#and came to the us as refugees where they face racism

[teaspoon-of-salt]

Xiong was born in 1973 in Phab Kheb, Laos, one of 11 children in a family that fled the country in 1975 and spent four years in a refugee camp in Thailand before emigrating to the United States, according to Sahan Journal. He grew up in St. Paul and was valedictorian of his class at Humboldt High School in 1992.

Xiong graduated with a political science degree from Carleton College in Northfield in 1996 and began traveling around the country as a motivational speaker, storyteller and rap artist, billing himself as the country's first Hmong comedian.

Xiong helped organize the first Hmong Minnesota Day at the Minnesota State Fair in 2015, and was named a Bush Fellow in 2019 to earn a master's degree in public affairs.

With Xiong's death, the Hmong American community in the Twin Cities has lost a true leader, "consummate organizer and cultural interpreter," said longtime friend Pakou Hang. In his presentations and writings, she said, Xiong was a teacher who tried to show people how to be kind, generous and do the right thing.

Xiong connected people across generational, cultural and political lines who traveled the United States to speak at schools, colleges and businesses, Hang said. As a friend, he could inspire laughter in every conversation, she said.

[Rest of article under cut.]

A highly regarded Hmong American activist, speaker and comedian from the Twin Cities was found dead Monday in Medellín, Colombia, after kidnappers demanded $2,000 in ransom from his family.

Tou Ger Xiong, 50, was killed while on a vacation to Medellín. His brother, Eh Xiong, confirmed his death Tuesday morning on Facebook.

"The pain of his loss is indescribable. We extend our deepest gratitude to all who have offered their condolences, thoughts, and prayers," Xiong's family wrote in the Facebook statement.

Xiong, who lived in Woodbury, was kidnapped Sunday after a date with a woman he met on social media, according to the Colombian newspaper El Colombiano.

A group of men contacted his family demanding $2,000 — the equivalent of $8 million in Colombian pesos — and killed him a day later without collecting the money.

Three American tourists, including Xiong, have been murdered in the last month, El Colombiano reported.

Kidnappings in Colombia are on the rise, according to authorities. In the first few months of 2022, 35 people were abducted in the country, and that figure is more than double this year for the same period.

Early last month, the father of a Colombian soccer star was freed after he was held for around a week by a guerrilla group.

[The excerpt above came from here.]

Former state Sen. Mee Moua of St. Paul, for whom Xiong worked as a volunteer coordinator in her successful 2002 campaign, said in a statement that she was "weighed down with grief for my friend," and called Xiong "a one-of-a-kind modern-day hero."

U.S. Rep. Betty McCollum, D-St. Paul wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, that Xiong's death was "devastating news" and that his work as a comedian and activist "touched many lives in the Twin Cities and beyond."

Hang said Xiong would perform skits based on his own stories growing up as a refugee and other lessons from the larger Hmong community. She recalled him bringing older Hmong women onto the stage to demonstrate how they would pick corn or fetch water as children, setting it to music and transforming it into a dance.

Xiong sought to connect first-generation Hmong American kids with classmates of other races, and strengthened intergenerational relationships with their families by making them proud to be Hmong, she said.

Xiong and Hang worked together on many community causes, including the formation of the Coalition for Community Relations, a group that traveled to rural Wisconsin from the Twin Cities in 2004 to "bear witness" at the trial of Chai Soua Vang, a Hmong American man eventually convicted for killing six hunters.

"We're not here to defend Chai," Xiong told the Star Tribune at the time. "We're coming together to accentuate the positives in the Hmong community."

Xiong also brought media attention to a hunger strike in Northern California in 2021 after a Hmong cannabis farmer was killed by police, Hang said. He flew to California to lead a march and gather stories. Discriminatory ordinances passed by Siskiyou County were later ruled unlawful.

"We don't have anyone else in the community like that," Hang said.

[bsof-maarav]

Editor’s Note: Sanne DeWitt is a microbiologist, geneticist, researcher, and author of a memoir: “I Was Born In An Old Age Home”. She has lived in Berkeley, California since 1957, where she moved for advanced studies in microbiology and genetics, and worked there until her retirement. The views expressed here are those of the author. View more opinion on CNN.CNN — 

In 1957, I moved to Berkeley, California: a bastion of American liberalism that squarely aligns with my progressive values, and a hub of American scholarship that nurtured my academic quest and professional growth. I came here for advanced studies in microbiology and genetics. Since then, I have lived, worked as a scientist and retired in this community.

Over the 65 years that I have called this beautiful area home, I have occasionally encountered antisemitism, but these one-off incidents never succeeded in destroying my spirit. When I was four years old, Nazis burst into my bedroom and sent me and my family to Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp. We were soon released and I was smuggled out of Germany by a Christian woman. After this harrowing experience, not much in the Bay Area could scare me.

But since the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the hatred towards Jews that I have seen in Berkeley terrifies me more than anything I have experienced while living here. I am still reeling from being called a liar at a Berkeley City Council meeting, where I asked for a proclamation to mark Holocaust Remembrance Day and spoke about October 7. The Jews at that meeting were circled and called “Zionist pigs” by menacing protesters.

We are approaching the holiday of Passover, which commemorates the freedom of the Israelites from Egyptian slavery and our formation as a free Jewish people in our own land. But this Passover is like no other in recent history, with scores of hostages still held in Gaza and Jews worldwide fearful for our future — including Jews in the US. We are facing the worst global antisemitism since the Holocaust and while it is not state-sanctioned as Nazism was, it is a threat going unchecked in California’s East Bay.

It is incredibly painful to see my neighbors vilify Jews, tear down posters of Jewish hostages in Gaza and not believe Jewish rape victims. In this hotbed, hatred and hostility have become normalized. Families have moved their children out of public schools. Jewish businesses have been vandalized and boycotted. And lies about Jews and Israel have gone unchecked and unchallenged in our public forums. Our local Jewish community is both horrified and petrified.

This onslaught of Jewish hatred cannot become the new normal. This epidemic must be treated as seriously as all other hatreds that our society is confronting, such as racism and homophobia. We need more education about Judaism and how the long, sordid history of antisemitism ties into other forms of hatred in our public schools.

We need colleges and universities to unequivocally denounce hate speech and actions directed at Jews. We need public officials to urge mutual respect, understanding and civil discourse during city council and town hall meetings.

I have seen where unchecked antisemitism can lead, when people will do nothing — or worse, join the mainstream, such as our German neighbors during Nazism. This Passover, I resolve with whatever time I have left in this world to fight for the safety of the Jewish people, in Berkeley and around the globe.

During Passover, we are commanded to tell the story of the exodus out of Egypt to our children. We believe in the lasting power of sharing this history with younger generations and reflecting on this hopeful new beginning. There is also lasting power in sharing my history as a Jewish refugee — and I invite my Berkeley neighbors to hear my story. Without understanding and acceptance, we are enslaved by our biases.

The hatred, violence and bigotry against the Jewish community cannot continue — for our shared future, we must confront it and root it out.

[queer-starwars-bracket]

Queer Star Wars Characters (Round 2): Legends Match 2

Juhani | Identity: lesbian | Media: Knights of the Old Republic

Juhani from 2003’s Knights of the Old Republic was the first ever queer character in Star Wars. The Mandalorian Wars rendered Juhani’s family refugees on Taris after the destruction of their homeplanet of Cathar. Juhani was enslaved due to her mother’s debts, but was liberated by the Revanchists when they freed Taris from Mandalorian rule. This inspired her to travel to Dantooine to train as a Jedi, where she fell in love with her fellow padawan Belaya. For her final trial, she was tricked into believing she killed her master when consumed by the Dark Side. She fled into the wilds of Dantooine, her turmoil agitating the wildlife. Dealing with Juhani is the player’s final trial as a Jedi, and they can either kill Juhani or handle the situation diplomatically and return her to the light. She then joins the player as a companion.

Traveling together, Juhani grows close to Revan and can be romanced by female Revans (the game shipped with the gender flag for romance bugged, but she is intended to be a lesbian). She takes the player turning out to be Revan very well, as she never truly accepted that Revan turned to the Dark Side due to how the Revanchists saved her. If the Dark Side ending is chosen, the player must kill Juhani.

Juhani strives to be a good Jedi, strongly believing in their principles. However, she struggles with the in-born aggression and heightened anger of her species, which with her perfectionism creates a vicious cycle that drives her towards the Dark Side. Other than Revan, she kept herself separate from the rest of the crew of the Ebon Hawk, especially Canderous Ordo due to the Mandalorian’s genocide of her people. She was also full of bitterness regarding the racism she faced on Taris, and struggled not to lash out against all humans because of it.

Lana Beniko | Identity: playersexual | Media: SWTOR

Lana Beniko is a Sith, but like chill about it. The head of Sith Intelligence, she is willing to work with the Republic when necessary to oppose the greater threat of the Revanites and the resurrection of the Sith Emperor. When the Eternal Empire came to take over the galaxy, she left the collapsing Sith Empire to look for the player character. She rescues them and joins them in the creation of the Eternal Alliance, where she can be romanced. She’ll be by your side through countless trials, willing to make the hard decisions. She’ll even join the Republic if that’s who you choose to align the remnants of the Eternal Alliance with.

As paradoxical as it is, she’s the Sith at their best- what the propaganda of the Empire says they are. She isn’t consumed by her emotions, and her use of the dark side is defined as her using the Force instead of trusting in it. 

[double-nakli]

has it ever occurred to yall that we don't care

like sorry I'm not really going to sit here and listen to eastern and balkan europeans complain in my face about racism like they're not the first ones ready to be racist when they can

when the US sent troops to Ukraine, they had to prepare black troop members, saying "you will be called the n word" not may, WILL. people are coming to your country and putting their life on the line and still the first thing you can think to do is call them a slur?

when Ukrainian refugees were rehomed to the UK, very quickly they started complaining about their black and Muslim neighbors, with some of them even having the audacity to say they felt safer in a warzone

the Irish and the Italian came to the US and within 2 generations joined the police forces en masse and committed horrendous crimes against people of color for DECADES

the founding members of Israel specifically stated (and documented) that they wanted to create the new state in either South America or the middle east where "the people are stupid and easy to subjugate" and then did it

we don't really care about your european-racism-against-whites discourse in the US because the rest of the world has seen that outside of Europe, you are first in line to commit atrocities against anyone who isn't white. we're not going to waste our time caring about your problems when you're causing ours

"european shrimp racism colours" are a haha funny joke because its true (and you dont even know the extent of it until youve stepped into balkans) but see if anyone thought about it for 3 minutes they mightve come to realize what racism actually is and why it came to be

[fatehbaz]

Gypsies aren't segregated moron theyre just known to steal dogs and shit lmao

Let’s not use slurs.

It’s been a while since I’ve made the post, but I’m gonna assume you’re referring to a post where I shared the work of the Environmental Justice Atlas project. Obviously doesn’t seem like you’re engaging in good faith here, but for the sake of anyone else who might want to look more deeply into environmental racism against Roma in Europe, I’m gonna temporarily ignore your tone. I’m very confident that looking at any map of Central and Eastern Europe displaying ethnicity, income, infrastructure failure, etc., would clearly and unequivocally show extreme segregation of Roma communities. In fact, the report shared in my post shows exactly that. The report includes exact lat-long coordinates of sites of some of the worst segregation; you could plug those into G00gle Earth, zoom in, and take a look for yourself. In some of these cases, local governments build literal walls and fenced enclosures. Is that not segregation? The report includes photos of the unlivable conditions of the sites, too.

The report: “Pushed to the wastelands: Environmental racism against Roma communities in Central and South-Eastern Europe.” Produced by ENVJustice, Environmental Justice Atlas team at ICTA-UAB. List of credits, from their published map: “The research team consists of Ksenija Hanaček and Federico Demaria (ICTA-UAB), Patrizia Heidegger and Katharina Wiese (EEB), Radost Zahireva (Bulgaria), Mustafa Asanovski (Macedonia), Ciprian-Valentin Nodis (Rumania), Zsuzsanna Kovács (Hungary), Ondrej Poduska (Slovakia).”

Most of the case studies documented by the team include photos of each site, sites where you and others imply that there is no “discrimination” or “environmental racism”. Some of the examples: hundreds of Roma living at a chemical laboratory at a copper factory; local governments forcing Roma refugees to live at landfills; lead poisoning of Roma families after forced settlement of refugees at mining complexes; local governments proposing and/or constructing fences and separation walls; etc. In each of these cases, it is clear that the UN, national governments, and local administrators clearly and deliberately engaged in forced removal and forced relocation often involving poisoning from environmental contaminants.

Here are just a few of the cases included in the report:

-------

If anyone is skeptical that Roma face extreme racism, discrimination, then I’d recommend taking a quick look at ... the history of Europe. Then I would remind skeptics to listen to the voices of Roma people. I’d also remind you that the scholars reporting on segregation, environmental racism, and discrimination really do their homework.

Why might it seem, on the surface, that anti-Roma racism might have, allegedly, “improved” in recent years (despite evidence to the contrary)?

Kocze and Rovid have used the concept of “double dis/course” to describe how contemporary Europe (in the late 20th and early 21st centuries) “promotes the integration” and so-called “equal opportunities” of Roma (aka: assimilation), while simultaneously denying even basic “recognition of, and ways to address, enduring structural violence”, environmental racism. The inclusion, in European dis/course, of “rights” and “opportunities” might seem benevolent on the surface. (”Oh look, European governments published a short statement and said a nice thing about the Roma. Discrimination is over, Europe is trying to help!”) But this obscures how anti-Roma racism and discrimination plays out materially, in reality. Because, meanwhile, local administrators and institutions can weaponize zoning regulations; selectively enforce municipal codes; over-p0lice; neglect infrastructure; and pursue evictions, often in ways that seem like “reasonable” enforcement on paper.

Dove-tailing with this apparent bureacratic neutrality, Kocze and Rovid suggested that part of the reason why anti-Roma racism has persisted or even strengthened (or, at least, re-asserted itself in different language) recently is due to what they call “three dimensions” of “double dis/course”: “racialised de-Europeanisation, [...] undeservingness, and (dis)articulation of citizenship”.

Similarly, scholar Huub van Baar -- describing recent European maneuvers to redefine their anti-Roma discrmination in more palatable terms -- references concepts like: evictability; contained mobility; secularization of borders; and racialization of poverty.

-------

While the books aren’t freely available, most of these articles are free to read online:

Silvia Rodriguez Maeso. “‘Civilising’ the Roma? The depoliticisation of (anti-)racism within the politics of integration.” Global Studies in Culture and Power. June 2014.

Huub van Baar. “Contained mobility and the racialization of poverty in Europe: the Roma at the development-security nexus.” Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture. Issue 4: Un/Free Mobility: Roma Migrants in the European Union. June 2017.

‘Angela Kocze and Marton Rovid. “Roma and the politics of double dis/course in contemporary Europe.” Global Studies in Culture and Power. November 2017.

Richard Filcak. Living Beyond the Pale: Environmental Justice and the Roma Minority.

