#ethnic cultures and religions will never get to the level of representation we want them to if we don't let white writers write about them

[eradicatetehnormal]

Are We Fucking Serious?

Apparently, it's racist to make references to Vodou in work. Nobody punches down on indie creators more than internet ass tarts who want to seem "moral" and "mature."

[matan4il]

I love your posts about Jewish representation on TV and it reminded me of another post I saw by someone else who talked about how there’s a movie coming soon to Amazon that’s based on a book (it’s called Red and White & Royal Blue), and how the only Jewish character from the book was the only character to not be cast authentically in the movie because the actress and her family and openly and proudly Christian. I don’t think the character herself was canonically very religious, she goes home for Hanukkah, but she was written as Jewish ethnically. The blog I read it on talked about how it’s Jew erased because they didn’t cast someone Jewish and you can’t play another ethnicity (especially a minority one) and because the character doesn’t really do anything Judaism related, no one will even know she was supposed to be Jewish. I was wondering if you had any thoughts on it?

Hi Nonnie! And just lemme give you the BIGGEST hug! I thought this was fascinating. I'm so glad that you enjoy my posts about Jewish representation on TV and in film, they're obviously really important to me on a very personal level. IDK if this'll make you happy to hear, but I plan on writing at least two more posts about Jewish rep, one on OUaT and one on Friends. All in the context of my theory regarding Jewish rep. Here’s my thoughts on your ask...

What you're asking about can be referred to as the question of "Jewface." It's a term that has existed since the late 19th century, when non-Jews started portraying caricatures of Jews, often while wearing fake enlarged noses, fake long beards, ragged clothes and speaking with a thick Yiddish accent. By 1909, mainstream American Jewry had already decried this custom. But recently, this term has been brought up again, in 2021 Sarah Silverman wanted to talk about the way Jewish roles often go to non-Jewish actors.

I have to admit that as a general understanding seemed to take over that white people should not be cast in the role of POC for several reasons, Jews were left out of that discussion, so I think Sarah was absolutely right in bringing it up, as are you to ask about the casting of this Jewish character in RW&RB. The thing is, Jews ARE an ethno-religion. That means that we're not like Christians or Muslims, who are only bound together by a shared religion, Jews are also bound by shared ancestry. We're not the only ones, BTW! Another prominent ethno-religion is the Druze. Now, the Druze are far more strict than the Jews, they cannot marry any non-Druze and no one can convert to the Druze religion. Judaism isn't as strict: Jews can marry non-Jews, and people can convert to Judaism. However, for most of Jewish history, not that many people converted to Judaism. It was due to more than one reason:

Many non-Jews never got a chance to know Jews and Judaism, so there would be no reason for them consider converting.

Judaism on its part is against trying to convert non-Jews to Judaism (we believe that if someone converts, that means their soul was always Jewish, they were always meant to be a part of the Jewish people. But for that, conversion has to be an act of free will and not the result of a campaign of persuasion).

Jews were persecuted to such a degree, they suffered discrimination in every walk of life you can think of, they were lied about, demonized, repeatedly attacked, too often even massacred, so why would you want to be a Jew? Even if you did get to know Jews and Judaism and decided you liked this, the price to pay for being Jewish was just too great. This was an obstacle to conversion as well as to simply marrying Jews.

This is why for the most part, non-Jews did not convert to Judaism. At the same time, Jews sought to marry other Jews in order to pass on the Jewish identity, faith, values, traditions, culture, language, etc. As one lady explained it to me some years ago, "If you truly believe that a certain set of values is full of good, that your religion is true and enriching, and that your culture is beautiful, why wouldn't you want your kids to have all that as well? And the best way of ensuring that inheritance was by marrying and having kids with another Jew."

That means that to a great degree, the People of Israel (notice, this is what Jews call themselves in the Bible: not the Religion of Israel, the People of Israel, עם ישראל) did remain one people, one nation. Even the exceptional people who did convert to Judaism, they also married into the Jewish people, and their kids married Jews as well, and so did their grandchildren, and so the descendants of converts still shared that same common Jewish ancestry.

And all of this together was probably critical to the survival of Jewish identity. Take for example the Philistines. They were a seafaring people (most likely Greek and originating in the island of Crete based on the pottery they left behind) who invaded the Land of Israel from the west and settled along the southern part of Israel's coast. When the Babylonian empire invaded and occupied the Land of Israel roughly 2600 years ago, the Philistines were expelled to Babylon together with the Jews. But where the Jews maintained their identity long enough for the Persian empire under Cyrus the Great to defeat the Babylonians and allow the return of exiled populations to their homelands, the Philistines disappeared from the pages of history. Historians believe it's most likely that as a small minority, they inter-married with the majority, the Babylonians, to the point where they lost their culture, their language, their faith, and as a result, their distinct identity, and that's why there's no record of them after the expulsion to Babylon.

Now back to the question of casting, while Jews all over the world share common ancestry, we don't necessarily all look the same. The Middle East is actually a place where facial features and skin tones have always been very diverse, and that's what the Jews are, Middle Eastern. Add to that some degree of inter-marriage with convert Jews, and the result is that there really is no one look that all Jews share. So the question of casting, I don't think it's best tackled through that prism. I think it's more about the way the ethnic part of the ethno-religious identity of Jews should be acknowledged. About feeling like we matter, and that casting directors take Jewish identity into account, just like they do when they cast for a black character or an Indian one or a Native American. I also think having this conversation would allow us to talk about how the idea of Jewish facial features HAS BEEN demonized along the centuries (precisely that idea of the "Jewish nose" that was used in ugly antisemitic caricatures, or the idea of Jews having darker complexions than the average European).

Lastly, I know some people might point out that Jews get to be cast as non-Jews, so supposedly this shouldn't prevent non-Jews from being cast as Jews. Well, other actors who are POC are sometimes cast in roles originally intended for white people. An example is the 2018 show Troy: Fall of a City which cast a black Achilles, even though he was Greek (and specifically described as having fair features, as the ancient Greeks believed that was a sign of being favored by the gods). As much as such a casting might stir a discussion, at no point would we assume this means it would be okay to cast a white person in a movie about Martin Luther King Jr.!

Which brings me to another point, the question of which Jewish roles are played by Jews and which are not. This is something that I thought of being a gay woman. I know that a lot of gay actors, once they come out and are publicly perceived as gay, they get type cast as gay. It doesn't matter whether they look gay. It doesn't matter that prior to coming out, they could get lots of straight roles. Once they're identified as gay, there's a world of roles they're not going to get anymore, especially as a romantic lead or an action hero. It's a part of why many gay actors choose not to come out, even if they're okay doing so on every other level.

I'll just stop the analyzing of gay roles for a second to mention that this was true for Jews for a really long time as well. Yes, they were cast in non-Jewish roles, but they had to change their names and make sure no one would know they're actually Jewish. For example, beloved comedian Danny Kay was actually born David Daniel Kaminsky. Kirk Douglas, the movie legend? Born Issue Danielovitch Demsky. Winona Ryder? She was born Winona Horowitz. Natalie Hershlag? You know her as Natalie Portman.

At the same time as openly gay actors are limited to (mostly minor) gay roles, there are MAJOR gay roles in the entertainment industry, the ones that will have prestige attached to them, and those are almost always played by actors who are publicly known as straight. Think of Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal in Brokeback Mountain, Jared Leto in Dallas Buyers Club or Armie Hammer in Call Me By Your Name. They're all men that the public knows as straight. Now, I think straight people should be able to play gay and learn some empathy for gay people through that, that gay people should get to play straight and not be punished through the loss of work opportunities for being open about being queer, and I also think that when it's all mixed up, that can also prevent the bullying of an actor for taking on a gay role to the point they're forced to come out (by accepting that it's okay to be queer, straight, questioning, gay-but-before-realization, and take on a gay role). BUT I do think we have to talk about the Big Gay Roles being cast almost exclusively by straight actors. We should put studios and execs, not actors, on the spot, and ask them for more Big Gay Roles and for more diverse casting in those roles, and we should def not badger a teenager for being cast in a gay role.

Along the same line, I was asking myself about Big Jewish Roles. TBH, over the years, there haven't been many, give or take mostly Holocaust movies. But now in recent years, we have the non-Jewish Rachel Brosnahan in the lead role as a Jewish woman in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, until that show was canned we had the non-Jewish Kathryn Hahn set to star as the Jewish Joan Rivers, the non-Jewish Daniel Craig was cast as the lead in the movie Defiance which told the real story of Tuvia Bielsky leading a group of Jewish partisans and saving the lives of roughly 1200 Jews during the Holocaust. These are just some examples off the top of my head, there are many more. So yeah, I'd like more Big Jewish Roles and more actual Jews cast in them.

In conclusion, I think Jewish actors being cast in Jewish roles should, at the very least, be talked about because it does matter and it does help explain a part of Jewish identity, and I also think we need more Jewish stories with Big Jewish Roles, and I think it does very much matter that those be cast (at least predominantly if not exclusively) with Jewish actors.

Thank you so much for being interested! And I am so sorry for the length... But I really didn't know how to do this subject justice in less words. xoxox

You can find my ask tag here and my other posts about Jewish representation here. xoxox

[writingwithcolor]

What Does Our "Motivations” PSA Mean?

@luminalalumini said:

I've been on your blog a lot and it has a lot of really insightful information, but I notice a theme with some of your answers where you ask the writer reaching out what their 'motivation for making a character a certain [race/religion/ethnicity/nationality] is' and it's discouraging to see, because it seems like you're automatically assigning the writer some sort of ulterior motive that must be sniffed out and identified before the writer can get any tips or guidance for their question. Can't the 'motive' simply be having/wanting to have diversity in one's work? Must there be an 'ulterior motive'? I can understand that there's a lot of stigma and stereotypes and bad influence that might lead to someone trynna add marginalized groups into their stories for wrong reasons, but people that have those bad intentions certainly won't be asking for advice on how to write good representation in the first place. Idk its just been something that seemed really discouraging to me to reach out myself, knowing i'll automatically be assigned ulterior motives that i don't have and will probably have to justify why i want to add diversity to my story as if i'm comitting some sort of crime. I don't expect you guys to change your blog or respond to this or even care all that much, I'm probably just ranting into a void. I'm just curious if theres any reason to this that I haven't realized exists I suppose. I don't want y'all to take this the wrong way because I do actually love and enjoy your blog's advice in spite of my dumb griping. Cheers :))

We assume this is in reference to the following PSA:

PSA to all of our users - Motivation Matters: This lack of clarity w/r to intent has been a general issue with many recent questions. Please remember that if you don’t explain your motivations and what you intend to communicate to your audience with your plot choices, character attributes, world-building etc., we cannot effectively advise you beyond the information you provide. We Are Not Mind Readers. If, when drafting these questions, you realize you can’t explain your motivations, that is likely a hint that you need to think more on the rationales for your narrative decisions. My recommendation is to read our archives and articles on similar topics for inspiration while you think. I will be attaching this PSA to all asks with similar issues until the volume of such questions declines. 

We have answered this in three parts.

1. Of Paved Roads and Good Intentions

Allow me to give you a personal story, in solidarity towards your feelings:

When I began writing in South Asia as an outsider, specifically in the Kashmir and Lahore areas, I was doing it out of respect for the cultures I had grown up around. I did kathak dance, I grew up on immigrant-cooked North Indian food, my babysitters were Indian. I loved Mughal society, and every detail of learning about it just made me want more. The minute you told me fantasy could be outside of Europe, I hopped into the Mughal world with two feet. I was 13. I am now 28.

