#racialized borders

[raffaellopalandri]

Book of the Day – Border and Rule

Today’s Book of the Day is Border and Rule, written by Harsha Walia in 2021 and published by Haymarket Books. Harsha Walia is a Canadian activist and writer based in Vancouver. She is active in immigration politics, Indigenous rights, feminist, anti-racist, anti-statist, and anti-capitalist movements. Border & Rule, by Harsha Walia I have chosen this book because I often cite it in discussions…

[desianarchist]

I hate this country I hate this country I hate this country I hate this country I hate this country I hate this country

[sukibenders]

I laugh every time someone says Penelope is more of a feminist who understands women's rights more than Eloise simply because she's LW because, be so for real right now, that is such a lie. Like Eloise has her moments and her feminism is very yte and privileged, but at least she takes the time to actually consider from other's perspective, even if she's rude here and there, and appears to make attempts to grow as a character (when the narrative allows her to rather than picking favorites). Penelope exposing secrets and being feared by most of the Ton, especially the women and young girls, for the amount of power she has does not scream feminist to me but go off.

[tomorrowusa]

One word I didn't expect to hear describing Joe Biden's State of the Union speech was "energetic" – but there it was bigtime. 😎

Dark Brandon was in the House and wasn't taking any prisoners. His fervent advocacy for progressive and pro-democracy policies left no one in doubt that he is The Anti-MAGA.

President Biden sounded like an older version of Harry Truman though without swear words. And much of the speech was aimed directly at the Republicans and at the GOP Supreme Court – calling them out right to their faces.

Biden wasn't just energetic, he absolutely taunted Republicans on an issue they've shot themselves in both feet on – immigration reform.

Biden’s Border Taunts Clearly Hit a Republican Nerve

Finally, he arrived at the topic that he knew Republicans couldn’t resist, because it represents that party’s most embarrassing recent failure. He reminded the country that at Donald Trump’s direction, Republicans had killed the strongest immigration bill in years, one that would reduce the flood of asylum seekers and bolster security at the southern border. And immediately the boos poured in from the red side of the chamber. “What are you against?” he asked, finally laughing at the opportunity to expose a bit of rampant hypocrisy. “Oh, you don’t like that bill?” It would save lives and bring order to the chaos at the border, he said, reducing fentanyl smuggling and giving every president the ability to shut down crossings when the surge of migrants became too great. [ ... ] Biden’s provocation on this issue may have been the most successful moment of the evening, one that will be replayed many times in the months to come on the campaign trail. And the power of it could be seen in the downcast face behind him of Speaker Mike Johnson, who wouldn’t bring the border bill to the House floor. All he could do was shake his head and hope Biden changed the subject.

Democrats have reason to feel good about this speech and it showed. His departure from the chamber was delayed by enthusiastic Democratic House members who were asking for selfies and getting autographs from Biden while chatting with him. If they had thought the speech was a dud they would have fled immediately.

On a somewhat funny note, the extended post-speech coverage of Biden's socializing on the House floor delayed the start of the GOP reply by the rather wooden Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama. Many viewers may have tuned out before her speech finally started a little before 11 PM Eastern Time.

[sangfielle]

the way dragon age handles ferelden is. so. something.

[aeriondripflame]

i am aware that it is fiction and it’s not that serious but god can you tell when someone doesn’t know the difference between nationality and ethnicity when they talk about criston being dornish

[zip-toonz]

OMG THERES A FUCKING HONDURAN FLAG EMOJI 🇭🇳 !!!!!

[shannaraisles]

Apparently this needs to be said again.

The experience of oppression/racism in the United States of America is not the only experience of oppression/racism in the world. There are nuances in other countries that you cannot grasp, just as I cannot fully grasp the experiences you are having.

No one owes you the full recounting of their own experience to justify an artistic choice. If you don't like something, that does not give you the right to make a public comment drawing attention to it in such a way as will draw the ire of those "fans" who like to go looking for people to pile in on.

People are flawed, and surprisingly enough, that means that their fictional creations are also flawed. If the character you are reading isn't absolutely perfect in every way, that's a good thing.

But the main thing, my lovelies, is that your experience is not the universal experience, and your reaction to a piece of art is not the universal reaction to it. Please stop trying to tell artists of all mediums to conform to your narrow world view.

We would all be so much poorer without the diversity of global culture and experience available to us, shown through the lens of that same diversity.

[peridot-tears]

You always have to give yourself the benefit of a doubt that society won't when it comes to stereotypes.

Like driving around as an Asian woman. That shit sucks, man. You fuck up a lil, or the other driver fucks up and they honk at you, and you know that they'll say some shit about "Asians can't drive" or "women can't drive."

I was driving in a traditionally white neighborhood that I swear was once a sundown town, and I stop to give this bitch their right of way, and they're sitting there glaring and honking at me, while I'm exasperatedly going, "Bitch, you gonna go or nah." And my Black passenger who I was dropping off home in that area goes, "Yeah, the old white folks here are always trying to make it a race thing about the Asians moving in, but the old guys are just shitty drivers."