Huub van Baar. “Evictability and the Biopolitical Bordering of Europe.” Antipode 49. August 2016.

Krista Harper, Tamara Steger, and Richard Filcak. “Environmental justice and Roma communities in Eastern Europe.” Environmental Policy and Governance. July 2009.

Aidan McGarry. Romaphobia: The Last Acceptable Form of Racism. 2017.

Margareta Matache and Jacqueline Bhabha. “Anti-Roma Racism is Spiraling during C0VID-19 P@ndemic.” NCBI: Health and Human Rights Journal. June 2020.

Global Studies in Culture and Power: Issue 6: Romaphobia and the Media. 2017.

E Vincze. “Socio-spatial marginality of Roma as form of intersectional injustice.” Studia Universitatis Babes-Bolyai-Sociologia. 2013.

Helen O’Nions. “Roma Expulsions and Discrimination: The Elephant in Brussels.” Brill. January 2011.

Romain Cames. “Government by Expulsion: The Roma Camp, Citizenship, and the State.” Sociology (International Sociological Association). 2013.

Victoria Shmidt and Bernadette Nadya Jaworsky. Historicizing Roma in Central Europe: Between Critical Whiteness and Epistemic Injustice. 2020.  

Huub van Baar and Ryan Powell. “The Invisibilization of Anti-Roma Racisms.” In: The Secularization of the Roma in Europe. 2018.

Catalin Berescu. “The rise of the new European Roma ghettos: a brief account of some empirical studies.” Taylor and Francis: Urban Research & Practice. October 2011

-------

I’m sure some of my friends here at this site could provide more reading recommendations. Or maybe there are Roma people here who’d like to chime in.

(Sorry, everyone, for exposing you to slurs.)

[ceph-the-ghost-writer]

The Primrose Path Pt. 1: Capture

Table of Contents/Intro Post

Content Advisory: Discussion/effects of war, prisoners of war/refugees, cultural clashes/misunderstandings, hints of forced assimilation, fantasy racism, threat of annihilation, death themes, death magic, the undead

The enemy caught them in a clearing, just after they’d finished performing noon prayers. He didn’t regret stopping. Judging from the grim but resolved faces around him, neither did his people. Not even the children whimpered, though, naturally, they clung to their families as the circle of mounted soldiers closed in. His eyes flitted to each Mortigean as they came trotting from the trees. None bore any grafted limbs, thank Cyanos. No tails draped down over their saddles. Not a single horn or tusk sprouted through their battered helmets either. More important, their wickedly curved sickle-swords and less flashy yet effective short swords remained sheathed. Perhaps perversions such as extra body parts were reserved for Mortigean nobility. Equipment cost enough as it was—commissioning a cuirass to accommodate four arms, or sandals for bird feet would likely be a nightmare. Despite the doom surrounding them, his mouth twitched with an improbable smile.

At about fifteen paces, one of the Mortigeans raised a closed fist. The others reined in their mounts. Enough space remained between each horse for a person to run though. Whether they’d be quick enough to avoid being hacked down was another matter. To his relief, none of his people tested their luck.

The soldier in charge nudged their tall chestnut mount forward. His people shuffled back, but he remained rooted to his spot, reckoning what came next. Sure as sunrise, the Mortigean stopped almost within touching range. Their attention fell on him and both took a minute to size each other up.

No beard grew on the soldier’s chin or the jawline he could see beneath their helm’s cheekguards. A woman, as far as initial impressions told him. One who was long, lean, and brown as the loam of the forest, like most Mortigeans. Older than him, but not by more than ten years as far as he could tell. Large eyes the color of smoke and filled with a lifetime’s share of weariness met his. She took in the columns upon columns of scripture adorning his exposed—as well as currently hidden—skin. Scripture he'd retraced every week since his ordination twelve summers past with a paste of clay and honey before sitting in the morning sun to meditate. Beige against deep golden-tan, the words stood out as clearly as ink on paper.

“Priest?” Her inflection almost warped the word into a different one, but he had to give the soldier credit. Most outsiders were too intimidated to even attempt speaking Matroian.

“Yes,” he replied, embarrassed for an absurd moment that he didn’t have a clue how to do so in Mortigean. “I serve Cyanos.”

The name had several of the other Mortigeans spitting onto the ground. It provoked nothing more than a nod from their leader. She lifted her arm to point to the long black and brown striped plumes sprouting from her helm.

“Ara Aleqa.” She lowered her finger to her segmented cuirass. “Ife.”

Ah. Rank and name. A good sign—people didn’t typically introduce themselves to those they intended to murder, not even in Mortigany.

Setting a hand on his chest, he noted his thundering heartbeat. “Thịnh Ân.”

The soldier, Ife, considered that a moment. “Tin Un? Priest Tin Un?”

“Close enough.”

She nodded at the people behind him, who instinctively crowded together tighter, children shielded at their center. “Are running from Sern?”

“Yes. A messenger rode into the village before dawn to warn us you were coming.”

Ife’s mouth mimicked a smile, but sadness shaped every other line on her face. “To where?”

Ân could barely lift his shoulders in a shrug from the burden pressing down on them. “Away from the border. Away from the fighting.” Taking a deep breath, he did his best to keep his next words from rushing out. “Are you going to kill us?”

Shaking her head, the soldier spoke a string of words in her own language. Ân understood just the last three—a name—but they explained everything.

Phan Thí Tiên.

It was his people’s turn to spit on the leaves underfoot. While Ân understood their reactions, he was all too aware that The Exile Queen’s soft spot for her former homeland was the only thing sparing them from the sword. Or worse.

Despite the sunshine beaming into the clearing, Ân shuddered. “Are you going to damn us?”

Tilting her head, Ife fixed him with a puzzled stare. His hands shaking even as he reflected how silly he must look, Ân pointed to the sickle sword sheathed at her hip, drew a finger across his throat, then lifted his arms straight out in front of him, doing his best to mimic the blank expression of someone who’d had their soul ripped away by dark sorcery. More than likely he just looked like a queasy drunkard.

Guffaws and snickers broke out amongst the Mortigeans. While Ife silenced them with a hiss, he caught the way her lips kept trying to wiggle up into a smile.

“No,” she told him. “Taking all. Moving.”

“Where?”

In answer, he received a shrug and apologetic grimace. Knowledge above her rank, apparently. Ân bit the inside of his cheek to keep from yelling something foolish at the Mortigeans. They marched in from their light-forsaken country, drove his people—simple woodcrafters, hunters, artisans, all with families, with children, with elders, with sick—out of their homes. And they hadn’t even thought to ask their superiors what might become of their captives.

Then again, they’d have to care enough to wonder. As much as he wanted to, there was no point in cursing at them. They’d chosen to follow orders rather than conscience, just as they’d embraced darkness. Pleas or sermons wouldn’t change that, not in a day at least. Likely not in a year either.

“Are you going to tear our families apart?” he asked, voice weary and drained from his struggle to keep his emotions tethered to reason.

A dent of confusion appeared between Ife’s brows. Ân gestured to a child of about nine summers clinging to her mother—little Kam and Thoa, the village smith. He pressed his hands together, as close as parent and daughter, before jerking them apart. Understanding sparked in Ife’s gaze.

“No…” She dragged out the word before pointing to him, then Thoa and Kam. Putting her own palms together, she pulled them away from each other.

So, the Mortigeans meant to divide the villagers by gender? Or keep immediate family together but separate distant or non-relatives? Ân supposed it didn’t matter in the end. The tactic would have the same effect: to demoralize and better control their prisoners, keeping the people of Matroi from forming an organized resistance. He figured he ought to be grateful their lives would be spared. Instead, he could do nothing for a moment except silently despise Phan Thị Tiên for not having the decency to die alongside her royal parents five years ago.

“Illuminator.”

The sound of his proper title fished him out of the dark whirlpool of his thoughts. Ân turned his attention back to the village smith. Studied the strong arms hugging her child to her side. Suppressed a flinch as he met the huge, fear-shiny eyes of tiny Kam.

“Illuminator, what should we do?” asked Thoa. Though her expression remained sturdy with determination, her own stare had more in common with her daughter’s than just color and shape.

The question looked far into the future—too far for Ân to see. However, the immediate answer was as clear as the tense, worry-bleached faces turned toward him.

“Go with the heathens. Don’t fight them by force.”

Cries of dismay and protest erupted, but he silenced them with a glare and clap of his hands.

“Give thanks to Cyanos they don’t just slit our throats and raise us back as undead slaves right here. And you forget two of the Radiant Gifts even as the sun shines directly on us: Courage and Tenacity. This may look like the end of Matroi in our limited vision, but surely the god has set us on this path with a purpose. Mortigany may invade our borders and divide us physically, but they do so at their peril. Remember, the word and will of Cyanos goes where we do. So, I say let them bring us deep into the heart of their lands! Watch and listen for the moment the god calls you to action, whether with blade or blessings, then strike with all of your might.”

Hope sparked in his people’s dim stares, rekindling the dying embers of his own. Turning back to the Mortigeans, a vicious breed of satisfaction flexed its claws in his chest to see some of them had rested their hands on their weapons, postures wary. They were wise to be. Resistance took many forms, some only growing stronger the more hardship thrown in the way. First thing was first, however. He had to make sure everyone lived to see another day.

Ân held out his arms, palms up. “Very well. We will go with you as long as you don’t abuse us. Where are we being taken?”

Relaxing only partway in her saddle, Ife gestured northeast. “Camp. Dejaza Negasi will be deciding where to put all.”

“There are elders and children with us. Others who have difficulty walking too.”

After a few sharp commands, about a score of Ife’s soldiers dismounted without attempting to hide their grumbling. Despite himself, Ân let the knot in his guts unravel. At least Mortigeans remembered a few basic human decencies. Horses were a precious commodity, always needed on the front lines, so his own people had done their best to pull those who needed help keeping up in what small carts they had—and in makeshift litters of branches and blankets when they’d run out of those. Though Ife’s orders had more to do with expedience than mercy, Ân wasn’t about to complain.

He kept the same attitude throughout the march that followed. He didn’t have much breath to spare for it anyhow. The Mortigeans didn’t set a brutal pace, but their speed made it clear they wanted to reach their camp sooner rather than later. Though Ân preferred the open plains of central Matroi and always would, traveling in the heat of summer wasn’t for anyone without a sturdy constitution. The shade of the borderland forests made a journey much more bearable. Still, he plopped down with a sigh on a mossy log the moment they paused to rest a couple of hours later. Buzzing legs stretched straight out is where Ife found him. Helm tucked under one arm, she walked over and watched in silence for several moments while he folded and tucked the prongs of a maple leaf.

“What is this you do?” she asked at last.

“A tradition from my home region. We fold leaves or squares of paper into birds. Vultures or hawks mostly, since they ride the thermals and fly highest. Along the coasts they make kites of gulls or pelicans instead.

She swiped away a trickle of sweat from her temple with a forearm, cuirass clinking with the movement. “Doing why?”

“Well, once you’re done folding, you tell the bird your wishes or prayers, then let it go on the wind to carry your words to Cyanos.”

“No plain here. No wind. No Matroi. Old forest. Deep.” Though her tone stayed light, her meaning weighed the corners of her mouth down into a frown.

He paused to stick his hand under one of the shafts of sunlight streaming through the canopy. “Yet Cyanos is still here.”

“Thinking he can hear you?”

“I doubt some trees are going to block him out, no matter how big or old.”

A whole conversation had amassed on Ife’s tongue. Lacking the Matroian words to organize it, however, she could only gaze at him with soft eyes and a hard line for a mouth, as if he were a child tracking mud into the house.

“Many ears, Tin Un,” she replied finally. “Not only your sun god.”

That he couldn’t argue with. Ân watched her put her helmet back on and return to where her horse nosed at the leaf litter, searching for something to graze. As she roused the other soldiers, a strange chill crept up from the base of his spine. He didn’t know what to make of Ife’s warning—if warning it was. The Mortigeans had acted annoyed more than anything else in their dealings with the villagers. They wouldn’t have been so lenient toward anyone who caused trouble, but Ân had confidence the council he’d given his people would hold at least until they were separated.

No plain here. No wind. No Matroi.

Did she mean her own gods were listening? The Mortigeans did have patrons of wind and water and wood, just as Matroi did. What they would care for a lone Illuminator he had no idea.

Unless…

The shiver slithering along his spine sent tendrils to touch his heart. Ân eyed the shade of the trees. The shadows that pooled in the crannies of ancient roots. The hollows and screens of branches that might conceal owls, possums, or other nocturnal agents. But no…Cyanos still had another few hours before he had to leave them in the care of his children, the stars, while he slept. The most infamous member of Mortigany’s pantheon wouldn’t dare show their ghastly face while the sun held sway in the sky.

“I’d like to see them try,” he told the leaf-bird perched in his hand despite the shards of frost stuck between his ribs. “Give me the strength to do what I can, what I must, when the time comes. That’s all I ask.”

Before the march resumed, Ân scrambled up the nearest tree, ignoring the peculiar looks it earned him from Mortigean and Matroian alike. He nestled his little bird confidant in the crook of the lowest branch. Like all believers, it would find its way to the light.

Part 2: Answered Prayers

[sageglobalresponse]

How Kemi Badenoch, 42, Grew Up ‘With No Running Water’ In Nigeria To Become Top Contender For British Prime Minister

Tory leadership hopeful Kemi Badenoch has gone from race outsider to a serious contender with the backing of Michael Gove and a promise to be the ‘fresh face’ the party needs after chaos of Boris Johnson’s premiership.

The MP for Saffron Walden, 42, who grew up in the UK, US and Nigeria, is known as a culture warrior with anti-’woke’ views on issues including trans rights that make her a hit among right-leaning members of the party.

The former equalities minister threw her hat into the ring with a plan for a smaller state and a government ‘focused on the essentials’ and won the support of Mr Gove, who said the party needs a leader with ‘Kemi’s focus, intellect and no-bulls*** drive’.

It marks a massive boost in profile for Ms Badenoch, a mother-of-three former banker who has only been an MP for five years and remains unknown to most of the population.

She admits her pro-Brexit views put her at odds with her husband Hamish, a Deutsche Bank banker and former Tory Councillor. The couple have three children – two sons and a daughter, who they keep out of the public eye.

Ms Badenoch was born in Wimbledon, south-west London after her Nigerian parents came to the UK so her mother, a professor of physiology, could receive medical treatment.

She grew up in Lagos where her father worked as a GP, although they spent time in the US while her mother was lecturing.

‘I come from a middle-class background but I grew up in a very poor place,’ she once said in an interview. ‘Being middle class in Nigeria still meant having no running water or electricity, sometimes taking your own chair to school.’

Ms Badenoch was born in south-west London after her Nigerian parents came to the UK so her mother, a professor of physiology, could receive medical treatment. Pictured, Kemi Badenoch (second from left) with (l-r) her brother, Fola, Kemi, her sister Lola and mother, Feyi

At 16, Ms Badenoch returned to London to realise her ‘dream’ of completing her studies in the UK and enrolled in a part-time A-Level course in Morden.

