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wovetherapy · 11 months ago

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Reclaiming Anger from White Supremacy

Anger is an elemental human emotion tied to basic survival much like happiness, sadness, and fear and can be defined as “an emotional response to an external or internal event perceived as a threat, violation, or injustice” (Berkeley UHS). This emotion often comes up when something feels wrong or someone feels like they have been wronged by someone or something. It can be characterized by a wide range of feelings including frustration, irritation, and betrayal - anger can be further dissected into underlying feelings as seen through the feelings wheel.

Evolutionary purpose

It has been widely theorized that anger has evolutionary origins and is an adaptive response. Anger has served as a form of protection, to defend against threats, compete for resources, and enforce social norms. It is associated with the fight or flight response of the sympathetic nervous system. In this primitive response, the adrenal glands flood the body with stress hormones (i.e. adrenaline, testosterone), preparing humans to fight. Meanwhile in another region of the brain, the prefrontal cortex (PFC) is responsible for decision-making and reasoning, inputting context and keeping one’s primal instincts in check such that one does not respond to anger every time with confrontation or combat.

Anger, race, and white supremacy

Anger is often depicted as a negative emotion and has historically been denounced as worthless and a source of evil. For BIPOC, anger has been criminalized. Black bodies have been systemically targeted and disproportionately subjected to police brutality and violence within the carceral system and by the general population at large, as highlighted by the Black Lives Matter movement. Society has been taught to fear dark skin, imperialist and colonialist powers continuing to fund and enforce these narratives which weaponize black and brown peoples’ anger. Meanwhile, Asian communities have been pitted against other people of color, used as the image of how minority individuals should behave, an act of white supremacy manifested through harmful stereotypes and the model minority myth. In this gendered and racial discrimination, the Asian diaspora has been reduced to stereotypes, invisibilized and silenced, women seen as docile and submissive, men seen as immasculine, and all deemed hard-working and compliant (never angry) with little representation or room for movement outside of these boxes. These white supremacist narratives intentionally create resentment amongst Black and Asian folk, both inwardly and outwardly, fueling anger and punishing them for their anger simultaneously.

These racist representations have additive consequences and further show the collective struggle against white supremacy. Limiting peoples’ range of emotional expression is an act of dehumanization and racism, and it often leads to violence against BIPOC communities and attempt to further silence these communities who protest in anger and solidarity. White supremacy is the name behind BIPOC being turned against each other and put in danger, being seen as physical threats, animals, and inconsequential objects.

Consequences of continual or unmanaged anger

Prolonged anger can lead to adverse physical and mental health outcomes. Physiological and biological changes occur to people’s bodies when they are angry. Heart rate and blood pressure become elevated and hormones such as adrenaline and noradrenaline are released. Tensing of muscles also occurs within the body. Frequently putting one’s body through these changes, i.e. by experiencing anger often, can lead to long-term medical conditions and complications such as: high blood pressure, depression, anxiety, insomnia, substance abuse, gastric ulcers, bowel disease, and diabetes (Ohwovoriole, 2023).

Displaced anger

Depending on an individual’s tolerance for expressing and holding space for certain emotions, anger can mask less tolerable emotions or be masked over by more tolerable emotions. Anger may displace uncomfortable emotions such as fear, sadness, helplessness, or despair. It is well-supported in literature that, especially in men, depression may be concealed and masked as anger (Berkeley UHS). Anger may also be a result of other psychological or physiological conditions such as unresolved trauma, substance abuse, or injury to the brain. Alternatively, when anger feels less tolerable, a person’s anger may manifest as chronic fatigue, sadness, helplessness, rationalization, blame, or cynicism. The displacement of emotions involving anger often occurs subconsciously and can go unnoticed without intentionally tuning in to one’s emotions.

Beneficial Purposes of Anger

Protection: Anger allows us to recognize threats and protect ourselves against aggression.

A source of energy: Anger gives us strength and activates our bodies to fight. This energy can serve to propel movements, create change, further goals, and spark creative solutions.

Motivation: Anger can serve as an indicator of injustice. It often arises when we are denied rights, disrespected, and exploited. Anger motivates us to find solutions to problems and focus on putting an end to injustices.

A source of empowerment: Anger, as opposed to desensitization, helplessness, or despair, allows us to continue focusing on our ability to change the situation. It empowers us to work towards a desirable future and take action.

Increases cooperation/solidarity: A common theme which stirs people to feel angry often brings people together in solidarity to fight for the common good. Collective anger indicates to others that it is important to listen to us and also signals that something is not right and we need to come together to find a better way.

Final Thoughts

Anger, although primitive in nature, has turned into a complex emotion intertwined with racial, social, and cultural implications. It has many beneficial usages, and it can be quite harmful. It can be motivating and freeing and also stifling and destructive. It is important to tune into how one’s relationship with anger may be manifesting in and influencing various aspects of life, including but not limited to interpersonal relationships, career, mental and physical health, and connection to self.

In understanding one’s own anger, it becomes possible to harness anger in community and in solidarity and has the potential to empower and sustain movements towards collective liberation.

If you’re interested in scheduling an appointment or you’d like more information, please contact us.

#Anger #Reclaiming #White Supremacy

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writingwithcolor · 4 years ago

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Fantasy Halflings, Elves, and Dwarves of Color

Zach submitted:

In my fantasy series I have multiple non human races such as halflings, elves, dwarves (which I might change to neanderthals), and gnomes. I remember reading somewhere not to have POC werewolves, but what about elves and dwarves? Would that be fine since it would help add to the realism of the world?

Thank you for the response, and I appreciate all the work you all are doing!

Having some of your elves and dwarves be people of color is good, at least in principle. Personally, I think it would add to the realism of your story, but it depends on your pre-existing worldbuilding. For instance, is your story set in an isolated area, or in a multicultural, metropolitan area? Are there different cultures in your world? Different nations? Because if you want to mimic real life demographic trends, you can have large cities that are more diverse, both in terms of human races and fantasy races. And you can also have small, rural areas that are predominantly one human and fantasy race, with only a few people from other demographics mixed in. But you’re already using a fantasy world of your own creation, so at the end of the day, “realism” isn’t that important—your worldbuilding can work however you want it to, as long as it’s logically consistent with itself.

Now here’s the only caveat in all this, or at least, the only one I can think of: if all of your human characters are white, having some of your elves and dwarves be people of color could come off as othering. But since you're here, I trust you not to do that.

—Mod Ixia

The thing with non-human races, monsters, etc. is that you’re going to have to be more specific! With werewolves, what you want to take away is, “if your only werewolf characters are all Black/dark-skinned POC (or a combination), you are likely to perpetuate animalistic/barbaric stereotypes and therefore you should steer clear;” not “POC werewolves are disallowed altogether.” You might be referring to the issue with Indigenous werewolves, which IS a much more hard-and-fast answer; Mod Lesya will touch on that below. The same idea applies to elves, dwarves, and halflings.

When we think about high fantasy races, there are going to be different stereotypes attached to them, some which are very deeply encoded in high fantasy media, due to influences like Tolkein and DnD. Elves are seen as noble/wise, intelligent, and close to nature. Dwarves are seen as blunt, blue-collar, and good with their hands. It’s the associations between race and stereotype that we have to work to avoid.

You may notice that some of these stereotypes line up with things we don’t want to see in POC rep. For example, making elves in your world allegorical of East Asians may perpetuate the “smart asian” model minority myth, if they’re shown as more inherently intelligent. Notice also that I said “allegorical of [group as a whole];” there’s no problem with making a fraction of your multiple elf or dwarf cast one of these groups; it’s when you make a generalization, either by tokenism or racial allegory, that makes it an issue. Similarly, making all of your halflings mixed-race could potentially end up creating racial allegories or assumptions depending on what side/race is human vs. non-human.

~Mod Rina

For me the issue is: are the fantasy races made up entirely of one ethnicity or not.

If you’re talking “Elves= Natives”, then I have a problem with that (as outlined in Fantasy Elves as Indigenous Peoples), but if you’re talking “some elves are Native but some are Black and some are white and some are Chinese” while also having human characters of those ethnicities, then it’s fine.

The “having human characters of those ethnicities” is the critical bit. The problem with making fantasy races as PoC is the tendency for writers to make all their humans white. This deeply and toxically links humans with white as default, and other species as other races contributes to dehumanization.

My caution with werewolves is very specifically Native werewolves, because Twilight has thoroughly poisoned the well for that. I’ve answered that before, as well (Werewolf Natives: Problems or Not?). It’s something to be extremely cautious about, because of how big Twilight is—especially with its recent resurgence.

Non-Native PoC have their own history with werewolves and being seen as animalistic that must be looked at, but when you have a multi-billion dollar franchise that set up a whole nation of people (the Quileute) as predatory beasts because of their lycanthropy, there is a lot of damage done. Native people are also often treated in historical documentaries as wolf-like, with the colonizers as helpless prey, which adds to the problems of associating Natives with werewolves.

It’s theoretically doable, but it’s also something so be very sensitive to the context of.

But as for the general concept of fantasy races having PoC members, it’s usually fine so long as there’s an established human society also having the same ethnicities. Also, really try to not make interspecies tensions as analogues to racism, because it just reinforces the concept that PoC are other and that humans don’t have those tensions amongst themselves.

Don’t stick all the fantastic racism on halflings because they’re mixed, don’t make orcs analogues for Black people then have orcs be discriminated against, that sort of thing. Each fantasy species should be more than just a single note, a single culture, because each species should be reflective of a population instead of a caricature. And populations have variety to them.

Also, do educate yourself on what fantasy races were coded as and avoid playing up the traits that line up with real-world stereotypes, as Rina said. Because fantasy has such a white-as-default problem, you’ll often find racist caricatures be the basis for them. Many, many, many PoC have discussed how certain fantasy species are caricatures of their cultures; googling around and spending some time listening to non-white book critiques is important (Booktube is very diverse and a great place to start).

And, importantly, see what ownvoices authors have done with fantasy races. This will help break out of the white, Christian-centric baseline that tropes assume, and will help you see more variety in how to handle trickier topics. Authors of colour and non-Christian authors have shown what they can do with what was originally caricatures of themselves, and seeing their perspectives will help you avoid some of the worst pitfalls that privilege allows you to ignore.

~Mod Lesya

As the other mods have already included most of what I wanted to cover, I just wish to point out one thing. As this blog often points out, trace your logic even for seemingly innocuous word choices - why are you using the word “race” to describe elves, dwarves, and other fantasy species?

The common answer is genre convention, since using the term “race” for fantasy species has its roots going back to Tolkien. But its use makes it easy for both writers and readers to fall into the trap of assigning an actual race or ethnicity to a fantasy species and appropriate or exotify the original culture on top of it. It also makes it easy for writers to just put together one race for the human race (see where it gets confusing?) and not consider building multiple races that make together a diverse society.

I highly recommend choosing a word other than race to describe the fantasy sapient creatures, so it’s easier to build more diverse cultures and portray more races into each fantasy species.

- Mod Rune

#fantasy #character creation #elves #dwarves #halflings #fantasy race #racial coding #fantasy creatures #people of color #coding #supernatural beings #allegory #racial allegories #long post #asks #race coding #ethnic coding

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47crayons · 3 years ago

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LOST, annotated

[anyone who has experienced loss knows that after a tragedy, a person has only one wish: to gain back what was lost, but in this poem, i touch on what happens when a void is caused not by the disappearance of something, but by the absence of something that never existed. because after all, absence is not a one-dimensional word. original text.]

there exists a secret that only my bare feet and the twinkling sky still know, one that they will store in a musty file cabinet, waiting to be discovered. it is of the campfire that roared and of we who roared louder [realistically, even the slightest chatter will be louder than any fire, but this speaks to the life that our stories bring to the world. the campfire can exist on it's own, but it's the people who bring it to life]. you see, when we tell stories, it is humanity’s bare bones that listen. but how do we speak of something that doesn’t exist? how do we talk around aching gaps? what i mean to say is: how do we tell a story of absence? [this is the central idea of this piece, the mantra, if you will, and it's a nod to the fact that our experience with loss almost always comes with something that is lost. the word absence highlights something that isn't there and perhaps never was]

this is a story about my home. [though this poem is really about absence, it's told through this two-fold idea of home—both my family and my experience being asian-american]

and since a story must start somewhere, this one starts here. let me paint the scene for you. this is the distance of twenty-one hours, two plane flights, three airports, and one taxi. this is the distance between three bittersweet goodbyes and two overdue hellos. the difference is seven thousand miles and one language barrier. [this is intentionally kept vague in terms of where i am leaving and where i am arriving] i do not belong here, but i am no more lost than i ever was. [and the reason i kept it vague was to make this point: it doesn't matter where i mean because i'm too asian to be american and too american to be chinese. where is my home, and how can i get there?]