And then I drive out of state with my NY license plates and everyone stays a gajillion miles away from me.

[tocitynews]

Video Shows Border Agents With Guns Drawn, Detain Family Returning From Mexico For A Family Funeral In Mistaken Identity Freak Out – Los Angeles California reporting

Durazo said the officers drew their weapons and told everyone to get out of the car, one by one, including two children and his 75-year-old aunt who had just laid her son to rest.

“It was terrible. The worst part is seeing the kids, you know, getting detained with guns drawn,” he said. “Honestly, I was really scared for my kids, you know. That's the hardest part.”

Customs and Border Protection has not responded to requests for information, including questions on protocol for these kinds of encounters as well as if the agency is investigating this incident.

[girl4music]

I love seeing characters on TV shows breaking the law to do good things. Helpful things. Justful things.

That sentence is so odd to say but sadly it’s the truth.

Because… as Xena taught me. There’s a big difference between what justice is and what the law is.

And we should never wait around for justice.

[ushypocrisy]

Texas passes law allowing police to arrest anyone suspected of crossing the border

December 23, 2023 Since taking office in 2015, Texas Governor Greg Abbott has been waging an unrelenting war on immigrants across the state. From the horrific Operation Lone Star, which saw thousands of National Guard troops deployed to the Texas-Mexico border and the installation of razor wire and buoys, to the forced bussing of migrants to Chicago, Los Angeles and New York, Governor Abbott has…

[liberalsarecool]

From Professor Christopher Robichaud, Senior Lecturer in Ethics and Public Policy, Harvard:

“I'll say this, and then I likely won't be saying much more on here for quite some time, to the relief of some, I'm sure. But my farewell warning is this.

Everyone in the days and weeks ahead will use this loss as an opportunity to seek validation for their own hobby horse complaint. Harris lost because she campaigned with Liz Cheney. Harris lost because she didn't embrace Gaza. Harris lost because she didn't choose Shapiro. Harris lost because she wasn't progressive enough (possibly my favorite one).

Take a good, hard look at the map, my friends. Trump has won the popular vote. Trump ran the table. Explaining that with your hobby horse issue isn't going to cut it, tempting and consoling as it may be. The problem isn't the electoral college. The problem isn't that we didn't have a full primary. The problem isn't Harris. The problem isn't that Dems didn't have the right message. The problem isn't even inflation or the border.

The problem is so much worse than any of those things. Those are all technical problems, with straightforward expertise fixes. If only it were so! No, our problem is not technical. It's very much adaptive. A party that embraced the Big Lie, supported an insurrection, and has been selling conspiracy-addled madness for years, [which] was widely and enthusiastically embraced. Voter turnout was profound! People didn't sit this out.

Simply put, the problem--as some of you have rightly posted--is cultural. America, culturally, has completely abandoned a politics of decency and respect and has embraced instead a politics of resentment, revenge, false nostalgia, and bullying. And if you look at the demographics, you also won't be able to comfort yourself that it's just a white thing, or a working class thing, or an education thing. It's multi-class, multi-gender, multi-educational, and multi-racial. That's what winning the popular vote means. That's what running the table amounts to.

A culture that has descended to this level of debasement is not easily fixed. In fact it may not ever be fixed. The timeline for changing something like this is decades--at best--not two-to-four year election cycles. You can extend that in this case, because with the GOP likely controlling all branches of federal government and the courts, they will ensure that mechanisms are in place to keep them in power long after their popularity has waned. You can count on that.

The GOP evolved into a party of rage, lies, and revenge--and it correctly diagnosed that there was and is a large appetite for that. That's what the country wants. At least enough of the country wants it to ensure broad appeal and widespread electoral success. The old GOP will never return, and the Dems have nothing to say to American culture at the moment. Nothing. They've been speaking to a country that's gone, like dust in the wind.

And that's my final thought, which my posts last night alluded to. The America I knew and loved is gone. This new America--nah, I won't even bother. I will say that cultural change is less likely to occur in politics or in the academy. You're not going to get people to see how vulgar they've become through a clever argument or a nice campaign speech, that's for sure.

This would be time for the arts, broadly understood, to step in. The arts can change hearts and minds. Too bad the arts have been systematically dismantled in education in this country, and on the other end, the tech industry's assault on the arts through AI is sure to hollow out any good-faith efforts that might emerge.

And for the rest of the world, America's rightward lurch is, I'm afraid, bad news for you too. I know you know this. Because it's not isolated, is it? It's just at the moment the most prominent example of a burgeoning trend. And this will embolden others in other countries, to be sure. We need not speculate what happens when countries become mired in lies, embrace resentment, and savor bullying. We know exactly what happens. Bloody conflict and global destabilization.

The first quarter of the 21st century will, therefore, in hindsight, be viewed as the seed-planting stage for the absolute shit show that's about to unfold globally over the next two and a half decades. Count on it.

Adopt whatever coping and endurance strategies you have available. You're going to need it.

I think that's all I've left to say.”

The least evolved. The most paternalistic.

