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ereyies · 3 months ago

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YOU ASKED AND SO I SHALL DELIVER!!

ʚ♡ɞ

I was discussing with a few friends how Of Mice and Men keeps being removed from American school curriculums and banned by various school administrations throughout the states for ‘vulgar language, using the lord's name in vain’ and so on, but primarily about how it was banned for containing ‘racism, misogynistic, and potentially offensive to those with mental disabilities’.

But that's the most fundamental point of the entire book. To show the prejudices that the characters on the ranch experienced and the importance of companionship. I found a whole list online about it, it’s super fascinating seeing just how harshly it is challenged. You can find it here, but I'll post screenshots of the list below:

When I say that the misogynistic and especially racist themes are ‘there for a reason’, that’s not to say that I believe it should be completely brushed over because it is still a fundamental part of the novel that shows a lot regarding the historical and social context which it was written in and about life of Americans during the Great Depression beyond just white able-bodied men and how it should be handled in modern society rather than completely brushed under the rug

It’s awful seeing these painful but important parts of black American history and the treatment of black people in the past being completely glossed over and ignored just because people are ‘uncomfortable’ to discuss it when it’s so important to acknowledge it so we can learn from the last the same way that is done with white history.

Books such as Of Mice and Men are lumped in with hatred-driven racist/misogynistic/ableist drivel when its incredibly important to the time period it was written and should serve as an example of what not to repeat

A wonderful friend of mine said this which is definitely worth contributing:

'Something I remember is the very blatant connection between Lennie and the ranch dog. The ranch dog had nothing more to give after it reached its elderly years and it was suggested that he was to be shot. For the ranch, it had nothing of value to give once its strength was gone. Lennie, who had been compared to a dog a chapter (or more? it's been a while) prior to making it a little more obvious would eventually be the same because jobs in that time period did not accommodate disabilities, particularly Lennie's intellectual disability. They make it very clear that that's the climate they had been working with when they discussed putting the dog down. '

“I ought to have shot that dog myself, George. I shouldn’t have let no stranger shoot my dog.”

Lennie’s parallel with Candy's dog was so clever because it was wrong. Yes, it was foreshadowing what was going to happen to Lennie, yes it was setting up how George was to be the one who shot him because he didn’t want Lennie to die at the hands of a stranger scared and alone potentially like Candy’s dog was. Yes, Candy’s dog had nothing to offer the ranch anymore as it was so old and was ‘no good to himself’ and that’s why it was proposed to shoot him as a mercy.

But Lennie did have something to offer, he was strong and worked hard and efficiently. But he was just assumed to be useless to others because of his intellectual disability. Everyone just kept underestimating him and making incorrect assumptions about him and what he was capable of which Steinbeck intentionally included because he DOES show that the assumptions made are incorrect. Lennie was truly so much more than what other characters believed him to be.

That’s why the harsh banning of it was so ironic and disappointing. The boards of education who read it and still chose to ban it for ‘ableism and offending those with mental disabilities’ are the ones who are assuming that Lennie is just as incapable as every other character assumes him to be. Children could learn a lot from this book and the writing of it's characters, but instead it’s brushed over because it makes people ‘uncomfortable’ when really it’s something so important that should be discussed and if there really is a ‘problem’ with it, then instead of banning it, school boards should instead focus on how the sensitive subjects should be actually taught and addressed than ignoring it or banning it entirely.

Crooks’s identity as a black man is so fundamental to his whole character and the way he is taught about in schools is extremely reductive, completely disregarding the way he’s treated which is bewildering since he’s just as fascinating and fleshed out as every other character in the novel - He’s got personality expressed through how he communicates with Lennie and even more so his room, he has dreams even if he pretends otherwise and longs for companionship, and yet schools just gloss over him as a character and swap out the n word and pretends like the way he’s addressed is just mildly unfortunate because it was written when racism towards black people was ‘the norm’ which again is extremely reductive and children do not truly learn anything from it.

Every major character can be sympathised with one way or another, they’re all so incredibly fleshed out especially for the time it was written even if there are aspects that aren’t socially acceptable today, it contributes to the discussions we NEED to have about WHY we feel this way about the book, how far we have come since it's writing, acknowledging the past and how it’s handled in the modern day. There is SO much to be learnt beyond the story not only looking at language and story, but also the racial, biographical, historical and social context of the novel!!

all the characters are reduced SO MUCH in an educational setting. ‘Lennie is the dumb one. George is the smart one. Curley is the angry one. Curley’s wife is the slut. Slim is the handsome one. Crooks is the black one. Candy is the old one.’

It's SO much more than just ‘Steinbeck wrote a racist, misogynistic, ableist book.’ NO. He wrote a story about migrant workers trying to find work during the great depression. He wrote a story about an intellectually disabled man in an ableist environment. he wrote a story about a woman in a misogynistic environment. He wrote a story about a black man in a racist environment. He wrote about how that environment failed and abandoned them. He wrote about how this environment embodies the whole world of the time it was written. Regardless, they all have a uniting factor: they have a dream. The American Dream specifically. Each one of them hears Lennie and George's dream and they all want the same thing and all band together until it all falls apart. It’s about how the American Dream fails and excludes marginalised groups. But it also is about the importance of companionship and how devastating isolation can be to a person. Candy is alone. Curley’s wife is alone. Crooks is alone. But George had Lennie and Lennie had George until the end when it all falls apart and they’re alone again.

“I tell ya, a guy gets too lonely an' he gets sick”

Again and again the need for companionship and togetherness is brought up:

“Books ain't no good. A guy needs somebody—to be near him”

“A guy goes nuts if he ain't got nobody.”

To conclude, Of Mice and Men is more than what people keep reducing it to. So many different messages and lessons can be extracted from this brilliant work of American literature. Dialogue about it will help to educate on American history of the treatment for people with mental disabilities, physically disabled people, the elderly, black people, and women. This will do more good than banning it.

ʚ♡ɞ

okay VERY sorry for how long this is but THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR READING IF YOU'VE MADE IT TO THIS POINT <33

sorry if I ended up repeating words a whole bunch or if it's confusing 😰😰 these are mostly edited messages that i copied and pasted from a discussion i had on discord last month that i have been ITCHING to share. love you all so very much, thank you for indulging me <33

please don't be afraid to add any points you think i've missed or correct any mistakes i've made but this was mostly a ramble i wished to share because i feel it's important, at least to me. have a lovely day wherever you are <33

hi guys it's me elaine im eating lunch right now

who wants an outrageously long post discussing why i think the education system in most countries (particularly the us) fails to correctly understand and teach of mice and men by john steinbeck to students??

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dykevillanelle · 4 years ago

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{ yearly booklist: 2020 }

books read: 107 pages read: 30,689

top 5: 1 (best). the faceless old woman who secretly lives in your home (joseph fink & jeffrey cranor) 2. the faggots and their friends between revolutions (larry mitchell & ned asta) 3. a little life (hanya yanagihara) 4. the summer we got free (mia mckenzie) 5. there there (tommy orange)

bottom 5: 5. pleasure activism (ed. adrienne maree brown) 4. the immortalists (chloe benjamin) 3. where the crawdads sing (delia owens) 2. the difference between you and me (madeleine george) 1 (worst). sugar land (tammy lynne stoner)

full list under the cut [in order read, *starred* are recommended]:

*bluets (maggie nelson)* pleasure activism (ed. adrienne maree brown) as lie is to grin (simeon marsalis) *the mythic dream (ed. dominic parisien & navah wolfe)* what is the what (dave eggers) *if beale street could talk (james baldwin)* *the stonewall reader (ed. new york public library)* *the water dancer (ta-nehisi coates)* *no name in the street (james baldwin)* honeysuckle (robin gow) where the crawdads sing (delia owens) a tale for the time being (ruth ozeki) *going to meet the man (james baldwin)* *dangerous families (mattilda bernstein sycamore)* *junk (tommy pico)* call down the hawk (maggie stiefvater) answered prayers (truman capote) veils, nudity, and tattoos: the new feminine aesthetics (thorston botz-bernstein) *jacob's room (virginia woolf)* *sag harbor (colson whitehead)* so many ways to sleep badly (mattilda bernstein sycamore) the red parts: autobiography of a trial (maggie nelson) *the cancer journals (audre lorde)* the truth (terry pratchett) sweets: a history of candy *a little life (hanya yanagihara)* *tomboy survivial guide (ivan coyote)* *feed (tommy pico)* *red, white & royal blue (casey mcquiston)* *are prisons obsolete? (angela y. davis)* girl walking backwards (bett williams) the end of san francisco (mattilda bernstein sycamore) guapa (saleem haddad) *tell me how long the train's been gone (james baldwin)* pulling taffy (mattilda bernstein sycamore) love & lies: marisol's story (ellen wittlinger) the difference between you and me (madeleine george) *the body keeps the score (bessel van der kolk)* nimona (noelle stevenson) *priestdaddy (patricia lockwood)* *why are faggots so afraid of faggots?: flaming challenges to masculinity, objectification, and the desire to conform (ed. mattilda bernstein sycamore)* the city we became (n.k. jemisin) over the top (jonathan van ness) huntress (malinda lo) patience & sarah (isabel miller) *the art of cruelty (maggie nelson)* tricks and treats: sex workers write about their clients (ed. mattilda bernstein sycamore) *the end of imagination (arundhati roy)* the evidence of things not seen (james baldwin) *on earth we're briefly gorgeous (ocean vuong)* *dark days (james baldwin)* trail of broken wings (sejal badani) the lady's guide to petticoats and piracy (mackenzi lee) peculiar institution: america's death penalty in an age of abolition (david garland) *alice isn't dead (joseph fink)* three parts dead (max gladstone) when brooklyn was queer (hugh ryan) *the faggots and their friends between revolutions (larry mitchell & ned asta)* the immortalists (chloe benjamin) *semi queer: inside the world of gay, trans, and black truck drivers (anne balay)* three guineas (virginia woolf) *the glass hotel (emily st. john mandel)* the girl who lived twice (david lagercrantz) *chokehold: policing black men (paul butler)* codename villanelle (luke jennings) no tomorrow (luke jennings) die for me (luke jennings) *just above my head (james baldwin)* *sketchtasy (mattilda bernstein sycamore)* *angry white men: american masculinity at the end of an era (michael kimmel)* *how to be an anti-racist (ibram x. kendi)* white fragility: why it's so hard for white people to talk about racism (robin diangelo) *there there (tommy orange)* *toward an intellectual history of black women (ed. mia bay et. al.)* jonah's gourd vine (zora neale hurston) *the faceless old woman who secretly lives in your home (joseph fink & jeffrey cranor) animal dreams (barbara kingsolver) *the adventure zone: petals to the metal (clint mcelroy, carey pietsch, griffin mcelroy, justin mcelroy, travis mcelroy)* *from black power to hip hop: racism, nationalism, and feminism (patricia hill collins)* sugar land (tammy lynne stoner) *nature poem (tommy pico)* *prisoners of politics: breaking the cycle of mass incarceration (rachel elise barkow)* *all the bad apples (moïra fowley-doyle)* body horror: capitalism, fear, misogyny, jokes (anne elizabeth moore) *the summer we got free (mia mckenzie)* john henry days (colson whitehead) the memory of blood (christopher fowler) the last smile in sunder city (luke arnold) *the death of vivek oji (akwaeke emezi)* *dust tracks on a road (zora neale hurston)* *an unkindness of ghosts (rivers solomon)* *thick: and other essays (tressie mcmillan cottom)* first test (tamora pierce) the noble hustle: poker, beef jerky, and death (colson whitehead) page (tamora pierce) *patron saints of nothing (randy ribay)* squire (tamora pierce) *this is how it always is (laurie frankel)* hidden (helen frost) jimmy's blues and other poems (james baldwin) 96 words for love (rachel roy & ava dash) *the colossus of new york (colson whitehead)* *heavy (kiese laymon)* *tell my horse: voodoo and life in haiti and jamaica (zora neale hurston)* lady knight (tamora pierce) *nobody knows my name (james baldwin)* *apex hides the hurt (colson whitehead)*

#bookblr #angel.txt

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evilelitest2 · 5 years ago

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Why do fascists hate capitalism?

Good question. About half the reasons they hate capitalism are the same reason most leftist do, bad people are still likely to be annoyed at a bad thing that hurts them. Here are the other reasons

1) Fascists don’t believe in social mobility. Capitalism core tenant is “social mobility’, that somebody can work hard and become a billionaire, blah blah blah. Now this focus on social mobility is and always has been mostly a lie, but even rhetorically capitalism values the notion of social advancement. fascists do not, in fascist ideology, your birth determines your place in the world, and is part of a “natural order”. The only way to improve yourself is through war, and even that is more fulfilling your existing destiny rather than creating your own. Thus Fascists despises any form of social advancement outside military leadership, which is a major reason why they hate liberalism, socialism and communism, but its also a reason why they hate capitalism (though they usually prioritize the left wing ideologies first). This is even more true for them when somebody they think is “inferior” advances ‘above their station. Fascists aren’t aristocratic, but they hate capitalism for much of the same reason that the feudal aristocrats and monarchs hated it. It brings change and challenges the caste system

(Speaking of which)

2) On that note, capitalism is rarely…ideologically racist. Now capitalism is racist, it promotes and enforces existing racial hierarchies, and much of the damage of colonialism can be laid at the feet of capitalism. However capitalist ideology rarely buys directly into blood purity or “The Volk” style race theory that fascists so love. Capitalism in the US makes it super difficult for a black man to advance compared to his white counterpart, but if a black man does manage to become a billionaire, capitalism is basically cool with it. If you look at a demographic breakdown of the 1%, it is mostly old white men (and almost all people who at least partially inherited their wealth) but it also includes a lot of non white people and women. its a minority and many of them come from dictatorships (Saudi Arabia, China ect) but the ‘richest people in the world club isn’t entirely monochromatic.�� To leftists, this doesn’t seem especially impressive, but to fascists it is way too much diversity. Because capitalism is at its heart…amoral, the system will keep going even if the 1% are majority non white, gay or women, but to fascists that is terrifying. they barely tolerate capitalism because the ruling class are mostly straight white dudes, but the thought of the ruling class not overlapping with their belief in racial science to them is terrifying

3) Capitalism is ultimately an amoral system. It doesn’t really believe in a larger ideology beyond “make a fuck ton of money” and “innovate…somehow.” It does evil things because it believes that doing so will make them money, if doing the right thing will make them more money, they will. Capitalism is just an utterly mercenary ideology, and will gladly pretend to support progressive causes if it turns a profit. Again, leftists (rightly) aren’t big fans of this, but fascists hate it for the same reason we do honestly.