And had you asked me, as a teenager, what my motives were in giving my characters’ love interests blue or green eyes, one of them blond hair, my MC having red-tinted brown hair that was very emphasized, and a whole bunch of paler skinned people, I would have told you my motives were “to represent the diversity of the region.” 

I’m sure readers of the blog will spot the really, really toxic and colourist tropes present in my choices. If you’re new here, then the summary is: giving brown people “unique” coloured eyes and hair that lines up with Eurocentric beauty standards is an orientalist trope that needs to be interrogated in your writing. And favouring pale skinned people is colourist, full stop.

Did that make me a bad person with super sneaky ulterior motives who wanted to write bad representation? No.

It made me an ignorant kid from the mostly-white suburbs who grew up with media that said brown people had to “look unique” (read: look as European as possible) to be considered valuable.

And this is where it is important to remember that motives can be pure as you want, but you were still taught all of the terrible stuff that is present in society. Which means you’re going to perpetuate it unless you stop and actually question what is under your conscious motive, and work to unlearn it. Work that will never be complete.

I know it sounds scary and judgemental (and it’s one of the reasons we allow people to ask to be anonymous, for people who are afraid). Honestly, I would’ve reacted much the same as a younger writer, had you told me I was perpetuating bad things. I was trying to do good and my motives were pure, after all! But after a few years, I realized that I had fallen short, and I had a lot more to learn in order for my motives to match my impact. Part of our job at WWC is to attempt to close that gap.

We aren’t giving judgement, when we ask questions about why you want to do certain things. We are asking you to look at the structural underpinnings of your mind and question why those traits felt natural together, and, more specifically, why those traits felt natural to give to a protagonist or other major character.

I still have blond, blue-eyed characters with sandy coloured skin. I still have green-eyed characters. Because teenage me was right, that is part of the region. But by interrogating my motive, I was able to devalue those traits within the narrative, and I stopped making those traits shorthand for “this is the person you should root for.” 

It opened up room for me to be messier with my characters of colour, even the ones who my teenage self would have deemed “extra special.” Because the European-associated traits (pale hair, not-brown-eyes) stopped being special. After years of questioning, they started lining up with my motive of just being part of the diversity of the region.

Motive is important, both in the conscious and the subconscious. It’s not a judgement and it’s not assumed to be evil. It’s simply assumed to be unquestioned, so we ask that you question it and really examine your own biases.

~Mod Lesya

2. Motivations Aren't Always "Ulterior"

You can have a positive motivation or a neutral one or a negative one. Just wanting to have diversity only means your characters aren't all white and straight and cis and able-bodied -- it doesn't explain why you decided to make this specific character specifically bi and specifically Jewish (it me). Yes, sometimes it might be completely random! But it also might be "well, my crush is Costa Rican, so I gave the love interest the same background", or "I set it in X City where the predominant marginalized ethnicity is Y, so they are Y". Neither of these count as ulterior motives. But let's say for a second that you did accidentally catch yourself doing an "ulterior." Isn't that the point of the blog, to help you find those spots and clean them up?

Try thinking of it as “finding things that need adjusting” rather than “things that are bad” and it might get less scary to realize that we all do them, subconsciously. Representation that could use some work is often the product of subconscious bias, not deliberate misrepresentation, so there's every possibility that someone who wants to improve and do better didn't do it perfectly the first time. 

--Shira

3. Dress-Making as a Metaphor

I want to echo Lesya’s sentiments here but also provide a more logistical perspective. If you check the rubber stamp guide here and the “Motivation matters” PSA above, you’ll notice that concerns with respect to asker motivation are for the purposes of providing the most relevant answer possible.

It is a lot like if someone walks into a dressmaker’s shop and asks for a blue dress/ suit (Back when getting custom-made clothes was more of a thing) . The seamstress/ tailor is likely to ask a wide variety of questions:

What material do you want the outfit to be made of?

Where do you plan to wear it?

What do you want to highlight?

How do you want to feel when you wear it?

Let’s say our theoretical customer is in England during the 1920s. A tartan walking dress/ flannel suit for the winter is not the same as a periwinkle, beaded, organza ensemble/ navy pinstripe for formal dress in the summer. When we ask for motivations, we are often asking for exactly that: the specific reasons for your inquiry so we may pinpoint the most pertinent information.

The consistent problem for many of the askers who receive the PSA is they haven’t even done the level of research necessary to know what they want to ask of us. It would be like if our English customer in the 1920s responded, “IDK, some kind of blue thing.” Even worse,  WWC doesn’t have the luxury of the back-and-forth between a dressmaker and their clientele. If our asker doesn’t communicate all the information they need in mind at the time of submission, we can only say, “Well, I’m not sure if this is right, but here’s something. I hope it works, but if you had told us more, we could have done a more thorough job.”

Answering questions without context is hard, and asking for motivations, by which I mean the narratives, themes, character arcs and other literary devices that you are looking to incorporate, is the best way for us to help you, while also helping you to determine if your understanding of the problem will benefit from outside input. Because these asks are published with the goal of helping individuals with similar questions, the PSA also serves to prompt other users.

I note that asking questions is a skill, and we all start by asking the most basic questions (Not stupid questions, because to quote a dear professor, “There are no stupid questions.”). Unfortunately, WWC is not suited for the most basic questions. To this effect, we have a very helpful FAQ and archive as a starting point. Once you have used our website to answer the more basic questions, you are more ready to approach writing with diversity and decide when we can actually be of service. This is why we are so adamant that people read the FAQ. Yes, it helps us, but it also is there to save you time and spare you the ambiguity of not even knowing where to start.

The anxiety in your ask conveys to me a fear of being judged for asking questions. That fear is not something we can help you with, other than to wholeheartedly reassure you that we do not spend our unpaid, free time answering these questions in order to assume motives we can’t confirm or sit in judgment of our users who, as you say, are just trying to do better.

Yes, I am often frustrated when an asker’s question makes it clear they haven’t read the FAQ or archives. I’ve also been upset when uncivil commenters have indicated that my efforts and contributions are not worth their consideration. However, even the most tactless question has never made me think, “Ooh this person is such a naughty racist. Let me laugh at them for being a naughty racist. Let me shame them for being a naughty racist. Mwahaha.”

What kind of sad person has time for that?*

Racism is structural. It takes time to unlearn, especially if you’re in an environment that doesn’t facilitate that process to begin with. Our first priority is to help while also preserving our own boundaries and well-being. Though I am well aware of the levels of toxic gas-lighting and virtue signaling that can be found in various corners of online writing communities in the name of “progressivism*”, WWC is not that kind of space. This space is for discussions held in good faith: for us to understand each other better, rather than for one of us to “win” and another to “lose.”

Just as we have good faith that you are doing your best, we ask that you have faith that we are trying to do our best by you and the BIPOC communities we represent.

- Marika.

*If you are in any writing or social media circles that feed these anxieties or demonstrate these behaviors, I advise you to curtail your time with them and focus on your own growth. You will find, over time, that it is easier to think clearly when you are worrying less about trying to appease people who set the bar of approval so high just for the enjoyment of watching you jump. “Internet hygiene”, as I like to call it, begins with you and the boundaries you set with those you interact with online.

[asitrita]

Personal rant

This is a personal rant about Spain’s history and some people’s interpertation of it, mostly regarding some of the “nations”, or “ethnic groups” that are sometimes considered Spain’s parents. If you think it can affect you personally, don’t continue reading.

I really do not understand people who consider Spain’s father figure anyone other than Rome. Like... literally, no one makes any sense other than Rome. I could buy Visigoth acting as Spain’s father figure, or as his “tutor”, and I could even understand (though in no way share) the idea of Castile and Aragon being Spain’s “parents”. Though, again, I would not share that hc either, because even if the current nation-estate of Spain is “younger” than the many different medieval kingdoms, the notion, the “idea”, the “identity” to some extent, of Spain is way older than any of those medieval kingdoms which, technically, were not nations nor modern estates either, so acting as if Spain came to be out of the blue in the 15th century, as if there had not been already a clear Spanish identity and notion of unity and nation prior the 15th/16th centuries is just... ignoring all the evidence. What I trully do not understand is when people have Al-Ándalus, Umayyad, or even Carthage, as Spain’s father figures. It is true that history can be interpreted in many different ways, more so when it comes to Hetalia, but there are some interpretations that... they just make no sense. Not from a historical point of view, at least. Guess you can have whatever headcanons you want, but historically speaking, they may make no sense whatsoever. And that is exactly the case with these interpretations. For Al-Ándalus and Umayyad the reason why it is utter nonsense for any of them to be Spain’s father figure is that they are literally everything Spain is not (and did not want to be). In the first years of our lives, until we become adults, we all build our identity against the others. Something similar happens with the different nations. They build their identity partially based on not being like the neighbour next door. We could say that Spain built itself against precisely these two guys up there, Al-Ándalus and Umayyad. One could think, “okay, but as we all know, in many cases, the first ones we try to build our identity against is our parents, so that could further emphasise the role of those two as Spain’s paternal figures”. Well, no, and here’s why. Maybe it all comes to what I understand as a father figure, but to me, in the case of nations, the father figure, or the “father” or “mother” of a nation should be the one the nation receives more influences from. It should be to some extent the “origin” of most, or a big significant part of the nation’s culture, identity, and overall, idiosyncrasy. Either that, or it should have left a very deep impact and long lasting effect in the character and identity of that nation. And what I mean is that the nation must have adopted transcedental aspects from that “father nation” that are now rooted deep in its character. Otherwise, a deep impact could be a traumatic event like a war that people from the nation have built their national pride upon, but that’s not what I mean. I mean that the nation has actively acquired, integrated, and assimilated, deep and transcendental elements and aspects of its “father nation” culture and identity, so the “father nation” identity has, to some extent, become the identity of the “new nation”. Examples of some of these transcedental elements could be religion (and overall, spirituality), sense of justice, moral values, or even lexicon related to abstract concepts and emotions such as love, passion, fear, desire, hate, regret, etc. So here’s the thing. Neither Al-Ándalus nor Umayyad did, in any way, affect Spain in this respect. Mind, I am not saying they didn’t leave any influence in Spain at all, what I am saying is that they did not have a transcedental influence in Spain’s identity. Or they did, but just in the opposite way. Spain takes its culture, society, values, and spirituality from Rome, and builds itself against Al-Ándalus and Umayyad (quite honestly, Spain’s relationship with these two is more similar to the “traumatic” event some nations have built their national pride upon I mentioned earlier than to any father-son type of relationship). If anything, they only helped to exacerbate Spain’s loyalty to its “indigenous hispanoroman” identity. Again, not saying they left no influence, for example, some architecture in southern Spain (though, tbh, it’s more like a couple buildings people visit while ignoring the hundreds of christians and roman buildings lol), some cities, some influences in the food and some traditional dishes, some new agricultural and destillation techniques, etc. And it is well known that up to 8% of the Spanish vocabulary is of Arab origin, even though, to be honest, much of that percentage are toponyms and half of the lexicon is no longer used in Spanish today (most people don’t even know half of these words, and some have their Latin counterpart). However, none of these influences affects Spain’s psique and identity to a transcendental level. Not only that, but the people who identified as Spaniards and all its old variants (derivatives of Latin’s hispanus/hispanicus) were the Northern Christian people, never the Muslims who lived in Al-Ándalus under Umayyad rule. It was northern Christians who talked about Spain, who considered Spain their “lost” nation, and who identified with a Spanish identity, not the people nor the rulers of Al-Ándalus (for a short time, Northern Christians would actually refer to Christians living under Muslim rule in Al-Andalus as Spaniards, to distinguish them from the Muslims). And in no way am I justifying the following, I’m just stating a fact, which is that Muslims were expelled. All of them. Which means that Spain, as a nation, as the people it represents, literally has almost no link whatsoever with the people of Al-Ándalus, Arabs, nor Muslims, other than its people, the “Spanish people” fought them for centuries. Obviously, they lived in the same piece of land, though borders were never an easy place to live in, they were not 24/7 killing each other (impossible to do that nonstop for almost 8 century), they often traded, and there were Christians living in Muslim territories who adopted some Arab or generally Middle Eastern/Oriental traditions and practices that they preserved even under Christian rule (they were called Moriscos), hence the influences. But these influences are so superficial and “materialistic”, they affected so little the Spanish way of understanding the world, that I trully think it is unrealistic to make any of these two Spain’s father figure. It is almost a bad joke when you get the Northern Kingdoms singing to Spain and identifying as Spanish, getting ripped of their representation and identity, and instead, associating this identity and representation (their identity and representation) to those who never identified as Spanish and fought those who did with the intention of conquering and subduing them. And I guess you could argue that most of “Spain” (the land) was under Muslim (Umayyad) control, but as I understand Hetalia, and modern states today, it is not about land, but about nations and ethnic groups, and the people they represent, and it just makes no sense to make Spain’s father figure neither Al-Ándalus nor Umayyad, because given history, they would have probably tried to kill Spain had they got the chance, and the same goes for Spain, as it certainly would try to kill them as well. Plus, friendly reminder that the muslim territory of Spain was, for the most part, independent from the Umayyad Empire, so even if members of the Umayyad dinasty ruled over Al-Ándalus, it was not part of its empire (again, for the most part, there was a short time it did belonged to the empire). Plus  Al-Ándalus was cut into pieces during the 11th century and the Arab “Umayyad” elite expelled from the Peninsula. I mean, neither the Umayyad dinasty nor Al-Ándalus lasted for 7 centuries. The Arab rulling elite (Umayyad) were expelled, and Al-Ándalus destroyed, by the end of the 11th century. So it is not true Spain received direct influence from these particular people for almost 800 years, that’s an extreme oversimplification of Medieval Spain, as Arab rule in part of Spain, as well as the existance of Al-Ándals, in reality, lasted for around 350 years, as opposed to Roman presence in Spain, which lasted for over 600 years, plus, they were never expelled and their identity completely permeated the indegenous inhabitants of the Iberian Peninsula.

