#nonwhite people in general.

[carfuckerlynch]

eye twitching. @ my chef stop fucking talking about indigenous people u can't even pronounce tlingit

[lovecatsys]

oh you like enemies to lovers? rivalries between two high school kids who are lowkey obsessed with each other? Well! May I introduce you to Jubilee x Monet St. Croix from Generation X?

[oleandy]

i've noticed there's. a lot more white dirk than there is usually.

[marvelsmostwanted]

There are people – some in my own Party – who think that if you just give Donald Trump everything he wants, he’ll make an exception and spare you some of the harm. I’ll ignore the moral abdication of that position for just a second to say — almost none of those people have the experience with this President that I do. I once swallowed my pride to offer him what he values most — public praise on the Sunday news shows — in return for ventilators and N95 masks during the worst of the pandemic. We made a deal. And it turns out his promises were as broken as the BIPAP machines he sent us instead of ventilators. Going along to get along does not work – just ask the Trump-fearing red state Governors who are dealing with the same cuts that we are. I won’t be fooled twice.

I’ve been reflecting, these past four weeks, on two important parts of my life: my work helping to build the Illinois Holocaust Museum and the two times I’ve had the privilege of reciting the oath of office for Illinois Governor.

As some of you know, Skokie, Illinois once had one of the largest populations of Holocaust survivors anywhere in the world. In 1978, Nazis decided they wanted to march there.

The leaders of that march knew that the images of Swastika clad young men goose stepping down a peaceful suburban street would terrorize the local Jewish population – so many of whom had never recovered from their time in German concentration camps.

The prospect of that march sparked a legal fight that went all the way to the Supreme Court. It was a Jewish lawyer from the ACLU who argued the case for the Nazis – contending that even the most hateful of speech was protected under the first amendment.

As an American and a Jew, I find it difficult to resolve my feelings around that Supreme Court case – but I am grateful that the prospect of Nazis marching in their streets spurred the survivors and other Skokie residents to act. They joined together to form the Holocaust Memorial Foundation and built the first Illinois Holocaust Museum in a storefront in 1981 – a small but important forerunner to the one I helped build thirty years later.

I do not invoke the specter of Nazis lightly. But I know the history intimately — and have spent more time than probably anyone in this room with people who survived the Holocaust. Here’s what I’ve learned – the root that tears apart your house’s foundation begins as a seed – a seed of distrust and hate and blame.

The seed that grew into a dictatorship in Europe a lifetime ago didn’t arrive overnight. It started with everyday Germans mad about inflation and looking for someone to blame.

I’m watching with a foreboding dread what is happening in our country right now. A president who watches a plane go down in the Potomac – and suggests — without facts or findings — that a diversity hire is responsible for the crash. Or the Missouri Attorney General who just sued Starbucks – arguing that consumers pay higher prices for their coffee because the baristas are too “female” and “nonwhite.” The authoritarian playbook is laid bare here: They point to a group of people who don’t look like you and tell you to blame them for your problems.

I just have one question: What comes next? After we’ve discriminated against, deported or disparaged all the immigrants and the gay and lesbian and transgender people, the developmentally disabled, the women and the minorities – once we’ve ostracized our neighbors and betrayed our friends – After that, when the problems we started with are still there staring us in the face – what comes next.

All the atrocities of human history lurk in the answer to that question. And if we don’t want to repeat history – then for God’s sake in this moment we better be strong enough to learn from it.

I swore the following oath on Abraham Lincoln’s Bible: “I do solemnly swear that I will support the constitution of the United States, and the constitution of the state of Illinois, and that I will faithfully discharge the duties of the office of Governor .... according to the best of my ability.

My oath is to the Constitution of our state and of our country. We don’t have kings in America – and I don’t intend to bend the knee to one. I am not speaking up in service to my ambitions — but in deference to my obligations.

If you think I’m overreacting and sounding the alarm too soon, consider this:

It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic. All I’m saying is when the five-alarm fire starts to burn, every good person better be ready to man a post with a bucket of water if you want to stop it from raging out of control.

