#and maybe we need to look at white identities to solve racism

[thedreadvampy]

feels shit tbh watching people you know are fundamentally, as much as anyone is fundamentally anything, good and caring people just fucking go slowly step by tiny step towards reactionary bigotry in ways you can't even. put your finger fully on.

[tianshiisdead]

It’s 3:30 am and I can’t sleep so here are some thoughts keeping me up.

Warnings for rambling (and complaints) about Chinese diaspora and culture and learning, some criticism, this isn’t inviting criticism from outside the community though and this is only my own opinion as a Chinese diaspora. I am also not super well versed on the culture and I’m honestly just trying to learn. Some of this is kinda unhinged and I’m definitely far far FAARR left politically so be warned.

I was thinking about soft power cultural exports (which E. Asia definitely triumphs at) and cultural identity and the twitter complaints about those pesky Asian liberal sellouts who still write articles about stinky food and hating their name when our elders are getting attacked in the streets. And you know, I don’t think it’s 100% productive to attack EasianAms with big platforms who are just expressing their thoughts, lifting up their community in the only way they know how, but that’s not to say all criticism against them is, well, completely invalid. I think most of us have gone through that self hatred phase, or at least a lot of us, that’s why the articles are relatively well received, but they’re also quite well received by white people and non easians, for a less cool reason maybe, because they’re pretty easy to swallow aren’t they? Like most things peddled by liberals, no challenges, no change, status quo is okay.

word count: 1400

Because like, boba tea and anime, subtle asian traits on facebook, k dramas and The Untamed (which is much more niche but yk). These things are palatable for a western audience, some of it is designed to be palatable for a western audience, and a lot of them are the cultural exports of countries with histories of western imperialism or colonization that changes, however subtly, beauty standards and stuff. Other stuff is cutely packaged propaganda but let’s ignore that for a second, Marvel is also cutely packaged propaganda so yk. I think, we all go through that self hate phase, an unfortunate bonus of growing up non white in a white supremacist society, but at some point you have to confront it. You grew up hating your culture and your name and your food through no fault of your own, but at some point you have to be the one to take steps to undo it and work through it if you want to be the Voice of Chinese Americans, otherwise you’ll just continue to peddle orientalist and racist ideals in a pretty packaging of anti-racism. ‘It’s okay because I’m Chinese and I think it’s okay’ doesn’t mean much when you’ve never bothered to look into the history of Chinese Americans and how they were treated here, when you don’t know the recent history of China and how the current state came into being, into the culture that isn’t just boba and poetry and strict collectivist family dynamics etcetera. and Like, you don’t *need* to know or to learn, but if you’re going to put yourself out there to be a cultural ambassador and try and show the positive side of your culture, be the role model for little kids you never had growing up, it’s important that you’re educated on these things and willing to listen so you don’t recreate the idea of the Chinese American identity as one inherently interwoven with shame, or one brushed up and painted over and ready to be consumed. 

The other issue, of course, is that packaging anti-asian racism as stinky food and ugly names that can be easily solved, and often is presented as already pretty much solved, is easy for non asian people to swallow. Like, it’s sort of like anime or boba tea, cute and brightly coloured, soft power with no hard power behind it, culture packaged up to be consumed (and. fetishized) with enough familiarity to a global audience to bridge the culture shock. You don’t need to think too hard about it, look away from imperial J/apan apologia and propaganda, look away from the icky parts of the culture, there’s no dog eaters here. Asia is only East Asia, Asia is pretty and made up of pretty idol boys and brightly coloured technology, Asia is backwards and gross and societal issues are symbols of that, to laugh at or moan about as if it’s something that only exists there. Or maybe societal issues don’t exist there, because look at those pretty cartoons and pretty actors, and you don’t want to give up your fan account just because of a scandal, right? It’s a playground, a movie, come laugh at it or indulge in the beauty or get upset at the bad parts and then put it down once you’ve had your fill of entertainment. For us, if you distract the crowd with these little sad stories you can cover up the violent parts of the racism, if you repaint Chinese Americans as a model minority based on your own upper middle class experience you can ignore the fact that this race has one of the largest wealth gaps and that for every rich Chinese American and fuerdai there’s a ton of poor working class immigrants whose faces have become indistinguishable with the crowd of nonwhite working class, little chance at moving up in a system already hostile to the poor but even more so to the immigrants, the POC, but never included in the discussions about their own people. 

There was a tweet I read about how it’s gross that the Big Name AsAm Ambassador of Culture and Talker of Racism Topics constantly yells about the See See Pee as if all the people here don’t already know it’s eeeevil and praises America’s systems and democracy in between crying about growing up bullied for food, lectures Asian Americans on their behavior with that huge platform of mostly white people, and when the violent attacks against elderly started coming out, it was radio silence from their end aside from another post about childhood bullying or maybe a criticism of how backwards Back Home is. Like, there’s nuance to every topic, a lot of stuff is going on and AsAm communities aren’t (and shouldn’t be) exempt from criticism and calls for reform and progress, but my very personal opinion is that if you’re marketing yourself as a talker abouter of racism and current events to a platform of mostly white people, you should maybe... cover this. There’s blatant warmongering on TV and in every news outlet that covers it, and I know Chinese Americans could lose their jobs or legitimacy if they peep a single word about the entire PRC being anything other than eeevil and backwards and they constantly have to prove their allegiance, even if it means ‘china covering up covid numbers BY 17083989385949%!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!’, but the last time Asian people were separated into ‘good asians’ and ‘bad asians’ and constantly forced to prove their allegiance a lot of uh bad things happened. 

But in the end, a lot of these journalists and Big Figures who write thought pieces and talk about racism are only allowed to succeed because they are palatable. No criticism aside from don’t be mean to asian people please, no changing the status quo or mentions about systemic racism or ongoing western imperialism and occupation in the global south or sex tourism in SEA and parts of Easia or white expats taking advantage of existing colonial hierarchies there, and plenty of self flagellation and American gov propaganda thrown in to make it easy to eat. America is okay, they say, there’s just some bad eggs in there. I grew up sad, but East Asians aren’t really victims of racism, we’ve always been welcomed here probably compared to other non white groups. There’s a lot of issues in our communities as well, you know this because you think we’re backwards already but here let me tell you about it, invite you to join in on lambasting us. There’s no issue with America’s system, I won’t criticize unless it’s already an ‘established’ topic, I agree with the list of evil countries and good, free countries and I support you. We’re sad because we had stinky lunches but it’s not your fault! Your system is fine.

[sometimesrosy]

I am worried about inclusiveness in my story. I've had these characters in my head for more than 10 years, maybe even 15. When I created them I was a child. As I grew up, I started "upgrading" my story & making it much more fitting to my age now, an adult. However, I don't have much inclusiveness in it. It's in a high fantasy world. The main character is bisexual, & his ex-boyfriend has darker skin. But other than that... I'm having a hard time changing the characters from what I imagined them.

This is a good and complicated question. I’m glad you asked.

There are problems here, and I think you’re finding you’re confronting them but you can’t quite identify them.

The thing about inclusiveness, about adding diversity to your work, is that it can’t really be solved by surface changes like-- oh this character is black now, all better.  BECAUSE diversity is actually about more than just the color of a character’s skin.

Diversity is about differences of life experience, culture, mindset, history, perspective, values. It’s about recognizing that the world is not just one, standard existence, but a multiplicity.

We are in a time now that is *changing* the way we understand people and identity. 

You started this story when you were a child and didn’t recognize all these complexities, and to tell the truth, society itself didn’t really recognize them at a larger level. There’s a reason why you as a kid didn’t see them.

Because our culture as a whole has identified white people as the default people. Specifically white, middle/upperclass, christian, able bodied, straight, cis men as the default person. ANYTHING you have other than that has to be identified, otherwise, we assume they are the default person.

The HERO is always this default person until we define them as otherwise, female, Black, poor, atheist, deaf. Oh look. There’s a new character who has a distinctly different experience than our default person. And you then have to WRITE them with that experience in mind, or you’re just writing the default person in a mask that is only skin deep.

So what I’m trying to tell you is that it’s not really diversity if you just change the color of your character’s skin without letting it reflect upon who they are as a person. And then how that affects your story. You can’t JUST make someone in a wheel chair without changing their part of the story on a fundamental level, don’t you think? If you switch your character from non stated but assumed Christianity to Judaism... how does that affect your story or character? And if it doesn’t, well lets say it’s irrelevant to the story, then how do you share that bit of background of the character, make it authentic and not seem as if you’re just checking boxes on the diversity list?  Do you even know enough about Judaism to write them fairly or will you just toss in some yiddish-- “Oy, what a shmuck!” and leave it at that? Ok well maybe your fantasy world doesn’t have Jewish people. Fair enough. 

But now I need to question your world building. Is everyone in your book of the same culture? Are there different races, religions, creeds, classes, ethnicity? If there aren’t, why not? Are you writing a world where no one travels? Where there’s an oppressive force that requires everyone to worship the same gods? Even JRR Tolkien had multiple races, languages, belief systems and cultures. I say “even” because Tolkien is often taken as the “whiteness model” of fantasy. The British/northern European ideal.

You might be attached to the way your characters look. You’re also probably attached to the world view that white is the default. We all are, frankly. The first novel I wrote I made it about a blonde white woman from the Bronx, where I am from, where blonde white women are few and far between. And I didn’t address how this white woman lived in The Bronx surrounded by mostly brown Latinx people. To be honest, I think I had internalized that concept of white people being the default, of ALL books being about the white experience and that was just how you write a story. If I were to rewrite that book now, I would make her Latina. I could keep the main story the way it was, but switching her to Latina would require a hefty rewrite as her character, experiences, understanding, perspective and the way she looked at herself and her world would be different. 

What you need to do, IF you want to add diversity to your novel, is to do a major overhaul of your understanding of what it means to be human and how our differences and intersections shape our identity and experiences. That means a major overhaul of your story. 

OR you could leave your story the way it is and don’t add diversity to what seems to be a complete story already, just to fit the times and concerns of the day, STILL do the work of overhauling your personal understanding of diversity, and then in the next book, build that diversity in from the bottom up. 

Even if you leave the book with everyone looking the way they already do, you might try adding an AWARENESS of race, diversity, otherness, bias, bigotry, etc. White people ALSO move through this world with people who don’t look like them. Acting like white people don’t have any repercussions from living in this racist society is making a statement that not only is the white experience the default experience and the way things should be, but also racism is just a given and doesn’t need to be examined, since it only affects POC.

Any way you take it, it’s a lot of work. That’s because confronting your own biases, blindspots, assumptions and unspoken prejudices is HARD and takes constant work.

[dragonturtle2]

My greatest apprehensions for the new My Little Pony movie & generation.

Today MLP Generation 5 has been made available on Netflix, and on Saturday I’ll be seeing it with my friends in the Milwaukee Bronies. I’ve had an uneasy feeling about it, and finally putting much of that into words was helpful. It was certainly interesting, and I’d like to share it with other people. I’ve done so with only a few, but I want to put this out there before anyone thinks my opinion is contaminated by either seeing the movie, or something getting spoiled. Tomorrow I may be relieved, let down, or just impressed that I managed to predict so much. Something I’ve definitely kept in mind is that with Generation 4’s premieres, finales, and own movie, the trailers were always cut unimpressively (IMHO). So I tended to be pleasantly surprised with pretty much everything I watch from G4, when I even bothered looking at the trailers. So I’ll be quite happy to be proven wrong this Saturday. Now…

They certainly didn’t intend to be flipping off everything Gen 4 established. No creator ever tries that when they’re brought into a franchise in the payroll of the IP owners. But for their society to regress to this point of segregation? The only thought process I can think of for this bizarre departure are A) The new show staff threw their hands up on matching anything with G4... or B) they came up with a totally fresh setting and timeline, and then some exec or analyst at Hasbro said “Heck no, you are GOING to connect this with our previous money-printing machine. Got it?” And that level of mandated storytelling doesn’t fill me with confidence.

I’ve heard at least one comparison to the Sequel Trilogy, which I expected. True, there’s some notable superficial similarities. It’s decades(?) later, the original heroes are spoken of as myths, for various reasons the world is in trouble, and our protagonist is a disciple-slash-fangirl of what the previous heroes fought for. But this is way more drastic and bizarre of a development.

The conflict in the Sequel Trilogy for the galaxy at large is that the Empire has returned, but rebranded. A new set of new jerks wanted power, teamed up with some of the old jerks, got a bunch of big guns, and held the galaxy hostage. That’s something that just happens in repeated strokes of history. It’s the re-drawing of a bunch of borders. The only moral failing there is being lax with fascists.

Having the Sequel Trilogy retread a plot also isn’t as weird as the My Little Pony franchise. The Force Awakens was made decades after the OT concluded, and the previous Prequel Trilogy took a really different direction and wasn’t received well. Then the franchise got completely new owners. So going back to its roots to start things out was a logical move. It’s only been THREE YEARS between these different shows of MLP, so the repetition doesn’t have much charm. Although repetition may not be the right word, since the setup for this show’s racial dilemma is way more extreme.

