#and it dealt with class issues + police brutality

[skeletons-in-ur-closet]

not the blog for this ik but i finished arcane s2 and i have Thoughts

[space-blue]

I still cant wrap my head around how vi eventually joined enforcers after years spent in prison and cop brutalities she experienced first hand. I’d try to rationalize it but The only logical reason i can think of is because of Cait and vi’s bias towards her that influenced her to join enforcers

I think, the issue that Arcane presents with Vi is one of archetypes.

Some fans have a tendency, even in my own posts notes, to defend and construct Vi as a real person. But she isn't. She's a fully fictional character, part of the great human art of storytelling.

I think that the issue at hand is that Vi's story as depicted in Arcane, doesn't follow very normal/standard/popular archetypes.

Her backstory is that her and her family are relentlessly harmed by cops, she spends half her teenage years in the worst prison. It would be a great backstory for someone like say, SILCO!!! Someone who goes on to hate Piltover and go to great and terrible lengths to oppose and fight them.

Transitioning her to her "game end state" is extremely hard, because her in-game status is that of a cop who polices her own people for Piltover;s sheriff. Ekko has barks that call her out for betraying Zaun. Vi used to have barks that were police brutality jokes. She has art where she's a US like donught eating cop. It's a vibe, and not a vibe that screams "I was abused by police my entire life!"

In the show we're not there yet, and we may not even go there at all (I'm of the opinion that if they make her Vander 2.0 it'll be more palatable and also provide a new skin to rack the money in with.)

But the transition is pretty brutal because they hurried to sell us on a Caitvi romance in season 1.

I think more people now are feeling iffy about Vi's actions because she goes along with the whole gassing operation, but IMO it is consistant with what we see from her in season 1. I'll explain.

I've seen the argument around that she only joins because the other option would be worse and she's basically a limiter for Cait, but no, sorry, she could argue with Cait for Zaun's protection, and be happy she decides on a smaller strike force while being horrified/opposed to the use of the Gray. She could be grateful Cait reduces her actions and still refuse to join her. She could not kiss her in the pipes while they probably both smell of mustard gas lol.

All of Vi's actions put together depict a picture so far, out of 12 episodes, and that picture just isn't very heroic or very nice. It's also very much not archetypal, so it's a lot more unpredictable. Some of her fans also have a tendency of defending her every action instead of embracing the darkness we see peeking through, which muddies the waters.

But I'm now pretty comfortable in my assessment that she's a good Vander 2.0.

She had a hard and broken childhood, ends up hardening and getting skills in prison, but not class consciousness. This isn't shocking, because Silco is taking over Zaun, and she hates that everyone seems to be working for him. Vi has zero awareness that her young self and Silco share the exact same goals (a Zaun that's not inferior to Piltover, where someone like Powder could live happy and safe).

Worse, Vi has her priorities all mixed up. The story is just complex and human. Vi is forced to raise Powder and also lead Claggor and Mylo her entire childhood. That's not great... She basically didn't get to be a child at all. Vander put a shit ton of responsibilities on her. We know from the Enemy video that she was pretty rough at times, which is a realistic depiction of a kid struggling under a lot of pressure in a rough environment. Then the sister who is so difficult to care for goes and kills the whole family seconds before they could all escape, the blow is dealt, they're separated…

And when freed, Vi has now 3 things on her mind:

-find her sister,

-kill Silco and destroy his operation/get revenge,

-and, oh wow that cop lady sure is hot!

Rescuing Zaun from Piltover is nowhere in her head. She complains about the Lanes having easily fallen to Silco, but at no point does the show hint that Vi may have greater goals of rescuing the Lanes from Silco.

Despite Vander's dying wish being "Take care of Powder", Vi's priority list is spoken right to Silco's face: She's going to find Jinx and undo what he's done to her head, but FIRST she will dismantle his business. Like, do you think Vander would be good with that agenda? lol

And don't come into my comments to argue that she's only saying this because she's facing Silco. Vi follows up by hitting Silco's factories and then wiping out the Last Drop and beating Sevika. Let's not forget name dropping her sister to the Council.

Saving Powder just ISN'T HER PRIORITY!!!

So what is her main drive? If it is "getting revenge" then the enemy of her enemy is her friend. Ekko, and Cait.

Vi going to Ekko's Firelight hideout and not becoming an instant member and not returning to them after season 1 also speaks VOLUMES about her priorities and her lack of "belonging" within Zaun.

You'd think she doesn't feel at home in the Lanes but may want to join and help the Firelights, right? They're the hope of Zaun… They're against Silco. But no. In season 2 she remains with Cait, hanging out awkwardly at her palatial home.

She goes and drinks in the street rather than seeking out the Firelights to see if they are fine or if she can help. As far as we can tell, she never saw Ekko after he took a bullet for Cait's plans and then a bomb to the face to stall Jinx!

So she just doesn't have any sense of home, any attachment to Zaun as a place or concept, despite being raised in it. She has resentment for Piltover and enforcers, but not enough to not fall for Cait and bend her principles. She cares for her family, but when it becomes complicated and difficult, she caves and changes her mind. She's also all talk about killing Jinx. She just can't, and after 2 missed opportunities, Cait is also mega fed up with it xD

Now Vi is going to go destroy her life with booze while rising and falling in the pits as a fighter. Then, from the trailers, seems like she'll get her shit together and fight Noxus.

I think in that way she's a Vander-esque character.

Rough start in life. Very angry. Prone to punch first ask later. Then, lacking guidance, they latch onto someone who is happy to give them direction (Silco/Cait). Then comes a breaking point (whatever triggered the drowning of Silco/Cait dumping Vi after the Jinx fight) and they switch to other occupations (running the Lanes/Pit fighting) and this is followed by another trigger that produces their end state as a collaborator (The bridge and adopting the girls/Whatever will happen fighting Noxus).

I think Vi can be given the space to basically gain a healthier view of Piltover (as an occupying force that can't be trusted for Zaun), while also being close to an enforcer for the good of Zaun (Vander worked with Grayson, Vi can work with Cait after Zaun becomes independent).

Vander is also a very flawed character. Lots of fans like to just see him as a sweet loving daddy, but he's a brutal killer who runs a racket business in the undercity lmao. We first meet him killing a man with his gauntlets, and the second scene he's threatening 2 people of death if they don't behave on his turf. Vander lacks the incentive that Shimmer is, so you bet your ass he was staying in power because "hound of the underground" had a gnarly reputation. Even foreigners know him by name.

He's the guy who was insane and violent enough to coldly drown his best friend with his bare hands. And let's not project any fanon here: He straight up apologises to Silco, says he's always regretted his actions, never says he was justified, and never contests Silco calling his actions a "betrayal".

Vander BETRAYED Silco, who trusted him. And Vander tells us he respected Silco, everyone did!

If we saw his arc live before us, I fucking bet it would be as swivelly and mystifying as Vi's. Poor slum kid becomes second in command to fanatical Zaun wannabe leader and revolutionary, creates the Lanes with him, then betrays him by trying to drown him with his bare hands, then takes over the business alone, hides his injuries, then leads a revolt due to some unknown inciting incident, then adopts kids, keeps running a smuggling/racket/protection business, whatever it is, while also collaborating with enforcers in secret, before being killed when his demons catch up with him???

I'm sure there's plenty of moments on such a journey that would make people scratch their heads. It's not very archetypal either.

And as a result Vi also only work if you see her outside archetypes. She's not an abused kid turned revolutionary, Silco style. Or abused kid turned freedom fighter/gang leader, Ekko style. She's not a very good sister, never was, never could be, simply from her circumstances. She's not super loyal because she has pretty weak principles. She's not driven by a strong sense of justice. She gives her word, then goes back on it. Acts strong and talks big and then buckles. And Cait can't have that, since it gets in the way of killing Jinx twice now.

Vi is mostly self interested, and driven by revenge and anger. Now that Silco is dead and revenge obtained, she's falling back on her sweetheart, and her lack of strong principles or loyalty show again, like in scenes where a bit of buttering up make her accept an enforcer badge.

I fully disagree with people who try to tell me she takes the job to protect Zaun! She takes it because she realises how much it would mean to Cait, and she has NOTHING BETTER TO DO with herself. She should be joining Ekko, at a minimum, but she isn't loyal to Zaun and isn't out there to save it. She cares about her family, but this only manifests in her being incapable to actually kill Jinx.

And like, it's OKAY!! Personally I'm okay with that.

I think Vi still has 6 episodes to gain a real, strong conviction, the way Vander did with the kids. And I'm also okay if that ends up being as a collaborator to Piltover. I would have written things differently because I think a longer and more non-romantic build up of trust and care with Cait would have been more beneficial, but I'm liking where things are going, because I've written Vi off as a good character.

She's very grey, and pitiable, but not sympathetic in her choices. A lot like Jinx, too. Jinx is just too cruel and sadistic to be sympathetic, but she's very pitiable.

And neither of the girls' flaws are their fault. They are the by-product of Zaun, of generational trauma and abject poverty and oppression. They are the fucked up women created by Piltover's fucked up rule.

As always, it's all Heimerdinger's fault, and I'm a little frustrated to see him cheapen Ekko's character with his Jar Jar humour right now.

Anyway, that's a pretty long answer, sorry lol

I'm always happy to get Meta posts, so thanks a lot. Don't hesitate to reply and elaborate.

[balioc]

A Simple Model

Both of the major US political parties are really very bad, right now.

(Blogger Has Amazing Novel Insights!)

The electorally-significant Dems, having finally lived up to their destiny as the new Party of the Elite, are a pack of careerist apparatchiks incapable of any vision beyond "keep the engine of the world chugging along for another day." (Turns out, that's the kind of person you have to be in order to rise to the top of the Party of the Elite.) They are aligned with enough of the major institutional power-players of American society that they're pretty much at the mercy of those power-players. They can be counted on to provide the kind of ass-covering deceit that big bureaucratic institutions generally provide (cf. Covid guidance). The last wave of "big change ideas" that were cutting-edge in the early-to-mid 2000s - marijuana legalization, public healthcare, stimulus spending, No Really We Could Just Have Open Borders, etc. - has been thoroughly assimilated, dealt-with or not-dealt-with to varying degrees, and they're not really having any new ones.

