#he doesn’t identify as white he is biracial

[starspangledsoldiers]

“i just can’t not call ryan white” you can’t? you absolutely CANNOT?? are you being held against your will? blink twice for help

[writingwithcolor]

Non-offensive Historical terms for Black people in historical fiction

@pleasespellchimerical asked:

So writing historical fiction, with a white POV character. I'm not sure how to address race in the narration. I do have a Black main character, and I feel like it'd feel out of place to have the narrator refer to her as 'Black', that being a more modern term. Not sure how to do this without dipping into common historical terms that are considered racist today. Thoughts on how to handle this delicately, not pull readers out of the narrative? (fwiw, the POV character has a lot of respect for the Black character. The narration should show this)

There are non-offensive terms you can use, even in historical fiction. We can absolutely refer to Black people without slurs, and if slurs is all one can come up with, it’s time to go back to the drawing board. I cannot say which terms are best for your piece without knowing the time period, but hopefully the list below helps.

Historical terms to use for Black people (non-offensive)

African American documented as early as 1782 (documented in an ad in the Pennsylvania Journal). Note the identity isn’t accurate for non-American Black people.

African could refer to African people or “from 1722 as ‘of or pertaining to black Americans.’”

The place of origin could also be used. For example, “a Nigerian woman”

Africo-American documented as early as 1788.

People of Color documented as early as 1796 (with specific contexts, usually mixed people)

Afro American documented as early as 1817, 1831 (depending on source)

Black American documented as early as 1831 

Black was used in Old English to refer to dark-skinned people. Black was not capitalized until recent years, so “She was a young black woman.” would make sense to say, though “She was a young Black woman.” is the better standard today, although not universally adopted. I personally prefer it capitalized. 

Moor was used as early as the late 1400s for North African people, but had a somewhat flexible use where anyone visibly Black / Of African descent or the Afro Diaspora might be referred to or assumed as a Moor. Note, it has other meanings too, such as referring to Muslim people, but that doesn’t mean the person using it is going by the dictionary definition. Not really the way to go today, but okay in a historical setting (in my opinion).

Biracial (1860s), mixed race (1872), multiracial (1903) and multicultural (1940s) are also terms to refer to people of two or more races.

Occupation + description. Throughout history, many people have been referred to as their occupation. For example, the Carpenter, The Baker, the Blacksmith. Here’s an example of how you might go about using occupation and traits to identify a Black character in history. Here’s an example I came up with on the fly.

“You should go by Jerry’s. He’s the best blacksmith this town’s ever seen. Ya know, the real tall, dark-skinned, curly haired fellow. Family’s come here from Liberia.”

Offensive and less-sensitive terms for Black people 

Blacks was used in plural more, but this is generally offensive today (Even writing it gives me **Thee ick*)

Colored was mostly used post-civil war until the mid 20th century, when it became unacceptable. This is not to be conflated with the South African Coloured ethnic group.

Negro/Negroes were also used as early as the 1550s. Capitalization became common in the early 20th century. I'm sure you know it is offensive today, though, admittedly, was not generally seen as such until around the 1960s, when Black replaced it. It does have its contexts, such as the trope “The Magical Negro” but going around using the term or calling someone that today is a lot different. 

Mulatto referred to mixed people, generally Black and white, and is offensive today. 

The N-word, in all its forms, is explicitly a slur, and there is absolutely no need to use it, especially in a casual manner, in your story. We’ve written about handling the N-word and alluding to it “if need be” but there are other ways to show racism and tension without dropping the word willy-nilly.

Deciding what to use, a modern perspective

I’m in favor of authors relying on the less offensive, more acceptable terms. Particularly, authors outside of the race. Seldom use the offensive terms except from actual direct quotes.

You do not have to use those offensive terms or could at least avoid using them in excess. I know quite famous stories do, but that doesn’t mean we have to so eagerly go that route today. Honestly, from teachers to school, and fellow non-Black students, it’s the modern day glee that people seem to get when they “get a chance to say it” that makes it worse and also makes me not want to give people the chance. 

It goes back to historical accuracy only counting the most for an “authentic experience” when it means being able to use offensive terms or exclude BIPOC from stories. We’ve got to ask ourselves why we want to plaster certain words everywhere for the sake of accuracy when there are other just as accurate, acceptable words to use that hurt less people. 

Disclaimer: Opinions may vary on these matters. But just because someone from the group cosigns something by stating they’re not offended by it, doesn’t mean a whole lot of others are okay with it and their perspectives are now invalid! Also, of course, how one handles the use of these words as a Black person has a different connotation and freedom on how they use them.

~Mod Colette

The colonial context

Since no country was mentioned, I’m going to add a bit about the vocabulary surrounding Black people during slavery, especially in the Caribbean. Although, Colette adds, if your Black characters are slaves, this begs the question why we always gotta be slaves.

At the time, there were words used to describe people based on the percentage of Black blood they had. Those are words you may find during your searches but I advise you not to use them. As you will realize if you dive a bit into this system, it looks like a classifying table. At the time, people were trying to lighten their descent and those words were used for some as a sort of rank. Louisiana being French for a time, those expressions were also seen there until the end of the 19th century.

The fractions I use were the number of Black ancestors someone had to have to be called accordingly.

Short-list here :

½ : mûlatre or mulatto

¼ or ⅛ : quarteron or métis (depending on the island, I’m thinking about Saint-Domingue, Martinique and Guadeloupe)

1/16 : mamelouk

¾ : griffe or capre

⅞ : sacatra

In Saint-Domingue, it could go down to 1/64, where people were considered sang-mêlé (mixed blood for literal translation, but “HP and the Half-Blood Prince” is translated “HP et le Prince de Sang-Mêlé” in French, so I guess this is another translation possibility).

-Lydie

Use the 3rd person narrative to your advantage

If you are intent on illustrating historical changes in terminology consider something as simple as showing the contrast between using “black” for first person character narration, but “Black” for 3rd person narrator omniscient.

-Marika

Add a disclaimer

I liked how this was addressed in the new American Girl books it’s set in Harlem in the 1920’s and there’s a paragraph at the beginning that says “this book uses the common language of the time period and it’s not appropriate to use now”

-SK

More reading:

NYT: Use of ‘African-American’ Dates to Nation’s Early Days

The Etymology dictionary - great resource for historical fiction

Wikipedia: Person of Color

[feminist-furby-freak]

We need to talk about how men weaponize their marginalized identities to harass and manipulate women.