Like you know the whole “Woke capitalism” thing that gets leftists worked up. its doing something good but you know they don’t care and so they will abandon us the moment they feel like they can get away with it and all that. That is how fascists feel about the racism in capitalism, they like it but because it is not ideological, they don’t trust it.

Again this seems weird to leftists, but yes, fascists don’t like capitalism because it isn’t racist enough. We tend to interact with capitalism more than fascism, so people often don’t realize how much worse it can get

4) Capitalism doesn’t care about the spiritual, except as something to sell. ironically for all the hatred capitalism and communism have for each other, the two ideologies actually share a lot in common, they are super secular, materialist, and basically assume that everything in the world is nothing more than simply products. Communists and capitalists disagree on what should be done with these goods, but neither of them believe there is anything beyond this world.

Fascists utterly reject this world view, they hate it, they hate it with a thousand suns. I know that there current image is a sort of ironic racism chanboard nonsense, but in terms of their actual beliefs, Fascists take everything super seriously. The entire argument of Nazism is that they value symbols more than actual human life, and they are fiercely attached to various “spiritual” political issues even if they are officially atheists. I mean capitalism doesn’t give a damn about “degeneracy” because it isn’t actually a material thing, its just an aesthetic preference, there is no like “measurement” of degeneracy. same goes for honor, the family, purity, and their approach to art, fascism is in many ways about finding meaning in otherwise mundane things. So at fascist rally to them is this transcendental almost religious experience, while a capitalist would be more It interested in trying to find a way to make money off it. Fascism is a highly Romantic movement, which doesn’t play well with the cynical wordy perspective of capitalists, who believe in nothing.

Fascists also dislike aristocracy, but they love the myth and romance that is necessary for aristocracy and monarchy. They basically want aristocracy of the skin.

5) Fascists kinda…hate the idea of money. Like Capitalism emerged from the merchant classes and is basically came about with the argument “all of your aristocratic concerns over honor, titles, and god are stupid, what matters is who has the money and how you use it” And Fascists just hate that worldview, one of their defining traits is their love of war and conflict, in fact fascists prioritize war over almost everything else. It has been noted by smarter men than I (I recommend Ur Fascism) that Fascism is basically a death cult, they want effectively an endless war that they can die gloriously in destroying their enemies.

Consistently by the way, fascists will prioritize destroying the people they see as inferior over securing their own material best interest. Hitler probably could have run his dictatorship in Germany on his own for quite a long time and lived in luxury, but he wanted a giant war because that is what they care about.

in fact actively seem to indulge in self destructive short term ideologies. The Nazi economic policy was an absolute joke, with the economy serving as nothing more than something to keep the war effort going. Stephen Miller, the most fascist like person in trump’s administration, is hyper fixated on a brutal immigration policy, even though it actually hurts the economy. Fascists oppose freedom of movement and free trade, even though those are policies neoliberal capitalism supports. The reason is that Fascists value the preservation of “The Volk” over profits, and would rather their people suffer than have to live alongside other races (these people are deeply stupid)

6) Fascism doesn’t enjoy having fun. I know for most of, our experience of capitalism is misery as we work, to earn the right to work, to earn the right to give, ourselves the right to buy, ourselves the right to live, to earn the right to die. However the way that capitalism sells itself is basically “buy lots of shit and that will make yourself happy”.

Fascism doesn’t really…like being happy. As i said before, they like war, they like conflict, they like having an enemy who they can destroy. To fascists, what matters most is how you kill and how you die, rather than enjoying life. Fascism is about fetishistic death. Pink Floyd was right that Fascism is almost a form of intellectual suicide.

If you look at Japanese fascism, there is big fixation on aesthetic purity focus, with the only thing mattering being conflict

7) Capitalism tends to value the urban, the industrial, and the technology, while fascists, like the Confederates before them, are enamored with the rural and the pre-industrial. This might seem surprising, but there are a lot of fascists who are into environmentalism, Nazis Germany was one of the first states to pass laws banning animal cruelty and limiting smoking. Fascists are really into this sort of “Clean earth, clean people’ aesthetic which always serves as the breeding ground for cruelty.

8) Capitalism tends to be leery of state control and fascists are all about that shit

9)Finally….we need to be frank. A lot of the ways we talk about anti capitalism actually can fit really nicely into the antisemitic narratives that so dominated fascist thinking.

so the Marxist says

“Hey the entire world is controlled by a tiny elite of rich greedy parasites who are making us fight each other in order to benefit themselves”

And the Fascist says

“Yeah….they are Jewish”

its actually really hard to depict the rich as a class without accidentally wandering into anti Jewish sentiments, because the last 2,000 years of anti Jewish racism has been about creating conspiracy theories where they secretly control the entire world. A lot of what fascism does is taking existing issues of capitalism and being like “oh yeah…that is the fault of the Jews. Or migrants/African Americans/Muslims/feminists ect. Gamergate is a good example of this, they are pissed at corporations, but they blame feminists rather than you know…the inherently predatory nature of capitalism. Many of the things we don’t like about capitalism are things they also don’t like about capitalism. This is a major thing they do in terms of recruiting, they focus on getting people pissed at capitalism but then make it be secretly run by Jews rather than you know..Jeff Bezos.

(nazi properganda and below are soviet Images of capitalism )

(and sometimes both)

This is why btw, I am less anti capitalist than most leftists, because talking to fascists makes you appreciate things about them. Hitler was destroyed by both a communist dictatorship and a capitalist democracy working together.

Its worth noting that while fascists do hate capitalism, they hate socialism a lot more, and tend to ally with capitalist to kill leftists, as we see from the Weimar Republic. Fascist are often ok with certain types of corporate authoritarianism, but in the same way the left can be ok with somebody like Obama.

(Frank Miller’s Batman is if Libertarian and Fascism had a baby)

The lesson I would take from this is that just because somebody hates the thing you hate, doesn’t mean they are necessarily your ally, they might in fact be even worse. Yet another reason to distrust the dirtbag left

#ask EvilElitest #Fascism #capitalism #adam Smith #Communism #Marxism #Nazism #Political theory #Liberalism #Imperial Japan #Nazi Germany #Fascist Italy #Alt Right #Gamergate #Dirtbag left

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openheart12 · 4 years ago

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I Did Something Bad

A/N: Today is my lovely adoptive mom’s @burnsoslow birthday! I never thought me making a post about yk what would lead to our friendship and Kryce! I hope you have the best day ever and that it is every bit as amazing as you are! I’m so thankful for your friendship and how you make me laugh until I cry or pee fvhujskdghfn and you’re the only one who could ever make me into a Drake stan. I love you so much! Eat all the cake you can for me! Happy birthday, love! I hope you know how much I adore you ❤

A/N 2: This is very much full of Donald Trump hate and despitement because who wouldn’t hate him anyways jkhkdjgh there’s also quite a bit of cussing

Word Count: 2,613

Thank you @rigatonireid for pre-reading!!

“This is bullshit,” Kurns exclaimed as Bryce and Dick were watching the events unfolding at the United States Capitol. “This is why you don’t vote for oranges.” She said while rolling her eyes.

“Agreed,” the two men replied in unison.

“Jinx!” They replied again at the same time that led to twenty minutes of them saying “jinx again” in response until Dick finally gave in and let Bryce win.

“You win, Bryce-y poo,” he had said. Kurns had kept her attention glued to the television during their little game.

“You okay over there, banana flavored moonpie?” Dick asked, directing his attention over to Kurns.

“No, look at all those turnips. And the cult leader himself told them to do this shit. People actually voted for this moron? They should all get head CTs to check for brain damage which they undoubtedly have.”

“Would it make you feel better if we overthrew the government while kidnapping Donnie?” Dick asked seriously.

“Yes, actually,” she answered with a wide grin.

“Okay, let me make a few phone calls and can you download some episodes of My Little Pony on Netflix for Bryce?” Kurns nodded her head in response, she also took the liberty of downloading Among Us on their phones so they wouldn’t be bored on the flight.

The flight from North Delanois was a little over eight hours and being on a plane that long with a toddler, well Bryce, was going to be a challenge.

It was a private jet so hopefully it would be more bearable, but just in case she also downloaded a few episodes of Max and Ruby and Yo Gabba Gabba. She also downloaded some episodes of Parks and Rec and Friends for herself.

After packing the essentials; clothing, toiletries, handcuffs, whipped cream, ice cubes -who knew- and My Little Pony gummies, they were off to the airport.

“Dick Kock,” Dick said introducing himself along with Kurns and Bryce.

Kurns was decked out in a Taylor Swift 1989 t-shirt and a pair of leggings with her trusty white vans whereas Bryce was dressed in a rainbow colored polka dot shirt, black and white striped pants, one blue croc and the other was yellow, and socks with weed on them. Him and Kurns had forgotten about meth since it already landed them in jail one. Chris P. Bacon was still a sore subject for the pair.

They boarded the plane and Bryce immediately went to find his gummies. Kurns took a seat next to Dick and pulled up CNN news to get an update on the attack on the Capitol.

Suddenly breaking news flashed across her phone screen: Taylor Swift set to release her tenth studio album later today.

“OH MY GOD! BRYCE LOOK!” Kurns exclaimed, jumping up out of her seat to show Bryce.

“OH MY GOD! TS10! TS10! TS10!” He chanted.

“Oh wow, that sure is exciting!” Dick chimed in.

“By the way, D, I think we should call this Operation ‘I Did Something Bad’ in honor of Taylor’s new album.”

“That’s a spectacular idea, Kurnel Mustard!” Bryce said with a smirk, it had been a new nickname he had given her after the three of them had played Clue one night.

“Shut up, Apple Bottom Jeans, Boots with the Fur,” she retaliated, mocking the Little Pony named Apple Jacks.

“Stfu,” he said, crossing his arms over his chest.

“You must be really mad if you’re talking in text.”

“Dick,” he pouted, “she’s doing it again.”

“Be nice you two, we have a long flight ahead of us.”

For the first two hours, they each did their own thing; Dick was reading a hunting magazine, Kurns was watching the news, and Bryce had already finished the entirety of My Little Pony.

“Do you guys wanna play Among us?” Kurns asked out of the blue.

“Hell yeah! I just bought the baby crew mate and I’m dying to use it,” Bryce responded.

“I’ve never played before but sure!”

“Okay so you’re either a crew mate or impostor and if you’re a crew mate, you have to do these tasks whilst trying not to die and if you’re an impostor, you go around killing other crew mates trying not to get caught in the process. You’ll get the hang of it eventually,” Kurns explained.

“Thanks love bug,” Dick placed a quick kiss to the side of her head.

The three of them found an open lobby and talked in the chat box waiting for the game to start and when it did, Dick asked the question of, “why is my name red?”

“Oh my God, Dick! Don’t say that. It means you’re an impostor,” Bryce explained at the same exact time Kurns called an emergency meeting.

“It’s purple,” Kurns typed in the text box, referring to Bryce’s color.

“What the frick! It’s so not me. I’m not playing anymore,” he pouted, turning off his phone and crossing his arms over his chest.

“Now, children, can you two not get along? Think about the bigger picture,” Dick intervened.

“True, but I’m still not going to play with her.”

His statement didn’t affect Kurns in the slightest and she went back to playing the game. Dick joined her while Bryce was running away from an imaginary dragon and he ended up colliding into one of the seats, face first.

“Ow,” he rubbed his forehead that was now bright red.

“That’s what you get for being a baby,” Kurns said, not looking up from her phone while Dick went to go check on his blueberry muffin.

“You okay, strawberry flavored fig bar? That’s quite a hit you took.”

“Yeah, a kiss would make it feel better though,” he said, using his puppy dog eyes. Dick smiled softly at him before kissing his forehead all better.

The three of them spent the next six hours playing games, eating, and watching movies from the age of the dinosaurs that Kurns had saved since she was over 10,000 years old.

After landing in Washington D.C., the trio headed straight to the Whitehouse, if people could storm the Capitol, how much harder could it be to kidnap the president? That was Kurns logic at least and as it turns out, it wasn’t that much harder.

Kurns went to the Oval Office while Dick and Bryce went to the bunker since that apparently seemed to be Trump’s favorite place in the Whitehouse. But unexpectedly, Kurns found the Donald Duck under the office in the Oval, tweeting away on his iPhone 4s.

“Mr. Racist,” she called and he immediately turned to look at her.

“What? I’m tremendously busy if you can’t tell.”

“I see that, Mr. Pigman.”

