

[so-many-ocs]

WIP Themes Tag

tagged by @all-eyes-no-dragon !!! ty for the tag this looks like sm fun :)

rules: bold the themes that appear in your WIP & italicise those that are loosely covered, then tag 10 people.

IT IS MIDLAND THRONE TIME BABEYYYYYYYY

addiction | beauty | betrayal | change vs. tradition | chaos vs. order | circle of life | coming of age | communication | convention vs. rebellion | corruption | courage | crime and law | dangers of ignorance | darkness and light | death | desire to escape | dreams | displacement | empowerment | facing darkness | facing reality | faith vs. doubt | fall from grace | fame and fortune | family | fate | fear | fear of failure | free will | friendship | fulfillment | good vs. bad | government | greed | guilt and forgiveness | hard work | heroism | hierarchy | honesty | hope | identity crisis | immortality | independence | individual vs. society | inner vs. outer strength | innocence | injustice | isolation | knowledge vs. ignorance | life | loneliness | lost love | love | man vs. nature | manipulation | materialism | motherhood | nature | nature vs. nurture | oppression | optimism | peer pressure | poverty | power | power of words | prejudice | pride | progress | quest | racism | rebirth | relationships | religion | responsibility | revenge | sacrifice | secrets | self-awareness | self-preservation | self-reliance | sexuality | social class structure | survival | technology | temptation and destruction | time | totalitarianism | weakness | vanity | war | wealth | wisdom of experience | youth

this is a sideblog so i can't really think of anyone to tag,,, if this looks fun to you consider yourself tagged !! go forth and tell people about your book xoxo

[nightcoremoon]

racism is such a stupid and confusing word. breaking it down into its base components, it’s something that concerns race- as in a combination of skin color, national origin, and ethnicity- and the suffix ism, which is defined as the act/practice/process of doing something.

this leads the hyperliteral and the superficially educated (high int low wis) to then assume, oh so racism is the act of, what, acknowledging race? “well I don’t see color” so then they turn a blind eye to any and all discussion of it, actively shooting it down when it does come up (don’t talk about racism or acknowledge that black people are black or else you’re mean and bad and evil) thus remaining complicit in their ignorance, and contributing to racism.

then you have the people who will be like, no that’s stupid, I’m gonna listen to the WORDS that black and brown people say and discern the meaning behind them. which is better, in that they’re the type to understand that there is prejudice in the world based on skin color, and thus avoid performing it. because racial prejudice- which is what being mean to black people because they’re black is called- is pretty easy to not do. it takes minimal effort to unlearn using slurs, or respect the bodily autonomy of afro-textured hair, etc.

but then we [white people] get complicit in being such a good person for not hating black people, we pat ourselves on the back for Not Being Assholes, but then turn around and appropriate black culture, get gross locs, adopt AAVE but not implement it correctly, gentrify neighborhoods, and then get all offended and shit when black people point out that we still perform systemic racism and benefit from white privilege. THAT is what people mean when they say that all white people are racist. you may not directly perform acts of antiblack oppression and behave in ways that reflect racial prejudice, but that doesn’t mean that you’re not racist. you may not be A racist, as in the noun, but you are still Racist, as in the adjective.

and unless you are actively vocally working to help dismantle or at least inhibit the systems of oppression inherent in our society, you are absolutely a big part of the problem. enough silence and complicity is enough to bolster the power of white supremacy and secure its foothold, even if you’re the nicest person in the world to Tyrone Your Weed Man and you listen to Kendrick and you say Finna and you voted Obama and watched Get Out and so on and so forth. “I don’t use the N word, even without the Hard R” that don’t mean shit if you stand idly by when you gladly accept benefits and special treatment that you undeservedly receive over your black and brown peers who deserve it just as much as you if not more so.

in fact, come to think of it, the fact that the word racism means so many different things to so many different people is the most insidiously integral part of systemic racism itself! we as a society can’t ever work together to eradicate racism when we can’t even fucking agree on what it even means in the first place. the English language itself is a contributor to systemic racism, particularly the antiblack systemic racism. so it’s no wonder they’ve been creating their own dialect. it’s not possible to push the creation of a new word in order to describe what systemic racism is without just saying that. which really sucks. this is a nebulous concept that will be damn near impossible to grasp unless you have someone individually walk you through it a step at a time. it sucks bro

[thevisibilityarchives]

Homegoing (2016), Yaa Gyasi

BIPOC

Summary: In the heart of Africa’s Gold Coast, two half-sisters, Effia and Esi, fall victim to the West African Slave Trade in drastically different ways. Their experiences plant the seeds for what their ancestors will undergo in the centuries to come in Yaa Gyasi’s debut novel exploring the familial roots essential to blackness in America. 

Full review: What does it mean to be an African-American? Because it has ranged for decades, it can be easy for younger generations to be unaware of the roots of the debate about identifying as “black vs. African-American”. The distinction may seem nonsensical or petty, a pure syntactical preference rooted in self-consciousness about black identity. 

However, the conversation was born out of a recognition that blackness is not a monolith. One could be black, but not African-American. African-American is a term specifically meant to refer to those born on U.S. soil to the descendants of those enslaved generations past. Our identity and culture are unique in that the era of slavery so wholly shaped who were were, and who we are today. 

Another differentiation for descendants of those who were enslaved (and a particularly sobering one), is that most, if not all of us, have European ancestry. Various fantasies, arguments, and justifications exist to explain what this may have meant for our ancestors. Under the yolk of racism, however, the answer is fairly clear: our homelands were taken and despoiled, then our bodies were taken to a new land and equally despoiled. 

In a way, this is where Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing begins, with Effia and Esi–two Asante women dwelling on the Gold Coast in the early 1800s. This British colony would eventually become known as Ghana.

Despised by her mother, Effia is married off to a white merchant currently residing at the Cape Coast Castle, a menacing structure that became the final portal for slaves shipping out across the Atlantic. As his common-law wife, she is treated as gently as a woman can be in a patriarchal society, and their relationship fulfills the previously-mentioned arguments set forth about interracial relationships during the age of the Slave Trade. Effia did not choose her husband James. She did not elect him out of love or desire. She was lucky enough though to have been met with a man who treated her with kindness and gentility, and given that he was legally married to a white woman in Britain, he remained committed to her as a common-law wife and cared for their son, Quey. 

Esi is not so lucky and represents the majority of experiences our ancestors encountered. 

Captured as a slave, Esi is taken beneath the bowels of the very Cape Coast Castle in which Effia resides on the upper floors, ignorant that below her feet pass the bodies of Asanti peoples like chattel. In the dank dark, it is there she is taken by an unknown white sailor, not by the kind tenderness shown by James, but by cruelty and callousness in a pool of human excrement. There will be no one but her to care for the child, who will be born into slavery.

Gyasi does not attempt to shy away from the fact that the Asanti people are in fact, complicit in the slave trade. Often, Conservatives attempt to argue in favor of racism by perpetuating the narrative that because West Africans took part in slavery, this serves as some sort of justification for its existence. 

Often, these arguments tend to ignore the fact that the intertribal slavery present within West African cultures prior to the West African slave trade, or even that practiced by the Vikings, Romans, Egyptians, or Aztecs does not really equate to the prolific scale of that which took part during the WAST. No other slave trade resulted directly in the formation of a set of prejudices and beliefs created solely just to sustain it. 

Race, as we know it, is a byproduct of this justification, defined by the National Human Genome Research Institute as: 

“a social construct used to group people. Race was constructed as a hierarchal human-grouping system, generating racial classifications to identify, distinguish and marginalize some groups across nations, regions and the world. Race divides human populations into groups often based on physical appearance, social factors and cultural backgrounds.”

No other slave trade resulted in the violent erasure of cultures, the systematic destruction of belief systems, and the violent attempt to so intensely segregate populations, the reverberations of which continue to exist today in the form of police brutality, gerrymandering, and the Supreme Court’s newest measures the end Affirmative Action, effectively restricting access to black and brown individuals from now reaching the upper echelons of academia.

Poverty, drug abuse, death, hope, famine, fear, lust, love, greed, violence, disease: these are the experiences of Esi’s ancestors in America, the experiences of my ancestors, of our ancestors. Where they diverge from Effia’s, they eventually converge once more for colonialism leaves nothing untouched in its corruption. It simply transforms things differently. Where it chokes the petals of a flower in one way on one side, its strangle may look slightly different on another. 

In America, we were beholden to slavery. We tilled fields, and in exchange were “gifted” Christianity as our languages and spirituality were violently beaten out of us. We were forced to conform or die, and left with just enough of our culture to influence the world around us so that our Creole flavors, soulful music, curvaceous bodies, and shrugged off and discredited ideas can flow in and out of fashion, never given full credit where it’s due. 

It is our story, the story of African-Americans: those descended from slaves, and by extension, those who have immigrated here. 

Black History Month celebrates the accomplishments of Black Americans, however many African-Americans remain ignorant of the long history of what has been lost to us: the culture stolen, the history hidden, the pain beneath, and the homes left behind.

You can find Homegoing at your local library, big box bookstores, local bookstores, or here via IndieBound.