Equestria for some reason has gone through a jaw-dropping morale decay. Not only have they embraced division they were fighting against in seasons 8 & 9, they’ve regressed to the level of segregation before Equestria was FOUNDED. The Star Wars equivalent of that would be not only everyone fighting the First Order, they also suddenly don’t allow Wookies and other aliens to drink from the water fountains. Like, how the heck did that turn into a problem?

If the only progress undone from Gen 4 were the relationships with the non-ponies introduced later, that would actually make more sense. Social equality has reactionary backlash, which often occurs immediately after landmark victories. Ponies were the ones that held the most power on the world stage (some kinds more than others in Equestria).

But the WAY bigger issue isn’t internal logic and retcons. I learned long ago to set aside any expectation of a reward or pandering for my years-long commitment to a toy franchise. It’s the potential mishandling of the topic of racism, and I worry we’ve already on shaky ground. The morale of “segregation is bad” feels like bottom of the barrel, kind of copout way of tackling racism. At least, it does for settings that are extremely modern like Generation 5 clearly is. Segregation of people by ethnicity, by rule of law, has fully shifted to obsolesce in the cultural landscape of first world countries. Not even the most deranged lunatics in our government like Boebert or Greene advocate for it (not yet anyway). Stories about segregation can still be done really well of course, but it can’t just be about wiping it off the lawbooks and solving everything. It needs look at why people do this in the first place, who fights for it as the status quo, and what social structures and habits keep the thing in place despite the efforts of good people.

Of course, we still HAVE segregation in society. Not legally, but de facto thanks to economic status and civic planning. And not just physical separation, but grotesque imbalances of power and means. Look at job opportunities, home ownership, insurance evaluations, scrutiny by police, investment in local schools, etc. In G4 it was pretty clear that WAY more unicorns got to live in the lap of luxury or centers of commerce and education. Earth ponies were more spread out, rural, and based on an agrarian existence to feed the country. It’s not that G4 did much with it, but that kind of setup is way closer to modern day inequality, and would be a more fertile bed for those kind of stories. Admittedly, the Pegasi city in the trailer looked absolutely LOADED, so maybe we do have that element in store.

What the trailers and press releases are saying feels weak even as just a segregation story. The ponies separating makes segregation look like a bunch of people moving out like feuding roommates… instead of being put in place by a group of people with WAY more power and money than everyone else. Segregation is portrayed as a mutual agreement, not exploitation. My worry is that they’re going to go to Pocahontas routes, and make the root of racism a select few rich figureheads spreading lies. And undoubtedly, rich people in the private and public sector DO profit off of ignorance and violence, and divert attention from real problems. But when white people in America were treating everyone as subhuman, it wasn’t FEAR that was driving it (at least, not exclusively). For one, it was profit and sheer convenience. Manual labor and the least desirable tasks could be foisted on to ‘lesser’ peoples, and they wouldn’t even require a humane wage. Even if there hadn’t been those empirical benefits, discrimination also brought the sadistic sense of self-importance that comes from standing on someone else’s neck. The imaginary structures of racism let people feel comfortable about their place in the universe.

I wouldn’t call Zecora’s introductory episode all that nuanced, but it was definitely more accurate to real life than the (hopefully hypothetical) scenario I described above. In Bridle Gossip, it’s extremely apparent that the Pony majority of Ponyville are the ones acting like tools, and singling out Zecora for being different. They are the ones obligated to apologize to HER. (Even though it’s of course awkward that they wrote Zecora as a rhyming witch doctor, when she’s meant to represent an African person. It might not be so bad if she wasn’t the ONLY Zebra, and the only creature coded that way.)

Companies and studios will gladly tell their audiences to sympathize with victimized individuals and populations of oppression, and hate the individual acts done upon them. But then they’ll get cagey about making some members of the audience feel any kind of guilt, from distantly benefitting from that system; or maybe even subtlety being part of one. It’s not good for the bottom line to name a civilian population for taking any racist, oppressive or outright murderous actions. No, it’s a single evil dictator (or CEO, or general) and their gaggle of cronies, who just needs to be overthrown. We see this toothless crud play out over and over because corporate entities are either A) that naive, or B) scared of some losers with megaphones losing their minds over the suggestion of self-examination. Some people are SO fragile at the idea of self-examination, or guilt. Because it goes back to having an identity, an innocent and sympathetic self-image.

[schraubd]

ACES Wild

Last we encountered the "Alliance for Constructive Ethnic Studies" (ACES), they were pushing fabricated evidence and wild screeds against "critical race theory" in a failed attempt to derail the California Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum after it was reformed in accord with tremendous efforts by a range of California Jewish (and non-Jewish) organizations.

Now they're back in action, and this time their target is California's new draft Mathematical Framework. What horrors are contained inside? Let's look!

The first draft of the California Mathematics Framework is out for review, and it includes as a resource "A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction," a guide that labels teaching practices like "addressing mistakes" and  "focus on the right answer" as "white supremacy culture."

This is critical race theory.

This is discrimination. 

(Is this "critical race theory"? Nope, not going to get sucked into that).

Unfortunately, as was the case in the ESMC debacle, we are given only the thinnest possible citations to the primary sources for the alleged offending content. The link to the CMF draft goes to a website offering a thirteen chapter document, all in separate documents, comprised of hundreds of page, with no indication of where in the morass the "Pathway" document is included. The link to the Pathway itself, for its part, goes to a site that contains five separate documents, again totaling hundreds of pages, with nary a clue as to where this language about "addressing mistakes" might be found. All of this, I suppose, is left as an exercise for the reader.

Well, I may not be a math expert, but I have gotten familiar enough with the strategies of ACES and its friends to know better than to accept what they say on faith. So I went in search of this resource and this language, to see if it is as scary and offensive as they say.

I want to begin with some good news: unlike the Ethnic Studies case, ACES and its allies do not appear to have completely fabricated the inclusion of the putatively offensive material. Congratulations, ACES! This is a big step forward for you as an organization, and you should give yourself a hearty pat on the back.

Alas, if we ask for more than "not fabricated" and stretch all the way out to "not abjectly misleading", things get dimmer.

Start with the CMF draft. From what I can tell, the section they refer to (where the Pathway document is "included as a resource") is on page 44 of chapter two (lines 1010-13). Here, in its totality, is what's included:

Other resources for teaching mathematics with a social justice perspective include... The five strides of Equitable Math.org: https://ift.tt/3qNG3O2

That's it (The website "Equitablemath.org" is titled "A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction"). It is mentioned, unadorned, in the "other resources" conclusion -- and as far as I can tell, nowhere else. Wowzers. I can feel the racial divisiveness cracking up from here.

One thing I'll observe on this is that often times one hears critics of "critical race theory" (or whatever random buzzword they're using today to connote "scary left-wing idea with a vaguely identity-politics kick") say that their problem isn't that the idea is included, but only that its indoctrinated -- it's not one perspective of many, it's the only perspective on offer. This protestation was always rather thin -- the many many bills banning "critical race theory" are decidedly not about ensuring viewpoint diversity -- and one sees just how hollow it is here. The raw, unadorned inclusion of the Equitable Math resource -- as part of a broader whole, not even quoted from directly -- is too much for these people to tolerate. This is not about ideological heterodoxy. This is about censoring ideas, full stop.

But maybe Equitable Math is such an awful or inane document that it would be wrong to include it, even as one resource among many. The way it's described, after all, makes it sound like Equitable Math is a group of hippies saying "2+2 = 4 is the white man's answer, man! Fight the power!" Is that what's happening? Is this a fever dream of post-modernism where nothing is true and everything is permitted?

Once again, I had to dig for myself to figure out where this content was so I could see it in context. The answer appears to be the first document on the site, titled "Dismantling Racism in Mathematics", on pages 65-68. Do they deny that there are such things as "right" answers in math? No: "Of course, most math problems have correct answers," but there are math problems (particularly word problems, but also data analysis) that can be interpreted in different ways that yield different "right" conclusions, and students and teachers should be attentive to that possibility. Do they say one should never "address mistakes"? No again, but mistakes should not simply be called out flatly but rather used as "opportunities for learning" with an emphasis on building on what the student does understand to lead them to recognize what they misapprehend.

I don't teach math, obviously, but there are many occasions where I'll say "such-and-such is the doctrinally correct answer -- but if we look at the problem from this other vantage, doesn't this other position become more plausible?" So when the Equitable Math site suggests, as an alternative to obsessive focus on the one correct answer, classroom activities like " Using a set of data, analyze it in multiple ways to draw different conclusions" -- well, that doesn't seem weird to me. Certainly, as someone who is also trained as a social scientist, I can say confidently that it's quite valuable to anyone who has seen how the same dataset can be deployed by different people with different priors to support different agendas.

Even more than that, the suggestions around "addressing mistakes" resonate with how I try to teach in my classrooms. Sometimes my students say something wrong. When they do so, for the most part I don't say "bzzzt" and move on, instead I try to guide them to the correct answer by having them unpack their own thinking. There's a lot of "I see what you mean by [X], but suppose ..." and ask questions which hone in on the problems or misunderstandings latent in what they're saying. And eventually they get there, hopefully without feeling like they've just been put inside an Iron Maiden for daring speak up. 

Admittedly, I've never thought of what I'm doing as "dismantling White supremacy" -- I just viewed it as good pedagogy. But then again, that's kind of what I've always thought when asked about such subjects -- we act as if there's this deep magic to fostering equity and inclusion in the classroom, when really it's employing the basic strategies of being a good teacher, one of which is declining to engage in a measuring contest where you prove you know more than the student does. Obviously I know more than the student does. I don't need to prove anything. So if they say something wrong, I do not gleefully pounce on them for it, I do my best to build on what they do know to get them to a position of right. Is that so outrageous?

Finally, ACES in its tweet identifies one other area of crazy-lefty-craziness in this resource: "the incorporation of 'Ethnomathematics'". What does that mean? They don't say, correctly surmising that fevered imaginations will produce something far worse than anything they might quote. So I'll do the quoting for them (this comes from page 8):

Center Ethnomathematics: 

• Recognize the ways that communities of color engage in mathematics and problem solving in their everyday lives. 

• Teach that mathematics can help solve problems affecting students’ communities. Model the use of math as a solution to their immediate problems, needs, or desires. 

• Identify and challenge the ways that math is used to uphold capitalist, imperialist, and racist views. 

• Teach the value of math as both an abstract concept and as a useful everyday tool. 

• Expose students to examples of people who have used math as resistance. Provide learning opportunities that use math as resistance.

I know, I know -- we're all going to pitch a fit about challenging "capitalist views". But apart from that, this seems ... very normal? We all know, to the point of cliche, that a barrier to getting kids interested in math is that they fail to see how it's useful to them or "in the real world". So they advise that math be taught in a way that resonates with real world experience. And likewise, sometimes, for some people "in the real world", math can feel like an enemy (think "am I just a statistic to you?"). So figure out ways to name that and challenge that. For the most part, "ethnomathematics" just reads as a particular social justice gloss on "being a good teacher", as applied to teaching in diverse communities.

Now perhaps one disagrees with these concepts as pedagogical best practice. I'm not a math teacher, I'm not going to claim direct experience here. But that goes back to the intensity of the backlash -- that these ideas need to be banned, that they are outright dangerous and unacceptable and neo-racism. Can that be right? Surely, these ideas are not so outlandish that we should pitch a fit about their being (deep breath) single elements of an 80 page document which is itself part of a five part series being incorporated as a single "see also" bullet point in the second chapter of a thirteen chapter model state framework. Seriously? That's where we're landing? That's what's going to drive us into a valley of racial division and despair?

It's wild. The people engaged in this obsessive crusade to make Everest size mountains over backyard anthills are nothing short of wild.

via The Debate Link https://ift.tt/39P79OA

[tinyhoovequius]

Bonkers Bananaville

Quick PSA edit:

Actively and intentionally harming another person because they inadvertently hurt you is the behavior of a narcissist. If you find yourself doing this, I recommend getting in touch with a therapist. Online bullies who target people for “problematic behavior” are often narcissists who are trying to get away with satisfying their need to punish and harm others who have unintentionally caused them distress while simultaneously satisfying their need for applause. There are other ways to resolve problems. The fact that they choose to wage sustained bullying campaigns is because of their personality disorder, not because it’s an effective or just tool for solving social problems.