Mostly separately from that, by a weird quirk of intellectual history, the otherwise-extremely-stodgy modern Dems managed to attach themselves to a very unpopular version of identitarian group-liberation ideology. There are arguments to be had about how much this matters in the long run, how long-lasting the effects are going to be, how likely the problem is to solve itself (and under what circumstances), etc.; but one way or another, (a) it's a political albatross, and (b) it's created a bunch of actual-factual problems on the small-to-medium scale.

The Republicans, meanwhile, have become so totally unmoored and directionless that their political program consists entirely of lashing out at things they don't like. The coalition has no center, and no integrity, save for its opposition to the elite sociocultural establishment. It is capable of embracing insane/inane "ideas" like tariff-based tax systems, border-wall-building, The Plague That's Killing A Ton of People Just Isn't Happening, etc.; it can be easily baited into gleefully embracing things as evil as police brutality and war crimes, just by presenting it with a smarmy opposition on those issues. It can toss random bones to constituent ideologies like right-libertarianism or religious social conservatism, but not advance their agendas in any overarching way. It is actively opposed to institutional competence, because competent institutional actors are assumed to be Of the Enemy, which is more important than anything else. It doesn't even try to keep most of its (insane) promises. It is increasingly dominated by naked grift, mostly directed at its own base. It is, in short, the kind of party that could nominate and then elect Donald J. Trump twice.

...either of these parties could easily, by this point, have become Totally Nonviable. This hasn't happened, mostly because both of them are coasting on their legacies, and through spinal reflex doing just enough to keep those legacies on life support. The Republicans are the traditional party of the rich and respectable, and even though they're increasingly unappealing to the country's newer middle-class cadres, they're still the party of Big Tax Cuts etc., which...stanches some of the blood flow. Meanwhile, the Democrats are the traditional party of minorities, and - although they're less and less able to depend on those minorities, as we just saw in the 2024 election - there are enough credible signals that they're Less Racist Than the Other Guys to keep the minorities more-or-less voting for the apparatchiks.

At this point, both parties are mostly selling "at least we're not the other guys." This is a very easy and low-energy thing for them. It requires no vision and relatively little competence; it plays on partisan hate and fear, which are more reliable and easier-to-stoke than hope or inspiration, in an environment suitable to them.

They will both continue selling that thing, rather than anything else, until forced to change. Which is to say, until one of them actually becomes Totally Nonviable and has to spend some time in the wilderness becoming a genuinely different kind of party. (Or, hypothetically, until one of them actually gets replaced by an outside institution. Good luck.)

Which is to say, we are going to be in this nightmarish stalemate until one of the parties breaks the other one over its knee, in the world's most depressing geriatric cage fight. This is actually even more important than it sounds, because the political situation is yoked to the sociocultural situation. We're going to be stuck in some version of this dumbass culture war until there is an ideological power capable of uniting the warring tribes, a power that is stronger than their toxoplasmic hostility to one another; that power could imaginably be a sui generis religious movement or something, but it's much more likely to be some kind of all-encompassing We're Actually Good political thing, a new Reaganism or War Rooseveltism or whatever.

I would strongly prefer for the Democrats to win that fight. I would strongly prefer to be ruled by the bleak sclerotic establishment, during the period when the opposition is getting its shit together and coming back to force a New Better Binary, rather than by a gang of nihilistic hucksters likely to dismantle random parts of the system and to make essentially-random diplomatic gestures to volatile dangerous foreign powers.

Until recently, I would have said that the Democrats were going to win that fight, in the sense that the contemporary Republicans literally couldn't. I thought that nihilistic hucksterism would always provoke enough horror, when given the power to do anything, that the bleak sclerotic establishment would have room to push its way back. Maybe that's still the case. But, like so many people, I've become more pessimistic.

[artsy-hobbitses]

ok. i’m sure you’re getting a lot of asks right now. if you get the time/patience to answer this, i’m trying to educate myself on this whole IDW thing. for context, i’ve never read it all the way through, i’m currently only aware of the general plot line and specific events. and when i did read it, i was an ignorant teen that came from a place of privilege and saw hardly anything wrong with the (painfully obvious) fascist/problematic themes in the comics; other than of course, they were shitty things the characters had done in their past — now as an ameteur writer that doesn’t know what the fuck they are doing in terms of character flaws and backstory, im trying to learn what is ok to place into one’s content to create those dimensions and morally gray areas many of us love, and what is not. — my question, albeit stupid and deserving of many o’ eye roll, is this: where does the line stand? what could have been done differently in the comics to keep that dimension but not create something so poorly handled as Coptimus, the tangled mess that is the autobot faction, or otherwise? ~thank you for your time.

Oh man, uh, this is definitely quite a heavy ask! To be honest I’m roughly in the same boat as you ie. I haven’t read the this series all the way through and mainly know of the setting/worldbuilding and pre-war shenanigans. 

I feel like I might not be the right person to give you a concrete answer on this but I can try and explain what I think went wrong at least in the very early stages of trying to build the entire Autobot/Decepticon societal dynamic, at least from what I know. Like a very basic explanation, I’m gonna keep it under this cut cause I might get long winded. 

IDW 2005 introduced some key concepts I think? That sort of set everything in motion as to why the war started: Cold Construction, Functionism, Beast-mode transformers being seen as a pariah class and the idea of a disposable class.  None of it is good, all of it is clearly made out to be horribly oppressively on multiple levels.

So you’ve got two sides, you want to portray the good guys as good guys BUT you also want to give your bad guys more depth/make them more human or relatable which is a good thing! 

So how do you do that? All the oppressive stuff I stated above which plagued IDW’s Cybertronan society is like, I’d say the morality baseline. Your readers know This Is Bad. People are suffering. That’s how you’ve written it

You make your Big Bad a member of the underclass who undergoes multiple challenges due to his station in life, things about himself he cannot change---he’s beaten down, persecuted, he’s empathetic to every one else’s suffering, he’s angry and wants to do something about it. He’s proactive about it. 

LOGICALLY, because your future bad guy is all these things any sane person would be ROOTING for, you want your future good guy to actually be starting from somewhere of the same point; a good guy who also suffers, goes through major challenges and sees these injustices and wants to do something about it. 

Like Magneto and Charles Xavier are generally good examples---they’re both persecuted against in a way we can all emphasize with, they’re not blind to these issues, and they both want to make things better. The biggest divide between them is that they’re going around it in very different ways. 

In trying to keep both sides starting from the same morality baseline, imho IDW failed horribly;  The major Autobots are not shown, pre-war, to care about what’s going on. Ratchet and Nightbeat seem to be the closest it comes to barely questioning the system (excluding Prime who is implied only got it after reading Megatron’s writings, and even then is too trusting of a system the reader and many others in-story can see is not working). They’re not shown proactively taking steps to fix issues that are affecting everyone who isn’t above a certain class. Most of them   come from relatively middle to high stations in life ie. scientists and doctors, who we are told will always have more rights than manual workers, miners, etc, even in life and death situations. More so, the underclass (beast mode transformers, cold constructs, victims of Empurata, the working class in general) is woefully underrepresented in their ranks. They’re very, very clearly privileged and nearly all of them have some degree of power/social standing that the Bad Guys do not. This is, somehow, the group we’re suppose to identify with. 

Instead, it’s the Decepticons who are shown to have to fight to get basic rights. It’s Megatron starving himself when he has so little already to save Terminus whose rations have been cut because they can’t work anymore and are seen as worthless. It’s Laserbeak (or Buzzsaw? It wasn’t clear) telling Ravage to not anger a Senator by refusing to serve them their Energon, because “They’d remove your spark for that!!”. Their ranks are made up of people who would be killed for simply questioning their station in life or forcefully ‘rewired’ to conform with the status quo. Their ranks are made up of people we have been told are suffering the worst underneath all these injustices---Megatron and Starscream are Cold Constructs (as are Prowl and Blaster but we don’t see Blaster’s side of things and Prowl is accepting of what he is because he was made in a higher station in life---a cop), Shockwave is an Empurata and Shadowplay survivor, Ravage/Laserbeak/Buzzsaw are Beast Modes (Autobots Steeljaw and Ramhorn also are of course, but they don’t have major roles pre-war and we do not see how they’re affected by all this).  This is, pre-war, the group we’re told are suppose to be the Bad Guys. 

Orion Pax is portrayed as a cop, one we’re told is very dutiful but also one who rushes to fill jail cells and is clearly more preoccupied with order than anything else. He’s, as good as he likes to try to be, is a cog of the system and he doesn’t do anything proactive to really fix it earlier on outside of shouting in the Senate. If he had been proactive after reading Megatron’s writings ie.a cop fighting the system, tried to be more empathetic to the people in his district? If he had left the police force and tried to make changes by himself? Maybe readers would have accepted him better. All I keep asking is “Why the hell didn’t you do something sooner? Why did you, as a good man, let it get this far even when you knew it was wrong?”  Megatron is portrayed as a working man who suffered police brutality for speaking out in his writings and he keeps writing, keeps fostering a revolution to fight the oppressive system. Megatron is the fire, the lead figure here early on who has actual chartable growth, the one who wants to change things even if it it meant violence because that was how the system dealt with him---maybe readers don’t agree with how he goes around things, but who else was really challenging or doing anything to fix it?  Why would anyone want to root for Orion Pax over Megatron in this situation?

TLDR: The morality baseline in this entire backstory pre-war was “Fight against societal oppression” which should have been really easy to get behind. Both sides should have started from that baseline.  The Decepticons did. The Autobots did not. 