Citations:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/not-all-black-people-are-african-american-what-is-the-difference/

https://www.science.org/content/article/genetic-study-reveals-surprising-ancestry-many-americans

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cape_Coast_Castle

https://nmaahc.si.edu/learn/talking-about-race/topics/historical-foundations-race

https://www.genome.gov/genetics-glossary/Race

https://www.forbes.com/sites/evangerstmann/2022/01/24/the-supreme-court-gets-ready-to-end-affirmative-action/?sh=7ab8a9695e38

https://youtu.be/v9hlvEl3Gf0

https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781101971062?aff=penguinrandom

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/12/15/enslaved-african-smallpox-vaccine-coronavirus/

[shackledeath]

Trigger warning: mentions of suicide, existential crisis and extreme topics.

now I’m about to get real deep and dark but getou. I relate to him deeply. I at one point in my life was going downhill into the ideology of nihilism I was extremely suicidal going through existential crisis and believed that my life was worthless it meant nothing and that I could no longer live happily in this world. but not only that, I believed the world around me was too broken too full of hatred, racism, prejudice, unfairness, inequality, injustice and so forth. due to my experiences in life along with having mental issues and not getting help from any of the sources that were supposed to “help” me like the cops, doctors, therapists, teachers, etc. my systems had failed me, I felt there was no one that could help me (I still believe that no one can help me but I’m much much better now) or even cared about me. I went to the cops for situations like someone breaking our window and blackmail got no help. I’ve went to the doctors seizing explaining to them that idk what’s happening to me that I have epilepsy but this seizure was coming from a fall, they doubted me accused me of lying. I’ve asked my teachers for help on things I didn’t understand, they ridiculed me and made a shit show out of me. I’ve done everything and ran to aaalll those resources, they didn’t help nor care. so naturally I felt like I couldn’t live anymore there was no way I could be happy here and after the blm the protests the amount of people dying learning about medical racism my mother possibly dying due to medical racism and so forth I began to feel uncomfortable unsafe afraid of everything and all my resources and the supposed helpful systems that were around me and white people. I began to become afraid of my world. so in getous words “I can’t be happy in this world” is how I felt. how could I live in such an unjust society, how could I be happy in it. nobody cares there’s no humanity here that’s not what I saw on this earth, not in this world, not in my life. it was rooted into my mind at the time that I just couldn’t live in a world that doesn’t care for me people like me people who aren’t like me, I couldn’t handle all the injustices I was having an existential crisis. what really tore me into pieces was how no one cared about my mental health how easy it was for people to dismiss how suicide is a joke how easy it is for me to commit the fact that people think I’m crazy because I am struggling and not getting any help the fact that doctors can misdiagnose me feed me drugs and make me think that it’ll be all better once I take them HELL making me take shit that’s not even for any of my mental issues the fact that psychiatrist hospitals are more traumatizing and damaging for my mental health when they are meant to HELP you. the fact that I am scared till this day to fully commit suicide again because i am afraid for it to fail and wake up in a hospital and they tell me I have to be in a psychiatric ward for x amount of months, weeks and that I’ll be forced to stay there. so yeah I really really resonated with getou when he said he couldn’t be happy in this world, because at the time I couldn’t either.

[qqueenofhades]

Do you think the technology/internet/broad access revolution we are in will change things for POC, queer people, racism, etc?

I think it's obvious that it already has? If you're asking whether technology/social media will change things re: marginalised people for the better, the jury is still out, and we're at a critical tipping point (both in America, but also worldwide) as to whether empirical reality, critical nuance, and acceptance of facts that don't fit your preferred worldview are going to have any continuing relevance to our political and social systems whatsoever. The internet has done a lot of good things, but the instant social media became a place where a) competing ideological narratives and outright fake news were all treated as equally valid, as long as it drove traffic and made money, and b) the owners of these platforms absolved their duty to control them with a shrug of "free speech," we were destined to go down this path, where we all inhabit custom-made information universes where we only ever interact with like-minded people, any critique becomes a sign of insufficient loyalty to The Cause, and collective civic responsibility no longer exists, but is instead replaced by downright sociopathic ultra-libertarian selfishness packaged as "individual freedom." (Just witness how some people have behaved during Covid, refusing even the slightest restrictions, even if making sacrifices would help save other, less fortunate people.) Not to sound like a grumpy old woman, but I think the impact on the real world was truly devastating and, in the short term at least, genuinely irreparable.

The internet has done us the service of connecting and empowering marginalised people who would never have met each other otherwise, providing the entirety of human knowledge at the touch of a button, raising visibility, and so forth. However, we are at an absolute crisis point of whether we're going to let people behave, act, legislate (and try to legislate for others) according to their preferred Facebook feed-version of reality, because see again: the monetization of information, no matter what kind of information, was always going to lead to this. We are just now realizing the devastating consequences of large segments of society walking around in their own personal universes and simply rejecting tenets of empirical reality that do not conform to their own ideology. The problem is, when a lot of people (on both the extreme right and the extreme left) live in lulu-land because of what they consume online, it inevitably affects everyone else. Social media makes it incredibly and poisonously easy to enter an entire information ecosystem that reinforces itself, therefore self-justifying itself in an entire universe of total bullshit, and once people get into that echo chamber, it is very hard (albeit not impossible) to get out.

So, you say. This all sounds awfully pessimistic. What would I do about it? Well, this is the part where I have to say that while I have ideas, and they're things I try to do for myself, it's not anything I can pull off alone. I have talked at length about how the humanities (and their attendant critical thinking skills) have been repeatedly, deliberately, and extensively devalued in late capitalism, precisely because they a) don't generate Production For The Machine and b) encourage people to ask awkward questions about power and control. As long as people aren't explicitly taught how to push back on this stuff, or aren't able to reject something -- even if it fits with their Ideology -- because it isn't true, we're going to be stuck in this mess. I'm not optimistic that legislative efforts against Big Tech will have any effect. I'm glad that at least we saw, however completely terrible it was/is, the stark result of alternate-universe grievance politics on January 6, and in the conservative media loudmouths dogpiling on the Covid vaccine as an attempted way to hurt those liberal sissies who believe in science. It's no coincidence that the states with the lowest vaccination rates are deep-red Trump-supporting southern states. It's only now, as the pandemic resurges in those exact places, that (once more out of expediency) the conservative "news" is finally, tepidly endorsing the idea that huh, maybe you should get vaccinated.

Anyway. The relentless monetization of social media at the expense of any kind of moderation for hate speech, the encouragement that you can post anything you want and never face any consequences Because Free Speech, and the way that we have all seen the vast and horrifically ugly prejudices that the social media universe has both exposed and cultivated anew... it's all pretty much a giant shitburger, if you ask me. I don't know how to quickly fix it. It's way too easy to exist in a bubble, to horrifically bully strangers you will never meet, and to have real and terribly detrimental consequences on our offline lives as a result. The internet obviously isn't going away, but if we don't seriously grapple with the kind of anti-citizens it's made us, I'm not sure what's going to happen, or if it's anything we should want.

I would like to think that we will slowly learn to use this awesome power more responsibly, and reverse some of the incredible damage that has been done, but if that does happen, it'll come when we've already hit rock bottom. Again, it has done good things: the worldwide protests after George Floyd's death, for example, would have been completely impossible without modern technology, in any number of ways. But if it's going to be a concrete social good for all of us, let alone the most vulnerable among us, we have so very far to go, and the global systems in place have absolutely no interest in enabling a reversal of the current trends. So. We will see, but I'm not too hopeful.

[cosmicjoke]

Okay, I gotta talk a little about chapter 65 of AoT, and really some of the themes being put forth in general in this chapter.  This is probably gonna be totally incoherent, because these are some big brain concepts that largely go over my head, I’ll be real, haha.  But I’ll do my best.

I want to focus on Kenny’s conversation with his Grandfather, because it’s here that we get into some of the more broad ranging and world relevant themes of SnK, particularly dealing with issues of racism, xenophobia, isolationism, and concepts of homogeneity.  

Kenny’s Grandfather talks about how the Monarchy doesn’t hate the Ackerman’s, but rather fears them, because they can’t be controlled.  Because the Ackerman’s, along with very few other bloodlines that somehow ended up behind the walls, are all of different races than the majority bloodline, meaning, of course, the Eldians.  And because of this, the power of the Titans doesn’t work on them.  The Monarchy then comes to think of these other bloodlines as threats to the peace it’s attempted to cultivate among the people behind the wall, because their memories aren’t able to be wiped.  So they end up using threats of violence, death, intimidation, and the like, in order to get these bloodlines to comply with their demands and keep quiet about what they know about the truth of the world and human history.  Most bloodlines end up complying under duress, but the only two that don’t are the Ackerman’s and the Asians.  They rebel and refuse, the Ackerman’s in particular giving up their position as the sword and shield of the Royal Government.  Until the head of the Ackerman clan decides to not pass down any of his generations knowledge to their children, and offers himself up for execution in an attempt to protect the Ackerman’s from being purged.  His efforts end up being in vain, though, as the Royal Government still finds itself unable to tolerate a group of people it can’t control, and thus the persecution of the Ackerman’s continues, until they’re driven to the fringes of society, forced to into desperation and poverty.  

What’s really interesting about this is how it reflects so many real life situations throughout human history, and where concepts of tribalism and nationalism and isolationism come from.  It’s usually because some governing power wants to control its population, its citizenship, and they do this by cutting them off from outside influences, indoctrinating them into a certain belief system and way of thinking.  We see this, for example, in countries today like China and North Korea.  This all is represented in AoT through the erasure of human history outside the walls, and the altering of historical texts to push the narrative that all record of human history older than 100 years has been lost.  The ruling government, in this case, has forced generation after generation to be taught that humanity simply doesn’t EXIST outside the walls, thus stomping out any hope or ambition to get outside those walls, and interact with the outside world.  If there’s nothing there to find, then why bother?  Of course, it’s an imperfect system, given it’s essentially impossible to quell human curiosity and, as another prominent theme in SnK, the desire for freedom, to be able to choose for oneself and have agency over your own destiny, etc...  Not only does the Royal Government employ these false teachings as a way of controlling the populace, but of course, also, the threat of the Titans beyond the wall.  If the “reality” that there’s nothing left of humanity out there isn’t enough to stop the more curious and skeptical among the population, then the threat of a horrific and painful death should do the trick.

If you study any sort of regime throughout human history that utilizes terror as a means of control, one thing they often do is get rid of the smart people first.  They cull intellectuals, artists, philosophers, etc...  They kill them or censor them so that they can’t influence or impact the general populace with rebellious notions, or instigate in people any ideas that their government might not be treating them right.  They want there to be no contention, no differential in thought, no real ideas or any sort of chance for clashes among groups.  They want everyone to look, act, think and feel the same, because when that’s the case, fewer quarrels arise, fewer tensions, fewer instances of rebellion, fewer cases of people clashing with one another, for various reasons, which can lead to critical thinking and ideas forming, to thought patterns and beliefs being challenged.  They want everyone to just sit quietly and not THINK.  They also, often, will target minority groups, and cast them into a kind of scapegoat role, a target for the general populace to aim their grievances at, to blame all their problems on, directing their unhappiness away from the true source of their woes, that being the government itself.  This is something we often see throughout human history.  One of the most prominent and tragic examples is the Jews in Nazi Germany.  Jews were, at first, skewered and debased through propaganda, painting them as the enemy of Germans, the great source of all of Germany’s plights and woes, essentially working the populace up into a frenzy of extreme feelings of bias and prejudice against them, before that escalated into gathering up and forcing them into cut off ghettos, away from the general population, before it took a much darker turn still, wherein they were gathered up and sent to death camps to be exterminated.  