I recently was talking with a friend (for context she is biracial and black but often white passing) who was being harassed by the guy in the seat next to her on a long train ride. He was trying to get her number and get her to agree to go out with him and she kept refusing. Eventually he asked if it was because he was black and if she was being racist. He told her if he was a white man she would have no problem giving her his number. I’ve experienced pretty similar situations a few times. The first time this happened I was maybe 14 (for context I am white) and came home bawling that I had been racist against some man for turning down his advances. My mom was like, first of all you’re literally a child and second of all someone’s identity doesn’t entitle them to you. Ever. As progressive/left-leaning people who care deeply about issues of racism it can be hard to acknowledge the fact that SOME men of color or men of other marginalized identities knowingly use that fact against women. And to be clear this is not to diminish the history of racism and the ways white women have historically harmed (and still can) black men. But stuff like this needs to be talked about even though it is uncomfortable. Victims shouldn’t be expected to stay quiet because it might hurt marginalized men. Some activists condemned Alice Walker for publishing The Color Purple and writing about (black) male violence because they said it would hurt black men. Many of us know about the unrealistic standard of the “perfect victim” but what about the “perfect perpetrator.” You might have seen the recent case where a woman came forward after being assaulted by a black trans identified man and thousands of people were telling her she shouldn’t have called the police because he’s marginalized and at risk. As if her actual experience as a victim matters less than his potential for being victimized. Obviously other groups of men can do this as well (I know a woman who was coerced into sex by a disabled man who used that to manipulate her) but this is just the example I’ve experienced recently. My post about trans identified men weaponizing their transness to sleep with women has gotten a lot of attention and I just wanted to address other ways male entitlement plays out.

[sahonithereadwolf]

Sokka winning over Willie Jack in the indigenous character poll thing is just kinda got me feeling a way. Don’t get me wrong, it’s an absolutely nothing issue. This really doesn’t matter. But it does have me thinking about this pattern I see a lot in pop culture where the, sometimes very racist expectations of the, often very white, dominant group and what they read as genuine and representative will often very much not align with the traits, ideas, characterization, and coding the in-group will identify with. I think a very good illustration of this is Overwatch, specifically the handling of Pharah. So, if you don’t know what happened. Parah, an Egyptian character, got skins called Thunderbird and Raindancer. (Yeah, you should already be groaning.) Not really the best. And there are plenty of articles on why they suck ass.

That was enough for a mostly white audience to start fanoning that she might be half-Indigenous. Which isn’t wrong in concept, as a biracial person I can indeed confirm that biracial people do indeed exist. But the why they were marking them was that it was meeting the concept of who and what a native is in their head. A cultural expectation of what it means to be indigenous that indigenous stories rarely get to exist outside of. (And we could turn this into a related discussion of the specter of medicine shows and the hollywood indian or the big three of shitty native reps which originated most of these expectations directly or indirectly, but that is for another time and another post.) Blizzard, being blizzard, tends to like to incorporate fanon into canon if it’s loud enough and doesn’t clash with their plans as a way of making them seem and fans feel engaged. So they made it canon because a mostly white fanbase saw a set of kinda shitty skins and said “indian”. This is despite push back kinda being pretty vocal and visible at the time. It felt hollow, disingenuous, and out of nowhere to a native audience who never read native off her and it never being meaningful before. And nothing meaningfully native was incorporated into her in the future. Nothing that a native audience would identify with or recognize could be seen in her. And it’s not like there wasn’t talk of indigenous coding in overwatch.. But Parah was never the person it was attached to. That was McCree. He has big shitty uncle energy (among other things).

But again. Because one met a mostly white fandoms expectations of native, and thus got more noise. One got the canon and the other got an ugly beach skin where they made him blonde. What we flagged as native and what white consumers flagged as native did not align.

Ain’t nothin’ wrong with Sokka. Sokka has a lot of features I wish more native characters got to have on tv. I know a lot of Alaskan Native folks that fuck with him. But if you tell me he’s more native than arguable the most native character to ever been on tv, from a tv show written, directed, and acted by Indigenous folk in a way tv hasn’t gotten the opportunity to be previously, I’m going to side eye you.

[innmortality]

Lmao, Jacob does not identify as black, he’s mixed race. He said, “He has a lot of love for port towns because there’s a lot of mixed race people (like himself) there.” Biracial/Mixed doesn’t equal black. His wife is white and their daughters are mostly white. Biracial/Mixed race people do not have the same experience of being a monoracial black person and if they happen to LOOK unambiguously black. SOME of them will try to distance themselves from blackness. Stop trying to claim mixed/biracial people as black because they’re not and never will be.

[onnattiming]

Blog #1 - Atlanta (2016-2023)

“Atlanta” is a TV show created by multifaceted artist Donald Glover. It follows the journey of a college dropout who starts managing his cousin; an upcoming rapper who goes by “Paper Boi”. As their journey unfolds, the group navigates through social and economic obstacles relating to racism, poverty, and class in a drama storyline with hints of deadpan comedy. The show serves as a commentary on these issues, while creating humor in surreal moments and “what-if” scenarios that offer perspective. A couple episodes with these scenarios include if Justin Bieber was black, a black man who identifies as a “trans-racial white man”, and a biracial student trying to prove his “blackness” through stereotypes for a full scholarship. Virtually everything the characters go through seems like a joke on the surface, but you are being shown a deeper perspective on how societal factors of race and class serve as obstacles to some and advantages to others. The video link below provides a comical scene where Paper Boi is being berated by illogical accusations and stereotypes because of his "background".

Atlanta’s third season introduces a completely new atmosphere by introducing four stand-alone episodes with one-off characters facing similar themes. When first reading “On The Matter of Whiteness” by Richard Dyer, I was immediately reminded about this season and how they tackled the topic of whiteness. The episode “three slaps” starts off following a white man and black man fishing on an eerie lake at night. They start talking about the creepy atmosphere and the white man explains why; the lake used to be a self-governed black town that was later flooded by the state government and that their souls are haunting the lake (this implies to the story behind Lake Lanier). He then murmurs that they were “almost white”. The black man questions him on what he meant by that, where he replies with “white isn’t a real thing, some people just become white” and that "white" is a social concept with no scientific basis. He brings up how the Chattahoochee river was dammed and the people living there refused to leave because they thought they were safe and “paid to be white”, leaving the other man speechless. He ends off by saying “White is when you are, where you are. With enough blood or money anyone can be white. The thing about being white is, it blinds you. It's easy to see the black man as cursed because you’ve separated yourself from him, but you don’t know you’re enslaved just like him”. The ideas reflect very closely to Dyer’s writings of how whiteness functions as a position of privilege and power,  how “white” has been shaped as a social construct, and the “blindness” that comes with being white. 