there’s something tender about the word home. it has an innate comfort, a feeling of sleeping in on saturday mornings and corners that only you can peel back. [you'll notice that it feels like i spliced two pieces together (the part about arriving and running and not being able to sleep AND the part about home in general); in fact, you could read two different pieces if you skip the opposite parts. that's intentional. i wanted to create a feeling of giving this off the top of my head, a thought vomit of sorts, because really, when have the concepts of absence and home ever been straightforward?]

one day, i am running, and a voice too far above my head whispers, “go home,” to which i respond, “where?” they ask me where i am from, but i don’t know, i don’t know. [and now that i've pointed out that this is about me being asian-american, that interpretation seems obvious, but when i wrote this line, i was actually thinking about my home home—or rather, my house] i tell them that i am from blooming buds in rib cages and from new springs [i have never been a fan of fresh starts, only of picking up where i left off in a new location], but as the sunlight dwindles and dips below the horizon, i have nowhere else to run, nowhere to return to. and as much as a part of me is afraid, another part of me is relieved to know that i can’t lose something not worth saving. [this is the darkest part of the poem, but also one of the more optimistic. it's simultaneously about wishing i was anywhere but here and about defying boundaries that i don't fit into.]

if you remember nothing else, remember this: a home is safe. what i cannot guarantee you is that you will have one. [this goes back to the idea of not belonging, of being lost, but instead of talking about how i don't belong, i recognize that you might not either. this can be a shared experience] but if you are searching, i will scour the ends of the earth until you have a place to call home. [sometimes when i use the second person in my writing, i have an intended audience. this time i don't. i don't care who you are—everyone deserves a feeling of being at home]

another day, i cannot sleep. the air sticks to my hands and to my face, it lodges itself in my throat. [speaking is a power as much as writing and art are, which i think that too many creators overlook, and here, it's being taken away] and it’s in this very moment that i come to a profound realization: i want to break something. maybe it’s because a mosquito will not stop buzzing or because the kettle will not stop whistling. or maybe it’s because i am in constant pursuit of something i may not find. or maybe, just maybe, it’s because my whole life i have been taught to keep things together. [enter stage left: model minority myth and chronic eldest daughter syndrome]

but maybe some of us were made to be wanderers. [returning to the concept of not belonging, but this time, i leave out the part about feeling lost. who said we had to belong to be found?] maybe the thing we are searching for doesn’t exist, has never existed. how do we grieve something that was never lost? [except despite the lack of necessity to belong, there's still an inherent loneliness to it. after all, pride and grief are not mutually exclusive]

so, we’ll wander until our bare feet [so now you might think, "why bare feet?" and to that i say: i don't like wearing shoes] reach this very campfire. but when all that surrounds a campfire is silence, what do we have left? when the fire burns to ash and scattered memories, what do we have left? and if that should occur, we will finally know how to tell a story of night skies without stars, a story of absence.

#imo this piece should be delivered verbally (hence some notations)#not adding the taglists here but i hope you enjoyed <3 #rose writes poetry #rose writes

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kagrenacs · 4 years ago

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Tes Iceberg Explained #2

Once again i’m not covering everything, particularly not bothering with things such as Black Books/Naked Nords which are a main focus within the games. And not everything is covered in extensive detail, many of these things i could cover more thoroughly, but that would make this post very, very long. CW for brief discussion of Sexual Assault

N'Gasta! Kvata! Kvakis!: A book with a secret meaning you can find

here: https://www.imperial-library.info/content/mystery-ngasta-kvata-kvakis

Nords were Giants: A theory that Giants and Nords share atmoran ancestors

The Last Dragonborn is Talos: A theory that the Last Dragonborn who is a potential Shezzarine like Talos, and shares a title with him

Mutara is symbolism for a penis: A lot of people joke that Mutara is symbolism for a penis and that’s it, but MK has stated it’s an anagram for Trauma revolving around the encounter with Molag Bal (original post deleted along with a lot of his reddit content)

Briar-Heart Lorkhan reenactment: the Reachmen sometimes will give a chosen warrior a Briar-Heart in place of their human heart to better harness magical energy and power, this theory connects it with Lorkhan’s heart being torn from his chest during his death

Titus Mede is Thalmor: Didn’t find much on this, but i feel it’s rather self-explanatory

The Trial of Vivec: An obscure MK text, TW for Rape if you go looking for it

Reavers from the North: A class of bandits on Solstheim

World-Eating/ The Aldudagga: An interesting obscure MK text discussing Alduin’s role as worldender. The text states that ‘the Leper Demon King’ and Lorkhan made a compact/bargain of some sort to prevent this. Lorkhan tries to hide under Red Mountain, but it’s already eaten by Alduin so he ends up stuck between/within Kalpas, essentially out of time. LDK states he and Lorkhan hoard parts of the old world and add them to the new, so that it takes Alduin longer to eat the world the next time. Alduin calls him a stupid little fucker (not relevant, but i wanted to have this on record) and curses him with the name Mehrunes Dagon, essentially forcing him to oblivion and cursing him to stay there until he destroys everything. It also attributes to part of Saarthal’s destruction to Mehrunes Dagon worshipers/Dagon himself, tells of a tale of a Flying Whale and a Dirtbird making a deal with Molag Bal and explains the tradition of Nord’s cow painting as offers for giants. Many folks consider this noncanonical, including some die-hard lore fans.

Abagarlas: A Molag Bal worshiping Ayleid city, in conflict with Meridia worshipping cities

The Tri-angled Truth: possibly the Psijic Endeavor, but also shown to be the worship of The True Tribunal and belief in Mundus as a trial ground made by Lorkhan. (The two statements may be connected by Boethiah, who preached the Psijic Endeavor to the Velothi)

The Ooze: A bosmeri term for the primordial chaos of early nirn before the Earthbones stabilized it.

Prophecy writing: This might be a reference to several things, possibly the actions of the ‘Hero’ in each Elder Scroll to fulfill the prophecy and make their will a reality, possibly the Ancestor Moth Cult and their role of recording the prophecies they see.

The Eleven forces: Laws of magic described by the Psijic order, also a term used to describe their council

The Halls of Colossus: An ancient site of ruins, possibly dedicated to the worship of dragons, as ESO shows. Tiber Septim may have kept the Numidium here and it may have had adverse effects on the surrounding region

Mantling: The concept of becoming so similar to another being, you literally become them/take up their power.

Tiber’s Purges: Destruction of cities and royal families that did not agree with Tiber Septims rule, using the Numidium

House Ra’athim and Mora: House Mora was a minor Dunmer/Chimer house with human ancestry, before fading away and being absorbed by House Hlaalu. House Ra’athim was a powerful clan of nobility within House Mora that ruled Ebonheart and were loyal to the King of Morrowind. The Ra’athim were said to be miners and owned an extensive amount of ebony mines. Nerevar was also said to be originally from House Mora.

Talos is Lorkhan: A theory that Talos mantled the place of Lorkhan within the pantheon of the Divines.

An-Xileel: An argonian faction of anti-colonists, probably based in Lilmonth

Tamriel Technological Degeneration: A theory that states the technology of Tamriel is slowly declining, primarily sourcing the existence of Dwemer tech. Sometimes associated with a theory that Tamriel is experiencing a decline in magic, citing the streamlining of skill trees in Morrowind and Oblivion into the one seen in Skyrim

Wulf: An avatar of Tiber Septim, seen in Morrowind

Mannimarco is not the King of Worms: The theory that the Mannimarco seen in Oblivion is not Mannimarco the God, but an imposter or the remnants of the mortal Mannimarco

Sunbirds: Altmer airships, possibly designed with the intent to reach Aetherius, may or may not have been successful. Sources are primarily unlicensed works or vague mentions

House Dres Vampires: Garan Marethi , Volikhar vampire, states he was tired of the politics of House Dres. A Game at Dinner recounts the poisoning of a spy at a banquet King Helseth held, notably the anonymous author was stated to be Dres and desired to be relieved of his title. Dhaunayne, mentioned as this spy’s master, appears in Morrowind as head of the Aundae vampire clan.

Arkved’s Void: The nightmare of the wizard Arkved, who stole Vaermina’s orb in Oblivion

The Book of Hours: A teaching by Vivec focusing on the Dragon Breaks, Middle Dawn and the Blue Star Mnemoli

The Dreamsleeve: This is a bit difficult to explain as there are two meanings often attributed to the word. The first meaning is the collective consciousness/dream of everyone in existence, and a method to transmit information from person to person via dreams/unconscious thought, this is the explanation present in canon. In things considered more dubiously canon, it is the process of life/death/rebirth.

Pyandonea is Aldmeris: The theory that the home of the sea elves is actually the ancient continent of Aldmeris

Emperor Zero: Discussed in previous post, TL;DR, a cult established by Tiber Septim to honor his predecessor paving the way for his conquering of Tamriel

Infinitely Large Planetoids: A reference to a text by MK discussing the cosmology of TES. The planets of Mundus are the Eight Divines/the bodies of them, they are also the planes of the gods. They appear as planets in the sky because mortal minds can’t comprehend their true form. They are infinite, but also surrounded by oblivion, so the mortal mind comprehends them as planets.

Kalpas: The cycle of birth/death/rebirth the universe/aurbis goes through.

Satakal: The Yokudan God of Everything, the universe, a fusion of Anu/Padomay. Like Alduin, he eats his own tail/is reborn (see kalpas above). The Yokudan pantheon is made up of Gods who learned to survive this cycle.

Summerset Isles is part of Thras: The thought that originally the Sload may have called the Summerset Isles home, or part of their home. Supported by the fact the oldest structures in the isles is made of coral.

Aldmeris never existed: The thought that the myth of Aldmeris is just a myth

Wayrest Secret painting message: Part of the main quest of Daggerfall, a way for the Agent to discover Daggerfall agents killed King Lysandus

Anumidi Models: A reference to Vehk’s Teaching, a text by MK that describes the Psijic Endeavor and it’s relationship to CHIM and the Tower. To summarize, the Anumidi models (Numidium and presumably lesser models such as centurions) are a metaphor/representation of the Tower (The universe when you tilt your head to the side, or an I)

Cybiades: An island off the coast of Sentinel, populated with Vampires.

Yokudan Sidestepping: The theory that the Yokudans/their pantheon come from an alternate timeline/the past, and avoided the destruction of Yokuda by stepping into the current timeline.

The Red Templars: Lore from the Redguard Fourms, MK describes them as ‘psycho-crusaders who drank the blood of Talos to get short-term martial shouting powers’ The rest of the legion largely disliked them.

Two Tiber theory: The Theory that Tiber Septim was in fact two people, Tiber Septim the general/Hjalti Early-Beard and Zurin Arctus. Making him both a Nord and Breton like ingame texts suggest.

Magika=Energy of Existence: I discuss this a few times on this blog. The simple theory that magic is energy/life force, the equivalent to the real world’s laws of thermodynamics. Supported by the fact that Meridia is said to be the lady of infinite energies and hates the undead who disrupt the natural flow of magic/energy

Dro’Zira: A Khajiit folk hero present at the Battle of Red Mountain, Wulfharth may have used his thu’um to turn him and other Khajiit into Senche. Said to have defended Wulfarth from Dumac Dwarfking, and killed the monarch. Later confined to the Shivering isles and rescued by Wulfharth.

Stars 3D Skydome: Presumably a reference to the fact that stars are holes between oblivion and aetherius and act as a sort of dome between Nirn and Aetherius

Blades Secret Bloodlines: Didn’t find much on this, my guess is it’s a reference to the theory that the blades kept the bloodlines of the Septim emperors a secret, and multiple bastard heirs may have been produced through generations.

Arden Sul: the first Duke of the Shivering Isles, Mania and Dementia have opposing beliefs on his life. Mania knows him as the Artificer Superior, a skilled craftsman who consumed large amounts of Greenmote, his revelers and/or himself may have consumed so much, their hearts exploded and ‘lifeblood flowed from their chests’. Extremists of Mania believe he is the true god of the Shivering isles. Dementia regards him as a Dark Deceiver, who fed poisoned wine to his allies, suspecting a traitor and killing everyone, reading their lifeblood for the traitor. When he couldn’t find it, he tore his heart out in distress. Extremists of Dementia regard him as the mortal aspect of Sheogorath. Both sides consider his soul to be beyond oblivion, ready to pounce at any moment.

From the Many-Headed Talos: Hemskir’s speech, another MK text. Describes Talos removing the jungle from Cyrodiil.

Hist Biological Supercomputers: Self explanatory, the theory that the hivemind of the hist is equivalent to a biological supercomputer (unrelated to tes, but this reminds me of the concept of plant intelligence, memory and perception)

#Tes Iceberg #The Elder Scrolls #Kagrenacs Journal #long post

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eternalrevivalist · 4 years ago

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Greece: A historical essay - Part 1/4

On the 25th of March 2021, the people of Greece celebrate their independence day. This year is especially important because it is exactly 200 years since the outbreak of the revolution (1821). I decided to honor my country and its history with a (relatively) detailed post.

Most people around the world already have knowledge regarding ancient Greece, so I will be brief here.