About Carthage... what can I say? This just makes no sense. It may not be as ironic (and almost offensive) as the other two choices, but in some way, it makes even less sense, if that’s even possible. Not much to say about this one, I just can’t even think of one thing Spain has inherited from this guy, can’t think of any influence from Carthaginean culture or whatever in Spain. The little I can think of slightly related to Carthage is actually Phoenitian so... I mean, Cartagena, in Murcia, is a great city, but... can anyone think of any significant influence, any significant link Spain as a nation, or Spaniards as an ethnic group, have with Carthage? I’m sure people from Murcia may come up with something but... in general, I really don’t think we have anything to do with Carthagineans, as much as I like Carthage. I’m sorry, but I trully can’t think of anything Spaniards, Hispanics, even Portuguese if you want (though I’m no expert on Portuguese history so I may be wrong on this one) have “inherited” from Carthage (guess you could link the Portuguese Empire based on trade with Carthage, but realistically speaking, there’s no historical corelation there either). I guess they may have introduced some new techniques and whatnot, but, really, that happens all the time, that does not affect the identity of a group nor their way of looking at the world greatly, unless it supposes a radical change in their way of life, which did not happen, since Carthage barelly controled some strategic cities. Yes, it got to the northern part of Spain, but did not have actual control over all that territory, and there was no cohesive rule nor anything I can think of... In any case, I’m no expert on Carthage either, but I trully cannot think of any Carthaginean influence in Spain at all. In conclusion, a nation’s “father figure” is the one that has, to some extent, “built the nation”, or “mould it”. Just like if we were talking about a human being, we should ask “how does it behave? how does it think? how does it see the world? how does it communicate? what are its values? what are its traditions?” Then ask about the origin of all those answers. And there you get the “father figure”. Spaniards speak a Latin-based language/s (but the Basques and some people from Navarra who speak a pre-Roman language), they are Christians, Roman Cahotlics to be more precise, and Spanish justice is based on Visigothic and Roman laws. Spanish culture is overwhelmingly based on Roman culture, as is its society, values, etc. The way Spanish interact with the world and others is based on a Roman perception of the world. They may be others who have influenced Spain, I’m not denying that, but none of them has, not by a long shot, defined Spanish identity as much as Rome has. The only event in history that had a significant importance in defining Spain’s identity other than Rome and getting to America, is the war against the Muslims, which includes the two listed above. But they never “added” to the Spanish identity on significant levels, for the most part they just reinforced it by acting as its antagonists, which is not exactly what I would represent as “parenthood”. Carthage... I don’t even know how that happened. And that’s it. This is not a personal attack to anyone who has any of these headcanons, it may seem like it is, but it is not. If anything, it is an “attack” to these ideas, simply because I don’t think they accurately portray Spain’s history at all, on the contrary, they distort Spanish history based on 18th and 19th century foreigner’s ignorant and orientalist crazy theories and assumption (and anti-Catholic propaganda, tbh), and Hetalia, at the end of the day, is about history. If any one has these headcanons,you do you, go with it, but please be aware that they are not historically accurate, that’s it.

[americangodstalk]

American Gods fan-made RPG: The Old Gods (how to create)

If you want to play or create an Old God, we would advise you first to make sure to check first material about the mythological figure you want to use. Check encyclopedias about the religion or culture you want to explore, research online for articles or studies of the god or goddess that will be your character. Mythologies and legends already have so much funny, crazy and incredible character descriptions, traits, trivia and stories that you cannot ignore them. Use them as much as you can, play them straight or subvert them, make them a major point or just a reference, but using as much real-world knowledge as you can will only make the game more interesting.

A first important note to make is that an Old God doesn’t actually have to be a “god” per se. Old Gods include mythological monsters, mythical figures, fairies and spirits of all sorts, supernatural or divine creatures... A God is an entity that people believed in, whose stories were told and passed on, and that received worship in a form of another (and worship can be as simple as avoiding to do a specific thing or cross a specific place out of fear of the entity). By this definition angels, demons, jinns, fair folk, trolls and yokai are all gods. Do not feel like you need to get a big name - you can always play with smaller figures. In the decay and loneliness of the Old Gods, all are now equal. 

When you select a mythological, religious or historical figure, always remember that they need to have been brought to America somehow. You cannot have an Old God whose people never set a foot in America. All the Old Gods are not native of the land - they were brought here (for Native American Gods, a separate section will be written - this one focuses mostly on non-Native old gods). In the American Gods universe, most of the theories of “early contact” with America are actually true. In the American Gods canon, the Vikings, the Egyptians, the Romans and the Chinese all discovered America before Christopher Colombus set a foot there (though all never stayed for long in this land). Feel free to dig up “early contact” archeological theories and use them in your canon. Of course, you can also choose to have the Old Gods be brought strictly by historically-accurate immigration waves. This is strongly encouraged - and we advise you to make a bit of research about the history of immigration and ethnicities in the United-States. 

Once you have your Old God or Old Goddess, you need to think of what his or her appearance and personality will be like. Personality wise, the original myths and legends usually give enough material - though you should always remember that some are in America for centuries now, and lived through many hardships. Their personality very probably changed in front of the misery of their situation and whatever new activity they took upon themselves to survive. Some might be in denial, others depressed or angry... As for the appearance, while you should base yourself on canonical representations of the entity in their original religion or culture, a few things should always be remembered:

They appear as regular, human beings. They can have or hide some unusual traits (trolls will appear as massive, tall or obese humans, while ifrits can need to hide behind sunglasses eyes made of fire and gorgons will need to always cover their head to protect the snakes) but they all appear to be regular, if maybe a little odd, humans. They can take more fantastical shapes, but they usually only do so in the Backstage (see the devoted section). The Old Gods always reflect their original culture - do not take an Egyptian god and describe him as a white-skinned man, or do not take a Chinese goddess and describe her as a copper-skinned woman (unless the original mythological description demands it). Japanese gods will appear as Japanese men, Slavic goddesses will appear as Russian or Eastern-European women. Another element that should be remembered is that the Old Gods are weaker in America, old and abandonned, and this often reflects in their appearance. Most of them appear as elderly people, or as sick in a way or another. Not all have to look weary and ancient - some still look like young people (especially if they are ever-young entities), but while in legends they will be beautiful youth, in American they can turn into acneic and lanky teenagers. Or they can keep their original beauty and majesty - if they have enough worship and belief. In general, the level of beauty, youth and anomaly of an Old God appearance is linked to their level of “Divine Decay” - see the corresponding section. 

Once you have selected their appearance and personality, powers should be considered. The Old Gods are creatures of magic and legend. Not all have fantastical powers, but many do. Once again, we can’t advise you enough to make research about the supernatural abilities of the creature or entity you want to play as - they usually have a given set of powers you should reuse in the game. Gods in general have a certain set of already-given abilities (be it fast-healing, shapeshifting, mind-reading...), but their level of power will again change depending on their “Divine Decay” (see the corresponding section). Always remember, in doubt, that the gods are reflections and embodiments of what they represent. A god of youth and beauty will appear as young and beautiful, while a goddess of fertility and abundance will appear with generous curves and a planturous body. 

Find the exact place in the United-States your Old God resides. Usually, the Old Gods do not travel much. They tend to stay in a given city or state for a certain amount of time. You can choose a geographical location based on the influence their native culture, religion or people had on it. You can select a place you are most familiar with, so as to master its geography better. Or you can select a place where it will be more convenient to play. 

The most important and final section of the character should however be the way they feed. 

Gods are born of belief - but they survive on worship. The Old Gods, to not fall under the Divine Decay, need worship to maintain their life and powers. In the modern world, since most usually their religions are not celebrated anymore, they need to adapt and get their worship through another mean.

You have two types of worship. The indirect worship - also known as fame. A god can feed of fame. If their stories and legends are still actively told, if their name is famous or part of popular culture, if they appear in works of fiction such as comic books or novels, if they are still studied today in school, they can use it as a way to maintain themselves. Note however that surviving on indirect worship alone is not enough, and many gods ended up fading away due to lacking the other and more important worship.

The direct worship - also known as ritual. Gods feed of worship in the primal sense of the term. Rituals, sacrifices and prayers. People do not realize it, but there are many ways to practice the rituals of old. Animal sacrifices can still be carried through slaughterhouses. The sacred practice of mummification is not so different from the work of a modern undertaker. Prostitution used to be sacred, and the taking of drugs was a mystical experience. And concerts today are no different from ancient rituals - gathering of an enthralled audience in front of a sacred performer, with music, songs and carefully prepared gestures. There are many ways to keep one’s worship alive: if the figure you chose is not famous enough to survive merely out of indirect worship, make sure they have an activity that procures them enough direct worship to survive. 

[crystalzelda]

heyy i wanted to say i read your post about Arab characters, definitely something that never crossed my mind so thank you for that, it was really nice to read your opinion and also to know something more about the people i follow, sometimes i come here to escape or w/e but i like hearing about people's minds or how their days went, etc

Thank you! I agree, I love getting a lot of perspectives on Tumblr, it’s great for escapism but also to learn about others.

I’m prefacing this with the fact that I am first generation American with an Arab father and an European mother.