*clips from Season 3 that tackle the topic of whiteness

The fourth episode of the season titled “The Big Payback'' follows a scenario where many black people start suing certain white people who had ancestry linked to slave owners who enslaved their forebears. We see this happen to Marshall, a white man being a victim of this epidemic by getting sued by a black woman he doesn’t know. As a result, he loses his family and home and ends up staying at a hotel. He stumbles across another white man named “E”, the same man from the previous episode, who is in the same situation. Marshall starts venting to him about what he lost, how he “didn’t do anything” and that they “don’t deserve this”, and E challenges him by asking “what do THEY (black people) deserve?”. Before Marshall can respond, E tells him “slavery is not past, it is a cruel, unavoidable ghost that haunts them in ways we can’t see”. He brings up Marshall’s situation where his daughter will have to grow up without a father and make a name for herself from the ground up, just like they (white people) did to them (black people). As Marshall comes to terms with his future, E reassures him by saying everything will be okay because “the curse they were running from has been lifted” and that they’re free. The episode ends with Marshall working in a fancy restaurant where part of his salary goes towards the woman suing him. As he serves a table, it’s revealed that the waiting staff is dominantly white with the diners being exclusively people of color. This episode relates to concepts covered by Peggy McIntosh’s “White Privilege, Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” which sets out to paint the invisible privileges white people benefit from without realizing it. The plot of this episode made some of those privileges aware to Marshall, one of them being that he doesn’t have to carry the trauma black people carry related to slavery and treatment of their people. Even though he didn’t “do anything” to that woman, he doesn’t see or feel the pain that she carries. This episode brings up a hypothetical scenario with results that would change the definition of class and make white people consider the “blessing" and "curse” of whiteness.

*ending of S3E4, showing a full white staff serving primarily people of color in a fancy restaurant

[dhampiravidi]

I don’t talk about it much in threads, but my OCs (especially those who are WOC) do face discrimination on occasion.

(tw: ageism, sexism, racism, etc.)

Jayn: even YEARS after releasing the official results of a DNA test to the media, some still claim she can’t possibly be her father’s daughter, simply because she doesn’t have light skin. A few of those she works with dislike & undermine her purely due to her age, race, sex &/or sexuality.

Naela: some Westerosi do not take her seriously because her mother is from Dorne, a kingdom known for its much more liberal customs. One of these customs includes accepting various sexualities & religions—ones like bisexuality & the Faith of R’hllor, which Naela identifies with.

Achilles: half of his fights start with someone making fun of the traditionally “feminine” things he wears to express his gender fluidity (or saying something cruel to one of his lovers). He’s also openly pansexual.

Jasmine: like Jayn, she’s biracial in pretty much every one of her verses, so there’s that. In TSC & The Covenant, she’s feared/somewhat hated for her magical abilities. The Clave in TSC is intially very conservative in pretty much every way, which doesn’t help.

Skadi: her height makes her a target for some. In Marvel & DnD, her parents are from rival races, so she can’t be among one w/o hearing some shit. As a kid (in the Marvel verse), she shaved off her hair to be like her father’s people (who are hairless), but later on, she grew it out partly because some Asgardian women kept calling her ugly.

Oraia: though she can shapeshift, she typically retains her brown skin, which has made her a target of racial discrimination on Earth for centuries. In Supernatural, Heaven is cruel to her people, the pagan deities, for kind of no logical reason (on top of that, they make her work for them by threatening her brother).

Hestia: In her Marvel verse, her dad is Cantonese while her mom is (White) Québécois. But her childhood bullies hurt her because she was a ballet/soccer prodigy & this only became worse after her mutant gene kicked in. I often write her as part of a poly trio w/Gambit & Rogue, so I’m sure someone would have a problem w/that IRL. & obviously all mutants in Marvel do not usually have a good time. In the Hunger Games verse, Hestia is treated w/suspicion by her District because she came from the Capitol (they aren’t actually wrong though, since she acts as a spy until the Rebellion).

Rose: In her historical era, her homosexuality isn’t usually accepted.

Aurelia: though she’s very confident in who she is, some try to make snide comments about her body, height, race & sexuality…assuming they’re brave enough to say it to her face.

Rela: some Twi’lek who were not raised as Jedi speak her first & last name separately. In Twi’lek culture, doing so dishonors the name. Rela faces this because she was not raised by her own people (though her parents actually had her until she was 3). Also, it’s widely known that Twi’leks are (in-canon) sold as slaves on some planets, where they’re valued only for their beauty. This helps Rela when she goes undercover, though. Zehara: during the Hundred-Year War, her race sometimes keeps people from trading w/her, since the Fire Nation is seen as the enemy of the other 3 nations. Also, many underestimate her in fights due to her age & sex.

Eugenia: if she dates Damon, she has to come to terms w/the fact that he fought for the Confederacy in the Civil War (even though he’s not racist & he’s dated other Black women).

Shayera: a good chunk of the DC Universe hates aliens & treats them as unwanted immigrants. Physically, many humans think she resembles someone of Latina heritage, so if they’re racist towards POC, they’re probably going to be rude to her.

Mu Lan: she had to pretend to be a man while in the military because women/females weren’t allowed to serve. In England, she’s often looked down upon due to her social status, race, accented speech & sex.

Monet: some asshole is always mad about her being a pretty, wealthy, brown-skinned liberal Muslim woman. Oh & she’s a mutant in Marvel.

Renée Michele: her parents are a poly trio, she’s a mutant (who had to wear sunglasses as a kid to cover up her unusual-colored eyes), she’s genderfluid (she/they), she’s bisexual & she’s visibly part-Chinese, she speaks w/a Southern accent using Cajun slang…(it’s a lot)

Rhea Livia: she skipped a grade (though not everyone in town knows that), she’s biracial (Black & White) & she was raised by her 2 moms, who are casual friends w/her dad.

[pink-pages]

The Keeper of Night

Spoiler Alert

RRRAAAAAHHHH!!! I am so fucking angry with this book!!! Ok, maybe that’s a bit of an over exaggeration. It’s just that I just finished it, like, 5 minutes ago, and I hate the ending. It’s not that it’s a bad ending, it’s just that it’s not a happy ending. For anyone (Although, honestly, if it were a happy ending for Ren and Hiro, I still would have hated it). Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great book and I recommend it. It’s just one of those books where the ending is so soul-crushingly bleak that you want to tear your own hair out. So yeah, that’s why I deducted one star from my rating.