[itsclydebitches]

It might be the 2020 talking here, but the Mantle citizens being oppressed feels less like the fascism claim that gets thrown around and more like anti maskers angry at not being allowed to go outside and get eaten by grimm in retrospect. Power outage? I'll just go outside where I know the grimm are while in a bad mood instead of my home that has insulation, barricades, and/or a fireplace. Nothing can go wrong with that idea. Destroy those anti grimm robots too! We won't need those in a minute!

The issue with those “This is a fascism/police brutality allegory” arguments (despite the fact that it’s pretty clear RT wants that to be the interpretation. Here I’m talking about what we actually get on screen, not what the authors my have intended to create) is twofold: 

1. They fail to acknowledge the grimm as an objective, immediate, 100% indisputable threat that if not addressed will lead to the killing/eating of the populace. Unlike the various bigoted complexities surrounding the claim that other people are a threat to the populace in our real world, the grimm have no ethical questions attached to either the danger they present or how they should be dealt with. They will kill you. You should shoot them. That’s that. RWBY’s grimm have not been constructed as representations of misunderstood minorities/outsiders—they’re literal monsters and thus any precautions taken to keep them from attacking you is weighted towards being a good thing. (The caveat: Provided any technologies created in the pursuit of safety are not so deadly that they pose a threat to the people if they fall into the wrong hands which, as we’ve seen in RWBY’s story, is something Salem managed beautifully. There are ethical questions attached to when the “This may pose a threat later” outweighs “But it’s helpful right now,” but that’s not the issue we’re covering today. This is a “Yes there are grimm and yes you should take extreme measures to protect yourself because they are 1000% a deadly threat” acknowledgement).    

2. They fail to acknowledge that RWBY hasn’t done the work of showing how these measures are hurting the people. The embargo hurts them economically, absolutely, but that’s a separate issue from the military control Ironwood keeps over the kingdom in response to the grimm/Salem — the presumed oppression we’re discussing. When we talk about that kind of control in real life we acknowledge the very real repercussions it has, everything from “The armed forces in our streets resorted to shooting at us when we peacefully protested their presence” to “The armed forces in the streets deny us basic human rights.” In the real world measures like these are a threat, but we see none of this in RWBY. Are Ironwood’s forces maliciously attacking people without cause, demonstrating that their protection may not be worth the harm they cause? No. We just see them doing their job of fighting grimm, allowing civilians to escape in the process. Are they denying the people their right to go about their lives peacefully? No. The people we see are not hindered by these safety measures. There are only two details I can think of to potentially support this: the bot that takes pictures of the group without their consent (which in 2020 would work better as a commentary on big corporations/privacy concerns in the digital age) and the fact that the people aren’t allowed to go out late at night... but that just circles right back around to Point #1: there are monsters out on those streets that want to kill you. Things like RWBY’s curfew aren’t implemented as a way of hindering protesters and silencing people—as they have been in the real world—but as a very basic “It’s harder to keep you alive at night so please stay in your homes to not get eaten.” 

So though I’m always wary of drawing perfect 1:1 comparisons between the text and a real event (as you say, anon, there’s some 2020 feelings attached to all this lol)... yeah, I’d agree that how the show presents this conflict is much closer to our current Covid situation: 

Government: You’re not allowed outside right now, you need to wear a mask, there’s no travel, no gatherings larger than ten people 

People: You can’t do that! This is an infringement on my rights! You’re trying to keep me docile and complacent... can’t everyone see what’s happening? The government is trying to tell us what to do. Every modern action movie has taught you that’s automatically a bad, scary thing! 

Government: No I’m... trying to keep you from spreading/catching a deadly virus, which can only happen if everyone obeys some — at times very tough — but still necessary rules. This is logic you should have learned in kindergarten. Everyone needs to work together and clean up the play area, even if they don’t want to, so that someone doesn’t trip over a toy. Except now ‘Oops I’ve tripped’ is ‘Oops I’m dead/in need of a transplant/chronically ill for an undetermined length of time.’” 

People: This is anarchy 

Government: It’s really not. It’s just a shitty situation that you’re refusing to help make better

Fans who reduce Volume 7 to “Ironwood is evil for making Mantle do things they obviously hate” fundamentally don’t understand—or simply refuse to acknowledge—the kind of threat these characters face. It’s indeed similar to looking at something like this 

(Source) 

and insisting on interpreting it as a poor woman being tortured under the laws of her government. “Military in the streets” has downsides attached to it (even if RWBY fails to accurately show them) in a similar way to how “Getting a swab stuffed up into what feels like your brain” has downsides too... but those downsides have to be weighed against the reason for these procedures existing in the first place: grimm and Covid. 

Oh. These downsides are better than dying. 

There’s nothing wrong with continually striving to lessen those downsides, as well as continually questioning authority in an effort to ensure that the power they hold isn’t abused... but we can’t let those fears blind us to the fact that sometimes horrible events require less than stellar solutions. At least for a time. The entire point here is the reasons behind why these actions were taken and whether their implementation remains necessary. An army among civilians due to racism and corrupt officials is not comparable to an army among civilians due to a continuous attack by literal monsters. An army that remains long after it’s necessary is not comparable to an army used during the height of a fantasy war. The ill-considered argument of “The Mantle people are oppressed because they are forced to live alongside robots and they don’t like it” does indeed have similarities with something like, “The people are oppressed because they are forced to wear masks and they don’t like it.” In both cases the consequences of obeying these orders (as shown in RWBY) are incredibly minimal and the benefit provided is staggering. It admittedly doesn’t help that Ironwood’s presumed oppression of Mantle is conflated with the severe class disparity and racism — things that are embedded into Atlas’ history and are mostly outside of his control— but the overall takeaway is that the knee-jerk response of “You can’t tell me what to do” should never outweigh the initial questions of, “Why do you want me to do this? What are the downsides of doing this? And are they worse than the repercussions attached to not doing this?” In the case of both “Trying to protect civilians from endless grimm/a magically powered queen” and “Trying to protect people from a truly horrifying virus,” these questions have some very compelling answers. 

Basically, 

[aleatoryalarmalligator]

What My Thoughts On Morrissey Today

In response to my writing idea someone gave me I picked this.

So basically, Morrissey’s nationalism in recent years has gotten in the way of me being able to appreciate much that he comes out with. This is wild because a few short years ago, I stood up for Morrissey and actually still feel very moved by a portion of his music. It got me through some really rough patches in my twenties.

I realize he’s human and has faults and I don’t know him completely but just eh, living in Portland and having seen the stuff going on I’m kind of not in the place in my life right now where I want to even try to dissect him. It’s not just a fact that he’s wrong, but that it seems altogether very much in rejection of the things that made his music so special. It was difficult for me to come to terms with it or fully make sense of why someone who’s unashamed expression of witty despair in the 80’s and 90’s, someone who was outcasted from the overall closed mindedness lower working class post ww2 world of northern England, unafraid to be gay and completely the antithesis of some Tory ideal could be bought by some tired nationalist agenda. It’s even more difficult to realize where his alegianced lie in a world that is starting to reject democracy, embrace anti intellectualism in the guise of some form of selective politically motivated skeptism, and I see the world move farther and farther into fascism.

Margaret Thatcher attacked The Smiths. Morrissey was taken in for questioning more than once out of fear for what he represented. Morrissey and The Smiths has some subversive element that really did threaten the establishment and cultural norms, in a way that I feel was a little more multidimensional than even a lot of bands in the English punk scene. I guess for me, even though I grew up in the Inland northwest of the US, I felt there was a lot of parallels in common. I too detest a culture based around animal consumption, was really not a part of the world I grew up in and didn’t want to work in the factories, I liked art and music and nobody around me was really into that stuff.

I still like the Smiths and most of Morrisseys old music. I read his autobiography. I know he is a dramatic self involved individual but I did feel that up till somewhat recently his heart was in the right place and he just liked to be controversial, which is somewhat true still, but now I think there was more to it, some nationalistic self preservation instinct kicking in. Its actually more prevelant than I even realized and I honestly think it’s getting the best of anyone with money or power, even those who once stood for something counter culture. It’s hard to think of him as racist in the traditional sense with his adoration for Latin America, but he might just be so self involved that his popularity in those regions gave him a bias. He probably separates the racism from the nationalism, blindly not wanting to see how the two concepts are quite inseparable. Falling right into it.

Him saying “everyone prefers their own race”, is kind of wild to me. I genuinely even try to entertain this as a possibility like a philosophical thought experiment or a deep dive of some kind into my own subconscious part of me I am avoiding somehow, and it’s not true for me or a lot of people. Who the fuck is he to say who prefers who, and how backwards and dehumanizing. It’s pretty repulsive, and being he is bisexual and felt the discrimination of homophobia growing up, I’m inclined to think he’s not able to see that he’s become the enemy he once represented the antithesis of.

The guy I’ve kinda been with is Mexican. I totally love him. I look into people’s eyes and I talk to and open up to people and if I connect with them I connect with them. Not like I’m trying to play the I gotta friend who is this or that as some kind of example of much, or that I don’t see color or some faulty implication, but I have been in situations where I’m the only white person at a party and I prefer them because they are my friends and I love them, and the idea of classifying who I prefer is to imply that the white race should be my main concern as they are the same as me and therefore superior and they aren’t. There is nothing inherently special to me or a kinship felt with other white people for either their appearance or cultural background. It’s nice to compare notes of pop culture but a lot of stuff people go through is universal. I don’t take too much issue with multiculturalism. My white skin is meaningless to me. I can’t imagine being so inept as a person that the color of my skin actually defines my identity rather than my autonomy or ideas or relationships and what I stand for and my ability to appreciate and connect with other people.