“That is hugely racist towards me. I happen to be winning very bigly at the moment. I’m trending on Twitter!” He said proudly, he then proceeded to show Kurns his crusty ass phone.

“Come on, I have some candy for you if you come with me,” Kurns coaxed him out from under the desk and led him to the white van they had brought with them, you know, the kind your parents warn you to stay away from.

“Fake news!” Trump exclaimed with a huff. “You must be friends with sleepy Joe.”

“You’re right,” she winked.

“You know, frankly, this doesn’t make America great.”

“I disagree, I think this definitely makes America great again,” Kurns retaliated.

“Does Mikey know about this?”

“Yeah, we planned it with the fly,” she snickered.

“Well, it’s fake news, believe me.”

“What?”

“Nothing you libtards wouldn’t understand it anyways. Anyways, what's that thing on your face?”

“My mask?”

“Yeah, what’s that for?”

Kurns shook her head, not even being surprised by the question. “We’re in the middle of a pandemic, Donald Dump.”

“What’s a panoramic?”

“Don’t worry about it.” She got out her walkie talkie to talk to the boys. “The orange has expired. Over,” she said, their code word for getting Trump out.

“Okay, bet, we’re on our way out. Over.”

“Good job, K!” Dick said.

“See you soon and thanks! Over.”

Fifteen minutes later, Dick and Bryce arrived with a six foot cutout of Donald.

“What the fuck is that?”

“Hey, that’s me!” Trump chimed in.

“Shut the fuck up,” Kurns said, she was quickly losing brain cells being in his proximity.

“That is rude, quite frankly.”

“We found it in his bedroom… along with some other, uh, questionable things,” Bryce explained.

“Like what?”

“Like a, uh, dildo with Pence on it.”

“Ew…” they all turned to look at Trump who was looking away and whistling, trying to pretend he wasn’t there.

“Oh, um, about that. That was a tremendous invasion of privacy.”

“Shut the fuck up,” they all said in unison and he pulled an imaginary zipper over his lips and threw away the key like a literal child.

“I can’t be near him anymore,” Kurns said suddenly, getting out her phone to call someone.

“Who are you calling?” Dick asked.

“Joe, I was gonna invite him to go get some ice cream.”

“OMG! I wanna go too!” Bryce exclaimed.

“And me!” Trump said.

“No, to both of you. You two have to keep an eye on Don and make sure he stays off of Twitter.” She was explaining when Joe picked up the phone. “Hey, Joe, do you want to go get ice cream somewhere?”

“Duh! Taylor is actually here right now and you don’t care if she comes do you?” He asked to make sure.

“Of course not! You can bring Champ and Major too! I know Jill is busy right now.”

“Okay! On our way!” He said before hanging up.

“Where are you going to go?”

“Probably McDonald’s or something, Taylor is also coming with us, he said.”

“YOU MEAN THE TAYLOR?” Bryce asked in shock.

“Yeah, him and Taylor are like BFF’s.”

“I still like her music 25% less, okay?” Donald brought up.

“Shut the fuck up,” Kurns said again.

“Fine, fine. But could you make sure Barron is fed?”

“Oop,” Bryce slapped his hand over his mouth.

“Yes, now shut up.”

Kurns was getting ready to go meet Joe and Taylor when Melania walked up to the van. “You have Trump?” She asked quietly.

“Yeah, why? You need him?”

“Yeah, could you make him sign this?” She placed some papers in Kurns hand. She read them and wasn’t shocked after realizing they were divorce papers.

“No problem, hold tight real quick. Dick, make him sign these!”

“Of course, ladybug.” He took a hold of Trump’s hand and wrote his name for him since he wouldn’t do it himself.

“Here you go,” Kurns handed the papers back to Melania and she left without looking back. “Okay, I’m leaving. Be careful with that moron and for the love of God, don’t let his supporters know you have him.”

“Roger that!” Bryce responded.

“Don’t worry, vanilla brown sugar! We’ll hold down the fort while you’re gone. Have fun!” He called after her.

She met Joe and Taylor at a local McDonald’s and greeted both of them with a hug. “Congratulations on winning the election and congratulations on album number ten!” She reached down to pet both of the German Shepherds who happily wagged their tails.

“Thanks!” They replied in unison.

“So how are the boys?” Taylor asked.

“Good! They sent their regards. They’re actually, uh, holdingtrumphostage,” she said fast enough so hopefully they couldn’t understand but they are actually educated.

“WHAT?” Joe exclaimed.

“Miss gurl, how did y’all pull that off?” Taylor asked while hysterically laughing.

“It was easier than I thought! Either security sucks or they wanted Trump gone and I can’t blame them for that.”

“Amen sister!” Joe replied.

“Can we see him?” Taylor asked.

“I mean, yeah if you want!”

“Okay let’s go!” She went to get up when Joe gently grabbed her arm.

“But the ice cream…” He reminded her.

“Of course, how could I forget?” She playfully rolled her eyes. They all ate their ice cream before heading back to the Whitehouse.

Once arriving, Taylor and Joe headed straight to the front doors while Kurns stood there like 🧍‍♀️. “Hey guys, he's actually right there,” she said, pointing to the white van.

Taylor opened the door to find Bryce half asleep on the ground, Dick was listening to ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun’ and dancing in his seat meanwhile, Donald had his lips glued to the side of the door, making out with it.

“What the fuck?” All three of them asked at the same time.

“OMG TAYLOR! HI! HOW ARE YOU?” Bryce shouted, jumping up off of the floor and pulling her into a hug.

“Hi!”

“Hello, Ms. Swift,” Dick greeted, gracefully bowing. “Mr. President,” he nodded.

“How did you all meet?” Don asked.

“We actually just met, our hate for you is what we bond over!” Joe explained in terms he would understand. Hopefully.

“Oh,” was all he said and started to play with his fingers. “I don’t know if you knew this, but Washington D.C. is actually the capital of the United Stats. Did you know that?”

“What did you think it was? And it’s the United States, not… Stats.” Kurns asked in a surprisingly concerning tone.

“I thought it was like a stat… or well state. Whatever it is.”

“Oh,” Kurns said while Taylor called him an idiot under her breath.

“That’s embarrassing miss gurl,” Bryce chimed in.

“ARE YOU TALKING TIKTOK TO ME? I WILL BAN YOU,” Trump threatened.

“Please, these empty promises you keep making are getting really old just like your term,” Dick said, making the others die of laughter… no literally, some Trump supporter that had been walking by had just collapsed and died.

“And I oop-” Kurns and Bryce said at the same time.

“IFHCBXNZNZ, HAHAHAHA,” Bryce barked out.

“Can we get something to eat? I really want some Dino nuggies 🥺,” Trump pleaded.

“No,” they all replied.

“So what are we going to do with him?” Taylor asked.

“I don’t know, what do y’all want to do with him?”

“Excellent question, K, I say we feed him to some alligators!” Bryce exclaimed, flapping his two arms together to make an alligator jaw and started running towards Donald who jumped back in fear.

“That’s not nice,” he pouted, a lone tear trickling down his cheek.

“Fuck you, but not literally or physically,” Taylor said, making sure to explain what she meant.

“I want some My Little Pony gummies!”

“Me too!” Donald said with a smile now on his crusty, orange ass face.

“No,” they replied again.

“Fine,” he crossed his arms over his chest and turned his back to them, like the toddler he is.

“Anyways, y’all want to go get Cookout?” Kurns suggested.

“Yeah, of course!” Joe responded.

The five of them headed to the nearest Cookout to get food and milkshakes, leaving Trump behind all alone. After hanging out with Taylor and Joe, it was unfortunately time to head back to North Delanois. With promises to meet up soon, the trio were soon enough taking off at the airport.

“What ended up happening to Trump?” Bryce asked seriously.

“He went to prison.”

“As he should, period,” Kurns said with a smirk.

“What are we going to do when we land?”

“Sleep!” Kurns and Bryce said.

“Of course, my love doves. I’m going to try to do that right now, so please try to get along.”

“Promise!” Kurns said, holding out her pinky finger which he took and kissed. The rest of the flight was surprisingly peaceful, Kurns and Bryce were able to get along while Dick slept. It had been a fun trip, one they hoped they would actually never have to make again.

Tags: @burnsoslow @ao719 @callmeellabella @rigatonireid because no one else should have to read this :)

#kryce and dick chronicles #happy birthday burnsy!!

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kiricade · 4 years ago

Text

Track #2

a playlist inspired by the documentary Thirteeenth

_____________________

JU$T - Run the Jewels

RTJ speaks to the spirit of Ava Duvernay’s documentary, Thirteenth, from the very beginning. Their lyrics sardonically recast the American Dream as dystopian reality. The language around academic and fiscal accomplishments are revealed to mask an underlying, contemporary system of slavery--slavery under capital, and slavery under consumption: “Master economics cuz you took yourself from squalor, mastered economics cuz your grade say you a scholar, mastered Instagram cuz you can instigate a follow,” are the opening lines, and while innocuous in themselves, are punctuated by the repetition of a righteous utterance of “slave”. This refrain serves as a subversive reminder that, “the Thirteenth Amendment say that slavery’s abolished, shit,” but, “look at all these slave masters posing on your dollar.” Similarly, Thirteenth acknowledges the continuity of slavery despite the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, illustrating modern slavery’s rapid, bipartisan-powered evolution under the Reagan, Nixon, and Clinton administrations.

The Guillotine - The Coup

“The Guillotine” is a reference to a major symbol of the French Revolution, which is generally viewed by historians as having been caused by the failure of France’s “Old Regimee” to pacify acute social and economic inequality. Transnational intellectual elites shifted the public sphere from Versailles (the home of the Court) to Paris, making the influence of the Court less effective. A financial crisis, further exacerbated by state debt, food shortages, and a population boom, led to the radicalization of the urban poor. If this is sounding familiar that’s because it is the dream imagined by The Coup, only this time for Black American liberation. The Old Regime, feudalism, and the privileges of nobility (including the exemption from taxes) were forcibly abolished under the Revolution. In “The Guillotine”, Boots incorporates this major French event to illustrate a radical solution to today’s unliveable serfdom. “Hey, you! We got your war, we’re at the gates, we’re at your door!” is a reference to the Bastille, a prison which was symbolically liberated by French revolutionaries. In a contemporary, American context, the Bastille can be construed as the mass industrial prison complex. But Boots further develops this analog: “It’s finna blow ‘cause they got the TV, we got the truth,” refers to the monopoly that capital has on American speech. Despite the stereotyping of the black urban male, and the continued disenfranchisement of felons in television, music, newscasting, and the mainstream, Boots’ message optimistically asserts that “the truth” will triumph over manufactured consent. Even though white supremacy controls all aspects of the justice system, people will ultimately triumph: “They [white elite] own the judges and we [the people] got the proof; we got hella people, they got hella ‘copters; they got the bombs but we got the--we got the--we got the Guillotine!”

Close Your Eyes (And Count to F**k) - Run the Jewels

Just as Thirteenth addresses the racial disparities of being on death row, “Close Your Eyes” challenges the machinery of solitary confinement, torture, and uses institutionalized religion as a metaphor for the disproportoinate burden placed on the young, black male. The story is told from the perspective of a prisoner in solitary, who has broken out and is leading a prison coup. The “conditions'' have created the narrator--the “villain”, who is “given vision, the vision becomes a vow to seek vengeance on all the vicious.” RTJ equivocates retributive justice with justified revenge, suggesting that victimized black men are righteous in wreaking vengeance on the justice system, and for seeking dues in an eye-for-an-eye-like fashion. Before they kill the wardens, the prisoners waterboard them--“We killin' 'em for freedom 'cause they tortured us for boredom. And even if some good ones die, fuck it, the Lord'll sort 'em.” This line is a reference to the Albigensian Massacre, during which the Papal Legate said, “Kill them; let God sort them,” justifying the slaughter of faithful Catholics along with Papal enemies. This old story translates to the modern day in the form of a justice system which treats black people in America as meaningless collateral in the pursuit of capital; the narrator encourages the prisoners to respond in kind. RTJ furthermore draws a comparison between enslavers and pedophilic members of the clergy, who strip “kids to the nude and tell them God’ll forgive them.” In this comparison, the clergy and enslavers use shame to keep their victims silent. By RTJ’s reasoning, if black children believe that they are sinful, then they will not feel justified to defend their basic human rights, or to bring vengeance on those who have wronged them.

No Rest for the Weary - Blue Scholars

Blue Scholars is composed of lead rapper Geologic, the son of Filipino immigrants, and jazz pianist Sabzi, an Iranian-American. Despite being an API crew, their music addresses the racial and socioeconomic issues plaguing marginalized groups in America more generally. “No Rest for the Weary” speaks to the colonial-imperialist legacy of American labor, and the mass industrial prison complex. “Diamonds ain’t enough to cover up a legacy of strange fruit,” is a tribute to Billie Holiday’s song “Strange Fruit”, which was penned to challenge the lynching of Black people in the South. “No Rest” reminds us that lynchings never ended, through allusions to the ways in which the early and contemporary police state impact intersectional peoples:

Pages torn out of the memory of those who remain shackled in the chains of international capital gain.

Geologic explains that those who have been enslaved have had their histories stolen from them. It isn’t clear whether Geologic means to say Black diasporic peoples who were enslaved by white colonizers, or Black Americans who are enslaved today under the mass industrial complex. To Geologic, it doesn’t matter, since all forms of slavery are driven by capital gain. DuVernay’s documentary, Thirteenth, similarly breaks this down for us, and uses examples of corrupt capital, such as the ALEC coalition, to demonstrate the parallels between old and contemporary slavery.