I deducted star #2 from my rating because I did not like the world of the Reapers. It’s not necessarily that Kylie Lee Baker’s world building was bad. She’s actually fantastic at descriptions. It’s just that the system the Reapers of England have for collecting souls seems so mundane. I also would have liked to see a little more of Ren’s life in London before she left for Japan. Obviously, I understand that there can’t be a whole lot of talking about her London life because the bulk of the action doesn’t happen until she reaches Japan, but seeing her interact with her father and stepmother would be helpful at building up her background.

Other than those two points (which are both matters of opinion), I really liked The Keeper of Night. Some of my favorite aspects of the book were Ren and Neven’s sibling interactions. I liked their bickering. I did not like their larger arguments as the book went on, but the light bickering about “goddamnit Neven, we’re trying to run away. Are you really bringing a cat?!” and other small stuff like that was fun. I also really enjoyed Hiro’s jokes.

I think the part about it that I loved the most was the folklore and myth. I loved learning the stories behind the different types of Yokai. I especially loved the little passages from Hakutaku’s book that Hiro read to Ren and Neven. I wish I could somehow get my hands on Hakutaku’s book (although I’m not sure if it’s even real).

The Keeper of Night also explores the biracial experience. Ren’s desire to be recognized as a Shinigami and her experiences in both England and Japan directly parallel the struggle between her identities as British or Japanese. This also relates to real life, often times biracial people are often not recognized as members of either of their communities. For example, a mixed race black and white person being seen as too black to be white but too white to be black.

Characters

Ren: I did not like Ren. Ren made me angry. I guess it’s partly because I don’t understand what it’s like to be identified as “other” on appearance by the people I identify with. No matter which part of her heritage Ren tries to identify with, she’s always recognized as an outsider. I don’t have that experience so I don’t understand her anger as much as other readers who relate to her can. That being said, her anger doesn’t excuse the way she treats her brother. Neven has stuck by her through everything. The only thing he asks is that she not kill people indiscriminately and be very wary of Hiro and in the end, she chooses Hiro over him. That’s something I will never forgive her for. As an older sibling myself, I would always always put my sisters above any boyfriend or love interest. I’m honestly more angry at her for what happened to Neven than JD Hiro because Ren had a duty to protect Neven and she actively chose not to.

Neven: Such a sweetheart. I love Neven. He’s just so fundamentally good. He didn’t deserve any of what he got at the end. I’m not saying he didn’t have flaws, because he did, but even what I see as his biggest flaw is also a mark of how insanely good he is. I think Neven’s biggest flaw is being too morally correct. I think he was only looking at the murder of Izanami from a “matricide is wrong” perspective and not accounting for all the nuances involved in this particular case. In this case, Izanami is a horrible being and a horrible mother that needs to be killed.

Hiro: JD. This man is JD from Heathers except a Japanese fisherman god. Also I have a little bit more sympathy for Hiro than I did for JD. I mean, he’s got the same charm that JD’s got and that same warped view of love. The difference is A) I fell for Hiro’s charms; and B) Hiro shows a range of emotions that make him seem more human than JD. I loved Hiro the moment we met him, which kind of tipped me off. For some reason, authors just can’t seem to be nice to my favorite characters; either they’re traitors or they die. In this case, both. I can definitely see how Hiro came to be the way he is. Being disowned by his mother and then wandering the Earth. He’s afraid of being alone and unwanted. That’s why he did what he did to Neven (and anyone else he perceived as hurting Ren or coming between him and Ren). He was trying to keep Ren with him. His whole story is honestly a tragedy and I fully blame Izanami for the way he turned out. I was most definitely on his side until he had Neven thrown to the deep darkness.

[blue-eye-samurai]

How the FUCK did people watch Blue Eye Samurai from beginning to end and y’all still didn’t realize that this show is NOT a queer story???

You watched a scene where Mizu (who IS canonically a cishet woman — so far) finally get a chance to show her husband who she really is: a woman who is not submissive, traditionally feminine and is also better at combat than he is. And how does he react? The way EVERY man reacts when presented with a woman who bests him in every possible way: he freaks out and calls her a monster. Mizu’s husband could accept that she is biracial only under the condition that she still play the role of a traditionally feminine, submissive housewife.

That scene is not about being queer. It is not a “metaphor” for queerness. You can still choose to interpret it that way if you want, but that doesn’t make your personal interpretation an irrefutable fact. Headcanons are still just headcanons. You should be able to separate your own headcanons from the actually canon material you’re given.

Speaking as a biracial (Asian/White) + multicultural cisgender woman myself (one who isn’t traditionally feminine either but still very much identifies as a woman), I related to that scene deeply for several reasons and so did many other women (cishet or not). Women, including cishet ones, are constantly being told how we should be and/or how we should behave if we want to be loved. Queer people are not the only ones who have complicated feelings about their gender and sexuality, cishet women have them as well.

Mizu’s whole narrative is that she can’t be truly herself: a biracial Japanese woman who’s an excellent warrior. If she wants to be taken seriously as a fighter and pursue her interests, she must play the role of a “man” in society. If she wants to be loved by her husband, then she must play a different role as well. I’m sorry but none of this is a “metaphor” for something else. The show’s creators (who are primarily two women of color) are quite literally telling us (especially in that particular scene) that women are not enough just as we are. THAT is the point of the whole scene — anything else is just projection from people who want to see something else.

How the FUCK do people watch The Tale of the Ronin and the Bride and go "ah shucks, cishet Mizu confirmed," like they didn't just watch Mizu go "here's a part of me, a secret, forbidden part of my life that I've never told you about, that makes me feel so fucking alive. Can you love me in spite of it? Can you love me for it?" And then watch her shatter, lose her family and her home, when it turns out the answer to that question was "No." How do you watch that and not think "Hot holy hell this shit is queer as fuck"???

[plutodetective]

Anyway, if anyone is wondering (I know no one is, but shh) about my plans for the end of the modern au with transfem!Jonathan. Spoilers for the canon below.

She and Mina kill Dracula together. Hell, I’m still figuring out a way in which the Bloofer Lady can show up and help to kill him too, so that I can have Natália, Mina, and Lucy parallel the three women who didn’t manage to break free from Dracula, and have it be a tale of three young women ridding the world of a dangerous older sexual predator.

As for who gets bitten? Considering that last year I advocated so hard for the Murray Mystery way, of having Jonathan be the one who gets bitten, because it makes zero sense to leave Mina behind for being a woman, but it makes some sense to leave Jonathan behind to protect him from reliving trauma?