ANCIENT AND ARCHAIC GREECE:

between 3000 and 1100 B.C. roughly, there existed the Minoan civilization of Crete. We know little about them besides their elaborate palaces (anaktora), intricate plumbing systems and wonderful frescoes. They used the linear A in their writing, which remains undeciphered to this day. This civilization was one which traded with the outside world. Being an island, they also did not have many fortifications, which might have contributed to their downfall. There are 2 main theories as to their decline: Invasions from the mainland Mycenaeans or the major volcanic eruption of Santorini around that time.

Pictured above: 1) a partially destroyed room, allowing a peek inside 2) some restored frescoes 3) an outer room 4) A showcase of the simple and geometric, yet elaborate and colorful, structure of the building. All of these pictures are from the Palace of Knossos.

The next civilization to succeed them were the aforementioned Mycenaeans, who thrived between 1650 and 1200 B.C. They originally lived in the Peloponnese peninsula, on the southern tips of mainland Greece. It appears that they invaded and subjugated the Minoans at some point. They used linear B for their alphabet, which has successfully been deciphered and is our first indication of archaic or proto-Greek. The later tales of Homer (Odyssey and Iliad) are set in the 1200s and involve Mycenaean legendary heroes and rulers.

They were organized in independent and semi-independent city-state kingdoms, crafted bronze weapons and were a war-like people. Around 1200, we see an increase in fortifications around their settlements and the remains of their palaces carry signs of having been burned. This implies that they, too, fell to an invading force which had been threatening them.

The Minoans and Mycenaeans appear to have both used a centralized “manorial” or palatial economic system, which revolved around their grand palaces.

After their fall came the dark age of ancient Greece, which lasted from 1100 to 750 B.C. As implied by the name, we have very little information about this time. Pottery lost its elaborate design and became merely geometric, the linear B alphabet stopped being used, settlements were much smaller and fewer in population.

One other notable involvement is the arrival of the Doric tribes to the Greek mainland, displacing and possibly mixing with the Mycenaeans.

CLASSICAL GREECE:

This is the ancient Greece everyone knows and loves. The Dorians were not the only ethnic group of that time, with them appeared the Ionians, Achaeans, and Aeolians. In myth, these are all relatives who came from the same ancestor, Hellen (not the famous Helen of Troy, but instead a male patriarch from Thessaly).

The Achaeans might have had a relation to the Myceneans or have existed alongside them to some degree, This is only a hypothesis though.

The Dorians were the direct ancestors of the Spartans and Corinthians, among other smaller states of the Peloponnese.

The Ionians are best remembered as the ancestors of the the Athenians but also their many coastal and islander allies, including the region of Ionia (modern Smyrna/Izmir region) in Asia Minor.

The Aeolians lived in modern-day Thessaly and were the most numerous of the Greek groups. During the Doric invasion, some of them fled to the island of Lesbos and the region of Aeolis (which they named) in Asia Minor.

During this period we see the early foundations of what would evolve into the ancient Greek city-state model, as most imagine it, as well as the government forms of Classical Greece - Oligarchy, Democracy, Tyranny. These forms of government acted as ancient ideologies of sorts, to a degree.

In Sparta, Lycurgus implemented the reforms which led to the highly militarized, disciplined, regimented and isolationist Spartans of the Classical period.

In Athens, there was a succession of reformers who led to the establishment of Democracy. First was Dracon, the least democratic of all and whose laws give us the modern definition of the word “Draconic”, afterwards we have the moderate Solon, who can be credited with the foundations of Democracy and maintaining a balance between the aristocratic wealthy and the common poor. There was a brief interruption to democracy between 561 - 510 B.C. as the leader of the Democratic faction, Peisistratus, took the reins of power as a Tyrant (back then, the word had a neutral or even slightly positive connotation, along the lines of “benevolent dictator/enlightened autocrat). The laws and customs of Athenian Democracy were kept in place during those years and were able to blossom after the end of the tyranny. Cleisthenes was the next in the line of reformers. A radical democrat, he greatly expanded the power of the poorer citizens. All of these reforms led directly to the Athenian Democracy inherited by Pericles right before the Peloponnesian war and during the zenith of Athenian power, wealth and culture through its leadership of the Delian League.

Before that though, there were the Persian wars, which started when the coastal city-states and former colonies of Asia Minor cried for help to the Greek mainland, in an effort to avoid complete annexation by the Persian empire.

This led Greece to band together against the threat of the Persians and beat them back, after many losses and much hardship. This is considered the main grand epoch of the classical era and bound them all together as “Hellenes” for the first time.

Greece was not a place of long-lasting peace and alliances though. Soon after, the Athenian populist democratic politicians promised their people great opulence, which they could only ensure by taking from the common fund of the Delian League and using that money on their city. Thus Athens prospered at the expense of its supposed allies, leading to the era of Athenian Hegemony around the 5th century B.C. (Sparta used to be the hegemon before them, around 650 B.C.). This all lead directly to the Peloponnesian war of 431 - 404, where the Spartans emerged victorious after protracted campaigns and battles, gaining the title of “liberators” for dismantling the Athenian hegemony and liberating their tributaries.

During this period we also have the beginning of Greek philosophy as we know it, with the activity of Socrates. Pre-Socratic philosophers were generally natural scientists and cosmologists, he was the first to deal with moral and political philosophy, changing the term forever. Plato was his student, who famously wrote his own political system in “The republic” and unsuccessfully tried to implement it in Syracuse. Aristotle was the student of Plato and became the founder of Mixed government and Classical republicanism (as it was later known and developed later in the renaissance), he was also the teacher of Alexander the Great, the famous Greek-Macedonian king who created an empire.

Sparta’s attempt at aiding oligarchic tyranny in Athens, with the conclusion of the war, failed and Athens returned back, somewhat weak but still great, after only a few years. The next hegemon to take the title were the Thebans, the third most powerful city-state of the era. They held it for a short while in the 3rd century, until Alexander the Great’s father, Philip II, took that title from them, laying the groundwork for the later conquests of his son.

Alexander defeated the Persians, conquered Egypt, Babylon, Asia minor, Persia itself and finally modern-day Pakistan and Afghanistan, reaching the Indus river, where he finally met his equal at the hands an Indian kingdom and was forced to return back to Babylon, where he died.

His empire fractured into four successor states and Rome met little resistance, fighting only Epirus and a weakened Macedon, in their conquest of Greece.

Pictured above: Greek states around 200 B.C.

Bright yellow: Seleucids

other Yellow: Achaean League, Epirus and states under Macedonian influence

Dark Blue: Aetolian League and Independent states

Orange: Macedon

Dark Green: early Roman conquests

Light Green: Kingdom of Pergamum

Purple: Ptolemaic (Egyptian) holdings

#greece #history #culture #archaeology #greek independence day

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banhchao · 4 years ago

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I just wanted to say I appreciate your tags to the that post. They’re anchoring. Better than I could have said it because I’m all kinds of frustrated right now.

omg asdfghjkl I WAS THINKING OF MESSAGING U BECAUSE I APPRECIATED UR INPUT! thank you for both sending this message AND for replying to that person! as SE Asian ppl, our frustration is 100% valid especially since our experiences and stories are constantly erased when talking about so-called “asian activism” in favour of e asians.

i know the op meant no harm at all. they even cleared things up i believe, speaking about how e asians are the most likely of all to be targeted thus they chose those countries first. op’s post is 100% valid; as u said, their choice to represent e asians as i believe op is e asian, is completely fine. they even said they are planning to add other asian countries, they just started off with those 3 first. which honestly i have no issue with.

but when u look at the greater scheme of things and put the post into full context, it comes off as erasing se asian ppl’s experiences because the hate crimes that are currently happening rn DO affect se asian ppl too. south asian ppl, west asian ppl and central asian ppl are also constantly forgotten in conversations of “asian activism” (which you added in ur reblog, THANK YOU), but in this context specifically, se asian ppl are the ones especially having our experiences and issues erased. which is so frustrating because this isn’t a one-time thing; it happens ALL THE TIME and has happened all throughout our lives.

mainstream asian activism in the west is centred around E Asian issues and the model minority myth (which doesn’t necessarily apply to all Asian ppl). asian representation in media is mainly e asian (which we unfortunately see when we look at the cast list of raya and the last dragon, a SE Asian-inspired Disney movie). when we go looking for rep or for spaces to discuss our experiences, we are only met with e asian faces and stories (which can contribute to intra-asian community colourism, classism, xenophobia... but that’s another can of worms)

this is not to say e asian ppl do not deserve their activism, awareness of their issues and representation - they 100% do. but the way “asian” has become an all-encompassing umbrella term to refer to all of asia but only fit in one group’s issues is frustrating, exclusionary and exhausting. asia is such a huge continent and every culture and group is diverse; there’s no way u can fit every issue under such an umbrella term. the way se asian ppl’s narratives and experiences are erased or stepped on to in constant favour of e asian ppl’s when both are equally as important is tiring to see and have to live with.

as valid as op’s post is, our frustration of our narratives being erased CONSTANTLY is also 100% valid. there aren’t only 3 countries in asia as many ppl believe and as good as their intentions are, the added context of the situation sorta makes it a bit in poor taste and kinda exclusionary. it’s not op’s fault and they didn’t mean any harm but these conversations do come from further context and do matter. as much as i don’t want there to be a divide, there are a lot of intra-asian community issues that we need to address in order to promote actual solidarity and spread awareness.

anyways to finish this off, ur feelings and frustration and exhaustion are 100% valid and i’m so sorry u have to deal with bullshit like this. a lot of ppl don’t realize this is not just an individual and personal thing; this is us being erased our whole lives and having to constantly tolerate it. i’m glad those tags were anchoring for you. just know that i’ll always have ur back in conversations like these and that ur feelings are valid. much love <3

#reply

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siriuschaostribe · 4 years ago

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Ficcino Maranki Diyetine Markiz Tesbihatı