=================

So recently, a good friend of mine, mx, has been getting bullied and harassed by some folks in the DC fandom. The circumstances are complicated and stupid and basically amount to a bunch of emotionally fragile morons deciding that because my friend argued that a character is asexual because they grew up under messed up circumstances and didn’t develop into a fully realized social being, my friend mx must be acephobic. Now I will fully admit that the phrasing mx used, when taken out of context, sounds really horrible! They used the expression “barely a person” to describe the character. This is an expression that we use among our friends group in a joking way to describe a character (never a real person) who has not been fully realized as a social individual within whatever fictional world they exist. It’s not so much an attempt to deny the character’s humanity as it is describing what has happened to the person as a result of their life circumstances.  Personally, I disagree with the idea that social circumstances would affect a person’s sexuality. Maybe it would affect their ability to relate to people so that if the person was demi or greysexual to begin with, it would push them away from the possibility of sexual relationships altogether? I can certainly see it contributing to a person being aromantic. And if I had been a part of that conversation that’s what I would have argued to mx.  I myself am asexual. It took me a long time to come out as ace and I had to deal with a lot of shit from random people, family and friends. But you know who never gave me any trouble? You know who always listened to me and supported me? It was mx. They were 100% wonderful about it. They never ever made me feel uncomfortable. They never made any weird advances or comments to me, even before I came out, which other close friends have done. They never pressured me to be anything different than what I am. Never made even the slightest suggestion that there was anything odd about my identity. And they tried to tell me why I am the way I am or dissect it. They let me speak for myself. And the reason they did this is because I am a real living breathing human being and not a fictional character. You see, mx and I are the type of people who make a distinction between how we talk about imaginary constructs and real people. We differentiate in how we treat fictional representations and actual humans (and I guess furries too. I know a lot of furries. I don’t want to exclude them.) 

So these assholes have been sending mx nasty messages, harassing them on multiple platforms, gotten them kicked out of a ton of Discord servers and are approaching anyone they come in contact with telling them that mx is a dangerous person because.... I don’t know, I don’t really understand their argument? Because mx phrased something in a way that reminded them of something fucked up other people have said to them? Nevermind that mx did not remotely mean it in the way that originally hurt them did. They can’t target the original person and mx presents an easy target so here we go into the land of scapegoats. I guess some people just want to find reasons to be upset about something so they can have an excuse to bully and harass others. Because if this was really about them getting hurt, as they claim, then why go to all the trouble of destroying the life of someone who doesn’t believe the things they claim? And it’s pretty clear they don’t based on how they treat the other people in their life who are ace.  Now these folks have known mx for maybe half a year and in that time have had very shallow conversations with them about comic book characters. It’s hard to make any sort of real assessment of a person based on that. However, they’re now going around telling people that mx has now for 10, 15, 20 years, some of whom have known mx IRL for that whole time, some of whom know mx’s family, some of whom have lived with mx, in other words, people who are very close to mx and know them extremely well.... these asshats online are telling them, “Oh, mx isn’t who they say they are.”

Right.  Because after having some disagreements about comic books in an online chat group, you have the full measure of a person. Because you can definitely tell everything about a person based on how they’ve analyzed a character and not based on how they actually treat real people that they know for twenty years. I think, given that I have heard every intimate detail of mx’s thoughts, feelings and life for the past twenty years because I am the kind of person they confide things in, even the fucked up things, I have a much better sense of who this person is than a bunch of whiny little bullies who take pleasure in harming as many people as they possibly can while looking justified in their abhorrent and despicable behavior by throwing up some fake front of social justice.

Oh, and one of these people deserves special mention. They’re a white person who claims to be a POC. They do so in order to call other white people racist and so that they can get lots of accolades and sympathy from others. As someone who has had to deal with the effects of systemic racism, this makes me furious. You don’t have to deal with the fear of family members being killed or imprisoned, you don’t have to deal with harsher treatment from the police or judicial authorities, you don’t have to deal with being treated as the brown friend, you don’t have to deal with the fact that there is not a single country in the world where you won’t be under increased surveillance or probable persecution or the threat of rape. So you do not get to claim some kind of moral authority that you think gives you permission to go around acting like a twisted, manipulative, toxic, abusive, sadistic fuck, while everyone lauds you for your imaginary struggle. Acknowledge your privilege and be an ally. Support people. Lift them up. Don’t claim an identity so that you can injure others. That’s seriously deranged. 

[arcticdementor]

It’s been mind-boggling to watch White Fragility celebrated in recent weeks. When it surged past a Hunger Games book on bestseller lists, USA Today cheered, “American readers are more interested in combatting racism than in literary escapism.” When DiAngelo appeared on The Tonight Show, Jimmy Fallon gushed, “I know… everyone wants to talk to you right now!” White Fragility has been pitched as an uncontroversial road-map for fighting racism, at a time when after the murder of George Floyd Americans are suddenly (and appropriately) interested in doing just that. Except this isn’t a straightforward book about examining one’s own prejudices. Have the people hyping this impressively crazy book actually read it?

DiAngelo isn’t the first person to make a buck pushing tricked-up pseudo-intellectual horseshit as corporate wisdom, but she might be the first to do it selling Hitlerian race theory. White Fragility has a simple message: there is no such thing as a universal human experience, and we are defined not by our individual personalities or moral choices, but only by our racial category.

If your category is “white,” bad news: you have no identity apart from your participation in white supremacy (“Anti-blackness is foundational to our very identities… Whiteness has always been predicated on blackness”), which naturally means “a positive white identity is an impossible goal.”

DiAngelo instructs us there is nothing to be done here, except “strive to be less white.” To deny this theory, or to have the effrontery to sneak away from the tedium of DiAngelo’s lecturing – what she describes as “leaving the stress-inducing situation” – is to affirm her conception of white supremacy. This intellectual equivalent of the “ordeal by water” (if you float, you’re a witch) is orthodoxy across much of academia.

DiAngelo’s writing style is pure pain. The lexicon favored by intersectional theorists of this type is built around the same principles as Orwell’s Newspeak: it banishes ambiguity, nuance, and feeling and structures itself around sterile word pairs, like racist and antiracist, platform and deplatform, center and silence, that reduce all thinking to a series of binary choices. Ironically, Donald Trump does something similar, only with words like “AMAZING!” and “SAD!” that are simultaneously more childish and livelier.

…

It takes a special kind of ignorant for an author to choose an example that illustrates the mathematical opposite of one’s intended point, but this isn’t uncommon in White Fragility, which may be the dumbest book ever written. It makes The Art of the Deal read like Anna Karenina.

Yet these ideas are taking America by storm. The movement that calls itself “antiracism” – I think it deserves that name a lot less than “pro-lifers” deserve theirs and am amazed journalists parrot it without question – is complete in its pessimism about race relations. It sees the human being as locked into one of three categories: members of oppressed groups, allies, and white oppressors.

…

This dingbat racialist cult, which has no art, music, literature, and certainly no comedy, is the vision of “progress” institutional America has chosen to endorse in the Trump era. Why? Maybe because it fits. It won’t hurt the business model of the news media, which for decades now has been monetizing division and has known how to profit from moral panics and witch hunts since before Fleet street discovered the Mod/Rocker wars.

Democratic Party leaders, pioneers of the costless gesture, have already embraced this performative race politics as a useful tool for disciplining apostates like Bernie Sanders. Bernie took off in presidential politics as a hard-charging crusader against a Wall Street-fattened political establishment, and exited four years later a self-flagellating, defeated old white man who seemed to regret not apologizing more for his third house. Clad in kente cloth scarves, the Democrats who crushed him will burn up CSPAN with homilies on privilege even as they reassure donors they’ll stay away from Medicare for All or the carried interest tax break.

…

Corporate America doubtless views the current protest movement as something that can be addressed as an H.R. matter, among other things by hiring thousands of DiAngelos to institute codes for the proper mode of Black-white workplace interaction.

If you’re wondering what that might look like, here’s DiAngelo explaining how she handled the fallout from making a bad joke while she was “facilitating antiracism training” at the office of one of her clients.

When one employee responds negatively to the training, DiAngelo quips the person must have been put off by one of her Black female team members: “The white people,” she says, “were scared by Deborah’s hair.” (White priests of antiracism like DiAngelo seem universally to be more awkward and clueless around minorities than your average Trump-supporting construction worker).

…

The downside, which we’re already seeing, is that organizations everywhere will embrace powerful new tools for solving professional disputes, through a never-ending purge. One of the central tenets of DiAngelo’s book (and others like it) is that racism cannot be eradicated and can only be managed through constant, “lifelong” vigilance, much like the battle with addiction. A useful theory, if your business is selling teams of high-priced toxicity-hunters to corporations as next-generation versions of efficiency experts — in the fight against this disease, companies will need the help forever and ever.

Cancelations already are happening too fast to track. In a phenomenon that will be familiar to students of Russian history, accusers are beginning to appear alongside the accused. Three years ago a popular Canadian writer named Hal Niedzviecki was denounced for expressing the opinion that “anyone, anywhere, should be encouraged to imagine other peoples, other cultures, other identities." He reportedly was forced out of the Writer’s Union of Canada for the crime of “cultural appropriation,” and denounced as a racist by many, including a poet named Gwen Benaway. The latter said Niedzviecki “doesn’t see the humanity of indigenous peoples.” Last week, Benaway herself was denounced on Twitter for failing to provide proof that she was Indigenous.

…

People everywhere today are being encouraged to snitch out schoolmates, parents, and colleagues for thoughtcrime. The New York Times wrote a salutary piece about high schoolers scanning social media accounts of peers for evidence of “anti-black racism” to make public, because what can go wrong with encouraging teenagers to start submarining each other’s careers before they’ve even finished growing?  

“People who go to college end up becoming racist lawyers and doctors. I don’t want people like that to keep getting jobs,” one 16 year-old said. “Someone rly started a Google doc of racists and their info for us to ruin their lives… I love twitter,” wrote a different person, adding cheery emojis.

A bizarre echo of North Korea’s “three generations of punishment” doctrine could be seen in the boycotts of Holy Land grocery, a well-known hummus maker in Minneapolis. In recent weeks it’s been abandoned by clients and seen its lease pulled because of racist tweets made by the CEO’s 14 year-old daughter eight years ago.

[yomariejuana]

Racism isn’t Black & White

This is the first post of many to begin this blog’s new purpose. Recently I had an idea to start a conversation about race including key points that are rarely discussed. I felt that it was time to really think about my place in this big fight towards equality, and what I can do with my own experience to help clear out the emotional fog that doesn’t always allow us to move forward in a constructive way.

Amidst all the protests and riots concerning police brutality, I thought about the fact that a white man will never understand the struggles of a black man unless we created a state of oppression for him in the same way. However, that is far from the most humane ways of going about solving this problem. At the same time, black and brown people will never understand the way white people exist in this society. What I found the most enlightening during this thought process that I had is that light skin Hispanics have had a taste of both experiences. As Latinos, we come from an integrated background. We are the product of the races of the new world intermixing, and this gives us a unique perspective. Specifically those of a fairer complexion know both what it is like to live in an oppressed state because we share our darker brother’s and sister’s pain, living in the middle of the chaos, but we also walk with a degree of white privilege. White people feel less threatened by someone who looks like them (for whatever reason - perhaps in many cases about some fucked up sense of guilt through self preservation).

Whatever the case is, Latinos and black people share a bond formed through our own traumas, a consequence of living in America as a minority. We have suffered brainwash all throughout our experience as colonized peoples. We have been made to forget our power, made to forget that we are products of peoples who had a genuine connection to the earth and our place here as its children. Perhaps for that reason our ancestors were not as destructive and dead set on imperialism as much as the Europeans, who are clearly a lost race. Maybe that’s why they felt the need to exert their dominance over our peoples. One who possesses true power would never need to weaken someone else. 

Nonetheless, I believe we were all placed on the same hemisphere for a reason. Integration is our future. Latinos know integration, we need to stop picking sides (white vs black), and begin to take our own seat at the table with the intent to bridge the gap of understanding between us all. What’s more, I truly believe that if more white passing Latinos stood up and acknowledged our privilege, and used it to take the conversation to a new level, we would be better suited to resolve the problem.

White people and white passing Latinos are being made to be ashamed of their privilege, almost making us wish we were just as deprived just so that we wouldn’t feel so much shame about how the color of our skin affects everyone else. I understand that acknowledging our privilege as white passing minorities can feel like such a huge erasure of our ethnic identity, however as a light skin Latina, I refuse to be ashamed. Instead I will use my privilege and my voice to help establish a state of equality and true freedom. I refuse to sit back while my own family members and friends who just happened to be born with a darker complexion suffer just because white people would rather run away from the uncomfortable reality rather than support the movement. 

As you read everyone’s responses, please consider that whatever is written here that might offend you, confuse you, or otherwise trigger you are all individual people’s experiences. White people (yes, even the allies) often do not understand when they are stepping on the toes of the oppressed. Their experience is their own, and if we can find a way to dismantle their prejudiced views in a way that does not shame them for being a product of generations of slave owners and colonizers, then we are closer to our goal. Many truly do want to change, and we need to swallow our pride and approach our oppressors with loving, open arms. 

Thank you very much if you took the time to read this statement. I hope you gain some perspective, if nothing else, out of these testimonies.

[yve-e]

Contribution

Anger can be a very powerful motivator. However, it can also be exhausting to maintain for long periods of time, not just mentally and emotionally, but can take a physical toll on the body itself.

At the same time, if we really want to change the world, we need to continue to act. This means that we each need to find a way to contribute on a regular basis to create that change. Over the past week, the focus has been bringing to light the atrocities that those in power inflict upon those they consider powerless, especially how “law enforcement” denigrates, abuses, and murders Blacks. Thousands upon thousands of people all over the world have gathered to protest the status quo, sharing horrific footage of the violence perpetrated by those who are at least nominally supposed to protect us.This has been crucial in bringing attention to the problem.

“Problem.” 