Blood of the Fang - CLPPNG

CLPPNG’s “Blood of the Fang” is filled with vampiric imagery, and opens with a reference to the experimental horror film, Ganja & Hess. In the original film, vampirism serves proxy to the assimilation or submission of black people to white people and white society. “Blood of the Fang'' continues this theme. At its heart, the song is a critique of moderate modern politics:

Queen Angela done told y’all, ‘Grasp at the root,’ so what y’all talking about ‘hands up don’t shoot’? [...] Brother Malcolm done told y’all, ‘By any means,’ so what y’all talking about, ‘all on the same team’?

CLPPNG invokes powerful black leaders such as Angela Davis, Huey P. Newton, Geronimo Pratt, Ericka Huggins, Malcolm X, and others, and in particular targets of COINTELPRO. He provides a poetic history of COINTELPRO, a covert and illegal CIA program that sought to sabotage and surveille black, communist, and socialist organizations. While the origins of COINTELPRO preceded the modern mass industrial complex, its systematic dismantling of black leadership enabled the culture we see today. CLPPNG facilitates a revival of radical and revolutionary politics in the face of a racist police state and industrial prison industry. It is not enough, according to CLPPNG, to simply demand, “don’t shoot.” Meanwhile, ‘all on the same team’ refers to President Barack Obama’s speech following the 2016 election transition--and serves to highlight the bipartisan effort to disenfranchise Black Americans, and undermine efforts at abolition.

* this concludes Xing’s half of the project; part ii was posted by Cesaria

#hip hop sociology

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dark-and-twisty-01 · 5 years ago

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Allen, Louis - murder victim (1964)

A native of Amite County, Mississippi, born in 1922, Louis Allen dropped out of school in the seventh grade to become a logger and part-time farmer. Drafted by the U.S Army in January 1943, he served 19 months in uniform, including combat duty in New Guinea. Upon discharge from service, he returned to his wife and two young children, the beginning of a family that soon increased to six. Although a proud African American, Allen had no part in the civil rights movement that challenged Mississippi's pervasive system of racial segregation in 1961. He would become a martyr to that movement by coincidence, strictly against his will.

One who joined the Amite County movement willingly was 50 year old Herbert Lee, a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) and participant in the 1961 voter-registration drive by Robert Moses of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Blacks who sought to vote in Amite County faced intimidation and worse, from racist vigilantes and from Sheriff E.L. Caston Jr., whose deputies raided NAACP meetings and confiscated membership lists. A neighbour of Lee's farmer E.W. Steptoe, led the local NAACP chapter and complained to the U.S. Department of Justice about Caston's harassment. On September 24, 1961, Justice attorney John Doar visited Amite County with Robert Moses, interviewing Steptoe and requesting names of any other blacks who had suffered harassment. Herbert Lee's name was first on the list, but Doar missed him that afternoon, as Lee was called away from home on business. There would never be another chance for them to meet. Early on September 25, the day after Doar returned to Washington, Lee drove a truckload of cotton to the gin near Liberty, Mississippi. Behind him, as he pulled into the parking lot, was another vehicle occupied by state legislator E.H. Hurst and his son in law, Billy Caston. An argument ensued between Hurst and Lee and climaxed when Hurst drew a pistol and shot Lee once in the head, killing him instantly. Robert Moses later described the event and its aftermath to journalist Howard Zinn.

Lee's body lay on the ground that morning for two hours, uncovered, until they finally got a funeral home in McComb to take it in. Nobody in Liberty would touch it. They had a coroner's jury that very same afternoon. Hurst was acquitted. He never spent a moment in jail...I remember reading very bitterly in the papers the next morning, a little item on the front page of the McComb Enterprise-Journal said that a Negro had been shot as he was trying to attack E.H. Hurst. And that was it. Might have thought he'd been a bum. There was no mention that Lee was a farmer, that he had a family, nine kids, beautiful kids, and that he had farmed all his life in Amite County.

One witness to the shooting was Louis Allen, who arrived at the cotton gin moments before Lee was killed. He watched Lee die, then saw a second white man lead E.H. Hurst to a nearby vehicle, whereupon they departed from the scene. Allen retreated to a nearby garage, where one of Liberty's white residents located him and walked him back to the cotton gin. En route to the crime scene, Allen's escort told him, 'They found a tire iron in that nigger's hand. They found a piece of iron, you hear?'

Allen knew better, but he had a wife and four children to consider. Within the hour, he found himself at the county courthouse, where a coroner's hearing had been hastily convened. White men armed with pistols packed the hearing room, glaring at Allen as he took the witness stand and lied under oath, confirming the tale that Herbert Allen had been armed, assaulting E.H. Hurst when he was shot. The jury wasted no time in returning the verdict of 'justifiable homicide.' Hurst subsequently told the New York Times that he had quarrelled with Lee over $500 debt, which Lee refused to pay. When Lee attacked him with the tire iron.' Instead, he had struck Lee with the trigger unconsciously.' Hurst denied Lee's civil rights activity, dubbing his victim ' a smart nigger' who normally avoided conflict with whites. Guilt-ridden by his false testimony, Allen confessed the lie to his wife and to Robert Moses. Elizabeth Allen described the conversation in a 1964 affidavit, as follows:

The day Herbert Lee was killed, Louis came home and said that they wanted him to testify that Herbert Lee had a piece of iron. He said that Herbert Lee didn't have no iron. But he said for his family and for his life he had to tell that he had an iron. Louis told me that he didn't want to tell no story about the dead, because he couldn't ask them for forgiveness. They had two courts about Herbert Lee's killing. When they had the second court, Louis did not want to testify. He said he didn't want to testify no more that a man ad a piece of iron when he didn't have it, but he said he didn't have no choice, he was there and he had to go to court. He said he told the FBI the truth, that Herbert Lee didn't have a piece of iron when he was shot

The 'second court' was a state grand jury hearing, convened in Amite County a month after Lee was shot. Allen approached Robert Moses, reporting that he had told his story to FBI agents, suggesting that he could get protection with the Justice Department he would testify truthfully and 'let the hide go with the hair.' Moses then telephoned Washington, and heard from Justice that 'there was no way possible to provide protection for a witness at such a hearing' )In fact, such protection is routinely offered to witnesses in organised crime cases and similar matters.) Allen went on to repeat his false story before the grand jury, which returned no indictments.

Things went from bad to worse for Allen after that, as Amite County whites apparently learned of his abortive effort to tell the truth. Strangers visited Allen's home and accosted his children, threatening his life. In June 1962 Allen was arrested on trumped up charges of 'interfering with the law'; he spent three weeks in jail, and was threatened with lynching, and suffered a broken jaw after one of Sheriff Caston's deputies struck him with a flashlight. White customers stopped buying logs from Allen, and local merchants cut off his credit at various stores. Only his ailing mother kept Allen from leaving Amite County, but her death in late 1963 freed him at last. Eagerly, Allen made plans to leave Mississippi for Milwaukee, where his brother lived.

Unfortunately, he had already waited too long. On January 1st, 1964, one of Allen's white creditors stopped at the house to collect a bill payment. While Allen counted out the money, his visitor pointed to Allen's three year old daughter playing nearby, and remarked, 'It would be mighty bad if she turned up burnt, wouldn't it? She's an innocent baby, but she could get burnt up just like that. I could tell you more, but I'm not. If I was you I would get my rags together in a bundle and leave here.'

Resolved to do exactly that, on January 31, 1964, Allen sought work references from some of his former clients. The first, Melvin Blalock, declined to provide a letter, concerned that he 'might be helping a communist.' Another, Lloyd King, later recalled speaking to Allen around 8:10 pm. Two cars were seen trailing Allen's pickup when he left King's farm, driving home. At the foot of his long driveway, Allen left his truck to open the gate, then apparently threw himself under the vehicle. The move failed to save him, as two shotgun blasts ripped into his face. Son Henry Allen found his father's body hours later, when he returned from a dance.

No suspects in Louis Allen's murder were never identified, but Robert Moses placed partial blame for the slaying on the FBI's doorstep. Moses and other activists believed that G-men routinely leaked the contents of confidential statements to local police in civil rights cases, thus leaving witnesses vulnerable to attack by racist authorities or the vigilante Ku Klux Klan. The segregationist McComb Enterprise-Journal theory in its description of the murder, noting that 'Strictly non-documented rumours have been current that Allen may have become a 'tip-off man' for the integration-minded Justice Department. Similarly, of the spearheads of a reported complaint that 'economic pressure' being applied against some Amite County Negroes.'

#Allen Louis - murder victim (1964)#Amite County #very controversial #racism #racist #very difficult to post #True crime #true murder #true crime community #true crime blog #true crime post #unsolved crime #unsolved murder #The Chronicles of True Crime #tcc #tcc crime #tcc blog #tcc blogger #tcc author

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facelessxchurch · 5 years ago

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What we’re your thoughts about the book?

Some asks were answered already in this post already so I just smacked those asks in here at the part where I talk about the topic in question, which is why the answer may not 100% fit the question.

Massive “Seasons of War” spoilers below the cut:

First off, of all, this book read like GoT/any zombie movie ever. With the necromancers being like the white walkers, Vile is the night king and daugar are the wights. even with the necromancers crumbling away after Vile got killed Tell me I’m not the only one seeing that.

I think there was a lot of fanservice and some confirmed headcanons in the book, which I really liked. Saracen magic got revealed, there was a return to the Leibniz dimension, the Vile vs Vile fight so many wanted finally happened (tho that was kinda underwhelming) and the Dead Men returned which I’m sure made a lot of people happy.

Ravel poisoning Saracen during the war and Vile being so powerful bc of being dead were two popular headcanons that got confirmed. And I am personally so happy that this book killed the ‘there is no sarcasm in the Leibniz dimension’ headcanon bc I bloody hated that.

Finally, Landy tries to please the old fans instead instead of what feels like purposefully pissing them off. I guess the phase 2 book sales weren’t that great so far (nice try blaming it on the pandemic, but no).

I’m also glad that the romance in this book was kept to a minimum bc The Val/Militsa kiss in the beginning, yikes, fanfiction has better written kisses than that. And the the dialog for the lesbian love triangle (bc for some reason Ms.Wicked aka Laura’s self insert is Militsa’s ex??) was cringy and stiff as hell, it felt more like first graders trying to do a dramatic play and not natural at all.

Surprisingly enough Mevolent’s and Serafina’s relationship seems to be the most healthy and romantic in the entire series and I have no idea if that was on purpose or if Landy just has twisted views on relationships.

I however am actually kinda happy with how Mev was written. He was sympathetic and charismatic, tho some of the stuff he did doesn’t fit to they way he’s characterised when he’s on screen (I know he is probably lying 90% of the time he speaks, but still). Like, banning all languages apart from English doesn’t seem like something a man who cares about culture, literature and art would do. It also seems kinda stupid bc those languages will be forgotten eventually and if they need an old text translated no one will be able to do it. Also, why English? Isn’t Mev old enough that his first/original language should be Gaelic? So weird. I have the feeling this was mainly done so Valkyrie (and with that the audience) can understand what the people on the continent are saying bc I very much doubt she understands/speaks any languages apart from English.

But I loved that Mev was also shown as insanely smart. He managed to outsmart Val multiple times. And I love how he doesn’t need his magic to fight, how quick and agil and skilled he is. So I take it that his fighting style is more based on agility and not getting hit, and he uses brute force only when forced into it (by Darquesse/the Unnamed). I was wondering about that bc his armor is made of leather and chainmail instead of metal plates which is considered light armor and not something a tank type of fighter would wear.

What really rubbed me the wrong way tho was when he was talking Tanith and Skul and more or less stated the war wasn’t a challenge anymore ever since Skul died. Or when he was talking to Val being like ‘you’re more powerful than I could ever hope to be’.It bothers me even more knowing that Val is based on girlfriend!Laura. Does really everyone and everything in-vers, even a big bad like Mev, rub Skul’s/Landy’s and Val’s/Laura’s ego? Big yikes.

Crespular Vies is surprisingly fun. At first I thought the two men going after the Obsidian Blade were hired by the Unnamed, but since that wasn’t the case, I think Crespular Vines hired them that so he could show up in time to save Omen and his friends. I think him opening up to Omen about being Skul’s former partner came too unprompted, too quickly and that he is trying to gain Omen’s trust so he can get close to Skul through him. I think another giveaway that that’s the case is bc one of the men Omen had to meet to get his brother back wore a Cleaver outfit and Vies gave that man probably the same reasoning Omen gave him.

That said Omen’s chapters were surprisingly enjoyable. By what I had heard of others I expected a sad sack that can’t fight worth a damn.

I’m not found of the Temper/Kierre stuff, it came out of nowhere.

Val is overpowered AF, it seems that she can get on Darquesses level with more practise/learning how to keep the doors open. She certainly needs to be nerfed.

Also I skipped the Darquesse chapters bc I’m giving negative fucks about her and the plague doctor.

The last 10% of the book were too rushed and felt like half finished thoughts.

Also I was kinda really bothered by the citizen of the Leibniz dimension. They were cartoonishly racist and it was very pretty black and white for the most part AKA everybody good is in the Resistance and all other sorcerers are evil/corrupt. That is also shown by there being children in the Resistance camp while there was no mention of children in the mage cities. In reality, most people are fairly mellow and it’s just a small percentage that is either really good or really wicked. I would have liked to see more racism towards mortals in form of apathy or ‘the soft bigotry of low expectations’ like I’ve seen it from Serpine in DotL. You know, make it a little less black and white.