At the time Nigeria was in the midst of political chaos that impacted the economy. The family experienced poverty and Ms Badenoch’s father ‘scraped together’ enough money for a plane ticket and £100 for his daughter to start her new life.

To support herself, Ms Badenoch, who lived with a family friend, secured a part-time job at McDonald’s and picked up ad-hoc work elsewhere.

‘Most of the students were from ethnic minorities and the expectations for us were low,’ she recalled in an interview with the Independent. ‘The poverty of low expectations must change. Schools and teachers matter.’

The future politician enrolled at the University of Sussex where she studied Computer Systems Engineering, graduating in 2003.

This led to a job as a software engineer at Logica, followed by by a role as system analyst at Royal Bank of Scotland. She was later appointed as an associate director at private bank Coutts.

In 2009 she began a part-time law degree at Birbeck College and has also worked at the Spectator magazine.

Ms Badenoch joined the Conservative party in 2005, aged 25, and says there were two ‘lightbulb moments’ that persuaded her to stand as an MP.

The first was when she heard a speaker at the Hay Festival ‘claiming that ethnic minorities all suffer from institutional racism’.

She told the Independent: ‘The left and the liberal elite think they have a monopoly on the caring issues, whether it is diversity or refugees.

‘Of course we have a moral obligation to help refugees but what is important – and more difficult to do – is to look at what works when they come; can they find work? Do they integrate? Do they take on British values?’

The second came during the Make Poverty History movement in 2005 when she was struck by the arrogance of ‘white men thinking they can save Africa’.

‘This was the last straw for me. What has helped and is helping African countries is free trade and enterprise, not more aid and more virtue signalling,’ she continued.

She grew up in Lagos where her father worked as a GP, although they spent time in the US while her mother was lecturing. Pictured, Kemi, aged seven, with her grandfather in Nigeria.

After unsuccessfully running for the seat of Dulwich and West Norwood in the 2010 election – a contest won by late Labour MP Tessa Jowell – Ms Badenoch was selected as the Conservative candidate for Saffron Walden, a safe seat for her party, in the 2017 election.

She won and delivered her maiden speech in Parliament just a few weeks later. In it, she described herself as the ‘British dream,’ the African ‘immigrant who came to the UK aged 16 and who became a parliamentarian’ in one generation.

She also described the vote for Brexit as ‘the greatest ever vote of confidence in the project of the United Kingdom’ and hailed

Ms Badenoch has had a rapid ascent through the ranks of the Conservative party, including a post as equalities minister. She resigned from government last week.

After first announcing her candidacy in The Times, Ms Badenoch officially launched her campaign in a speech at the Policy Exchange think tank on Tuesday.

In a wide-ranging speech, Ms Badenoch attempted to add economic heft to her anti-woke foundations, with a slapdown of her rivals over their un-costed tax cut offers.

But she also lashed out at British businesses that focus more on social change instead of making money, as she laid out her free market credentials.

She said: ‘The ability to defend the free market as the fairest way of helping people prosper has been undermined. It has been undermined by a willingness to embrace protectionism because of special interests.

‘It’s been undermined by retreating in the face of the Ben and Jerry’s tendency.

‘They will say a business’s main priority is social justice, not productivity and profit.

And it’s been undermined by the actions of crony capitalists colluding with big bureaucracy to rig the system in favour of incumbents against entrepreneurs.’

The MP for Saffron Walden has the declared support of 15 colleagues, including recent Cabinet minister Michael Gove, who was at her campaign launch.

Standing in front of a union flag-patterned backdrop bearing the slogan ‘Kemi for Prime Minister’, she said: ‘In the debate we’ve been having about the future of our party and our country, there have been lots of promises to cut taxes.

‘I am committed to reducing corporate and personal taxes, but I will not enter into a tax bidding war over: ‘’My tax cuts are bigger than yours’’.’

‘For too long, politicians have been saying you can have it all – you can have your cake and eat it,’ she added.

‘But I’m here to tell you that that isn’t true – it never has been.

‘There are always tough choices in life and in politics: no free lunches, no tax cuts without limits on Government spending, no stronger defence without a slimmer state.

‘Unlike others, I’m not going to promise you things without a plan to deliver them.’

Ms Badenoch and her husband Hamish pictured with one of their daughters. The couple have kept their three children – two daughters and a son – out of the public eye.

Ms Badenoch said she would tackle the economic crisis by cutting spending on international aid, university student subsidies, and ‘superfluous support staff’ including well-being officers and diversity ‘tick-box exercises’.

She said: ‘While the priority of the £300 billion the Government spends on procurement should be value for money, in truth this is being undermined by tick-box exercises in sustainability, diversity and equality.

‘These are good things but they need to be done properly.

‘Why are we spending millions on people’s jobs which literally didn’t exist a decade ago, like staff well-being coordinators in the public sector?’

She added that she would ‘get the police to focus on neighbourhood crime’ rather than ‘waste time and resources worrying about hurt feelings online’.

The Essex MP is competing with prominent Cabinet faces including Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss, but she said her lack of experience is a ‘huge advantage’ because she does not come with ‘the baggage of so many of the decisions that have been made’ in recent years.

‘People want a fresh face, and they can’t have somebody who has been in Cabinet a very long time,’ she added.

Ms Badenoch said she has ‘a lot of respect’ for Mr Sunak and Ms Truss, but she is ‘not worried’ about running against them.

She said her Government would be guided by the ‘Conservative principles’ of a ‘limited government doing less, but better’ and a ‘strong nation state’.

Culled from Dailymail

[mariacallous]

While it’s too early to tell what the scale of the migration caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will be when all is said and done, it’s clear that the war has sent demographic shockwaves across the region. In addition to the millions of Ukrainian refugees who have fled to the EU, more than a million others are now in Russia, many of them victims of forced deportation. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of Russians have left their own country, fleeing the Kremlin’s wartime crackdown on dissent and Putin’s mobilization campaign. While these crises differ in scale, one consequence they share is that children from both countries are suddenly living in environments where they stand out from their peers — a situation ripe for bullying. Journalists from the student-run online magazine Doxa spoke to Russian and Ukrainian parents now living abroad about the difficulties their children are having at school. In English, Meduza explains what they learned.

Iryna (name changed) is from a small town in Ukraine’s Donetsk region. She moved with her husband and two sons to St. Petersburg after the roof of their home was blown off by a shell. The family would have preferred to go to Europe, but Iryna's elderly parents still live in Ukraine, so she didn’t want to move too far away.

“One [of Iryna's sons] is a teenager and the other is just a baby,” Natalia, a St. Petersburg-based activist who works with Ukrainian refugees in the city, told the Russian news outlet Doxa. (Natalia spoke to journalists on Iryna's behalf; Iryna was too scared.) When the family’s home was shelled, Iryna's older son used his body to shield his little brother. Soon after, he began suffering from what sound like symptoms of trauma. “He would freeze for a few seconds at a time, he slept poorly, he cried out in his sleep, and his legs would shake,” Natalia said.

Unable to find a job that paid enough for an apartment in St. Petersburg, Iryna and her family eventually moved to a border town in the Rostov region. Still, she and Natalia stayed in touch. When she would travel to the city so Natalia could help her with document issues, she would sometimes start crying while talking about her new home. “[Iryna would say that] there are portraits of Putin and Kadyrov everywhere, the population practically pray to them, and everybody supports the war and hates Ukraine, despite the fact that practically everybody has family there,” Natalia told Doxa.

Iryna's older son enrolled in a local school, but he only went for three days. “He came home with a smashed-up face: the classmates beat him up after he told them he was Ukrainian and proud,” Natalia said. “Now the boy refuses to go to Russian school, and Iryna is afraid child protection services are going to come for him. Now the teenager is remotely attending his Ukrainian school.” The boy’s classmates are spread throughout Europe and the unoccupied part of Ukraine; he’s the only one in Russia.

Natalia told Doxa that explicit bullying of Ukrainian children in Russia is the exception rather than the rule, and other volunteers agreed. For example, Alla, a charity organization employee who lives in St. Petersburg, said that it’s easier for parents who’ve been deported to Russia from Ukraine to send their children to school than it is for migrants from Central Asia, who often face racism and hostility in Russia. This is in part because even Russians who support the war usually don’t blame Ukrainians in Russia for simply being there: “If they believe [Russian propaganda] and believe that Ukrainans are Nazis, then they think, ‘These people are running from the Nazis,' and [so] they treat the refugees alright,” she said.

Nonetheless, many Ukrainian students in regions throughout Russia have faced bullying and harassment at school this year. Lida Moniava, the founder of the Lighthouse Charity Foundation, listed examples in a recent Facebook post:

Last week, two upperclassman girls spent five hours having a ‘chat’ with the director [of the school] and representatives of [security] ‘agencies.’ Their classmates had complained about an 'anti-Russian’ post one of the girls made on social media. [In another case,] kids were shouting at an overweight [Ukrainian] boy, ‘Did you sit in a basement and starve, fatty?’ Another boy, as part of an assignment for his social studies class, was asked to 'draw the flag of any country,' and drew the Ukrainian flag. His classmates snatched the drawing from him and stomped on it. One teenage girl started coming home from school sullen and depressed at the start of the year, though she said everything was fine. Then her mom looked in her backpack and found notes with threats from her classmates because of her nationality.

‘I’m glad my daughter is here’

The Russian parents living abroad who spoke to Doxa described a strikingly different situation. Initially, they said, their new acquaintances and colleagues asked how they could help their new guests; a few people were even given time off work. While some inevitably felt tension surrounding the topic of the war, nobody described experiencing as much as incivility from their new hosts.

Lidia, a Russian woman living in Tbilisi, said that there are six Russian-speaking children in her daughter’s class, not including her daughter. “One day, when they were talking to one another in Russian, the teacher came to them and asked them not to speak in the language of occupiers, even among themselves,” she told Doxa. “But none of the six children is even Russian. One of them, for example, is from Kazakhstan.” Overall, though, Lidia said that both the students and the teaching staff at her daughter’s school in Tbilisi are “so much less toxic than in Russia,” adding, “I’m really glad my daughter is here.”

Veronika, a Ukrainian woman who lives in Germany, has tried to take a more active role in her daughter’s school situation. “I don’t let my child be friends with Russian children. I develop an unfriendly attitude towards everything that comes from Rashka,” she told Doxa. Regardless of what their parents might tell them, however, Veronika's daughter and the Russian students in her class talk to each other — though “when parents come around, they separate,” said Veronika. “[One of the Russian girls,] of course, told her parents [that I forbid my daughter from talking to her]. But there was no conflict between us — maybe the parents [...] have decided it’s better not to react.”

[littlewitchwhore]

Okay guys, here is the first short story I'm posting.

TW: Rape, murder, some gore, racism, sexism, homophobia, a critique of the southern US, and christian references.

I do not condone actual rape, murder, racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. This is just fantasy.

And now, I present

The Hunting of Sonya.

It had been three weeks since the executive order was given. Three weeks of running from abandoned shack to drainage pipe to thickets of trees where she might be safe. Three weeks of praying to whatever would listen that she not be found. Tonight, it seems her prayers might not be answered.

Whatever progress social justice and racial equality might have made in the past years has been violently set back. It started with feminist and pro-black movements constantly being undermined by themselves and their lack of cohesion. With no set leaders and ideas, no reliable code of conduct, and no unifying goals, the members had no direction for their justified anger to be aimed at, and nothing to hold them back from extreme measures. The first major riot happened a year ago, when several peaceful protesters were shot by a couple of trigger happy cops. They didn't stay peaceful.

In one of the most gruesome incidents in recent history, those two cops, and a few others with them, were overwhelmed and beaten to death. But the death of those cops was just the tip of the iceberg. Within a month, riots were taking place in every major city in America, with from people on both sides of the argument killing, and burning the homes and business of those they fought against. A civil war seemed inevitable. Then the election happened, as it does every four years, and a very conservative candidate, on a platform of returning the country to a state of peace and prosperity, undertoned with heavy racist and sexist messages, was elected by a narrow majority. Within two weeks, there were soldiers in every city to keep the peace, and strict laws were enacted severely limiting the rights of groups that were deemed to be the aggressors in the conflict; blacks and women. And the new president was cheered, because the bloodshed mostly ended. The laws and military presence, he had always said, were to be removed after a period of time, when the country was stable again.

But after several months, and a couple isolated riots, the laws were not gone. They got worse. Blacks and women stopped being able to gather in groups larger than 5. They stopped being able to purchase and own firearms. They were even stripped of properties and business, since those could be potential staging points for further violent action. Then they stopped being able to vote after a local election put a violent but charismatic thug up as mayor, who then tried to mobilize a whole town to war against the new president. Then came the executive order that stripped citizenship and all rights from blacks and women. Black people were given a week to leave the country or be deported or turned to slaves. Women fared little better, being reduced to honored servants to white men, and bargaining chips in men's deals. In a year, America had gone from the bastion of liberty and social activism to an authoritarian, patriarchal ethno-state. And the rest of the world, being crippled by their own social and economic issues, and being utterly unable to fathom summoning the military might needed to take on the United States, let it happen.

Sonya was unlucky. She had had the misfortune of residing in Louisiana when the order came down. You see, most people had the decency to let the blacks pack up their things and make for the borders and airports. Most empathized with the plight of the now refugees, even. But the south has always been a little backwards, hasn't it? Large groups of would be slavers started patrolling and detaining blacks and lone women who they could snatch up, after all, it was only illegal to do so for a week. So when Sonya and her family had made for the border, they were taken by one of these bands of slavers. Her father had been beaten mercilessly, and killed when he fought back, her younger brother put in chains, and her mother and sister were gangraped in front of her. She would have suffered the same fate, but when they went to strip her, she caught a fat one by surprise and was able to run, handcuffed and clothes torn, into the woods.

She had barely managed to stay ahead of the men chasing her. It took her three days to finally find an old shack that had a rusty saw she used to cut the chain on the cuffs, so she could use her arms, though the cuffs themselves remained tightly around her wrists. She might have been able to saw those off too, had it not been for the owner of the shed finding her. He was not sympathetic. She had actually had to kill him to escape, after he pulled a machete off the wall and tried to kill her. She didn't escape unharmed though, and her leg was badly cut. At the time, she didnt worry about it too much, since she had to get away, but after a week of running and hiding in hovels and drainpipes, she feared infection. It certainly wasn't getting any better, and was starting to smell. And her killing the man made the men chasing her all the more obsessed with finding her. Now, she wasn't just a 'little nigger whore who needs to learn her place,' as one of them had said, she was a violent, murdering runaway slave.

Now, she finally had a chance to rest. She had made her way out of the more populated areas and was close to the bayou. She figured if there was a chance at finding help from other black folks, it would be in the places the white folk didn't like to go. Besides, her cousin Tyrell was probably still around the area, he always liked to fight and wouldn't have left. At least, that's what she hoped. She was hiding in another drainage pipe beside a small highway. It was raining, and the pipe was half flooded, but she hadn't seen but two trucks all day, so she felt safer and more comfortable than she had in a year.