Within the world of AoT, the same thing happens to groups like the Ackerman’s and Asians, and whatever other, unnamed minority groups exist behind the walls.  They’re persecuted, badmouthed, hunted and threatened into compliance, their ability to do business and make money, thus make a living, cut off and blocked.  Pushed into a corner until they eventually start to die out.  

It’s really fascinating, and brilliantly depicted by Isyama, how the Monarchy’s self-delusion leads them to believe they’re preserving peace and prosperity for the homogeneous population by hunting down and terrorizing groups of minority bloodlines and ethnicity’s and races, creating for these subsets of people a world and a life of endless suffering, and blinding themselves to their own, tyrannical exercise of power over a large population.  Of course this sort of thing also leads to greed and a lust for power, a need for ever more control, ever more expansion of that power, which in turn leads to the very thing the Monarchy here claims to want to prevent, which is war.  Even if the Royal Government, and the Monarchy, and the King, started out with somewhat noble intentions, it eventually morphs into a twisted and persistently corrupting power play.

There’s also the theme here of scapegoating an entire group of people, and holding them accountable for sins they themselves did not commit.  We see in Historia’s memories of Frieda, and how she would at times begin acting like another person, how she became vitriolic and almost violent in telling Historia that she can “never cross the fence”, proclaiming that they’re all “sinners” and thus need to be punished by being imprisoned.  This is where the original King’s philosophy begins to become deeply problematic and dangerous.  In order to control the population, he’s forced each inheritor of the world’s memories to also inherit his philosophy, forcing each heir to labor under the belief that the Eldian’s are somehow responsible for the atrocities committed by their ancestors, and thus should continue to pay for them, even though not a single person at this point living behind the walls was even yet born when those atrocities were committed.  The danger here is in the possibility of those people being held accountable for things they didn’t do, realizing the injustice of that, and in turn, growing angry and resentful for being made to suffer for crimes they didn’t commit.  This in turn leads to a desire to hit back, to fight, to defend themselves, etc...  This same scenario plays out on a smaller scale with the Ackerman’s, with the future generations of Ackerman children continuing to be hunted and persecuted, despite none of them having any knowledge whatsoever of the history of humanity or the world.  It’s all a vicious cycle.  

Further, this kind of attempt to play God, by dictating to an entire group of otherwise uninvolved people what they do and don’t deserve, and in turn deciding for them that they should be punished for things they did not do, is morally bankrupt.  Deciding, in general, for an entire population, how they should be allowed to live is also morally bankrupt.  And this exposes the Royal Government and Monarchy as corrupt, among about a million other things in story.  Essentially, it’s a condemnation against the concept of any, one person having absolute power.  That never ends well, for anyone.  

Well, anyway, I’m just rambling at this point, lol.  It’s just really fascinating and amazing how Isyama weaves all of these deep themes into his story, I think, and forces the reader to really think about these kinds of things.

Also, I missed the fight between Levi and Kenny!  I’m glad they added that to the anime, haha.  

I also noticed how Historia might have had an unintentional impact on what Eren later decides he has to do.  She keeps going on and on here about being an “enemy of humanity” and wanting to “destroy everything”.  And while Historia clearly doesn’t actually mean what she’s saying, and is only acting out in her frustration and anger at her douchebag of a father trying to manipulate her into sacrificing herself for his delusions of grandeur, what she also says to Eren about her “being humanity’s enemy, but Eren being her FRIEND.” is clear foreshadowing of what Eren later decides is his best and only course, to do whatever it takes to protect his friends, including killing the rest of humanity.  This probably also ties into Eren’s choice to not reveal what he learns from his father’s memories, in an attempt to protect Historia.  But I haven’t gotten to that point yet, so I’ll come back around to it later maybe.

[metapianycist]

Hello, I read your message but unfortunately I cannot reply you because you have restricted the replies to mutuals only, so i'll reply your question: it was indeed 8 years ago (sadly i have forbiden to send links in the question section) but TL;DR: you said that you don’t use the word oppression because it implies a "privilege" dynamic in order to explain the anti-ace bias. As you considered "privilege" was not a viable concept in this regard.

(this is the post that the asker is referencing)

initially when i was writing a response, i wrote a whole long thing about what informs my current position as well as previous positions. then I actually read the post you're referencing, and i don't agree with what i wrote in 2012 (and neither does the friend who askboxed me in that post).

so instead I'm going to describe what 2012 was like, in order to give you context for that post.

in 2011-12, i didn't know about how oppressions that lack a privilege/oppression dynamic worked, and if you wrote the word "oppression" to describe something on this site, a lot of people would assume that you also believed that the oppression proliferated via a privilege dynamic. oppression is defined in every sociology class I've ever taken as prejudice plus power—which people often said as "prejudice plus privilege" (today i realize that privilege is only one possible form of "power" that can exist). so that's why i assumed that the word oppression implied a privilege model.

the privilege model was developed in critical race theory specifically as a way to explain why racism is invisible to white people and how it continues to proliferate. white people continue to reinforce racist structures of society because they are incapable of independently noticing the unearned benefit (privilege) granted to them by a society built on white supremacy. i knew this at the time i wrote the post you're talking about.

the privilege model entered feminist discourse via an essay by a white woman (whose name i honestly forget) called "Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack," where she listed examples of her own white privilege and then decided to apply a privilege model to describe how sexism is invisible to men, who benefit from it. that's how the term male privilege came into being. i read this essay in 2009 in an intro women's studies class. (I have not read Black feminist and womanist commentary on the term but I want to, because many things I've seen white women categorize as male privilege are things that don't apply to Black men.)

so that was my own intellectual background to the post from 2012. now I'm going to describe the context of asexual discourse i was participating in at the time.

prior to 2010, sometimes the question of "are we oppressed for being asexual" would arise. different aces put forth all different answers about this, but it was mainly an intellectual exercise that didn't affect our ability to talk about asexual issues. even if it got heated, this was a question discussed among asexual communities. there was no consensus. there wasn't pressure for consensus. that pressure took center stage after 2010.

efforts to prove that Asexuals Are Oppressed began because of people who refused to take asexual issues seriously unless we could prove we were Oppressed. when we described our issues in ways that could be understood as oppression, they moved the goalposts and told us that it wasn't enough and that we had to prove that our issues could not be due to any other structural oppression that they already accept.

if someone did make an argument for the existence of a specific anti-asexual oppression, it was never seriously evaluated by these goalpost-shifters. and it was taken by those people as evidence of LBGTQ asexuals being homophobic. (most of the asexual people involved in 2011-12 ace discourse were not heteroromantic, in my memory. many of us were trying to talk about issues we experienced within LGBTQ spaces as LGBTQ asexuals.)

i want to repeat: the whole reason 'Are Asexuals Oppressed' is still a question at all is because of bad-faith actors knowingly demanding an impossible standard because they were never interested in taking asexual issues seriously.

so today, I take the position that asexuals shouldn't have to prove there's a specific anti-asexual oppression built into society in order to have asexual issues taken seriously. because the people who demand that standard are bad-faith actors who are only trying to stop asexual people from talking about our experiences.

asexual people should be able to say "this happened because I'm asexual" without being told "no, it was because of misogyny." even if it was 100% provable that the event was explainable by misogyny alone, denial of sexual agency is still affects asexual people in a specific way (sometimes multiple ways at once, as with BIPOC asexual people) that we need to be able to talk about.

what i meant in 2012 was "if oppression means a privilege dynamic, and a privilege model doesn't work to explain bad stuff happening to asexual people, I'm not going to use the word oppression anymore to describe asexual issues"

on the subject of why I think a privilege/oppression model doesn't work wrt asexuality today, this is what I mean:

non-asexual trans women experience no unearned benefit compared to asexual trans women, because transmisogyny involves stripping all of them of sexual agency

non-asexual autistic people experience no unearned benefit compared to asexual autistic people, because ableism involves stripping all disabled people of sexual agency.

non-asexual LGBQ people experience no unearned benefit in society compared to asexual LGBQ people. heterosexism categorizes all of us as inadequately heterosexual.

hypersexualization and desexualization are aspects of racism that strip BIPOC of sexual agency (they are tools of other oppressions as well)

because so many oppressions, especially racism and misogyny, involve stripping people of sexual agency, it does not make sense to claim that there exists a system granting unearned benefit to non-asexual people ("allosexual privilege"). it is also racist to apply a framework developed for understanding racial dynamics in a way that denies the impact of racial dynamics.

privilege of a majority group isn't the only framework that can ever exist to explain an oppression. all oppressions work together, but all work differently.

"Are Asexuals Oppressed" is a question that has been deliberately wielded by bad-faith actors to distract us from discussion of concrete asexual issues (like: white asexual people describing asexual issues in ways that marginalize Black asexual issues). "Are Asexuals Oppressed" is a question that reopens a lot of old wounds i got during 2011-12 as a prominent ace discourser. and that's why i refuse to try answering that question anymore.

because there shouldn't need to be a concept of a specific institutionalized anti-asexual oppression in order to have people take asexual issues seriously.

[ruminativerabbi]

Vulnerability

Vulnerability has a bad rep in our world. In fact, what we all long for is precisely the opposite: to feel invulnerable, impervious to incoming danger, safe and secure not only when we hide under our beds in the dark of night but when we are out and about in the world. But we—speaking of society as a whole but also of us ourselves as individuals—we may have moved a bit quickly in that regard and not sufficiently thoughtfully. Being paralyzed with fear about dangers that are highly unlikely to come our way—that kind of vulnerability is definitely something negative that all who can should avoid. But owning up to the vulnerability that inheres in the human condition itself is in a different category entirely. As this last pandemic year has taught us all too well, it is only a sign of maturity and self-awareness to own up to the degree to which we can fall prey to a virus so tiny that you’d need an electron microscope to see it at all and to behave accordingly. And waving away that danger as fake news because you don’t choose to acknowledge your own vulnerability is not a sign of courage or valor, but of lunacy born of a witch’s brew of foolishness, naiveté, and arrogance.