Obviously there’s millions of Arabs and Muslims in the world, and like other minorities have said, the problem isn’t that the Chosen Racial Hollywood Archetype is inherently inaccurate - of course there are hijabis they are awesome and kickass and who are very devout and for whom wearing a hijab is super important to them and their culture. But since it’s the One Positive Archetype (not getting into the racist caricatures for the antagonists... now that shit is next level racist) and there’s so few of us, it kind of becomes the one and only representation which makes the rest of us who don’t indentify with that journey feel even more isolated? Like oh she’s Arab like me, but I don’t see much of myself in her at all, so I feel like she’s not “for me” but that makes me feel almost disloyal for that thought, bc there’s so little rep, I want to uplift all these instances! There’s a lot of conflict. Of course the answer to that is to have more characters of that ethnicity, race, culture, religion, but to most ppl having One Is Enough. K then! Lol these topics are sooo complicated, there’s so many nuances! I’m glad I can get ppl to think on my perspective a bit, but absolutely am not speaking for all of us as we all have had very cool and personal journeys that deserve their time in the sun too!

[kashif1550]

Post 3 - Multicultural America

1.What is the subject of your film, program, or internet/social media selection? Provide a brief summary, describing your selection and how it relates to our course topics, readings, and screenings.

For the site I picked, I used the root dot com because I wanted to find a way to discuss white-passing and also how it’s changing. Initially, I was going to do that by introducing the 1950s movie, Imitation of Life, for my post about films. Both the remake and original, though, give off a white person’s narration of what it’s like to be a white-passing individual, similar to how Gone with the wind is a white supremacist view of how slavery in the south was like. 

(The way the slaves were depicted is far from reality, making it uncomfortable to watch at times when they portray the mammy character.)

In short, it sugar-coats the trauma, glossing over the true pains that black people faced when navigating their world—and for that reason, I avoided it. 

Before I dive into the article about white passing, let us review what “passing” is first. Passing can be used in more ways than just race. For someone to pass, it means to be perceived as something they aren’t. When it comes to the topic of race, white passing is when someone passes as white, but in actuality have a mixed-race background. Throughout US history, African Americans have passed as white as a means of survival, understanding that there life would be at risk if the truth was told about their parent’s racial background. Society was closed off for non-whites; the best schools, best towns, best jobs were in the segregated white side of town. 

For someone of mixed-race heritage to venture into those areas safely, they would have to embrace only one side and play into the image of what they wanted others to see when they looked at them. Because, at the end of the day, the system of how race operates is based on perception.

Still, to this day, people have to put up an inaccurate front, maybe even lie about their real name, to secure a job. Race-based implicate bias in workplaces has led to research being brought to the public’s attention due to how serious the issue has gotten throughout the years. 

Looking at a study conducted by Princeton professors, Paul von Zielbauer, of New York Times, discusses how race plays a big factor—despite having problems with law enforcement. White men with a criminal conviction get just as much, if not more, job offers than an African-American man with nothing on his record.

“White men with prison records receive far more offers for entry-level jobs in New York City than black men with identical records, and are offered jobs just as often—if not more so—than black men who have never been arrested, according to a new study by two Princeton professors.” (Zielbauer, 2005) 

Decades past The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom led by MLK Jr., African American men are still hindered at entry-level jobs. People tend to push the blame on minorities, stating that the problem lies that, however, that can’t be the case when the entire system of race was built on injustice. The system cannot be deemed broke if it is doing what it was meant to do, discourage darker skinned people from providing for themselves and achieving upward mobility. 

And that, sadly, leads us to why white-passing was so prevalent after slavery and into the 20th century. It was not because these individuals wanted to, but because they had to. Connecting this back to the reading, I think back to Peggy Mclntosh’s piece on white privilege. 

She says, “I have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets which I can count on cash in each day, but about what I was ‘meant’ to remain oblivious. White privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes tools, and blank checks. Describing white privilege makes one newly accountable.” (Mclntosh, 1989) 

As Mclntosh stated, white privilege is ‘unearned assets’ given to you on the bases of your skin, not your skills. Continuously, we see people try and paint minorities as the ones that caused this curse of bad fortune, dismissing the existence of white privilege entirely in the process. Even more childish than that, people demand the end of affirmative actions as though the playing field has been set leveled for everyone. It isn’t, and to say it has is a clear slap to the face of every disadvantaged black and brown person who lives in this country. 

2. Referring to related and appropriate readings and screenings from the course, describe how your selection represents racial and ethnic identities (and if applicable, intersectionality). In what ways does your selection for each of the journal entries generate a conversation regarding race, ethnicity, and cultural diversity?

The way my selection has represented racial identity is through the lens of the one-drop rule. Through Henry Louis Gates Jr. article titled “How Many ‘White’ People Are Passing?’ he discusses how the roles are beginning to show what was the aftermath of the one-drop rule. 

When talking about the fallout of such a law, it iscreated a precedence of people ignoring the existence of their white parent in order to box that person in to a ‘colored only’ section. For the piece I picked, it creates a conversation by questioning about how often that rule wasn’t used and how it created an unneeded divided. 

“‘Bryc found that about 4 percent of whites have at least 1 percent or more of African ancestry […] “the percentage indicates that an individual with at least 1 percent African ancestry had an African ancestor within the last six generations, or in the last 200 years. This data also suggests that individuals with mixed parentage at some point were absorbed into the white population,’ which is a very polite way of saying that they ‘passed.’” (Gates, 2011)

However, when you compare that to African Americans, the percentage is far more staggering, showing that people who looked “white enough” wasn’t always the case for mixed-race people. Shockingly enough, it is stated that: “research shows that the average African American has a whopping 24 percent of European ancestry.” (Gates, 2011)

24?! That’s means, unlike with white people, African American’s bloodline had someone fully white not as far back. Many people of mixed-race background submerged themselves in to the African American community, as well as the obvious underlining effects of sexual assault of enslaved black women. The article gets even more interesting when they dive into where the hidden ancestry might show up more, showing that whites living in the south had a higher chance of having unknown African DNA. 

“In South Carolina at least 13 percent of self-identified whites have 1 percent or more African ancestry, while in Louisiana the number is a little more than 12 percent. In Georgia and Alabama the number is about 9 percent. The differences perhaps point to different social and cultural histories within the south.” (Gates, 2011) 

It begs to ask the question how many people are unaware of their own identity due to the fear of the past, having grandparents who lied about their linage in order to get a better life for their offspring. 

3.How does your selection relate to the course readings, screenings and discussions?  Reflect upon the representation and circulation of racial and ethnic identities in popular visual culture. Your reflections should be attentive to the intersectionalities of race, ethnicity, sexuality, religion, socioeconomic class and gender.

When it comes to the popular visual culture and “white passing” the stories are definitely there. At the turn of the century, literature had a bit of an obsession of the concept of “passing” as white. The novel like “Passing”, “Imitation of Life” and other tales followed ambiguous African-Americans. The novel “Invisible Man” was less about running between the lines of white and black, but rather a social commentary about a fictional scenario of an ambiguous African American man who drifts between two worlds, unnoticed as an onlooker, and discussing economical and political tensions that are rising.

Overall, when we thinking of “passing” individuals in the media, we notice that many sided with their white side to secure roles. For Broadway star, Carol Channing, she did not even claim her black ancestry until 2002 - at the age of 80. Before that point, she only identified as of European descent. Having been shielded from her own identity till the age of 16, it wasn’t a surprise that Channing had a lot of unsettling ignorance resided about her own heritage, making cringeworthy comments.

When she was told that her father was partly black from her grandfather, she said: “I know it's true the moment I sing and dance. I'm proud as can be of [my black ancestry]. It's one of the great strains in show business. I'm so grateful. My father was a very dignified man and as white as I am. My [paternal] grandparents were Nordic German, so apparently I [too] took after them [in appearance]” (Chicago Tribune, 2003)

I feel uncomfortable now even looking at her say that being black was “one of the great strains in show business.” Her comments were distasteful, dismissing how slaves were forced to perform in front of their masters and how that led into subcultures of new music like blues and country. She chalked up all of her talent to her black grandfather and her white looks to her white ancestors. If only she knew that wasn’t how genetics work. Perhaps, if the divide placed on mixed-race people wasn’t so strenuous, we wouldn’t have cases of ignorance like this.

For the most part, the media has mainly shown the stories of mixed raced women, not showing the struggle of mixed-race men who have to choose if they’d “pass” as only one race. As I stated before, “Invisible man” isn’t really about passing because his own race wasn’t up for debate, but rather what he saw due to his ambiguousness. 

There’s many reasons as to why women were the main focus when talking about “passing.” However, it becomes obviously clear in the film Imitation of Life, writing the mixed-race girl off as a trickster for being something she wasn’t. In a sense, Hollywoods take on “passing” women was that they were deceptive, completely disregarding the essential need of passing as white. Sadly, in Imitation of Life, the mixed-race girl is beaten to a pulp after her white date finds out she’s mixed with black.  

Sources:

Zielbauer, Paul von 2005

    “Race a Factor in Job Offers for Ex-Convicts”

      New York Times, July, 17, 2005

 Mclntosh, Peggy 1989

      “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”

Gates, Louis Henry

    “How Many ‘White’ People Are Passing?”    

https://www.theroot.com/how-many-white-people-are-passing-1790874972

Rusoff, Jane

    “At 82, Channing still in step” Chicago Tribune 

[anothershadeofpurple]

I know that SQ at this point is a dead thing with no hopes of happening now but at what point do we suddenly flock to this new lgbt character/relationship A&E are trying to sell us. I understand representation is important and scarce but to kiss a$$ to these two guys who treated our fandom like crap and have no regrets over the last 6 years "cause who remembers?" (a la Eddy) is upsetting to me. I feel like it's a betrayal to SQ to accept this. It gives them thought that we only wanted any f/f

Hey Anon!

Is this a general comment in response to things you read or is it because I tweeted Adam about how the announcement of the inclusion of an LGBTQ character had the opposite effect of normalizing? 

I can - obviously - see why people think it’s not going to happen, but I am still pretty sure that it will if they get to tell their story, which influences the way I communicate about it. It all makes sense if you look at their world building as Emma’s mental space - the how might be unpredictable, but it’s pretty clear they set up Regina and Henry to be Emma’s fairy tale happy ending and her story isn’t actually over yet.

The first openly queer characters were Ruby & Dorothy. Ruby is the wolf and the wolf guides the way as I talked about here. So if you look at Emma’s mind as that of a repressed lesbian - the product of religion and unaccepting society - then suddenly the queer subtext being everywhere just below the surface makes a lot of sense. Ruby symbolized a desire that would no longer be repressed - the first breakthrough if you will.

“The Ruby Slippers are a deep dream symbol, representing both Dorothy’s means of getting around in Oz and her identity, her unassailable integrity. The shoes are a reassuring Mentor’s gift, the knowledge that you are a unique being with a core that cannot be shaken by outside events. They are like Ariadne’s Thread in the story of Theseus and the Minotaur, a connection with a positive, loving anima that gets you through the darkest of labyrinths.”From: The Writer’s Journey - Christopher Vogler

That brings me to the spoilers of a new LGBTQ character - my money is on Alice. I’ve written about this new book telling the story from the perspective of consciousness - check here, here and here. From the spoilers it’s my guess many of these new characters will be playing out aspects of Emma’s life before we met her. Many females of different ages are added and we’re going to an urban setting in our world. She’s remembering who she is. Whatever this character’s storyline is, it’s the next step in Emma’s process of breaking through repression and being honest about who she loves. It will still be fantastical, it’s still a fairy tale setting, but my guess is it will give us more clues about Emma’s past that are a little closer to how things actually happened than the hints we’ve gotten so far.