Also, I understand the mermaids, but the bats in Europe were random AF. Like, I would understand it if they were just in Romania/Transylvania as a nod to the Dracula-typ vampire legends originating from there. As a plot-device they weren’t really needed to keep the protagonists from flying bc the danger of getting spotted by necromancer by doing so should be enough of a threat to keep them on the ground. This might seem nit-picky of me, but the bats just seemed so bloody random to me like wtf????

And also bc I’m a slut for magical creatures, I would have really liked to see more of them than just daugar and giant bats. Some undead cut together and resurrected necromancer experiments would have been pretty cool tbh. Like whatever the hell this is.

Something like zombie bears would have also been acceptable, I mean, bears are fucking terrifying on their own, let alone when undead and decaying.

I’m kinda pissed at China that she wanted Skul to kill Nef, but it does seem in character. Of course I still don’t like it bc I headcanon as Nef, Eliza and China having been besties during the war (no matter what canon says, I’m keeping that headcanon). I’m surprised Skul didn’t let Wreath have Nef considering that. Then again, he thought Nef might still be useful. And he was right. I loved how Nef actually had an essential part in saving the world by throwing the bomb. So proud of my boi <3 But Skul refused to kill him even after that. Could it be that Skul is finally getting character growth and development? 👀

Aaaand, China’s continuing to be a tyrant. With Tanith’s sense of justices flaring up shown when he killed the city governor, Erato, and Nef being shown to go after people that betray him (Lorien) I think those two are being set up to go after China to kill her (and to probably kill Creed too). Imagine Eliza joining the team bc she want a piece of China too.

I feel sorry for Baron, but at least he got a few speaking lines this time around. Still, I really wanted Nef to save him. :C Like, he suffered so much before he died too considering he spend a year alone starving and thirsty with broken legs in the middle of nowhere wft, why is Baron getting fucked over like this? #BaronDeservedBetter2020 he is the only honorable person of all faceless followers and he’s the one that gets screwed over in every book he shows up in, why tho- 😭

Speaking of Nef, I absolutely loved him in this book, he was a delight and stealing the show whenever he was on the page, despite being used as punching bag through pretty much the entire book. If people have always treated him that way I can see why he turned evil jfc that poor man. Despite that, he was still being such a clever, funny and relatable bae <3 He’s described as ‘cynical, and nasty but also kinda cheerful’ and as liking to ‘needle’ people (aka trolling and roasting) by Val and that essentially describes every shitposter on the internet ever. And I so loved the way he roasted Saracen lmao

And how he’s so clever, like the Lorien part was my favourite scene closely followed by how Nef essentially talked Remus Crux into getting himself killed, just 👌 smart snek boi, I love him <3 Also I hope he keeps poisoning everybody thoughts against Skul like how he had already been doing it to Tanith, he’s poison in human form and that’s just my jam.

That obedience bracelet was kinda fucked up tho.

Why does this thing even exist? Aren't electro shocks or any other form of pain enough instead of shutting his nervous system down/rendering him completely defenceless? I feel like some messed up mage 100% used it to keep himself (sex) slaves at some point in time :/ Landy might have gotten that idea from some fucked up hentai. Even the implications of the name "obedience bracelet".... I can’t be the only one that got creepy perv vibes from that thing, right?

Btw what the fuck happened to Harmony? You know, Leibniz Serpine’s girlfriend. She hasn’t been mentioned again. Did she die? She didn’t seem too found of him in DotL, was she plotting against him and he found out about it, killed her and fled the Resistance? Or did she die prior to him leaving and it was part of the reason he left bc she was the only thing that had tied him emotionally to the Resistance?? Or Landy just forgot she existed. I would not be surprised.

Of course my biggest issue with this book was how he retconned Nef’s magic and how he took his trademark, his red hand, away, but more about that in a different post.

TL;DR: Nef was a delight even though he was done dirty. Mev’s scenes were a 50/50 split between good and bad. I actually liked the Crespulare and Omen chapters. The Unnamed was a disappointment. The last 10% of the book were to rushed and the final fights that were supposed to be the biggest were underwhelming. The rest is meh, didn’t really care tbh. Let’s be real here, I only bought this book bc Nef played a bigger role in it, anyways.

#skulduggery pleasant #seasons of war #seasons of war spoilers #review #book review #I hate 'read more'#but this got so bloody long #RIP mobile users #long post #Anonymous #answered

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antoine-roquentin · 5 years ago

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On the day the Supreme Court announced its decision in Furman v. Georgia, 45 men were on death row at the Ellis Unit in Huntsville, Texas. Newspapers described how the men erupted in cheers after the news came over their TVs and radios. Many believed that it was the end of capital punishment. The day after the ruling, on June 30, 1972, the San Antonio Express published a photo of the Texas electric chair with the caption “May Never Be Used Again.”

More than half of the 589 people spared by Furman were black. Among them was Elmer Branch, on death row in Texas. Twenty years old at the time of his arrest — and with a reported IQ of 67 — Branch had been sentenced to die for raping an elderly white woman in Vernon, Texas. He swore that he was innocent, but he was found guilty on the basis of eyewitness identification and a shoe print that matched his sneakers. When the Supreme Court announced that it would consider Furman back in 1971, the justices also took Branch’s case, along with another rape case out of Georgia. All three cases involved black defendants and white victims.

During the oral argument before the Supreme Court, Branch’s lawyer invoked the racism underlying his client’s case. A black man convicted of rape in Texas, he said, “has an 88 percent chance of receiving a death penalty,” compared to the 22 percent chance faced by non-black defendants. As in the rest of the South, such statistics were a direct legacy of lynchings and racial terror. The vast majority of the state’s death sentences handed out for rape came from East Texas, which once held the highest population of enslaved people in the state.

Furman, decided 5-4, was a tenuous and fractured ruling. Each justice wrote his own opinion, only two of which expressed opposition to capital punishment itself, rather than to how it was being applied. Most had little to say about racism, although the issue loomed large over the decision. The road that led to Furman had been paved in the 1960s by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, which had embarked on a data-driven mission that exposed racial bias in rape cases. As Justice Thurgood Marshall noted in his concurrence in Furman, of 455 people executed in the United States for rape since 1930, 405 had been black.

Nevertheless, lawyers had repeatedly failed to impress the courts with such statistics. Judges rejected the racial evidence as insufficient — although it is clear today that the deeper concern was that acknowledging racism would undermine the entire criminal justice system. The Supreme Court would eventually decide in McCleskey v. Kemp that racism in death sentences was inevitable, inoculating capital punishment from being challenged along racial lines. In the meantime, Furman was decided on the less controversial question of arbitrariness: the conclusion that the death penalty was “wantonly” and “freakishly” imposed, with no rhyme or reason guiding who should live and who should die.

While the Furman court mostly steered clear of race, the reaction to the ruling was fueled by racist fearmongering. Georgia’s segregationist lieutenant governor called the decision a “license for anarchy, rape, and murder,” according to Evan Mandery in “A Wild Justice: The Death and Resurrection of Capital Punishment.” At a press conference, President Richard Nixon, who’d won election on a wave of racially incendiary “law and order” rhetoric, defended executions as a deterrent. That day, Mandery writes, “legislators in five states announced plans to enact new death penalty statutes.”

Support for the death penalty skyrocketed. According to Mandery, in the last Harris Poll prior to Furman, 47 percent of respondents supported the death penalty, with 42 percent opposed. After Furman, a Harris Poll found 59 percent in favor. By the end of 1972, Florida became the first to pass a new death penalty law, followed by a slew of states the next year.

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cicadacreativemag · 4 years ago

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Navigating Black Allyship as a Non-Black Person of Color

Herman Luis Chavez, Managing Editor

For non-Black people of color, it can be difficult to navigate allyship with the Black community, especially for those who are only just now beginning to educate themselves on Black justice. This article provides an introduction to the first steps and best practices you can take to be a better ally for Black folk in the U.S. as a non-black person of color.

Allyship is a complicated ordeal, especially for non-Black people of color.

In the wake of the recent nation-wide demonstrations in response to the disproportionate effects of police brutality on Black communities, many white individuals have found themselves inspired to seek education that confronts their white privilege, that exposes the history of white supremacy in the U.S., and that lays bare the realities of racial disparities in police systems. Yet, communities of non-Black people of color have been either silent or selfish, such as the hesitancy to join in protests or the reports of Hispanic neighborhoods ousting protesters in Manhattan.

Colorism is prominent in Hispanic communities, where we see darker-skinned Latinos are more likely to experience racial descrimination and are more likely to experience worse mental and physical health. A preference for lighter skin in Latino communities often begins in the household, with families praising lighter-skinned children and treating darker-skinned children worse, often calling them racially charged terms such as “indio” or “prieto” that teaches a distinction between lighter skin and darker skin. Latinos carry this with them in the way they treat Black people. The racial ambiguity of Latinos make it all the more difficult to deconstruct their relationship with racism both in and out of the Hispanic community.

Similarly, in Asian communities, a preference for lighter skin complicated their relationship with Black justice. This white preference is often made explicit through health products or procedures, like those from Thailand, that promote a change in image in pursuit of lighter skin. The k-pop musical genre that is immensely popular in the U.S. is largely based off of Black musical styles—a sign of cultural appropriation—and the powerful k-pop industry has largely stayed silent in the wake of Black Lives Matter.

These instances of racial preference in non-Black communities have very real consequences for Black communities. We should not forget Hmong-American Tou Thao’s complicit behaviour as Derek Chauvin knelt on George Floyd’s neck, when he stood nearby and ignored Floyd’s repeated pleas to breathe. It is difficult for those of us who identify as non-Black people of color to acknowledge colorism or racism in our own communities that are already discriminated against in American society, but it is vital to deconstruct our concepts of race to support Black individuals who suffer the most systemic violence and oppression in the United States.

So… how do we do that?

Step One: Understand that to be an ally, you must be actively anti-racist. This means moving past being simply “not racist,” where your complicity allows racism to continue in yourself and in those around you. The National Museum of African American History & Culture’s guide to being anti-racist says it best: “Being antiracist results from a conscious decision to make frequent, consistent, equitable choices daily.” This means challenging racism whenever you see it, whether in yourself or in others; it also means incorporating anti-racism into your daily life, such as dedicating yourself to sign at least one petition, read at least one article, or contact at least one elected official every day.

Step Two: Acknowledge that we are on both sides of the issue, and that is valid. On one hand, people of color do experience racism everyday in this country, from the anti-immigration rhetoric used against Hispanic individuals to the anti-Asian rhetoric that has grown out of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, on the other, we do experience privilege due to the lighter color of our skin, and we are not as systematically oppressed as Black people. We must recognize that our own racial and ethinic suffering is valid while also understanding the importance of supporting Black communities.

Step Three: Confront your own anti-Black tendencies and those in your household. Does your family call you “moreno” and prefer your lighter-skinned sibling? Do you still subconsciously cross the street when you see a Black person walking in your direction? Take some time to take stock as to how racist rhetoric, no matter how small, has manifested itself in your daily life. We must understand when we have been programmed for racism and actively counter those measures. This is especially important to do at home, to ensure that we don’t pass along those dangerous perspectives to future generations.

Step Four: Empathize. We need to understand that the loss of Black lives are not just names or numbers on your old college friend’s Instagram story; these are human beings, with lives and relationships like us who remember them. By understanding the humanity of the suffering of Black families, where 1 in 1,000 Black men can be expected to die at the hands of police brutality or whose children are funneled through the school-to-prison pipeline, we open ourselves to how necessary it is to become an ally in anti-racism.

Step Five: Education. Deconstruct your relationship with whiteness and power by centering the Black experience in narrative, qualitative, and quantitative manners. Read books by Black authors, listen to podcasts that break down Black history, study articles on systemic racism in police systems. By spending the time acquiring knowledge on the Black experience, you become better equipped to challenge your own viewpoints and to educate others. Here’s a starting point: go back to each of the links throughout this article and read them. Next step? Visit the end of this list for some more resources to get you started. By simply reading every link in this article, you are already taking an important step in anti-racism and supporting Black communities.

You can also put all of these steps together.

Take the time to listen about their stories from those who knew them. While it may be uncomfortable, confronting the humanity of the victims of police brutality allow us to open our hearts more to understanding the experience that these communities endure. I have been attending a weekly webinar titled Black Minds Matter, a public course intended to raise the national consciousness about issues affecting Black children in education (you can attend the last three sessions; they’re coming up now!), where academics, educators, and guest speakers discuss the importance of valuing Black knowledge at all levels of our education system. In our last session, we heard from Gwen Carr, Eric Garner’s mother. Here are a few quotes that Carr mentioned about Garner, which gave the audience a depth we couldn’t understand only from a name and a statistic:

“The family always wanted him at the functions, he was the life of the party.”

“I stopped them from picking on him, and I brought him home for dinner.” Carr recalls Garner saying this to her when she came home to find him with a classmate who had been bullied.

“‘Mom look! I did it, I got 100% attendance,’ and I said, ‘You did that?’ and he said, ‘no mom, you did. You got me up every morning.’”

“He was a strong student. He didn’t have too many problems in school with his classmates, the teachers talked highly about him, and they said that he was a person who if you confronted him, he would face it.”

By attending the Black Minds Matter webinars, for only 90 minutes a week, I am taking action for education that stimulates empathy and it turns allows me to be more successful when I engage in anti-racist work with myself and others. This is one of many examples of the type of actionable items you can take to support the Black community.

It is a difficult step to take, but an important one to bring about racial equality for everyone. By reframing our relationship with racism, becoming anti-racist, and supporting Black communities, we begin the change that breaks away at the strength of racism throughout our society.