Those Illinois Nazis did end up holding their march in 1978 – just not in Skokie. After all the blowback from the case, they decided to march in Chicago instead. Only twenty of them showed up. But 2000 people came to counter protest. The Chicago Tribune reported that day that the “rally sputtered to an unspectacular end after ten minutes.” It was Illinoisans who smothered those embers before they could burn into a flame.

Tyranny requires your fear and your silence and your compliance. Democracy requires your courage. So gather your justice and humanity, Illinois, and do not let the “tragic spirit of despair” overcome us when our country needs us the most.

Sources:

• NBC Chicago & J.B. Pritzker, Democratic governor of Illinois, State of the State address 2025: Watch speech here | Full text

• Betches News on Instagram (screencaps)

[beauty-funny-trippy]

Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker Condemns Trump’s LGBTQ Erasure & Rising Authoritarianism in Blistering Speech (State of the State Address, 2025): "The seed that grew into a dictatorship in Europe a lifetime ago didn’t arrive overnight. It started with everyday Germans mad about inflation and looking for someone to blame. "I’m watching with a foreboding dread what is happening in our country right now — a president who watches a plane go down in the Potomac and suggests, without facts or findings, that a diversity hire is responsible for the crash. Or the Missouri Attorney General who just sued Starbucks — arguing that consumers pay higher prices for their coffee because the baristas are too “female” and “nonwhite.” "The authoritarian playbook is laid bare here. They point to a group of people who don’t look like you, and tell you to blame them for your problems. "I just have one question: What comes next? After we’ve discriminated against, deported or disparaged all the immigrants and the gay and lesbian and transgender people, the developmentally disabled, the women and the minorities — once we’ve ostracized our neighbors and betrayed our friends — after that, when the problems we started with are still there staring us in the face — what comes next? "All the atrocities of human history lurk in the answer to that question. And if we don’t want to repeat history, then for God’s sake in this moment, we better be strong enough to learn from it. "If you think I’m overreacting and sounding the alarm too soon, consider this: it took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic. "All I’m saying is when the five-alarm fire starts to burn, every good person better be ready to man a post with a bucket of water if you want to stop it from raging out of control. "Tyranny requires your fear and your silence and your compliance. Democracy requires your courage. So gather your justice and humanity, Illinois, and do not let the “tragic spirit of despair” overcome us when our country needs us the most."

[rivetgoth]

I feel like part of what’s kinda wild to me about the weird “born in the wrong generation but in an alternative 80s punk goth queer way” crowd that idolizes this nonexistent 80s that was like a goth alt GNC queer safehaven is that without fail every time I actually talk to older goths or other older alt people or even just older queer or nonwhite people who were actually there in the 80s they’re IMMEDIATELY like “oh you were NOT missing out hahaha.” Like at best the coolest things they’ll talk about is getting to see some OG alt bands live in their prime or getting to see a cool movie in theatres, that IS genuinely cool, like major jealousy to anyone who got to actually witness Skinny Puppy or Ministry live in the 80s ykwim, but literally ALL of these people will then immediately start talking about how much people sucked, how much mainstream culture sucked, etc. It was literally Reagan-era AIDS crisis. Dystopian literature took off for a reason. Racism was a massive society-wide issue. War on drugs was in full swing. Even just the insanely racialized pushback against disco during that time is of note tbh. Massive brand commercialization was getting worse and worse. Whenever I talk to gay people from that era they express so much relief about how much the world has improved since then. I was talking to an older woman in her 50s who’s been in the goth scene since the 80s who was saying that back in the day if she went out dressed in her goth clothes she was called a faggot on the street. I remember her jokingly being like “well at least they were saying it to me and not actual gay people I guess haha…” There are aspects of 80s culture, especially 80s subculture and counterculture, that I really really enjoy, obviously, and certain sentiments surrounding big art trends of the time that I love, but it’s just kind of ridiculous to me that YEARS after collectively mercilessly mocking the trend of white girls saying they miss the 50s while ignoring the fact that Stonewall and the civil rights movement hadn’t happened yet, no-fault divorce didn’t exist, and lobotomies were still acceptable, I’m seeing posts nearly daily on this site that are like “well if I had been born in the 80s art would be good and music would be good and there’d be a queer alt community for me, but instead I was born in the tiktok poser generation 💔” like girl I’m sorry but you ARE the tiktok poser. Get offline and go FIND your community. Your issue is not that you were born in the wrong generation, you literally just do not know how to find modern underground subculture. Because it is underground.