Now I want to talk about what you’re saying, about people selling out. The fandom has done every conceivable thing to get the showrunners’ and the media’s attention over the years. There’s been anger and attempts at diplomatic conversation. There have been twitter trends and media articles. Nothing really came of it. If anyone involved doesn’t know the importance of Emma, Regina & Henry versus any other LGBTQ couple by now, then they’re never going to know because they do not want to know. Not to mention they know what they have written and produced. They know exactly what they have been doing, what they have been suggesting with these characters.

Now I see a mentality of placing blame on each other for how fandom has been treated or how the storyline has evolved. “If only we had done this differently we would have had different results. We would have gotten what we wanted.” It’s a defense mechanism in order to not feel powerless. Look for somebody closer to you. Somebody who you can blame so you don’t feel out of control. So you feel you can get some form of justice by punishing someone. The reality is that the blame lies with:

An inherently homophobic society

A conservative media culture

Heterosexual writers writing queer characters based on research but not from life experience

Old school PR principles

…

If you accept blame lies with a marginalized group or individuals within it and how they react to their unfair treatment - even if people are doing the opposite of what you think is productive - you are losing sight of the real issues and the real causes. The truth is that you are angry with other people who are reacting to an unfair situation they are also a victim of. We have to recognize that in some ways we simply are powerless before we can figure out what power we do have. 

What to do?

Anger is fuel, it’s energy. Treasure it, but try to direct it. Within the disadvantaged group, find the people who feel the same about this issue as you do. Maybe it’s only one person, maybe it’s five people, maybe you can find a bigger group. Vent with them. Talk out the frustrations with them to take the edge off. Publicly talk about what frustrates you and why, but avoid being passive aggressive and placing blame. Backgrounds of people online and what they seek here are incredibly diverse. Ages, levels of education, how far they are in the self-acceptance and coming out process, financial backgrounds, ethnicities, temperaments, levels of involvement, … Always be aware you are lacking a lot of information about the people you are interacting with - some of which you would have in real life. People are more receptive when they’re not under attack and many here feel vulnerable - whether they seem like they do or not. You may be right about something, but that doesn’t mean you’ll be understood. Pick your battles, focus on being understood first. 

Now with your group of people - or even if it’s just you - decide what you can do with what you have. Get informed. Read books on activism. Find the right words. Decide what the right course of action is for you. Identify the power structures you are fighting. Think big. Think about the next time around, think about changing things for future generations. Consider supporting the opposite of what you are fighting. There are a million ways to make a change. Find something that works with your personality, your means, your level of comfort, your talents. Find something that is safe for you to do depending on your situation - and if you are risking your safety, make it a conscious choice, something that comes from within and not from outside pressures.

I’m under the impression that in emancipatory struggles of minorities there are always roughly two groups. Generally, there will be a group labeled as “radical”. I would say that these people are actually more right about how things should be. They will rally, point out the flaws in the system. They are often considered aggressive, but they’re obviously not, they’re just very aware of the unfairness and point out the differences between them and the privileged group.

The other group is a group who is more focused on building bridges and being diplomatic. They try not to rock the boat and aim for smaller changes. What you bring up - “selling out” - is often a complaint heard from the more radical group when talking about the moderate group, while the moderate group is worried about the boat rocking too hard and there being repercussions and setbacks to the progress if we push too hard and too fast.

In reality it’s often those two groups taking opposite action - but doing in the same moment in time - that creates change. We need people to loudly call attention to issues, we need people to gently explain the issues when people are called to attention. Some people need to be kicked into action, others need a gentle hand guiding them. The power comes from these different approaches. While we need to keep each other in check - especially when it comes to intersectionality, because yes, in those cases diplomacy often crosses over into selling out - seeing things this way helps me personally recenter. Take a step back, look at the bigger picture and never forget who and what you are actually fighting. Make sure that’s where you direct your energy. Be communicative within your own group, but don’t get completely side-tracked interacting with people who do things differently but who ultimately share your cause. 

Odds are someone needs to hear what they have to say in the way they say it. Odds are somebody needs to hear what you have to say in the way you have to say it too. Just don’t lose sight of the real causes of your discomfort.

[narcissusanasui]

all of an 😎

*em. all of em. jesus christ.

god katie, fInE (but thanks, cherie, love yo

1. if someone wanted to really understand you, what would they read, watch, and listen to?

Read Les Mis, watch Game of Thrones and Voltron, listen to folk rock (especially Phillip Phillips and Mumford & Sons)

2. have you ever found a writer who thinks just like you? if so, who?

Never really thought about that, but the writing styles of Dickens, Doyle, and Austin always stick in my head so i guess them???

3. list your fandoms and one character from each that you identify with.

katie NO, that’s TOO MUCH. so i guess i’ll just give examples of the ones that i have actually thought about relating to:

Katara from A:tla was like THE strong female character of my childhood. Guarantee that she made me a feminist

Lance from Voltron because i spent way too much time like 4th grade through 11th worrying that i was that “seventh wheel” and thinking that i didn’t have a lot of skill and i wanna support my friends so yeah

Yuuri Katsuki from Yuri on Ice. look what the world did to this guy - he’s got anxiety

Ennoshita Chikara from Haikyuu because BOI I ALWAYS GET SHOVED INTO HAVING TO LEAD PEOPLE BUT IT TOOK ME YEARS TO UNDERSTAND IT

Sugawara Koushi from Haikyuu. i am the Mom Friend and i will fight you

4. do you like your name?  is there another name you think would fit you better?

i do like my name. my parents almost named me Colleen - which i don’t think fits, but then again i believe that we all grow to fit our names. i hated my last name as a little kid because no one would say it right (an issue that exists today too) and like when i started elementary school i straight up kept the spelling of it on a piece of paper in my pocket so i wouldnt mess up. now i love it and i think my name flows really well and if i get married i might not change it.

5. do you think of yourself as a human being or a human doing? do you identify yourself by the things you do?

well i call myself a human being. and while my actions are important to me, thinking too much about what i do and what i couldve done gets me freaked out so instead i sit and just be. i’ll think calmly and exist

6. are you religious/spiritual?

im agnostic - raised Roman Catholic (but even then we werent strict about following it but i did do ccd and my sacraments so yeah). i want to believe that there is something but there just isnt enough solid evidence for me to be comfortable and if there is some god or force or something, i am a minuscule piece of the massive universe and that god wouldnt give a shit so why should they influence my decisions? i love religions tho. they have fascinating history and i love seeing all the similarites because it just shows how so many humans are all so similarly spiritual and through seeing those similarites it makes me feel more spiritual because i know my catholic upbringing shaped me as a person and i know that there has to be a deeper meaning behind the world’s religions being so connected

7. do you care about your ethnicity?

yes. im fifty shades of white, but the larger pieces of my background are the cultures that my family celebrate still today and they are what i identify as. im italian-irish-american with a polish last name and i will eat my cuisine and wear the Callahan family crest and hopefully make it to Avelino someday

8. what musical artists have you most felt connected to over your lifetime?

i was raised on billy joel and elton john so their music is built into me with such a powerful level of nostalgia that i will feel like im back in my house before we repainted it and replaced the furniture and im dancing like an idiot to crocodile rock at age 4 again. PP and M&S hit my emotions hard since i first heard them, but M&S’s Sigh No More album will forever equal driving to chicago because we played that album and only that album the. whole. time. except at night because thats when billy joel comes out

9. are you an artist?

at the most basic definition yes. i make art for fun and relaxation through music and writing and doodling and crafts

10. do you have a creed?

i just want to be content with my life when i die. i want to know that i loved and supported people the best i could. so i guess always put the family first (family being whoever i deem to be in that category). and don’t be an asshole.

11. describe your ideal day.

not too hot or cold, like the temperature fall shouldve been. hiking a trail or mountain with changing leaves, watch some of my favorite shows, go to one of my favorite small restaurants.

12. dog person or cat person?

cat.

13. inside or outdoors?

inside

14. are you a musician?

yes

15. five most influential books over your lifetime.

stoppppppp. Tale of Two Cities, Catch-22, Pride & Prejudice, Night, To Kill a Mockingbird

16. if you’d grown up in a different environment, do you think you’d have turned out the same?

nope. i grew up 30-60 minutes from some of the most important locations in american history. went to them way too many times as a kid so then when i was a teen i just snapped like “wait some people only come here once in their lives and thats why we have so many annoying tourists! because this kind of stuff ISNT NORMAL?!” and now im a history major so yeah

17. would you say your tumblr is a fair representation of the “real you”?

almost. i cant really be fully myself because that involves way too much of my personal life and im scared of accidentally pissing people off on the internet so there is a little bit more filter here

18. what’s your patronus?

i actually dont know because i lost my pottermore login forever ago so i never actually did that quiz

19. which Harry Potter house would you be in? or are you a muggle?

im ravenclaw with hufflepuff as my secondary, so im a ravenpuff, but ravenclaw is totally my main

20. would you rather be in Middle Earth, Narnia, Hogwarts, or somewhere else?

Hogwarts or the world of Avatar (not the blue people one) - like after war when everything is chill and magical

21. do you love easily?

when i get attached to someone, good luck getting rid of me, im here for the long haul, so yes

22. list the top five things you spend the most time doing, in order.

listening to music, thinking about fictional stories i want to write, reading, watching videos, actually writing (whether that be my journal or my fiction or hw)

23. how often would you want to see your family every year?

as much as possible

24. have you ever felt like you had a “mind-meld” with someone?

as when i felt perfectly in sync talking to someone? yes with my history prof and with my father

25. could you live as a hermit?

im an introvert but id miss my loved ones too much

26. how would you describe your gender/sexuality?

im cis female and im asexual (somewhere on the spectrum), my romantic attraction is something im still figuring out

27. do you feel like your outside appearance is a fair representation of the “real you”?

katie considering you figured me out basically on sight, yes

28. on a scale from 1 to 10, how hard is it for someone to get under your skin?

5 or 6?

29. three songs that you connect with right now.

“Africa” by Toto because it’s still in my head. “Float On” by Modest Mouse. “Sound of Change” by Dirty Head.

30. pick one of your favorite quotes.

“I am the one thing in life I can control. I am inimitable. I am an original.” - said by Aaron Burr in Hamilton

katie i shouldve been finishing my essay

I would say send me a number but this is done now lol so go reblog it and join the fun

[nightcoremoon]

hugely unpopular opinion here

I'm not gonna vocally support incest because, gross, but like... can we fucking stop putting it next to pedophilia, bestiality, rape, and abuse?

if two rednecks hook up after a family reunion, but they're both consenting adults and there isn't any coercion involved, yeah I find it to be creepy and gross because I wouldn't fuck any of my cousins, but putting it at the same level as the big for of actually irredeemable and bad things just really rubs me the wrong way.

now, fucking your parents or children is wrong from a biological, psychological, and emotional standpoint. if they got pregnant then that child would be super deformed beyond belief. coercion will ALWAYS be present in a romantic relationship between parent and child. sibling fucking is also a straight shot to webbed feet. doubly so if they're twins (dear japan... stop).

but two people whose parents just so happen to be related to each other, if they really wanted to fuck, and they agreed to it, the problems I see it are VASTLY overshadowed by the problems with coercion and biological disasters, pedophilia (kids can't consent), bestiality (non-sapient animals can't consent), rape (no consent), and abuse (I really shouldn't have to explain why that's bad).