More resources:

A Google Drive folder with readings, videos, speeches, music, and more that focus on Black history and liberation

Free Yale Online Course: African American History: From Emancipation to the Present

Georgetown Anti-Racism Toolkit

USC Anti-Racist Pedagogy Resources

School of the Art Institute of Chicago Anti-Racism and Black Lives Matter Virtual Library

Petitions to sign

Colorism 101 for Educators

#Herman #essay #BLM #july 2020

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takaraphoenix · 5 years ago

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Are you doing the anti challenge? If so...Malec or Jalec! :D

*lol* Aw, come ooon, those are both way too easy! *laughs*

Disclaimer (so I won’t frighten people like Bee did ;D): This is a game to apply Anti LogicTM to any ship asked and find out why it is Horrible Awful Problematic. It’s all in good fun and meant to mock this trend of bending backward to find problematic content in fictional ships!

Ma/ec:

pedophilia, quite clearly. Alec’s 17 when Magnus first hits on him in the books - and even in show canon, Magnus has multiple centuries on Alec, which considering a two year age gap qualifies as pedo, then this qualifies a hundred times over

Alec is Very Problematic because he wilfully ignores Magnus’ alcoholism for like an entire season

Magnus is Very Problematic because instead of having adult conversations (-> his immortality), he mocks his young lover for being so young (which also: see #1)

they both constantly lie to each other, which is super manipulative and toxic and problematic!!

no communication ever, all problems are immediately brushed under the rug! Not Healthy!

Alec was literally in love with Jace for over ten years and then immediately jumped into his relationship with Magnus, using him as a rebound! Magnus deserves better than that!!

Alec was literally down for chipping Magnus “for his own good” like a dog!

the Clave has a centuries-old history of abusing and suppressing Downworlders and thus as a loyal Shadowhunter working under the Clave, Alec is highly problematic for not speaking up and working blindly for them for all his life, only really caring when The Guy He Bones turns out to be part of the suppressed minority. No woke points for only caring about racism when you suddenly start dating someone affected by it...

Magnus danced with Dot and nearly kissed her while opening up to her about things that he couldn’t be bothererd to share with the guy he supposedly loved. That was as good as cheating because it’s about the emotional bond and Alec deserves better!

Ja/ec, which I don’t even have to think about because I got most in anon hate myself already:

incest, since Jace was taken in by the Lightwoods when he was ten as a charge and if you meet someone late in life there is absolutely no way that your feelings could also develop in a romantic way when others tell you that you are now supposed to think of this total stranger as your family!! So this is absolutely incest and thus gross and disgusting!

it’s super racist since Alec happens to be dating a man of color in canon and you know that as soon as you break a relationship featuring a character of color up and have the other party then date a white character, you are clearly only doing it because you are being racist

it’s clearly abusive because of the power-imbalance when Alec becomes head of the Institute and this Jace’s boss

super unhealthy since they constantly nearly die to save each other. that’s super toxic, you shouldn‘t want to die for your lover!

Jace totally manipulates Alec into doing whatever he wants so it’s super unhealthy

Jace nearly murdered Alec when he was possessed by the Owl! ABUSE!!

Clary is the protagonist and Jace’s canon love interest so like you clearly hate women because you’d rather she doesn’t get her One True Love!!!! IT IS CANON SO IT IS THE PERFECT SHIP AND IF YOU DON’T SHIP THE CANON STRAIGHTS, YOU HATE WOMEN

You clearly fetishize gay men!! Since you rather ship a non canon mlm ship over the canon straights! Ewww! Gross fetishizer :O

Send me a ship and I’ll tell you why it’s problematic, with varying degrees of sarcasm!

#I admit this is easier #with the ship I don't ship #over the ship I DO ship #though like not tagging ships #send me asks #destinyrainevans

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clive-owen-and-the-knick · 5 years ago

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THE KNICK: haunting quality of a fever dream from which you didn’t want to wake

Typhoid Mary and the birth of ‘contact tracing’ – as seen in The Knick Want to know why ‘tracing asymptomatic carriers’ works? Then watch Steven Soderbergh's brilliant, gory historical drama

“ But Thack laid on his back was the perfect fade to grey. The Knick had finished as it started: with the haunting quality of a fever dream from which you didn’t want to wake. “

New York has been paralysed by a wave of deaths, caused by a fast-acting and unrelenting infection. It strikes indiscriminately, targeting the wealthy as ruthlessly as the downtrodden. Scariest of all, this is a hidden killer. By the time you discover you’re sick, it’s often too late. Survival is a roll of the dice.

Such is life as apprehensively lived in Manhattan today, indeed in the rest of the world. Which may explain why we’re all glued to movies such as Contagion and Outbreak, and Netflix’s documentary Pandemic: How to Prevent an Outbreak. But it was also a key plot point from a little-watched television drama that ran in 2014 and 2015. A storyline that was, in turn, based on the real-life case of a lethal outbreak in New York at the turn of the century.

Steven Soderbergh’s The Knick was the prestige-TV equivalent of one of your five-a-day. And it came just three years after he directed Contagion, about a Covid-19-style outbreak. More importantly, it was about the birth of modern medicine: the painful and gory gestation of practices we take for granted now.

Yet the Knick (now available on demand through Sky) explores advances in brain surgery, anaesthetics, infant mortality rates and, most significantly from a 2020 perspective, the battle against infectious diseases such as typhoid and tuberculosis, which we see claim a baby in its cot.

The setting is a baroque New York hospital, The Knickerbocker (based on a real hospital in Harlem which finally closed in 1979). The year was 1900: a time when moustaches were huge, syringes even bigger, and surgery had more to do with lopped-off limbs than hip replacements.

The Knick was a period caper with a very modern pulse. Soderbergh used it as a vehicle to address such eternal themes as addiction, racism and the struggle between head and heart (not to mention the importance of a perfectly maintained ’tache).

It starred Clive Owen, one of the go-to-actors for tortured intensity, as a maverick surgeon with the fantastically old-fashioned name of Dr John “Thack” Thackery. We see him forge ahead in areas such as skin grafting (he grafts skin from a patient’s arm to her nose), placenta previa surgery and hernia repair. He was a pioneer working in a time of unprecedented medical advancement.

As was the real-life surgeon upon whom he was loosely based. William Halsted was the house physician at New York Presbyterian Hospital, where he introduced such innovations as patient charts, and invented the painful-sounding Halsted mosquito forceps – “a ratcheted haemostat to secure and clamp bleeding vessels”. And he married the first nurse ever to wear gloves during an operation. He was, in addition, addicted to cocaine and morphine (then legally available), requiring a minimum cocaine intake of three-grammes daily.

With the cocaine and the clamps and the great facial hair, you can see why he was irresistible to Soderbergh and The Knick’s creators, Jack Amiel and Michael Begler. Their fictional version of Halsted was a classic flawed anti-hero. In a just world, Thack would have joined the ranks of the small screen’s great “difficult men”, alongside Tony Soprano, Walter White and Don Draper.

Thack was portrayed by Owen as charismatic, enigmatic, permanently dishevelled and moderately racist (there are tensions early on over the hiring of African-American doctor Dr. Algernon C. Edwards). He also romped with prostitutes – as was the fashion at the time – and began the day with enough cocaine to floor a camel.

With coronavirus bringing humanity to a stand-still, Thackery is ideal company for an extended binge-watch. The killer infection plot surfaces midway through the first of its two seasons. It doesn’t directly involve Thack. He is otherwise occupied taking drugs and cavorting with nurse Lucy (Eve Hewson, daughter of Bono).

Investigating the deaths are two second-string characters, Health Inspector Jacob Speight (David Fierro) and Cornelia Robertson (Julia Rylance), society lady and head of The Knick’s social welfare office. They discover all the households struck down with typhoid , a bacterial fever caused by a pernicious strain of salmonella, have one thing in common: a County Tyrone cook named Mary Mallon worked there.

But how could a cook spread typhoid, which cannot survive the high temperatures associated with preparing food? Eventually they work it out: she’s passing on the fever through her signature room-temperature dish of peach melba. This leads to another question: if she’s knowingly spreading typhoid all over the Upper East Side, why doesn’t she herself show symptoms?

The answer lies in a cutting-edge new theory: that some individuals carry and spread infection whilst themselves not developing symptoms. It’s a condition known as “asymptomatic”. Today, we all know what that entails, but at the time it wasn’t universally accepted within the medical profession.

Certainly, the characters in The Knick struggle to get their heads around it. “She must be a filthy thing and as sick as a cesspool,” Speight says to Robertson as they rush to stop Mary – “Typhoid Mary”, they’ve dubbed her – from serving another dose of lethal peaches.

How did they find her? By tracking down all those who fell ill, and then the people with whom they interacted, and overlaying the data points on a map of Manhattan. In other words, by “contact tracing” – a concept which might have sounded dreary a few months ago, but which today is on everyone’s lips.

In the final confrontation, they head her off at the kitchen, and she’s arrested attempting to flee. (Some might say that the American actress, Melissa McMeekin, should also be in the dock for her dreadful Irish accent, which suggests a heavy viral load of Darby O’Gill and the Little People.) Scientific ignorance, alas, wins the day. Just two episodes later, Typhoid Mary is freed, when the judge refuses to believe that someone could transmit a lethal fever while immune to its symptoms.

These are, more or less, the facts of the real-life case of Typhoid Mary, an immigrant from the Old Country estimated to have fatally spread the fever to more than 50 people (via her delicious ice-cream, however, not peach melba). Yet there was no Hollywood ending for her, despite press baron William Randolph Hearst helping fund her defence at trial. She avoided prison, as she does in The Knick, but the Typhoid Mary name followed her around. And, though she found work under a number of aliases, people continued to die in her vicinity.

Mallon was eventually sent back to North Brother Island in New York’s East River – where we she see her incarcerated in The Knick – and lived out the last 23 years of her life in enforced isolation. After her death from a stroke in 1938 at age 69, an autopsy revealed a gall bladder riddled with typhoid bacteria.

The Knick itself would submit to the inevitable after two seasons and just 20 episodes. And yet despite low ratings, it wasn’t necessarily an obvious candidate for cancellation. The critics loved it, and Soderbergh, one of the most instinctive filmmakers since Spielberg, made it quickly and cheaply for HBO offshoot Cinemax. (Incredibly cheaply, in fact, considering the realism with which he brought to life turn-of-the-century New York.)

He shot each 10-part series in just 73 days – roughly one instalment per week. That’s a decent clip when churning out a 20-minute sitcom. But to produce gorgeous prestige TV in that time-frame was remarkable. The Knick, which was shot on location in New York, looked incredible. While clearly set in the past, there’s something grippingly vivid and urgent about it. It’s the very opposite of starched, stagey period telly such as Downton Abbey and HBO’s own Boardwalk Empire.

That’s because Soderbergh filmed in natural light as far as possible. He was able to do so thanks to cutting-edge RED digital cameras, equipped with new “Dragon” sensors designed to work in low levels of light. Even when it was grim and gloomy outside, he could shoot using natural light. “Every once in a while, an actor would walk onto the set and say, “Are you guys bringing any light in?’” Soderbergh told Fast Company in 2014. “And we’d go, 'No, that’s it'.”This produced the occasional strange side-effect. Looking back over footage, for instance, Soderbergh would suddenly sense something amiss. He’d freeze the frame and zoom in. And there it was: because of the fading light, the actors’ pupils were massively dilated.

Bravura directing was accompanied by powerhouse acting from Owen. As far back as his break-out 1990s hit Croupier, he was always a coiled spring when on screen. All that repressed tension spewed to the surface in his portrayal of Thackery, a brilliant man wrestling perpetually with demons. “It was very, very challenging and very, very demanding, and Steven [is] really fast and very concentrated,” Owen said in a 2014 interview with Indiewire. “We did the 10 hours in just over 70 days, or seven days an episode. There’s some incredibly difficult technical stuff there. All the operation stuff that’s logistically very difficult… Sometimes we’d shoot up to 13 or 14 pages a day."And yet, Soderbergh was supposed to have retired when he made The Knick. In 2012 the director of Out of Sight and Ocean’s Eleven had publicly stepped away from filmmaking. A few months later, he received a pilot script by comedy writers Amiel and Begler. His ambition at the time was to become a painter – a mission he expected to occupy all his free time over the next several years. “I was aware that the 10,000 hours required to become just good would take years of steady, applied focus,” he said. “I was basically ready to do that. I was taking painting lessons from [naturalistic wildlife artist] Walton Ford and having a great time learning things, talking to him and watching him work.”

When he read the screenplay for The Knick, and was riveted from the opening page. “I was the first person to get ahold of the script for The Knick and I just couldn’t let that pass through my fingers. It’s about everything I’m interested in. Everything. I was the first person to see it. And I thought, 'I have to do this'.”

Amiel and Begler had knocked around the industry writing disposable chuckle-fests such as the 2004 Kate Hudson vehicle Raising Helen. The idea for The Knick came when Begler had a turn of poor health. “I was having medical issues. I was researching alternative medicine, and was also frustrated,” he recalled to Indiewire in 2010. “I was thinking: What were my options 100 years ago? I can go online and find out so much different information now. Too much, even.

“But what do you do in 1900? On a whim, Jack and I just bought a couple of medical textbooks from eBay. We opened them and it was just incredible. And yes, it was a horror show. I couldn’t believe the things I was reading: people drinking turpentine to help a perforated intestine.