As I prepared myself for surgery last week, I was feeling exceedingly vulnerable. I lay in bed at night talking to my heart, asking why it wasn’t just doing its thing properly on its own, why it was intent on betraying me after all these years of me not burdening it by smoking cigarettes or consuming huge quantities of trans fat. Didn’t I deserve better? I certainly thought I did! But now that the whole procedure is behind me and I’m feeling healthy and fortunate to live in an age of miracles (and if having a non-functioning valve in your heart replaced without them having to open your chest and then being sent home the next day to recuperate doesn’t qualify as a miracle, then what would?)—now that all that is behind me, I see that intense vulnerability that I was feeling in the days leading up to last Thursday in a much less negative light. Yes, there are people who live in terror of an asteroid colliding with the Earth. (For NASA’s own statement about the likelihood of that happening, click here. We’re apparently good for at least the next couple of centuries.) But that’s not the kind of slightly obsessive vulnerability I want to promote as healthy and sane, but rather the kind that speaks not to fantasy but to reality. To the fact that our hearts are not made of steel and that our bones really do crack quite easily. To the fact that, despite all we do to suggest that the opposite is true, we are mortal beings lucky to be gifted with a few score years to wander the earth, to do whatever good we can, to leave behind some sort of legacy for our descendants to contemplate positively once we ourselves are no longer around to be contemplated in person. Feeling vulnerable because the human condition is vulnerability itself—that isn’t craziness or obsessivity, just an honest appraisal of how things are in this world we all share for as long as we do.

These were the thoughts I had in mind as I read the report in the paper the other day about people coming to shul last Shabbat on 16th Avenue in Boro Park last week only to be greeted by men gathered in front of the synagogue screaming “Kill the Jews” and “Free Palestine.” Which kind of vulnerable did those people feel, I wonder—the silly kind (because there weren’t that many hooligans in front of the synagogue, because the cops showed up almost instantly, because the bad guys didn’t actually have guns with them or bombs, and because they fled the scene once they realized how completely outnumbered they were about to become) or the wise kind rooted in a fully rational appraisal of how things are in this world we share with so many who seem to feel entirely justified in their bigotry and prejudice and who appear mostly to have no problem putting both on full display for all to admire? (For an account of the Boro Park incident, click here.) I’m hardly an alarmist who sees a pogrom around every corner. But, of course, it’s hardly an example of alarmism to be alarmed when truly alarming things happen. Maybe I’ve read too many books about Germany in the 1930s. Or maybe not.

We have entered into a new stage, a dangerous and upsetting one. At first, the stories appeared random. A twenty-nine-year-old man wearing a kippah was beat up in Times Square as he tried to make his way to a pro-Israel rally. Then, a day or two later, a group of thugs wearing keffiyehs invaded a restaurant on 40th Street and started spitting on patrons they suspected of being Jewish. Next we heard about people being attacked in the Diamond District on 47th Street, where it isn’t ever hard to come across some Jewish businesspeople or shoppers.  Two days later we were back in Times Square, this time watching footage of a Jewish man being knocked to the ground and beaten in front of the TKTS buttke where they used to sell last-minute tickets to unsold-out Broadway shows when the theaters were open.  Nor is this just a New York thing: the police in L.A. are currently investigating an attack on outside diners at a Japanese restaurant as an anti-Semitic hate crime that occurred the same day that a family of four was terrorized in Bal Harbour, Florida, by a group of men threatening to rape the wife and daughter and yelling “Die Jews” and “Free Palestine” at them. I could go on. There have been similar incidents in New Jersey, Illinois, Utah, Arizona, and several other states. And although I’m focused here mostly on American incidents, the rise in this kind of hate crime is not specifically an American phenomenon: we’ve read of similar, even worse, incidents just lately in London, in Germany, and in Italy.

The question is how to respond, not whether we should. The fantasy that complaining only makes things worse needs to be laid to rest permanently and irrevocably. (The Jewish community could learn a good lesson in that regard from Black America, where it was once also imagined that responding publicly to racism would only make things worse. It’s hard to imagine any Black citizens putting that argument forth today, yet I hear it from Jewish Americans regularly.) Nor can we allow ourselves the luxury of imagining that this dramatic uptick in anti-Jewish violence is “about” Israel. Israel’s recent war with Hamas was, in my opinion, entirely justified. I can see how people might feel otherwise, and even strongly so. But I know too much history—and specifically too much Jewish history—to indulge in the fantasy that anti-Semitism is “about” anything other than the hatred of Jewish people, Judaism, and Jewishness itself. No matter how many shows an actor appears in, he’s the same person under all of the costumes he gets paid to wear on stage.

I myself have lived a blessed life. Born just eight and a half years after the Nazis were murdering up to twelve thousand people a day at Auschwitz, I have hardly ever encountered real anti-Semitism directed directly at me personally. (And I speak as someone who spent several years living in Germany in the 1980s.) Nonetheless, sensitivity to anti-Jewish rhetoric and violence is the hallmark of my Jewishness, the foundation upon which my eager willingness to live my life as a public, fully-identified, and unambiguously-identifiable Jewish person rests. And that is why I am disinclined to wave away the latest series of anti-Semitic incidents in New York and elsewhere as a random set of creepy one-time events—nor would anyone describe that way who has ever read a book about the history of anti-Judaism or anti-Semitism. For people eager to dine at my table, I recommend Walter Laqueurs’s The Changing Face of Anti-Semitism: From Ancient Times to the Present Day  as your appetizer, Léon Poliakov’s four-volume History of Anti-Semitism as your main course with a side serving of David Nirenberg’s Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition. For dessert, I  recommend Deborah Lipstadt’s Antisemitism: Here and Now. I can promise you that you won’t be hungry when you’re done.

There have been encouraging signs too, of course. President Biden has spoken out sharply and strongly against the uptick in anti-Semitic incidents, calling them despicable and condemning them unequivocally as “hateful behavior.” We have heard similarly supportive rhetoric from Governor Cuomo, Mayor Di Blasio, Senators Schumer and Gillibrand. So that’s good. But will any of the actual sonim out to harm Jews hold back because of a presidential tweet or a senatorial press release?  On the other hand, there were seventeen thousand tweets disseminated by Twitter last week that contained some version of the words “Hitler was right.” Just wait until they find out that the President considers them despicable!

I don’t mean to sound unhappy that supportive, unambiguous language denouncing anti-Semitism has emanated from the highest offices in the land. Just to the contrary, I am thrilled that our leadership has spoken out so boldly and clearly. But I also don’t imagine it will matter until it is deemed just as unacceptable to speak disparagingly about Jews in public as it is—at least in all places that decent people gather and live—to espouse hate-fueled violence against Black people or Asian-Americans, or any other American minority. And that will take—at least in some quarters—a sea change of attitude that can only be accomplished through the kind of ongoing educative process capable of moving society forward. How to do that, I’m not sure. But I am sure that that is the challenge the new normal has laid at our feet. And I am as sure about that as I am that these recent incidents, for all they come dressed up as part of the Israeli-Palestinian controversy, have nothing at all to do with Middle Eastern politics and everything to do with the unique place anti-Jewishness continues to occupy in Western culture as the one remaining version of bigotry to which otherwise normal and nice people can still openly subscribe without suffering much for their views. Or at all.

[thinkbothways]

Entry 02

2020 was without a doubt the most chaotic and dazing year of my adult life. To “unpack” my take I’ll have to organize this entry as well as possible, as it’s so easy to lose track of, or even establish a point.

Toilet-Paper-Gate

The toilet paper frenzy baffled me. This topic forces me to admit my most cynical understanding of humanity as a social entity. (For the sake of keeping this interesting I’ll be as honest as possible, but I must first say that this is not a reflection of my typical feeling towards us humans.)

It was early covid days and we were all learning about the impending threat of this virus. Slowly I saw more masks at the grocery store, the news reported it coming closer and closer to being a full global outbreak, and then I saw the toilet paper aisle at Kroger. What do I think happened? In a nutshell, people are greedy and will put themselves first when they feel threatened in any way. Hoarding TP was one way for people to create some sense of control in a situation where there really wasn’t any. I saw videos online of people literally fighting each other for the last TP roll at the store. The situation resembled a panic induced TP stock market crash. This was the first reaction to covid and it was bleak. 

Covid is a situation that requires people to consider the impact their actions have on others and what happened? Totally selfish behavior. A problem was created for no reason but to bring a small sense of comfort and victory to a few.

I have fought to embrace my role as a member of society and to make compassion my default feeling towards others. Toilet-paper-gate challenged that. The pandemic had barely started and true colors were already being shown.

BLM protests, the news, the protests & privilege

This is a tough one to reflect on; it is so complex because it takes a specific experience to fully understand. An experience I can only observe. What I can do here is be as honest as possible about my personal experience; one I have never actually articulated. Here it goes:

For most of my life, I have been “asleep” in regards to the underlying racial tension that plagues our country. I was raised in a mostly white town/county in Massachusetts. The area I grew up was mostly upper-middle class and laughably peaceful. I road bikes with neighborhood kids, walked to school, and used my small allowance to buy soda at the old town market. 

When I was probably around 7 or 8 years old my parents showed my sister and I the 1977 historical miniseries, “Roots.” 

“Based on Alex Haley's family history. Kunta Kinte is sold into the slave trade after being abducted from his African village, and is taken to the United States. Kinte and his family observe notable events in American history, such as the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, slave uprisings and emancipation.” -wikipedia summary

I remember feeling utterly shocked by this series. Roots was my introduction to that part of our countries history. The horrifying imagery from the film is still seared into my memory. But as far as I knew, what the film depicted was only history. It was scary and evil, but nothing more than a thing of the past. For a young innocent mind like my own, it was inconceivable for that kind of evil to exist in modern times. In my world of nickelodeon, nintendo, and Harry Potter; racism just didn’t exist.

Up until I moved to Boston for college in 2010, at the age of 18, I really thought that racism was old news. I had never met a “racist” and I had never heard anyone say or do something racist. It was my understanding that everyone saw racism as despicable and it was pretty much abolished. In fact I still grapple with cognitive dissonance from that comfortable belief and coming to terms with the reality of our society.

In college I made friends of all different backgrounds. I studied fine art and saw films, paintings, performances, and every kind of subversive form of expression imaginable. I learned about important topics like “institutionalized racism” and the prison industrial complex. As I matured I noticed the racist undertones in our media. But I had not connected with the topic on an empathetic level. It seemed totally separate from my small world. At an art school you really don’t meet people that are prejudice. At least I didn’t. So to me it was a real, serious issue but it didn’t hit close enough to home to have a deep impact on my life.

Since then I’ve lived a tumultuous  and exciting life that basically centered around me. I did my best to be kind and learn all I could about our world and my reality was ultimately defined by me.