What an inane word to describe the wanton destruction of human lives. Still, it is a problem, and it’s something we need to solve. Making people aware of the situation is only the first step. It’s complicated and has been around for hundreds of years in one form or another. If we are serious about creating sustainable change, we need to approach it from multiple angles.

We need people to continue to show up and protest, speak up and sign petitions.

We need people to continue to share information.

We need people to donate to both national and local organizations to provide legal and social services.

We need people to provide those services.

We need to vote, especially in local elections that most directly impact our lives.

We need people to work to make sure that voting is fair and accessible to all.

We need people to run for public office to represent those who have been ignored or suppressed.

We need people to support those campaigns.

We need people to create stories, music, and art that convey the anguish and heartbreak of the oppressed.

We need people to create stories, music, and art that show us how much better the world could be and inspire us to work towards it. Fiction is a wonderful thing; even pure fantasy can contain Truth and give hope for the future.

We need people to volunteer in their communities, building connections with their neighbors, one human being to another.

We need to seek out and support minority-owned businesses.

We need teachers who can explain things to the next generations so that our children not only expect better but are stong enough to demand it.

We need everyone to have easy and affordable access to healthcare and nourishing food.

We need everyone to have easy, affordable, and non-stigmatizing access to mental health services.

We need so much, and there’s no way any single person can do it all. 

Fortunately, we’re in this together. Find out what calls to your heart, and that can be your contribution to our human tapestry.

The only thing that each of us needs to do is to work on ourselves.

I’m a middlish-class white woman. I grew up in a community that was almost entirely white with a handful of Hispanics. The only black kid I remember in my elementary school was Julie, then in middle school there was Vince. That was it. I only knew TWO black kids until high school. I used to joke that the reason I didn’t grow up prejudiced was because there wasn’t anyone around to be prejudiced against.

At the same time, even though I didn’t have negative assumptions about blacks, I also had NO idea what it was like to be black in the United States. It wasn’t until I was at university that I started to discover that the color of your skin had a huge impact on your world.

I entered UCLA at the tail end of anti-apartheid protests. I thought that racism was something that happened Over There. Then one of my English classes assigned Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and my heart shattered at the horror of a black girl who had so deeply absorbed racist societal standards of “beauty” that she thought that the only way she could ever be considered pretty is if she had blue eyes. Later, I was chatting up this hella cute black guy, talking about how much I loved Johnny Clegg’s music and the way his bands combined Celtic melodies and “tribal rhythms.” With extreme politeness, the guy I was talking with gently informed me that he “found that term offensive.” I was stunned. To me, “tribal” was just a description that, in this case, referred to traditional Zulu music. I didn’t know how to respond, but the incident obviously stayed with me as I thought about it, long and hard.

I’d already been interested in psychology, especially in terms of identity and experience. I ended up majoring in social psychology, curious about how individuals and groups influenced one another. Race became another facet that I sought to understand.

That was 30+ years ago. And you know what? I’m still seeking to understand. Being “woke” isn’t something that happens once where you gain enlightenment and you’re done. It needs to be an active verb, something that you do, throughout your life. I’m still asking myself:

Am I making unfounded assumptions? How can I double-check both my premises and conclusions?

Am I speaking over anyone?

Am I projecting my own experience on someone else and mistaking it for Truth?

If I find myself reacting defensively to something someone else says, what does that mean about me? (Generally, it means that, on some level, my own thoughts, feelings, desires and actions are out of integrity; I need to step back and look at myself to see where I need to up my game and do more to walk my talk.)

How can I improve how I phrase my words to better convey my thoughts in a way that can be heard and understood as I intend them? And is my intention truly in the service of others or, if I’m just seeking validation or to hear myself talk, would it be better to keep silent?

We all have different backgrounds, experiences, gifts, and fears. We have different dreams and different ways of seeing the world. But we’re all human, and we’re all in this together, and while none of us can single-handedly do everything that needs to be done, we can all do something, even if it’s as small as trying to be a little kinder than we need to be.

We can do this.

You have to wash with the crocodile in the river You have to swim with the sharks in the sea You have to live with the crooked politician Trust those things that you can never see Ayeye ayeye jesse mfana (jesse boy) ayeye ayeye

You have to trust your lover when you go away Keep on believing tomorrow will bring a better day Sometimes you will smile while you’re crying inside And just once you’ll turn away while the truth is shining bright Ayeye ayeye Jesse mfana ayeye ayeye

It's a cruel crazy beautiful world Every time you wake up I hope it's under a blue sky It's a cruel crazy beautiful world One day when you wake up I will have to say goodbye Goodbye… It's your world so live in it!

Beyond the door, strange cruel beautiful years lie waiting for you It kills me to know you won't escape loneliness, Maybe you’ll lose hope, too Ayeye ayeye jesse mfana ayeye ayeye

It's a cruel crazy beautiful world Every time you wake up I hope it's under a blue sky It's a cruel crazy beautiful world One day when you wake up I will have to say goodbye Goodbye…. It's your world so live in it!

When I feel your small body close to mine I feel weak and strong at the same time So few years to give you wings to fly Show you the stars to guide your ship by

It's a cruel crazy beautiful world Every time you wake up I hope it's under a blue sky It's a cruel crazy beautiful world One day when you wake up I will have to say goodbye Goodbye….

It's your world so live in it!

Cruel, Crazy, Beautiful World Johnny Clegg

[ijaws]

@transdonnatroy

Seeing as how you blocked me, I'll answer what I can remember here. Maybe you'll see this, maybe not, but here goes. (If anyone else wants to weigh in or discuss this, jump right in.)

The reason why I said that you'd be racist for being agaisnt Whitewashing is rather simple. You're discriminating against an actor/actress based on their skin color. That's the definition of racist. That's what YOU were accusing me of when I was against POCs taking traditional, established, characters. Hiemdall, Domino, and Valkyrie to name a few. So if I'm racist for not wanting POC-washing to happen, then how are you not racist for being against Whitewashing?

I know your arguments already so I'll make them for you.

"Whitewashing is used as a tool for oppression and racism. Essentially robbing POCs from any roles they could possibly have and filling them with White Actors. That is wrong."

I completely, 100%, agree that it is wrong. However, you cannot have it both ways. You cannot sit there and cry racism and oppression over Whitewashing then go on to celebrate POCwashing. That is literally a double standard.

"Well when a POC takes a White Role it's okay because a lot of the time a White Character's story doesn't have much to do with their skin color. It also allows for positive representation in the media so other POCs can see people that look like them that they can relate to on the big screen."

That's wrong. All of it is wrong. If you apply that logic, the logic that their skin color doesn't really matter since they're white, then that means that White People could take POC roles if their story doesn't revolve around their skin color. John Stewart (Black Green Lantern), Cyborg, Sam Wilson (Falcon/Captain America), Nick Fury, Jessica Cruz (Latina Green Lantern.), etc. None of those characters have a story that revolves around their skin color. Theh just happen to be Black or other. That means it should be PERFECTLY acceptable to race swap them.

"NO! THAT'S WHITEWASHING AND STEALING THEIR REPRESENTATION-"

Oooh I see... So... why don't Marvel, Disney, and other Media Companies, I dunno, MAKE NEW ORIGINAL POC CHARACTERS? If you want TRUE fucking representation in these movies?????? I don't think POCwashing is helping.

You know what... I actually think it's insulting to POCs. Why?

Well essentially Marvel, Disney, and Hollywood are simply giving POCs handouts. 2nd hand characters. Simply race changing a role to get the minorities all across the world to suck their dick and sing their praises. Meanwhile Marvel, Disney, and Hollywood are all laughing at minorities behind the scenes. I imagine it goes like this.

"Omg, can you believe it! We don't even have to lift a finger! We don't even need to make New Original POC Characters! Just toss them a White Character and cast a Black Actor and they'll pay! They ACTUALLY think we care!!! Hahaha Being woke is SOOO fucking easy. Can you imagine if we HAD to make oroginal POC characters with original stories about them? I know, right? What a hassle..."

It's honestly like they're telling POCs that they aren't worth the risk. They aren't worth risking money to tell a new story with a new character. That all they'll EVER get is hand me down roles. 2nd rate characters. Nothing that is their own.

This can be said about Valkyrie, Hiemdall, Ariel, Domino, and MAAAAAANY more.

Don't you want to see more ORIGINAL POC Characters???

Where's Brother Voodoo, Statick Shock, John Stewart, Bishop, SILK (Asian Sipder Girl), Psyche (Native American woman who joined the X-Men), Robbie Reyes (A Ghost Rider) etc.?

Why not INVENT new Original POC characters that were never white and were never hand-me-down roles? They'd have their own original stories, powers, and have their own identity. They wouldn't have to ride the coat tails of a White Character's Legacy.

Okay, so that's all I got... Before someone actually calls me racist again I want to say that I'm a source material person. If a character is created a specific way they should stay that way. If they're made as a White Person, they STAY White. If they're made as a Black Person, they STAY Black. If they're made as a man, they STAY a man. If they're made as a woman, they STAY a woman. If they're made as gay, Bi, or whatever, they STAY gay, Bi, or whatever... I don't support gender, race, or sexuality swapping of any kind. If you want representation, do it the proper way and create NEW original characters. Don't approapriate a character that doesn't reflect your people and try to change them around to where it does... That's called cultural appropriation people...

One last thing. You don't solve cultural appropriation with more culturual appropriation You don't solve racism with more racism. You don't solve sexism with more sexism. You don't solve sexual discrimination with more sexual discrimination.

That's the bottom line.

[scorpio-karma]

Kat is biracial but her delusional black female stans insist on claiming her as black simply because of her phenotype and proximity to whiteness being a celebrity. I had a feeling Kat would agree with original anon. Y'all do this with all black biracial actresses (Zendaya, Candice Patton, etc). Stop claiming them then crying dark skin erasure.

KG claims her Jewish side more than anything. I don't blame her.

Breathe in, breathe out, deep breaths

Where do I start without just screaming in all caps because honestly I'm just tempted to do that and not dealing with you at all, but I can't just leave it at that because you not only need a history lesson but you need to learn it's not okay to say this shit. To quote a friend of mine, just say you hate black people and go because to be coming in my inbox with this nonsense, that's essentially all you said.

I love how this morning you wanted to remind me that Kat is black, but now all you want me to do is acknowledge that she's white. The perfect kind of consistency for someone of this caliber.

Anyway, let's break this down sentence by sentence because otherwise I'll have an aneurysm trying to address all that nonsense at once.

Kat's biracial

No shit sherlock, how long did it take you to figure that out? More than one wikipedia search?

but her black delusional fans insist on claiming her as black because of her phenotype and proximity to whiteness being a celebrity.

Some mighty fancy words for complete bullshit. Maybe her "delusional black fans" claim her as black because she's, surprise surprise, black! Claiming her as black simply because she looks black would be like Nina Dobrev's latino fans claiming her as latino simply because she's tan, but they don't because every part of her is eastern European AKA white.

I have a feeling Kat would agree with the original anon.

Other than she's from the Kpelle tribe of Liberia which is a fact, there's nothing to agree on. In fact, she'd probably be quite offended that someone is speaking on her behalf with words she's never said. If she has taken issue with what I post on my personal blog, trust me she would make it known herself, but as it stands I am a random tumblr blog who isn't @ing in any capacity, so she could give zero fucks about what Isay because she has no idea who the fuck I am. I'm a nobody and perfectly fine with that.

She would also probably take issue with the way you're addressing her black fans because while, as you so eloquently keep reminding me, she is half white, she's also half black and that makes up a considerable portion of her phenotype and as such affects the way the world views her and people treat her. She has experienced racism, especially from the fandom of a show she was on for 8 years, so to see you targeting her black fans in such a malicious manner, I don't see her taking too kindly to that. Nothing in the history of ever has been solved with racism plain and simple.

Y'all do this with all black biracial actresses (Zendaya, Candice Patton, etc.) Stop claiming them then crying dark skin erasure.

I wasn't aware being biracial meant you got to pick which race you are. In that case, from now on I will be known as a white woman. When I get angry I will be called the angry white woman. When I say something sassy I'll be known as the sassy white woman. And when I express even the slightest opinion I will be known as that rude white girl. Or...it doesn't work like that because no matter how many times I tell people I'm just white (which makes up 30% of my DNA btw) no one is going to see me as anything other than black and the shit ton of hurdles that come with it. I can't lean into being white and neither can they.

That "one drop" rule that you're claiming black fans do, is actually something implemented by white people. They needed their people pure as snow, you have one drop of anything other than white you couldn't claim them. Historically we are the only people who claim biracial black people because that's how fucked up the world is. Yes, she's half white, but trust me, ain't no white people claiming her, or Zendaya as white (as far as I know Candice isn't biracial and even if she was she has said herself she identifies as a black woman, would you like us to keep her from that because she has one drop of white in her?). To them they are black and nothing else. To us they are black and white which comes with it's privileges over dark-skinned black people due to them being lighter and the supremacy the euro-centricism has put on light/whiteness, but as I stated before that comes with it's own complications with identity.