“My jaw hit the ground. The further we dove into this world, the more crazy s--- we saw. There was too much good stuff here. Once we saw that it was about medicine, then we started to look at what the world of 1900 was like. The world was changing so fast, with so much to play with.”

That “crazy s---” was searingly translated to the screen. The Knick is striking in that it’s set in a world only a few steps removed from ours. Thackery and his colleagues are recognisably modern doctors, not medieval quacks or shamans. Yet their practices also feel like butchery by another name. As antiseptically filmed by Soderbergh, The Knick often has the unflinching quality of an avant-garde horror film.

Thackery injecting cocaine into his genitals (all his other veins having collapsed) and performing a bowel operation using “a revolutionary clamp of his own design” are, for instance, among the highlights of the pilot. Episode four, meanwhile, sees the good doctor trying to save a woman from a botched self-administered abortion. The three-minute sequence contains more gore than all the Saw movies laid end-to-end.

The Knick finished in bravura fashion, too. As season two came to a conclusion, it was unclear if it would be renewed. So Soderbergh gave Thackery a wonderfully ambivalent send off. He recklessly attempts surgery on himself – without an anaesthetic – only for the experiment to go awry. There are a lot of entrails and lots of blood.

“My peripheral vision seems to be going… body temperature has begun to drop,” he says. “This is it… this is all we are.” And then his life flashes before him. Has the most brilliant surgeon of his era expired on his own operating table?

Soderbergh later revealed the plan was to kill off the character and that a third season of The Knick would have time-jumped to the 1940s (he wanted to film it in black-and-white). But Thack laid on his back was the perfect fade to grey. The Knick had finished as it started: with the haunting quality of a fever dream from which you didn’t want to wake.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/0/typhoid-mary-birth-contact-tracing-seen-knick/

#CliveOwen TheKnick 1900 DrThackery LucyElkins #clive owen #the knick #just another Tuesday at The Knick #typhoid mary #steven soderbergh #awesome article #fever dream

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islamcketta · 5 years ago

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What a week it’s been. Seven days ago at this time, my husband was with our dog, Rocky, at the vet for what would be his second to last visit and I was trying to decide how to tell our four-year-old son that the dog wasn’t coming home. The dog did come home, and we spent a tense 48 hours watching for the inevitable before we could get the second, final visit. And somehow, on Monday I did find the words to tell my son that Rocky was not coming home. He covered his ears and did not want to talk about it. As heartbreaking as this conversation was (as well as subsequent ones where I tried to make sure he knew he could talk to me when he was ready), it’s nothing compared to trying to explain racism to a small child, even as I’m still learning about it myself.

But the time for change is now. That’s why I finally took Ijeoma Oluo’s So You Want to Talk About Race off the shelf in my bedroom where it had been waiting too long to be read.

When my son was born, a friend insisted I read Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates. An excellent book, and a hard read in that early parenting time when my empathy for all humans was almost shattering, I learned a lot from Coates. But my reading of that book did not fix our society and really, it did not fix me either. And I won’t say that I’m fixed now that I’ve read (most of, I’ll finish the rest this afternoon) Oluo’s book, either, but So You Want to Talk About Race engaged me in a conversation I needed to have with myself and Oluo gave me both the language and the understanding necessary to try harder.

A Lexicon of Racism

Too much of my experience of the world these days comes from Twitter-sized synopses in which I either smile or rankle before moving on and forgetting. And while I’ve had a superficial understanding of the concepts of white privilege, intersectionality, and microagressions, I haven’t really put the work in to know what I could do about any of it besides feel guilty and try to not say ignorant things. Oluo helped me take that next step by unpacking what the words mean and what they look like in everyday life. She opens up ideas of how white people can start to confront and dismantle them in their own lives and in the lives of the people around them. She also speaks directly to people of color.

Two of the most impactful things Oluo helped me understand are the power dynamics of racism and the ways I’ve been failing to properly empathize with the experiences of people of color. They are not unrelated, but while I cannot dismantle the white supremacy inherent in our institutions (today anyway), I can breathe in her “basic rules” of determining if something is about race until they are a part of my body:

It is about race if a person of color thinks it is about race.

It is about race if it disproportionately or differently affects people of color.

It is about race if it fits a broader pattern of events that disproportionately or differently affect people of color.

Do any of those rankle? As a student of sociology, I had no trouble accepting the last two, but I really struggled with the first. Which meant I had to ask why. Where I’m at now (a few days into this process) is that I’ve been so gaslit about my own experiences (as a woman) that victim blaming is part of my body. My mechanism for feeling better about myself is trying to control every aspect of every situation so that I can never get hurt so if someone else gets hurt then clearly they failed to control something. Except that argument is as full of bullshit for people who are subjected to the abuses of a racist system as it is for women who are raped, assaulted, or harassed.

And the passing of a counterfeit $20 bill is never, ever a crime that should be paid for with a life.

The Beauty of Vulnerability

“Acknowledging us, believing us, means challenging everything you believe about race in this country. And I know that this is a very big ask, I know that this is a painful and scary process. I know that it’s hard to believe that the people you look to for safety and security are the same people who are causing us so much harm. But I’m not lying and I’m not delusional. I am scared and I am hurting and we are dying. And I really, really need you to believe me.” – Ijeoma Oluo So You Want to Talk About Race

I haven’t read White Fragility (yet), but I do know that when confronted with my own racism I more want to hide in a corner than confront my bad actions and I’m certain I’m not alone. In So You Want to Talk About Race, Oluo does the reader the kindness of opening up her own vulnerability. She both unpacks moments when she was not representing the values she espouses and experiences when she has been victimized by institutions and individuals. I’m deeply grateful for this approach, because by being so open and vulnerable with her readers, she made it much easier to be open and vulnerable back. Although she often says (correctly) that it is not the victim of racism’s job to educate the perpetrator, this choice is helping me examine both the problems with the system and also the ways in which I have perpetuated those problems.

The Structures of Power

As I mentioned, institutionalized racism was one of the hardest parts of this book to get my head around, I think because I was raised to believe in this American ideal of founding fathers who were looking out for all of us and who set up this great nation around some very laudable ideals. And now I have to interrogate all of that. We all do.

The police in my brain are here to “protect and to serve” and that’s a comfortable place to return to when I want to ignore one more abuse or death at their hands. But I remember the way the teenagers in my home town were hounded by the police—and we were white. When you entrust someone with a job, you have to be very careful how you frame that job. Even if you think about little things like quotas for traffic tickets. That’s not the police looking to stop people who are breaking laws, that’s a worker trying to check off a list of tasks and they’ll enforce traffic laws at whatever level they can until that list is complete. Now add a government and a legal system that was designed to protect the property of white men. I don’t know enough about what makes the police act as a military force against people of color (though I’m thinking about it); I do think they are acting to protect a status quo that should not be protected.

I don’t need to watch the video of George Floyd’s death to know that kneeling on the neck of a human being (ever, not to mention until they die) is not ever okay. But when John T. Williams was shot down in cold blood by a Seattle police officer, I used personal knowledge of his behavior to make excuses for the officer. When the pregnant Charleena Lyles was shot and killed three miles from where I lived with my almost two-year-old, I was sickened yet did nothing. In truth, those cases formed a pattern where the police failed to place the value of a human life above the value of their own inconvenience.

It’s beyond time that we confront what is wrong with policing in this city and this country, that we dismantle the current system, and that we instead build something that serves everyone. Something that treats human lives (of all colors) with value. I believe strongly that this starts early in life when we must give all children the same opportunities. I also believe that we have to stop treating 12-year-olds like Tamir Rice like it’s too late for them because their bodies are big. That no one should die for selling cigarettes, as Eric Garner did, or for being in a house where drugs were suspected of being sold, as was the case with Breonna Taylor. Black lives are human lives and black lives matter.

What I’m Telling My Son

The day my (then two-year-old) son asked for a Playmobil tactical van, my heart sank. But he thought it was a police car and he wanted it and I wanted him to have what he wanted. Now he asks me to turn off NPR when they use the word “dead.” Mostly I do, because there are a lot of details he does not need to know. But this week is different. As will be all the weeks going forward.

This week we talked about why people become police officers, that some people want to help others and that’s good, but that some people want power over others, and that’s bad. We talked about skin color and things that make people look different but that’s only how they look on the outside. We talked about how he needs to stand up for his friends because sometimes they won’t be able to stand up for themselves. Later, I’ll probably have him sit through the Sesame Street town hall on racism. Because while we try to surround him with diverse books and friends of all colors with a wide variety of life experiences, it’s not enough.

So I’m going to keep reading, Oluo’s book and others, and turning that knowledge into action. There are a myriad of good anti-racism reading lists out there and I also recommend this podcast and essay. As always, I’m open to your suggestions. Let’s take our hands off our ears and change the world with the power we have. We’re stronger than we know.

The post So You Want to Talk About Race (I Do) appeared first on A Geography of Reading.

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jcmorgenstern · 5 years ago

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@superohclair oh god okay please know these are all just incoherent ramblings so like, idk, please feel free to add on or ignore me if im just wildly off base but this is a bad summary of what ive been thinking about and also my first titans/batman meta?? (also, hi!)

okay so for the disclaimer round: I am not an actual cultural studies major, nor do I have an extensive background in looking at the police/military industrial complex in media. also my comics knowledge is pretty shaky and im a big noob(I recently got into titans, and before that was pretty ignorant of the dceu besides batman) so I’ll kind of focus in on the show and stuff im more familiar with and apologize in advance?. basically im just a semi-educated idiot with Opinions, anyone with more knowledge/expertise please jump in! this is literally just the bullshit I spat out incoherently off the top of my head. did i mention im a comics noob? because im a comics noob.

so on a general level, I think we can all agree that batman as a cultural force is somewhat on the conservative side, if not simply due to its age and commercial positioning in American culture. there are a lot of challenges and nuances to that and it’s definitely expanding and changing as DC tries to position itself in the way that will...make the most money, but all you have to do is take a gander through the different iterations of the stories in the comics and it’ll smack you in the fucking face. like compare the first iteration of Jason keeping kids out of drugs to the titans version and you’ve got to at least chuckle. at the end of the day, this is a story about a (white male) billionaire who fights crime.

to be fair, I’d argue the romanticization of the police isn’t as aggressive as it could be—they are most often presented as corrupt and incompetent. However, considering the main cop characters depicted like Jim Gordon, the guys in Gotham (it’s been a while since I saw it, sorry) are often the romanticized “good few” (and often or almost always white cis/het men), that’s on pretty shaky ground. I don’t have the background in the comics strong enough to make specific arguments, so I’ll cede the point to someone who does and disagrees, but having recently watched a show that deals excellently with police incompetence, racism, and brutality (7 Seconds on Netflix), I feel at the very least something is deeply missing. like, analysis of race wrt police brutality in any aspect at all whatsoever.

I think it can be compellingly read that batman does heavily play into the military/police industrial complex due to its takes on violence—just play the Arkham games for more than an hour and you’ll know what I mean. to be a little less vague, even though batman as a franchise valorizes “psychiatric treatment” and “nonviolence,” the entire game seems pretty aware it characterizes treatment as a madhouse and nonviolence as breaking someone’s back or neck magically without killing them because you’re a “good guy.” while it is definitely subversive that the franchise even considers these elements at all, they don’t always do a fantastic job living up to them.

and then when you consider the fetishization of tools of violence both in canon and in the fandom, it gets worse. same with prisons—if anything it dehumanizes people in prisons even more than like, cop shows in general, which is pretty impressive(ly bad). like there’s just no nuance afforded and arkham is generally glamorized. the fact that one of the inmates is a crocodile assassin, I will admit, does not help. im not really sure how to mitigate that when, again, one of the inmates is a crocodile assassin, but I think my point still stands. fuck you, killer croc. (im just kidding unfuck him or whatever)

not to take this on a Jason Todd tangent but I was thinking about it this afternoon and again when thinking about that cop scene again and in many ways he does serve as a challenge to both batman’s ideology as well as the ideology of the franchise in general. his depiction is always a bit of a sticking point and it’s always fascinating to me to see how any given adaptation handles it. like Jason’s “”street”” origin has become inseparable from his characterization as an angry, brash, violent kid, and that in itself reflects a whole host of cultural stereotypes that I might argue occasionally/often dip into racialized tropes (like just imagine if he wasn’t white, ok). red hood (a play on robin hood and the outlaws, as I just realized...today) is in my exposure/experience mostly depicted as a villain, but he challenges batman’s no-kill philosophy both on an ethical and practical level. every time the joker escapes he kills a whole score more of innocent people, let alone the other rogues—is it truly ethical to let him live or avoid killing him for the cost of one life and let others die?

moreover, batman’s ““blind”” faith in the justice system (prisons, publicly-funded asylum prisons, courts) is conveniently elided—the story usually ends when he drops bad guy of the day off at arkham or ties up the bad guys and lets the police come etc etc. part of this is obviously bc car chases are more cinematic than dry court procedurals, but there is an alternate universe where bruce wayne never becomes batman and instead advocates for the arkham warden to be replaced with someone competent and the system overhauled, or in programs encouraging a more diverse and educated police force, or even into social welfare programs. (I am vaguely aware this is sometimes/often part of canon, but I don’t think it’s fair to say it’s the main focus. and again, I get it’s not nearly as cinematic).

overall, I think the most frustrating thing about the batman franchise or at least what I’ve seen or read of it is that while it does attempt to deal with corruption and injustice at all levels of the criminal justice system/government, it does so either by treating it as “just how life is” or having Dick or Jim Gordon or whoever the fuckjust wipe it out by “eliminating the dirty cops,” completely ignoring the non-fantasy ways these problems are dealt with in real life. it just isn’t realistic. instead of putting restrictions on police violence or educating cops on how to use their weapons or putting work into eradicating the culture of racism and prejudice or god basically anything it’s just all cinematized into the “good few” triumphing over the bad...somehow. its always unsatisfying and ultimately feels like lip service to me, personally.

this also dovetails with the very frustrating way mental health/”insanity” or “madness” is dealt with in canon, very typical of mainstream fiction. like for example:“madness is like gravity, all it takes is a little push.” yikes, if by ‘push’ you mean significant life stressors, genetic load, and environemntal influences, then sure. challenge any dudebro joker fanboy to explain exactly what combination of DSM disorders the joker has to explain his “””insanity””” and see what happens. (these are, in fact, my plans for this Friday evening. im a hit at parties).

anyway I do really want to wax poetic about that cop scene in 1x06 so im gonna do just that! honestly when I first saw that I immediately sat up like I’d sat on a fucking tack, my cultural studies senses were tingling. the whole “fuck batman” ethos of the show had already been interesting to me, esp in s1, when bruce was basically standing in for the baby boomers and dick being our millennial/GenX hero. I do think dick was explicitly intended to appeal to a millennial audience and embody the millennial ethos. By that logic, the tension between dick and Jason immediately struck me as allegorical (Jason constantly commenting on dick being old, outdated, using slang dick doesn’t understand and generally being full of youthful obnoxious fistbumping energy).