The bully. The liar. The most resentful.

This is the reality we are in. FOX and Republicans have been repeating the script for decades.

The Dark Ages are conservative aspirations.

The abdication of values/principles is complete.

'Good faith' no longer exists on the Right. The more reprehensible the action/person, the bigger the addiction. Trump proves this.

Anti-paternalism, anti-fascism and anti-bullying are my paths forward. Join me.

[communistkenobi]

stealing this screenshot from a post correcting people about what liminal spaces are, because I want to say something kind of unrelated and don’t want to bother the op - it’s funny this wiki article identifies airports as one of these non-places, and one of the “criteria” for a non-place is somewhere where you are able to remain anonymous, because (at least in north america, I can’t speak globally), one of the primary terrors of airports is its ability to render you a known quantity at basically any time, to bring you into public attention specifically by cops and security people identifying who you are. Airport security, bag inspections, police, surveillance cameras, etc do this security theatre routine at airports in a way that is more intense than other public spaces. Like I just don’t think this state of remaining anonymous in the airport applies to muslims or other religious and racial minorities the state deems to be a “high risk population” vis a vis border security, I think if you want to make the argument that these places allow anonymity, a fundamental part of this analysis has to include the fact that this anonymity is premised on visiting state violence, surveillance, and coercion on largely non-white and religious minorities, particularly and especially muslims, to “protect” and secure this space of (largely white) public anonymity 

[edwardteachswombtattoo]

Every time I look at this I lose my mind slightly. The map. The poetry. The little drawing of Ed. Just thinking about Stede carefully sketching this tiny little drawing of Ed, adding in details from memory.

Thinking about how Ed's face on the wanted poster is a racialized fiction meant to incite fear and paint him as a monster

while Stede's drawing is literally just what Ed looks like from Stede's POV.

It even has a border!! And the little hearts!! And just look at the way Stede draws Ed's hair!!

Every other drawing of Ed we've seen depicts him as some kind of monster, something just barely human. But here he's just...a guy??? Literally just a guy??? A pretty guy??? Not a vampire clown or a ghoul or a legend, just...a pretty guy.

[dailyadventureprompts]

Do the ethnostates inherent in major fantasy ever feel real weird to you? You’ve got elftopia (full of elves, where everyone speaks elf and worships the elf gods), orc-hold (full of orcs and maybe their slaves, where everyone speaks orc and worships the orc gods), and dwarfton (made by the dwarves! for the dwarves!).

You might have some cosmopolitan areas, usually human-dominant, but those are usually rare enough in-setting that they need to be pointed out separately. Is this just based on a misunderstanding of the medieval era, and the assumption that countries were all racially homogenous?

This has been bouncing around my brain the last little while. Do you have any thoughts on that? Is it just in my head?

I think what you've noticed is a quirk of derivative fantasy writing, which like a lot of hangups with the genre originates in people trying to crib Tolkien's work without really understanding what he was going for:

Though it contains a lot of detail, Tolkien's world is not grounded. It functions according a narrative logic that changes depending on what work in particular you're focusing on at the time (The Hobbit is a fairytale full of tricks and riddles, Lord of the Rings is a heroic epic, The Silmirilion is a legendary history).

One of the reasons the races are separate is to instill the feeling of wonder in the hobbits as POV characters for the reader, other folk live in far off places and are supposed to feel more legendary than our comparatively mundane friends from the shire. The Movies captured this well where going east in middle earth was like going back in time to a more and more mythologized past.

In real life, people don't stay static for thousands of years, no matter how long their people live. They meet, mingle, war and trade. Empires rise and fall creating shrapnel as they go, cultures adapt to a changing environment. This means that any geographic cross section you make is going to be a collage of different influences where uniformity is a glaring aberration.

What the bad Tolkien knockoffs did was take his image of a mythical world and tried to make it run in a realistic setting. Tolkien can say the subterranean dwarven kingdom of Erebor lasted for a thousand years without having to worry about birthrates or demographic shifts or the logistics of farming in a cave because he's writing the sort of story where those things don't matter. D&D and other properties like it however INSIST that their worlds are grounded and realistic but have to bend over backwards to keep things static and hegemonic.

Likewise contributing to the "ethnostate" feeling is early d&d (backbone of the fantasy genre that it is) being created by a bunch of White Midwestern Americans who were not only coming from a background of fantasy wargaming but were working during the depths of the coldwar. Hard borders and incompatible ideologies, cultural hegemony and intellectual isolation, a conception of the world that focused around antagonism between US and THEM. These were people born in the era of segregation for whom the idea of cultural and racial osmosis was alien, to the point where mingling between different fantasy races produced the "mongrelman" monster, natural pickpockets who combined the worst aspects of all their component parts, unwelcome in good society who were most often found as slaves.

This inability to appreciate cultural exchange is likewise why the central d&d pantheon has a ton of human gods with specific carveouts for other races (eventually supplemented with a bunch of race specific minor gods who are various riffs on the same thing). Rather than being universal ideals, the gods were seen as entities just as tribalistic as their followers.