What gets me is that in his support of the far right is not even in line with his hatred of police, or the hatred he had a few years ago. I mean, he has always gone on and on about police brutality, he’s been harassed by them on multiple occasions. He shows them on giant projectors at his shows. Police are a very important staple for fascism and nationalism, and he is now on their side after all this time? What changed? The lost young man he once was in 1981 feels very very different from who he has become and piecing together that transformation has been something I’ve been trying to do for awhile. I try to embrace both but they seem like similar but different people at odds with one another, like an uncle and nephew.

Here is what I imagine happened, and I could be wrong about that but I was a Morrissey fangirl for quite awhile. I literally had his signed autograph above my bed with dried flowers around it like a shrine for a few years, and got a grasp of Morrisseys personality in some ways.

To start off, Morrissey is a very poetic and sharp guy but he’s very miopic about his interests and has always had the tendency to see the world in a black and white framework. This in and of itself is not necessarily bad, but it’s the core framework of who he is as a person. When he was young it was very much more a reflection of his hatred for authoritarianism and deceitful people and phony artists. It’s not bad and it contributed to his music and lyrics and became the thing he was loved/hated for. The way he goes about it really has always been the double edged sword of his charm and vileness all in one and something people have mocked time and time again. He likes to be the guy in the corner that looks fine and smug and believes he sees the virtues/dispicable attributes of everyone in the room and there have been times in his life where he was, and though he won’t ever attack anyone face to face he’s quick to speak his mind about it.

Morrissey is also a very vain person. It’s subtle but he is very singular on certain aesthetics. At times it made him brilliant and poetic and a visionary. The Smiths album covers are beautiful. His look is both elegant and absurd in its grasp for purity. It also makes him seem like a twat and a pretentious prince. The fact that he seems to be these two things at once is what gave him that kind of controversial star quality at times.

Those are just two natural traits he has always been obvious with. And he struggled with it and focused on his passions and dealt with depression in the 80’s. Then fame happened and the smiths ended. He kept to himself more or less in the 80’s and 90’s aside from his disdain for Margaret Thatcher, but he kinda lost his mind a bit when his drummer took him to court in the nineties. Right or wrong he fought for two years and lost a good chunk of his money from The Smiths and when that happened he kind of was forced to start again. He lost his home. He developed that early personalized sense of self preservation and victimhood. I think he lost faith in many of his more naive ideals when he was younger. When you read his autobiography and know what happened it’s like he had to step out of his old life and into something else.

Then, he’s always been a vegetarian superiority type. I liked that he calls it as he sees it but because of his need to black and white think everything he came off as deluded and smug. I mean, to be fair you can’t seem to win with people who want to eat meat and I agreed with a portion of his message, but he never questioned himself. He’s not good at that, or doesn’t appear to be. My personal interpretation of him was to agree with part of it and give him the cred for being not afraid to be a dick and say it, but to see also that he was so dramatic and self absorbed about it to also laugh at him and the way he said it.

Now to go into fascism and why it grew on Morrissey. I see the world as kind of falling into polarization and flux because of the failures of neoliberalism. It’s a long political explanation, but essentially the systems that are in place do not provide answers to a lot of catestrophic issues. Democracy, though the best thing we have, is flawed. I really like philosophy and have studied this and the various arguments that are made, and I don’t have the answer either but fuck if I will ever side with nazis.

People are seaking solace in new ideas that are actually quite old, namely socialism and fascism that provide answers that democracy fails to. Capitalism eats itself and created monopolies and unfair wealth distribution, technology is making human labor obsolete and therefore not a stable means to base our economic system on, those with wealth are hoarding it and trying to separate themselves from the world they helped ruin. We are destroying the planet, running out of natural resources, many of our leaders in the last three or for decades have been flawed, there isn’t a universal safety net for things like natural disasters and pandemics and there are still places stripped of their natural resources where human slavery is prevalent and children starve to death. Neoliberalism has promised some great answer but has actually been the contributor to this entire mess.

We are seeing the beginning of the end now, and I am sure Morrissey isn’t going to waste that without putting himself in the victim shoes, the white traditional quintessentially Englishman of wit, who sees his beautiful world he grew up in disappearing in multiculturalism and seeing himself and the culture of old England as a dying breed, that needs to be preserved at any cost. He probably was on the fence about it for some time, weighing out his disdain for authoritarianism, having a bougouis experience with the seemingly left leaning media that he never managed to win over and called him out for his every misstep. I bet he had a friend who opened him up to the idea that we don’t know about who changed his mind. I bet cuts in taxes for the rich helped him preserve his wealth that he definitely feels entitled to after losing the first portion of it in the court case. He’s rich, famous and old and often times that leads to being quite out of touch, even to the best intellectuals. He lost his mother who was dear to him and I can imagine, even though it’s not political, it created a deep sense of emptiness and dis ease. Nationalism often times gives people a sense of security and identity and purpose. And the idea of having an unpopular opinion excited him just as it always has, gave him the opportunity to be the smug poet in the corner of the party, and he sold out. Hard. And he’s probably proud of it.

He’s irrelevant now. Honestly his latest album wasn’t good, and I like later Morrissey. He doesn’t have the same energy. I just feel like he’s grasping at something that he never fully ever had. What’s weird to me is that I’m writing about him like this when honestly, I could also easily write about how beautiful and meaningful the Smiths and Morrissey has been to me. I can’t explain how it cut through the extreme isolation I’ve been in, not to mention how the Smiths really changed music for the better. There’s always going to be a part of me that wants to defend him. I’m not saying we cancel him. I kinda think he canceled himself. I’m not going to try to not enjoy the smiths or morrissey when I hear him, and I will still hear it and enjoy it but I’m not ever going to spend my own money on filling his pockets. I still nostalgically enjoy the person he was a very long time ago and what he used to represent. I realize at the end of the day he’s just a flawed person. But also fuck fascism, and fuck Morrissey for caving into it.

I mean, at the end of the day the hardest part is that I made him a part of my identity and I just had to stop doing that in a simplistic way. I tossed out a morrissey shirt I had (it’s was a cheesy shirt anyway), and I found new genres of music and while I still love the smiths it’s not like I can’t do without them every day. I break down and listen to them sometimes. I know the songs so well. I listen to Xiu Xiu which is a modern day similar equivalent in some ways but is absolutely better and the singer Jamie Stewart is fucking gold.

[qqueenofhades]

I have a question about your opinion as a historian about how to deal with problematic past. I am French, not American, so not quite as aware of what is happening right now in the US regarding statues as I probably should. My question is the following: many of the politicians who promoted (admittedly white) social equality in France, worked on reforming labor laws, etc, in the 19th / 20th century were certainly not anti-colonialist. How to deal with this "mixed legacy" today? Best wishes to you!

First off, I am honoured that you would ask me this question. Disclaimer, my work in French history is largely focused on the medieval era, rather than modern France, and while I have studied and traveled in France, and read and (adequately?) speak French, I am not French myself. So this should be viewed as the perspective of a friendly and reasonably well-informed outsider, but not somebody from France themselves, and therefore subject to possible errors or otherwise inaccurate statements. But this is my perception as I see it, so hopefully it will be helpful for you.

(By the way if you’re interested, my post on the American statue controversy and the “preserving history!” argument is here. I originally wrote it in 2017, when the subject of removing racist monuments first arose, and then took another look at it in light of recent events and was like “WELP”.)

There’s actually a whole lot to say about the current crisis of public history in a French context, so let me see if I can think where to start. First, my chief impression is that nobody really associates France with its historical empire, the same way everyone still has either a positive or negative impression of the British Empire and its real-world effects. The main international image of France (one carefully cultivated by France itself) is that of the French Revolution: storming the Bastille, guillotining aristocrats, Liberté, égalité, fraternité, a secular republic overcoming old constraints of a hidebound Catholic aristocracy and reinventing itself as a Modern Nation. Of course, less than a generation after the Revolution (and this has always amused/puzzled me) France swung straight back into autocratic expansionist empire under Napoleon, and its colonialism efforts continued vigorously alongside its European counterparts throughout the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century. France has never really reckoned with its colonialist legacy either, not least because of a tendency in French public life for a) strong centralization, and b) a national identity that doesn’t really allow for a hyphen. What I mean by that is that while you can be almost anything before “American,” ie. African-American, Latino-American, Jewish-American, Muslim-American, etc, you are (at least in my experience) expected to only be “French.” There is a strong nationalistic identity primarily fueled by language, values, and lifestyle, and the French view anyone who does not take part in it very dimly. That’s why we have the law banning the burka and arguments that it “inhibits” Muslim women from visually and/or emotionally assimilating into French culture. There is a very strong pressure for centralization and conformity, and that is not flexible.

Additionally, the aforementioned French lifestyle identity involves cafe culture, smoking, and drinking alcohol -- all things that, say, a devout Muslim is unlikely to take part in. The secularism of French political culture is another factor, along with the strict bureaucracy and interventionist government system. France narrowly dodged getting swept up in the right-wing populist craze when it elected Emmanuel Macron over Marine Le Pen (and it’s my impression that the FN still remains relatively popular) but it also has a deep-grained xenophobia. I’m sure you remember “French Spiderman,” the 22-year-old man from Mali who climbed four stories of a building in Paris to rescue a toddler in 2018. He was immediately hailed as a hero and allowed to apply for French citizenship, but critics complained about him arriving in France illegally in the first place, and it happened alongside accelerated efforts to deny asylum seekers, clear out the Calais migrant camp, and otherwise maintain a hostile environment. The terror attacks in France, such as 2015 in Paris and the 2016 Bastille Day attack in Nice, have also stiffened public opinion against any kind of accommodation or consideration of non-French (and by implication, non-white) Frenchpeople. The Académie Française is obviously also a very strong linguistic force (arguably even more so than the English-only movement in America) that excludes people from “pure” French cultural status until they meet its criteria. There really is no French identity or civic pride without the French language, so that is also something to take into consideration.