The summer of 2020 was an awakening. Covid had flipped everything upside down. I was confined to my tiny downtown Columbus apartment for months. 

George Floyd was killed.

When the news broke I found the whole thing sad and disturbing. But I was still asleep. The protests began and the movement was spreading throughout the country. Suddenly the movement erupted literally outside of my window. I heard the sounds and watched as a crowd of people gathered on Broad St, rapidly growing in size and getting increasingly louder. Police in riot gear lined up in front of them, marching towards them in attempt to intimidate. Pretty soon I had half of my body hanging out of the window to get a close look. The crowd chanted and pushed back on the police. They went back and forth, seeming to challenge each other to make a move. The police made the first move. Streams of powerful mace sprayed the crowd in a brown mist. Suddenly I was coughing and choking. I had never experienced mace before, nor any real violence. I think that is the moment a part of me woke up.

I think that, like in the toilet paper frenzy, people are more self centered than they know or would ever admit. For a movement to really work, it has to also have a direct effect on uninvolved individuals. The BLM protests did that. I had inadvertently gotten involved just by poking my head out of my window. That moment induced in me a new empathy. I was exposed to the smallest amount of mace and was choking and my eyes were burning. I literally cannot imagine how it would feel to be maced in the face by a police officer, but I can now understand how truly fucked up it must have been.

I think that it is in our nature to empathize with things we see ourselves in. Things that validate us and our existence. I think that an individual’s reception of art is an example of this experience. We like art that we see ourselves in. Whether it is a painting that shows a certain form of pain, or a song that describes a form of love we’ve experienced. 

I think that, as the majority, white people don’t automatically see themselves in other white people. But I can surmise that minorities have that innate empathy towards each other.

From my apartment window I saw that. I imagine that, for black Americans, seeing George Floyd murdered symbolized their own murder.

I try to understand, but I can only do so within the limitations of my own experience and empathy.

I’ll never know what it’s like to be black in America. The closest I’ve gotten to that experience was breathing in a small amount of mace from across the street. Mace that wasn’t even intended for my lungs. That is my privilege. It’s something that is extremely difficult to wrap my head around. 

What do I do?

With the pandemic still dominating basically everything, it’s difficult to come up with ideas. I feel more detached from society than ever before. To be honest, I don’t really know what I can do. I think we’re all kind of stuck watching the world through our TV and window. Our political climate is more volatile than ever and it’s got our attention by the balls.

Imagining a post-covid world feels like fiction. For now my plan is to listen to learn. I have a feeling that this class will be enlightening.

[bornpariah-a]

leeeeeet’s talk about dorian and bull shall we? because of everyone in the inner circle, dorian is most aggressive with bull or, i guess, most defensive with him, for a variety of reasons. a lot of it is linked back to intrinsic racism and how tevinter society portrays the qunari ——— dorian absolutely and utterly distrusts bull because he’s under the qun, has conceivably taken part in the war, and because he’s ben hassrath. most likely dorian’s experience with qunari for all of his life was limited to seeing qunari in courts, being shown as play things as if they were show dogs, et cetera. bull is probably the first qunari that he’s met and spoken to on equal footing, and dorian just doesn’t trust the fact that he’s apparently accepting of a tevinter mage in his midst.

in my mind, qunari are something of horror stories, cautionary tales, so on and so forth in the imperium. dorian’s instinctively afraid of losing his magic / being subjugated / etc ( his parents using a magic suppressing collar on him during his imprisonment doesn’t help matters ) and the fact that under the qun mages mouths are sewn shut and they are forced to be weapons is utterly horrifying to him.

not that any of that excuses dorian from being a general ass to bull and flagrantly distrusting him when he, much like dorian, is lending his aid to the inquisition against all relative odds. the game does a poor job at getting past that in any meaningful way ——— it goes from dorian questioning bull and being skeptical that bull isn’t a mole ( beyond being a literal spy of course ) and won’t try to kill him at any given chance to... well, aggressive flirting, and we all know how i feel about that.

they have the potential to have a layered and fascinating friendship, and i like to think that they do get there at some point... eventually. dorian’s capable of putting aside prejudices and unlearning racism he’s been taught since he was born, it’s just that it didn’t happen in the game, and there could’ve been interesting dialogues between them.

no, we aren’t talking about the “romance” here.

[bdub86]

AFRICAN STUDIES CENTER - UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

"Letter from a Birmingham Jail [King, Jr.]"

16 April 1963

My Dear Fellow Clergymen:

While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities "unwise and untimely." Seldom do I pause to answer criticism of my work and ideas. If I sought to answer all the criticisms that cross my desk, my secretaries would have little time for anything other than such correspondence in the course of the day, and I would have no time for constructive work. But since I feel that you are men of genuine good will and that your criticisms are sincerely set forth, I want to try to answer your statement in what I hope will be patient and reasonable terms.

I think I should indicate why I am here in Birmingham, since you have been influenced by the view which argues against "outsiders coming in." I have the honor of serving as president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization operating in every southern state, with headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. We have some eighty five affiliated organizations across the South, and one of them is the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights. Frequently we share staff, educational and financial resources with our affiliates. Several months ago the affiliate here in Birmingham asked us to be on call to engage in a nonviolent direct action program if such were deemed necessary. We readily consented, and when the hour came we lived up to our promise. So I, along with several members of my staff, am here because I was invited here. I am here because I have organizational ties here.

But more basically, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the prophets of the eighth century B.C. left their villages and carried their "thus saith the Lord" far beyond the boundaries of their home towns, and just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco Roman world, so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid.

Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial "outside agitator" idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.

You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations. I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes. It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city's white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative.

In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self purification; and direct action. We have gone through all these steps in Birmingham. There can be no gainsaying the fact that racial injustice engulfs this community. Birmingham is probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States. Its ugly record of brutality is widely known. Negroes have experienced grossly unjust treatment in the courts. There have been more unsolved bombings of Negro homes and churches in Birmingham than in any other city in the nation. These are the hard, brutal facts of the case. On the basis of these conditions, Negro leaders sought to negotiate with the city fathers. But the latter consistently refused to engage in good faith negotiation.

Then, last September, came the opportunity to talk with leaders of Birmingham's economic community. In the course of the negotiations, certain promises were made by the merchants--for example, to remove the stores' humiliating racial signs. On the basis of these promises, the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth and the leaders of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights agreed to a moratorium on all demonstrations. As the weeks and months went by, we realized that we were the victims of a broken promise. A few signs, briefly removed, returned; the others remained. As in so many past experiences, our hopes had been blasted, and the shadow of deep disappointment settled upon us. We had no alternative except to prepare for direct action, whereby we would present our very bodies as a means of laying our case before the conscience of the local and the national community. Mindful of the difficulties involved, we decided to undertake a process of self purification. We began a series of workshops on nonviolence, and we repeatedly asked ourselves: "Are you able to accept blows without retaliating?" "Are you able to endure the ordeal of jail?" We decided to schedule our direct action program for the Easter season, realizing that except for Christmas, this is the main shopping period of the year. Knowing that a strong economic-withdrawal program would be the by product of direct action, we felt that this would be the best time to bring pressure to bear on the merchants for the needed change.

Then it occurred to us that Birmingham's mayoral election was coming up in March, and we speedily decided to postpone action until after election day. When we discovered that the Commissioner of Public Safety, Eugene "Bull" Connor, had piled up enough votes to be in the run off, we decided again to postpone action until the day after the run off so that the demonstrations could not be used to cloud the issues. Like many others, we waited to see Mr. Connor defeated, and to this end we endured postponement after postponement. Having aided in this community need, we felt that our direct action program could be delayed no longer.

You may well ask: "Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?" You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word "tension." I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue.

One of the basic points in your statement is that the action that I and my associates have taken in Birmingham is untimely. Some have asked: "Why didn't you give the new city administration time to act?" The only answer that I can give to this query is that the new Birmingham administration must be prodded about as much as the outgoing one, before it will act. We are sadly mistaken if we feel that the election of Albert Boutwell as mayor will bring the millennium to Birmingham. While Mr. Boutwell is a much more gentle person than Mr. Connor, they are both segregationists, dedicated to maintenance of the status quo. I have hope that Mr. Boutwell will be reasonable enough to see the futility of massive resistance to desegregation. But he will not see this without pressure from devotees of civil rights. My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure. Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was "well timed" in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never." We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that "justice too long delayed is justice denied."

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness"--then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court's decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all."

Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an "I it" relationship for an "I thou" relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. Hence segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and sinful. Paul Tillich has said that sin is separation. Is not segregation an existential expression of man's tragic separation, his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness? Thus it is that I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court, for it is morally right; and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong.

Let us consider a more concrete example of just and unjust laws. An unjust law is a code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal. By the same token, a just law is a code that a majority compels a minority to follow and that it is willing to follow itself. This is sameness made legal. Let me give another explanation. A law is unjust if it is inflicted on a minority that, as a result of being denied the right to vote, had no part in enacting or devising the law. Who can say that the legislature of Alabama which set up that state's segregation laws was democratically elected? Throughout Alabama all sorts of devious methods are used to prevent Negroes from becoming registered voters, and there are some counties in which, even though Negroes constitute a majority of the population, not a single Negro is registered. Can any law enacted under such circumstances be considered democratically structured?

Sometimes a law is just on its face and unjust in its application. For instance, I have been arrested on a charge of parading without a permit. Now, there is nothing wrong in having an ordinance which requires a permit for a parade. But such an ordinance becomes unjust when it is used to maintain segregation and to deny citizens the First-Amendment privilege of peaceful assembly and protest.

I hope you are able to see the distinction I am trying to point out. In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law, as would the rabid segregationist. That would lead to anarchy. One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

Of course, there is nothing new about this kind of civil disobedience. It was evidenced sublimely in the refusal of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego to obey the laws of Nebuchadnezzar, on the ground that a higher moral law was at stake. It was practiced superbly by the early Christians, who were willing to face hungry lions and the excruciating pain of chopping blocks rather than submit to certain unjust laws of the Roman Empire. To a degree, academic freedom is a reality today because Socrates practiced civil disobedience. In our own nation, the Boston Tea Party represented a massive act of civil disobedience.

We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was "legal" and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was "illegal." It was "illegal" to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler's Germany. Even so, I am sure that, had I lived in Germany at the time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers. If today I lived in a Communist country where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I would openly advocate disobeying that country's antireligious laws.