Both of them get left behind by Van Helsing and the Suitor Squad. Natália to be protected from reliving her trauma, Mina so Natália doesn’t stay alone. But it doesn’t work. Dracula manages to assault both of them. They both serve as a “human gps”, as Murray Mysteries puts it. Mina is more distraught about the possibility of their friends (who, to be clear, are not all men. I’m making Seward a woman too) having to kill Natália than the possibility of dying herself. She thinks that it’s better to die than to live as a vampire, however. Natália, on the other hand, is what she is: a version of Jonathan. Theirs is the holiest love, and if the only way they can be together is to become vampires (and kill the rest of the Crew of Light once they’re transformed), so be it.

I’m not making Jonathan into a woman to “keep him in Mina’s pocket.” What would be the point of that? I’m making Jonathan into a woman for two reasons: 1) I think him being a trans woman is a very valid reading of the way he identifies strongly with women and feels more comfortable in the women’s quarters of the castle, so much so that that’s where he chooses to fall asleep, and 2) I’m a biracial, bisexual, neurodivergent woman. I want white people to do their best to write three dimensional, compelling, complex characters of color. I want straight people to do their best to write three dimensional, compelling, complex queer characters. I want neurotypical people to do their best to write three dimensional, compelling, complex neurodivergent characters. I want men to do their best to write three dimensional, compelling, complex women. So, as a cis person, what kind of hypocrit would I have to be not to do my best to write three dimensional, compelling, complex trans characters?

And if Jonathan Harker, who starts off as a young, bright-eyed, kind character- but already with the skills to allow him to survive kidnapping and intense abuse- and ends up making speeches like the “holiest love” one, isn’t a three dimensional, compelling, complex character, I don’t know who is.

[deviiancetv]

All of these celebrities coming out after the Will Smith vs. Chris Rock thing is starting to show a lot of their true colors. I’m here for it, but at the same time it’s like, why did this need to be a bigger thing? This is why I miss the days when celebrities were idolized, when we didn’t have to see that they’re all really nasty/toxic people. What’s even crazier is how quick we’ve gone from loving them, to the minute they do something or say something controversial, random bits of info just come out of nowhere about who they really are. It’s like somebody is lowkey always praying on their downfall, and the minute they do something, somebody in the industry just releases all of their dirty laundry to be rediscovered.

Like, I didn’t know Jim Carrey allegedly had something to do with his ex-girlfriends death. And I’m more surprised to know that Zoë Kravitz is a predator, wanting to hook up with Jaden Smith when he was 14, and doesn’t identify with black culture even though both of her parents are black and jewish 😭. Chris Rock let’s his white comedian friends say the n-word (I always felt the vibe that he was a sellout, no shade).

What’s sad is that this will all be forgotten by next year. Well maybe not Zoë’s thing, the black community will handle her for a LONG TIME. Zendaya is the unproblematic biracial queen

[malkaleh]

I think as a biracial person who was denied and is reconnecting with her heritage and identity I have a lot of feelings about Elrond - because he was taken from his birth family, heritage and language so very young (his name isn’t actually his birth name) and it’s something he and his twin find as adults. And that’s not to say he doesn’t love his adopted family - you can see that in so many things and it’s part of him as well it’s just, the loss and pain and the lack is there as well. And feeling guilt for the connections you have, on either side(s) and never being enough for either feelings. It’s also the way that you can deeply deeply love but also, these were the people who took you from your home in an act of violence. You can love, you can understand that they had no choice and still feel as though your birth parents have abandoned you. I don’t think you have to choose but you don’t have to deny either.

And I think over you know, his immortal existence Elrond does come to be ‘I am enough as I am - as all of the above and neither’ and also I find it really interesting that he really identifies with the Line of Luthien specifically which is all of his identities/a biracial line*

*multiracial line might be the better term - like I’m white/persian/syrian/jewish etc.

[blue-eye-samurai]

For real 🤦🏻‍♀️ @dicapiito all these think pieces from white folks (including queer ones) going on and on about the supposedly “ambiguous” and “fluid” nature of Mizu’s gender are genuinely so exhausting to see every single day here. It hasn’t even been two months since the show was released and I’m already tired of seeing this crap in the tags every single day.

Like yes, okay, everyone should be able to enjoy their headcanons and personal interpretations of fictional media, but they should also be able to do that without erasing Mizu’s canon narrative as a woman of color. Blue Eye Samurai is about being a biracial Japanese WOMAN. Hell, it was literally co-written by a biracial Japanese woman (Amber Noizumi) as well, so Mizu’s experiences are very much shaped by women of color.

Mizu is mainly ostracized by Japan’s society for being “too white” in their eyes — she is not seen as a fellow Japanese person even though she was born/raised there and only speaks Japanese. And then later on, Mizu is also shunned (by her own husband) for not being a woman who is submissive, traditionally feminine and classically beautiful by Japanese society’s standards.

No matter how hard she tries, Mizu is never seen as a true “Japanese” nor is she seen as a true “woman” even though she is actually both. Mizu is not seen as a human being — she’s only seen as a monster, as a disgrace to society and is constantly treated as such. If that doesn’t directly speak about the experiences of women of color, then I genuinely don’t know what does. 🤷🏻‍♀️

Mizu presents as a man out of survival, not out of desire. She allows people to refer to her by he/him pronouns out of necessity, not because she actually identifies as a man. Mizu herself said (to Mikio) in her own words that she HAD to be a man, not that she wanted to be one. None of this was actually a choice for Mizu.

It was Mizu’s “mother” who told her since infancy that she must always be a boy — it wasn’t the other way around. Mizu has been forced to live as a man even when she never even wanted to be one. And yes, I can definitely see how that experience will resonate with many different queer people (trans, nonbinary, intersex, etc) but that doesn’t make this a queer story. People insisting otherwise are actually misgendering Mizu and are projecting themselves onto her story.

Like seriously, how do they (white queers) STILL not realize that women of color aren’t seen as “women” unless we are as hyper feminine as Akemi is? How did they watch this whole show from beginning to end and STILL not realize that one the main reasons why Mizu is so angry is because she was denied womanhood since birth? It genuinely infuriates me how quickly and swiftly they do this, especially to women of color who aren’t traditionally feminine.

Just because Mizu walks the line between femininity and masculinity, it doesn’t mean that they have the right to discount her perspective as a woman. Just because they find things about Mizu that resonate with them personally as a queer person, it doesn’t mean that she’s canonically nonbinary or trans. White queers seriously need to stop making everything about themselves for once.

Blue Eye Samurai is playing 3D chess with gender. Mizu's presentation is shaped not only by internal perception of self (of which we cleverly see very little) but by external forces of sexism, colonialism, xenophobia, and vengeance that have shaped their world. Their gender is contextual, fluid, used both as an expression of vulnerability and a blunt force weapon. It's all in service to their ultimate goal, yes, but we see through flashbacks and conversations with Madam Kaji and others that it's also deeply personal, deeply hidden, deeply entwined with desire and duty.