It is precisely this subjective element which distinguishes the Renaissance magus from the medieval theorist; for static hierarchical schemes and correspondences between planets and music are transformed into dynamic energies at work throughout creation, energies which can be harnessed and transfused for the harmonising of individual souls. Following Plotinus, Ficino emphasises the necessity of focussing the emotion in an act which depends on both intuition and expertise in order to expand consciousness: 'Whoever prays to a star in an opportune and skilled way projects his spirit into the manifest and occult rays of the star, everywhere diffused and life-giving; from these he may claim for himself vital stellar gifts.' In the Platonic/Pythagorean tradition, music and the stars are inextricably linked as audible and visible images of an invisible dimension of existence, whose intellectual perception is made possible through the senses of hearing and sight. The foundations of the musical cosmos are established by Plato in the creation myth of his Timaeus, which maintains a vital connection to Egyptian, Chaldaean and other ancient traditions. In this dialogue, Plato sets up a model for a three-fold musical cosmos where the movements of the spheres, the passions of the human soul and the audible sounds of music are all expressions of a divine intelligence manifesting through the various dimensions of creation. Such a tripartite division was to be differentiated by the fifth century A.D. theorist Boethius as musica mundana, musica humana and musica instrumentalis, and it was commonplace for music theorists to work out elaborate systems of corrrespondences between astronomical distances and musical intervals, between the nature of musical patterns and emotional states, between planetary characteristics and audible sound. The key, in this tradition, to the ordering of the cosmos, whether astronomically or musically, is of course number - a discovery which was transmitted to Western thinkers by Pythagoras. Indeed for the Platonists number determines all things in nature and their concrete manifestation, together with all rhythms and cycles of life. Number revealed by the heavenly bodies unfolds as Time, and as the human soul was seen to be mirrored in the order of the heavens, divination, or aligning oneself to the gods, required the appropriate ritual at a precise time. Iamblichus tells us that the numbers gov erning nature are the outflowing energies of the gods, and if we wish to assimilate ourselves to them, we must use their language - that is, align ourselv es with the harmonies underlying the cosmos. Merely humanly contrived numerical systems, discursive conceptions of number, numerological theories, cannot reproduce an experience of unity which will give rise to true knowledge of first principles. In the Timaeus, we learn that the Demiurge created a substance called the world-soul and inserted it into the centre of the world-body. He then divided up this soul-stuff according to the ratios of the three consonant musical intervals, that is the octave which resonates in the proportion of 2:1, the perfect fifth, 3:2 and the perfect fourth, 4:3, continuing, by further division, to create the intervallic steps of the Pythagorean scale. The soul was cut into two parts which were bent around each other, forming the circles of the Same and the Different: the Same containing the unmoving sphere of the fixed stars, the Different containing the moving instruments of Time, or the planets. The Different was then divided into narrower strips which were arranged according to the geometrical progressions of 2 and 3; 1 2 4 Page 38 and 1 3 9 27. Permeating the whole cosmos, the soul connected the physical world with the eternal, being 'interfused everywhere from the centre to the circumference of heaven' and partaking of 'reason and harmony'. The human soul, also partaking directly of the anima mundi, must therefore be regulated according to the same proportions. But due to the passions of the body, the soul on entering it became distorted and stirred up - only the correct kind of education could restore harmonious equilibrium. This education would induce a recognition of the soul's congruence with the cosmos through the audible harmonic framework of the musical scale, for as we have seen, the proportions in the world-soul could be reproduced in musical sound. The numbers one to four, or the tetraktys, thus not only form the framework for all musical scales, but also embody this dynamic process of embodiment in the fourfold m o v e ment of geometry from point to line to plane to solid; from the unity comes the duality of opposition, the triad of perfect equilibrium and the quaternity of material existence. Each stage both limits and contains the one following, and the initiate is warned in the Chaldaean oracles 'do not deepen the plane' - that is, extend towards the material world from a the perfect condition of the triad, but do not lose your limiting power by letting go of it and becoming lost in the quaternity, or chaos of matter. This can be understood musically as the imperative of maintaining the perfect intervals as defining structures. In listening to geometry in sound, the perfect intervals set a framework or limit on unlimited sound, and since the specific arrangement of sizes of tones and semitones within this framework mirror the exact astronomical relationships of the planets, the very fabric of creation is brought to the ear and, in Platonic terms, evokes a memory of the harmonies once heard with the ears of the mind. F r o m this essential premise, the schemes attributing planets to actual pitches and astronomical distances to musical intervals abounded. In the Myth of Er at the end of his Republic, Plato suggests that sirens positioned on the rims of the planetary orbits each sound a pitch, making up a musical scale, much like a Greek lyre projected into the heavens. In another interpretation, found in Cicero's Dream of Scipio, the planets produce different tones according to their various speeds of revolution. We are told that 'the high and low tones blended together produce different harmonies' and that 'gifted men, imitating this harmony on stringed instruments and in singing, have gained for themselves a return to this region, as have those of exceptional abilities who have studied divine matters even in earthly life'. Exactly how to imitate the music of the spheres thus became the question raised by music theorists, and the science of harmonics, or the study of mathematical properties of musical ratios, was considered to be the first step. It is very difficult to know how much this highly speculative procedure - considered by Plato to be the highest form of knowledge - influenced the practical music-making of classical times. We are certainly better informed about the connection between musica humana and musica instrumentalis, for central to ancient Greek musical writings is the concept of ethos, or subtle ethical effects produced in the human psyche by the use of different modes or 'set' combinations of tone-patterns. For example, the Phrygian mode moved men to anger, the Lydian soothed them, the Dorian induced gravity and temperance - each quality being reflected in the character of particular regions. By medieval times the ancient Greek modes had been replaced by the eight Church modes, but this did not interrupt the association of subtle ethical effects by theorists. One twelfth century writer notes that 'the modes have individual qualities of sound, differing from each other, so that they prompt spontaneous recognition by an attentive musician or even by a practised singer'. It is to our loss that the music we hear today is limited to only two types of mode - the major and minor. But what of the connection between ethics and cosmology? Ethical powers were attributed to syst e m s of pitch, while planets were generally associated with single pitches - so in the writings of most classical theorists, it is difficult to see how an effective form of musica instrumentalis could influence the human soul through direct imitation of cosmic harmony - despite the model transmitted by Plato. Generally speaking, celestial phenomena were made to fit a preconceived notion of musical order, rather than the phenomena themselves being asked to reveal their order as principles of intelligence. Although the Middle Ages produced some great original thinkers in this field, such as John Scotus Eriugena in the ninth century, and indeed the influential Islamic school of musical and astrological therapy, it was only in the fifteenth century that the West began to explore the practical means by which the harmonic relationships in the cosmos could be expressed through music, not by literally reproducing astronomical measurement in sound, but by symbolically evoking a unifying principle at work in the manifest and unmanifest worlds. With the music theorists Georgio Anselmi and Bartolom¾ Ramos de Pareja, we see the seeds being sown for a revisioning of cosmic music. (PDF) The Music of the Spheres: Marsilio Ficino and Renaissance harmonia. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/290164617_The_Music_of_the_Spheres_Marsilio_Ficino_and_Renaissance_harmonia [accessed Apr 23 2021].

#demiurge #gnosticpowers #summongnosticpowers #therapy #healing #music #oldmusic #veryoldancientmusic #ancient #relic

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chsamuseum · 4 years ago

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CHSA Interns Respond: What does AAPI Heritage mean to us?

This month, we asked our interns to share their reflections on AAPI Heritage, answering the question, “What does AAPI Heritage mean to you?” Here’s what they wrote:

AAPI Heritage Is…

...a living history

Shou Zhang, Research Intern (We Are Bruce Lee)

I am a 1.5 generation Han Chinese American.

I believe our communities' diverse and beautiful history lives through us like water flowing from the past into the present and onwards to the future. Our very existence in this country is a testament to the resilience of those who came before us. When I can go to a Chinese grocery store and buy goods that satisfy my taste for the Chinese Lu culinary cooking style, that experience is the legacy of our lived history. When I cook the dishes that my family taught me, the very act of it is a celebration of my Han Chinese culture.

Examples of China’s Lu cuisine, originating in Shandong. (PC: China & Asia Cultural Travel).

To me, the AAPI history of my community is a lived experience. I recognize that the Han Chinese and Han Chinese American community in America are members of a wider community whose struggles and experiences intersect with our own. So for me, AAPI History Month means going beyond protecting, sustaining, and sharing the history of the culture of my community – it means finding the emotional space to listen to the stories of other AAPI communities.

In my journey as someone who grew up and emigrated from the People's Republic of China, I have been particularly invested this month in learning more about the lived experiences of other ethnic and indigenous communities who emigrated from mainland China, who have had a drastically different experience than my own.

...a way to understand my identity

Samantha Vasquez, Research Intern (Chinese in the Richmond)

Being Asian American is integral to my identity, as I have spent almost twenty-one years attempting to understand what it meant to be Asian and American. I am a Chinese adoptee with a third-generation Chinese American mom and a first-generation Mexican American dad. I learned about the term "third-culture kid" in a Multiracial Americans course in college, and I found it to describe my experiences almost perfectly. This experience is defined as the phenomenon in which a child grows up with their parents' culture and the culture of the place they grew up. Both of my parents grew up in the U.S. and have navigated what it means to be American. For me, I have my Chinese heritage, through which I participate in traditions and cuisine, and I also have my Mexican culture, through which I understand Spanish phrases and attend religious ceremonies.

There are so many nuances with my identity that I had trouble understanding when I was younger, but I embrace being Asian American because it can encompass these nuances. I want to give my children the tools to begin to understand their identities, no matter what their culture is. I want them to know my parents and their cultures' influence on my upbringing. I want them to embrace all cultures and realize how interconnected we all are.

...a source of political strength

Katherine Xiong, Community Programs Intern

I have to admit that I struggle a lot with the term “AAPI.” Doubtless, the lived experience of individuals grouped together under the AAPI umbrella are extremely disparate -- even within ethnicities, there’s so much diversity that it’s hard to say that people belong ‘together.’ Take the term “Chinese” for example: It’s fuzzily defined. It can (or can not) include diaspora from the mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, etc., many of whom chafe under the label “Chinese American” because of political connotations in their countries of origin. It can include descendants of the first railroad workers, migrant workers, and communities facing gentrification, but can also include some of the richest people in America, many of whom have become the gentrifiers. We don’t all have the same history, or the same political issues, either. Questions of affirmative action that my conservative parents are thinking about and questions of media representation my friends are thinking about are not the same problems that massage workers or Chinese American elders in large cities are facing. Zoom out to all of the ‘AAPI’ umbrella, and the differences grow still vaster. Yet outsiders often read us as “all the same.”

A protestor displays her support for solidarity between the Black and AAPI communities. (PC: NBC News).

As I interpret it, the power of the term “AAPI” has less to do with identity and more to do with politics. And it’s not about having the same political ‘issues’ or racial/ethnic stereotypes. It’s about coalition-building and solidarity in spite of difference -- building from communities up, across ethnic and class lines. It’s about recognizing the ways in which we all get ‘read’ as one people from the outside and leveraging those misconceptions to say, ‘If you treat us all as one people, fine. Then we’ll face our problems together, and support each other in each other’s problems, no matter how different we are. We are not the same, but our communities do not have to form around divisions and differences. We can borrow each other’s strength. We can -- and will -- make change.”

...the past (and the people) who shaped our present

Samantha Lam, Development Intern

As Asian Americans, we have been taught to believe that we are the model minority, and thus a greater ‘proximity to whiteness.’ AAPI history tells us the exact opposite. For example, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first immigration ban towards a specific ethnic group, and was only fully repealed with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which abolished the National Origins Formula. Discrimination towards Asian Americans is not as much a “thing of the past,” as some people like to think.

I cannot stress how important it is to know about how we as Asian Americans have reached our current status, thanks to the sacrifices of people like early Chinese laborers, who came to the U.S. hoping to find work, and Asian American activists who fought for our civil rights. I know more about this thanks to heritage museums and cultural institutions like CHSA. I am so grateful to CHSA for filling in the blanks for me and many other young Asian Americans who may not have been taught Asian American history in school.

High school students in Oakland at Black Panther Party funeral rally for Bobby Hutton. (PC: Asian American Movement 1968).

AAPI Month this year has been far sadder than I think anyone anticipated with increasing reports of hate crimes towards Asians. However, I can see a silver lining in the uptick in Asian American activism and with more resources being made available online discussing topics like intersectionality and the history behind the model minority myth. I believe learning and connecting with Asian American history has allowed me to better understand the struggles other minority groups have faced here in the U.S., and I know I need to do more with the privileges I have.

…a diverse community with many voices

Kimberly Szeto, Education & Research Intern

Real talk: I am not the biggest fan of umbrella labels like AAPI, API, etc. There is so much to being Asian American or being Pacific Islander that just gets bunched up into one monolithic category. As people, we are more than what labels and stereotypes define us to be.

But what the labels such as “AAPI” and “API” do instead is bring together a community of people with similar but different backgrounds and give a space to embrace and celebrate who we are, as well as giving us a voice. Yes, May is the month to celebrate AAPI, but why don’t we celebrate all year round? As Asian Americans, we should not have to conform to what “societal norms” in the U.S. constrain us to be, for us to stay quiet and not rock the boat in fear of backlash. Furthermore, we must debunk the model minority myth stereotype, where Asians are seen as uniformly more prosperous, well-educated, and successful than other groups of people. This is a dangerous generalization of vastly different groups of people, one that allows the white majority of America to avoid responsibility for racist policies and beliefs. We need to embrace who we are and educate those who may not know or are less aware.

I started hearing the term AAPI more prominently when I got to college and found a place in the AAPI community at UC Santa Cruz. I think this is where I started to feel more comfortable and began to champion my Asian American identity because I felt like my community was a safe space. I was no longer embarrassed by my family out in public and the customs of our culture that others may have found foreign.

As an Asian American, I think it is very important to keep history and customs alive. That includes our lives here in America as well as the history of those who came before us, and all the triumphs, struggles, and little things in between. These are the experiences that should form the narratives of any human being, no matter where you are from and who you are.

I invite you to celebrate AAPI Month with me, and to encourage you to embrace your own heritage and to educate and support yourselves and others.

#chsa #chsamuseum #chsacomcon #community connections #aapiheritagemonth #AAPIHM #reflections #heritage #asian america #pacific islander

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arecomicsevengood · 4 years ago

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“Follow Your Own Star”

Lately I’ve found it hard to shake the feeling that everything of value is being destroyed, but we are being given simulacra in exchange, while we wait, to soften the blow. The relationship between the U.S. economy and what actually has value is basically nil, obviously, and COVID has only highlighted that, but beyond that, being in isolation has brought to light how much of what I consider “real” because it exists outside the bounds of money is nonetheless vulnerable. We’ve been given podcasts to fill our working hours with parasocial relationships where once we may’ve had genuine camaraderie with our coworkers. We’re given desultory political candidates to vote for in the absence of those who would govern in accordance with our actual beliefs. It feels like an elaborate art heist is taking place, where the masterpieces are exchanged for forgeries, and the endgame of those seeking to enrich themselves is to set a bonfire of all that’s made us human, all we’ve invested our true selves into. All this can occur only because our relationships have been made increasingly transactional already. I wondered at the start of quarantine how many couples, with the ability to see one another in the flesh compromised, had switched to having “sex” over Skype, how many intimate relationships were compromised by distance into resembling cam shows. Partly this curiosity was a way of comforting myself, as I came to the understanding that I would not be entering into anything approaching a real romantic relationship for the foreseeable future.