France also has a strong anti-authority and labor rights movement that America does not have (at least the latter). When I was in France, the joke was about the “annual strike” of students and railway workers, which was happening while I was trying to study, and we saw that with the yellow jacket protests as well. Working-class France is used to making a stink when it feels that it’s being disrespected, and while I can’t comment in detail on how the racial element affects that, I know there has been tension and discontent from working-class, racial-minority neighborhoods in Paris about how they’ve been treated (and during the recent French police brutality protests, the police chief rejected any idea that the police were racist, despite similar deaths in custody of black men including another French Malian, Adama Traoré.) All of this adds up to an atmosphere in which race relations, and their impact on French history, is a very fraught subject in which discussions are likely to get heated (as discussions of race relations with Europeans and white people tend to get, but especially so). The French want to be French, and feel very strongly that everyone else in the country should be French as well, which can encompass a certain race-blindness, but not a cultural toleration. There’s French culture, the end, and there isn’t really an accommodation for hybrid or immigrant French cultures. Once again, this is again my impression and experience.

The blind spot of 19th-century French social reformers to colonialism is not unlike Cold War-era America positioning itself as the guarantor of “freedom and liberation” in the world, while horrendously oppressing its black citizens (which did come in for sustained international criticism at the time). Likewise with the American founding fathers including soaring rhetoric about the freedom and equality of all (white) men in the Constitution, while owning slaves. The efforts of (white) social reformers and political activists have refused to see black and brown people as human, and therefore worthy of meriting the same struggle for liberation, for... well, almost forever, and where those views did change, it had to come about as a process and was almost never there to start with. “Scientific” white supremacy was especially the rage in the nineteenth century, where racist and imperialist European intellectuals enjoyed a never-ending supply of “scientific” literature explaining how black, brown, and other men of color were naturally inferior to white men and they had a “duty” to civilize the helpless people of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and so on, who just couldn’t aspire to do it themselves. (This is where we get the odious “white man’s burden” phrase. How noble of them.) So the nineteenth-century social reformers were, in their minds, just doing what science told them to do; slavery abolitionists and other relief societies for black and brown people were often motivated by deeply racist “assimilationist” ideas about making these poor helpless people “fit” for white civilization, at which point racial prejudice would magically end. This might have been more “benevolent” than outright slave-owning racism, but it was no less damaging and paternalistic.

If you’re interested in reading about French colonialism and postcolonialism from a Black French perspective, I recommend Frantz Fanon (who you may have already heard of) and his 1961 magnum opus The Wretched of the Earth/ Les Damnés de la Terre. (There is also his 1952 work, Black Skin, White Masks.) Fanon was born in Martinique, served in World War II, and was part of the struggle for Algerian liberation from France. He was a highly influential and controversial postcolonial theorist, not least for his belief that decolonialization would never be achieved without violence (which, to say the least, unnerved genteel white society). I feel as if France in general needs to have a process of deep soul-searching about its relationship to race and its own imperial history (French Indochina/Vietnam being another obvious example with recent geopolitical implications), because it’s happy to let Britain take the flak for its unexamined and triumphalist imperial nostalgia. (One may remark that of course France is happy to let Britain make a fool of itself and hope that nobody notices its similar sins....) This is, however, currently unlikely to happen on a broad scale for the social and historical reasons that I discussed above, so I really applaud you for taking the initiative in starting that conversation and reaching out for resources to help you in doing it. Hopefully it will help you put the legacy of these particular social reformers in context and offer you talking points both for what they did well and where their philosophy fell short.

If there does come a point of a heightened racial conversation and reckoning in France (and there have been Black Lives Matter protests there in the last few weeks, so it’s not impossible) I would be curious to see what it looks like. It’s arguably one of the Western countries that has least dealt with its racial issues while making itself into the standard-bearer for secular Western liberalism. France has also enthusiastically joined in the EU, whereas Britain has (rather notoriously....) separated from all that, which makes Britain look provincial and isolated while France can position itself as a global leader with a more internationalist outlook. Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel are currently leading the effort for the $500 billion coronavirus rescue package for the EU, which gives it a sense of statesmanship and stature. It will be interesting to see how that continues to change and develop vis-a-vis race, or if it does.

Thanks so much for such an interesting question, and I hope that helped!

[dangerrobots]

the three most common white people you’ll talk to about BLM

the thing i can consider myself an expert on is white people making the wildest excuses for remaining ambivalent. it’s actually crazy. there are many strains of these people:

1) The understanding therapist

These are the people that will readily admit that the government is essentially corrupt, that police are trained to protect each other and not the public, that racism has been allowed to run amok, etc etc etc. They know phrases like “system racism” and “police brutality” and sometimes even “reparations.” They will nod emphatically along with your discussions of discrimination and oppression. They are there for you, man! they say. they get it.

After their listening politely, it is time. now they can assume their god-given role of constructive critic. “you know, more people - not me obviously, i totally get you, but i mean other people - would support these movements if they stopped breaking the windows of innocent shopkeepers! looting innocent Targets! don’t they know that now those stores won’t reopen in their communities? don’t they think of the long term repercussions? and is it possible that all of this” *gestures vaguely to protest marches and facebook posts* “is an overreaction?”

it doesn’t seem to have occurred to these people that black organizers are, in fact, capable of critical thinking and understanding nuance. they apparently think all ~angry~ black people are just children, who need to work through their emotions with a kindly white so they’ll stop talking so loud on the news and blocking the road to mommy’s hot-yoga-for-postpartum-oxy-addiction class.

2) The innocent dummy

“I don’t know what the right answer is!!! all this talk about police abolition and historical oppression... i just don’t get it. i mean i think police brutality and racism is bad, but... I just don’t know how to feel!! all this violence!” They look at the most melanated person in their twitter vicinity imploringly, humbling themselves at their feet. “teach me! i have so much to learn.”

Aight, listen. there’s nothing wrong with wanting to be more well read on social issues. the problem here is that the innocent dummy is often just being willfully ignorant because the reality of the situation - which they understand perfectly well - makes them uncomfortable. if we really live in an authoritarian police state, that means they would have to... donate money! protest! the horror!!! the white guilt!!!!! how can they stand it?? that can’t be right! so they wring their hands and ask for recommendations for bell hooks books to put on their goodreads “currently reading” list, where it will stay for the rest of time because they are never going to so much as google that poor book.

3) The beleagured hermit

“Listen, i just don’t want to get involved in politics. ever. it’s just not something i need in my life. who needs that kind of stress?? it’s all just tribalism, my team is better than your team, alldat. everyone is so polarized lately. can’t we just get along?”

this has been said a million times, but politics (aka current societal events) are not something you can just not have in your life, like dairy products or mark wahlberg movies. it’s a practice in which people fight over shit like “do native americans deserve rights” and “is murder still bad when a cop does it?” and “should we respond to an incoming pandemic, or would our time be better spent jacking off fox news?”

yes, sir, i too would prefer if we could just worry about whether marvel phase VI is gonna be any good or what sneakers to buy next season. this shit is not fun for most people, particularly the ones that aren’t getting paid for the trouble of trying to not get killed or deported. maybe, someday, we will progress as a society to the point where the most urgent social issue is what color to paint our new solar-power sidewalks or whatever. when that day comes, you are well within your right to blow it off and spend your off hours jacking it to robot porn. until then, THERE IS PRESSING SHIT TO BE DEALT WITH.

[bippityboppitybibuck]

I’ve stayed relatively silent, I have a main blog that is heavily heavily politicized, I know that if someone was to follow a fandom blog they would expect fandom content, that’s the reason I have my side blogs.

My main blog is so heavily politicized that it consistently looses me followers, I use tumblr as a way to scream into the void, uncaring if the void screams back at all.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve watched through my feed as we lost our collective shit over the fact that white men were able to walk into states buildings armed so heavily they could take down just about anything they wanted and all they were met with was quite and distance keeping police force - they protested the fact that they were being ‘locked up’ because the world was facing a pandemic that couldn’t have decimated us.

No one was okay with this not a soul.

But it’s different now, it’s different because even people I’ve seen on my feed have been posting about how ‘they shouldn’t incite anything, and they really should just stay home’ as though their right to protest gross inequality and mass violence agaisnt POC is somehow on the same level as white men and women who want to be able to take a jaunt down to the hair dresser or the local fucking applebees.

I’m Canadian and it sickens me to see that we somehow think ourselves better than our American neighbours, as though Regis Korchinski-Paquet was a victim of police brutality and race genocide. Because let’s be honest, in the same way that under funding black and brown neighborhoods and creating eco conditions favourable for asthmatic and pulmonary issues is a race (and class) genocide this is too. Brutality doesn’t cover it anymore, this is murder, this has always been murder.

I’m also white, I know that my words are not as powerful, nor as needed as POC voices now, because I have never and will never experience policing as they do but to sit back while America burns, as those who have dealt with centuries of hatred and prejudice and violence and death rise and reduce a country they built to ash. To not show them my support, to not show them that they are backed by people they’ll never meet people who see what they have been forced to endure would be as bad as those how have inflicted the pain that runs so deeply in their bones.

I see you. I stand with you. I will fight with you. While I can not my brothers shall stand between you and those who wish you dead. My whiteness protects me as my gender coding does not. It sickens me to see that this is getting the coverage it deserves because white lives are being put at risk.

White people, especially white men protect the POC around you, use your whiteness as a force field. White women understand that the cops won’t hesitate to shoot you too. White people do not incite violence or destruction but protect those that do. You and your white counterparts won’t be blamed for the damage so don’t add to the fire by burning a cop car.

Wear cameras, scream that you are recording, invoke your rights clearly and concisely, use water not milk to flush tear gas, rubber bullets can kill you. The pigs are aiming for your heads, the system is broken, but it will bury you if you don’t take the precautions that you’ve seen all over this site. Stay alive, stay fighting, stay vigilant, stay mad.

My words don’t mean as much as POV voices, listen to them, do not doubt them, they understand this better than we ever could. If I had my wits about me more this all would make more sense but my mind has been frayed by the news.