She had just closed her eyes for a minute, hoping for some sleep, when she heard the engine approaching. It was a truck, by the sound of it, and it was moving slowly. It stopped very close to where she was hiding. Panic shot through her like a blade of ice. How could they have found her? Wasn't she well hidden? They never found her in a drainpipe before! She got very still, and listened intently while being poised to spring from her hiding spot and run as fast as her badly wounded leg would allow into the woods nearby, just across the pasture she was next to.

A door slammed, and a very angry sounding man's voice was soon heard berating his truck for its many faults as her went about adjusting something under the hood. After a few moments, the man cursed again and determined it was the battery that was the issue. Another moment passed, and the rain let up, letting Sonya hear things clearly. There was quiet, then a door opened, and the man said, “Hey Bubba, i'm broke down 'bout 15 minutes outta Reeves, down up on 113... Yea, daggum battery bit it 'gain, third time this week. You think you could come on up this way and gimmie a little ol' jump? Alright, well I 'preciate that, brother... yea, i'll see you soon... Yea, see you then.”

Sonya relaxed a little, fairly certain that she wasn't in any more danger than she had been, and waited for a while. After what felt like an hour, another truck, a much healthier sounding truck, rolled up. There was a greeting, and after what Sonya presumed was an examination of the broken down truck by Bubba, the truck was jumped off, rather unhappily. “Now listen, if this truck is needing to get jumped off this much, you either need a new battery, or your alternators busted. You need to get this truck to the shop and get it fixed tomorrow, if it'll even start.”

There was a couple minutes of bullshitting between the two men, and at one point, Bubba expressed an interest in finding a “little house slave” for himself, since his brother found one and was apparently very pleased with her. They seemed to be wrapping up when the first man, who was called 'Red' declared that he had to piss. Sonya jumped a little in surprise when the stream of urine landed right next to her. The pissing stopped abruptly.

“You heard that, Bubba?”

“I ain't heard shit but your fucked up engine.”

“No, somethings in that drainpipe. Coon or sumin.”

Sonya tensed up again. Was this it? Would they find her? Could she take on two of them? Could she outrun them? Those and a thousand more questions leaped through her mind in those few seconds. She readied herself to lunge at whoever stuck their face in the pipe first, then bolt for the fence. Maybe she'd be able to make it, she had always been fast before her leg was cut, even running track in highschool. For a moment, she wished that she was back then, only two years ago, but a whole lifetime ago, it seemed. She couldn't wish long, however, because a light was shone directly in her face, the flashlight from a phone, and one of the men right behind it. She lunged, fist first at the light, and was rewarded by a startled yelp from the man, followed by the soft crunch of a broken nose under her fist.

The man fell backwards, his phone flew from his hand, and Sonya landed on top of him. A moment later, she brought the metal cuffs around her wrists down on his face together, then jumped up, unsteadily in the wet ditch and on her injured leg, and bolted for the fence. The other man, on the road still, called out to Red, and started rushing over, still processing what was happening. Sonya had the upperhand though, and was scrambling over the barbed wire before the second man actually recognized that it was a human who attacked his friend. But Sonya was unlucky, and as she was getting her injured leg over, one of the wires snapped, and she felt hard, her injured leg being dragged across the remaining wires, cutting her, and tearing the strip of dirty tee shirt that she had wrapped her wound in, off. Minutes later, she was across the small pasture, at the treeline, and she risked a look back. They weren't chasing her, at least not yet. Sonya breathed a sigh of relief, then turned and took off into the trees. Even if they weren't hot on her tracks, they likely would be.

Sonya watched the sun rise the next morning, and with the light, she could inspect her leg. It was definitely infected, a puffy, angry gash that slowly oozed a foul smelling, dark green pus, tinged with streaks of blood. She needed antibiotics or she was going to have very serious issues very soon. Hungry and weak from irregular meals, dehydrated and exhausted, and badly injured, she needed a break, a safe place. The rest of that day was spent trying to find food, clean water, and someplace with medicine. She found none of those things, and as the sun was setting, she resigned herself to an awful night under a tree, and wished for more rain, so she could catch a few drops with her mouth. But Sonya was unlucky.

She dreamt of awful things that night, as she often did these days, when she could dream. She dreamt of monsters rising out of murky pools to chase her, and of spiders bursting from her leg wound to consume her. She dreamt of her father's face, broken and bloody, his lifeless eyes staring at her and he whispered “Run.” She dreamt of her mother and sister being raped, but the men doing it were red skinned and horned breasts, with massive cocks that writhed like boas and strangled her mother, and tore her sister in half. And she dreamt of the hounds of hell chasing her from the scene, and into a void that wasn't there before. She turned and the hellhouds were gone but they howled still, from somewhere in the distance. The howling seemed to get louder and come from all around her, and she turned about quickly, trying to find the source of it before snapping awake in a cold sweat. The howling didn't fade with the rest of her dream, no, it was actually getting louder. It was real. And Sonya had been in the area long enough to recognize the baying of hunting dogs when she heard it. She knew that they bayed for her, and without thinking about it, she took off away from the sound, clearly from the direction she had come.

She limped through the woods as fast as she could on her increasingly lame leg, the sound of the dogs growing louder and louder around her. They couldn't be far, at this point, she thought to herself, they were just too loud. Her lungs were burning, her leg no longer in pain, just numb, her heart pounded in her chest from fear and the exertion, and her head throbbing because she was too tired. She stumbled over tricky roots in the pale moonlight and fell hard, barely raising her hands in time to stop from busting her face open. As she struggled to her feet, the howls of the hounds like sinister thunder around her, she knew running wouldn't work. Maybe she could hide in a tree? Better than being torn apart by hounds with fiery eyes. She cast her eyes about wildly, looking for a tree she could climb, and settled on a young oak with low hanging branches. She scrambled up the tree as fast as she could, with great difficulty, as her arms were weak and shaky, and one of her legs was useless. She managed to get onto a good branch just as the dogs, three of them, rushed the tree, howling and snapping at her heels.

Whoever was hunting her, Red and Bubba, maybe the fat one she escaped, she didnt know, but whoever it was was no friend of hers, and they would be here soon. And she was a treed coon, waiting for the slaughter up here. What were her options? If it were one dog, maybe she could jump on it and keep running, but three? No chance. She couldn't wait for the men to find her, her fate would be sealed. Maybe she could move to another tree and hope the dogs don't notice? Not like she had another choice. She went higher, hoping to get more leaves and distance between her and the watchful hounds. Near the top of the tree, not as high as she might have liked, she found her chance to move trees, a pine branch that came very close to hers. She balanced as best she could on her branch, holding onto a higher one for support, and slowly crept her way along the branch to the end. She reached out and grabbed a thin pine branch above the one she wanted to step to, and hoped that it would support her if she lost her balance. One foot went across the gap, her lame leg's. So far so good, now if she could just...

A branch snapped, and Sonya fell. She landed on her bad leg and felt a hot gush from her wound as something burst, then the pain was too much, and she passed out, luckily, before the first dog's teeth found their mark.

It seemed to Sonya like an unnaturally long, and unusually uneventful unconsciousness. It was long enough and stark enough for her to actively think to herself that she should have woken up by now. Was she dead? It had been a long fall... Maybe the hell hounds has finished her off? Wouldn't surprise her, she supposed, but don't they usually drag someone down to hell? Maybe this was hell? Seemed too quiet though, hell was supposed to be bright and painful. So this was.... Purgatory? That wouldn't be so bad, she thought. At least here she wasn't someone's slave to rape. And her leg was better! At least, she thought it might be. She couldn't see anything, but she couldn't feel any pain either. She definitely still felt like she had a body, though. But death was supposed to remove you from your body, so...

She was woken suddenly, by a door opening. Her eyes flashed open and the light stung, so she shut them tight again. Then her head burst into pain from somewhere inside, and she became aware of the rest of her pain too. Her hand stung like it had been flayed, the left side of her chest ached, and her wrist was almost certainly broken. Her leg, however, didn't hurt much at all, just throbbed slightly in time with her heartbeat. She groaned as the pain hit her, and she felt woozy and sick.

“Well, look who's up. My you gave quite a fight. Oh no, don't you try and move yet.” Sonya had, of course, tried to get up, but the effort was too much, and she merely rolled over and tried to vomit, but found she couldn't. “Yeah, when you gone and broke ol' Red's nose like that, well, we didn't take very kindly.” She opened her eyes again slowly, adjusting to the brightness of it all. The man speaking was Bubba, she recognized the voice. It seems that once again, Sonya was unlucky; this time because she wasn't dead. She managed to give the man a glare, to which he chuckled.

“Now, is that any way to treat the man who been takin' care of you? Why, I coulda' let them dogs go and have their way with your leg there, lord knows it smelled bad enough to be some sorta snack for 'em.” She looked at her leg, and saw it was bandaged properly, her hand and opposite wrist too. She also saw that apart from her bandages, and a large metal cuff around her good ankle, she was naked. There was nothing for her to cover herself with either. She looked back at Bubba, who was watching her closely.

“L...le...” She tried to speak but her throat was more parched than she'd known it could be. As her mouth tried to form words, her lips cracked painfully. “Bet you're mighty thirsty, ain't ya'?” Bubba said as he pulled a water bottle from a nearby case of them. He walked over to her, and squatted, so her was closer to her level. “Now, I don't care for things being the way they are. And I am sorry about you and your kin goin' through this. I had a few good buddies of the African persuasion. But I also had a brother, bout half a year back. Your kind decided his life was worth less than a message.” Bubba unscrewed the bottle of water and put it down, just outside of Sonya's reach. “You're lucky you're a pretty little negress. Means you might not have such a bad life, if you ever learn how to act right. Time's they are a-changin'. Now you gotta get used to that fact real quick. You can't be doing that runnin' 'roun' throwin' hands business no more. You are a slave now. You act nice and you look pretty, and you don't throw no fit when a man decides you're better used in bed than the kitchen. You got that?”

Sonya glared again at him, but she didn't have much strength left to try to fight the notion, nor did she think she would get any water if she did. She begrudgingly nodded, to which Bubba smiled. “Good. Now imma' give you this water here, and you're gon' sip it real slow like, because you drink too much at once and you're gonna throw up. Then, imma' go and find you something to eat, so you don't waste away there. And when I come back, you're gonna thank me for being so nice and considerate, and for my attentive care to your wounds.” He moved the water where she could reach it, and then walked out, closing the door behind him. Sonya grabbed the water and sipped, as she was bid, since that was all good advice. The cool water actually hurt going down, but she had never known something so wonderful before.

She was alone in the room now, sipping water as fast as she figured she could keep it down. It was a small room, dark brown carpet only a few shades lighter than her skin. The walls were fake wood paneling, the ceiling white and popcorned. The walls were bare, save for a single window, boarded up. There was no furniture in the room. The cuff around her ankle was connected with a thick chain to the only thing of note (besides the case of water by the door) in the room, a large chest freezer, which the sat on top of the chain, effectively keeping her leashed. She tried to think of some way to escape, but her options seemed very limited. And until she had some strength back, there was no way she could get far, even if she did find a way to leave.

Her planning was disturbed by Bubba coming back, this time carrying a paper plate with a sandwich and some chips on it, The breakfast of kings. He walked over and placed the plate down where he had put the bottle of water, just out of her reach. “Now, I reckon you can speak again, since most of that water is gone. As I recall, you owe me some gratitude.” She looked at him, and with sincerity, she said “Th-thank you. For my leg, and the water.” Then, “Please, let me go. I didn't do nothing to deserve this.”

Bubba gave her a look, not cruel or uncaring, a look that was close to sympathy. “I know, I don't believe that half of your kind did. But if I were to let you go, how far do you reckon you'd make it on that leg of yours? Oh I cleaned it up, been rubbing it with antibiotic cream, even got my vet to come stitch it up a bit. But you ain't gonna be using that leg for another week, if you're lucky.” He gave her a look, up and down, “You don't strike me as the lucky type.” He sighed. “And before you ask me to try to sneak you out of the country, you should know that all the borders are locked down tighter than a faggot's jeans. No, you're stuck here, and that's all she wrote 'bout that.” The way he said it was soft, like he was trying to be kind about delivering such horrid news. He gently pushed the plate of food withing her reach. “You best get that food in you, gotta get some strength to heal up, else you wont be as useful to your new owner. You're gonna be safe here while you heal up, and after that, the boys and I are gonna make sure you know to act civil and can perform the duties that men are lookin' for in a house slave.”

Over the next week or two, Sonya couldn't quite tell because of the lack of sunlight, Bubba proved to be a rather hospitable captor. He was never cruel to her, ensured that she was fed and well hydrated, and took special care of her injuries. He had even given her a small pillow and an old blanket, but warned her that she shouldn't get used to comforts like that. And perhaps most notably, he never touched her but to clean and bandage her wounds. She was kept naked, and told “You're probably gonna be kept naked wherever you go, and if I were to give you any clothes, they'd just be taken from you. No, better to get used to being on display now.” when she asked for a shirt. But despite her nakedness, Bubba didn't stare at her either. Maybe he really did feel bad about this whole thing. Not that it stopped him from selling her, that's just business. The world changed, and Bubba was quick to adapt to what brought home bread. But for a time, she was safe, and could process what had happened. She cried herself to sleep nightly, and would often weep in her waking hours. Her dreams were mostly memories, always ending with that awful night, her father's face with dead, sightless eyes, her mother's look of grim determination and resignation, her sister's tear streaked screams. Sonya doubted she would ever forget, and knew that she would never forgive. She decided that her survival was now a matter of biding her time, staying as safe as she could, waiting for a chance to escape the country. Or maybe she'd be able to last until the global community worked together to get fix the atrocities committed in the past year. Either way, running wasn't an option for her. She had to endure.

The peaceful time with Bubba was short lived, because once she was mostly healed, Bubba brought 'the boys' over. Three of them, Red being among them, clearly identified by the recently broken nose and a fresh scar on his brow. Bubba spoke first. “Now, you know how things are, and what you need to do. Show these boys here that you ain't got no fight, and they're like to take it easy on you. 'Cept Red, he's still mad about his nose, even if it does make him look better.” The guys chuckled and Bubba gave one last look at her, laden with meaning, then left and closed the door. The remaining men started really looking at her, lust obvious in their eyes.

It was quiet for a long moment before Sonya stood up and, resigning herself to endurance, bent over the freezer, closed her eyes, and started to pray.

[route22ny]

What My Korean Father Taught Me About Defending Myself in America

Born in 1939 during what would be the last years of the Japanese colonial occupation of Korea, my father, Choung Tai Chee, also called Charles or Chuck or Charlie, came to the United States in 1960. He was flashy, cocky, unafraid, it seemed, of anything. Wherever we were in the world, he seemed at home, right up until near the end of his life, when he was hospitalized after a car accident that left him in a coma. Only in that hospital bed, his head shaved for surgery, did he look out of place to me.