It's not a one or the other situation, it's both. They're black and they're on a lighter spectrum due to being biracial so Hollywood/Life has implemented a dark-skin erasure. You're erasing something that's such a big part of their experiences in life, not us. Her "delusional black fans" know she's biracial and have yet to claim her to be anything else or erased that side of her the way you're doing her blackness.

KG claims her Jewish side more than anything. I don't blame her.

I don't know what rock you live under but jewish does not equate white. She's black and Jewish, not black or Jewish. It may have been a funny or die sketch, but I see no lie. And even is she wasn't Jewish due to her white mother that still wouldn't mean anything because there are several Jewish people of different races, in fact I believe that is a major religion in Ethiopia. That's the crazy thing about religion, anyone can be apart of it. I don't blame her for embracing her Jewish side either because it's an integral part of her just like being black is.

Edit: I forgot, something was cloying at me about what you said. Clearly I and many of her "delusional black fans" were offended by this but this isn't the first time I've felt offended by this. And then I remembered:

Congratulations! You've reached Matt Davis level of racism.

[politicaltheatre]

Rock Bottom

We have a problem.

That's the first step, right, admitting it? Everybody knows that. But is that enough? Have we reached a tipping point? Have we, in our long addiction, finally hit rock bottom?

Probably not.

That’s the thing about addiction. The whole world can see the addict and his addiction for all they are, but until the addict sees it himself and realizes at long last that he has no choice but to break it he will keep on going, lying to himself and others that it is not what it is and that they have nothing to fear.

Of course, we do.

To be clear, our addiction is a psychological one, not a chemical one. None of what you read from here on out is meant to denigrate physical addiction or to suggest that beating that is as simple as beating a psychological one, which itself is neither easy nor fast.

If only this was as simple as a single man's psychological addiction to one thing. Even then, the variables of how he slid into it and why are his and his alone. It's the constants of addiction, the root needs and ultimate ends, that we need to focus on. They are the same for everyone - that's why they're constants - but getting past the fog of the wheres and whens of addiction's start and end takes an effort few can bring themselves to make.

So, instead, we end up focusing on variables; in this case, guns and violence and revenge. These are the manifestations of our addiction, not the addiction itself. A step further, a level beneath those, we find the root cause. That is, we find it if we dare to look.

Our addiction is to avoiding accountability. 

We've had it easy for so long. We have so many options, so many excuses, so many others to blame. When everything’s good, when we have no worries, the ride is so much fun. It never feels like it’s going to end. 

And then it does, and it feels so bad. We must pay our bills. We must accept that others have a right to what we want, that we must be accountable to them, too. 

To go from that feeling of certainty to an equal and perhaps even greater feeling of uncertainty is terrifying. Give us a fix, we beg, take care of us and make it better. The fantasy isn’t real, we know that, but we’ll take it. 

Just looking at this past weekend, there are so many examples at play, all showing how we are locked in our worlds of fantasy:

• There is the world of the shooters, fetishizing guns and the rush of violence and revenge against invented enemies, foreign and domestic. They get to dream up a story, placing themselves at the center as hero or villain, always in control, never wrong. The killing is a means to that end, and to an end to their story they believe they can control, either by living or dying as martyrs to their cause.

• There is the world of the Trump and NRA supporters, who have invested so much of their identities in these external authorities that they don’t dare reject them for fear of rejecting themselves. Does anyone really doubt that Trump or one of his latest mouthpieces don't understand this? The racism is a means to gaining and maintaining control, just like the millions the NRA pays to politicians to toe the line and spread their talking points. A rational mind knows this, but an addict's mind has its own logic and that couldn't be easier to exploit.

• There is the world of those opposing them, stuck cycling through the same rituals of anger because they, too, want quick and easy solutions, not that they can admit it. The hard work, personal sacrifice, and patience required are more than they can bear, or maybe just more than they literally can afford. It's easy being angry. It's easy staying angry. It's easier still if that's all you ever do. You get good at it. It becomes a safe place, one you never have to leave.

• There is also the world of those trying to make that change, taking the risks, pushing and pressing the world around them to try to take any small step it can to save just one life. These are the ones investing themselves in hard work, personal sacrifice, and patience until they have exhausted all three. They burn out because the audience they needed to reach, the addict and those around him fearing risk themselves, just weren't ready.

• And then there is the world of the rest of us, slowly numbing ourselves to the pain and suffering of others because we tell ourselves that the power to solve it is beyond us. It's the kind of acceptance that friends and family members of addicts know all too well. It is well practiced and so common we barely give it a conscious thought, if we do at all.

If you know addiction then you must see excuses and evasions for what they are. It’s always some other thing, a thing over which nobody could possibly have any control. It’s always someone else’s fault, some easy scapegoat already an outsider, be it someone who is different or something, such as the government, which is untouchable.

They're all variables. They always will be. Take away one scapegoat, you find another. Take away one focus of your addiction, you find another.  If there is always another thing, there is never control, and if there is never control then we don't have to feel shame for the damage done.

There is no high like having to be accountable to no one. There can be no low like crashing from that high.

What we do know is this: We don’t think of our country as a family. We don’t even think of it as a community. For far too many of us, sharing space and resources with each other is considered an inconvenience at best and an invasion at worst.

We lie to ourselves, choosing to believe that crime happens to others, that the heat and storms of climate change are happening to others, that lack of adequate health care is happening to others, and that economic inequality is happening to others.

It all "happens", a beautifully passive word. It allows us to be passive. It allows us to tell the lie that its cause is beyond our complicity and its solution beyond our ability. And so, the cycle continues.

For the shooting in Dayton, racism and white supremacy don’t seem to have been a motive, but right there we run into trouble with another word, "motive".

Racism and white supremacy are means to an end, that end being a feeling of control and a denial of accountability to others. However different they may appear on the surface, the shooter in Dayton had his own means to those same ends. That those ends have become normalized is what made both shooters dangerous. That they had access to automatic and semi-automatic firearms is what made this a tragedy.

Which brings us to "the party of personal responsibility”. They demonized the term "gun control" because a well paid marketing firm found a way to make it sound evil. The truth is everything we choose to do or not do about firearms qualifies as gun control.

We, the people, who elect others to represent us and our best interests, we have control over guns. Any law passed or not passed is done through that representation. Any law currently on the books, even one stating that a certain class of guns cannot be regulated, is gun control because, in fact, guns are regulated by that law.

So, let's skip distracting ourselves with that. Whatever we do next, it will control guns in some way. We just have to decide what we want from that control and who we should trust to exercise it.

Which brings us to Donald Trump.

For the shooting in El Paso, we can and should blame Donald Trump. Whatever official statement he put out yesterday or may put out today, he has used racism and the violence of white supremacists as a means to gaining and maintaining power. The evidence is so far past overwhelming that our inaction in the face of it is shameful.

Trump's defense-by-omission of the gun lobby and scapegoating of mental illness not only put the lie to any condemnation of hatred and bigotry, they bring unpleasant reminders of demagogues of the past stoking racism and scapegoating the mentally ill.

Is that what it will take for us to hit rock bottom? Must we, like Europeans and South Americans before us, fall fully and completely into the abyss of fascism and civil war before we learn what we must learn? The next election will answer that as well as anything.

The Democrats may win back the White House and the Senate in 2020, but it’s looking more and more like it will be the result of Trump, McConnell, and the rest of the Republicans in Washington finally going too far, or finally being seen for how far they refuse to go, than anything the Democrats have to offer.

But hasn’t that always been the pattern?

The right wing, the pushers in this analogy of addiction, offer short term thinking with easy solutions to difficult problems. They use division and bigotry as means to gaining and maintaining power. Finally, as society collapses, they point the finger at anyone else, not just to avoid their own accountability but because it enables those clinging to what they offered to avoids their own.

The left wing, the sober grownup at the party, demands accountability in all things, including from themselves. Thinking long term, they get shunted aside in the short term, a canary in the coal mine listened to only to gauge the threat but not to avoid it. Only when the threat is so near, when there are no more others on whom to cast blame or burden, do we finally ask them for help.

That’s when we elect the left wing, to clean up our mess. Are we ready? Have we hit rock bottom? We're close, and it seems getting closer everyday.

- Daniel Ward

[magic-and-moonlit-wings]

Chapter 17: Disappointing Mentors

Becoming The Mask

Content warning for this chapter: the canonical racism most trolls have for Changelings affects Blinky's reaction to learning Jim is a Changeling.

"Leave the gaggletack here," said Jim. Draal growled. "I'm not saying 'throw it in the furnace and get rid of it forever' – in fact, don't do that, because that would probably really mess the furnace up – just don't bring it with us."

Telling Blinky was dangerous enough. He didn't want Draal abruptly forcing him to switch forms in the middle of Trollmarket. Draal could still decide a promise made to a Changeling was as unbinding as a promise from one and break their deal, but it would take longer for him to prove to anyone else that the Trollhunter was a Changeling if he had to go find a gaggletack.

"Leave your knife," Draal countered.

That wasn't much of a sacrifice. Even without the Creeper's Sun blade or the Amulet of Daylight, Jim was well-armed.

He held the gleaming green knife out to his side, pointed at the floor. "Drop them on three?"

Draal held out the gaggletack likewise. "One … two … three."

The gaggletack hit the cement floor with a clank. The knife made more of a clatter – cling-clack-cloi-oing-click.

Jim did not take a deep breath. If he stopped to psyche himself up, he'd never go through with this.

"Let's go."

The tunnel Draal had built linking the basement to the sewer system was sturdily constructed. It was wide enough for a troll Draal's size to move easily, big enough even AAARRRGGHH could possibly use it to visit, but narrow enough that Draal alone could easily defend the passage.

Jim walked beside Draal, not wanting to march ahead and feel like a prisoner, nor to linger behind and make Draal think he was trying to bolt. Being in arm's reach of an angry troll, a troll angry at him, was nerve-wracking. Jim's respect for Stricklander and Nomura ticked up a few more notches for how often they handled Bular.

Even if it was partially Nomura's fault that Jim was in this position.

Nomura called Stricklander from the museum's phone. He couldn't afford to ignore a call from the place where the bridge was being stored and rebuilt, the way he might ignore a fellow Changeling's personal phone number if they called at an inconvenient time.

"Good evening."

"Stricklander," she growled at him. She'd shed her human face as soon as she'd locked her office.

"Ah, Ms Nomura. To what do I owe this very late pleasure?"

"When were you planning to tell the Janus Order that Lake has the Trollhunter Amulet?"

There was a pause. She smiled mockingly, imagining him scrambling to wake all the way up and invent an explanation.

"Once we have the bridge completed," he claimed. "For now it's in our hands, and somewhere no one would think to look for it. Don't tell me the boy's been showing it off."

"No, no," Nomura said lightly. "I'm acquainted with his mother and happened to see him with it." When he interfered in a fight to try and protect me. That boy may be too invested in his cover. "I wanted to be sure I didn't have to worry about Bular finding out and venting on the antiquities that it hadn't been delivered to him."

"Bular knows," said Stricklander quickly, either because it was true or as a lie to keep Nomura from being the one to report it.

"I'm surprised Lake is still alive, then … unless Bular only knows he has the amulet, not that he can use it."

Another pause.

"What exactly did you see?" Stricklander's voice was soft in the way it got when he tried to hide tension.

"Oh, you didn't know the new Trollhunter's identity?"

He growled at her, creating a rumble of static.

"Jim Lake is on a highly classified mission to infiltrate Trollmarket, in a position above suspicion of being a spy. Tell me you didn't cost us that opportunity by killing him."

"I did not kill him," she said honestly. Cost him the position, maybe. "The boy was breathing and in one piece when I left his house."

"Good."

"Careful, Stricklander, or I'll think you've gotten attached."

"Infighting weakens us. We need to be at our full strength to bring about Gunmar's return."

"Acknowledged. Nothing further to report." She hung up.

Nomura decided against reporting the missing stone from Killahead Bridge for now. Lake had been clever, acquiring that piece of insurance. He could claim to Bular that a part of the bridge was in Trollmarket, where only Lake could retrieve it. The Janus Order couldn't take Trollmarket by force; they needed Gunmar's army to stand a chance against so many trolls.

As the only Changeling who knew Lake had taken the bridge piece, Nomura now had some unique leverage over the Trollhunter. That wasn't a position she was willing to give up so soon.

She wondered idly how he was going to cover up Draal's death. Creeper's Sun didn't leave much of a trace, magically speaking, and once the body was broken it should be easy to hide. If no one knew Draal would be at the Trollhunter's home, it should be easy enough for Lake to claim ignorance when the troll was reported missing, and if anyone did know, he could claim Draal had never arrived.

On the other hand, he'd implied Draal might live through tonight … maybe, despite Draal's reaction, the young Changeling had actually made some headway in converting him.

Nomura had been unsuccessful when she tried that, but … that had been a long time ago. Maybe something she'd said had finally started to sink in, and given Lake a foothold to claw deeper into Draal's stubborn head. It would be nice, if they could be on the same side one day.

Quiet trickles and splashes of water would make a soothing sound in any setting but a sewer. There was the occasional metallic groan echoing off a distant pipe, and the squeaks and scurries of rats fleeing two large predators, for all that trolls didn't usually bother with them.