[tressasinterlude]

𝐑𝐀𝐍𝐓 #𝟑: Female Public Figures Dating Men with Questionable Views That Contradict Their Image & Alleged Politics

𝗗𝗜𝗦𝗖𝗟𝗔𝗜𝗠𝗘𝗥: These rant blog posts are really just reflective of my thoughts at the time that I make them and are posted here because I need an outlet to release all of this shit I have going on my busy ass mind. That’s it and that’s all. Now let’s get into it..

This rant was greatly inspired by none other than Ms. Robyn Rihanna “Tell Your Faves To Pull Up [in regards to social injustices directly affecting black people]” Fenty and her openly colorist boyfriend, A$AP Rocky. Aside from the fact that Rihanna tends to slip under the radar and is never held accountable for her problematic ways due to her conventional beauty (i.e. Her heavy usage of anti-Asian slurs, particularly targeted towards Chris Brown’s ex gf, Karrueche), it’s very alarming that a woman who has an entire makeup brand with a campaign based around the inclusivity of ALL black women is publicly flaunting a beau who once said that DSBW do not look good with red lipstick.

And yes, I’m very much aware that Rakim said this tasteless comment over 8 years ago but from the looks of it, not much has really changed with him. Don’t @ me about it neither because I don’t care.

Also peep how he compares a hypothetical darkskinned woman to a man (Wesley Snipes) while trying to explain how his antiblackness isn’t wrong because he said something about white women as well. Gaslighting at its finest. Don’t you just love it! 😀

Furthermore, you would think that somebody of Rihanna’s level of stature would know not to associate themselves with someone as messy as A$AP Rocky but... Stupid is what stupid does, I guess! I can’t even begin to place the blame on him anymore because he’s revealed his true colors and we all have made the deliberate choice to either accept it or don’t and have discontinued all support for him. Unfortunately, misogynoir is never the dealbreaker for most people and the hatred for [dark-skinned] black women is so engrained in society that it’s frowned upon when we publicly speak out against it. Very ass backwards if you ask me but that’s society for you. Now, enough about that. Let’s focus back on Ms. Vita La Coco.

As a woman who claims to be a girl’s girl and is always presenting herself to be someone who is the epitome of a pro-black feminist bad ass, it just makes her alleged activism come off so disingenuous when she’s also laying down with the same man that actively attacks the demographic she’s supposed to be standing in solidarity with. It’s “Black Lives Matter” on the IG posts but your vagina is getting moist for a man who openly stated he doesn’t relate to what goes on in Ferguson because he lives in Soho & Beverly Hills. Ferguson being the exact place where a 17-year-old black boy’s lifeless corpse laid on the hot concrete for FOUR hours after he was murdered by a police officer. He couldn’t 'relate' to the fate of so many black men, women, and children who are murdered or seriously injured from state-sanctioned violence because they’re poor and he is not or so he thought.

But then again, what can I really expect from a woman who identified as being “biracial” until as recent as roughly 6 years ago? What can I really expect from a woman who called Rachel Dolezal a ‘hero’ for cosplaying as a black woman? I’d be lying if I said my expectations for her were high in this regard because sis has always shown us she was lacking in this department. And just for the record, this is not a personal attack on Rihanna at all for the die-hard Navy stans in the back. I admire her latest fashions and bop my head to her music just like the next person but she’s getting the side-eye from me on this one.

Trust and believe me though, she’s not the only woman who I can call out for being a hypocrite. Of course not! This stone can be cast at a few others. So without further ado, why don’t we bring Ms. Kehlani Parrish to the front of the congregation? Prior to Kehlani’s recent declaration of identifying as a lesbian, her last public relationship with a man was with YG. Yes, the same YG who felt it was necessary to say him & Nipsey had ‘pretty light-skinned’ daughters to raise in the middle of his deceased friend’s memorial. By the way, Nipsey’s daughter is not even light (or at least not in my book anyways.) She’s a very deep caramel tone just like her father which makes what he said even more moronic. Yes, the same YG who thought it was clever idea to use slavery as an aesthetic for a music video to a diss track about 6ix9ine. And yes, also the same YG who has derogatory lyrics targeted at bisexual women. Just to end up sweating the red carpets with one. I swear the jokes just continue to write themselves.

This raises the question once more; How high of a pedestal can I really put a multiracial woman who has a song titled ‘N*ggas’ and when received backlash for the song in question, she used the ultimate ‘I’m mixed’ copout while not having a visibly black parent in sight?

It’s also kind of suspicious to me that many were not privy to Kehlani’s secret romance with Victoria Monét (pictured bottom right) until Victoria did an interview with Gay Times revealing she fell in love with a girl but they subsequently broke up because Victoria had a boyfriend and that girl was pregnant in a polyamorous relationship. Fans began to speculate because both Victoria & Kehlani previously candidly spoke about their sexual orientations, Kehlani had just had Adeya and they both were seemingly close. Their short-lived fling would later be confirmed when Victoria released the song ‘Touch Me’ on her last project and Kehlani hopped on the remix. Meanwhile, Kehlani’s relationship with Shaina (pictured bottom left) was very overt and all over her Instagram feed from my recollection. And as you can see, Shaina looks absolutely nothing like Victoria. They look like the complete opposite of eachother in every aspect which is kind of alarming(?) to say the least because why is it that the women she proudly claims as her partners tend to have a very racially ambiguous look such as herself but her ‘sneaky links’ on the other hand are undoubtedly black women? Again, it could just be me jumping conclusions. You know, I’m kinda good for that however something tells me I’m not. Y’all be the judge of the material though.

Last but not least, I’d like to touch on Ms. Raven Tracy very briefly. I was very weary about even including in this segment and if I should just put her in a entirely separate blog post with other women who openly date abusers despite their checkered past (alongside Nicki Minaj & her r*pist murderer of a husband, India Love & Sheck Wes etc.) being this particular blog post was based around the theme of lightskinned/mixed women dating men with extremely problematic views about DSBW. Raven obviously isn’t lightskinned or mixed however I refused to ignore how contradictory her [former] relationship with an alleged (I used this word very loosely and mainly for legality purposes.) serial r*pist while promoting a brand that is all about feminism & body positivity. This also traces back to A$AP Rocky by default being that Ian Connor is his very close friend and he came to Connor’s defense when several women came forward detailing accounts of Connor allegedly s*xually assaulting them. (I wish I could place the actual video of what A$AP Rocky said verbatim but Tumblr only allows one video per blog post. 🙄)

Back in June of this year, Ian & Raven had a back & forth on Twitter after Ian tweeted about Raven “fucking everybody” behind his back. I can only assume that he was alluding to Tori Brixx posting a video of her ex, Rich the Kid & Raven kissing on her story. Disgusted is not even the word to describe my feeling when she admitted she stuck by Ian despite of his many allegations of s*xual abuse because she loved him and her being a empath causes her to want to help everybody. Imagine aiding and abetting a predator and even paying for his bail & legal fees just to turn around and expect sympathy because this same individual cheated on you and exploited you all over Twitter for the public to see. The same man that you would get back with not even a WEEK after the fact & turn off your IG comments because it isn’t our “business” after making it our business...