I'll make an analogy to put it in perspective.

misogyny is bad. racism is bad. homophobia is bad. transphobia is bad. antisemitism is bad. islamophobia is bad. xenophobia is bad. ableism is bad. classism is bad. this we all can agree on. fat-shaming is also bad. but women, people of color, queer people, jews, muslims, immigrants, the handicapped and mentally ill and neurodivergent, and the poor have all been long victims of stripping civil rights, genocide, lack of representation in media, throughout all sorts of societies and cultures: victimized by bigotry, prejudice, and hatred. fat people are often mocked and receive subpar medical care in modern day america. which sucks, don't get me wrong, but if I were asked if between fat people and, say, black people, who faced a harder time, I'd without question say black people. fat people aren't murdered by police. fat people have never been rounded up in camps and killed off. fat people don't have an identity to strip. being fat doesn't alter the chemistry of your brain or inhibit the abilities of the body or restrict you to a different social class or provide leeway for people to deny you civil liberties on account of their religion on as mass a scale as the others. it can make life as a woman, person of color, queer person, ethnic or religious minority, disabled or mentally ill person, or impoverished person harder when in conjunction with that minority, but by itself, if you're a straight white neurotypical otherwise able bodied christian (or ambiguously atheist) american cis male who happens to be fat, for the love of god shut the fuck up about how much you're ~oppressed~ for weighing over 250 pounds.

and that's the end of the analogy.

in the analogy, non-coercive incest would be fat shaming. bad, yes, but to a much lesser extent than literally everything else mentioned. I know that analogies are difficult for discourse gremlins on this hellsite to understand but I'm hoping people are smart enough not to froth at the mouth and zero in on buzzwords and frame me as some incest-loving fat-shaming bigoted perverted asshole.

and furthermore, a lot of ancient (like, before common era level ancient) cultures around the world often had no choice but to resort to incest in order to keep their people going. egypt, greece, rome, japan, china, india, many native american, latin american, and african tribes, pacific island peoples, scandinavian peoples, countless others i'm forgetting about right now, all have long histories of incest that permeates their culture and religious beliefs. maybe not sibling or parent-child (in all cases; some did that too), but a lot of cousins fucked. and it's super fucked up to brand all of those cultures as evil as pedophilia/bestiality/rape for doing things that we in our current state of society are afforded the privilege of looking down upon. even cultures victimized by many genocides like jews are populous enough now that they won't have to fuck their cousins just to keep their bloodlines alive and probably won't ever considering just how many humans there are in the world.

now, this can totally come off wrong and... bad. one thought that popped into my head was "are you implying that incest was normal in ancient brown skinned people thus suggesting they're rooted in savagery and grossness and thus asserting your own white superiority" are you reed richards because WOW that is quite a stretch. plus exclusively white skinned people fucked their children to keep the family on the throne [well, and egyptians, but that's a tale for a different time], so jot that down.

and of course it doesn't reflect well on me that I'm saying anything other than INCEST IS JUST AS BAD AS PEDOPHILIA/BESTIALITY/RAPE... I wouldn't fuck anyone in my biological family or anyone who marries into it, and I certainly don't wanna be around people who would. and gross fortysomething uncles with leery eyes at their teenage nieces are, well, pedophiles anyway. however, I feel like when it's not coercive it's not as big of a deal and that it shouldn't be demonized- now here's the important part- AS MUCH as the other things that I've mentioned.

now of course, as a person who would never consider anything like that, my perspective is heavily skewed. and as a person who has not been victimized by non-coercive incest (i was sexually abused as a child by most likely either my stepgrandpa who watches child porn and molested my sister as a kid, my schizophrenic methhead uncle who watches child porn and dates women the mental age of children, or my father during a crack and heroin binge, in descending order of possibility, but that's got nothing to do with consensual cousinfucking), I'm not attuned to the psychological effects of consensual cousinfucking, and am not exactly the most knowledgeable person on the subject.

THEREFORE.

if I'm wrong and there's scientific studies done on the subject and there are dissenting logical opinions I would love to hear them because I'm sure there's GOT to be a legitimate, tangible reason why incest between cousins is bad.

*also on the subject, technically speaking every single human on earth is probably descended from the same gene pool. scientifically it's from the first humans who evolved from a common ancestor with apes, theologically (from only a judeochristian perspective) it's from noah's sons ham, shem, and japheth, and I'm sure that there's a hundred other ways to trace back all of humanity to one single set of parents, so in an odd way all humans are distant cousins to each other. I'm curious as to know exactly how far away two people need to be on a family tree for it to no longer be technically classified as incest. fourth cousin? fifth cousin? sixth? ninth? twelfth? this is purely a scientific curiosity only tangentially related to the rest of the post and should be ignored when it comes to the other passages.*

TL;DR I don't have enough of a proper base of knowledge to understand the specific exact logical reasonings behind why non-coercive non-pedophilic consensual incest that won't result in horrible birth defects is bad. I know that it is bad, but beyond just a modern social norm... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ idfk man I just want a link to someone laying it down using science n shit so I can shut down fuckin white supremacists on twitter or something

edit- no anons, no notes. nobody read this lulz

[enetarch]

Discussing How An Event Affected You, and What You Wanted Instead

When understanding a problem, testing samples include or exclude distinctive differences in a population. Diversity in the sample set or lack there of may be necessary depending on what problem is being observed. In the case of Darwin’s Finches, samplings were finches from different islands. In the case of a class room, it would be students with various and diverse backgrounds.  In the case of companies, it would be the various employees with diverse backgrounds.  And, in the case with clients, every client is considered unique.

While samples may integrate or segregate based on differences, it is used scientifically to study a particular and unique characteristic of the population as a whole.  Who is affected by this problem and why?  For cancer patients, the segregation of candidates may be required to identify a unique gene flaw, which is then tested against non-cancer patients.  The same would hold true with Alzheimer patients.  Or patients with Leukemia due to exposure to glyphosate [ Round Up ].

When segregation and integration are used in a human population to define racism, it is not used scientifically to understand a problem, but to create an artificial problem that doesn’t exist, and probably never did. Yet, it is used to exclude and separate people from opportunities that should be available to everyone.

Racism is not a prejudice against humans of different races, because there are no different human races. Rather, racism is the process whereby certain characteristics — like religion — are taken as signs of essential biological difference. Sociologists Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields call this creation of difference "racecraft." Racecraft is all the cultural work done to divide people into arbitrary categories called "races." Once you've established that this human, over here, is not in fact fully human, discrimination and prejudice follows naturally.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlaws discrimination in hiring on the basis of "race, color, religion, sex, age, or national origin."

A recent ruling by U.S. Magistrate Mark Hornsby of Louisiana helped to clarify the distinction between race and racism. Hornsby ruled July 16 in a civil case Joshua Bonadona vs Brewer, where Bonadona sued under civil rights law, alleging that Brewer had discriminated against him by denying him a coaching position because his mother was Jewish, even though he himself is Catholic. In this case, Bonadona wasn't being discriminated against for religion, since he was not actually Jewish. So was he then being discriminated against on racial grounds, based on his heritage?

Hornsby concluded that he was, since "Jewish citizens have been excluded from certain clubs or neighborhoods," Hornsby writes, "and they have been denied jobs and other opportunities based on the fact that they were Jewish, with no particular concern as to a given individual’s religious leanings. Thus, they have been treated like a racial or ethnic group that Title VII was designed to protect from employment discrimination based on membership in that group.”

Systematic segregation was and is used to create unnecessary problems, like: discrimination, isolation, wage gaps, roadblocks to work, investment disenfranchisement, poorer public services, fewer business opportunities, opposing culture fears, concentrated fears, linguistic and dialogue drift … just to name a few problems at the society level.  

And in a recent conversation concerning low wages for teachers, I stated, “are you aware of the stress placed on people who are earning below that limit [4x their rent]. They and their children are not able to participate economically in our society. Many of these homes have high ACE numbers, leading to children that will not be productive when the graduate from high school or college, simply because they will be dealing with psychological problems and inappropriate social habits.”

To break down the stereotypes created through segregation there are two sets of instruction needed:

1. Debate as Scientific Inquery

2. Facilitating the affects of an action

Our country is not a democracy as many believe, but a republic.  A republic is built on the power of representation, or put another way, sampling.  The idea is that a representation of the populous as a whole is taken to understand the social direction the group as a whole should go.  We consider how these representatives are elected the democratic process, but it’s more than just voting .. it’s talking, and not just talking (free speech), it’s how we discuss issues that matter.

Debate provides the guiding principle on how issues are discussed. We don’t have to use the rules of debate, or Roberts Rules of Order to insure that debates between 2 or 5 individuals are handled with decorum. This methodology only gets in the way at this level of discussion.  Instead, it is to focus on the issue vs labeling.

Labels – topics, groups of people, types of fruit, … - are used convey meaning when a longer explanation of meaning is not necessary.  The distinction between Roman Tomatoes and Cherry Tomatoes is easily understood. Yet,  labels easily lead to classifications based in racism or wealth – squalor, poor, low, middle, and wealthy, upper class.  Labels can also be applied to the conditions children at home face – single parent, fatherless, only child, middle child, youngest child, molested, endangered, …

Whenever someone uses a label in a debate, the participants in the debate should not accept the label as given, but instead use the scientific method to consider the label’s validity.  Is gravity really 9.8 meters per second squared, or only at sea level?  What happens as we move farther away from the earths surface, does gravity change?  

Nor should labels be used in a derogatory fashion to label a debater, such as name calling, or race bating.  “You are only saying that because you’re a bleeding heart liberal!  Stop being a snow flake and accept the fact that homeless people choose to be low life’s who don’t want to work!  They could find work if they wanted to, they just don’t want to!”

Scientific Inquiry, uses 6 questions to determine if everyone agrees that something is what it is, vs common sense:

1. observer the phenomena

2. form a question

3. create a theory about the phenomena

4. conduct an experiment

5. analyze the data and draw conclusions

6. see if others can replicate your results

Here the scientific process can be used to test that gravity does in fact change as you move away from sea level, though ever so slightly.  And, it can be used to examine the labels used in a debate.  Those labels that concern the topic of diversity in homeless populations.  We could simply challenge the observation that all homeless people are alike. Are they?  What if some of the homeless do actually want to be homeless, while others are migratory, and others became homeless due to economic circumstances that they are unable to change and would willingly choose a home if the opportunity arose, and so on.

The biggest challenge will be changing the culture ingrained methods we use to discuss how a problem affects us.  I say culturally ingrained, because as a child I was uniquely positioned to watch how a family issue affected me personally, and how my mother used her authority and position to pressure me into silence.  This issue is the, “Family Secret!”. It’s passed down through the generations. It happens to every generation. It is never spoken about, because if others were to learn of the family secret they would judge us, ridicule us, think less of us, or they would split us up and put us in different families that would be far worse than what I was dealing with as a 5 year old.

The challenge is to provide a space where people of all ages can:

1. state what the situation was

2. voice how a situation affected them

3. state what they wanted instead

"We believe that the real number of children whose records were lost or who were afraid ever to come forward is in the thousands," the grand jury report says.  

In a study of children exposed to violence, including being a witness to and a victim of violence, is examined among 8-11-year-old children of migrant and seasonal farm workers. Potential relationships between sociodemographic factors and violence exposure are examined, and associations between violence exposure and children's emotional and behavioral problems, and weapon carrying behavior are investigated. The results show that greater than 50% of the children had been exposed to violence, with 46% having witnessed violence among others and 19% having been the direct victims of violence.