In the context of all of this, reading a book that feels reminiscent of the work of another artist feels like a minor thing, but it slips easily enough into the larger pattern. After reading Roaming Foliage by Patrick Kyle, I thought “Huh, this is very much a CF/Brian Chippendale thing.” Then, after reading Eight-Lane Runaways by Henry McCausland, I thought, “Oh, this is even more like a CF thing.” Both are, I think, appropriate for kids, which Powr Mastrs isn’t, but I also never read Powr Mastrs and felt like the thing that made it good was its BDSM pornography elements. People have been biting CF’s style for years — enough for him to address it with a little note in the third Powr Mastrs book, instructing them to “follow your own star.” Simon Hanselmann admits the similarities between the character design for Owl and a character in CF’s story in Kramers Ergot 5, Hanselmann’s subsequent popularity seems to suggest a moment where something becomes less of a direct influence and more just something that exists generally in the world. It’s art: Inspiration, influence, and appropriation are all part of the game. Reading Hanselmann, I’ve wondered what his work would’ve been like before exposure to his most obvious influences; reading these, I wondered instead if they would still have been made had Powr Mastrs 4 ever come out, to finish out the story and close the system; it feels like, in a transactional relationship between artist and audience, the fact of a work remaining unfinished makes it more socially acceptable to steal from. For instance, think of the debt Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain owes to Rene Daumal’s Mount Analogue. It feels like an attempt to create something with an ending, to satisfy a desire for the logic to reach its conclusion. The comics fulfill a certain set of expectations, I found them a pleasant enough experience, satisfying on a certain level. However, on a deeper level, I found them completely unsatisfying, because they speak so directly to a sense of unfulfilled potential. They lack the thrill that CF’s comics provide, of totally transcending any expectations placed on them.

Measuring the impact made by CF, Paper Rad, and the Fort Thunder contingent is difficult to calculate, because there were so many radical gestures inside that work, and while some have been metabolized, others have not. The “reclamation of genre material in an art-school context” is maybe the most readily understood. Johnny Ryan’s Prison Pit probably wouldn’t exist were it not for these comics, but that’s such a “who cares” for me, such a dumbed-down and simplistic understanding of what makes these comics good. The silkscreening of covers is close behind, in terms of something that people really ran with. That’s fine, no one owns silkscreening, it looks great. What hasn’t really been reckoned with are the gestures against commodity fetishism. Paper Rodeo is progenitor of the free comics newspaper format, but the work that ran there is so much wilder than what you see in what followed, and most of it was anonymous. I understand why that was a gauntlet that wasn’t picked up, but is still one of the things that made an impact on its initial readership. Similarly, I haven’t seen anyone steal the CF format of the single-sheet xerox, with comics on the front and back. I guess that’s not surprising! But honestly? Sick format.

I’ve just been talking about comics, but Lightning Bolt playing on the floor is its own radical gesture, albeit one with an obvious precedent in the form of Crash Worship. The Forcefield oeuvre is its own thing. Those videos are great! The animation made out of photographing the cutting layers of multicolored clay… I wonder how much of this stuff hasn’t been picked up on because it’s the last stand of working with real world physical materials, before the coming of digital as the default medium for art students to work in. Obviously, the silkscreening has similar roots in physical media, and playing on floors relates directly to how you communicate with people when you’re in the same physical space as them. Real world community has distinct advantages, but many that came after took the trade for the benefits working digitally provides. Anyway. I could write a 33 1/3 book proposal for Lightning Bolt’s Ride The Skies that addresses all this stuff, but I also believe I would not be the best person to write such a book; I suspect those better suited would not be interested.

There is something so exciting about artists whose work feels overflowing with ideas, not just on a level of concept or drawing but also in terms of how the work is presented. That whole Providence/Picturebox crew was so abundant with this creative ferment that when I see others picking up on individual threads it makes sense on a certain level — you want more of a certain thing — but if it’s not backed up by something distinctly unique, as a reader I’m hyper-aware of what’s absent.

These artists also made books, and records, and it was their doing so that brought their work to a larger audience, including me. Not everything has to be a gesture against making money. But at the same time, radical gestures suggest the benefits made in fostering community work out better in the long term than leveraging oneself to be consumed as a commodity does. This is not to suggest that McCausland or Kyle are doing something wrong that will sabotage some sort of grand plan for utopia: I’m really just riffing here. If I buy electronic music mp3s online, I’m not necessarily going to lament the death of live music performance the same way I do when buying the mp3s of a jazz act. Looking at a contemporary superhero comic that feels dire and ugly will make me nostalgic for the Mike Parobeck comics of my youth, but a contemporary black and white zine exists in a completely different universe and might not remind me of anything. Certain things make you miss the world that was more than others.

It’s also worth noting that by all accounts Patrick Kyle has a bunch of people online ripping off his style but I have successfully been able to avoid such people. While Roaming Foliage is consciously modeled after the sort of weird adventure comics of not just Powr Mastrs, but also Brian Chippendale’s If N Oof, What I am most often seeing and thinking “that’s a ripoff” is the presence of these geometrical patterns which are also similar to design choices made throughout his oeuvre. There’s a chaotic, obfuscatory energy approach to comics that he works with frequently, but so much of his other comics feel dark, melancholy, or paranoid whereas this feels much lighter in its tone. At the same time, compared to the claustrophobia of Don’t Come In Here, having his characters move about makes for an adventure narrative. Watching them wander, interact, and be given quests and goals belongs to this tradition that’s not unique to the Picturebox artists — but the feeling that this fantasy material was arrived at through adventure games like Zelda moreso than Tolkien makes for this sort of… generational level of familiarity, rather than seeming to occupy some sort of Campbellian myth-space, if that makes sense. The strangeness of Kyle’s art, where backgrounds overtake figures, suggests a sort of PC glitching, almost like the Cory Arcangel/Paper Rad collaboration Super Mario Movie, but achieved through photocopier technology of blowing up and distorting images. It is the sensation of a feeling being chased after that makes the book feel less exciting and more melancholy, though subsequently, that darker feeling might make the book slot into Kyle’s oeuvre so much that bigger fans of his might not even notice the resemblance I’m seeing.

McCausland has a list of acknowledgments in his book which includes CF alongside Herge and Otomo. I can sort of see them all, but Herge especially is an influence that’s been so widely absorbed by comics as a whole that I really only feel particularly aware of it in the case of Joost Swarte or something. McCausland’s resemblance to CF is reinforced by things as molecular as a resemblance in the lettering, which is really odd. The figures all have this youthful smallness to them, and I can’t tell if the characters are meant to be young specifically or if it’s just the way he’s learned to draw. I can see Otomo, but it’s definitely approached through the CF filter. Other trademarks, like the rendering of geometric shapes, the patterns of parallel lines, seems integrated, highlighted, by the “racetrack” premise that gives the book its name. However, he distinguishes himself because his work is more constantly busy, with the same general level of detail. There’s also these trees in the background, which seem like they’re rendered as these painted soft grey daubs, a type of texture you don’t see in CF’s darkened pencil work.

His storytelling is different, prone to large spreads, or showing the same character multiple times in a panel as they move across the landscape. (The dimensions of Eight-Lane Runaways are considerably larger than those of Powr Mastrs.) There are nonetheless panels that seem exactly like CF drawings, but with a less cryptic sense of humor. It feels more populist, like it’s based around what a person liked, and in the act of working it out, subtracted the mystery. What would’ve been a detailed “money shot” in a CF sequence is here the baseline level of drawing detail that never gets subtracted from. It’s really fascinating to me how this makes it less good, I think many people would prefer it.

I wrote most of this before learning that Anthology is releasing a new CF book next week. You can order it and see preview images at the Floating World site. You can draw your own conclusions. CF’s on his own path such that you might not even note a resemblance between his new images and McCausland’s. We’re all living on the same planet, orbiting the same sun in an expanding universe, subject to the will of an accelerating time.

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wishonastarx3 · 4 years ago

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I saw this coming... I’m so fucking tired of this.

I don’t care who reads this, if you actually know me in real life then you probably know that this is how I feel from my instagram story. I apologize in advance of the language in this post. These are my emotions and thoughts. (And yes I am aware that within the AAPI community there are it's issues, but that's not the point of this post)

I’m SO SICK AND TIRED of this shit. What happened on Tuesday WAS NOT OKAY. EIGHT PEOPLE ARE DEAD and SIX of them were ASIAN WOMEN. Click the hyperlink if you live under a rock or if you just don’t watch the news. I don’t know how you people live.

The Asian and Asian American community in this country has been saying for the PAST YEAR that we are NOT OKAY and that we NEED HELP. Donald FUCKING Trump REPEATEDLY kept saying pre pandemic, “CHINA! CHINA! THEY’RE STEALING OUR JOBS!!! CHINA IS EVIL!!!” and of course his base bought into that. BUT when the freaking pandemic started it was “THE KUNG FLU” or the “CHINA VIRUS”. So now, let’s make the target on our backs EVEN BIGGER NOW!!! (I still don’t understand HOW there were Asians who voted for him... but that’s beside this point of this)

This past year has had over 3800 reports of Asian American HATE CRIMES against us. These fucking cowards are going after our ELDERLY COMMUNITY like the BABY BITCHES that they are. WHY?! JUST FUCKING WHY?! What does this do for you? It makes me SO ANGRY to see these videos of the elderly community being ATTACKED and KILLED. I watched on video of a toisan lao (old Chinese Woman) in SF who was being attacked and she fought back against her attacker (AS SHE FUCKING SHOULD. HE ENDED UP IN A STRETCHER). But that really... that one really struck a cord with me as that’s the dialect my family speaks and it made me think “fuck. That could have been my grandmother. That could have been my grandfather.” Going after the community that doesn’t speak english, LITERALLY POWERLESS and that is old like a bunch of COWARDS. I, as a 5′9 Asian American woman from New York City has dealt with my far share of harassment... but the fucking elderly? Really?

This pandemic has just gave them an EXCUSE to attack us. As if we weren’t already being harassed and marginalized before!!! But of course, one will say “but how can that be? Asians are the model! You guys are the best minority group out there. Everyone loves you!” HAR HAR MOTHER FUCKER

So lets set up some points

The Model Minority Myth - the “idea” that Asians are the smarter minorities who end up becoming the doctors and lawyers who are good at math, science and end up going to Harvard. I’m sorry... what? This is pathetic. AND A FUCKING MYTH I’ve dealt with these AWFUL cliches and stereotypes. Are they good stereotypes? Sure...? BUT do you understand:

What that does to the individual? What about the Asians who do not want tot be doctors? What about the Asians who then have to deal with the mental illness that goddamn society created for us? (I’m not even going to go into the lack of Asians in entertainment business. That’s a whole separate headache.)

WHY ARE WE IGNORING THAT IT’S ONLY A SMALL GROUP OF ASIANS THAT END UP DOING THAT?! Are we going to IGNORE the Asians who don’t go to Ivy Leagues? Or the ones that are living below the poverty line?

This literally created the Racial Triangulation between the minorities! White people have put Asians on a pedestal in comparison to the other minorities and YES other minorities HATE us for that reason.By saying that we are the “Model Minority” it LITERALLY creates this thought that we better than the “other minorities” but yet we still ain’t white. So we aren’t a part of the majority therefore putting us in no mans land.

THE NEGATIVE stereotypes - OH and TRUST ME there are A LOT. These are just the ones at the top of my head.

The FETISHIZATION of Asian Women - this shit ain’t new. This is literally what the term “yellow fever” means when referring to MEN who only like Asian women. The fetishization of asian women LITERALLY GOES BACK TO 1890s when the short story “Madame Butterfly” was written when a WHITE MAN was in Japan and fell in love with an Asian girl (WHO WAS 15 BTW). There are literal journal entries of European and American men who were in Asian at the time who said LITERALLY SAY HOW EXOTIC Asian Women are, that apparently our vaginas just “feel different”. I’m sorry... WHAT?! I HATE nothing more than when I have dealt with men saying some bullshit about how “exotic” I am. Also lets not forget how American society has de-masculinate the Asian Man. Saying that have small dicks and that they are skinny and scrawny, therefore aren’t men. So you like only half of us?

Our Food - WE DO NOT EAT DOG. I grew up being told “YOU EAT DOG! YOU’RE CHINESE!”... fuck you. And now, Asian food is seen as “amazing” I’m happy you like our soup dumplings and bao. But you were the same fucking people who told me I ate dog. So you love our food but not the people? Okay. I see you. Oh and I didn’t forget about the people who have gagged at Asian food.

Mocking how we look and our language - Am I the only Asian American who had people pulling their eyes and saying CHING CHONG at them? Please, get hit by a bus. And isn’t ironic how now “fox eyes” are a make up trend? funny isn’t it?

People telling us to “GO BACK TO CHINA!” “GO BACK TO WHERE YOU CAME FROM”

I’m sorry. Who educated you? Asians have been in this country since the 1850S. WE BUILT THE DAMN RAILROADS. SOME OF US WERE KIDNAPPED HERE TO BUILD THAT SHIT. (Another note is how ASIAN AMERICAN HISTORY IS NOT TAUGHT IN SCHOOLS. This needs to be addressed and changed.)

Also for MYSELF - my GREAT GRANDFATHER BUILT THE DAMN RAILROAD and SERVED IN THE ARMY in WWI. My Great Uncles were in the Air force in WWII and my GRANDFATHER served in the KOREAN WAR where he was shot in the ear and received a Purple Heart. I FUCKING DARE YOU to tell me to go back to my country. MY FAMILY HAS DONE MORE FOR THIS COUNTRY THAN HALF OF THESE RACIST MOTHER FUCKERS.