A tae kwon do champion by the age of 18 in Korea, he had begun studying martial arts at age 8, eventually teaching them as a way to put himself through graduate school, first in engineering and then oceanography, in Texas, California, and Rhode Island. He loved the teaching. The rising popularity of martial arts in the 1960s in Hollywood meant he made celebrity friends like Frank Sinatra Jr., Paul Lynde, Sal Mineo, and Peter Fonda, who my father said had fixed him up on a date with his sister, Jane, in the days before Barbarella. A favorite photo from his time in Texas shows him flying through the air, a human horseshoe, each of his bare feet breaking a board held shoulder high on each side by his students.

When I complained about my wet boots during the winters growing up in Maine, he told me stories about running barefoot in the snow in Korea to harden his feet for tae kwon do. His answer to many of my childhood complaints was usually that I had to be tougher, stronger, prepared for any attack or disaster. The lesson his generation took from those they lost to the Korean War was that death was always close, and I know now that he was doing all he could to teach me to protect myself. When I cried at the beach at the water’s edge, afraid of the waves, he threw me in. “No son of mine is going to be afraid of the ocean,” he said. When I first started swimming lessons, he told me I had to be a strong swimmer, in case the boat I was on went down, so I could swim to shore. When he taught me to body-surf, he taught me about how to know the approach of an undertow, and how to survive a riptide. When I lacked a competitive streak, he took to racing me at something I loved—swimming underwater while holding my breath. I was an asthmatic child, but soon, intent on beating him, I could swim 50 yards this way at a time.

For all of that, he was an exceedingly gentle father. He took me snorkeling on his back, when I was five, telling me we were playing at being dolphins. There he taught me the names of the fish along the reef where we lived in Guam. He would praise the highlights in my hair, and laugh, calling me “Apollo.” And as for any pressure regarding my future career, he offered something very rare for a Korean man of his generation. “Be whatever you want to be,” he told me. “Just be the best at it that you can possibly be.”

Only when I was older did I understand the warning about being strong enough to swim to shore in another context, when I learned the boat he and his family had fled in from what was about to become North Korea nearly sank in a storm. In Seoul as a child, he scavenged food for his family with his older brother, coming home with bags of rice found on overturned military supply trucks, while his father went to the farms, collecting gleanings. His attempts to teach me to strip a chicken clean of its meat make a different sense now. I had thought of him as an immigrant without thinking about how the Korean War made him one of the dispossessed, almost a refugee, all before he left Korea.

When I began getting into fights as a child in the U.S., he put me into classes in karate and tae kwon do for these same reasons. He loved me and he wanted me to be strong. I just wasn’t sure how I was supposed to take on a whole country.

We moved to Maine in 1973, when I was six years old. My father had taken us back to Korea after I was born, to work for his father, and then moved us around the Pacific—from Seoul to the islands of Truk, Kawaii, and Guam, in his and my mother’s attempts to set up a fisheries company. Maine was his next experiment, and not coincidentally, my mother’s home state. On my first day of the first grade, in the cafeteria, after a morning spent in what seemed like reasonably friendly classes, my troubles began when I went up to take an empty seat at a table and the blond haired, blue-eyed white boy seated there looked up with some alarm and asked me, “Are you a chink?”

“What’s a chink?” I asked, though I knew it wasn’t a compliment. I had never heard this word before.

“A Chinese person. You look like a chink. Is that why your face is so flat?”

This was also the first day I can remember being insulted about my appearance.

“I am not Chinese,” I said that day, naively. In a few years I would learn I was in fact part Chinese, 41 generations back, but at that moment, I tried to explain to him about how I was half Korean, a nationality and situation he had never heard of before. Half of what? And so this was also the first day I had to explain myself to someone who didn’t care, who had already decided against me.

He was a white boy from America, and he was repeating insults that seem to me to have come from a secret book passed out to white children everywhere in this country, telling them to call someone Asian “Chink,” to walk up to them, muttering “Ching-chong, ching-chong.” To sing a song, “My mother’s Chinese, my father’s Japanese, I’m all mixed up,” pulling their eyes first down and then up and then alternating up and down.

I was struck, watching Minari a few months ago, when the film’s Korean immigrant protagonist, David, is asked by a white boy in Arkansas in the 1980s why his face is so flat. “It’s not,” David says, forcefully—so many of us have this memory of someone saying this to us and responding that way. Why did a boy in Arkansas and a boy in Maine, in their small towns thousands of miles apart, before the internet, each know to make this insult?

When I got home from that first day at school, I asked my mother what the word “Chink” meant, and she flinched and covered her mouth in concern.

“Who said that to you?” she asked, and I told her. I don’t remember the conversation that followed, just the swift look of concern on her face. The sense that something had found us.

I was the only Asian-American student at my school in 1973, and the first many of my classmates had ever met. When my brother joined me at school three years later, he was the second. When my sister arrived, four years after him, she was the third. My mother is white, a blonde-haired, blue-eyed American, born in Maine to a settler family. I have six ancestors who fought in the Revolutionary War, but none of them had to fight this. I don’t know how to separate the teasing, harassment, and bullying that marked my 12 years of life there from that first racist welcome. It makes me question whether I really had a “temper” as a child, as I was told, or whether I was merely isolated by racism among racists, afraid and angry?

My father dealt with racism throughout most of his life by acting as if it had never happened—as if admitting it made it more powerful. He knew bullies loved to see their victims react and would tell me to not let what they said upset me. “Why do you care what they think of you?” he would say, and laugh as he clapped me on the shoulder. “They’re all going to work for you someday.”

“Don’t get even, get ahead,” was another of his slogans for me at these times. As if America was a race we were going to win.

Two decades after his death, writing in my diary while on a subway in New York City, I began counting off all of my activities as a child—choir, concert band, swimming, karate and tae kwon do, clarinet, indoor track, downhill and cross country skiing—and I asked myself if my parents were trying to raise Batman. Then I looked down to the insignia on my Batman t-shirt, and I laughed.

These lessons my father gave me—to be the best you can be, to fight off your enemies and defeat them, to swim to safety if the boat sinks, and in general toughen yourself against everything that would harm you—these I had absorbed alongside certain unspoken lessons, taken from observing his life as a Korean immigrant. To have two names, one American, known to the public, and one Korean, known only to a few intimates; to get rid of your accent; and to dress well as a way to keep yourself above suspicion. Did I need to train like a superhero just to be a person in America? Maybe.

But if I thought of superheroes, it was because my father was like one to me, training me to be like him.

One legend I heard about my father when I was growing up is the story of a night he was being held up at gunpoint, while he was unpacking his car. Whoever it was asked him to shut the trunk and turn around and raise his hands in the air. He agreed to, slamming the car trunk down so forcefully, he sank his fingertips into the metal.

By the time he turned around, the would-be stick-up artist was gone.

He would often ask me and my brother to punch him, as hard as we could, in his stomach. He was proud of his abdominal strength—it was like punching a wall. We would shake our hands, howling, and he would laugh and rub our heads. One time he even used it as a gag to stop a bully.

A boy on my street had developed the habit of changing the rules during our games if his team started losing. We had fights over it that could be heard up and down the street, and one day I chased him with a Wiffle bat, him laughing as I ran. My father stepped in the next time he tried to change the rules during a game and prevented it, telling him all games in his yard had to have the same rules at the beginning as the end—you couldn’t change them when you were losing. When the boy got mad, he said, “I bet you want to hit me, you should hit me. You’ll feel better. Hit me right here, in the stomach, as hard as you can.”

The boy hauled off and punched my dad in the stomach. I knew what was coming. The boy went home crying, shaking his hand at the pain. His mom came over and they had a talk. The rule-changing stopped.

I tried teasing my classmates back after being told to by my father. Stand-up as self-defense requires practice, though: During a “Where are you from?” exercise in the second grade, I told my classmates and teacher I had “Made in Korea” stamped on my ass, which elicited shocked laughter and a punishment from my teacher. I remember the glee when I called a classmate an ignoramus, and he didn’t know what it meant—and got angrier and angrier when I wouldn’t tell him, demanding that I explain the insult. When told to go back to where I came from, I said, “You first.”

Increasingly, I just hid, in the library, in books. When given detention, I exulted in the chance to be alone and read. I was an advanced student compared to my classmates, due in part to my mother being a schoolteacher, and I learned to make my intelligence a weapon.

The day several boys held me down on my street and ran their bicycles over my legs, to see if I could take it, as if maybe I wasn’t human, that felt like some new horrible level. I don’t remember how that ended or if I ever told anyone, just the feeling of the bicycle tires rolling over the skin of my legs. The day I bragged about my father being a martial artist to my classmates, they locked me in the bathroom and told me to fight my way out with kung fu, calling me “Hong Kong Phooey,” after the cartoon character, as they held the door shut. This was the fourth grade. After I got out of that bathroom and went home, I told my father about it, and he told me it was time to take tae kwon do. I had to learn to defend myself.

I would never be like him, never break boards like him, but for a while, I tried. I still cherish the day he gave me my first gi and showed me how to tie it. I learned I had a natural flexibility, which meant I could easily kick high, and I took pride in my roundhouse and reverse roundhouse kicks. But after a few years, my father took issue with a story he’d heard about my teacher’s arrogance toward his opponents, and he pulled me out of the classes. “It is very dangerous to teach in that spirit,” he told me. And he said something I would never forget. “The best fighter in tae kwon do never fights,” he said. “He always finds another way.”

I have thought about this for a long time. For the ordinary practitioner, tae kwon do and karate prepare you to go about your life, aware of what to do in case of assault. They offer no guarantee, just chances for preparedness in the face of the violence of others as well as the violence within yourself. At the time I felt my father was describing the responsibility that comes with knowing how to hurt someone, but I came to understand it as a principled if conditional non-violence, which, in this year of quarantine and rising racist violence, is one of the clearest legacies he left to me.

Like many of us, I have been trying to write about these most recent attacks on Asian-Americans, some of them in my old neighborhood in New York, and I keep starting and stopping. How do we protect ourselves and those we love? Can writing do that? I know I learned to use my intelligence as a weapon to keep myself safe from racists, starting as a child, and suddenly it doesn’t feel like enough. The violence is like a puzzle with many moving parts, but the stakes are life and death. “You’re really going to homework your way through this one?” I keep asking myself. The people attacking Asians and Asian Americans now are like the boy I met on my first day in the first grade. They don’t care whether or not we are actually Chinese—the primary experience Asian Americans have in common is mis-identification. The person who gets a patriotic ego boost off of calling me a “chink” isn’t going to check if they’re right about me, and I don’t imagine they’ll stop their fist or their gun if I say, “You’re just doing this because of America’s history of war in Asia,” even though we both know this is true. And so I have been thinking of my father and what he taught me.

The most overt way my father fought racism in front of me involved no fighting at all. He founded a group called the Korean American Friendship Association of Maine, which helped new Korean immigrants move to Maine and find work, community, and housing, along with offering lessons on how to open bank accounts, pay taxes, file immigration paperwork, and get drivers’ licenses. For both of my parents, community organizing, activism, and mutual aid like this were commitments they shared and enjoyed and passed along to us, their children, and this led to much of my own work as an activist, teacher, and writer. I am not my father, but I am much as he made me.

There’s a difference between fighting racists and fighting racism. Where my father stayed silent, I have learned I have to speak out, which has felt, even while writing this, a little like betraying him. And as a biracial gay Korean American man, I don’t experience the same identifications or misidentifications he did. I am mistaken for white, or at least “not Asian,” as often as I’m mistaken for Chinese, and have felt like a secret agent as people speak in front of me about Asians in ways they would not otherwise. I learned most of my adult coping strategies for street violence from queer activist organizations after college.

Even as I write, “I wonder if he ever felt fear living in America,” it feels like a betrayal, especially as he isn’t around for me to ask him. I think again about how my father always made a point of dressing well, for example, but it always felt like more than that. Men wearing suits as a kind of armor, that isn’t so strange. He had his suits made at J. Press, wore handmade English leather shoes—shoes that fit me. I sometimes wear them for special occasions. Among my favorite objects of his is a monogrammed J. Press canvas briefcase, the name “CHEE” in embossed leather between the straps. After his father gave him an Omega Constellation watch when I was born, he eventually acquired others. For a time I thought he did this aspirationally, but most of his family in Korea is like this: Well-dressed, with a preference for tailoring and handmade clothes. All of my memories of my uncles coming from the airport to visit us involve them arriving in their blazers.

The first time I followed my father’s advice to wear a sports jacket when flying, I received a spontaneous upgrade. I didn’t have frequent flyer miles and the person checking me in was not flirting with me either. There was nothing but the moment of grace, and the feeling that my father, from beyond the grave, was making a point as I sat down in my new, larger, more spacious seat. Because I had never tried out this advice while he was alive.

Like much of my father’s advice, it came from his keen awareness of social contexts, and it worked. His wardrobe came from the pleasure of a dare more than a disguise. You don’t acquire a black and gold silk brocade smoking jacket in suburban Maine because you want to fit in with your white neighbors. Sometimes his clothes were a charm offensive, sometimes just a sass. The jacket advice may well have been an anticipation of racist treatment, of a piece with perfecting his English so he had no accent, and raising us to speak only English. My mother spoke more Korean to us as children than he did—a remnant of her time living in Seoul.

Now that I am old enough to choose to learn Korean, I still feel like a child disobeying him, just as I do when I dress too casually, or acknowledge that I’ve experienced racism. I know I am just making different choices, as you do when you are grown, but also, I am stepping out from behind his program to protect myself. I feel the fears he never spoke about, and instead simply addressed with what now look like tactics. At these moments I miss him as much as I ever do, but especially for how I would tell him, this may have protected you. It won’t protect me.

In my kitchen the other day, as I was making coffee, I fell into the ready stance, with my right foot back, left foot forward, and snapped my right leg up and out in a front snap kick. This is the basic first kick you learn in tae kwon do. And you do it again, and again, and again, until it is muscle memory. You move across the room this way and then turn to begin again.

I wasn’t sure if my form was exactly right, but it felt good. Memories came back of the sweaty smell of the practice room, the other students, the mirrors on the walls, the fluorescent lights. All those years ago, I had thought my father had put me in those classes in order to become him, but as I sent my practice kicks through the air, I remembered how even learning them made me feel safer, protected at least by the knowledge that he loved me. I could not have said this at the time, but after those attacks, I had feared I wasn’t strong enough to be his son.

I still fear that. I suppose it drives me, even now. It is dehumanizing to insist on your humanity, even and perhaps especially now, and so I am not doing that here. Each time I’ve tried to write even this, a rage takes over, and then the only thing I want to do with my hands doesn’t involve writing, and I stop. But I know from learning to fight that hitting someone else means using yourself to do it. My father’s advice, about fighting being the last resort, has given me another lesson: You turn yourself into the weapon when you strike someone else—in the end, another way to erase yourself—and so you do that last. In the meantime, you fight that first fight with yourself, for yourself.

You may never be able to protect what you love, but at least you can try. At least you will be ready.

Alexander Chee is most recently the author of the essay collection How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. A novelist and essayist, he teaches at Dartmouth College and lives in Vermont.