The canal was lined with storm drains. Arcadia Oaks' human population had first constructed the canals to reroute water from heavy rains and prevent flooding. Jim had never gotten around to asking if Trollmarket was ever flooded by some hapless troll, opening the portal without knowing the surface weather.

Jim told himself it did not hurt that Draal flinched when Jim got out the horngazel. Jim should be the one skittish and flinchy right now. The dagger-like crystal didn't even glow the same colour as his Creeper's Sun dagger, and any resemblance to a Darklands-native stinger crystal was entirely cosmetic.

Jim would admit to himself that it hurt when Draal growled at him again, this time for summoning his armour. He did not conjure the sword. Considering his promise not to use the sword against Draal, this was probably only hollow comfort.

Blinky was passing a leisurely evening in his library, not studying for any purpose beyond a pure love of knowledge and appreciation for the written word.

First he read A Compendium of Swamp Trolls, containing what little outsiders had gleaned of the cultures and traditions of the Quagawumps and their cousin tribes. Then he perused a work of human literature loaned to him by Tobias from the boy's grandmother's collection; a gristly and suspenseful detective novel, for which Blinky only solved the mystery himself a mere half-chapter before the protagonist.

Now he was comfortably immersed in a treatise he'd read before but enjoyed as a sort of scholastic palate cleanser, on the effects of static on a troll's mental clarity and emotional wellbeing. Blinky felt the essay had a soothing effect on his mind not dissimilar to static's own properties. He chose not to indulge in static itself more than sparingly, lest it cut into valuable reading time.

Next on his informal reading list was a dictionary that claimed to translate the goblin tongue – transcribed in phonetic trollish, as, if goblins had a written language, no non-goblin had yet discovered it, and given the proclivity towards vandalism in the goblin species, one would expect their written language to be known, if only in the form of graffiti.

"Good, you're here."

"Draal?" Blinky jumped. Draal wasn't a frequent visitor to the library even when he lived in Trollmarket. "Has something happened to – Master Jim." He hadn't noticed the Trollhunter at first.

"And alone," Master Jim noted. "Where's AAARRRGGHH?" Draal shut the door.

Blinky frowned and shut his book. "What seems to be the problem, gentlemen?"

"Jim has something to tell you."

Master Jim looked wide-eyed at Draal, who scowled back. The human's breathing was quick and shallow.

"I … I …"

His eyes darted from troll to troll to door. He settled mostly on Blinky, two eyes meeting four – Blinky kept two eyes on one side pointed at Draal.

"Please don't hate me," Master Jim whispered.

Blinky turned a third eye to Draal, who gave no sign what this was about save that it was serious.

"I … haven't been entirely honest with you," said the human boy. He wrapped his arms around his middle and hunched his shoulders. "Draal found out something, and, it's gonna make you think less of me" – Draal snorted – "but if you agree to keep it secret, he won't tell anyone either."

"You're blackmailing him?" Blinky summarised, glaring at Draal now. He put his upper pair of hands on the young Trollhunter's shoulders. "Master Jim. I have come to know you quite well in these past months. I do not believe any secret could make me think less of you. As your mentor, I vow not to expose any matter you tell me in confidence. And frankly, Draal, I'm disappointed in your behaviour."

Master Jim's smile looked forced. "It's nice to hear you say that." He put his hands on Blinky's for a moment, before stepping back out of arm's reach.

"I'm a Changeling."

Blinky did not absorb these words at first. His reaction when he did was disbelief. He blinked disjointedly, all six of his eyes on the seemingly-human boy.

"Show him," Draal pressed.

Master Jim did not transform. But his eyes glowed with otherworldly light, sclera turning from white to gold, and blue irises turning red.

Blinky recoiled, stumbling back into a table. The Changeling flinched. His eyes became human again.

"But … the gaggletack." The night the other humans had followed him to Trollmarket, Master Jim had picked up the artifact without hesitation.

"That only forces a transformation if it makes skin contact." The boy flexed his hands, drawing attention to his gauntlets.

"But you're the Trollhunter," Blinky protested. "How could Merlin's Amulet have thought a Changeling was a good choice for a Trollhunter?!"

"I have some theories on that, actually." And oh, that academic excitement that had been so endearing in a human child became ominous and threatening in this new light. "I wondered if maybe it just called out to the first troll who got close enough to it after the last one died, you know, other than whoever killed them. Or it could've broken when Bular threw Kanjigar off the bridge? Or maybe sunlight exposure damaged it. I mean, it is a troll artifact."

No wonder he'd adjusted to the existence of trolls so quickly, he knew of them all along! No wonder he'd learned to speak trollish so quickly, he must have already known it! No wonder he could fight so well, Changelings would be trained in combat, and no wonder he never hesitated to use Rule Number Three, a Changeling would have no qualms about 'dirty fighting' the way human literature suggested a human ought to have. No wonder he'd been cunning enough to scruff AAARRRGGHH, what human could have possibly thought to do that –?

"This should not be possible!" The troll waved all four arms as though to swat this knowledge away, like a human pestered by an insect.

"It makes a little more sense than it picking a human, right? Changelings are still technically trolls."

Blinky had grown accustomed to seeing the Trollhunter armour shrunken to fit a human shape, but this new information made the familiar sight blasphemous.

"No," said Blinky, without thinking, "you aren't."

Previous Chapter (Nomura learns Jim’s the Trollhunter, Draal learns Jim’s a Changeling, and Jim learns Barbara and Nomura are acquaintences)

Table of Contents

Next Chapter (AAARRRGGHH gets back to the library and weighs in on this)

I am not sure how to spell 'Quagawumps' so I went with the spelling used on the DVD subtitles for the episode The Shattered King, where the swamp trolls are first introduced. I make no promises to spell it consistently in the future.

[supercoolgamesstuff-blog]

Standing Up - Game Informer

New Post has been published on https://www.coolgamingzone.com/standing-up-game-informer/

Standing Up - Game Informer

When Manveer Heir left BioWare in 2017 after working on the Mass Effect franchise as a senior gameplay designer, he was burned out. He had been making games for a dozen years, putting in the time during crunch and enduring the wrath of Gamergaters for his beliefs. Like he had done at times during his career, he contemplated walking away from making video games entirely, but he knew he wasn’t done yet.

Heir took some time off in New York figuring out his next move, and reconnected with a deep-seated ambition to form his own video game company – a dream he held since he was in the 10th grade when he drew up his own business plan.

In order to craft the kinds of stories he wanted to tell and address some of the issues he experienced in the video game industry, Heir founded his own studio. Heir’s experiences with the Mass Effect franchise and companies the size of Electronic Arts exposed him to systemic problems that interfered with his goal of surfacing stories of characters of color and different backgrounds created by diverse developers.

From left to right: Manveer Heir, Founder, chief visionary officer; Rashad Redic, Founder, chief creative officer; Bryna Dabby Smith, Founder, chief executive officer

Heir reached out to Bryna Dabby Smith, an industry veteran with deep experience managing projects like Sleeping Dogs, for help with the business side of the venture, and word circulated of what Heir was putting together.

This prompted Rashad Redic, previously an environment artist at Bethesda, to get in contact with Heir. A six-hour conversation later, Heir had solidified his nucleus for Brass Lion Entertainment around the three of them and started the ball rolling on the company’s first project: Corner Wolves, a game exploring the personal effects of the U.S. government’s self-proclaimed War on Drugs in ’90s Harlem.

Brass Lion was created to tell stories you won’t get from most studios because it’s not setup like most studios. Brass Lion wants to actively hire developers of color and other diverse backgrounds, consciously bucking the trend of male whiteness.

A survey of developers in 2017 by the International Game Developers Association (IGDA) reported that 71 percent of respondents identified as white or multiracial with white, 79 percent were male, and 86 percent were heterosexual. Furthermore, while 81 percent said they felt diversity in the workplace was important, only 42 percent felt diversity was actually increasing – down from 47 percent in 2016.

Change is slow because institutions are inherently structured to preserve their status quo. There may be individuals, and even whole departments, that are sympathetic to hiring developers from diverse backgrounds, but there is a barrier of in-group selection that slows down progress.

“Something that people say is, ‘Well, we just hire the best people,’” Heir says. “But when you look at the research you find out that meritocracy is kind of a lie. People really hire people that look like them, and they use words like ‘culture fit’ or ‘not a culture fit’ to push out people who maybe don’t fit in but have a diversity of ideas.”

Hiring people with different backgrounds has a knock-on effect of better quality. Heir mentions Harvard Business Review articles based on research that says that mixed teams produce better results because they naturally question each other more and have less group-think that may stifle innovation. “You start to check each other’s biases,” Heir explains. “You don’t just nod your head and go, ‘Yup, that first idea is the best one,’ because everybody is coming at it from a different angle.”

From these different experiences comes a different kind of game. Corner Wolves’ story is about Jacinte, a young Afro-Latina living in Harlem and working at her father’s bodega. One evening Jacinte returns to find him murdered in front of the store. The game is Jacinte’s attempt to find out who killed him and why, but the themes layered underneath run deeper.

If you think how racism works in the real world, it’s embedded in all of our real systems.

Manveer Heir

Harlem was particularly affected by drugs during the 1990s when the game takes place. Both community leaders and politicians called for action to clean up the drug problem, but the increasing law-and-order approaches were neither taking care of the problem nor serving the community. In the ’70s, New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, who once favored rehabilitation, turned to a tough-on-crime approach. President Reagan signed into law more mandatory minimums and cemented them with the narrative of an urban crack epidemic. President Clinton increased mass incarceration of even low-level offenders with his 1994 crime bill.

The effect this had on Harlem and the ethnic communities therein exposed the systemic racism of the U.S. justice system. Research contemporary to the game’s setting as well as countless studies since have clearly shown there are racial disparities when it comes to the arrest and conviction rates, as well as sentencing lengths, of blacks as opposed to whites committing the same crimes.

One prominent example of racial disparities in relation to the War on Drugs is the infamous 100-to-1 rule established in 1986, specifying mandatory minimum sentences for specific quantities of cocaine. This said that distribution of five grams of crack resulted in a minimum five-year federal prison sentence, while it took 500 grams of powder cocaine to trigger the same minimum sentencing, even though the chemical composition and effect of either form of cocaine is appreciably the same. Blacks were specifically targeted since they were more likely to use crack than affluent whites, who used powdered cocaine.

This large-scale history lesson might not be prominent in the head of Jacinte, nor the player, but it has had a demonstrable effect on the world of Corner Wolves and the lives within it. Heir and Brass Lion believe the issues and lessons this history exposes are things that video games can dig into in their own special way.

“What I think you do is create the systems in a way that supports your thesis, that supports the themes and motifs of the game, of the story,” says Heir. “And then you make sure that it is embedded in all the different systems of the game. If you think how racism works in the real world, it’s embedded in all of our real systems. It’s embedded in the school system already. It’s embedded in the policing already. It’s embedded in job applications already.”

Thus, Corner Wolves’s Harlem is a world players can move around and participate in, but it’s also one that is already defined by forces outside of Jacinte’s direct control. “I think that higher-level point of view, and that control [players] don’t have – I think that’s what I want people to experience,” Heir says. “You don’t always get to be the hero in our world because literally the rest of the world doesn’t let you.”

The chips may be stacked against Jacinte, but she’s not powerless. The game has melee-based combat (no guns, however) and a conversation system designed to give her some agency while realistically portraying the world and situations around her. Heir says he likes exploring the grey area beyond absolutes of right and wrong – which RPGs in particular are well-suited for – and that at the end of the game players hopefully come away drawing conclusions, even if they aren’t necessarily able to power themselves up to some convenient, happy ending.

Jacinte, a 20-something high school graduate who didn’t go to college, isn’t part of the neighborhood’s drug trade. However, she’s aware of it, not only due to her dad’s death but because people in affected areas have to be, simply for the sake of their own survival.

Her status in the world allows her to move between different groups. One of the ways this surfaces is through code switching, or changing how you speak depending on who you’re talking to in order to present yourself differently. This could easily come into play with Jacinte’s background as both black and Dominican, moving between the two facets of her identity via language, as well as when speaking to the police and authority figures.

“We definitely want to get that authenticity,” Heir says. “It allows us to write a lot of different characters from lots of different backgrounds so we can have lots of different lenses on the same problem, to let the player kind of choose what angle they like to approach things from or what their thought processes on how to solve these issues [are].”

The game touches on dirty police, drug dealers, corrupt politicians, and even larger forces, but needs to do so in a way that’s still realistic to Jacinte and which doesn’t let the narrative and gameplay elements drift too far apart.

The team is working on gameplay prototypes to build a demo for publishers (the game uses Unreal Engine 4), but they haven’t nailed down all of its aspects. Given Heir’s background and love of action/RPGs, the game will likely lean in that direction, but all involved know that much will likely change by the time it launches a few years from now.

Art director and Brass Lion chief creative officer Rashad Redic is responsible for building the actual game world. The team wants to layer in touches authentic to Harlem and Jacinte’s mixed background, but filtered through an anime-inspired look. Anime is not only a personal touchstone for Redic, it also has a meta resonance because it’s popular in the black community.