Violence exposure was positively related to children's emotional problems, behavioral problems, and weapon carrying behavior. Compared to non exposed children, violence exposed children were eight times more likely to evidence internalizing problems, were six times more likely to evidence externalizing problems, and were four times more likely to carry weapons (specifically, knives or guns).

As NYPD SVU demonstrates in their series, is that children do not have the language to articulate the violence that they have witnessed.  Nor, when the violence is reported, are people willing to listen to it, as the Grand Jury in Pennsylvania reported.  Victims of rape were often told to get out of the precinct house by officers who didn’t want to hear about it.  If they made it past the officers to a detective, the case was often lost.

When university's create “Safe Spaces”, what they should really be creating are “Safe Spaces for people to talk about the violence they witnessed or was perpetrated on them.”  In most cases, these safe spaces are created by therapeutic integration groups, where “Adults Molested as Children” or AMACs are able to see how the violence affected everyone involved.  They are encouraged to discuss how the violence affected them. And, they are encouraged to discuss what they wanted instead.

I said that this is a cultural issue, since this same situation [non disclosure and confrontation] is perpetrated by the HR departments.  People who feel offended are separated from those that have offended them, instead of confronting them.  Closure comes from being able to describe the situation, state how if affected them, and what they wanted instead. While I won’t go into all the legalities of why this methodology came about and persists, I can use this forum to advocate that the HR department review it’s policies with group psychologists to see if this method could be employed to improve relations between various groups of people.

References:

Judge rules that Judaism is not a race but Jewish people can be targeted for racism. Here's why that matters.

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/judge-rules-judaism-not-race-jewish-people-can-be-targeted-ncna896806

Economic Consequences of Segregation

http://www.umich.edu/~lawrace/consequences.htm

Scientific Method Steps

http://www.schoolofdragons.com/how-to-train-your-dragon/the-scientific-method/scientific-method-steps

Report details sexual abuse by more than 300 priests in Pennsylvania's Catholic Church

https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/14/us/pennsylvania-catholic-church-grand-jury/index.html

Children Face Dangers On Farms, But Not From Farmwork

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2012/03/09/148320219/children-face-dangers-on-farms-but-not-from-farmwork

Survey of exposure to violence among the children of migrant and seasonal farm workers.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7610214

Key facts about children’s exposure to violence

https://www.childtrends.org/indicators/childrens-exposure-to-violence

[qluemagazine]

Beyonce Photographed by Tyler Mitchell

Since the news broke that Beyonce will be the cover star for the Vogue September issue, we’ve been anticipating what the cover will look like, especially since she’s the one in charge of everything about the cover and as she told Clover Hope for the cover, you can bet she’s a super human, she’s a legend and we can’t get enough of every of her look for this cover and even her words too.

Freedom

I don’t like too much structure. I like to be free. I’m not alive unless I am creating something. I’m not happy if I’m not creating, if I’m not dreaming, if I’m not creating a dream and making it into something real. I’m not happy if I’m not improving, evolving, moving forward, inspiring, teaching, and learning.

Legacy

My mother taught me the importance not just of being seen but of seeing myself. As the mother of two girls, it’s important to me that they see themselves too—in books, films, and on runways. It’s important to me that they see themselves as CEOs, as bosses, and that they know they can write the script for their own lives—that they can speak their minds and they have no ceiling. They don’t have to be a certain type or fit into a specific category. They don’t have to be politically correct, as long as they’re authentic, respectful, compassionate, and empathetic. They can explore any religion, fall in love with any race, and love who they want to love.

I want the same things for my son. I want him to know that he can be strong and brave but that he can also be sensitive and kind. I want my son to have a high emotional IQ where he is free to be caring, truthful, and honest. It’s everything a woman wants in a man, and yet we don’t teach it to our boys.

I hope to teach my son not to fall victim to what the internet says he should be or how he should love. I want to create better representations for him so he is allowed to reach his full potential as a man, and to teach him that the real magic he possesses in the world is the power to affirm his own existence.

I’m in a place of gratitude right now.

I am accepting of who I am. I will continue to explore every inch of my soul and every part of my artistry.

I want to learn more, teach more, and live in full.

I’ve worked long and hard to be able to get to a place where I can choose to surround myself with what fulfills and inspires me.

Opening Doors

Until there is a mosaic of perspectives coming from different ethnicities behind the lens, we will continue to have a narrow approach and view of what the world actually looks like. That is why I wanted to work with this brilliant 23-year-old photographer Tyler Mitchell.

When I first started, 21 years ago, I was told that it was hard for me to get onto covers of magazines because black people did not sell. Clearly that has been proven a myth. Not only is an African American on the cover of the most important month for Vogue, this is the first ever Vogue cover shot by an African American photographer.

It’s important to me that I help open doors for younger artists. There are so many cultural and societal barriers to entry that I like to do what I can to level the playing field, to present a different point of view for people who may feel like their voices don’t matter.

Imagine if someone hadn’t given a chance to the brilliant women who came before me: Josephine Baker, Nina Simone, Eartha Kitt, Aretha Franklin, Tina Turner, Diana Ross, Whitney Houston, and the list goes on. They opened the doors for me, and I pray that I’m doing all I can to open doors for the next generation of talents.

If people in powerful positions continue to hire and cast only people who look like them, sound like them, come from the same neighborhoods they grew up in, they will never have a greater understanding of experiences different from their own. They will hire the same models, curate the same art, cast the same actors over and over again, and we will all lose. The beauty of social media is it’s completely democratic. Everyone has a say. Everyone’s voice counts, and everyone has a chance to paint the world from their own perspective.

Pregnancy & Body Acceptance

After the birth of my first child, I believed in the things society said about how my body should look. I put pressure on myself to lose all the baby weight in three months, and scheduled a small tour to assure I would do it. Looking back, that was crazy. I was still breastfeeding when I performed the Revel shows in Atlantic City in 2012. After the twins, I approached things very differently.

I was 218 pounds the day I gave birth to Rumi and Sir. I was swollen from toxemia and had been on bed rest for over a month. My health and my babies’ health were in danger, so I had an emergency C-section. We spent many weeks in the NICU. My husband was a soldier and such a strong support system for me. I am proud to have been a witness to his strength and evolution as a man, a best friend, and a father. I was in survival mode and did not grasp it all until months later. Today I have a connection to any parent who has been through such an experience. After the C-section, my core felt different. It had been major surgery. Some of your organs are shifted temporarily, and in rare cases, removed temporarily during delivery. I am not sure everyone understands that. I needed time to heal, to recover. During my recovery, I gave myself self-love and self-care, and I embraced being curvier. I accepted what my body wanted to be. After six months, I started preparing for Coachella. I became vegan temporarily, gave up coffee, alcohol, and all fruit drinks. But I was patient with myself and enjoyed my fuller curves. My kids and husband did, too.

I think it’s important for women and men to see and appreciate the beauty in their natural bodies. That’s why I stripped away the wigs and hair extensions and used little makeup for this shoot.

To this day my arms, shoulders, breasts, and thighs are fuller. I have a little mommy pouch, and I’m in no rush to get rid of it. I think it’s real. Whenever I’m ready to get a six-pack, I will go into beast zone and work my ass off until I have it. But right now, my little FUPA and I feel like we are meant to be.

Ancestry

I come from a lineage of broken male-female relationships, abuse of power, and mistrust. Only when I saw that clearly was I able to resolve those conflicts in my own relationship. Connecting to the past and knowing our history makes us both bruised and beautiful.

I researched my ancestry recently and learned that I come from a slave owner who fell in love with and married a slave. I had to process that revelation over time. I questioned what it meant and tried to put it into perspective. I now believe it’s why God blessed me with my twins. Male and female energy was able to coexist and grow in my blood for the first time. I pray that I am able to break the generational curses in my family and that my children will have less complicated lives.

My Journey

There are many shades on every journey. Nothing is black or white. I’ve been through hell and back, and I’m grateful for every scar. I have experienced betrayals and heartbreaks in many forms. I have had disappointments in business partnerships as well as personal ones, and they all left me feeling neglected, lost, and vulnerable. Through it all I have learned to laugh and cry and grow. I look at the woman I was in my 20s and I see a young lady growing into confidence but intent on pleasing everyone around her. I now feel so much more beautiful, so much sexier, so much more interesting. And so much more powerful.

Beyonce Photographed by Tyler Mitchell

Beyonce Photographed by Tyler Mitchell

Beyonce Photographed by Tyler Mitchell

Beyonce Photographed by Tyler Mitchell

Beyonce Photographed by Tyler Mitchell

Beyonce Photographed by Tyler Mitchell

Beyonce Photographed by Tyler Mitchell

Beyonce Photographed by Tyler Mitchell

Beyonce Photographed by Tyler Mitchell

Beyonce Photographed by Tyler Mitchell

Beyonce In Her Own Words; Vogue September Cover Since the news broke that Beyonce will be the cover star for the Vogue September issue, we've been anticipating what the cover will look like, especially since she's the one in charge of everything about the cover and as she told Clover Hope for the cover, you can bet she's a super human, she's a legend and we can't get enough of every of her look for this cover and even her words too.

[salmanadergalal]

Where is Media Power ?

Introduction

Communication theorists have always been arguing that news media can’t be taken at face value and that’s since the Linear Model of Communication; which is a one-way form of communication that does not involve any feedback or response from the receiver. Consequently, it was followed by the notion of the Interactive Model, which added the receiver’s feedback to the original message indicating that communication is not a one way but a-two way process.

Amongst the vast technological advancements of the 21st century, the linear model of communication and the Bullet theory effect of mass media have become obsolete. Media power has greatly varied since then, which worked in with the audience’s increasing media literacy levels. Still, we are in no way totally immune to the power of media and the politics of news. Some may know how to critically read and analyze media content, but they still get hailed by it.

That’s why we need tools and theories to help us discern how information works.

The Listening Post: Media Theorized; is a project conducted by Al Jazeera Media Network in collaboration with journalists from all around the world. This project have basically compiled the theoretical works of five famous thinkers and introduced them in a series of videos to provide the audience with a critical tool to help dissect and examine what they are exposed to on a daily basis.

This paper will reflect upon the ideas of these thinkers and find possible correlations in their theorization of media.

Roland Barthes

Like his fellow theorists, Barthes- as a literary theorist- urged media criticism and reading the semiology of news. He has perceived any linguistic sign; an image, a text...etc as a cultural content. These signs can be encoded on two levels. The denotative level; which gives a straightforward and immediate understanding that is deprived of any association. The connotative level is when we connect context, cultural elements and ideas to the sign.

Barthes work was mostly centered around how connotations are intentionally formulated by elites to induce meanings that support the structures of dominant power, meaning that media can act as a check on political power.

Noam Chomsky

Chomsky is a famous American linguist, philosopher and social critic who argued that mass media act as machines that manufacture public consent which means that media tell us what those in power need them to tell us, so we can all fall in place. Consent can be manufactured through providing a content that is imbued with connotations which will eventually induce a political infused layer of meaning to the text or the image. Both Barthes and Chomsky differently analyzed the mechanics of power but their meeting point was where connotations- through political and economical power- can lead to public consent.

Marshall McLuhan: “The Medium is the Message”

McLuhan as a leading media theorist during the 60s believed not in the sole power of content but in the medium that delivers it. He argued that if we don’t understand the medium, we can’t fully understand the message. With each advancement that has been brought to different media, our collective experience as audience was formed and shifted through our understanding of the medium and how we relate to it. Thus, the way in which we understand the medium affects our understanding of the message.

“We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us” Marshall McLuhan.