[jewish-privilege]

...We reached out to black Jews (...) to understand their feelings at this wrenching moment and what their message is for the broader Jewish community. Here’s what they told us.

...April Baskin is a diversity consultant and racial justice director of the Jewish Social Justice Roundtable.

Personally in terms of my energy right now, I’m just exhausted. Just seeing all the suffering particularly in light of the people going out into the streets without a plan or adequate protections in place (friends, march marshalls, legal aid contact info, etc.), the poignancy of people whose politics otherwise have them mostly sheltering in place during the worst pandemic we’ve seen in over a hundred years, that they are compelled to take action — at their and our own peril. But it seems their thought is, “How can we not stand up?” As a Jewish social justice leader, I have a visceral, fundamental concern for people’s well-being in this moment — that people are very triggered and that this is all in the context of pre-existing heightened anxiety and stress because of the pandemic. And for black folks, whether it’s conscious or not, the sense of terror we feel for when is the shoe going to drop for someone we know, someone in our town, for us?

I am experiencing more white Jews sending me private messages. A lot of them are saying “What can we do?” and in time I hope we can advance our collective knowledge and education enough so it can become more of “I’ve been proactively learning from people of color and here is what I am doing,” or “These are the things I’m considering. I’m mostly leaning towards this one, does that sound like it’s in alignment with your vision?”

That said, it’s a step forward and it’s good, but it’s asking more of us as Jews of color to not only figure out how to maintain our jobs and do additional leadership and activism in this moment, but then also being asked to support and manage white Jews’ work during a time in which many of us are traumatized and heartbroken. But this is progress, and I would rather people reach out, however they best know how, than apathy and not doing anything or paralysis from fear.

...Yitz Jordan is the founder of

TribeHerald

, a publication for Jews of color, and a hip hop artist also known as Y-Love.

What am I feeling? Anxiety. That’s what I’m feeling. I had an anxiety attack on Friday. I live in the ‘hood, I live in Bushwick, so I’m not really geographically in the Jewish community, but I know that somebody on Friday for instance was shot not too far from me and I was terrified as to what the response to that was going to be, were cops going to respond and was rioting going to happen in my neighborhood?

And in the Jewish community, this is the kind of fight that I’m having: “This didn’t happen after the Holocaust, why are black people acting like this?” It’s that role of explaining over and over again to people who quite often don’t want to listen.

I feel like there’s the same split that’s going through America in ideological lines, is going through the Jewish community … whatever percent of Orthodox Jews that support Trump, you see it more from these people. When we say the Jewish community in general that also consists of people like JFREJ [Jews for Racial and Economic Justice] and Jewish Voice for Peace and these other organizations, but in the Orthodox world, the pro-Trump wing is where I’m hearing these types of conversations. And I’m seeing this, ranging from lack of knowledge to callousness regarding people of color. There are some people who genuinely don’t know, and to whom a lot of these issues are very new. Especially Hasidish people, for instance, this just isn’t part of the Shabbos-table conversation — police brutality, inequality, systemic racism. But you have some people who just show callousness.

Gulienne Rishon is a diversity expert and chief revenue officer for TribeHerald Media.

I am thankful for true allies, who understand that this is not the time to center their own experiences. I am thankful for true allies, who understand that the experiences they and their ancestors have had are to be used in this moment as empathy, and that no one is denying them their experiences in asking them to listen and learn.

But mostly, if one more white-presenting Jew tries to tell me today that they don’t have white privilege (not that they aren’t White, but that they don’t have white privilege) because they’re Jewish/the Holocaust/Jews got kicked out of schools, I might lose my mind. I should not have to deal with people telling me that my story (the Black part) doesn’t exist because my story (the Ashkenazi experience) exists. But I do. And I am confident that part of why G-d put me in the skin of a biracial Jewish woman descended from a kindertransport survivor, a WWII veteran who was kicked out of his Hamburg Gymnasium for being Jewish, and two Southern Black Virginians, is to help us as a people face our sinat chinam and take responsibility for being the light unto the nations by helping, not closing our ranks and denying the pain others feel because of the freshness of ours.

Facilitating difficult conversations about race is literally my profession. Yet, some days, I’m just a person behind a keyboard on Facebook who came out of our day of rest hearing that the world erupted in flames, and I look at the beautiful brown skin of my daughter and her parents, and I’m angry and afraid. I’ve worked so hard to have these conversations with grace when you’re caught up in your feelings about the complexity. On a day when it’s not about the complexity, but processing and mourning actual death, can you please give the same grace to mine?

...Anthony Mordechai Tzvi Russell is

a musician

who blends traditional Yiddish and African-American music.

Let’s get real here, American Jews: You are living in an Old Country, whether you choose to recognize it or not. The state-sanctioned violence visited upon Black communities happens in ghettos you can easily pronounce, in towns you visit without the aid of a tour guide and cities you reside in without a granted law of return.

So, who are you in this narrative, this country from which there is no real option of flight, this century which is your own, your heartless ruler, hands slick with the blood of children and refugees, the cavalries, maintaining “order” on your behalf over a people whose mere existence for centuries has been deemed disorderly?

Solidarity with Black people doesn’t require a radical act of historical imagination. You are here. We are here. You know what to do. Do it. Now.

Tema Smith is a writer and the director of professional development at 18Doors, an organization for interfaith families.

I’m deeply upset about George Floyd and also that he is not the first and not the last, and that it’s taken a murder so egregious to really get people out into the streets in this way, and get a lot of people to wake up to what happens unfortunately too frequently.

I also have deep gratitude for the moment that we’re in, for so many people who hadn’t previously spoken out are speaking out.

As far as the Jewish community, the number of people who either have spoken out publicly or who have reached out privately as people who just care and want to make sure that me and other Jews of color are feeling OK right now — and I think most of my friends who are Jews of color are experiencing similar things from their friends — is huge. Frankly, I’ve gotten messages from people who I’ve never corresponded with beyond public tweets, just reaching out saying ‘Are you OK?’ and a recognition that is in many ways at a new level.

This isn’t the first time that something like this has happened. This is the first time I’ve received messages from so many people and that makes me hopeful for that grassroots community level being there to support each other, and that is huge. And the fact that there is a growing chorus of voices in the Jewish community speaking up, that’s huge, and that people are showing up at protests, I can’t say enough of how meaningful it is to see that...

[jeonjk0504]

why didn’t you say anything about the racism bts have faced these past days :(

Hey anon!

I actually haven‘t been online here because of the racism debate. I was on twitter and was supporting it there on two accounts nonstop! if you want to follow me, my @ is also jeonjk0504 :)

You are completely right though, i should have spoken up on my platform here sooner, to educate my followers on this really important matter!

If i make mistakes or should word things differently, please let me know, as you can tell i‘m not native.

The short version:

Credits to @ squishykosmos (twt)!

What happened?

3 days ago, the german radio host Matthias Mattuschik from the station Bayern3 spew racist remarks about BTS because of their MTV Unplugged cover of coldplay. He is a fanboy of coldplay and only wanted to introduce their song ‚Fix you‘ but somehow it was necessary to explain to his listeners why it was an utter insult that BTS had an MTV unplugged concert (he called it paradox, because it‘s a boyband) where they were allowed to cover his favorite song. Coldplay allowed the cover by the way and even commented on it positively.

Here are two links from his original rant, translated in english:

https://twitter.com/bts_updates_ger/status/1365211269133971458?s=21 (Part 1)

https://twitter.com/atinystrawbery/status/1365052883771785219?s=21 (Part 2)

As a german i know that to other people our language sounds quite agressive in general, but this is a whole different level. This isn‘t said in a jokingly way, it‘s pure hatred.

He called BTS a virus against which hopefully there will be a vaccine soon, that their cover of coldplay is blasphemy and that they are little pisser who should get a 20-year vacation in North Korea. Considering the rising violence against Asians all over the world because of Covid, his speech is extremely harmful and normalizes hate against Asians apart from the fact that it was racism in it’s purest form. Why the wish for a South Korean Group to have vacation in the North Korean dictatorship is inhumane and racist, i hopefully don‘t have to explain further. He even said, he can‘t be xenophobic, because he drives a korean brand car (which turned out to be japanese). The new ‚i can‘t be racist, i have a black friend‘.

This also hasn‘t been the first time, in 2018 he made an antisemetic comparison between smoker and jews for which he got a little attention, but no consequences.

Furthermore ARMY dug up a picture on his instagram from 2020 with the caption ‚ Is more evidence needed?!?,‘

A short note:

What makes this even more infuriating is that the radio station is regulated by public-law and german citizens are OBLIGATED to pay for it. We literally are forced to pay money to a radio station that broadcasts openly racist slurs! And no, it‘s not allowed. They have policies that explicitly say they are not allowed to discriminate, they have to support diversity and have to be politically and economically independant.

Do they give a fuck? Apparently not really.

Did Bayern3 answer the hashtags and the pressure?

They did, first came a short nonpology where they said that the show, which Matthias Matuschik is broadcasting, is known for his direct and honest opinions and that he could have worded it better. They are sorry if anyone felt insulted, which is excusing the feeling of the fans, but not the act in itself.

After Army answered with the hashtag ‚Racism is not an opinion‘ and various media coverage surfaced, they posted a second ‚apology‘, where they -again- said that they are distancing themselves from what was said and Matthias has always been an avid supporter of refugees so he is very far away from being a racist. (Supporting refugees doesn’t excuse you from saying racist things though.) Matthias stated that he is shocked from the reactions, that he is ‚sorry if people felt what he said was racist‘ and that his family is getting death threats. (which is in no way acceptable of course.) They would review what was said so it doesn‘t happen again.

Here you can read the statements in german and translated in english:

First statement: https://twitter.com/bts_updates_ger/status/1365087239756259330?s=21

Second statement: https://twitter.com/bts_updates_ger/status/1365305564050382849?s=21

This would have probably been the beginning of a conversation, if Matthias wouldn‘t have went to facebook after his second apology to like a supporting post that basically stated that the topic is way overhyped and in the 80s you were allowed to say your opinion without people getting butthurt (this is a short form.) He completely revised his remorse literally the same day after the updated apology and supported a statement that was gaslighting the people who critized him. You can read the facebook post here:

https://twitter.com/traveltomyrm/status/1365321397342461957?s=21

Since then: Nothing. My mom told me yesterday they‘re playing dynamite a lot, i told her to switch the channel.

News Coverage

Thankfully, we got a lot of support from I-ARMY and K-ARMY, otherwise we wouldn‘t have been able to trend the hashtags day and night and kept them in the top categories in germany and worldwide. We also got a lot of support from international media who called out the racism and put them into context in really amazing articles. (Also K-Media and J-Media but i only have screenshots, no links) Here are a few of them:

https://rollingstoneindia.com/xenophobic-german-presenters-comments-about-bts-are-just-the-tip-of-the-racist-iceberg/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bryanrolli/2021/02/26/bts-were-once-again-the-subject-of-racist-on-air-remarks-and-received-a-pathetic-non-apology/

We even got celebrities like halsey, max, lauv, steve aoki, JJ Ryan, DJ Swivel, Liam McEwan, Zara Larsson, MTV UK, Columbia Records and some more bring attention to the issue and show their support for BTS in the face of racism.

This support was probably the reason why we even got a second ‚apology‘, because guess what? German media ain‘t having it. Since the beginning of our protest, i think i saw 2 articles in total which actually called it racism, various newspapers and online magazines were downplaying it by talking about ‚insults‘ and concentrating on Matthias calling BTS pisser instead of quoting the actual racist remarks he made. We got no TV news whatsoever. So naturally, german locals looking at this protest think that Fans are going on a rampage because their favorite boygroup got insulted.

It has been maddening. The radio station and host have been trying to sit this whole thing out for days, in hope we lose energy over the weekend and it‘s draining to not be heard or taken seriously. For me it‘s still a priviledged perspective, because i don‘t have to bear consequences when this thing is over, one way or another. But for Asians in our country, also some of my friends, this horror in times of covid will continue. The lack of serious German Media coverage has been frustrating and embarrasing to say the least, but also shown again, that the topic gets overshadowed by prejudices against KPop, the fanbase and Asians as part of satirical fun (which it isn‘t).

Why is that?

This is my personal take and not a deep analysis, just my personal observations: Germany might be progressive in a lot of aspects, but they still have deeply ingrained every day racism against asians and they have a huge problem realizing and admitting to that. We don‘t have a lot of asian representation and there is a huge alieniation from asians for a lot of german 50+ (also less, but those are the ones in power mostly). Racism against Asians is not seen enough and people don‘t empathize, partly because they‘re white privileged people who don‘t have to live with certain stigma, partly because they simply don‘t care to educate themselves about minorities in their own country. This ignorance is widespread, if it doesn‘t happen in front of your doorstep, it‘s probably nonexistant. It‘s also not only reserved for Asians, january 2021 we had a talkshow where 5 white german people talked happily about what minorities such as Romani people think as insulting or racist. They did get a lot of backleash because obviously they talk about matters, without letting minorities be part of the discussion, but real consequences? Nope.

I doubt that this protest will get Matthias Matuschik fired (which it should if you are openly racist on a public platform), because the pressure is too low and the radio station has shown with their first statement that they thought it‘s rather funny than problematic. But i don’t know what‘s going to happen. Apart from being an ARMY, i am an adult who condemns racism in any way or form. Why german media chooses to overlook the essence of the debate and makes it a hystercial fanbase issue is beyond me.

If you want to have a look yourself, you can follow German Fanbase accounts, such as @ BTS_UPDATES_GER for updates in german and english.

And at last, here is a thread on how german media reproduces Anti Asian Racism : https://twitter.com/storiesbythuy/status/1366073706817196046?s=21

German Armys are trying to come up with a plan to gain more attention for the topic at the moment, so we‘ll see how things turn out! Please support us if possible!

[krastbannert]

Works Masterlist

I had a masterlist page on my blog, but apparently on mobile - which, I would imagine, people use more regularly - it doesn't exactly work correctly. So, here's a post instead. This contains all of my works, both fandom and original. I'll update it as I remember to do so.

Feel free to pester me about any of them!

Avatar: The Last Airbender

Ashmaker AU

Ashmaker - V1 - They were all the same. They were refugees. Outcasts. Orphans made by a war started so long ago that peace wasn’t something any of them considered. But here, they had a chance to start over. And with a new life, for each one came a new name. Here, now, he’s Longshot - the refugee, the orphan, the archer, the Freedom Fighter.

But once, not so long ago, he had been someone different. Once, his mother had been earth, dirt, and stone; his father, smoke and fire and warmth. Once, his name had been Kazon. Once, he had been a citizen of Fire. And always, he had been a firebender. But no matter who he was or where he went, the same question burned in his heart:

Will he ever be more than just another ashmaker?

Burn on the Pyre - A boy with a heart of fire searches for family, a girl with no one else searches for meaning, and a ragged firebrand starts a new war. A quiet war - a war in the shadows.