We are at war, understand this, propaganda has been circulating since long before most of us were alive, this is the culmination of the battles fought since Selma probably from long before then too. This is one of our moments one of the moments our children’s children will be taught, do good and fight until you have no fight left in you.

Black lives matter, black lives matter, black lives matter

Unfollow me if you want, I understand this isn’t spn content, but honestly I couldn’t give a damn.

[the-funtime-autocrat]

Chicago in the 1960s was a brutal place for poor people. Black, brown and white people all dealt with poverty, unemployment, police violence, substandard housing, inadequate schools and a lack of social services. Ethnic and racial groups each created their own social service and activist networks to combat every kind of oppression. One was the Young Patriot Organization (YPO), which was based in Hillbilly Harlem, an uptown neighborhood of Chicago populated by displaced white southerners. Many YPO members were racist, and they flaunted controversial symbols associated with southern pride, such as the Confederate flag. But like blacks and Latinos, the white Young Patriots and their families experienced discrimination in Chicago. In their case, it was because they were poor and from the South. In his short time as a Black Panther leader, Fred Hampton wanted to advance the group’s goals by forming a “Rainbow Coalition” of working class and poor people of all races. Former members of the Chicago Panthers and YPO tell different versions of the same story of how the groups connected: Each attended the other’s organizing meetings and decided to work together on their common issues. Over time, the Black Panthers learned to tolerate Confederate flags as intransigent signs for rebellion. Their only stipulation was that the white Young Patriots denounce racism. Eventually, Young Patriots rejected their deeply embedded ideas of white supremacy – and even the Confederate flag – as they realized how much they had in common with the Black Panthers and Latino Young Lords. Assumed to be natural enemies, these groups united in their calls for economic justice. In the Aug. 9, 1969 issue of The Black Panther newspaper, the party’s chief of staff, David Hilliard, admiringly called the Young Patriots “the only revolutionaries we respect that ever came out of the mother country.” Recalling his work with the YPO, former Black Panther Bobby Lee explained that “The Rainbow Coalition was just a code word for class struggle.” In the end, the Illinois Panthers brought together various elements of the black community, Confederate flag-waving southern white migrants (Young Patriots), Puerto Ricans (Young Lords), poor white ethnic groups (Rising Up Angry, JOIN Community Union, and the Intercommunal Survival Committee), students and the women’s movement. The disparate groups under the coalition’s umbrella pooled resources and shared strategies for providing community services and aid that the government and private sector would not. Initiatives included health clinics, feeding homeless and hungry people, and legal advice for those dealing with unethical landlords and police brutality.

Colette Gaiter, “Chicago 1969: When Black Panthers aligned with Confederate-flag-wielding, working-class whites” (January 8th 2017).

[eeveelutionsforequality]

The thing that most people don't get about bigotry and assholery is that if you sort people into these generalized groups then most, if not all, groups are on the receiving as well as the giving end. Most people fall into multiple groups, and many have ancestry from multiple ethnic groups.

You wouldn't know from looking at me how much Welsh, Irish, Scandinavian, Spanish, Celt, etc, is in my ancestry - you wouldn't know that I'm descended from people that the English think of as inbred sheep-shaggers, as well as people that the Welsh think of as mindless, money driven imperialists... heck, most Americans wouldn't even know that they have that stereotype of each other. You wouldn't guess that I have to remind family members who pride themselves on their English side that they're talking about themselves when they vomit out the pejoratives directed at other Europeans or at lower classes.

The poor and the middle class think that the rich are posh toffs, who wallow in pools of money that they don't care to spend on anything but flamboyant displays of wealth; the rich and the middle class think that we, the poor, are a heaving mass of drunken, racist idiots who don't appreciate the politics and charities that they support for our alleged betterment; the rich think that the middle class are in the poor category, and the poor think that the middle class are in the rich category.

The white poor in the trailer parks of America are considered backwoods, inbred, unhealthy, drunken, bigoted wastes of oxygen; the black people in the poor communities are thought of as violent thugs with absent fathers, who's only redeeming feature is musical skill; the rich white people in the cities are looked down upon as fools who name their child Mystical Rosemarybush India Kyaytyryn and feign gluten allergies, while rotting their brains with abysmal vegan diets and obscenely priced lattes.

The straight cis "white" guy who you think is a disgusting, misogynistic cunt based solely on the fact that you're a feminist and he's a man who disagrees with you, is also half Mexican and only white passing, and is so used to people stereotyping him as a rapist and misogynist that your "feminism" is indistinguishable from racism.

The pretty white girl, who you think is a rich white "Stacey", who you think gets everything handed to her and couldn't possibly understand the loneliness that you feel, grew up in an abusive religious household and suffers from the very same mental health issues that make you feel like no woman could ever love you and like you must adopt the label of "incel" and rally against the ills of the world that disadvantaged you, so your anger at the cards that life has dealt you is indistinguishable from the garbage that fundamentalists forced on her throughout her childhood.

I've been a victim of police brutality and medical abuse because I'm trans and mentally ill, I've been called xenophobic and racial slurs and treated like I'm inferior because of where my ancestors were born, but because I'm a pale guy on the internet I got told that I had no right to speak about those experiences, and it was practically indistinguishable from the officers and medical staff making it very clear to me that they already had a cover story and nobody would believe me.

When you sort people into these boxes, and actually follow every thread between them, you'll come to the conclusion that everybody hates each other, that everybody's victimized by something... but it's easier to pick out the instances that suit your own worldview, your own culture, your own experiences, and then assume that everybody you come into contact with on the internet can be sorted into the bad group or the good group.

What you're calling "intersectional" never seems to be about actually looking at every single one of those threads, seeing how they go in so many directions and affect everyone... it's just about expanding your "bad group" and "good group" to be based on more than sex/gender.

~ Vape

[eye-of-enigmatic-thought]

Another character for my Gaia AGR stuff, say hello to Vashti! A homeless Indo-European agender kid trying to survive in a harsh fascist dystopia and help others survive in it too.

Character background under the cut, content warning for themes and discussions of: racism, sexism, classism, misogyny, transphobia, police brutality, poverty, and homelessness.

(NOTE: Whilst I am Indo-European, I know very little of the cultures and the main ethnic features of Indo-Europeans, if any Indo-European person has criticisms, by all means please tell me.)

Vashti is a agender Indo-european teen who was born and raised female, throughout their childhood they had issues with their gender and had always felt they 'weren't really a woman and not really a man either', but kept their feelings on it a secret to prevent any more complications than the ones they already face. 

Vashti's family was an odd case, for being a middle class family in Atlantis, they were also people of colour (a mixed variety of Indo-European and Middle Eastern ethnicities). Whilst being middle class meant they could afford more basic needs than lower class people could, due to their race they still had less opportunities and were more likely to be arrested for small crimes by the APF (Atlantic Police Force). Some of them even saw fit to have body mods such as nose jobs to make themselves look less their ethnicity, Vashti in this case, has had a nose job (hence their small nose).

However despite this the family could still afford education, and they were able to give some of the younger generations, such as Vashti, the ability to go to school and receive some education, it was education that was filled with lots of propaganda, but still education nonetheless and would give them job opportunities. However, Vashti dealt with a lot of racism and sexism for not being a 'feminine woman' not only from other students but from the teachers as well, this led Vashti to purposefully skip school, leading them to have a reputation of a delinquent and be arrested many times by the APF when caught, which in turn caused all sorts of financial trouble for Vashti's family. When however Vashti managed to get away with it, they would explore their city, often intermingling with lower class areas.

Vashti was always taught by their peers both in and out of school that they deserved their treatment for being a poc, in some ways they even believed it, and thought trying to escape the racism they faced meant that they were 'weak', but when they saw the injustices done to the lowerclasses, they were horrified, they saw people like themselves be beaten to death by the police for the most smallest crimes or even no crimes at all, they saw various gangs that would recruit children and force them to do horrific deeds, they saw many families living in poverty and abuse with no hope to get out of it. Everything they were taught in education, that they 'deserved' this treatment was a lie, because NO ONE deserved to be dehumanised for simply existing. This revelation sparked a change in Vashti, and when not in school, they would secretly engage in many communities both lower and middle class to help the people in them.

Ironically, they also learned more about the world from the lowerclasses than school, from engaging with the various lowerclass communities, they learned about many different cultures, including ones where the concept of gender was much more 'loose' and not as strict and rigid. Eventually, they came out as agender to their family, but word got out and unfortunately for the APF this was the last straw for Vashti, as being transgender was seen as 'obscene'. Vashti was now permanently expelled from school and now at risk for being sent to a labour camp or chimeran experimentation, and if their family continued to try and support them, it was possible that they would be too, so they were forced to disown Vashti, though not before secretly helping them escape from the APF, but unfortunately making Vashti homeless.

Being homeless has not been kind to Vashti, their lack of access to clean water, food, and hygiene products has led them to have all sorts of health problems, however due to their previous deeds in helping the lives of various communities, they've managed to receive support from them, and in turn, with further education and job-hunting out of the question, they continue to help others in any way they can whilst avoiding the APF.

[christinakoumoutsidis-blog]

Reading Journal #1: Week 4 (Race)

Finishing “The Hate U Give” this week gave me a lot to think about, especially going into our first seminars. Race is a topic that I often don’t think about and I believe that its due to my white privilege. It can often be an uncomfortable topic, especially in a time where so much controversy exists. However, our lecture and seminars, I became more comfortable having these discussions. In the safety of our classroom, I was able to grasp a better understanding of race and the parts of being African American that many do not understand unless they have dealt firsthand. This in turn has opened a new door on this topic, as well as given me the opportunity to gain a better sense of awareness. 