[drdemonprince]

Read the cop post you reblogged. Apologies if I’m being too literal. I’ve had ppl break into my house before. What am I supposed to do in that situation? Shoot the person? Let them shoot me? Genuinely asking for an alternative bc I don’t want to call the cops ever. It just feels like it’s often ppl who don’t live in areas with higher crime who post stuff like that and it feels out of touch with the reality some are living in. Most ppl in my neighborhood don’t want to abolish the police. It’s white liberals, leftists, anarchists who get to live that out more. Idk if this makes sense, but would love to hear others thoughts.

I have also had people break into my home, I've heard drills run on my block multiple times in just the past year, I've witnessed multiple shootings, violent domestic assault outside my home, etc. I also live in a racially diverse area and speak regularly with my neighbors and yeah, a 70-year-old Black grandmother in Chicago is far more likely to be a pro-cop Trump supporter than she is to be a radical anarchist. Your average person of any identity group is unlikely to be an abolitionist or anarchist... because those are still extremely fringe political positions in this world. Now it is also experience that the majority of actually committed abolitionists are Black & brown people, but that doesn't mean a majority of people from those identity groups in general are abolitionists at all. The white leftie abolitionists...mostly aren't actually abolitionists in practice from all that I've seen. Give them a roommate who doesn't pay the bills and has a mental health episode and they'll wield the tools of the state just as readily as anybody.

And that kinda brings me to one of my questions. Has calling the cops worked for you when you have had to deal with a home invasion, robbery, attack, etc? I just mentioned this in another post, but in my case *threatening* to call the cops has helped sometimes. The existence of the police state as a threat did help keep my stalker from going further when he broke into my apartment. But when a person (especially a person in a non-wealthy, majority-nonwhite area) calls the cops, how often do they show up soon enough to be helpful? How often do they confuse the attacker and the victim? How often do they blame the victim and refuse to file a report? How often do they attack or kill the wrong person? How often does their presence escalate things and cause people to panic, causing more violence?

I'm not trying to be a little shit here, I know that the answer is not "100% of the time". Sometimes, in the present world, a person is overpowered and in danger and they have no support network around them and they call the cops and the sirens or the sight of big dudes with guns scares their attacker away. I have, once or twice, witnessed some version of that too. It didn't do anything to get the victim away from their abuser or prevent harm from happening in the long term, but it did cause people to scatter.

Of course the long term abolitionist answer is that we need community networks of support to keep one another safe, to prevent crimes motivated by need, to deescalate conflict, and maybe even to secure justice and safety by scaring abusers and rapists etc off. In the absence of those things formally existing, I think we should all do what we can to build those networks of support in our communities, and thinking about how we can address problems without using the police. I wrote about some examples of that I witnessed and lived through here:

I don't think there are many great options right now if a person is attacked. I know that I minimize my involvement with the police as much as I humanly can. Again, only you can decide for yourself what you believe, what you can do, what you need, what you think is right.

[junglejim4322]

I’m going to be real for 1 single second people pretending that the general public turning on chappel roan for things like not endorsing a candidate is some kind of homophobic hate crime that’s happening because she’s a lesbian are lost in the sauce. it is because she’s white and other white people see it as a betrayal and a failure on her behalf for not prioritizing the needs of white people above nonwhite people. This includes white queers

[catboybiologist]

have you also noticed that the tgirl tummy tuesday thing is, like, almost exclusively white girls? why is that?