Hip hop is another strong current for the title, and not just for nostalgia’s sake, but because it adds its own larger commentary. “Part of the appeal of hip-hop in the first place,” says Redic, “was you’d get that lens of what life was like in a way that felt like someone was telling you a personal story. We just have to figure out how we distill that into a game. If rap was the sort of genesis of the inner city and urban communities having a voice and giving people a window into their lives, then maybe our game is going to be the beginning of that as an art form for us.”

Brass Lion has signed a contract with Just Blaze (DJ and Jay-Z producer), although his dedicated work will come later in the project. Redic says that they’re not sure if they’ll use licenses for specific songs or even fashion brands, but certainly the goal is to imbue the game with an authentic vibrancy.

As much as there is to be still defined about Corner Wolves, much is set firmly in place, guiding the project forward. Brass Lion CEO Bryna Dabby Smith knows what it takes to build a good foundation for a game and to keep it on track, having been key to that as a project manager on Sleeping Dogs at United Front when it was with Activision. “One of the things I think they did particularly well was the story element, and they really invested heavily on the narrative design,” she says. “It wasn’t just the feel of the world; they were actually writing something that felt like it was actually tonally correct from a cultural perspective. That it actually had roots in something beyond just, ‘Hey this is going to be a kick-ass game.’”

There’s a major shift happening, and I think games are late to the party.

Bryna Dabby Smith

Brass Lion is currently working on Corner Wolves as a game, and is open to it appearing on as many platforms as are viable. The developer also believes the property has great potential to exist in other mediums, whether that’s film, comic books, or another form that takes place in the world.

So far, the reception to Corner Wolves and Brass Lion in general has been positive from the people the trio have met with. “There’s a major shift happening, and I think games are late to the party,” Dabby Smith says. “I think movies have already started to go there, and if you’re talking to anyone in the greater entertainment space, anyone with any sort of Hollywood background, they already get it because they’ve already seen Get Out, and they’ve seen Black Panther, and they’ve seen Crazy Rich Asians all do incredibly well because they’re telling compelling stories. And the fact that they center characters of color and they center more marginalized voices is not holding them back because people are hungry for that and they’re looking for different types of stories.”

For Brass Lion and Corner Wolves in particular, these stories are not black and white; they might not have a happy ending, and are too big to solve through a video game. But they are what people need and want to hear, and the time for them to be told is now.

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[briangroth27]

Dark Phoenix Review

The final installment in Fox's X-men franchise, Dark Phoenix, is unfortunately not one of their best, but it doesn't deserve the hate it received from critics (or the box office) either. Like Apocalypse (which I also enjoyed for the most part), Dark Phoenix falls into the middle of the X-pack; not too shabby considering there are some legitimately great movies in this series! I was looking forward to this film—I like the cast, they've got most of my favorite X-men on this team, and the Dark Phoenix Saga had been wrecked by The Last Stand so I was ready to see them give it another go—but while Dark Phoenix has some really solid ideas and cool moments, it needed another draft to fully realize its potential (another unfortunate similarity to Apocalypse).

Full Spoilers…

The X-men starting out as public superheroes with a direct line to the White House was a fun change of pace! Giving them fans that cheered them on was a cool reversal from the protest groups we saw in X-men, though for this development to really make an impact we should’ve seen more civilians hating/attacking mutants in the movies beyond the brief glimpses we got in X-men and Apocalypse, both in fight club scenes (The Gifted explored the idea that everyday racism would come from the people just as much as the government in much more detail than the movies ever have). Regardless, I loved that they were able to retain a very "X-men" quality to this new status quo, with mutants’ acceptance hinging on their continued best behavior and the idea that they would unendingly risk themselves to save the world. It was smart to not have bigotry solved only for Jean (Sophie Turner) to wreck it with her newfound power (and also because solving it off-screen would’ve been a disservice to the entire mythos as well as those who face it in real life), but to instead keep them constantly on the edge of losing everything they'd gained. Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) was absolutely right that mutants shouldn’t have to save the world (or worse, keep saving it) to be accepted by the rest of humanity, and I wish the movie had come back to that point by the end of the film. Her argument with Charles (James McAvoy) ties back to his insistence in First Class that humanity would accept them in exchange for stopping war really nicely though. Forcing mutants to always be over-and-above model minorities works perfectly, but they should've done more with this point instead of just creating a rift between Raven and Charles and using it as stakes for Jean's fall. I would’ve liked some closing statement on where mutants’ standing landed after the events of the film; maybe even Jean or someone making Mystique’s argument to the public to force them to face themselves and the position they’d put the X-men/mutantkind in.

Speaking of Jean’s fall, Phoenix was done much better here than in The Last Stand. I think X2's idea of making Phoenix a natural evolution of Jean is a fantastic choice (as was X2-writer Michael Dougherty’s idea to have her continue to evolve into the cosmic Phoenix in his version of X3), but making Phoenix a split personality ruined that by taking it out of Jean's control and stopping it from being Jean’s story. I’d argue this is the same problem the revised comic canon has, with a space bird taking the place of a split identity but resulting in the same lack of control/meaning/development for Jean’s character. Here, they do the cosmic origin fairly faithfully, but oddly ignore Apocalypse’s revival of the "secondary mutation" plot when Apocalypse forced Jean to evolve into full-firebird status through conflict (which, by the way, is perfect for him). They could’ve easily resolved this rift by having Hank (Nicholas Hoult) tell Jean her powers had been boosted "even beyond what Apocalypse caused" or that En Sabah Nur’s “upgrade” enabled her to survive absorbing the cosmic energy into herself in the first place. As it is, that's not a big leap for viewers to make, but it should've been said in the film.

Getting into the actual mechanics of Jean trying to deal with all this new power, I think this was a mixed bag. I liked her senses opening up at the party and would’ve liked to see that enhanced awareness continue. Her crushed reaction to her father (Scott Shepard) giving her to Xavier because he couldn't forgive her for the accidental death of her mother (Hannah Anderson) or handle raising a mutant child was a rough, powerful reveal that Turner acted perfectly, but then we got to an element of Jean being confused by what she can/should do with all this power rather than acting with that power, which slowed the momentum of her character (and the story). I’d really like to see a version of the Phoenix Saga where Jean runs with her new powers rather than being manipulated or confused about what to do with them, especially if they’re insistent on doing it all in one movie. Her talks with Erik (Michael Fassbender) and especially Vuk (Jessica Chastain) offer insight into what she could be and I wouldn’t want them to have less character-building conversations in favor of meaningless fight scenes, but I wanted to see Jean take action and deal with the fallout of her choices rather than only get to the point where she’s ready to make those decisions in the first place. I would've much preferred her trying to, say, forcibly fix the world so they don't have to keep saving it like Mystique was worried about or something (especially given their obviously strong bond at the beginning).

This is another unfortunate similarity to Apocalypse: while En Sabah Nur said a lot of great stuff in that movie, despite getting rid of all the nukes and leveling Cairo, it felt like we were constantly on the cusp of him escalating things instead of actually getting to see him do what he talked about. Here, I felt like we were on the verge of Jean taking ownership of her powers, only to have her talked into denying them, try to give them away, get captured by the government, get attacked by aliens, etc. Similarly, they really needed to dig into her decision to leave Earth on a bigger level than just being scared she’d hurt people she cared about. Why not make it her choice to see what’s out there and to see what she can become instead (which would be a cool parallel to mutants as a whole not being able to develop while stuck in savior mode for humans)? Leaving Earth should’ve been something that tied to or conflicted with her hopes and dreams for her life during and after the X-men (which would’ve been nice to know before she’s forced to give all of that up in the face of this power), rather than falling back on what feels like a much more simplistic “the power is just too unsafe for her to have on Earth” idea. That idea almost looks like humans are right to fear mutants, because even they can’t safely use their powers here, and that’s the wrong message for a X-men story. I did like that Jean acting with her emotions rather than burying them was shown as a good thing here that made her stronger: that’s a great rebuttal to Xavier trying to block them off and hide pain from her to protect her.

I was very glad that the movie didn't have Xavier blocking her split personality this time, but rather that he'd covered up Jean's accidental manslaughter in an effort to help her have a normal, happy life. That was always my read from the trailers��she didn't seem like she knew she killed her parents in Apocalypse—but I didn't expect the twist that her dad had survived and didn't want her at all and I loved it. I fully bought into Xavier's "you are not broken" reassurance to young Jean (Summer Fontana), so that moment worked really well to help sell the betrayal Jean felt. I wish we’d seen Scott (Tye Sheridan), Ororo (Alexandra Shipp), Kurt (Kodi Smit-McPhee), and Peter's (Evan Peters) reaction to what Xavier did as well though. I also would've liked to see their opinions on Xavier's massive hubris here ("All I did was create a world where we can all live in peace"), as well as his insistence that they be superheroes to earn their keep. Despite the lack of opinions from everyone but Mystique, I did like seeing this side of Xavier and thought it was just as interesting to see how he handled winning as how he’d handled mutants being the underdogs for so long. I'm glad this movie didn't agree with him that it was right to manipulate Jean's mind like Last Stand did, and Charles thinking she shouldn't experience any kind of pain is a nice callback to his own attempt to ignore the pain of the world in Days of Future Past (his older self told him that hope would allow him to bear the pain of the world without breaking, and it seems that Xavier decided he should be the only one to take on that pain rather than let others bear it as well). It also works well as an early form of his attempts to keep mutants safe even to their detriment (like making them superheroes to stay in humanity’s good graces). This habit of ignoring pain was especially evident in his almost cavalier discussion with Hank after Mystique’s funeral (with a side of “you can’t criticize me when I’m hurt too”), and it took me a bit to understand that he’s trying to do the same thing to Hank that he did to Jean, just without using his powers: he can’t process the pain of his loss and doesn’t want to see anyone else “stuck” in their feelings either. I’m glad he actually apologized on the train; I wasn’t expecting that and it was a solid development. Of the things Kinberg improved this time from Last Stand, Xavier as a not-so-great guy was definitely handled much better, precisely because he was proven wrong and dealt with it.

Erik nicely (and finally) transitioned into the peaceful existence promised by Apocalypse, even if (as others have noted) the disconnect between his crimes in that movie and the government respecting him here is a little jarring. I really liked him running Genosha, though it would've been nice to comment that this community was the last stop on the mutant Underground Railroad Mystique was part of in DOFP and Apocalypse. It didn't have to be and worked just fine without that connection, but it would've been nice to say that she helped build his mutant paradise (especially given the impact losing her has on him) and that effort would’ve buttressed her argument with Xavier nicely, since she would’ve had a hand in creating a better life for mutants as well. Erik's talk with Jean about letting go of vengeance once he realized it wasn't helping was solid (he learned something from Charles back in First Class!), but I wanted the movie to bear out that he really had changed. I hated that this movie again relied on a woman getting fridged so Erik had a reason to get murdery (with added Hank rage!): that's lazy, especially since they used that already-tired plot in the last movie. I wish both of these films had Erik as a teacher at the school, but if we couldn't get that bit of 80s comics lore, surely there was another way to use Erik here. Maybe his point of view should’ve shown us what everyday mutants think of the X-men as the poster children of the atom, and how that affects their ability to have a modicum of respect/tolerance from humans. If they couldn’t find something for Erik to do except try to kill Jean, he shouldn't have been included so they could focus on the other characters more. I did like his life on Genosha essentially proving Mystique's point and enjoyed him telling Xavier to shove his speeches, even if it was in the midst of his rage. I'll also say that the ending they found for Erik and Charles—Erik taking him back to Genosha to live out the rest of their lives together—was perfect.

I loved where they took Mystique over these prequel films! We got the badass villain in the original trilogy, so seeing her morals develop for the better in these movies was a breath of fresh air and a chance to explore new, original possibilities (even if they were inspired by her actions in the Age of Apocalypse comics timeline). I liked that she came so far as to be the field leader of the X-men and thought her argument with Xavier here was great. It meshed nicely with her opinion in X2 that they shouldn't have to conform to human appearances (or, here, their expectations) to live in peace. This was an important truth to bring up and I'm surprised that it feels like the first time I've seen it addressed in an X-story. I can almost accept her bristling at fame (and the unfair burden that fame represents) as the reason she shifts into her human appearance so often, even at the mansion, but that needed to be spelled out. I liked the rapport she had with the team, especially Jean, and I wish we saw more of an impact on them when she died (if we're wishing for things, I wish she hadn't died at all). Storm especially should’ve had more of a reaction, given Mystique was her hero. The younger students get a moment, but it's more about Jean as the culprit than Mystique's loss. I wish Mystique had let Jean know she agreed with her sense of betrayal and stuck with her instead of trying to bring her back to the mansion (even if I do see why she'd want to play up their family relationship to calm her down). It also wasn't the best strategy for the team to wear their X-uniforms to meet Jean at her house: what kind of message does that send? Having Mystique run with Jean and perhaps toy with the idea that they could change humanity for the better with Jean’s new powers so they could stop fighting to earn their peace might have been a cool development of her argument. Mystique could've played the role the Hellfire Club did in the comics & the Brotherhood did in X3, but with altruistic intentions. If she had to die, I wanted it to have more meaning and purpose: it should’ve been about her and what she stood for instead of immediately being about Erik/Hank's anger and Jean's culpability. I wonder if being impaled is an echo of how Wolverine “killed” her in X-men?