Hate crimes in America have been happening since the 1880s. Yellow Peril goes back to the 1880s when Asian were literally depicted as these murderous group invading from Asia. And of course, they depict us with slanted eyes and with long braided pony tails. THIS SHIT AIN’T NEW. There has also literally been LAWS banning Chinese from coming to America. i.e THE CHINESE EXCLUSION ACT oh and lets not forget Japanese Interment during the 1930s. THIS SHIT AIN’T NEW. ALSO let’s not forget the Vincent Chin Murder in the 1980s when a Chinese American was BEAT TO DEATH because his attackers thought he was Japanese and they were blaming the Japanese for taking their jobs.

As I sit here, feeling not as angry as at the beginning, if history has taught me anything, fear and anger has been the drive for these crimes. In the 1880s we were thought to be evil and that we were going to take away all of the jobs (but low and behold, some of us were KIDNAPPED here). During WWII it was right after Pearl Harbor after Japan bombed it. Vincent Chin, his attackers were angry at the Japanese. Current day, Donald Fucking Trump decided to put the target on our communities back with both jobs being sent to China and with the Coronavirus being our fault.

What happened on Tuesday with the Atlanta police officer saying that the 21 year old was “having a bad day” WAS BULL SHIT. I didn’t know killing 8 people was a RATIONALE RESPONSE. Okay then. Call it what it is, A HATE CRIME. This man was saying he had a “sex addiction” and that he wanted to get rid of the temptation and he associated ASIAN WOMEN and the ASIAN SPA to be that temptation. AND WHY IS THAT?!?!?!? THE FETISHIZATION OF ASIAN WOMEN.

And before I get off of my soap box, THE MEDIA WAS PRETTY FUCKING LATE TO JOINING THIS, AND CALL IT WHAT IT IS, A HATE CRIME. SO MANY of the crimes against the Asian elderly go unreported or are not deemed hate crimes WHEN THEY ARE. SO MANY of them do not know English or enough English and can not report what was said to them. And what sucks too, my dad even said it, I think your grandparents would just take it because they would see this as “I immigrated here, I have to take this shit”. WELL THAT TRAIN STOPS HERE. WE WILL NOT BE SILENCED. WE WILL NOT SHY AWAY. WE ARE TAKING OUR SPACE THAT IS RIGHTFULLY OURS. I fucking PROMISE you that if you try to do so, you will have hell to deal with.

I’m not going to get into the subject of the people who are SILENT during this but were ALL OVER social media for their BLM support. I’m just going to leave it at we are asking for your help and to amplify this. Please.

To my non Asian friends who have reached out to me, I do appreciate it. I really do. But please rather than telling me you are here for me if I want to talk, I BEG of you, please read and learn about the history as well as the Asian/Asian American experience in America. It’s really not as rainbows and butterflies people have been thinking. Hate against Asian and Asian Americans started before 2020.

To my Asian brothers, sisters, aunties and uncles PLEASE stay safe.

#stopasianhate #stopaapihate

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96thdayofrage · 4 years ago

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The anti-racism consulting industry does deserve both some sympathy and some credit. Its intention, to prod white Americans into more awareness of their own racism, is beneficent. And their premise that white people are often unaware of the degree to which racial privilege has enabled their success, which they can mistakenly attribute entirely to merit and effort, is correct. American society is shot through with multiple overlapping systems of racial bias — from exposure to harmful pollution to biased policing to unequal access to education to employment discrimination — that in combination sustain massive systemic inequality.

But the anti-racism trainers go beyond denying the myth of meritocracy to denying the role of individual merit altogether. Indeed, their teaching presents individuals as a racist myth. In their model, the individual is subsumed completely into racial identity.

One of DiAngelo’s favorite examples is instructive. She uses the famous story of Jackie Robinson. Rather than say “he broke through the color line,” she instructs people instead to describe him as “Jackie Robinson, the first Black man whites allowed to play major-league baseball.”

It is true, of course, that Robinson was not the first Black man who was good enough at baseball to make a major-league roster. The Brooklyn Dodgers decided, out of a combination of idealism and self-interest, to violate the norm against signing Black players. And Robinson was chosen due to a combination of his skill and extraordinary personality that allowed him to withstand the backlash in store for the first Black major leaguer. It is not an accident that DiAngelo changes the story to eliminate Robinson’s agency and obscure his heroic qualities. It’s the point. Her program treats individual merit as a myth to be debunked. Even a figure as remarkable as Robinson is reduced to a mere pawn of systemic oppression.

One way to understand this thinking is to place it on a spectrum of thought about race. On the far right is open white supremacy, which instructs white people to fight for their interests as white people. (Hence the 14-word slogan, “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”) Moving to the left, standard-issue conservatism tends to discount the existence of racism and treat all problems in pure color-blind terms, as though racism has been banished. To the left of that is standard liberalism, which acknowledges the existence of racism as a problem that complicates simple race-neutral solutions.

The ideology of the racism-training industry is distinctively to the left of that. It collapses all identity into racial categories. “It is crucial for white people to acknowledge and recognize our collective racial experience,” writes DiAngelo, whose teachings often encourage the formation of racial affinity groups. The program does not allow any end point for the process of racial consciousness. Racism is not a problem white people need to overcome in order to see people who look different as fully human — it is totalizing and inescapable.

Of course, DiAngelo’s whites-only groups are not dreamed up in the same spirit as David Duke’s. The problem is that, at some point, the extremes begin to functionally resemble each other despite their mutual antipathy.

I want to make clear that when I compare the industry’s conscious racialism to the far right, I am not accusing it of “reverse racism” or bias against white people. In some cases its ideas literally replicate anti-Black racism.

Glenn Singleton, president of Courageous Conversation, a racial-sensitivity training firm, tells Bergner that valuing “written communication over other forms” is “a hallmark of whiteness,” as is “scientific, linear thinking. Cause and effect.”

This is not some idiosyncratic oddball notion. The African-American History Museum has a page on whiteness, which summarizes the ideas that the racism trainers have brought into relatively wide circulation.

“White” values include things like “objective, rational thinking”; “cause and effect relationships”; “hard work is the key to success”; “plan for the future”; and “delayed gratification.” The source for this chart is another, less-artistic chart written by Judith Katz in 1990. Katz has a doctorate in education and moved into the corporate consulting world in 1985, where, according to her résumé, she has “led many transformational change initiatives.” It is not clear what in Katz’s field of study allowed her to establish such sweeping conclusions about the innate culture of white people versus other groups.

One way to think through these cultural generalizations is to measure them against its most prominent avatar for racial conflict, Donald Trump. How closely does he reflect so-called white values? The president hardly even pretends to believe that “hard work” is the key to success. The Trump version of his alleged success is that he’s a genius who improvises his way to brilliant deals. The realistic version is that he’s a lazy heir who inherited and cheated his way to riches, and spends most of his time watching television. Trump is likewise incapable of delayed gratification, planning for the future, and regards “objective rational thinking” with distrust. On the other hand, Barack Obama is deeply devoted to all those values.

Now, every rule has its exceptions. Perhaps the current (white) president happens to be alienated from the white values that the previous (Black) president identified with strongly. But attaching the values in question to real names brings to life a point the racism trainers seem to elide: These values are not neutral at all. Hard work, rational thought, and careful planning are virtues. White racists traditionally project the opposite of these traits onto Black people and present them as immutable flaws. Jane Coaston, who has reported extensively on the white-nationalist movement, summarizes it, “The idea that white people are just good at things, or are better inherently, more clean, harder working, more likely to be on time, etc.”

In his profile, Bergner asked DiAngelo how she could reject “rationalism” as a criteria for hiring teachers, on the grounds that it supposedly favors white candidates. Don’t poor children need teachers to impart skills like that so they have a chance to work in a high-paying profession employing reasoning skills?

DiAngelo’s answer seems to imply that she would abolish these high-paying professions altogether:

“Capitalism is so bound up with racism. I avoid critiquing capitalism — I don’t need to give people reasons to dismiss me. But capitalism is dependent on inequality, on an underclass. If the model is profit over everything else, you’re not going to look at your policies to see what is most racially equitable.”

(Presumably DiAngelo’s ideal socialist economy would keep in place at least some well-paid professions — say, “diversity consultant,” which earns her a comfortable seven-figure income.)

Singleton, likewise, proposed evolutionary social changes to the economy that would render it unnecessary to teach writing and linear thought to minority children. Bergner writes:

I asked whether guiding administrators and teachers to put less value, in the classroom, on capacities like written communication and linear thinking might result in leaving Black kids less ready for college and competition in the labor market. “If you hold that white people are always going to be in charge of everything,” he said, “then that makes sense.” He invoked, instead, a journey toward “a new world, a world, first and foremost, where we have elevated the consciousness, where we pay attention to the human being.”

Whether or not a world along these lines will ever exist, or is even possible to design, is at best uncertain. What is unquestionably true is that these revolutionary changes will not be completed within the lifetime of anybody currently alive. Which is to say, a program to deny the value of teaching so-called white values to Black children is to condemn them to poverty. Unsurprisingly, Bergner’s story shows two educators exposed to the program and rebelling against it. One of them, Leslie Chislett, had to endure some ten anti-racism training sessions before eventually snapping at the irrationality of a program that denigrates learning. “The city has tens of millions invested in A.P. for All, so my team can give kids access to A.P. classes and help them prepare for A.P. exams that will help them get college degrees,” she says, “and we’re all supposed to think that writing and data are white values?”

Ibram X. Kendi, another successful entrepreneur in the anti-racism field, has a more frontal response to this problem. The achievement gap — the long-standing difference in academic performance between Black and white children — is a myth, he argues. The supposed gap merely reflects badly designed tests, he argues. It does not matter to him how many different kinds of measures of academic performance show this to be true. Nor does he seem receptive to the possibility that the achievement gap reflects environmental factors (mainly worse schools, but also access to nutrition, health care, outside learning, and so on) rather than any innate differences.

Kendi, like DiAngelo, argues that racism must be defined objectively. Intent does not matter, only effect. Their own intentions are surely admirable. But the fact is that their insistence on denying that America provides its Black children worse educations inhibits working toward a solution. Denying the achievement gap, like denying the gap in how police treat white and Black people, seems to objectively entrench racism.

It’s easy enough to see why executives and school administrators look around at a country exploding in righteous indignation at racism, and see the class of consultants selling their program of mystical healing as something that looks vaguely like a solution. But one day DiAngelo’s legions of customers will look back with embarrassment at the time when a moment of awakening to the depth of American racism drove them to embrace something very much like racism itself.

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chiseler · 4 years ago

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The Second Most Dangerous Anarchist in America

{NOTE: September 16th, 2020 marks the 100th anniversary of the Wall Street bombing, an event which the city, for some reason, refuses to commemorate.}

A little after two on the afternoon of April 15th, 1920, the paymaster of one of the two shoe factories in Braintree, MA, together with a security guard, decided in a change of pace to simply walk that week’s payroll the few blocks from the office to the factory. The payroll, a little over $15,000 in cash, was divided between two strongboxes, each carried by one of the men. Along the way, and in front of over fifty eyewitnesses, a gang of five men, strangers to the small town, gunned down the paymaster and the guard, grabbed the strongboxes, hopped into an idling blue Buick, and sped away. The Buick, later determined to have been stolen a few weeks earlier, was a fancy model with curtained windows, plenty of chrome, and fat tires.

Two days later, on April 17th, two men on horseback discovered the car abandoned in the woods along the western edges of Bridgewater, just a couple miles south of Braintree. Much thinner tire tracks leading away from the scene were assumed to belong to the car into which the killers piled after ditching the Buick.

Bridgwater’s police chief, Michael Stewart, was a cigar-chomping, two-fisted type who’d been raised in Boston. Despite being the son of Irish immigrants, Stewart harbored a deep distrust of more recent immigrants from Germany, Poland, and Italy, especially the political types, suspecting them of being responsible for most of the crime in the region. He was proud to have been able to turn over six bona-fide Reds living in Bridgewater during the Palmer raids of the previous year.

Upon hearing about the Braintree killing, Stewart was reminded of a similar attempted heist in Bridgewater four months earlier on Christmas Eve. Again a shoe factory payroll had been targeted by a group of armed men in a getaway car. That time, however, they were thwarted when the truck containing the payroll crashed, and the would-be thieves were blocked by a passing trolley. Frustrated, they hopped back into the getaway car, another fancy, recently stolen model, and fled empty-handed.

During his abortive investigation into the failed heist, Stewart had been pointed to a ramshackle two-story house in the woods. Locals referred to it as Puffer’s Place, and believed it was home to a group of Italian anarchists. Those who’d heard of Puffer’s Place had no idea what went on there, but if it was full of anarchists, you knew it couldn’t be good. It sounded like a promising lead—Stewart was convinced Italian anarchists were responsible for the job—but he wasn’t able to find the shack, and gave up on the investigation.