A connection can be drawn from here to Barthes idea of it’s the reader’s understanding of the text that gives it a meaning and that’s how he/ she is the one to give life to the mediated content -whether it’s a text or an image- and not necessarily the stodium of the author or the image maker (Attalah,2017). Media may try to manufacture consent through implicit focus on what power structures want us to know or perceive, but it’s how we interpret the connotational meaning of such images that determine if we will or will not fall in line to media myths and building ideologies.  

Stuart Hall

The Jamaican- British Historian, has argued that media representations are always saturated with ideology. He focused his work on breaking the code of such ideologies. Having been born in colonial Jamaica and studied in Britain, Hall reflected upon his experience with colonialism to explain mechanics of media power in representing race, gender, ethnicity, religion, ...etc. He believed that media has a great role in structuring certain molds of race and class in the British society. However, he went beyond the simplistic encoding that accused the English of being inherently racist. To understand how racism functions and how power relations are embedded in who represents what, Hall combined Marxist class categories, with the role of culture in colonialism (Kundnani, 2017).  In Hall’s account, media -constructed images of racial crime, Muslims, and Othering of immigrants, were contained by the English people and used to project and work through their anxieties. Hall believed in the power of media representations, and it’s role in constructing our knowledge about certain people and certain places. Whereas other media theorists believed that messages are imposed from above, Hall argued that power is more complex, and in his analysis he found forms of resistance to ideologized media narratives that can be seen now in the examples of “ Black Lives Matter”, “Women’s March”.

Through the lens of representation, Hall addressed colonialism and otherness. In that he drew on Edward Said’s -the Palestinian- American literary historian- conceptualization of the colonized as the Other. A common ground can be found between how both theorists reflected upon their multicultural experiences, and then explained the postcolonialism effect on media narratives. Meanwhile, Hall gave us tools to understand the ideology of media representation of race in Britain, Said showed how the West had the power to stereotype the colonial as the Other and as well leave them voiceless. In his book “Orientalism”, Said explained how the Orient was helplessly captured in Western media frames and stereotypes without being able to represent itself. Hall said “The representations of the colonized were internalized by the colonized: They had the power to make us see and experience ourselves as ‘Other’. These means that such powerful representations constructed an image of what the West know about Other people and societies and they as well affected how the colonial perceived their self-image. Hall used representation as a lens to critique ideologies and Said used Orientalism to read the media, spot the stereotype and unlearn the myth (“Media Thoerized”, 2017).

Collectively, all these media theories are correlated in their belief in the power of media, but they differently attempted to crack down it’s rhetoric. Though most of these theorists began their work in the 20th century and applied it to the 19th century, all of their notions are evident in modern culture. Hence, no matter how much tools we use to read the media and discern it’s strategies, it still keeps a hold of us if not politically, it will entertainmently. We need these theories now more than ever to help us in our immense encounter with media everyday. As a form of power, media hegemony can be spotted, but hardly controlled. We are never sure what’s real,  as power is always somewhere else.

Bibliography

Online Articles

Attalah, L. (2017, March 02). Roland Barthes in Egypt: Authors and Authoritarianism. Retrieved April 01, 2017, from http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/listeningpost/2017/03/roland-barthes-egypt-authors-authoritarianism-170302144419114.html

Kundnani, A. (2017, March 02). Journalism, identity and what Stuart Hall taught me. Retrieved April 02, 2017, from http://www.aljazeera.com/programmes/listeningpost/2017/02/journalism-identity-stuart-hall-taught-170228105012994.html

Websites

Jazeera, A. (2017, February 28). Media Theorised. Retrieved April 01, 2017, from

http://interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/2017/the-listening-post-media-theorised/phone/index.html

Youtube

Edward Said on Orientalism:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVC8EYd_Z_g

HyperNormalization:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fny99f8amM

[itsthefishdoctor-blog]

Bet you can’t guess what this is about #NastyWoman

I thought I’d start this very overdue blog talking about the thing on everyone’s mind: the Super Bowl.

Lol jk.

So it’s block weekend and I have way more pressing things to do than write a blog. I really, really should have been studying instead of sitting here typing this post. I was going to wait until after my exam tomorrow but I’ve honestly been too worked up all weekend and there was no way I was going to make it through the rest of the day without saying something about the women’s march on washington.

Before I even get started on what’s going on now, I think it’s important to have quick recap/history lesson so we’re all on the same page here.

I’m going old school here and starting with a brief recap of The Constitution, ya know, that super old document our President just swore to “preserve, uphold, and protect”. In case you had forgotten or idk, never learned it, our constitution has a nifty first amendment stating: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.” That is literally the first amendment. Right there at the top. Just a friendly reminder of that stuff you learned in high school government class that everyone seems to now have an issue with.

Onto the next history topic. Marches on Washington date as far back 1894 beginning with a march literally from Ohio (you go boys) for workers rights. The more notable marches include the women’s suffrage march in 1913, the Klu Klux Klan march in 1925 (yea, that happened), and the march on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963 (more affectionately known as the Civil Rights March). While each of those three marches deserve some recognition for various reasons, I’m gonna talk about the Civil Rights march. This is where MLK Jr. gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech. This is where “10 demands” were made calling for equality in employment, wages, and education. This is where the country came together giving, a face to injustice, racism, and division. This is the march that showed the power of peaceful demonstration and unity. Fast forward 50 or so years and hundred of thousands of women have gathered in Washington D.C. (And other major cities across the globe) to peacefully protest. To stand together, united in our outrage, our embarrassment, our fear. Many people are, again, calling them crybabies or sore losers. Many people think they’re are being dramatic and have no cause to protest. Many people don’t think protesting serves a point. I hope some of those people are reading this because honestly, I want you to hear this and I want to hear your reply because I want to understand. I want to understand how you don’t understand this march. I want to understand how you can mock and belittle these hundreds of thousands of women standing up for what they believe in. I want to understand how you can see something like this and not even try to understand what it must have taken for so many women to be a part of it. I want to understand how you don’t understand, really I do. I wish I didn’t understand. I wish I didn’t feel the same thing these women do or could stop myself from empathizing with the other groups of people they march for. I wish my privilege of being a white, upper-class woman made me oblivious to the injustices faced by so many in our country. But I do understand, because it doesn’t. Donald Trump is the president of the United States. This is a fact. He is the president of my country, a country I am so honored and proud to belong to. I, and the majority of the country, am not happy about this fact. I am not unhappy because he is a Republican. I am not unhappy because Hilary Clinton lost. I am unhappy because this man is not MY president. I get how this is a hard statement for people to swallow. Really, truly I do. When I first heard it, I was a little put off by it as well because, well, he is the president. And even though he is a master at denying facts, I can appreciate that a fact is a fact. But even though he is THE president, I do not have to claim him as mine. He does not belong to me and he sure as hell does not represent me. I’d like to think he doesn’t represent most of us, even people who voted for him. I’d like to believe MY country does not relate to a LYING, racist, homophobic, ignorant, narcissistic, deceitful, close-minded, accused sex offender. But ya’ll really are making it hard. I get why some of you felt like you had to vote for him. I get how you felt like you had no choice to look past those qualities he embodies and chose to make him president. I don’t understand how you of all people aren’t standing out there with these women or, even worse, are criticizing them for criticizing him. And maybe you don’t fully understand the point of the protest. I’ve actually seen a couple of people who genuinely seem to be trying to understand what the goal of these women is so I’ll address that now. First off, they aren’t trying to get Trump removed from office. Seriously. Even if that was possible by a simple march, no one wants to get stuck with Mike freaking Pence as our president. They aren’t trying to demand “special privileges” or “throw a tantrum” because they didn’t get what they wanted. Hundreds of thousands of women all over the world did not give up their precious time just to throw a damn fit. Come on guys. These women are marching as a statement to the new president and to the world. They are marching for their rights and the rights of their daughters and minorities, and the LGBTQ community, and immigrants, and every other group of people who Donald Trump has at some point in time been made to feel less human and less important. They are marching to show that no matter who lives in the white house, our country will not stay silent to injustice, inequality, and hate. We will not allow anyone to take away rights from our fellow citizens. We will not allow rape culture and sexual assault to be normalized and accepted. We will not allow racism and xenophobia to be a part of our society. We will not allow the values that President Trump has exhibited to be the culture of our country. We will not allow anyone, including President Trump, to silence us. And we will absolutely not allow the world to ignore the already great nation we are so lucky to live in. I am so proud of these women. I wish I could be there to join their force but am so thrilled to watch this historic and powerful event unfold. I am so lucky to belong to a generation of such bad-ass women who refuse to be ignored. It is such an honor to live in a country where we are guaranteed the freedom to peacefully assemble and make our voices, our concerns heard. So to all my fellow nasty women and their supporters, THANK YOU. Thank you for standing up for my right to my body, for my children’s right to love whoever the hell they want, for my friends’ of any ethnicity and their right to feel safe and valued. Thank you for not forcing those less financially privileged from choosing whether to have a lump in their breast examined or feed their family for a week. Thank you for demanding that my work be just as valuable and well-compensated as my male co-workers. Thank you for showing future generations of women that they are beautiful and important no matter what size they wear. Thank you for showing the world that no man has the right to touch any woman without her consent. Thank you for being an inspiration in a time where so many of us feel so little hope. To those of you who are rolling your eyes at these protests and belittling these women, I also want to thank you. It is because of people like you that this march even existed and this will certainly be an event that history will applaud. Its definitely one I’m so proud to witness. I also hope at some point you can understand why this is necessary. I hope you can understand that these women are fighting for your right to be either pro-life or pro-choice, fighting for your right to make decisions about your own body. I hope you never need to utilized Planned Parenthood’s services and are never forced to deal with an unplanned pregnancy. I hope you one day understand that demanding that women make as much money as their male counterparts is nothing but common sense. I hope you understand the irony of taxing feminine hygiene products because they aren’t a medication but not drugs like Viagra, Rogaine, or Testosterone. I hope you never fall in love with someone of the same sex and are told you can’t marry them. I hope your religion always stays in the majority and is never the one being told to sign up for registries. I hope you never feel persecuted for your race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. I hope you understand how blessed you must be to not feel these inequalities on a personal level. I also want you to understand that this is what protests are for. The men who founded our country did so because they were unhappy with their leadership. They made this a country founded on freedom and justice and guaranteed everyone of us the right to criticize our government peacefully; exactly as these women are doing. This is their right and it is a right that has been exercised before to produce great change in our nation. Great change is about to unfold. No one is rooting for President Trump more than me. I am rooting for my country. I am rooting for the rights of every single citizen, even those who didn’t vote the same way as me. That is the beauty of our country. This march is the beauty of our country. Equal rights is the beauty of our country. Donald Trump will not decide our America for the next four years. No matter what policies he implements or ridiculous things he says, he will never be a representation of our United States. It’s up to us to show our children, our sisters, our brothers, our friends, our world that we are not Donald Trump. We are stronger together y'all, we have always been stronger together and we never needed Hillary in office for that to be true. We are one nation and we have to take care of each other. We have to stand up for each other. We have to demand that everyone be treated fairly. We have to protect our freedoms and show the world that America has always been, and will always be the greatest nation in the world. I hope there are so many more marches to come. I hope there are so many different people we get to celebrate and support. I hope everyone gets to exercise their freedoms and stand up for those who need it. I hope this election has inspired people like it has inspired me. I hope there’s a whole generation inspired to be the type of nasty women who know they can do anything they want, even if that’s to run for president. “Here’s to strong women. May we know them. May we be them. May we raise them.”