I was fully aware of the Black Lives Matters movements, the riots and ongoing effects of police brutality that are occurring worldwide. However, since I’m not one who was directly impacted, I think that I struggled to connect with those who did, since I could not put myself in their shoes. During our lecture, we discussed “The Whiteness Project”, which was something that I had never heard about. After leaving class, I decided to take a further look and was appalled when hearing some of the statements made. One in particular that stood out to me was from a white male who said, “I feel that Caucasian individuals are more suppressed than African Americans.” The feeling that sat with me after hearing that was of pure disgust. I felt that even though I could not directly relate to African American’s who have dealt with certain issues, I know that these statements are extremely false. It is moments like these that I am so grateful to have the opportunity to take classes like this that allow me to gain a better understanding on difficult topics like race. “The Hate U Give” was an extremely insightful read and I feel that it connected to the audience as young adults. I became socially aware of culture and race in the media when I was in high school. The Black Lives Matter Movement took off in 2013, and while I read the book, felt very representative of the “Real life” events that occurred. Much of the media coverage that occurred during this time period was reflected in the text. Towards the end of the book when riots and protests were occurring, I couldn’t help but think of the riots that occurred in Ferguson in 2014, as well as the numerous other protests that have occurred since then. I think the beauty behind “The Hate U Give” is that anyone can create a personal connection to the story, no matter what race they identify as. Someone who is African American may identify more literally with the text, understanding the daily struggles that Starr deals with. Someone like myself can connect more with the perspective of it, seeing police brutality in the media and seeing a more personal view on how it impacts certain people’s lives. Overall, I feel that the assigned reading for this week, as well as our seminars and class discussions truly gave me a better sense of understanding race which is something that can be difficult to grasp.

[soulvomit]

I mostly care about people’s praxis, far more than their analysis or their fandoms. You will reach that point, too.

I feel like a lot of the culture of young Millennials and Gen Z hitting “cancel” on friendships with people who aren’t ideologically identical, is kind of interesting, because there are only a few ways that could have come about. This filtering is something I can apply to *new* friends, certainly - I have, and I do - and my newer friends are much more “like me” in terms of how I presently am. But it’s harder with legacy friends, and it’s harder with people who are clique members. There is very little way I could do this because of what the general social shape of my life is like. I wouldn’t be surprised if many of you feel the same way in your 40s, once you’ve had a chance to make a bunch of different friends in the non-digital world - at your jobs, in your neighborhood, etc. - and once you find that your same-age friends that you had in your teens and 20s, have either changed, or *not* changed (and *you* have changed). One of my groups of mismatched, imperfect people goes back to the 1980s. We are in our mid to late 40s now. This is the group I run into the most issues with, with politics. Many of them were oddballs or even radical in their day.  It’s not that they are now Trump supporters or anything. They aren’t. They largely either voted for Bernie or Hillary and not a single one of them voted for Trump. But after I moved away, I got involved in LGBTQ culture... and they simply stayed the same. Being actually in LGBTQ culture in the Bay Area, in the 90s, isn’t the same as being a hetero person in a heterocentric world who doesn’t hate gay people. Most of my friends up here are actual allies or activists. Most of my friends in LA, who I grew up with, are simply not haters. Most are super progressive by 1990s LA standards. They support trans rights and gay rights and bi rights and women’s rights at the most basic and active level I actually require from cis het middle class people: as a non-hating outsider who will back up LGBTQ people at the polls and who will back up their LGBTQ friends when there’s trouble. They call people out when people tell gay jokes. They use people’s preferred gender pronoun, respect trans people’s identities, and probably even have friends who are trans. But they have no idea what’s actually going on in the LGBTQ community or what conversations are being had or even what those conversations are being called. I’m pretty sure they don’t “get it” about any gender identities besides male and female, on a deep internalized level. But they will respect your identity despite not “getting it.”    They are not the perfect kinds of 100%-validating all-accepting friends *now* that I needed as a teenager and 20something. The funny thing is, they *were* the 100%-validating all-accepting our-politics-100%-match friends when I was initially friends with them. But people change. They meet the minimum requirement I have of family members, to be able to sit at the same dinner without me raging and walking away. There are things I simply don’t talk to them about, because I feel like they live on a different planet from me and just don’t get all the finer points of political or social stuff I’ve dealt with since leaving LA. While they don’t particularly do anything that is harmful or racist by today’s terms, I also can’t really talk about them about that stuff, because they just Haven’t Kept Up. It’s annoying sometimes, because I love to talk about that stuff and think about that stuff and a lot of them seem like they’ve closed themselves off since their early 20s.  And that’s the thing - lots of people, particularly people who are not that marginalized themselves, simply Do Not Keep Up with the latest discourse around every new movie or piece of media or every new offense. And even older marginalized people don’t necessarily have the same analysis as younger marginalized people.  The group I grew up with, knows what’s on the ballot, they support their real-life friends, but it is the kind of thing of “I don’t know your life experience, but I love *you.*” No, that is not the same at all as “hate the sinner but love the sin.” The shape of this is more like, in real life, “I support your rights and I support *you* and I voted for the right things, but I don’t get what’s wrong with the representation in that movie nor do I even know what people are saying about it.” They have no problem with analyses of racism and other forms of prejudice as a more binary thing but aren’t up on the latest analyses of it as a pervasive cultural thing or The Invisible Knapsack or 2019′s construction of cultural appropriation. I can’t even talk with some of these people about these things. They don’t even know these conversations are happening any more than they know what music the young people are listening to. Their whole world consists of other people their age, older people, and their own children. Actually the ones with teenagers more up on the issues. This will happen to you, too, because chances are, you will either politically drift from your high school and college age friends, or they will drift from you. Some of you will “keep up” more than others have.  Sometimes you’ll educate them - but sometimes you’ll just leave those topics alone. Most of the time, you’ll just leave it be. Especially since so many people past their 20s have just frozen in place, culturally and socially (those of you who are a little older know this, just think about your high school reunion).  There gets to be a point at which you just end up accepting that there is such a thing as Woke Enough.  Here is the thing: It’s a stark truth that a lot of you, in your 20s, are probably at the peak level of engagement that you will ever be. And some of you who go on being activists, will be burned out by this age. Even those among you who are LGBTQ may find a partner then just kind of close yourself off inside your world of partnered friends, and move to the burbs away from where all the discourse is taking place. And with the discourse swinging younger and younger - you may eventually find yourselves totally out of the loop. Eventually, you will find that your friends that once matched you on everything, no longer match you on everything... but provided they don’t do anything too horrific (and you get to decide what your limits are, and yes you will probably have to pick and choose your causes because by your 40s you’re going to find that it’s impossible to be all things to all people and “not being a dick” is the best you can offer.) You won’t even know it’s happening until it’s happened. And it WILL happen and there is pretty much nothing you can do about it. There are a couple of them whose politics infuriate me, because of how oblivious they seem to be about anything that has happened since 1999.   Honestly, these people do piss me off, and I feel like there is a lot of willful ignorance among a lot of cis-het white middle class people in my age group. Especially the ones who didn’t lose privilege in some major way. And honestly. I have to just hold my nose. Because after 30 years of friendship, they’re still the group in which I’m most likely to find a place to live should I need one, or a kidney donor.  It would be almost impossible to “cancel” them for not being perfect. For not knowing the newest and most woke terms. Here is a way that in your teens and 20s you get to more play “pick and choose” - if your friends are all individual people whom you met as an individual person. None of them know each other. You aren’t in some enmeshed group with a lot of overlapping, intersecting interdependencies. Small town and clique and workplace dynamics almost always have a little bit of “Geek Social Fallacies” to them, because it’s not like you can just push someone out of the group, not when they’re married to your other friend and their wife is your kids’ babysitter.  I have a couple of legacy friends from the high school days who were progressive for the 80s and 90s. Not a single one of them would ever vote for or support Trump and plenty would defriend you over the same. They’re not progressive by Gen Z standards. I just have to be okay with them not being transphobes, not being racists, not being homophobes or biphobes. I have to be okay with them backing me at the polls and boycotting problematic companies, even when their analysis is not all that. There is a lot of indirect problematica in 90s progressive politics. People just didn’t have as much information. Here’s an example. You get a lot of political analyses that are the product of people who know about the Civil Rights Movement, who generally are the most generous definition of what the 90s thinks of as “not a racist.” They voted for Obama, are great with their kids marrying a black person (or they married one), are great even with living in diverse communities. They may even be against police brutality. They grew up in upper middle class communities that weren’t necessarily ethnically or racially exclusive. But they don’t have the analysis that Gen Z leftists have, or that the LGBTQ community has, or that poor marginalized communities have. They don’t use the same framing or same words to talk about these issues. They don’t think they are racist, because their main connections with POC are with other second-generation middle class people. Their analyses almost always exclude generational poverty.   So what happens is because they’re so clueless, they support policies that they think are not racist, but lead to racist results. Because this cause and effect  can be almost invisible to someone not actually living in poor, diverse communities. They genuinely think gentrification is awful but at the same time they don’t actually know anyone who’s ever been gentrified out. Or their friends moved away who were poorer, but it’s “a mystery,” because the thing with Bay Area gentrification is that it was happening one family at a time as far back as the 90s and no one was talking about it. Most of them are well-intentioned but the particular set of issues are so incredibly nuanced that somebody on the outside just probably won’t understand unless they’ve grown up around that group or put a lot of time into learning the problem. Like, I’m pretty sure that a lot of them, as good as they are about relating to other ethnicities, don’t really get Native issues. I’ll have to settle for the fact that they know enough to only buy Native art from Native people, and they know not to wear war bonnets. But I don’t expect them to know a single thing about S’Klallam land management crises. It’s only recently that any of them would’ve had any context regarding residential schools like the one my grandfather was in. And yes I like when people listen and actually grasp what I’m saying from real empathy and understanding and interest in knowing. But you’d be surprised how short this is, about so many things, in the real world. Most people are not that interested in my long stories about ANYTHING unless that’s what they actually came for. I have to be okay with the fact that my friends that I grew up with, are not “with it” as much as I’d like them to be, and decide how “with it” I require - then once I have decided, I have to be okay with the fact that they would probably give me a kidney. My more recent friends are the ones who are more “with it” about the same things I care about.  But you’d be surprised how little a lot of subjects ever, ever actually come up in a conversation of longstanding acquaintances - when the acquaintanceship runs a decade or more. And the main metric for “listen” is, “if it DID come up, would I be able to tell them? Would they get it?” A lot of them won’t Get It to the degree that someone just like me would get it. And I’m so many things in one person, that nobody is ever going to be Just Like Me. So others’ empathy and understanding, for the purposes of my own life, has to be Good Enough. Everyone has to make an individual choice on this one and decide how much sameness they need in certain areas, how much empathy. The people who really fucked up - like the couple of people who really did turn out to be racists - I’ve long since canceled. I’m no longer friends with any radfems, either.  And what’s more is that I have a big extended world of people, but I also have a “circle of trust” that is only a few. Those are the handful of people who know me, get me, I can fully be myself with. And these are not my high school or college era friends. These are worth three times their weight in gold. But most of what younger Tumblrians expect in their dealings with people - that’s stuff I only really get out of the people in my circle of trust.  For everyone else, Good Enough will have to be okay. What’s more is that I bet a lot of you will come to the same conclusion one day.  I realize this sounds like middle class white normie neoliberal apologia. But there’s a difference between “people who are my very best friends, who I can tell everything to” (which is not actually THAT many people, but it’s enough) and “people I generally otherwise enjoy and wouldn’t kick out of an AD&D game, but can’t talk about EVERYTHING with.”