Because the trans community on Tumblr is overwhelmingly white, yes it is a problem.

Some of it comes from the top, eg nonwhite users being banned more frequently, some of it is community momentum surrounding representation of the members already in it, and some is biased from the people in the community themselves.

I don't have much of an idea how to fix it, but I would love to see more representation in the Tumblr trans community in general and I'm all ears if there's anything I can do.

[phoebastria-albatrus]

i need to make a post on why i draw 3/4 of the pd nonwhite can i trust the jrwi fandom 2 be normal. awesome. lots of posts today lesgo (this got really long so under the cut)

vyncent is like canonically vaguely asian whatever the fuck that means but he is just generically mixed SEAsian king 2 me. he cannot name any part of his heritage and he’s real 4 that. anyhoo. i think his actual like straight up immigrant allegory is smth more people should think about!!! people are thinking your weird for not knowing what something is??? holy fuck!!! social fumbles??? fuck!!! yeah!! anyway. and the assumption of a dumb immigrant and how people perceive him as that and are actually confused when he can stand his ground and say stop talking at me. yeah. anyway asian king and the feeling of being stuck in someone’s perception of you is something imma bring up w dakota too so.

dakota. yeah. i usually draw him Black or mixed and i think this is important regarding his backstoryyyyy. poc and esp Black families aren’t given the same support sometimes in grieving and that Can lead to drug abuse moreoften so. that happens with alaska. and dakota is in this place of i need to be strong because people will pick on me if im weak and alaska needs me. that’s basically canon but boy if you imagine it in a poc way. 100 damage. so you look outwardly strong to everyone else but like!! you’re just a kid!!! and adultification!! ur a 16 year old boy and you just want to be silly!!! and then people still see you like this and you think but that’s not me!!! but you can’t drop this now either. so you’re stuck between being seen as weird by white peers and weak by poc peers.

mixed latina-white for our girl ashe and it Is important that she doesn’t remember anything she might’ve learned from her mother. her brain made space for the demon language by shoving out her other language or smth. but yeah so you kill your mother and a couple years later you realise oh, i have nothing from my culture and my father can’t help me with this. he doesn’t know how to help keep my hair healthy or what those words mean or how to throw a quince. so ashe spends her time in online school clubs and internet forums but somethings still missing. she finds tutorials for her hair and starts doing language courses but there’s still Something missing. because she’s being taught this by someone she doesn’t know or who’s just a face behind a screen and. yeah. the disconnect from her culture is something vyncent Kind of gets but she’s alone in this. so yeah ashe is someone who became moreeee. timid. in physical spaces. to keep eyes off of her and not dissect whatever is wrong with her. why she doesn’t pronounce that correctly or why she walks around with a white father.

anyway. thats it. dont kill me.

[burr-ell]

I'm gonna be real, as a Southern white woman: the way some folks in the CR fandom have been talking about Southern white women and the South in general in relation to Imogen (and by extension Liliana) is weird, infantilizing, and distinctly indifferent to the actual voices and lived experiences of nonwhite people. It claims to be critical, but it has more interest in sympathy and pity and making excuses than anyone ever having to face realistic, justified consequences. Your pain is valid, but your white middle class experience—whether you're queer, a woman, neurodivergent, or some combination thereof—is not the central lens through which your favorite stories must be viewed lest the rest of us be misogynist lesbophobes. The fact that the litmus test for who is and isn't a true feminist activist is whether or not you endlessly coo and simper over the feelings of a skinny femme white woman (and have all the "correct" headcanons about her) does not give me confidence that any of you are interested in a perspective remotely different from your own—or indeed, actually doing any of the hard work necessary to help make things materially better for the South in real life.