Across the world, a prince with half a face looks for the truth, a princess with half a heart and half a soul searches for home, and neither can see the revolution simmering at home.

All it takes to light the pyre is a one spark - and when the fire starts to burn, there's only one question: who burns with it?

------

Book one of the story of the Freedom Fighters, of a boy with a heart of fire, and how a world fought back.

Trigger warnings for depiction of fictional racism, and semi-graphic depictions of violence.

Waiting to be Seen - A small, fluffy moment, years post-war, between Longshot, Smellerbee, and some neighborhood kids (and their own).

The Good, the Bad, and the Life in Between

Twin Flames -  Azula meets her niece Izumi for the first time, and finds something in her that she hadn’t expected.

Lonely -  A stolen moment between Zuko and Azula. Takes place after Season 3 Episode 5: ‘The Beach’.

Lonely Together -  Another stolen moment between Zuko and Azula, after their loves have passed away.

to that loyal heart you’re forever sixteen -  Chit Sang had a daughter in the 41st Division. Zuko remembers her.

Drifting Up the Cliffs With the Rising Stars - Zuko left her behind. He knows it, regrets it, and wishes he could change it. When Mai escapes the Boiling Rock, he thinks they might have a chance to start over. But first they have to finish what they started.

those stories written in your skin -  Zuko, it turns out, has tattoos. A lot of tattoos. And each one tells a story.

Giving Thanks and Other Things -  Fourteen years after the war, the Gaang and their families gather together at the Jasmine Dragon for Ba Sing Se’s Mid-Autumn Festival, a holiday to gather together friends and family and give thanks for the blessings of life. In the midst of the party, Iroh takes a moment, and simply observes over a cup of tea.

but one cup of sake - Zuko is old, and his time has come. The day he knows is his last, he revives one more forgotten tradition before he passes.

the easiest thing in the world - It was such a simple question, something he should have thought of long before. But it takes Zuko actually saying it for him to start thinking about it. What are you gonna do when you face my father? When Zuko comes to him, Aang has to ask the question that’s been on his mind ever since.

A Mirror of Possibility -  A little moment between Azula and Kiyi, prior to Azula’s re-coronation as a Princess.

Look How Far We’ve Come - Somehow, from a thousand miles away, they can see it. A brilliant, shining spear of brilliant blue light. Zuko’s seen something like it before, and he can’t help but think of that day. The day that Aang came back - and now, a year later, they’re here. So much has happened, and it’s only brought them full circle - right back to the way they started.

Brave Soldier Girl - The story of Azula, and her long journey home from the war.

We Will Become Silhouettes

Hey, Pretty Boy -  The story of a boy and a girl, and a love that ends far, far too soon.

One Night in September - It’s been two years since Yue passed. Two years of grieving, of missing the girl he had married at just sixteen years old - and lost moments later. Two years, and he decides that maybe it’s time to stop running, and start again. And he’s not quite sure when he first started thinking of Suki that way, just that it feels right.

Sometimes a second chance at love is earth-shattering - and sometimes it’s just a random September night and a girl who can kick his ass.

A Place in Between -  In a strange place in between places, after a long, long time, two people reunite.

A Place to Call Home - In the City of Stars, a girl gets a chance to start over, in friendship, in love, and in life. Or, Mai finally wakes up in Ba Sing Se - and the reality of what she’s done starts to set in.

That Others May Live - Or, all gave some, and some gave all.

Go For Broke - Thousands of miles from home, Kanto makes his choice. The one that every soldier has to make at some point - stay, or go?

(Stay, he'll answer. Because someone has to. Because he has to.)

Hopefully, one day, he'll see his family again.

Maybe, one day, they'll forgive him.

------

Based on the true story of Hiroshi “Hershey” Miyamura, Sergeant (Ret.) United States Army, recipient of the Medal of Honor.

Miscellaneous

Taangst Week 2021 - the ghosts that we knew made us blackened or blue

Swing Life Away - A little adventure for Toph and Aang turns out to be something a whole lot more.

To Dance The Blade - Zuko watches his girlfriend as she dances, turning her swords into art, and he can’t help but admire what she becomes on the floor. (Written for Spring Maiko Week 2021 - Day 3, ‘Ethereal’)

Punch Drunk Love - Jet hadn’t meant to say it. He really hadn’t; sometimes, on a bad day, he just snaps.

Normally, though, it’s not to a beautiful girl who can also deck him.

And normally, he’s not meeting that girl again days later.

(If only he hadn’t totally fucked their first meeting up.)

All the Little Things - Tumblr prompt dumping ground.

home is your hand in mine - In the time they never thought they'd get, Smellerbee and Longshot have to decide what to do now that the war's over.

As long as they have each other, though, they're not sure it really matters.

------

Written for Avatar Sunken Ships Week 2021 Day 2 - Running Away Together.

Under Mistletoe and Falling Snow - During an emergency visit to the hospital, Kiyi manages to work a little Christmas magic for her brother.

Go For Broke - Thousands of miles from home, Kanto makes his choice. The one that every soldier has to make at some point - stay, or go?

(Stay, he'll answer. Because someone has to. Because he has to.)

Hopefully, one day, he'll see his family again.

Maybe, one day, they'll forgive him.

------

Based on the true story of Hiroshi “Hershey” Miyamura, Sergeant (Ret.) United States Army, recipient of the Medal of Honor.

Original Works

Songs of the Sea

Sins of the Past - When Corvin and Ilaera join the crew of the SS Tethyria Blue, they stumble upon a family they never expected - but like every family, this one has skeletons in the closet. Some buried deeper than others.

But it's only when they notice murders in every port they stop in - murders that seem very familiar to the ship's mysterious security officer, Skar, murders that leave him looking haunted, like he's seen a ghost - that the two begin to wonder: how deep are this family's secrets, and when they start looking, what will they uncover?

(Secret identities, disavowed missions, rebel warlords, and a trail of bodies leading back to one place: one of the darkest chapters of the Great War, and the Scorpion King.)

------

Book One of Songs of the Sea.

A Surprise Trip Home - Ilaera gets a present for her birthday, one she didn’t expect, from a source she never could have imagined.

Escaping the Shells - Just because Hakim had escaped the shells didn’t mean he was in one piece. Sometimes, in the night, he’s still there, tangled in the barbed wire.

(The war had taken something from all of them, even the ones who didn’t carry the marks where others could see.)

Told You So - Ilaera is standing in the rain - and Corvin just needs to know why.

The Dragon Prince

If the Sky Comes Falling Down -  Soren, for one last time, goes out to the spot he and his sister shared growing up. A quiet spot, just for them to think and laugh with each other, a place he hasn’t been in a long time - and runs into someone he didn’t expect, but always hoped to see.

Mass Effect

Scars -  Jack accidentally learns something about Miranda, and she’s not entirely sure what to do with it.

Tron: Legacy

Sunrise -  Quorra experiences the one thing she’s wanted more than anything.

Destiny

sinners to be saints

to live all our days once more - Every story has a beginning.

Every Guardian, a new life. A second chance, a chance to live their life again.

------

A REDUX version of my old work, "Rise".

"Trust me." - Petra takes a chance, and listens to her boyfriend.

(He, of course, takes the chance to give her a bit of a scare - but she thinks she made the right decision.)

------

REDUX version of my old work by the same title.

from under an ironwood - Lia does some digging - and gets Sig to admit to his greatest secret.

Sometimes, heroes are never made public. Sometimes they get dirty, so the world stays clean. Sometimes, they think they're anything but a hero.

Moments

First Kiss -  Petra and Sig go to a Christkindlmarkt (Christmas Market) in the streets of the Last City; Petra is nervous, and Sig does his best to help guide her through. By the end of the night, their relationship has gone somewhere neither expected, but both want.

Fishing -  Lia goes fishing at the Farm, and gets into some deep thoughts.

Rise - Every Guardian has a beginning. A second chance. A chance to live their life over. Every one of those beginnings is a little different. Some are born amidst tranquility, from the glittering shores of Terran lakes to the iron sands of Martian deserts. Others are born in fire, fighting even for their first breath. And for some…for some, their second chance is not their first resurrection, and it is not given, but earned in blood.

Trust Me -  Another day, another adventure with Sig.

Six Wounds -  The five times Lia heals Sykron, and the one time he heals her.

The Abyss -  In the aftermath of the Battle of Six Fronts, Sig wanders the empty streets of the Last City. He wanders, gazing at the devastation, and ponders the cost to the survivors…and to himself.

Dragon Age

Drips, Drops, and Drabbles - Thedas is a violent, terrible, funny, beautiful place. It would only make sense that the little bit and pieces of life for our favorite cast of assholes heroes are just like the world they call home, from moments of romance and laughter to violence and darkness.

Basically just little drabbles and short stories unrelated to any other writings that I get random ideas for.

Horizon

Maybe Even Two - Born an outcast, and suddenly thrust into a new role as a Seeker, Aloy - quite frankly - doesn't really know what she's doing. All she knows is she needs to find the woman who looks like her. Is she her mother? She has no idea - but she's the key. And, there is, she knows, a lot she doesn't have time for on this journey; after all, she has killers to track, and machines to master, all before breakfast.

But, as she travels, she slowly finds that there's a certain Vanguardsman who she'll always have a minute for. Maybe even two.

[littlemixnet]

I grew up in an area called Laygate, South Shields in the north-east of England. It’s near the docks where a lot of Arabs worked from the 1920s. My granddad Mohammed arrived around 1943 from Yemen. He worked as a firefighter in the merchant navy, before becoming a laborer at the docks. It was in South Shields that he met my grandma Amelia, whose dad was from Egypt. They were very much in love and settled in the coastal town. They loved the large Arab community, and everyone stuck together. Sadly, my grandma passed away when my mam was just four so I never had a chance to learn much about my Egyptian heritage, but my granddad talked about her a lot.While my granddad didn’t force his children or grandkids to follow his religion, he was a devout Muslim and wanted us to know about his faith and culture. We lived near the local mosque and he would tell me beautiful stories about when he went to Mecca. He would always cook for us, too – I loved his chicken soup with khubz, which is the best bread in the world. I remember him fasting for Ramadan, and during Eid I would wait for him outside the mosque and say Eid Mubarak to his friends as they came out, and they would gift me a pound coin. It was important to him that I learned how to read and write Arabic, so every Saturday I went to Muslim school. I have fond memories of it. I went from the ages of eight to 10, but I think I was unfortunately too young to understand how important it was to learn. I also went to church every Sunday, but faith-wise I don’t know what I believe in. I think, perhaps, that stems from having so many beliefs and opinions put on me.I had a happy childhood. My primary school was incredibly multicultural – there were a lot of asylum seekers and refugees from all over the world so I just felt a part of it. That changed when I was a teenager and went to secondary school. My granddad passed away and suddenly I felt like I had lost that whole part of me. He was the person I’d go to when I felt down. He made me feel proud of who I was – he was my line of understanding to my Arab heritage. I felt alone. At school, I didn’t fit into any group, and started to experience prejudice and racism. I was one of the very few people of color in the school, so from the off I felt like an outcast.Where I’m from in England, if you weren’t evidently black or white, you were put in this big bowl of one ‘other’ thing. I used to get called the P-word, which I didn’t understand as I’m not Pakistani. I was also called half-caste. During one incident someone pinned me down in the toilets and put a bindi spot on my forehead. There was a complete lack of education and understanding of different races and faiths. It affected my mental health. I became very depressed and it triggered the eating disorder I had throughout school.Looking back, I realize I experienced microaggressions even as a kid, whether it was being part of musicals in my hometown and having white powder put on my face to blend in with the rest of the cast, or not getting cast at all because there were no people of color in the musical. It wasn’t until I moved to London and into a multicultural environment that I realized how messed up it was. I was 18 when I moved, just after I did The X Factor [in 2011]. I went from being the token person of color to being in London, where it didn’t matter. All of a sudden I was thrown into the limelight [with Little Mix], and people didn’t know what I was, so I went along with it. I had suppressed who I was because I wasn’t proud. I had been bullied into thinking I should be ashamed of my identity, so I didn’t talk enough about my heritage in interviews. It makes me sad to think about it now.When I was younger, I didn’t see enough representation of Arabs in magazines or on TV, and when I saw people who looked like my granddad they were always misrepresented. There’s this stereotype of Muslims being terrorists. I regret now that I didn’t talk about it more, but I was young and scared. I’m trying to make up for it now. I’m more open to being that voice for people. I think it comes with being more confident in yourself, and more curious. My mam and me have started looking into our culture more and it’s something that is bringing us closer together. The Black Lives Matter movement and the war in Yemen has triggered a lot of trauma for my mam, who I think suppressed who she was for a long time, too. The past few months have been very eye-opening for us. We’ve talked more than we ever have about race and who we are. As an adult I’m connecting more with my Arab side – it’s a shame that it’s taken me until now to understand that. Being Arab is a beautiful thing. I’m trying to learn more of the language; in fact, during our US tour with Ariana Grande [Little Mix was one of the opening acts on Grande’s Dangerous Woman tour in 2017], I did an online Arabic course. One of my goals is to learn the language so that I can travel more to the Middle East. I get a lot of messages from Arab fans saying that they look up to me and that it’s lovely to see positive representation of an Arab woman in pop culture. The messages were one of the triggers that encouraged me to explore who I really am.When I was young, my grandad used to play Arabic songs for me, and I think it did influence me. When I’m in the recording studio people say they can tell I have Arab heritage because when I do riffs I must subconsciously perform them in an Arabic style, which is lovely. My granddad used to love hearing me sing – that’s definitely one of the main reasons I got into music. One of my favorite memories of him was when I bought him a Mecca-shaped alarm clock that played the call to prayer. He played it and started to cry – it made me realize how powerful music can be.It’s taken me too long to embrace my heritage and I wish I did it sooner. I want people to know that who you are is a beautiful thing – learn about your ancestors and educate yourself on your heritage. It gives you a purpose. It’s important for me to use my platform to be a better person and raise awareness, especially about what is happening now in Yemen. It’s not being talked about enough. I’m striving to be a better role model for my fans and be an artist that I would’ve liked to have seen as a young girl.

Jade for Vogue Arabia.

[off-in-the-moors]

Joseph Kavinsky analysis, part 2

aka no voice and no dream pack

Warnings: spoilers for the whole Raven Cycle, mentions of: drug-use, abuse, death, s*cid, xenophobia

Part 1 // Part 2

Before starting, I wanted to thank for likes and support, not only on part 1 but also on my other posts. I was writing this more for the catharsis, after months of seeing and not really speaking about a lot of stuff. It’s nice to know, somebody read it. Some say, Kavinsky is their comfort character and, well, he will stay with me for a very long time. But enough of that. Let's talk about the point of view, xenophobia and the Dream Pack.