[berniesrevolution]

One consistent theme of American politics over the last generation has been the increasingly strong ideological discipline of the Republican Party. What that has meant in policy terms is fairly clear: tax cuts for the rich, cuts to social insurance programs, deregulation, free trade, union-busting, and a belligerent foreign policy.

The rise of President Trump, of course, seemed like it might upset things. He ran as an erstwhile economic populist, promising to protect Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security; enact soak-the-rich tax increases; and tear up free-trade deals that had harmed the (white, he none too subtly implied) working class. But his actual administration, stacked as it is with right-wing hardliners, has simply underlined the dominance of conservative ideology. The only significant policy passed during his administration has been a traditional tax cut for the rich, plus a lot of deregulation carried out at the executive level.

So what about the Democrats?

Certainly before 2008, one couldn't say they had a starkly different set of policy ideas. Up through about the early 1970s, it had been a fairly straightforward working-class party, but after a generation of reform, under Bill Clinton it stood for a muddle of capitalism worship leavened with means-tested welfare programs. At bottom, it was a left-inflected version of the same neoliberalism that comprises Republican Party doctrine.

But the 2008 financial crisis called that ideology into question. It turns out that Clinton's welfare reform grossly harmed the poorest Americans, his neoliberal trade agreements dealt a sharp blow to the national manufacturing base, and his financial deregulation set the stage for global economic catastrophe. Though Barack Obama basically held the line on Clintonian orthodoxy, when he was gone from political competition in 2016, previously marginal left-wingers like Bernie Sanders and Keith Ellison, who had been carrying the old New Deal torch for decades, suddenly rocketed to the front rank of politics.

Has the party as a whole changed its thinking on these questions, though? To get one initial look, I interviewed multiple Democratic congressional candidates. I reached out to dozens, attempting to get a decently wide range of perspectives and regions. Ultimately, eight candidates agreed to be interviewed, and while the sampling method is clearly less than scientific, it provides an interesting sort of ersatz focus group containing a decent mix of left-wingers and centrists. Not being quite sure what I was going to find, I asked fairly basic questions about economic, social, and foreign policy, focusing on broad disputes between the economic populist-dovish wing of the party and the neoliberal-war hawk wing.

My major conclusion is this: The Democratic Party has developed a strong consensus on social justice issues like gay marriage, transgender rights, and police brutality. On foreign policy, it seems somewhere in the middle — not exactly favoring imperialist wars of aggression, but not terribly interested in a new paradigm either. But the party as such makes virtually no attempt to put forward a consistent party line on economic issues. On political economy, what up-and-coming Democrats believe and say depends largely on forces outside the party, and the candidates who are the clearest thinkers are the ones who have done their own reading and research.

This lack of ideological spade work is setting the party up for disaster down the road.

I interviewed Jess King (candidate for Pennsylvania's 11th District), Richard Ojeda (West Virginia's 3rd), Gil Cisneros (California's 39th), Shireen Ghorbani (Utah's 2nd), Mike Levin (California's 49th), Diane Mitsch Bush (Colorado's 3rd), Dan Canon (Indiana's 9th, who lost his primary after the interview), and Randy Bryce (Wisconsin's 1st, where he is gunning to fill Paul Ryan's seat after Ryan retires). I attempted to contact several senatorial candidates, as well as the DCCC itself, but none agreed to talk.

First, a bit of necessary background. The greatest political-economic risk for Democrats is the possibility that the next Democratic president will have to clean up after another financial crisis. During the Great Recession, the Obama administration moved heaven and Earth to save the financial system (including looking the other way while Wall Street committed a world-historical crime spree), but the party only managed milquetoast half-measures to save the rest of the economy. The economic stimulus of 2009 — passed in a panic after Obama was inaugurated — prevented a full-blown depression, but did not restore full employment.

As 2010 progressed, it became increasingly obvious that the stimulus had been a severe undershoot. But Democrats did not pass another. The reason was ideological. The Keynesian idea that the government should spend until full employment was reached — as it did during the New Deal and the Second World War, thus fixing the Great Depression — took tentative hold in 2009, but soon afterwards the forces of neoliberalism regrouped and began loudly flipping out about deficits. Most Democrats had a vague at best understanding of the logic of stimulus, and quickly gave in.

(Continue Reading)

[virginiaprelawland]

Athletes Impact On The BLM Movement

By Marquise Mobley, Virginia Commonwealth University Class of 2021

March 26, 2021

In the midst of a global pandemic, America has dealt with numerous issues that have delayed modern progression. One of the issues being police brutality; police brutality was an imposing headliner in 2020, which resulted in massive protests. The protest began on a state level and quickly spread to a global phenom.  Citizens from various countries joined the fight, and the BLM movement was shown a significant amount of support. Significant companies such as Puma, Nike, and Adidas broadcasted their support through social media to honor victims and support the BLM movement. Athletes kneeled and spoke out against the criminal justice system; it was indeed a year Americans will never forget. With all of this misfortune, it questions how the world views America. Are opposing countries taking America less seriously?  Are immigrants becoming more hesitant to migrate to America because of racial prejudices?

The death of George Floyd not only shook America, but it also shook the world. The tragedy sparked chaos in numerous communities. Which begs the question: is protesting the only successful way to get recognition from the government. Author Kurtz says, "the immediate aftermath of George Floyd's murder sparked another wave of athlete activism. Political opinions from athletes have consistently been dismissed and frowned upon by political figures. On February 19th of 2018, Journalist Laura Ingraham told NBA superstar Lebron James to shut and dribble. She stated she was not interested in getting political advice from "someone who gets paid 100 million a year to bounce a ball. " This can be seen as an example of white privilege; she is only expressing her view and not considering the minority. Athletes are essential to the reform because they have the ability to bring in millions of supporters.  They also bring awareness to supporters who are not active in politics. Colin Kaepernick can be seen as a modern-day activist that was shunned upon by many political figures. Kaepernick kneeled during the anthem of the united states for police brutality and social injustices toward African Americans.

"I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color. To me, this is bigger than football, and it would be selfish on my part to look the other way. There are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder."

Kaepernick became a headliner that transcended football and was covered by almost every media source. He took a stand for not only for African Americans but also was a voice for athletes.  Kaepernick's ambition cost him his job, but he later became the voice of an award-winning Nike ad campaign. NFL commissioner Goodell later said the league was wrong for silencing their players and players should be allowed to protest peacefully. This brings me back to my first point that protesting appears to be the only way to get the government's attention. 

I included LeBron and Kaepernick's cases to show the progression of athlete activism from 2016 till today. Within that short period, the BLM movement has gotten a vast amount of support and grew enormously. More athletes are voicing their opinions and standing for what they believe in . Even International athletes such as FIFA players are showing support by kneeling before games. This shows that sacrifices from athletes such as Kaepernick have not gone in vain and they ultimately help progress the movement. Recently, the NBA All-Star game was dedicated to elevating historically black colleges.  They raised more than three million dollars, and all of it was donated to HBCUs.  The BLM movement has gotten a massive surge of advertisement from video games, Clothing brands, television, and so much more. 2020 was a bad year for social injustices, but it was a good year for progression. Americans are starting to take action and realizes that racial injustice is still a significant problem in America. Now that many Americans are no longer deny the issue, we can now work towards fixing it.

______________________________________________________________

Boren, Cindy. “A Timeline of Colin Kaepernick's Protests against Police Brutality, Four Years after They Began.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 26 Aug. 2020, www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2020/06/01/colin-kaepernick-kneeling-history/.

Kurtz, Jeffrey B. “Sport, Social Justice, and the Limits of Dissent After George Floyd: A Reply to Butterworth - Jeffrey B. Kurtz, 2021.” SAGE Journals, 2020, journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2167479520976359?casa_token=yAkPyLULDWkAAAAA%3ABmiU4ZklMDY_r-r9sF9IYvFDYV-QcK1Dc37mt2HtoQZIsJLlzEgw1AYM44MKc36yeBS3_rcoqTPCKA.

Sullivan, Emily. “Laura Ingraham Told LeBron James To Shut Up And Dribble; He Went To The Hoop.” NPR, NPR, 19 Feb. 2018, www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/02/19/587097707/laura-ingraham-told-lebron-james-to-shutup-and-dribble-he-went-to-the-hoop.

Photo Credit: James Boyes