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

In your statement you assert that our actions, even though peaceful, must be condemned because they precipitate violence. But is this a logical assertion? Isn't this like condemning a robbed man because his possession of money precipitated the evil act of robbery? Isn't this like condemning Socrates because his unswerving commitment to truth and his philosophical inquiries precipitated the act by the misguided populace in which they made him drink hemlock? Isn't this like condemning Jesus because his unique God consciousness and never ceasing devotion to God's will precipitated the evil act of crucifixion? We must come to see that, as the federal courts have consistently affirmed, it is wrong to urge an individual to cease his efforts to gain his basic constitutional rights because the quest may precipitate violence. Society must protect the robbed and punish the robber. I had also hoped that the white moderate would reject the myth concerning time in relation to the struggle for freedom. I have just received a letter from a white brother in Texas. He writes: "All Christians know that the colored people will receive equal rights eventually, but it is possible that you are in too great a religious hurry. It has taken Christianity almost two thousand years to accomplish what it has. The teachings of Christ take time to come to earth." Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.

You speak of our activity in Birmingham as extreme. At first I was rather disappointed that fellow clergymen would see my nonviolent efforts as those of an extremist. I began thinking about the fact that I stand in the middle of two opposing forces in the Negro community. One is a force of complacency, made up in part of Negroes who, as a result of long years of oppression, are so drained of self respect and a sense of "somebodiness" that they have adjusted to segregation; and in part of a few middle-class Negroes who, because of a degree of academic and economic security and because in some ways they profit by segregation, have become insensitive to the problems of the masses. The other force is one of bitterness and hatred, and it comes perilously close to advocating violence. It is expressed in the various black nationalist groups that are springing up across the nation, the largest and best known being Elijah Muhammad's Muslim movement. Nourished by the Negro's frustration over the continued existence of racial discrimination, this movement is made up of people who have lost faith in America, who have absolutely repudiated Christianity, and who have concluded that the white man is an incorrigible "devil."

I have tried to stand between these two forces, saying that we need emulate neither the "do nothingism" of the complacent nor the hatred and despair of the black nationalist. For there is the more excellent way of love and nonviolent protest. I am grateful to God that, through the influence of the Negro church, the way of nonviolence became an integral part of our struggle. If this philosophy had not emerged, by now many streets of the South would, I am convinced, be flowing with blood. And I am further convinced that if our white brothers dismiss as "rabble rousers" and "outside agitators" those of us who employ nonviolent direct action, and if they refuse to support our nonviolent efforts, millions of Negroes will, out of frustration and despair, seek solace and security in black nationalist ideologies--a development that would inevitably lead to a frightening racial nightmare.

Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself, and that is what has happened to the American Negro. Something within has reminded him of his birthright of freedom, and something without has reminded him that it can be gained. Consciously or unconsciously, he has been caught up by the Zeitgeist, and with his black brothers of Africa and his brown and yellow brothers of Asia, South America and the Caribbean, the United States Negro is moving with a sense of great urgency toward the promised land of racial justice. If one recognizes this vital urge that has engulfed the Negro community, one should readily understand why public demonstrations are taking place. The Negro has many pent up resentments and latent frustrations, and he must release them. So let him march; let him make prayer pilgrimages to the city hall; let him go on freedom rides -and try to understand why he must do so. If his repressed emotions are not released in nonviolent ways, they will seek expression through violence; this is not a threat but a fact of history. So I have not said to my people: "Get rid of your discontent." Rather, I have tried to say that this normal and healthy discontent can be channeled into the creative outlet of nonviolent direct action. And now this approach is being termed extremist. But though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. Was not Jesus an extremist for love: "Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you." Was not Amos an extremist for justice: "Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream." Was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel: "I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus." Was not Martin Luther an extremist: "Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise, so help me God." And John Bunyan: "I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a butchery of my conscience." And Abraham Lincoln: "This nation cannot survive half slave and half free." And Thomas Jefferson: "We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal . . ." So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice? In that dramatic scene on Calvary's hill three men were crucified. We must never forget that all three were crucified for the same crime--the crime of extremism. Two were extremists for immorality, and thus fell below their environment. The other, Jesus Christ, was an extremist for love, truth and goodness, and thereby rose above his environment. Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.

I had hoped that the white moderate would see this need. Perhaps I was too optimistic; perhaps I expected too much. I suppose I should have realized that few members of the oppressor race can understand the deep groans and passionate yearnings of the oppressed race, and still fewer have the vision to see that injustice must be rooted out by strong, persistent and determined action. I am thankful, however, that some of our white brothers in the South have grasped the meaning of this social revolution and committed themselves to it. They are still all too few in quantity, but they are big in quality. Some -such as Ralph McGill, Lillian Smith, Harry Golden, James McBride Dabbs, Ann Braden and Sarah Patton Boyle--have written about our struggle in eloquent and prophetic terms. Others have marched with us down nameless streets of the South. They have languished in filthy, roach infested jails, suffering the abuse and brutality of policemen who view them as "dirty nigger-lovers." Unlike so many of their moderate brothers and sisters, they have recognized the urgency of the moment and sensed the need for powerful "action" antidotes to combat the disease of segregation. Let me take note of my other major disappointment. I have been so greatly disappointed with the white church and its leadership. Of course, there are some notable exceptions. I am not unmindful of the fact that each of you has taken some significant stands on this issue. I commend you, Reverend Stallings, for your Christian stand on this past Sunday, in welcoming Negroes to your worship service on a nonsegregated basis. I commend the Catholic leaders of this state for integrating Spring Hill College several years ago.

But despite these notable exceptions, I must honestly reiterate that I have been disappointed with the church. I do not say this as one of those negative critics who can always find something wrong with the church. I say this as a minister of the gospel, who loves the church; who was nurtured in its bosom; who has been sustained by its spiritual blessings and who will remain true to it as long as the cord of life shall lengthen.

When I was suddenly catapulted into the leadership of the bus protest in Montgomery, Alabama, a few years ago, I felt we would be supported by the white church. I felt that the white ministers, priests and rabbis of the South would be among our strongest allies. Instead, some have been outright opponents, refusing to understand the freedom movement and misrepresenting its leaders; all too many others have been more cautious than courageous and have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained glass windows.

In spite of my shattered dreams, I came to Birmingham with the hope that the white religious leadership of this community would see the justice of our cause and, with deep moral concern, would serve as the channel through which our just grievances could reach the power structure. I had hoped that each of you would understand. But again I have been disappointed.

I have heard numerous southern religious leaders admonish their worshipers to comply with a desegregation decision because it is the law, but I have longed to hear white ministers declare: "Follow this decree because integration is morally right and because the Negro is your brother." In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro, I have watched white churchmen stand on the sideline and mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard many ministers say: "Those are social issues, with which the gospel has no real concern." And I have watched many churches commit themselves to a completely other worldly religion which makes a strange, un-Biblical distinction between body and soul, between the sacred and the secular.

I have traveled the length and breadth of Alabama, Mississippi and all the other southern states. On sweltering summer days and crisp autumn mornings I have looked at the South's beautiful churches with their lofty spires pointing heavenward. I have beheld the impressive outlines of her massive religious education buildings. Over and over I have found myself asking: "What kind of people worship here? Who is their God? Where were their voices when the lips of Governor Barnett dripped with words of interposition and nullification? Where were they when Governor Wallace gave a clarion call for defiance and hatred? Where were their voices of support when bruised and weary Negro men and women decided to rise from the dark dungeons of complacency to the bright hills of creative protest?"

Yes, these questions are still in my mind. In deep disappointment I have wept over the laxity of the church. But be assured that my tears have been tears of love. There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love. Yes, I love the church. How could I do otherwise? I am in the rather unique position of being the son, the grandson and the great grandson of preachers. Yes, I see the church as the body of Christ. But, oh! How we have blemished and scarred that body through social neglect and through fear of being nonconformists.

There was a time when the church was very powerful--in the time when the early Christians rejoiced at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society. Whenever the early Christians entered a town, the people in power became disturbed and immediately sought to convict the Christians for being "disturbers of the peace" and "outside agitators."' But the Christians pressed on, in the conviction that they were "a colony of heaven," called to obey God rather than man. Small in number, they were big in commitment. They were too God-intoxicated to be "astronomically intimidated." By their effort and example they brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiatorial contests. Things are different now. So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an archdefender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church's silent--and often even vocal--sanction of things as they are.

But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today's church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust.

Perhaps I have once again been too optimistic. Is organized religion too inextricably bound to the status quo to save our nation and the world? Perhaps I must turn my faith to the inner spiritual church, the church within the church, as the true ekklesia and the hope of the world. But again I am thankful to God that some noble souls from the ranks of organized religion have broken loose from the paralyzing chains of conformity and joined us as active partners in the struggle for freedom. They have left their secure congregations and walked the streets of Albany, Georgia, with us. They have gone down the highways of the South on tortuous rides for freedom. Yes, they have gone to jail with us. Some have been dismissed from their churches, have lost the support of their bishops and fellow ministers. But they have acted in the faith that right defeated is stronger than evil triumphant. Their witness has been the spiritual salt that has preserved the true meaning of the gospel in these troubled times. They have carved a tunnel of hope through the dark mountain of disappointment. I hope the church as a whole will meet the challenge of this decisive hour. But even if the church does not come to the aid of justice, I have no despair about the future. I have no fear about the outcome of our struggle in Birmingham, even if our motives are at present misunderstood. We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny is tied up with America's destiny. Before the pilgrims landed at Plymouth, we were here. Before the pen of Jefferson etched the majestic words of the Declaration of Independence across the pages of history, we were here. For more than two centuries our forebears labored in this country without wages; they made cotton king; they built the homes of their masters while suffering gross injustice and shameful humiliation -and yet out of a bottomless vitality they continued to thrive and develop. If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands. Before closing I feel impelled to mention one other point in your statement that has troubled me profoundly. You warmly commended the Birmingham police force for keeping "order" and "preventing violence." I doubt that you would have so warmly commended the police force if you had seen its dogs sinking their teeth into unarmed, nonviolent Negroes. I doubt that you would so quickly commend the policemen if you were to observe their ugly and inhumane treatment of Negroes here in the city jail; if you were to watch them push and curse old Negro women and young Negro girls; if you were to see them slap and kick old Negro men and young boys; if you were to observe them, as they did on two occasions, refuse to give us food because we wanted to sing our grace together. I cannot join you in your praise of the Birmingham police department.