All that changed a day after the Braintree attack, when Stewart received a call from the immigration bureau asking after one Feruccio Coacci, a known anarchist who lived in the area and was scheduled for deportation.

Coacci, who’d been living with his wife and a housemate at Puffer’s Place, was quickly tracked down and deported on the 19th. In fact, after weeks of delays and excuses, he insisted on being deported on the 19th. Upon learning Coacci had coincidentally worked at both targeted shoe factories, and just as coincidentally failed to show up for work the day of both heists, Stewart became suspicious. On Tuesday the 20th, he headed back out to Puffer’s Place with another investigator.

They were met at the door by a small, funny-looking man who introduced himself as Mike Boda. Bona invited them in, showed them around, and answered their questions. He even showed them his revolver. Coacci, he said, had some friends who were anarchists and very bad men, but he had nothing to do with them himself.

When they were done looking around the cluttered house, Bona led them to the dilapidated car barn out back, explaining his car, a clunky 1914 Overland, was in the shop to get its magneto repaired. Although Overlands had very thin tires, there were also fatter tire tracks on the garage’s dirt floor. Buda explained this away by telling the officers he sometimes pulled in at a funny angle.

Satisfied, Stewart thanked Mr. Voda for his time and cooperation, and left.

Realizing later what a horrible mistake he’d made, that the tire tracks were just the clue he needed, Stewart rushed back to Puffer’s Place the next morning, arriving on the front stoop about twenty seconds after Bona slipped out the back door and vanished. By the next day, when Stewart stopped by again hoping to find Buda, Puffer’s Place had been cleaned out.

A few people at the time described him as resembling a clown without makeup. He was short and balding, with a great bulbous nose poised above a black mustache. But Mario Buda was not a man known for his rollicking sense of humor. Those who knew him said he was quiet, serious, enigmatic and a little arrogant. Still, there was something of the clown about him. At least he took his slapstick very, very seriously. Instead of cream pies or seltzer bottles, however, he leaned more toward dynamite. Now, a century after his most famous performance, he’s become the stuff of myth, both in anarchist and law enforcement circles.

Buda was born on October 13th, 1884 in Savignano sul Rubicone, Italy, a region known at the time as a hotbed of anarchist thinking.

In 1907, after a few minor scrapes with the law and an increasing sense he’d never be able to make a go of it in Savignano, a then-23-year-old Buda sailed to America. Although already an avowed anarchist, Buda had also apprenticed as a shoemaker, a skill he hoped might come in handy in the land of plenty. It didn’t, and after working a series of menial jobs, starving and getting nowhere for two years, he returned to Italy in 1911. In 1913, he decided to give America another shot, this time settling in Boston and finding work at (depending on the account) a shoe factory, a hat factory or, together with his brother, a shop that sold cleaning supplies. That same year he became friends with another shoemaker named Nicola Sacco, whom he met when both took part in a protest at a nearby textile factory. Along with being a shoemaker, Sacco was also an anarchist, a follower of Luigi Galleani. In the pages of his magazine, Cronaca Sovversiva, Galleani advocated what he called The Propaganda of the Deed, which called for the violent annihilation of all government institutions through a relentless program of bombings and assassinations. Although the magazine never had more than 5,000 subscribers, it was considered the most influential anarchist periodical in America, while Justice Department insiders had labeled Galleani himself, who lived in Barre, Vermont, the country’s most dangerous anarchist.

Buda began attending local Galleanisti meetings where, sometime around 1916, he also met a fish peddler named Bartolomeo Vanzetti. He would later cite Sacco and Vanzetti as two of his best friends in the world.

The image of the swarthy, bomb-tossing anarchist in a long dark coat and low-slung hat solidly entered the American popular consciousness in 1919 (see below), but anarchist bombings across the country were not that uncommon prior to 1919, and in fact can be traced back to at least the Haymarket Square bombing of 1886. Still, there’s something so simple, even comforting and Romantic, in attributing all these incidents to a single figure, a lone super villain with a taste for black powder. Apart from a few scattered basic facts, precious little is known about Buda. He gave no speeches, left no writings, never married, played things very close to the chest, yet still seemed to be everywhere in the country at once. Over the past century this mysterious little man with the big nose has become as prime a candidate as anyone for supervillain status.

So this is where the speculation begins, most of it based on hindsight which itself is based on speculation.

On New Years Day, 1916, a security guard at the Massachusetts State house discovered a wicker suitcase packed with dynamite in the building’s basement, but was able to dispose of it before it went off. The following day another bomb planted in nearby Woburn was a bit more successful, detonating inside a factory belonging to The New England Manufacturing Company. No one was hurt, but the building suffered extensive damage. Was Buda involved in either incident? It’s unknown, and in fact it’s fairly unlikely, but in recent years armchair radical historians have been including them as possible early examples of Buda’s handiwork.

Seven months later on July 22nd, as America began prepping to dive into World War I, cities across the country staged what were called Preparedness Day parades to express public support for the military. Radical and labor groups assailed the idea, not only because they saw it merely as a cheap excuse for large businesses to angle their way into fat government contracts, but also because part of what was termed preparedness was the institution of a new military draft which would mostly, if not exclusively, affect the working class.

The parade in San Francisco, which attracted an estimated 50,000 marchers, was thrown into chaos when a suitcase packed with dynamite and left on the sidewalk exploded. Ten people were killed, and another forty were sent to the hospital with serious injuries. Suspicion immediately focused on socialists, labor groups, subversives and other radicals. The local chamber of commerce and business leaders, happy to cooperate with the police, compiled a list of known labor agitators who’d been involved in recent strikes. They passed the list over to the cops, who started rounding up Reds. In the end Warren Billings and Tom Mooney, both of them low-level labor activists, were charged with the bombing. Both men had solid alibis, both had been out of town that day, but thanks to the testimony of one well-coached prosecution witness, Billings got life, and Mooney was sentenced to death.

In the uproar that followed, Billings and Mooney became poster boys, early martyrs for the labor movement, but, twenty years later, received full pardons. That still left the question, who built and planted the crude bomb? Assuming it was the work of anarchists and not German saboteurs, every notable anarchist in the country—beginning with Emma Goldman—fell under suspicion, with the smart money leaning toward Boda. There exists no evidence linking him to the explosion, but there was no evidence linking anyone to the explosion, so whose to say it wasn’t a Buda job? The case remains unsolved to this day.

Later in 1916—and this we do know—Buda was arrested at a Boston anti-militarism protest that turned violent. At his hearing, like so many anarchists at the time, he refused to take the oath on a Bible, and was sentenced to five months in jail for contempt. Upon his release in early 1917, and hoping to avoid that newly-instituted draft, he reconnected with Sacco and Vanzetti and the trio spirited away to join a growing collective of Italian anarchists living in Monterey, Mexico.

There, Buda worked in a laundry and—here we’re back to speculation—may have spent his free time honing his bomb-making skills. What evidence there is to support this idea came later in 1917.

On November 9th, a Milwaukee, WI-based Italian evangelical minister, fed up with these slacker anarchists giving speeches badmouthing America when the country was at war, held a loyalty rally in front of the city’s anarchist headquarters. A fight broke out, the police were called, and in the end two anarchists were shot and killed. In retaliation, a group of ten anarchists, Buda among them, left Mexico and returned to the States with a mission. On the night of November 23rd, they left a bag containing a bomb in the basement of the offending evangelical church. Before it detonated, however, it was discovered by a janitor, who brought it to the local police station.

That’s where it exploded, killing nine cops and one civilian. Although several anarchists, including Buda, were rounded up and questioned, there was no solid evidence against any of them, and they were all released. No charges were ever filed. Today the Milwaukee blast is generally accepted without question as a Buda operation.

Buda, who upon his return from Mexico adopted the pseudonym Mike Boda, moved back to Massachusetts in early 1918. His precise whereabouts and doings over the course of the next two years remain foggy, though a few people think they know what he might’ve been up to.

On the afternoon of April 29th, 1919, a small package wrapped in brown paper arrived in the mail at the home of Georgia senator Thomas W. Hardwick. Hardwick wasn’t home, so his housekeeper brought the box inside and, together with Hardwick’s wife, set about opening it at the kitchen table.

The package turned out to be a novelty sampler from Gimbel’s. Or so the box claimed, anyway. When the housekeeper tore open the flap marked “OPEN,” she unwittingly released a spring that allowed a small vial of acid to spill on three blasting caps, which detonated the stick of dynamite packed in the wooden box. The explosion blew off the housekeeper’s hands and left Hardwick’s wife badly burned and lacerated.

That same day, an identical package arrived at the home of Rayme Weston Finch, a Bureau of Investigation agent with the Justice Department. One of Finch’s staffers took the initiative and opened the curious package, but ignoring the clearly-marked instructions, opened it from the wrong end. The acid vial merely tumbled out onto the table, and the bomb didn’t detonate.

After these two incidents, law enforcement departments, the post office and the media all began posting nationwide warnings about any similar packages. Even before word started to spread, a sharp-eyed postal clerk in New York had already set aside over a dozen identical packages for lack of postage. A total of thirty-six bombs had been mailed around the end of April, apparently in the hope they would be received and opened on May Day. Scanning the list of those politicians, judges, law enforcement officials, wealthy businessmen and newspaper editors who’d been targeted—including J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller, and Attorney general A. Mitchell Palmer—gave investigators a reasonably clear insight into the motivations of the Mad Bomber.

In a paranoid frenzy following the Bolshevik Revolution, city, state, and federal governments passed a series of sweeping anti-immigrant and anti-sedition laws, making it all but illegal to be an outspoken socialist, communist or anarchist, especially if you also happened to be Italian. All those people slated to receive mail bombs had either supported or enforced the legislation. Fisk, for instance, lead a raid on the offices of Cronaca Sovversiva in 1918, arresting three Galleanisti. Hardwick, meanwhile, had sponsored legislation aimed at crushing the labor movement and driving Left-leaning immigrants (mostly Italians) out of the country.

Two thoughts at this point. First, if Boda built the bombs in question, and if it was his idea to disguise an exploding box as a “Gimbel’s Novelty Sampler,” then he clearly had a much wackier sense of humor than most people realize. And second, again if Boda was responsible for the bombs used in the April campaign, they represented a marked leap forward in design. The earlier bombs attributed to him had been crude devices, just bundles of dynamite with primitive timing mechanisms, while these mail bombs were sophisticated and intricate. So who knows? Maybe he really had honed his skills during those months in Mexico.

On June 2nd, as federal investigators were still trying to narrow down their list of suspects for April’s mail bombs, eight much more powerful bombs, once again targeting judges, politicians and Attorney General Palmer, were detonated simultaneously in cities across the country. Bombs went off in Pittsburgh, Washington, New York and Chicago. Along with being packed with metallic shrapnel, each of the devices also contained a leaflet which read:

War, Class war, and you were the first to wage it under the cover of the powerful institutions you call order, in the darkness of your laws. There will have to be bloodshed; we will not dodge; there will have to be murder: we will kill, because it is necessary; there will have to be destruction; we will destroy to rid the world of your tyrannical institutions.

The flyers had been signed “The American Anarchist Fighters.”

This time there were two casualties. One was a night watchman, the other the former editor of Cronaca Sovversiva, who was in the process of depositing a 25-pound bomb on Palmer’s front steps when it prematurely exploded. The bomb demolished the front of the house, but Palmer, who was at home with his family at the time, was in a back room and remained unharmed. The bomber, meanwhile, was scattered in small pieces all over the genteel Washington, D.C. neighborhood.

Combined with the flyers, when the bomber was eventually identified as a Galleanista the feds had all the evidence they needed to deport Luigi Galleani back to Italy. But that was only the beginning of Attorney General Palmer’s revenge.

Although no one was ever arrested or charged for the bombing campaign, toward the end of 1919, the Attorney General, a long-time hardliner when it came to immigration, Sedition, labor unions an radicalism, launched what came to be known as The Palmer Raids. Cops across the country (including Police Chief Stewart in Bridgwater) rounded up roughly 10,000 suspected anarchists, communists and socialists, most of them Italian. In the end over 500 were deported. Meanwhile, American intellectuals whose own political views edged into the pink found themselves subject to federal and local suspicion and persecution. While the Palmer raids only lasted a few months, the first Red Scare would linger much longer.

Sacco and Vanzetti

On the evening of May 5th, 1920, two weeks after Mike Boda slipped away from Police Chief Michael Stewart, word began to spread the cops were going to start rounding up local radicals in their as yet fruitless search for the men responsible for the Braintree and Bridgwater crimes. Members of the local Galleanisti cell, including Sacco, Vanzetti, and Boda, decided it might be wise to quickly dispose of any stray dynamite and anarchist literature anyone might have laying around their homes. It was also decided the best and most efficient way to do this would be by car. Boda had the only available car, and though it was still in the shop, it was ready to be picked up. Boda, Sacco, Vanzetti and another friend made their way to the mechanic’s house about nine, but when the mechanic and his wife made a hamfisted attempt to stall them, it became clear something was afoot. Boda correctly smelled a set-up, and told the mechanic he’d come to pick up his car the next morning instead. The four men quickly left, splitting up as they did so.