[bemusedlybespectacled]

since @sketchy-scribs-n-doods asked why birth certificates are racist:

preface: read this post about eugenics so that I don't have to write that overview again.

anywho! the very very short version is that there was a guy named Walter Ashby Plecker (hereafter "the Plecker fucker") who was a doctor in Virginia in the late 1800s/early 1900s. like he was born right around when the Civil War ended and his family owned slaves, if you want to get an idea of the time and place we're talking about.

the Plecker fucker, along with a couple of his good buddies John Powell and Ernest Sevier Cox(1) from the Anglo-Saxon Club(2), wrote and lobbied for a law called the Racial Integrity Act (incidentally, one of the blueprints the Nazis used for their own laws), which did a couple of things:

it legally categorized every person into either "white" or "colored," with "white" being only people with a completely unbroken and provable white European heritage – with a teeny tiny exception for people who were less than 1/16th Native American that he was bullied into including(3) – and "colored" being literally everything else, with no specificity as to whether it meant Black or Asian or Native American or whatever;

it prohibited white people from marrying colored people (though notably not banning having sex with them: we're talking about a guy whose family owned slaves here, so you can do the math on that)

it allowed for the sterilization of certain undesirable people, such as the mentally ill; and, most importantly for our purpose:

it required all births and marriages to be registered in a big state-wide database, with the races of all parties listed.

and he also set himself up as the first guy in charge of that registry, so that it would be done exactly the way he wanted it.

prior to this, if you could get away with passing as white, you were (generally) treated as white. this was to prevent any white-passing mixed race people from marrying into white society (because their birth certificate records would show that their parents had nonwhite heritage), and eventually eliminate mixed race people, period.

now, obviously birth certificates weren't in common use before this law, so at least the first wave of people affected by the law could still (in theory) lie about their ethnicity and establish themselves as white on their birth certificates, thus allowing them to continue marrying "real" white people.

not a problem! the Plecker fucker fancied himself a bit of a genealogist (meaning he thought everyone with the same last name was related, somehow), so he'd just go in and edit people's records to say "colored," invalidating their marriages in the process, and ordered all of the people under him to do the same. like, there's a letter he sent out to the county-level people that was like, "anyone with the last name Collins [yes, really] is actually mixed race, DO NOT LET THEM GET MARRIED TO WHITE PEOPLE, EDIT ALL THEIR RECORDS."(4)

outside of the obvious negative effects of the law in general not allowing interracial marriages (until it was overturned by Loving v. Virginia in 19-fucking-67) and sterilizing anyone disabled or "feebleminded," him going in and literally erasing Native heritage from records has prevented Virginian Native Americans from being able to claim federal tribal recognition, because it's all just "white" or "colored," which could mean anything nonwhite.

anyway, that's why birth certificates are racist. they were made up by a racist guy to do more racism. and then that racist guy got hit by a car and died.

I stg this is the short version. the longer version was idk how many pages before I melted into a depressed puddle of goo and almost flunked out of my senior year of college.

(1) Ernest Sevier Cox was a weird fucking dude in that he was really good friends with Marcus motherfucking Garvey, to the point that they attended each other's events, dedicated books to each other, and wrote each other a lot of letters even after Garvey was deported to Jamaica (and Cox personally tried to get Garvey released from jail when he was imprisoned for mail fraud). This was partly because white nationalism and black separatism accomplished the same ultimate goals (i.e. Black people leaving the US) from different angles, but I think they just also genuinely liked each other? For some reason??

(2) Basically the KKK but for genteel, refined, upper-class people instead of violent, disorderly peasants (yes, they legit disliked the KKK because it was a poor person thing). Also, I can't find it again, but at one point when I was researching all this in college, I was looking through old school newspapers and either William & Lee or William & Mary had a junior Anglo-Saxon Club, sort of like a Young Republicans, and one of their contributions to the student newspaper was a piece about how they definitely weren't racist and how dare they be accused of racism, they just didn't want blacks or whites mixing! How is that racist? (Yes, they used the word "racist," and I have no idea what their definition of racism was, if it wasn't what they were doing) Anyway, I think about that a lot.