It is true that the police have exercised a degree of discipline in handling the demonstrators. In this sense they have conducted themselves rather "nonviolently" in public. But for what purpose? To preserve the evil system of segregation. Over the past few years I have consistently preached that nonviolence demands that the means we use must be as pure as the ends we seek. I have tried to make clear that it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends. But now I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends. Perhaps Mr. Connor and his policemen have been rather nonviolent in public, as was Chief Pritchett in Albany, Georgia, but they have used the moral means of nonviolence to maintain the immoral end of racial injustice. As T. S. Eliot has said: "The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason."

I wish you had commended the Negro sit inners and demonstrators of Birmingham for their sublime courage, their willingness to suffer and their amazing discipline in the midst of great provocation. One day the South will recognize its real heroes. They will be the James Merediths, with the noble sense of purpose that enables them to face jeering and hostile mobs, and with the agonizing loneliness that characterizes the life of the pioneer. They will be old, oppressed, battered Negro women, symbolized in a seventy two year old woman in Montgomery, Alabama, who rose up with a sense of dignity and with her people decided not to ride segregated buses, and who responded with ungrammatical profundity to one who inquired about her weariness: "My feets is tired, but my soul is at rest." They will be the young high school and college students, the young ministers of the gospel and a host of their elders, courageously and nonviolently sitting in at lunch counters and willingly going to jail for conscience' sake. One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judaeo Christian heritage, thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

Never before have I written so long a letter. I'm afraid it is much too long to take your precious time. I can assure you that it would have been much shorter if I had been writing from a comfortable desk, but what else can one do when he is alone in a narrow jail cell, other than write long letters, think long thoughts and pray long prayers?

If I have said anything in this letter that overstates the truth and indicates an unreasonable impatience, I beg you to forgive me. If I have said anything that understates the truth and indicates my having a patience that allows me to settle for anything less than brotherhood, I beg God to forgive me.

I hope this letter finds you strong in the faith. I also hope that circumstances will soon make it possible for me to meet each of you, not as an integrationist or a civil-rights leader but as a fellow clergyman and a Christian brother. Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.

Yours for the cause of Peace and Brotherhood, Martin Luther King, Jr.

Published in:

King, Martin Luther Jr.

[graduatestudentmusings]

A night in Jail

Jeff Lodin June 4 at 4:45 PM  · Saturday night (May 30th), I was arrested and spent the weekend in jail in the name of George Floyd. The protesting outside my condo building had settled down but for one remaining group of protestors. The group was a few feet away from me, and everyone was peacefully walking without the slightest indication of violence. I finished up a phone conversation with my friend and turned to head back into my building, but stopped when I heard some sirens. As I turned around, one cop car sped by, then another came to a screeching halt and the doors flew open. A squad of cars pulled up and officers began jumping out of their cars, running towards, tackling, and forcefully arresting every protester they could catch. I ran for the door of my building, but before I could reach it, I was speared in the side by an officer. He pinned me down with his knee on my upper chest, close to my throat. He then turned me over, pushed my face into the asphalt, and handcuffed my wrists. They lined us all up on the curb and told us we were being arrested for violating a city mandated curfew. This 10:00 pm curfew was just instated at 9:30pm, but the amber alert did not go out until 10:26 PM, so I, along with the majority of the city, had no idea this curfew had been put in place. An officer approached and walked back and forth in front of the line of arrestees (there were about 30-35 of us), with a victory cigar clenched between his teeth. I expressed to him that I lived in the building we were outside of, and that I was just going back inside. He responded with a smirk, “sometimes we cast a net to catch the fish, and sometimes we catch a Nemo. You are our Nemo.” Around midnight, a penitentiary bus pulled up. They packed us in like sardines, without any distancing or face masks to protect us from COVID-19. For the next 6 hours we were kept on the extremely cold bus – handcuffed, shivering, and without access to a restroom or water. The “windows” did not admit any light, so it was impossible to discern the time of day, or even if it was light or dark outside. There was a complete disregard for our safety and wellbeing. They treated us like animals. As miserable as we were during that endless bus ride, the protest continued. I could not help but admire how, even during this infuriatingly unfair situation, everyone on that bus – whether white or black, rich or poor – was unified against the injustice of George Floyd, and the mistreatment of black people everywhere. We arrived at Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center around 6 AM. We were processed and told to change into orange jumpsuits and sandals. In a way I was thankful to have been given shoes (the officer that arrested me did so with such force, he broke my shoe), but the jumpsuits did very little to keep us warm in the jail, which was kept as freezing as the bus we spent our entire night on. The food was hardly edible and was only eaten to keep ourselves from starving. If you were vegetarian, kosher, or had any other dietary restrictions, your only option was to starve. Our only access to water was from a water fountain shared by all the inmates, which many of us avoided due to the risk of COVID-19. We were kept in a room without windows or clocks, so again there was no way of knowing what time of day it was or long we had been there. The restroom security camera footage was publicly displayed on TV monitors for everyone to see (male and female), further perpetuating our humiliation. They informed us that they could not take us to the individual cells, since they were “riddled with people suffering from COVID-19, and since there is no cure, if we got sick in jail, we would not be admitted to the hospital. We would have to recover from it on our own, or die.” I looked around. As we sat in our orange jumpsuits, you could no longer tell who came from privilege and who was homeless. Whether you were white or black, we wore one color and we were the same.I was bailed out Sunday night, and unfortunately had to leave some of my new friends behind to spend their second night in jail, since not everyone had the luxury of posting bail as I did. I retrieved my possessions and was escorted out of jail. I checked my belongings and noticed that all the cash had been taken from my wallet. It was a truly miserable 24 hours. Even though I came out of it bruised, sleep deprived, and down some money, I look back and I am thankful for the experience. I had no idea how broken and flawed our system really is. I experienced just a small taste of the injustice that minorities deal with on a regular basis, and was completely blown away by the cruel, borderline inhumane, conditions they are subjected to before being proven guilty. Growing up as a white Jewish boy in a privileged household, I had very limited exposure to the systematic racism and racial profiling that exists in our society. I thought it only existed in distant, and uneducated parts of the country. I thought by treating everyone as equals and by disapproving of racist and prejudice comments, that I was doing my part to enforce my stance on equality, and that was enough. That was clearly not enough. Just because racism did not impact me directly does not mean I should be complacent and stay silent. We cannot stay silent and expect only those most affected to bear the full burden of speaking out. The disproportionate hatred towards minorities must end. The biased criminal justice system and police culture must end. The abuse of power without accountability must end. Minorites cannot single-handedly change a system that is inherently skewed against them. It is up to all of us to come together and make our voices heard. All of us. Published by The ACLU.

[hey-have-you-heard]

Hey have you heard these 50 songs from 2019

I really enjoyed this last year so going to give it another go for ‘19. I put quite a lot of thought into what actually a ‘song of the year’ for me when I was first constructing and then heavily editing the playlist that came to be my Top 50 of 2019. I think the most important thing is that above all it’s a track that I’m glad exists, sometimes this is because of the songwriting or composition, sometimes the performance, sometimes the lyrical importance and sometimes just because it sparks joy.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6bFJOjL8b8Zc2s5r1oJbsk?si=UJdqSXOTR3SQ8D3IwcmV2g

Explanations for each tracks inclusion below the fold…

100 gecs - 800db cloud 100 gecs channel a mix of Crystal Castles and Sleigh Bells with a Death Grips level appreciation for noise. It’s an absolute rush and that outro is just absurd.

Natalie Evans - Always Be Natalie Evans soft melody and sing song vocals are sublimely sweet on this heartfelt track of lost love, longing and nostalgia.

Petrol Girls - Big Mouth “If you fight back or disagree you’re the one with the fucking problem” this hits home, hard. Big Mouth is a rallying cry to speak out against oppression and discrimination, to raise you’re voice and be heard, not to be controlled.

Charli XCX ft. Lizzo - Blame it on your Love Charli has a midas touch when it comes to pop, combine that with Lizzo who has just about been the most fun thing in music this year and you’ve got a 10/10 banger.

Poppy - BLOODMONEY Poppy’s music just keeps going further down the rabbit hole. Originally playing with blending elements of nu-metal with bubblegum pop, she now seems to have transcended genre altogether to create whatever BLOODMONEY is, it’s absolutely ridiculous and I love it.

Body Hound - Bloom Get on that GROOVE! So proggy it hurts, this track from Body Hound is a technical wonderland of metamorphosing rhythms, gargantuan riffs, and just the tastiest of chord progressions.

Can the Sub_Bass speak - Algiers Word of warning, this is not an easy listen. A freefall tumble through genre and tone accompanies a stream of consciousness monologue full of racism, prejudice and political and artistic critique.

Elohim - Buckets Buckets is an onslaught of trap influences, emotional outbursts and aggressive distortion. I’m a big fan of this sound.

VUKOVI - C.L.A.U.D.I.A I know very little about VUKOVI as a band, but that riff is absolutely massive and this track has been a constant throughout my year on that basis alone.

Show Me The Body - Camp Orchestra Apparently more hardcore bands should use Banjos, because this is a damn good sound. Slowly building from a single bass line this track builds into a powerful demolishing force.

clipping. - Club Down Having thoroughly proven themselves able to do afro-futurist scifi on the Hugo nominated Splendor and Misery, clipping. now turn their considerable talents to horror core and unsurprisingly nail it. Daveed’s flows are tight as ever as he brings to life a decaying city backed by tortured screams.

Dream Nails - Corporate Realness YOU ARE NOT YOUR JOB. WORK IS NOT YOUR LIFE. YOU ARE NOT WHAT YOU MUST DO IN ORDER TO SURVIVE. Dream Nails are great and exactly what we need right now.

ControlTop - Covert Contracts This track positively bristles with an anxious energy. A fitting sound for the subject of the information overload we find ourselves locked into everyday.

Cherry Glazerr - Daddi There’s an icy coolness to ‘Daddi’, a disconnected sarcasm that falls away to reveal the anger and torment in the chorus, it’s a masterful bit of emotional storytelling through musical tone.