Boda went into hiding in East Boston, but on their way home on the trolley that night, Sacco and Vanzetti were picked up by a cop who considered them suspicious characters. The pistols they were carrying and all the anarchist pamphlets in their respective homes only strengthened Stewart’s belief he had two of the killers in custody.

While keeping a very low profile in Boston, Boda closely followed the growing case against his two friends in the local papers. On September 11th, 1920, Sacco and Vanzetti were officially indicted on first-degree murder charges.

Five days later, a little before noon on September 16th, as the sidewalk began to fill with the lunch hour crowds, a man drove his old horse and cart down Wall Street, coming to a stop outside the corporate headquarters of the J.P. Morgan bank, just down the street from the Stock Exchange. The man, whom nobody would later recall seeing, climbed down, tied up the horse, and strolled away, one would like to imagine with his hands in his pockets and whistling a casual tune. Nobody paid much attention to the horse and cart, a common sight around New York at the time. Besides, everyone was too focused on lunch and that afternoon’s business meetings.

At a minute after twelve, the hundred pounds of dynamite packed in the cart exploded, sending nails and 500 pounds of iron sash weights ripping into the junior executives, bank tellers, secretaries, stock brokers and office boys who filled the streets. Cars were tossed around like cheap toys, trolleys a block away were blown off the tracks and windows throughout the financial district were shattered, as a fiery mushroom cloud arose above the gaping hole where the horse and cart once sat.

The streets and sidewalks were littered with broken glass, bleeding bodies, and parts of bodies as an eerie silence fell over the area. Then the screaming began.. In the end, thirty-eight people were killed, with another 300 hospitalized.

William Flynn, director of the Bureau of Investigation, insisted on handling the case himself, ordering the immediate arrest of any known anarchists and, for good measure, the IWW’s Big Bill Haywood, who was in Chicago at the time of the bombing. Along with Haywood, eleven anarchists from the New York area were arrested, but all were soon released for lack of evidence.

Although a $100,000 reward was offered for information leading to an arrest, Flynn only had two clues to work with.

One was a handful of flyers discovered by a mailman in the minutes before the bomb went off. In prude red letters on yellow paper, the flyers read:

“Remember we will not tolerate any longer. Free the political prisoners or it will be sure death for all of you.”

It was signed by “American Anarchist Fighters,” the same group behind the 1919 bombings.

The other was a blacksmith from Little Italy who told police that a day before the bombing, a short, balding Sicilian came into his shop to either (depending on the telling):

1. Rent an old horse and cart.

2. Rent a horse to pull a cart,

Or 3. Have his old horse, who was already pulling a cart, fitted with new shoes.

Flynn didn’t have much to go on, and his investigation went nowhere. In retrospect, he would later insist he knew from the start his primary suspect was Mario Buda, but Buda was never brought in, never questioned, and no charges were ever filed against him.

Buda, meanwhile, still going under the name Mike Boda, slipped off to Providence, and by the end of the month was on his way back to Savignano where, despite ongoing political activity and occasional trouble with the police (including a five-year exile), he would spend the rest of his days as a quiet and serious shoemaker. He died on June 1st, 1963.

According to Buda’s nephew, in 1955 his uncle confessed to him that he had indeed built and delivered the Wall Street bomb, though it’s unclear if he confessed to any of the other bombings attributed to him. It’s also unclear if Buda, eight years before his death, clarified to his nephew whether the Wall Street bombing was done in reaction to the indictment of his friends, as a final Puck You to Attorney General Palmer—or, hell, merely as a kick in the balls to the whole damn capitalist system. We’ll likely never know. To this day, the shrapnel pockmarks from the bomb can still be seen on the facades of several financial district buildings, and the case remains open.

Buda was, without question, a shadowy and slippery character. Over the years he’s taken on the aura of a Dr. Mabuse or Professor Moriarity. And who knows? Maybe he really was a mad anarchist genius. After all, no clues were ever left behind at the scenes of the bombings attributed to him, so there’s no saying he wasn’t responsible for all of them and more. Maybe he really was that good. I’d like to believe so.

by Jim Knipfel

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noctomania · 4 years ago

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As Someone Who Didn’t Vote For 10 Years: Your Vote Matters.

Hey. So, let’s chat. Or rather, hear me out.

I turned 18 in 2006. I did not vote until 2016. Bc even I saw through my apathy & prioritized trying to combat potential fascism. You can get an idea of how many elections one sits out of over a 10yr span here. It’s a lot & I should have done my part much sooner. Though I could say “well I was in college from 2007-2012 & &&” no. Not an excuse. I had time no doubt. I was just apathetic. I have reflections for those who continue to abstain from their right & duty to vote.

I remember my parents encouraging me to register to vote. I think it was part of applying for my license or something. I can’t remember if I ever registered with a party, but I think in TX in order to vote you have to be registered with a party. In any case, since I’ve been registered in the north I haven’t been part of a party bc I too felt the whole thing was a sham. I was still remembering the robbery that was Bush’s terms. TWO WHOLE TERMS. I remember seeing my mom cry when he won his first term. I remember hearing about all the awful shit he was doing as president from my dad & stepmom.

But I also remember thinking: “Why isn’t anyone doing anything?”

It can be incredibly disheartening & frustrating & downright angering to hear about atrocities without hearing about the forces fighting back. Death & Drama sells.

I wasn’t eligible to vote when bush was running. Then Obama came along & I was like “Great, surely my blue state I live in now is all for him & I don’t gotta bother - y'all got my order.”

Your. Vote. Matters.

Obama was an incredible victory. I will never allude to him ever being perfect bc he, just like every other president, has had to make tough decisions that do not always work out, or they make decisions you outright disagree with. He’s just part of the spectrum of what we’ve known, but he was the first Black president of a nation that was built & raised on destroying Native communities & enslaving Black people. That was & will remain significant. As you can imagine, during that time of not voting I also was not entirely involved in racial matters as much as I should have been despite what I was actively learning about in college. I sunk into apathy.

Apathy is a comfort not afforded to everyone. It is not an option for everyone as a means of survival. Were Black communities & of color to sink entirely into apathy they would be completely wiped out bc there are organized white supremacists who spend every waking hour trying to find new ways to attack in covert & not-so-covert ways - voter suppression, intimidation, manipulation, propaganda. Apathy is a privilege. A white privilege that even a kid raised on free lunches at school & hand-me-downs from neighbors could afford.

Your. Vote. Matters.

Let’s talk symbolism. “My refusal to vote is symbolic of my disgust with how this nation is run, how our elections are corrupt, to show my hatred of the electoral college, my vote doesn’t matter anyway bc ...”

You’re right. Your vote is symbolic. But not for what you think.

When you don’t vote, that is like not replying to a message. The nation poses a question to all voters: Who do you want to represent you? If you don’t reply to the email, your input isn’t counted at all. There is no footnote to say “I didn’t vote bc of such-and-such reason.” You might have been unconscious. You might have forgotten. You might have not cared. You might care very much.

But there is literally no job in the entire election process who’s responsibility is to sit in an office & contemplate why Jared in Oklahoma didn’t cast a vote.

“Gee, I sure hope Jared is ok. Is he mad at us? I guess he might want change...”

No. The way you show that you are not happy with how things are going is to vote. THAT is how you send the sentiment of “Hey so this isn’t great I’d like to try moving this way.” But we can’t really make progress without continuing to push. Even when things look like they’re going well (”Hey, we got a Black guy in office, we’re doing great with the racism stuff!”) you gotta keep pushing - which is why you need to be able to realize the ones you do vote for need to be criticized as well. Obviously, there will be myths & the ones about Obama probably hit a record tally on that with how angry a Black person as president made the racists in this country feel, but there are valid criticisms as well that should not be overlooked if we want to know how to push for a better tomorrow, or to avoid accidentally electing a new nightmare bc you aren’t getting immediate results from who you thought was going to change the world. It’s a lot to put on one president. It would take multiple terms, beyond 2, to really see a shift considering they may be combating an opposing congress or supreme court.

The only reason your vote matters is because it is symbolic. If we all had esp we wouldn’t need to vote. Writing on a form that looks different depending on where you are yet all cumulatively results in the tallying for ONE election is entirely symbolic. That’s not an argument against voting, it’s proof as to why you should vote. Symbolism is not without consequence. Look at every book-burning that has ever happened. Our ideas are symbolic until they are put into practice. Your vote is your idea. We can’t read your mind. And the government isn’t reading your blog being like “GiantD0ngB0ng really said it best when they said ‘Fuck politicians’. That really change our perspective on how we had been running this nation. You’re right GiantD0ngB0ng, you’re right.”

If we had elected Hillary after Obama, we wouldn’t be so fucking bad with corona bc she wouldn’t have dismembered the pandemic response Obama had built due to swine flu, we wouldn’t be nearly as worried about ACA, we would still absolutely have criticisms bc no matter Woman, Black, Hispanic, Immigrant, Trans, Disabled, Homeless, or any combination of intersection of minorities, nobody is perfect. Nobody knows all the answers. Thus a decentralized government model that will only remain anywhere near as such if we stop letting fascists & bad faith actors get power by using our symbolic vote to say no.

Most everyone HATES group projects. I certainly do. If any people enjoy them, there are still likely aspects of it that rub them the wrong way like having a partner that doesn’t contribute. Guess what.

Elections are group projects.

I believe it was EvelynFromTheInternets who made me realize that, & echoes much of the same sentiment I have written in this.

And at 5:55 she says: What Are You Going To Do On November 4th bc We Are Still Fighting For Suffrage. We have to keep pushing & working towards a better tomorrow, today. None of it will amount to much if people are not voting. You can campaign & fundraising & educate all you want. But if people don’t vote it’s all for nothing. You need both.

“ As of June 2020, the United States had the highest number of incarcerated individuals worldwide, with more than 2.12 million people in prison “ This is absolutely part of the bigger problem & yet another way people have been disheartened. It’s on purpose. They don’t want disenfranchised communities to be able to vote. So we - those of us who don’t have to wait in lines for hours, those of us who don’t face racial violence, those of us who can choose apathy & laziness for a decade with little to no personal consequence - must vote symbolically for them.

If you want your vote to mean something then vote for them. Vote for the people who are still ineligible to vote even though they aren’t in prison anymore. Vote for the people who despite working more than you do, harder than you do, for less than you do, still have to pay taxes & still denied the right to vote. Vote for the people who can’t vote bc police murdered them. Vote for the people who wait 10 hours in line to vote & are turned away when they finally get to the front of the line. Vote for those who don’t have the right to relinquish in the first place. Hell you can even vote for those who do vote anyway but have been misled by propaganda. Bc if you don’t, eventually we all will sink. You may be in the upper class of the titanic but in the end the whole ship is going down & you may just have the opportunity to slowly freeze out in the dark ocean on a lifeboat with all your rich strangers with the slim chance at survival rather than swallowed immediately by the sea like those who were locked in the lower levels to keep them from access to rescue.

At 7:24 Evelyn hits another really important part that I think drives my whole point home: as a Black woman her actual life, & those who share her experience, is on the line constantly in this country & much of this world. It is not entirely as symbolic to some people as it is to the more privileged populations.

Sure, your vote is symbolic, & sure you not voting is absolutely symbolic. But the only thing not voting is symbolic of is your apathy, your own privilege to choose that & think you’ll be fine & that it’s other people who need to “wake up”. No babe, it’s you. Wake up to the wider consequences of symbolic gestures.

Your vote matters whether it’s electoral college or popular vote. Your vote matters to getting closer to an admin that will enable popular vote as the determinant & eradicate the electoral college. Your vote matters whether you’re in a “blue” state or a “red” state or a battleground state. A state is only red or blue until it’s not. I come from TX I know about that shit. The only reason “battleground” states are a focus is bc they fluctuate more often than others, that doesn’t make others ineligible to change. Your vote matters bc you may be only a portion of the overall grade, but the overall grade affects everyone. It will impact others more harshly than you.

Your Vote Matters.

I want to add one last note: voting doesn’t happen once every 4 years, & it’s never JUST about president. If you don’t go vote at all, you are neglecting the more local stuff as well which is what affects the bigger elections. If all you do during a group project is read one line during the presentation in class, the grade will reflect you lack of effort elsewhere throughout the project. If I showed up & only voted for president & nothing else it would be for nothing. Racist & bigoted GOP will vote all red all the time up & down ballot. It’s not about age either. If your vote didn’t matter then they wouldn’t sink so much money & effort into trying to prevent people from doing it.

#vote #2020 #election #it matters #black lives matter #incarceration #prison #united states #obama #trump #clinton #biden #civic engagement #civic duty #suffrage #voting #fascism #democracy #symbolism

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