PoV

The running motif in TRC is, all antagonists get PoVs. No matter if they appear in one book (like Whelk) or reoccur (like the Greenmatles). The reader gets multiple chapters with their backstories, internal thoughts and goals. This move by the author is a double-edged sword, on one hand we get a better understanding of them but on the other, by knowing them better they become less effective antagonists and the air of mystery and surprise of what they're up-to/what they know is lost. E.g. In TDT we are first told about Colin Greenmatle and what is he capable of, making him a good threat for our main characters. But when we finally meet him in BLLB, with his attitude and scenes like dissing Ronan's Latin grammar or making cheese crackers while his wife is held at gun-point, he becomes more of a comedic antagonist than a villain to fear.

But here's the thing: I already lied to you. In TRC, all antagonists get PoVs, except for Kavinsky. It's a odd exception from the rule, considering Gray Man in TDT and The Wasp Demon in The Raven King, also got PoVs. But why? There are two things to look at. One I already mentioned. By giving a character PoV, the reader gets better understanding of them. By not giving Kavinsky one, Margaret didn't give anything to make K or his actions clear or understandable. By not knowing his motivations, K is left to pure interpretations, but how the reader will do it mostly will be influenced by his demonetization. Of course, not everybody will just accept what the book tells them without thinking for themselves but most fans don't.

"Bang", he said softly, withdrawing the fake gun. "See you on the street."

Alone, this single line can be interpreted in many different ways. Is it K being angry and threatening Ronan? Or maybe Joseph breaking inside because he was proofen, he really has no one? It all depends on the reader.

Second, when asked on her tumblr, if she'll ever write anything from K's pov (in 2015, before The Raven King was published), M*ggie said she won't, because: she already explored that type of character ("the thoughts and motivations of a powerful, suicidal, creative person with few inhibitions") in Sinner (2014, spin-off/companion book of her older series, The Wolves of Mercy Falls, 2009-2011 for the main three) with Cole St. Clair; that writing through PoV of such character is emotionally and mentally draining for her (which is understandable); and even if she wanted to explore it again in the future, she would through a different character's lenses than K's.

Let's talk about St. Clair.

The characters of Cole and Kavinsky have some similarities: both are drug addicts, who are rich.

That's where they end.

Cole was a famous musician, having the stereotypical rock-star life (drugs, alcohol and sleeping with fans included) with good family relationships, while K was a son of a mobster who tried to kill him and a mother who was a drug-addict herself. While their perspectives would have similarities, there is also other problems. Cole St. Clair already got PoVs in his series and a stand-alone book, Joseph Kavinsky got nothing and will get nothing. Cole had friends that cared for him and helped him, Joseph Kavinsky had his Dream Pack (which whom we don't know what type of relation he had) and his customers who we can safely say, only cared for what he can provide them with, he tried to befriend or start a relation with Ronan who rejected even the idea of it and no one even reached out to him. Cole got his happy ending and (hinted at) a girl he loved, K got rejected by everyone and committed public suicide. (Now, I heard a opinion that K didn't commit suicide, because the dragon killed him. Here is the thing, K could move out of the way multiple times, even Ronan shouted to him to move. But he didn't. He watched the dragon fly towards him and just said "The world is a nightmare.". He choose death.)

People wanted K's PoV, because they wanted to know, what pushed him to do what he did in TDT. But, in my opinion, even if M*ggie gave K pov, she would use it to further demonize him than to make the reader understand him more. She already did write a whole post exaggerating and straw-manning the canon, just to also say "Kavinsky has a very logical backstory that leads him to this place". A backstory we as the reader never truly see and one she forgot to write into her book. At the end, she truly cared only about Ronan.

Xenophobia

The Raven Cycle is a very flawed and problematic series, there are already many other posts taking about racism, misogyny, lack of diversity and many other issues with it, but in regards to Kavinsky, I'll only touch on the xenophobia. (I could talk also about portray of metal-illness, but I'm not the person to talk about it and I would feel comfortable with it.)

Kavinsky is a stereotype of a Slavic person, one we see in American media since the Cold War, especially in 80s movies. The Evil Russian trope. The son of the mobster, drug-addict, forger who can get you anything even illegal stuff, a thief.

When describing Kavinsky, one of the things Ronan mentions is: "refugee's face, hollowed-eyed and innocent". One could argue, "refugee" has many meanings, but boiling it down, is a person who came to the country to escape and seek a refuge. Many people moved to America to find a better life, in the believe of the American Dream, and many of them where driven to do that, especially from ex-Eastern Bloc countries. Kavinsky's Bulgarian, unknown if an immigrant himself or a son of immigrants, but the point still stands.

About Blue’s comment "import from somewhere else" I don't need to say much. First, obvious: You don't import people, only foreign goods, like cars. Second: this shows, he is "the other" in the eyes of the characters.

There is more to it, then just the physical description. We need to look at the outfit he wears. White tank top, white sunglasses, a small earring in one ear and a gold chain around his neck. This gives two images: one of a typical douche-bag, party asshole and the rich kid; the second of a Slavic stereotype, especially of a Russian criminal. If Margaret wanted to make K even bigger stereotype, she would dress him like a dress/gopnik, in a tracksuit.

The thing is: M*ggie could had saved the situation if she had subverted the stereotypes. E.g. K didn't wanting anything to do with the crime live, his family was forced into by circumstances or K being the guy to get stuff from, but he isn't doing it for any gain.

The truth is, K being Bulgarian doesn't add anything to his character, except for xenophobia. (Personally, I tried to find where the surname "Kavinsky" came from. It is Slavic, that much I can tell you for sure, but the rest is my speculation and searching. My best guesses are: Russian (it appears most commonly in Russian, after USA and a use in Russia set novel) or Polish (because it has uncanny simulates to the surname "Kawiński", if it was anglicized like e.g. "Kamiński" into "Kaminsky"). This isn't a common surname and with Peter from the To All the Boys trilogy and the musician, it's hard to find any information.)

But for now, K's portray is one of the many issues.

The Dream Pack or the lack of it

The Dream Pack is the unofficial name for K's group, with whom he parties and races (the canon name is "Kavinsky's Pack of Dogs" which is ugh). They're unfortunately, a non-characters. It's bolt to even call them background characters. Their portray, or again, lack of it, leaves them as props, their only role is to be K's followers and to show K as a leader on a equal ground as Gansey. We're lead to believe, they are like Kavinsky, yet another raven boys, and to make are main characters so “not like the other raven boys”. Problem rises in connection to the previous point, out of four members, only one has an English surname.

Prokopenko is a Ukrainian surname and for his description, we get "ears like wingnuts", "crooked shoulders" and his voice as "milky with drugs". It's said he had "recently attained official crony status", and was noted being in close desecrate to K for a while. Later we discover Proko is a forgery, a dream creature like Matthew and Aurora. It's heavily implied the real Prokopenko is dead, but if K had something to do with it, is unknown. He is the only character to "chortle", which Margaret said she hates and also "fratty boys and the chortling men they turn into". From this we can deduce, that not only the Dream Pack and people at K's parties but all raven boys (with the exception of the main characters) were writen like this on purpose as the personification of everything M*ggie hates. We are also informed, he drives a Golf.

Skov, who according to a deleted scene, full name is Blake Skovron, is polish (or at least anglicized version of it). In said deleted scene he's described as "major asshole, minor bigot" (unfortunately I couldn't find it to confirm it). The only canon stuff about him is: he drives a RX-7 (Mazda RX-7).

Jiang is Chinese, making him one of three canon Asian characters we see in the series (not counting Henry's father, because he's just mentioned, same goes for the Vancouver crowd). Like Proko, his role is a little bigger. In the Raven King, after Ronan finally returns to school after a long time of skipping, he tells him: "Hey, man, I thought you'd died". Ronan doesn't respond, but tells the reader he doesn't want to see Jiang outside of his car, racing. The only other thing we know about him: he drives a Supra (Toyota Supra).

Swan is the only one with an English name, but all we know about him is: he drives Volkswagen Golf, one that matches Proko's.

(For future writers: what car a character drives, isn't a personality trait.)

With the already minimal diversity, this shows the non-Americans as the antagonists or at least "the worst". On the opposite side, we have our main characters. Richard Campbell Gansey III, who has the whitest and British name I ever saw; Adam Parrish, born and raised in Henrietta, Virginia; Ronan Lynch, son of a Irish immigrant, whose Irish identity starts and ends on tit-bits; Blue Sargent, who is half-tree and ambiguous, but was drawn as white by the author multiple times (Yes, I am aware of the Instagram post, but Margaret herself said, she isn't confirming anything that isn't already written in her books. She couldn't even confirm Adam's hair color and made a joke out of it.) The only exception is Noah Czerny, whose surname is Slavic (probably Czech), but this bares no effect on his character.

The Dream Pack are the whole communities babies, created by head-canons and fanons, their relations with Kavinsky and themselves are explored, who they are as people, their appearance, their interests... This is beautiful how many different versions and interpretations of non-existing characters is there. (I, myself also made a version for a rewrite, based partly on the fanon.)

But at the end of the day, the fans did the author's job of creating believe friend group and in the end, their only function was to show, Kavinsky is a king, just like Gansey.

[antoine-roquentin]

1952                

The [United Packinghouse Workers of America] takes its advocacy outside the plant and sues a Waterloo tavern owner for failing to serve Blacks. It was one of many tactics the union used to desegregate the city. One of its most effective strategies involved white workers going from tavern to tavern to order food and drinks. Their Black coworkers came in next. When the businesses refused to serve the Black workers, the white workers walked out. From the late 1940s through the ʼ60s, the union handled discrimination complaints at other workplaces, pressured hotels to desegregate, boycotted stores that wouldn’t hire Blacks and convinced the local newspaper to stop identifying race in crime articles only when the suspect was Black.

Jimmie Porter, a locally heralded civil right activist, was central to the union’s integration efforts. A native of Mississippi, he observed that while the racism in the North wasn’t as blatant, it also wasn’t too different from what he’d left. “I pretty well knew where I stood in Mississippi, and here, I had to be told and reminded,” he said in an oral history interview. “They had conditioned most of the Blacks who lived here to never look at how well they should be doing compared to whites who they had gone to school with, but to measure themselves by their country cousin.”

1954            

Anna Mae Weems becomes one of the first Black women to integrate Rath’s sliced bacon department, a bastion of white women working in a pristine environment. Born in Waterloo, Weems couldn’t understand why, after graduating from high school, she couldn’t get the jobs that her white classmates were getting. The union recruited her to further challenge the race and gender barrier at Rath. She soon became the shop steward for the bacon line.

It had been a long fight to get there. Black workers had often been assigned to the dirtiest jobs in the packinghouse. Black women were overrepresented in hog casings departments, where they “flushed worms and feces from the animal’s intestines,” one historian wrote. Meanwhile, Black men were frequently assigned to the kill floor, though the position had unexpected advantages. Whenever there was a dispute, the workers could stop the line, threatening to let the hog carcasses rot until the company resolved their grievance.

1956            

Rath’s employment peaks at nearly 9,000 workers. Thanks to the jobs at the packinghouse and at other factories, thousands of Black people moved to Waterloo from the South during the Great Migration. As Rath became an increasingly popular brand, the union ensured that the workers’ economic fortunes rose with it. By the mid-1960s, wages were the equivalent of $24 to $32 an hour in today’s dollars, helping create a Black middle class.

1967            

An upstart company, Iowa Beef Packers, introduces a product known as “boxed beef,” transforming the meatpacking industry. Instead of sending sides of beef to butcher shops, IBP workers stood side-by-side, each making a specific cut to disassemble a carcass moving down a conveyor. “We’ve tried to take the skill out of every step,” IBP’s president had told Newsweek in 1965. The new process sped up production and allowed the company to move its plants from cities into rural areas where livestock was plentiful and unions were scarce. Most large meatpackers would follow suit.

1968

The UPWA merges with the more conservative Amalgamated Meat Cutters as corporate power grows in the changing meat industry.

1979            

The meatpacking union joins an organization of retail and grocery clerks to form the United Food and Commercial Workers. Some meatpacking workers found themselves battling with their union as much as their employers. At some plants, members of old UPWA locals tried to push back against wage cuts, but the UFCW leaders sided with the meatpackers. “It was like a shot of whiskey. When we was the UPWA, we was little but powerful,” a union leader told oral historians. “Then we joined the Amalgamated and we got like a mixed drink. Now it looks to me like we’re a shot in a quart of Squirt.”

1985                

After years of financial trouble, Rath shuts its doors, contributing to an economic tailspin in Waterloo that deeply affects the Black community. Simultaneously, the 1980s farm crisis had taken a toll on Waterloo’s other big employer, John Deere, which laid off thousands. As the last ones in, Black workers were now the first to go, erasing hard-fought economic gains.

The civil rights movement had spurred the desegregation of Waterloo’s schools, but as in other cities, it prompted white flight. Without good-paying jobs, many middle-class Black families also left for opportunities elsewhere. Those who stayed faced bleak prospects. “You could have a master’s degree and be in Waterloo, and if you were Black, it was hard for you to find a job,” said the Rev. Belinda Creighton-Smith, senior pastor of Faith Temple American Baptist Church.

1988            

IBP announces its plan to build the world’s largest hog-slaughtering plant in Waterloo, promising 1,500 jobs for the struggling city. Many hoped it would provide work for hundreds of laid-off Rath employees, but some leaders had their doubts. The company had a reputation for mistreating workers and had been fined by the Labor Department for failing to report injuries. Willie Mae Wright, the only Black city council member at the time, was among those skeptical of IBP. But after meeting with community members, she said in an interview, she “went along with it knowing that people didn’t have jobs.” City officials approved the IBP plant.

1990            

IBP’s slaughterhouse opens to much excitement in Waterloo. But many of IBP’s initial hires don’t stay on the job for long. Some told community leaders they were overwhelmed by the speed of the processing lines, which left their hands numb. After several years, few in the local workforce wanted to work there.

1996

IBP looks elsewhere for workers. It recruits homeless people from shelters and under highway overpasses. It hires labor agencies to find workers from the U.S.-Mexico border, and appeals to California farmworkers who want out of the hot fields and a lower cost of living.

IBP also runs a recruiting operation in Mexico, buying ads on local radio stations and turning pharmacies, stores and car washes into application centers. The company eventually charters buses to transport workers directly from Mexico to its plants. While IBP insisted the workers were authorized, dozens were detained in two immigration raids on the Waterloo plant....

2018            

A financial news site, 24/7 Wall St., ranks the Waterloo-Cedar Falls metro area the worst place for Black people in America. The Black unemployment rate is nearly five times higher than for whites, and Black residents own homes at less than half the rate of white residents, the report notes. Despite the economic gains that meatpacking jobs had provided a generation earlier, Waterloo remains largely segregated, with a historically Black neighborhood bounded by railroad tracks on three sides. And many in the Black community haven’t fully recovered from the 1980s economic downturn.

2020                

An outbreak at the Tyson plant makes Waterloo one of the country’s biggest COVID-19 hotspots. The disease disproportionately affects the city’s immigrants, refugees and communities of color — a demographic heavily employed by Tyson. “This is their first attempt to get a slice of this American apple pie and then for it to be so bitter for them is a travesty,” said state Rep. Ras Smith, who represents the city’s east side. “I don’t want Tyson to overshadow what Waterloo is.”