That being said, I just genuinely want to know: Why do these women completely go against what they stand for in regards to these men? Maybe it was never genuine from jump street and if that’s the case, why jump on the bandwagon of performative activism? Is it because it’s profitable right now? Is it because disrespecting black women is not an immediate death sentence to your careers and more often than not actually helps you advance even further? I guess that’s the billion dollar question that’ll never truly be answered. I just want the world to stop using black women as their stepping stool to get to where they need to go and then discarding of us when we’re no longer beneficial. Support us all the way or don’t support us at all. We deal with enough disrespect as is so we’d appreciate if y’all would stop straddling the fence and partake in your misogynoir out loud if that’s what you choose to do. We have no use for fake allyship and quite frankly, it’s doing more harm for us than good. Please and thank you!

Sincerely,

- 𝙼𝙸𝚂𝚂 𝙴𝙳𝙶𝙰𝚁 𝙰𝙻𝙻𝙴𝙽 𝙷𝙾𝙴. 💋

[swanlake1998]

Article: The Unbearable Whiteness of Ballet

Date: April 22, 2021

By: Chloe Angyal

In an exclusive excerpt from her new book Turning Pointe, contributing editor Chloe Angyal lays out the ways that white supremacy is embedded in ballet's most basic foundations.

Wilmara Manuel and her 11-year-old daughter, Sasha, were at the world finals of a ballet competition, the Youth America Grand Prix, in 2015 when it happened. Shortly before the competition began, the young dancers were on the performance stage with their parents, warming up and preparing to dance the solos they’d been rehearsing for months.

As Wilmara, who is Black and originally from Haiti, and Sasha, who is biracial, stood there, a young white dancer looked around the stage, checking out the competition. “And her eyes land on Sasha,” Wilmara remembers, “and I saw her look [Sasha] up and down, and then look at her mom.

“And her mom said, ‘Don’t worry. They’re never really good anyway.’ ”

Wilmara did her best to contain her shock. Sasha didn’t hear what the white mom had said, and Wilmara wasn’t about to tell her, because “that’s not the thing I want to discuss 10 minutes before she takes the stage.” But Sasha could sense that something was amiss. “Just the look on my face, she was like, ‘What? What happened? What did she say?’ ” Wilmara brushed her daughter off.

Don’t worry. They’re never really good anyway. An entire worldview of white resentment of Black progress and excellence passed quietly from mother to child in just seven words.

That white mother could not fathom that Sasha, a biracial child with a Black mother, might be really good—as in very good, or truly good—at a traditionally white art form at which her child was presumably also quite proficient. She could not imagine that Sasha might deserve to be at that competition, might have qualified on her merit—her talent and skill and persistence—rather than because of what she might consider a misguided or even unjust attempt to diversify ballet by lowering standards. They’re not really good, but they are allowed to be here. In this space that is rightfully yours, in this art form that is rightfully yours. They’re never as good as the white girls, a sweeping generalization that grants no individuality, no humanity, to any nonwhite dancer. They’re all the same, and they never deserve to be here. But don’t worry. Your excellence is a given. You belong here, while their presence is conditional or even ill-gotten.

A few minutes later, Sasha took the stage and performed her solo. She ended up placing ahead of that white dancer.

From then on, Wilmara traveled with Sasha to every competition, paying the additional travel costs to make sure that, if something like that ever happened again, she’d be there to support her daughter.

“That has stuck with me,” she says. “And it’s one of the reasons I make the sacrifice and I go with her everywhere. Even if there are others going, I feel like I need to be around should comments like that pop up. I just don’t feel like I can take that chance, you know? And what cracks me up is that . . . she doesn’t even look as dark as I do, which makes me feel like, ‘Oh my God, if you were darker, like, what else?’ ”

Sasha grew up in a suburb of Indianapolis and is now 16. She trains at the Royal Ballet School in London, an exclusive training ground that serves as a feeder school for the Royal Ballet. It’s widely acknowledged to be one of the best ballet schools in the world.

Wilmara says that people often express their surprise at the quality of Sasha’s training and technique. “Oh wow, you’re really good,” Wilmara says by way of example. “Where do you train? Have you been dancing for a long time?” She says that while she tries to give these white people the benefit of the doubt, she knows what they usually mean, and she’d prefer they just come out and say it: “I’m surprised you’re that good. You’re Black and you’re dancing and you’re good.”

Now that Sasha is a little older, Wilmara talks to her about the racist assumptions embedded in those surprised comments. “You know she’s asking because she doesn’t think a person of your color can do this,” she’s told Sasha, who now “gets it when she hears that tone of voice.”

And, she says, she’s been frank with her daughter about the kind of resistance she should expect from the overwhelmingly white ballet establishment if she keeps excelling—which she shows every sign of doing.

It’s moms who do the bulk of the work of ballet parenting: the sewing of costumes, the schedule keeping for rehearsals and recitals. And when you’re a ballet mom to a dancer of color, there’s an even higher price to pay.

“Not everybody’s gonna be thrilled,” Wilmara says, paraphrasing her conversations with Sasha. “Even if you’re not a dancer of color, it’s cutthroat. And on top of that, you are a dancer of color, and so that poses another threat in some ways. So you have to be mindful of your things and what you are doing, and know what things are okay, and [pay attention to] when you are uncomfortable.”

This emotional labor, the work of helping young dancers understand what “that tone of voice” means and why it’s being used—or the work of deciding whether to tell your child about the racist remark you just overheard or absorb it yourself and shield them from it—is a part of parenting not demanded of mothers of white dancers.

Then there’s the payment in time and money required of Wilmara to make sure that Sasha’s ballet experience is as fair and worry-free as possible. Once, at a competition, Wilmara forgot to color in the “nude” pale pink straps on one of Sasha’s competition costumes. Wilmara scrambled to find brown foundation because none of the vendors at the competition had a leotard in Sasha’s skin color.