(3) This is informally called the Pocahontas Exception, because a lot of really, really influential, prominent and rich Virginians actually took a lot of pride in claiming to be descended from Pocahontas and John Rolfe (even if they weren't), and without the exception, they'd all be classified as "colored." Plecker didn't want any exceptions at all (he was, at the very least, not a hypocrite about what he thought "white" meant), but given that some of the people the law would make "colored" would potentially be voting on the law, he had to include the exception or risk it not being passed at all.

(4) The reason I even got into this subject in the first place is that one of my family tree names is on that list and we're pretty sure they moved to Kentucky because of it, but it doesn't necessarily mean they're related to us OR that they were white-passing mixed-race people: they could well have been just plain white people who happened to have the same surname.

[azspot]

MAGA faithful were prepared to hate transgender people and nonwhite immigrants and 10th-generation nonwhite citizens. But now they’re required to hate cartographers, and Lutherans, and private charities, and NATO, and Canada, and missionaries, and farmers, and Dolly Parton, too, probably. And they have no idea what arbitrary new things they’ll be required to hate tomorrow.

Ain’t That America

[neptune432]

I feel so conflicted with how many people hc kabru as transmasc compared to other characters, ESPECIALLY seeing how many view kabru as a bottom/submissive with laios. I'm sorry but I know people learn to view south asian men as being less masculine and I can't help but view kabru's treatment by the fandom thru that lens. it's also possible to have dark-skin men be treated as overly aggressive and overpowering compared to white people (and I've seen that with how people treat kabru and mithrun's relationship), but not as often with laios and kabru.

with all that being said, I can't help but wonder if this influenced the common hc of kabru being transmasc. like I do enjoy the thought of more south asian trans characters but I also know how white people view us and it makes me wary. why does kabru get this hc so often over every other character? I'd like to assume this is being done in good faith and I'm overthinking things but the way the fandom treats kabru is too familiar to me. I deal with my own complicated feelings about gender as an indian while living in a white society and I can't help but question these things

and I know being transmasc is not the same thing as being "less masculine" but I also know that race has affected how some people in the fandom view kabru. white society views asian men as generally not fitting within their idea of cisheterosexuality due to stereotypes that began with colonialism. so I have to wonder if that's affected the fandom's view of kabru when it comes to his gender and personality.

I know people will get angry at me for saying negative things about a trans hc but I can't just ignore the way race affects how others characterize nonwhite characters. a lot of you just don't want to admit the racism is there and get overly defensive like I'm trying to attack you or something. I just want an acknowledgement that these issues exist and may be subconsciously affecting your view of things.

edit: someone pointed this out and I wanted to say that kabru's definitely not the only one who gets trans hcs. my thoughts were mainly about how a lot of labru content tends to have kabru be the trans character in the relationship, which I don't think is an accident. I'll also say it's not impossible for trans people to simply see themselves in kabru and hc him as trans for those reasons, which is totally reasonable. but I don't believe race never affects how people view kabru. I think there can be multiple reasons for why someone views kabru a certain way and it's not always obvious. I just wanted to point out that this can be one of those reasons.

[talenlee]

Decemberween 2024 — Youtube Academia

Hey, I’m in academia, here are some people I look to for ‘how to communicate and make a point in academia and what you can use it to do.’

First up, hand over heart, this is going to have a real sampling bias. I’m going to point to three diferent academics who make stuff in spaces I can participate in and all three of them are dudes, and white enough that my dad would mostly consider them white. He’d probably be on the fence about Daniel Immerwahr. This is a problem in academia in general and it’s a problem with me in the specific: The stuff that I’ve gotten attention to, even the stuff that is explicitly about broadening my access to and understanding of nonwhite cultures and the nonwhite parts of the world is coming to me through white guys from academia. I’m not wild about it but it’s better in my mind to acknowledge it and present the sources then pretend this isn’t where I’m coming from.

Anyway, hey, here’s an essay titled Why Hip-Hop is the Most Important Artistic Movement In Human History.