I was generally disappointed by Hank's role throughout the whole movie. I didn't like that he was in his human form so often: so he never got what Mystique was saying about loving himself as he is, even with the world loving the X-men? That’s depressing and if it was meant to be a conscious decision on his part, it should’ve been explored as his own self-hatred (or maybe he is secretly afraid that humanity will turn on mutants again, so he doesn’t want to fully give himself over to embracing his Beast appearance), not brushed aside like a common secret identity. And shouldn't he have shifted into his Beast form at Mystique's funeral, since his transformation was triggered by his emotions? I liked that this borrowed bit of Hulk mechanics revealed what he truly felt in DOFP: that was a cool comment on trying to suppress your real self and way to dramatize who Hank actually was. Here, he has full control but chooses to look human most of the time, which is not a good look (even if I bet a lot of it was about letting Hoult act more clearly without the Beast prosthetics). Like others have said, Hank getting fired up to kill one of his students is an even worse look and if they had to go there, I wish it had more fallout. The movie doesn’t bother much with the betrayal Scott & Co. must feel about their leader turning on one of them like this (instead, that anger is directed at Erik as if Hank didn’t go to him). Then they just let him come back as the headmaster of a school renamed after Jean after all that? No way. Not that I don't believe in forgiveness, but his actions were brushed aside way too easily (just like Erik and Storm's team-up with Apocalypse was in the last movie). I wish he'd retired like Mystique wanted to (if nothing else, to honor her wishes) and left the school to Scott and Ororo instead (they're nearly 30, after all).

I wish there had been less focus on the First Class characters and more of a passing of the torch here. In fact, we needed a lot more of the younger team members' opinions on everything happening in this movie, especially Jean's turn. They’d spent 10 years fighting and living together, after all: surely they have strong opinions. Ororo gets the point of view that Jean’s shown who she really is and isn’t coming back, but then she immediately acts counter to that by backing Scott’s effort to bring her home (and all of this is beside the fact that she too was party to massive loss of life but got to waltz onto the team, which would’ve been an interesting perspective to bring up). I also would’ve liked to see their reaction to Xavier's betrayal (if I were them, I'd be asking how much of their own lives he might’ve changed) and their fame (how do they see their (much safer) world vs. how do the older characters (who fought for it) see it?) as well as the implications of that celebrity status. The short shrift they got was a big negative for me. I was here to see Jean, Scott, Ororo, Kurt, and Peter as the leads, but we only really got Jean out of this bunch. Scott gets some solid moments with Jean—enough to sell their romance and connection—and it’s obvious there’s a friendship amongst the younger generation of X-men, but I feel like the things Jean was going through should’ve created more shockwaves amongst her closest friends. Even with a relatively small roster, you’d never know Storm and Nightcrawler were major X-men from their showing here and Peter is almost completely sidelined after getting his own spotlight scenes in the previous two movies. I would’ve liked Erik to know Peter is his son after he awkwardly didn’t find out in Apocalypse, though it wouldn’t have fit into this movie as it is. Kurt being Mystique’s son would’ve given a unique flavor to their mission interactions, but I guess we’ll have to wait for the MCU to get that relationship.

Another conversation/argument the younger and older generations of mutants could’ve had was about whether Jean’s powers were acceptable within the mutant subculture (which is something we also need to see more of in live-action), much less to the rest of humanity. How much is “too much” mutation (Kurt might have some feelings on that vs. the others’ invisible mutations, not that he’s any more a mutant than the rest of them)? Is there a line where a mutation just won’t be acceptable to non-mutants, no matter what goodwill they’ve gained in society? What about to other mutants (and crossing that line should really come without also making Jean a killer)? With the X-men becoming accepted as the backdrop, Jean’s evolution into Phoenix and the fight against her could’ve been played as a metaphor for people who accept LGB rights but are Transphobic, which would’ve fit the themes of the X-men as a franchise and would’ve added a new layer of complexity to the mutant metaphor (though as a straight cis guy, I defer to the LGBTQ community on whether that'd actually be a good idea and a story worth telling, or if it would hurt more than it helps; it might be preferred to bring in more trans mutants to the team and deal with mutants who are transphobic rather than piling another metaphor onto it, particularly as Jean is already a white woman dealing with racism & homophobia via hatred of mutants). It could also simply be about power & control: maybe Charles and Erik ironically can’t accept the new kind of mutant Jean is (Hank’s apparent self-hatred probably wouldn’t let him either), and they could’ve built the heroes’ split out of that lack of tolerance rather than killing Mystique.

The D’Bari mostly worked for me as antagonists if that was the way Kinberg wanted to go: they made for solid, tough cannon fodder that required mutant powers to defeat. I appreciate that they included that bit of comics canon, but ultimately them being Shi’ar who’d detected Jean's growing power signature and came to extinguish the Phoenix before it destroyed another solar system would’ve worked better IMO, since they could be the authority figures for Jean that humankind couldn’t (also opening the door to the conversation of whether she needs authority figures or if she should be trusted with her power). As it is, even still being the D'Bari could've worked if they'd come to put the Phoenix Force on trial for destroying their world, with Jean an unfortunate "accomplice" to the power. With them wanting to use the power to recreate their world instead, I would’ve liked more comparison between the D’Bari wanting to reclaim their home and mutants saving the world to maintain their place in society. You can also draw a connection between their willingness to manipulate Jean into bringing back their world (or coaxing her to give up her power so they can do it themselves) instead of the harder path of accepting and dealing with their loss and Xavier trying to ignore pain altogether (I do like that parallel a lot). Both the D’Bari and Xavier reached obsessive levels, and the aliens’ obsession with recreating their home at the cost of Earth serves as a nice foreshadowing of what could happen to Jean if she doesn't deal with her pain. I understand that in a two-hour movie we can’t see nuance to every faction, but it would’ve been nice to see some variance between the D’Bari’s goals: were any of them content to live out their lives peacefully? Were these just the fanatics of their species? Did any of them initially buy in before seeing what Vuk brought them to and thought, “this is too far?”

The action was solid, with a mostly good range of power use (even if they weren't as creatively applied as in previous installments). I liked the space rescue sequence a lot (minus apparently not caring about covering Kurt's hands in the vacuum of space) and the fights in New York City and on the train were well-done and comic booky. I was disappointed in the Quicksilver super-speed scene this time and agree with others on Twitter that every character should get spotlight moments like his. Regardless, it was cool that the team didn't hold back their powers and that the effects budget had the capability to let them cut loose. Weaponizing the team’s powers through the X-jet was a great idea! The one character cutting loose that seems weird in hindsight is Kurt’s murder spree on the train: at first it didn’t strike me as particularly odd, given the X-men aren’t at a Superman-level of not killing their enemies and all comic book heroes tend to get their bloodlust elevated in live-action, but after hearing my brother and others online point it out, yeah, it’s an odd choice for him.

Simon Kinberg’s writing and direction carried over a consistent feel from the previous installments, which (like others have noted) was not the case in the transition from X2 to Last Stand. Whatever my wishes for things that they could’ve covered or done differently here, these at least felt like the same characters we’ve been following for the past 1-3 films. He kept the action clear and managed to juggle the characters who did get the most focus pretty well. The scope could’ve been a bit bigger given Jean’s potential and left me wanting more, but I liked that they kept personal focus on the characters instead of having Jean gain absolute power and then stand behind Magneto, saying nothing. I wish they had used the 90s setting a lot more: the only 90s thing about this is that the space shuttle is still in regular operation. First Class and DOFP used their decades to enhance their respective stories; I’m sorry Apocalypse and Dark Phoenix fell short of that. They could’ve at least made a nod to Scott being an X2-canon boy band fan! I get the reason for the team’s matching uniforms—Xavier wanted an orderly image—but they really should’ve used the 90s-inspired ones from the end of Apocalypse instead. They looked so much cooler! I wish they’d brought back John Ottman’s main theme as the X-theme here, because this score didn’t resonate with me like the music of the previous films did.

Dark Phoenix is definitely a mixed bag, but overall I enjoyed a lot of it while wishing it had taken things further. I admire its ambition, even if its success is hampered by the same mistakes of previous films. I’ll buy it on home video, but for the first time I’m looking forward to the MCU’s X-men relaunch more than feeling sad about losing Fox’s version (though Feige is right to let the franchise rest for a bit). While this movie doesn’t have the emotional impact that Endgame does as a culmination, the X-films (along with Blade) kickstarted the modern superhero film and the weight of the franchise’s reach and impact is not lost on me. This series has been a huge part of my life for more than half of my life and I would’ve followed these actors and characters into another adventure—I still genuinely love or like nearly all of the movies in this 19-year franchise—but I do think they’ve kinda run their course. I’m happy that this felt like an ending even though it wasn’t planned as one, and I know I’ll revisit these films even after Disney releases their take on the franchise (which should really be a long-running TV series rather than films, but that’s neither here nor there). It feels weird to say goodbye, but it’s time.

If you’re into the X-men or a fan of these films, don’t let the rotten reviews scare you off from seeing this one. It’s not perfect, but it’s well-acted and there are solid themes with good action. It’s definitely worth a trip to the theater to see this version of Marvel’s merry mutants on the big screen one last time!

 Check out more of my reviews, opinions, and original short stories here!  

[treatedlikeanimals]

The Beginnings

“Ultimately, dichotomization yields a vision of ‘them’ as profoundly different. Ultimately, dichotomization results in stigmatizing those who are less powerful.  It provides the grounds for whole categories of people to become to objects of contempt” (Rosenblum & Travis 35).

I would like to encourage everyone to reread that paragraph, but notice the 7th-to-last word. “People.”

The first time I heard a woman mention one of her best friends was a chicken, I remember stopping what I was doing while everyone else continued eating just like it was normal. A...chicken? And then I realized, why not? Did I have any good reason for her not to be friends with a chicken? So I went back to eating, too. 

Even the original paragraph from the aforementioned reading commits the sin it cautions against.  We do not only characterize categories of people to become objects of contempt; we characterize categories of beings to become objects of contempt.  Do not think of the black/white dichotomy, nor the male/female dichotomy, but the human/animal one. This is the ‘who is proven sentient and even considered an individual”/”not considered an individual” one. And of course, we nuance this even further. Dogs are generally not acceptable to eat in US culture, while pigs are. But very young animals are sometimes given more consideration, or sometimes if they’re cute or sometimes if we have to visually see their death, or maybe if it’s your own pet....the moral caveats become very muddled all too quickly. 

But it all boils down to we think we are better simply because we are different. This gives us a feeling of dominion, that we “own” and are entitled to use another species because they are the other.

Why do we consider ourselves, as humans, so much greater that we think it is okay to enslave other species in this way? Because we are supposedly more intelligent? When we measure intelligence according to our own standards, of course, we are more intelligent. But I cannot build a nest like a bird does, and I do not know how to swim like a dolphin, and my pollinating skills certainly do not resemble those of a bee. If those species measure intelligence, I am sure we look the least intelligent to them all. So how about our ethics or our reasoning skills? As a species, humans constantly destroy, pollute, and spread hatred on the only world we all share- the Earth. The massive environmental effect our species has had is devastating, and we do not contribute to the ecosystems like other species do...so why do we consider ourselves superior? The “might is right” principle has led to the most dangerous events in history, yet we continue to use it with animals every single day, once again, simply because they are the “other.”

We speak extensively about human rights, about making sure there are support groups and safe spaces for people who need them, but speciesism is blatantly ignored.  As a point, speciesism hasn’t even been covered as part of this class. After activities, rewards of chocolate candy containing products that are meant for a mother to nourish her offspring are given freely, while we all congratulate ourselves for recognizing the unfairness of the patriarchy. 

We still are using biological differences to justify mistreatment on an institutional level. The problem of racism wasn’t solved when no biological basis for racism was found. So I don’t want to hear that it’s due to the animal’s “biology” that speciesism exists. People have always tried, and failed, to use biology as a basis for excluding people from protection. This has happened with marginalized people as well, especially with Native Americans (please see Mary Crow Dog’s Lakota Woman for a first-hand account of the atrocities Natives have faced by colonizers and white people since we arrived). “Calling upon the model of the Chain of Being, and using natural difference in physical features, they created a new form of social identity. ‘Race’ developed in the minds of some Europeans as a way to rationalize the conquest and brutal treatment of Native American populations.....their inferiority was natural and/or God-given” (Rosenblum & Travis 55).

Racism is about power and keeping structures in place for the personal gain of some groups over others. Speciesism is the same. 

After all, who could give up cheese and bacon?

Sources:

Crow Dog, Mary. 1991. Lakota Woman. New York, NY: Harper 

Perennial.Rosenblum, Karen E. & Toni-Michelle C. Travis. (2015).The Meaning of Difference: American Constructions of Race, Sex and Gender, Social Class, Sexual Orientation, and Disability. McGraw Hill. 7th (seventh) edition.