The Physics House Band - Death Sequence I Listening to Physics House latest release, the Death Sequence EP feels like a physical journey. This opener is a perfect example of this, as you’re plunged straight into a heady and disorienting mix of rhythms and counter-melody’s, the Sax guiding you through the turbulence until you land in a placid midsection, before that bass riff drags you forward through rhythmic breakdowns into an absolutely absurd brain melting saxophony and then it just keeps on going from there…

Witching Waves - Disintegration I saw WW back in the early summer, they were a bassist down so it was just a guitar and drums duo. They started with this track and it was one of the most pure punk things I’ve experienced, drummer/vocalist Emma Wigham bashing the absolute shit out of her kit . A great no-nonsense lo-fi banger.

Lingua Ignota - DO YOU DOUBT ME TRAITOR Another, not particularly easy listen here. DO YOU DOUBT ME TRAITOR is a dark and angry brooding track, building in intensity to release the primal rage, fear and horror of the abused. Its deeply chilling and instantly arresting. This track and the entire CALIGULA album stands as an absolute must listen.

Carly Rae Jepsen ft. Electric Guest - Feels Right I love the instrumentation on this one, those chunky piano chords and screaming guitar lift the track out and make it the highlight of an already great album to me.

Orla Gartland - Figure it out Dialing back the intensity slightly, Orla chronicles the frustrations of having to deal with someone in your life who you’re done with. The choruses burst forth in beautifully fuzzy explosions of noise. That vocal flair at the start of the final chorus is chef kiss.

Battles - Fort Greene Park Battles are at their best when they keep things simple. This is evident on 2019′s Juicy B Crypts which features some incredibly cluttered moments, but this just makes Fort Greene Park stand out all the more. A delightfully spacious piece of math rock, from some of the best in the business.

Dogleg - Fox Boy howdy, do I love me some midwest emo. Catharsis in musical form, it just makes me want to mosh my troubles away like I’m 16 again.

Tørsö - Grab A Shovel Tørsö go hard, I can appreciate that. An absolutely brutal track about the destructive power of depression and self-loathing.

“Pijn & Conjurer playing Curse These Metal Hands” - High Spirits “We were like, are we Pijn and Conjurer, or are we Curse These Metal Hands? I think we’ve settled with ‘we are Pijn and Conjurer playing Curse These Metal Hands’ …whatever that means!“ what it means is one of the most joyously triumphant pieces of metal music I’ve ever heard. Some of the guitar lines in this absolutely soar.

Lizzo - Juice Lizzo has won 2019, her message of self love, acceptance and body positivity has won her both critical and cultural acclaim and permeates her music in a way that makes it impossible to not love.

COLOSSAL SQUID, AK Patterson - Kick Punch Colossal Squid is the name given to Three Trapped Tigers drummer, Adam Betts’ experimental project. After a solo album of percussive wizardry Betts has now teamed with vocalist AK Patterson to give us something else entirely.

Evan Greer - Liberty Is A Statue Evan Greer uses the a folk punk sound to deliver an essay on the damaging influences of cis-normativity and social inequality. Of course I like this one.

Taylor Swift - Lover I wasn’t on board with this song for a fair while, but then I kept listening to it and kept coming back to it because of a roughly 50 second section which ties the track and the whole album together. Yeah, this is on here purely for the bridge, which is just beautiful.

Dodie - Monster Monster is an incredibly well written and delivered study on how perception changes with resentment and it makes me cry.

The Y Axes - Moon Moon is a delightfully dreamy piece of pop that glitters with infectious melodies, it’s lyrics a blissful embracing of cosmic nihilism, need I say more?

Ezra Furman - My Teeth Hurt My teeth hurt is a song about tooth ache, about that pain you carry with you everywhere and can’t get rid of, that ruins your days and and is one hell of a mood. Yeah it’s about gender dysphoria.

Nervus - No Nations Speaking of things being a mood, this track hits the nail squarely on the head.

Cultdreams - Not My Generation "Everyone ignores me Unless I’m on a stage talking Because they put me on a pedestal And pretend I’m just performing“ Lucinda Livingstone calls out the misogyny in our culture with a singular ferocity.

Lil Nas X - Old Town Road If there’s one song that’s dominated 2019 this is it right here. Who ever had the idea of putting that NIN Ghosts sample to a trap beat and cowboying over the top of it is an absolute genius.

King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard - Planet B It’s impossible to predict where King Gizzard’s sonic influences are going to take them next I doubt even they know half the time. Whatever they turn their hand to though they do it as if they mastered the sound decades ago Planet B is an all out thrash track with a strong environmental message.

Kesha - Rich, White, Straight Men Okay, I’m about to compare Kesha to John Lennon here but HEAR ME OUT… As ‘Imagine’ asked us to consider a world without conflict or capitalism, Kesha now posits that we should tear up our conceptions of our society based on its formation by a privileged group and imagine what kind of utopia could be built if we gave the underprivileged and minority groups a say.

Allie X - Rings A Bell The chorus here sounds like it could have been off Daft Punk’s Random Access Memories, and I’m all about that sound. Combined with Allie X’s dreamlike vocals make this a certified bop.

Poly-Math - Sensors in Everything Sensors in Everything is a beast of a track spanning over 14 minutes of absurdly dense prog. Having recently enlisted keyboardist Josh Gesner. Polymath make use of the new sounds and textures available to them, at times imitating a sort of Hammond sound not unlike John Lord to the chaotic maelstrom of noise.

Calva Louise - Sleeper Big hooks on this one. Sleeper has a confident swagger to it’s sound which stands apart for the bands previous work. It’s an absolutely huge track.

Slipknot - Solway Firth Slipknot didn’t disappoint after the tease of 2018′s “All Out Life”, following up with an album which blended old and new aspects of their sound to create one of their best to date. Solway Firth is a perfect example of this matching the punishing heaviness of Iowa with the melody driven sound of All Hope Is Gone.

Clt Drp - Speak To My Seeing Clt Drp perform live was one of my highlights of the year. The filthy guitar tones, powerhouse vocals tight as heck drumming and the _grooves. _Absolutely like nothing else I’ve seen. Just an incredible band that deserve so much more recognition.

Black Country, New Road - Sunglasses Black Country, New Road released two tracks this year and now I just want more. Dense wordy lyricism plays off against ever evolving instrumentation to present a raw cut of emotional storytelling.

Her Name Is Calla - Swan Her Name Is Calla are a band that have always been on the edge of my radar, my Dad is very fond of them and saw them live a couple of years ago, but never went back to relisten to any of their stuff, then they started an album with this. I was sold instantly.

black midi - Talking Heads Talking Heads (the band) are an obvious inspiration on this track. Both David Byrne’s vocal style and the Talking Heads penchant for sharp angular melodies are on show here. But given an extra ounce of chaos through Black Midi’s delivery.

Amanda Palmer - The Ride The ride is ten minutes of bundling up all your fears and anxieties of where we are and where we’re going and just, accepting them as part of the ride. Written off the back of a prompt from Amanda asking her fans what they were afraid of right now.

Kim Petras - There Will Be Blood Okay, let’s have some out of season spookiness. Love the squelchy synths on this, there’s a huge amount of energy on this track and with it’s commitment to the horror conceit it makes for a super fun bop.

Kate Nash - Trash Kate Nash’s sound is like bathing pure nostalgia,here she spins the toxic-relationship narrative central to her work to deliver a bigger story about humanity’s, quite literally toxic relationship to our planet.

American Football & Hayley Williams - Uncomfortably Numb The other side of the “midwest emo” coin. A melancholic song built on a soft bed of arpeggiated chords and clean harmonics, Uncomfortably Numb is a heartbreaking track of losing everything and of cycles persisting thorugh generations. Employing the clever metatextual trick of referencing Pink Floyd’s comfortably Numb to mirror the generational similarities.

Glenn Branca - Velvet and Pearls Disclaimer, Glenn Branca was a musical hero of mine, his approach to music and composition being solely responsible for influence a vast number of my favourite bands. Released posthumously, Velvet and Pearls is taken from a live performance by Branca’s ensemble and perfectly captures the sense of sonic disorientation, conjuring aural illusions through an assault of intricately crafted noise. It’s an exhilarating piece that should be played as loud as humanly possible.

Brutus - War The raw emotional strength of Stefanie Manneart’s vocals instantly made me pay attention when I first heard this track. Then the song exploded into a barrage of riffs and breakneck drumming.

Valiant Vermin - Warm Coke Another slice of throwback pop, Valiant Vermin proved with “Online Lover” how much of an ear she has for pop and has proven it once again with Warm Coke. Is a real good bop.

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Welp there it is, 50(+1) songs, I had to limit myself to one track per artist in the main 50 because according to Spotify I listened to [checks notes] 1082 new artists this year. There are a small handful of tracks I wanted to highlight from the same artists though as they offer something quite different to the tracks in the playlists, so here they are quickly with 3 word descriptions.

Petrol Girls - Skye (dead dog, sad) Amanda Palmer - Voicemail for Jill (Talk about abortion) Ezra Furman - I Wanna be Your Girlfriend (Trans Torch Song) Battles ft Jon Anderson & Prairie WWWW - Sugar Foot (Batshit Prog Insanity) Poppy - Choke (Dark Minimalist Pop) Show Me The Body - Forks and Knives (Anxious nightmare punk) Lingua Ignota - CALIGULA (the whole album.)

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Closing Statement

Cultdreams - Statement

There has been a shadow over the entertainment industry the latter half of this decade. Whether film, music, TV or video games, the late 2010′s are filled with stories of people coming forward to bravely tell their stories about being abused and manipulated by men in positions of power. The #metoo movement as it’s come to be known has been a powerful force in giving marginalised people a voice and the ability to call out oppressors and in starting the groundwork to root out the misogyny in the seats of power, but this is a battle far from won.

While there are thousands of stories out there I want to focus on one in particular.

In 2016 a number of women spoke out about various forms of abuse by a well-known musician in the punk scene. It’s now over three years later and this group of women are in the midst of a long fought claim of defamation from this musician. If this case goes through it sets a precedent for silencing marginalised voices in the industry. They have been fighting for so long and with no legal aid available for the case they have had to finance their defense from their own pockets.

This is where Solidarity Not Silence comes in. Solidarity not silence is a crowdfunding effort to help take the case to trial without the women bankrupting themselves entirely so that they don’t have to give in to this mans demands.  You can read more about Solidarity not Silence and make a donation (if you feel so inclined) here: https://www.crowdjustice.com/case/solidaritynotsilence/

You can also follow them on twitter here https://twitter.com/solnotsilence