Why Hip-Hop is the Most Important Artistic Movement in Human History: A Professor Skye Video Essay

Watch this video on YouTube

I think this is a good starting point for Professor Skye’s work.

Professor Skye presents three kinds of work. One is album reviews, where he breaks down and analyses components in how albums work and what they present in their messages, in a way that explicitly is not seeking to centre his interpretation but rather academically recognise a useful generalised language bridge for people like me who use the term ‘generalised language bridge.’

Second to that there are kind of larger, high-concept comparisons, where he provides a meaningful explanation to people outside of hiphop interest as to what’s going on. This led to him going extremely viral thanks to explaining the Kendrick/Drake beef this year which, god that was a thing, wasn’t it. The third thing that Professor Skye does is historical and academic contextualisation of music media. That can be things like ‘here’s iconic stuff from the 1980s,’ and it can be ‘behold as I use Proust to discuss this album.’

In each case I think there’s a sort of meaningful value to ‘doing the readings.’ Listening to the albums he talks about or the songs he talks about as and when he starts to talk about them means that each video is a sort of expository piece to accompany the text. I watch media analysis all the time of stuff I have not and never will watch, like Victorious, but in that case, the analysis is explicitly trying to present the text so you don’t need it. That’s not what Professor Skye is doing. This is not a channel trying to convince you to enjoy a thing or to enjoy the thing without the thing. It is a textual engagement with the album, and that is a really cool thing to do. You might not even have the mental muscles practiced for that at this point.

I'm What the Culture Feeling

Watch this video on YouTube

By the way, if you listen to Skye and go ‘oh hey, this is interesting and I’d like to know more,’ here’s a video essay from FD Signifier which is long, yes, but also extraordinarily good, about the same kind of topic and coming from inside the culture. If Skye makes you think ‘hey, I could be interested in this,’ then you should probably then check out FD Signifier.

Your Grammar Is Basic Compared to Black English

Watch this video on YouTube

But hey while I’m talking about language bridges (I was, honest), what about a language expert to talk about distinct grammatical differences between English (as I am used to calling it) and Black English. Language Jones is an interesting guy with a specific skillset, which is expertise in linguistics at an academic level, specifically the way your brain picks up and relates to linguistics. When you do that, you stop having to focus on formal and proper structures and instead get a lot more inclined to seeing the way language slops into the grooves in human brains and social spaces. Sometimes that means explaining to you and me what a wug is, and that’s interesting, but I find it much more interesting when he does dives like this one.

In this video, what Jones is doing is picking apart Black English into the toolkit I have in my head for understanding proper English, with terms like subjunctive and participle, and then demonstrate that the way Black English works is entirely a coherent grammatical structure, it’s not vibes or habits or attenuating with a specific person, it’s a whole other form of English and it’s really fucking nuanced. There’s a degree of fineness in Black English that is simple absent from Proper, Formal English. Formal English that I was taught is structured such that there are a host of unintuitive, hard to maintain stiff forms for completely correct conveyance of intent (“can I” vs “may I”), while Black English instead has a coherent grammatical structure that gives more fine control for intention, tense and position and the listener is there to interpret it rather than to enforce it.

This is not totally surprising, and if you talk to uh, any Black people, you probably already know this. What this gave me is a useful toolkit for reconstructing the grammar form. Really interesting stuff!

Daniel Immerwahr How to Hide an Empire

Watch this video on YouTube

Look, I’m sure I’ve talked about Daniel Immerwahr’s work in the past. I share this video from him every time I want to get people to think about American colonialism in the ways that make them uncomfortable. It’s a good talk, it uses its time well, and it also highlights a topic and the relationship of ourselves to the way things communicate their identity through their names and symbols of themselves.

Oh and if you don’t like that, check out Daniel Immerwarh’s podcast talking about the real world histories of Dune. Talks during the pandemic were restricted, but dang some of them were on wonderfully untypical topics.