“Come on, people, you are here,” Wilmara remembers thinking. “There may not be that many [dancers of color], but they are all here and you should be able to bring various shades of nude leos.”

Succeeding in ballet, or even just surviving, requires extra talent, extra work, extra resilience, and extra sacrifices from dancers of color, especially Black and brown dancers, and their parents. White ballet moms might have to talk to their white daughters about how cutthroat ballet is. But they don’t need to issue additional warnings about how a white girl’s success will be received by that cutthroat culture, because almost all the successful girls and women in ballet are white.

“They’ve had to grow up a lot faster,” Wilmara says of Black and brown ballet dancers. “I think the ballet world makes you grow up a lot faster, but on top of that,” there are the “extra hurdles that other dancers don’t have to think about.” There are the overtly racist comments backstage before a performance and the subtly racist “compliments” after. There is time spent frantically searching for the right leotard or adapting the default pink leotard. There is the knowledge, internalized first by parents and then by their kids, that if you make it over all those hurdles your success will be viewed with suspicion and resentment—that ballet does not have a “diversity” problem; it has a white supremacy problem.

“Our kids,” Wilmara says, “are thinking about this and thinking about it early on.”

The organizing principle of ballet—of training, of performance, of making a ballet body—is control. Control of your rigid torso while your foot shoots upward from the hip in a battement. Control of a silent and compliant class of otherwise giggly 9-year-old girls. “The traditional and classical Europeanist aesthetic for the dancing body is dominated and ruled by the erect spine,” wrote dance scholar Brenda Dixon Gottschild in her landmark book The Black Dancing Body. “Verticality is a prime value, with the torso held erect, knees straight, body in vertical alignment. . . . The torso is held still.”

It all demands control. Control of your smiling face as your feet scream in your pointe shoes at the end of a long pas de deux. Control of your weight, of your turnout, of your stretched and strengthened feet that now arch into a shape no ordinary foot can make. “The ballet audience, attuned and habituated to view control as a prime value, applaud its display and are embarrassed when it isn’t fulfilled,” Gottschild wrote.

Discipline, order, adherence to strict and unquestioned rules. That’s what ballet is. When Gottschild asked Seán Curran, a white dancer and choreographer who performed with the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, what he pictured when he thought of white dance or white dancing bodies, he said, “Upright. . . . For some reason, ‘proper’ stuck in the head a bit, something that is built and made and constructed rather than is free or flows.” A body that is rigid, obedient, and disciplined, remade from something natural and unruly into something refined and well behaved. Proper. “Whiteness,” Curran said, “values precision and unison.”

Curran’s assessment identifies a central underlying prejudice of white supremacy: the belief that people of color, and their bodies, are wild. Uncivilized, animalistic, subhuman. That white people—who, by contrast, are assumed to be organized and civilized—have both a right and a responsibility to tame that which is untamed and impose order, precision, and unison on it. To suppress and control that which is savage; to press it into something that approaches whiteness but will never be truly white and thus never truly equal.

This is the logic that underpinned white colonization and American slavery. It is also the logic that makes racial segregation possible: that which is pure and organized must be kept separate from that which is profane and undisciplined. And central to this worldview is the idea that the work of white supremacy is unending, not because white supremacy is flawed, but because the very people it seeks to suppress are inherently inferior, naturally incapable of complying. Because of some inborn lack—of will, of understanding, of discipline—people of color will never fully obey, never properly assimilate, never be redeemed by whiteness. In this way, white supremacy perpetuates itself, justifying both its worldview and the permanent need for its existence.

It’s little wonder, then, that ballet—with its fixation on control, discipline, and uprightness—wraps itself so neatly around whiteness. It makes sense that white Americans, reared on the belief that whiteness is synonymous with order and refinement, also believe that people of color have no place, or a limited place, or a conditional place, in classical ballet.

Furthermore, it is easy to see how the ideal ballet body—so controlled, so upright—is everything that white supremacy imagines a Black body is not. And because of deeply ingrained American cultural associations with musculature, loose movement, brute force, and untamed sexuality, the Black body is believed to be everything a ballet body is not permitted to be.

“When we talk about the ballerina,” says Theresa Ruth Howard, a former dancer and a teacher, diversity strategist, and the founder and curator of the digital ballet history archive Memoirs of Blacks in Ballet (MoBBallet), “we’re talking about the ideal, our stereotype of the desirable woman, and that is reserved for white women.”

Howard has made a career of helping the people who run ballet companies and schools to examine their ideas about what makes for a “good” ballet body, asking them to question their biases about the inherent fitness of white bodies and unfitness of other bodies, especially Black bodies. She says that long-standing racist tropes about Black women’s bodies make Blackness and ballerinas seem antithetical.

“You have the trope of either the jezebel, the mammy, or the workhorse of the Black woman,” which are incompatible with desirability, fragility, and sexual purity, the ideal of white womanhood at the heart of the ballerina’s appeal.

“She’s desired. It’s the epitome of beauty, of grace, of elegance, and these are not adjectives that are assigned to Black women,” Howard says. “Especially not darker-skinned Black women. This is why the closer you look to the white European aesthetic as a Black woman, the better chance you have at occupying that role. Especially at a higher level.”

Despite the long tradition of Latin American dancers carving out successful professional careers in the U.S. and the enormous success of Misty Copeland—a light-skinned Black dancer whose ascent to the pinnacle of American ballet was a watershed moment for Black dancers and audiences alike—the archetypal ballerina is still a pale-skinned white woman with slender limbs, negligible breasts and hips, and long, sleek hair. In the American cultural imagination, the ballerina is still white.

George Balanchine famously said that “ballet is woman,” but that’s not the whole truth. Ballet is white woman, or, perhaps more precisely, white womanhood. Ballet is a stronghold of white womanhood, a place where whiteness is the default and white femininity reigns supreme.

Excerpted from Turning Pointe: How a New Generation of Dancers Is Saving Ballet from Itself by Chloe Angyal. Copyright © 2021. Available from Bold Type Books, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

[mr-double-downer]

my fellow mutt. tell me of your troubles.

kids used to ask me what race i was and i didnt know or didnt answer. i thought my dad was black most of my childhood because his skin was just dark. hes latino. lol.

im luckier then most, since i just look mediterranian, and could pass for a spaniard, greek or someone from the balkans or romania.

i identify as white spiritually though and very much like white people, but sometimes I appreciate latino's fun catholic culture.

being biracial is fun because no one knows what I am. Depending on the status of my beard and tan, I’m either Russian, Middle Eastern, Greek, Latino/Hispanic, with the only occasional correct guesses of “are you part black”

truly the man of a thousand faces Justin Trudeau doesn’t have shit on me