There’s more. There’s always more. Dr Kipp Davis shows up when I look for academics I follow, but his interest is in Biblical studies. He’s part of the Diablocritics, which means Dr Jennifer Bird is on there, and it’s a way I can check out her work in a way that I find very accessible and interesting, and the other members of the Diablocritics are there, too.

Still, sometimes something academic is just something interesting. I don’t think Josh Worth is a doctor or professor or something. I think technically, he’s just a designer, as in a User Experience designer, that kind of specific discipline of having a clear, meaningful purpose for a visual expression. I share to you this graph Josh Worth made of the solar system if the moon, our moon, was a single pixel.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[indecisiveavocado]

Once we're tokenizing let's go all in

Globally, 83.1 percent of Jews are Zionist (see "Notes and Citations" for calculation details) This means that when non-Jews point to their token antizionist, they are pointing to 16.9 percent of the global community, which is not a small percentage but also not a particularly large one.

Let's see what else we can do

Remember how Trump is super anti-Latinx? Well, 46 percent of Latinx people still voted for him. That suggests that when Trump points to Republican Latinx people, he's being under half as tokenizing as when non-Jews point to antizionist Jews. Indeed, 33 percent of nonwhite voters went for Trump. Trump's an Islamophobe? 21 percent of Muslims pulled the lever for him.

Are we really going to argue Trump isn't an anti-Latinx Islamophobe?

Or can we accept that antizionism is not supported by Jews as a whole, and while individuals may dissent and are welcome to, the ongoing tokenization of antizionist Jews is tiring and lends itself to all sorts of repugnant conclusions?

Notes and citations

83.1 percent of Jews are Zionist: Using AJC data, I would conservatively define 91 percent of Israeli Jews as Zionist, which works out to 41.2 percent of the global Jewish population. Since I don't find that definition great but there aren't many studies on what percent of Israelis are Zionist, I'll switch when I can. Thus: Add in 91 percent of Canadian Jews (yes, the same percent as Israel. I told you it was a conservative estimate) for another 2.3 percent. And don't forget 80 percent of American Jews (that cited in an article by the generally antizionist Jewish Currents, by the way), which works out to another 31.6 percent. So far we've got 75.1 percent of the global Jewish population. But we can do better.

82 percent of Jewish community leaders--the closest I could find--in a broad swath of European countries said their commitment to Israel was stronger post October 7. For my purposes, I'll count that as Zionist. The countries represented with Jewish populations of 10,000 or greater were Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK. The other countries listed (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Ireland, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Montenegro, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Serbia, and Slovakia) have a combined Jewish population of 53,000, which works out to about that of South Africa, 0.3 percent of the world's Jewish population. In total the survey studied countries representing 7.2 percent of the world's Jewish population; that's another 5.9 percent of the world's Jewish population that's Zionist, for a total of 81 percent.

But don't worry, we're not done; I was also able to find studies on Australia. While surprisingly few Australian Jews explicitly identify as Zionist, 88 percent feel responsibility for ensuring the state of Israel continues to exist; that's another 0.7 percent.

Latin America? A 2022 poll (you will need to enter a "name" and "email" to get access; just spam your keyboard) of Jewish leaders found that a whopping 91 percent agreed with the statement that Israel "Es el centro de la vida judía y parte indisoluble de mi identidad" (Google Translate: "It is the center of Jewish life and an inseparable part of my identity"). They don't specifically mention the countries, but I assume it's those of their member countries (minus Brazil, as the report's in Spanish): Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, Venezuela. Of those, Argentina, Chile, Panama, and Uruguay have over 10,000 Jews; they make up 1.5 percent of the world's Jewish population. Bolivia, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Peru and Venezuela have a total of 15,400, 0.1 percent of the total. Thus we find that Latin America adds another 1.4 percent. We are at 83.1 percent.

I stopped there.

Trump voting data: https://archive.is/yu1Hq (WaPo article unpaywalled), https://www.cair.com/press_releases/cair-exit-poll-of-muslim-voters-reveals-surge-in-support-for-jill-stein-and-donald-trump-steep-decline-for-harris/ (Muslim vote)