Even if subconsciously on the part of the writers, jason’s over-aggressive energy can be read as a commentary on genZ—seen by mainstream millennial/GenX audiences as taking things too far. Like, the cops in 1x06 could have been Nick Zucco’s hired men or idk pretty much anyone, yet they explicitly chose cops and even had Jason explain why he deliberately went after them for being cops so dick (cop) could judge him for it. his rationale? he was beaten up by cops on the street, so he’s returning the favor. he doesn’t have the focused “righteous” rage of batman or dick/nightwing towards valid targets, he just has rage at the world and specifically the system—framed here as unacceptable or fanatical. as if like, dressing up like a bat and punching people at night is, um, totally normal and uncontroversial.

on a slightly wider scope, the show seems to internally struggle with its own progressive ethos—on the one hand, they hire the wildly talented chellah man, but on the other hand they will likely kill him off soon. or they cast anna diop, drawing wrath from the loudly racist underbelly of fandom, but sideline her. perhaps it’s a genuine struggle, perhaps they simply don’t want to alienate the bigots in the fanbase, but the issue of cops stuck out to me when I was watching as an social issue where they explicitly came down on one side over the other. jason’s characterization is, I admit and appreciate, still nuanced, but I’d argue that’s literally just bc he’s a white guy and a fan favorite. cast an actor of color as Jason and see how fast fandom and the writer’s room turns on him.

anyway i don’t really have the place to speak about what an explicitly nonwhite!cop!dick grayson would look like, but I do think it would be a fascinating and exciting place to start in exploring and correcting the kind of vague and nebulous complaints i raise above. (edit: i should have made more clear, i mean in the show, which hasn’t dealt with dick’s heritage afaik). also, there’s something to be said about the cop vs detective thing but I don’t really have the brain juice or expertise to say it? anyway if you got this far i hope it was at least interesting and again pls jump in id love to hear other people’s takes!!

tldr i took two (2) cultural studies classes and have Opinions

#wow this was a hot fucking mess #i tried to be organized but my thoughts weren't coming out super well #again anyone interested please feel free to jump in or correct me at any place you feel like #i die on the ''jason todd would be treated horribly by fandom if he were a character of color' hill tho #i could go on about 1x06 until im blue in the face but that's the uhh overview. the executive summary.#dc titans #i need meta tags and shit for this show #god help me in too deep #finding the meta side of fandom was a GIFT tho i love this shit #so excited

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ultralullstuff · 5 years ago

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Is Paris Burning?

There was a time in my life when I liked to dress up as a male and go out into the world. It was a form of ritual, of play. It was also about power. To cross-dress as a woman in patriarchy -then, more so than now - was also to symbolically cross from the world of powerlessness into a world of privilege. It was the ultimate, intimate, voyeuristic gesture. Searching old journals for passages documenting that time, I found this paragraph:

She pleaded with him, “Just once, well every now and then, I just want to be boys together. I want to dress like you and go out and make the world look at us differently, make them wonder about us, make them stare and ask those silly questions like is he a woman dressed up like a man, is he an older black gay man with his effeminate boy/girl lover flaunting same-sex love out in the open. Don’t worry I’ll take it very seriously, I want to let them laugh at you. I’ll make it real, keep them guessing, do it in such a way that they will never know for sure. Don’t worry when we come home I will be a girl for you again but for now I want us to be boys together.”

Cross-dressing, appearing in drag, transvestism, and transsexualism emerge in a contex where the notion of subjectivity is challenged, where identity is always perceived as capable of construction, invention, change. Long before there was ever a contemporary feminist movement, the sites of these experiences were subverisve places where gender norms were questioned and challenged.

Within the white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy the experience of men dressing as women, appearing in drag, has always been regarded by the dominant heterosexist cultural gaze as a sign that one is symbolically crossing over from a realm of power into a realm of powerlessness. Just to look at the many negative ways the word “drag” is defined reconnects this label to an experience that is seen as burdensome, as retrograe and retrogressive. To choose to appear as “female” when one is “male” is always constructed in the patriarchal mindset as a loss, as a choice worthy only of ridicule. Given this cultural backdrop, it is not surprising that many black comediants appearing on television screens for the first time included as part of their acts impersonations of black women. The black woman depicted was usually held up as an object of ridicules, scorn, hatred (representing the “female” image everyone was allowed to laugh at and show contempt for). Often the moment when a black male comedian appeared in drag was the most succesful segment of a given comedian’s act (for example, Flip Wilson, Redd Foxx, or Eddie Murphy).

I used to wonder if the sexual stereotype of black men as overly sexual, manly, as “rapists”, allowed black males to cross this gendered boundary more easily than white men without having to fear that they would be seen as possibly gay or transvestites. As a young black female, I found these images to be disempowering. Thay seemed to bothallow black males to give public expression to a general misogyny, as well as to a more specific hatred and contempt toward black woman. Growing up in a world where black women wer, and still are, the objects of extreme abuse, scorn, and ridicule, I felt these impersonations were aimed at reinforcing everyone’s power over us. In retrospect, I can see that the black male in drag was also a disempowering image of black masculinity. Appearing as a “woman” within sexist, racist media was a way to become in “play” that “castrated” silly childlike black male that racist white patriarchy was comfortable having as an image in their homes. These televised images of black men in drag were never subversive; thay helped sustain sexism and racism.

It came as no surprise to me that Catherine Clement in her book, Opera, or the Undoing of Women would include a section about black men and the way their representation in opera did not allow her to neatly separate the world into gendered polarities where men and women occupied distintcly different social spaces and were “two antagonistic halves, one persecuting the other since before the dawn of time.” Looking critically at images of black men in operas she found that they were most often portrayed as victims:

Eve is undone as a woman, endlesslyy bruised, endelessly dying and coming back to life to die even better. But now I begin to remember hearing figures of betrayed, wounded men; men who ham; men who have women’s troubles happen to them; men who have the status of Eve, as if they had lost their innate Adam. These men die like heroines; down on the ground they cry and moan, they lament. And like heroines they are surrounded by real men, veritable Adams who have cast them down. Thay partake of feminity: excluded, marked by some initial strangeness. Thay are doomed to their undoing.

Many heterosexual black men in white supremacist patriarchal culture have acted as though the primary “evil” of racism has been the refusal of the dominant culture to allow them full access to patriarchal power, so that in sexist terms thay are compelled to inhabit a sphere of powerlessness, deemed “feminine”, hence thay have perceived themselves as emasculated. To the extent that black men accept a white supremacist sexist representation of themselves as castrated, without phallic power, and therfore pseudo-females, thay will need to overly assert a phallic misogynist masculinity, one rooted in contempt for the female. Much black male homophobia is rooted in the desire to eschew connection with all things deemed “feminine” and that would, of course, include black gay men. A contemporary black comedian like Eddie Murphy “proves” his phallic power by daring to publicly ridicule women and gays. His days of appearing in drag are over. Indeed it is the drag queen of his misogynist imagination that is most often the image of black gay culture he evokes and subjects to comic homophobic assault -one that audiences collude in perpetuating.

For black males to take appearing in drag seriously, be they gay or straight, is to oppose a heterosexist representation of black manhood. Gender bending and blending on the part of black males has always been a critique of phalocentric masculinity in traditional black experience. Yet the subversive power of those images is radically altered when informed by a racialized fictional construction of the “feminine” that suddenly makes the representation of whiteness as crucial to the experience of female impersonation as gender, that is to idealization of white womanhood. This is brutally evident in Jennie Livingston’s new film Paris is burning. Within the world of the black drag ball culture she deicts, the idea of womanness as feminity is totally personified by whiteness. What viewers witness is not black men longing to impersonate or even to become like “real” black women but their obsession with an idealized fetishized vision of feminity that is white. Called out in the film by Dorian Carey, who names it by saying no black drag queen of his day wanted to be Lena Horne, he makes it clear that the feminity most sought after, most adored, was that perceived to be the exclusive property of whte womanhood. When we see visual representations of womanhood in the film (images torn from magazines and posted on walls in living space) they are, with rare exceptions, of white women. Significantly, the fixation on becoming as much like a white female as possible implicitly evokes a connection to a figure never visible in this film: that of the white male patriarch. And yet if the class, race, and gender aspirations expressed by the drag queens who share their deepest dreams is always longing to be in the position of the ruling-class woman then that means there is also thedesire to act in partnership with the ruling-class white male.

This combination of class and race longing that privileges the “feminity” of the ruling-class white woman, adored and kept, shrouded in luxury, does not imply a critique of patriarchy. Often it is assumed that the gay male, and most specifically the “queen”, is both anti-phallocentric and anti-patriarchal. Marilyn Frye’s essay, “Lesbian feminism and Gay Rights”, remains one of the most useful critical debunkings of this myth. Writing in The Politics of Reality, Frye comments:

One of thing which persuades the straight world that gay men are not really men is the effeminacy of style of some gay men and the gay institution of the impersonation of women, both of which are associated in the popular mind with male homosexuality. But as I read it, gay men’s effeminacy and donning of feminine apparel displays no love of or identification with women or the womanly. For the most part, this femininity is affected and is characterized by thatrical exaggeration. It is a casual and cynical mockery of women, for whom feminity is the trapping of oppresion, but it is also a kind of play, a toying with that which is taboo.. What gay male affectation of femininity seems to be is a serious sport in which men may exercise their power and control over the feminine, much as in other sports... But the mastery of the feminine is not feminine. It is masculine..

Any viewer of Paris is Burning can neither deny the way in which its contemporary drag balls have the aura of sports events, aggressive competitions, one team (in this case “house”) competing another etc., nor ignore the way in which the male “gaze” in the audience is directed at participants in a manner akin to the objectifying phallic stare straight men direct at “feminine” women daily in public spaces. Paris is Burning is a film that many audiences assume is inherently oppositional because of its subject matter and the identity of the filmmaker. Yet the film’s politics of race, gender, and class are played out in ways that are both progressive and reactionary.

When I first heard that there was this new documentary film about black gay men, drag queens, and drag balls I was fascinated by the title. It evoked images of the real Paris on fire, of the death and destruction of a dominating white western civilization and culture, an end to oppressive Eurocentrism and white supremacy. This fantasy not only gave me a sustained sense of plearure, it stood between me and the unlikely reality that a young white filmmaker, offering a progresssive vision of “blackness” from the standpoint of “whiteness”, would receive the positive press accorded Livingston and her film. Watching Paris is Burning, I began to think that the many yuppie-looking, straight-acting, pushy, predominantly white folks in the audience were there because the film in no way interrogates “whiteness”. These folks left the film saying it was “amazing”, “marvelous”, “incredibly funny”, worthy of statements like, “Didn’t you just love it?” And no, I didn’t just love it. For in many ways the film was a graphic documentary portrait of the way in which colonized black people (in this case black gay brothers, some of whom were drag queens) worship at the throne of whiteness, even when such worship demands that we live in perpetual self-hate, steal, lie, go hungry, and even die in its pursuit. The “we” evoked here is all of us, black people/people of color, who are daily bombarded by a powerful colonizing whiteness that seduces us away from ourselves, that negates that ther is beauty to be found in any form of blackness that is not imitation whiteness.

The whiteness celebrated in Paris is Burning is not just any old brand of whiteness but rather that brutal imperial ruling-class capitalist patriarchal whiteness that presents itself -its way of life- as the only meaningful life there is. What would be more reassuring to a white public fearful that marginalized disenfracnhised black folks might rise any day now and make revolutionary black liberation struggle a reality than a doumentary affirming that colonized, victimized, exploited, black folks are all too willing to be complicit in perpetuating the fantasy that ruling-class white culture is the quintessential site of unrestricted joy, freedom, power, and pleasure. Indeed it is the very “pleasure” that so many white viewers with class privilege experience when watching this film that has acted to censor dissenting voices who find the film and its reception critically problematic.

In Vincent Canby’s review of the film in the New York Times he begins by quoting the words of a black father to his homosexual son. The father shares that it is difficult for black men to survive in a racist society and that “if you’re black and male and gay, you have to be stronger that you can imagine”. Beginning his overwhelmingly positive review with the words of a straight black father, Canby implies that the film in some way documents such strenght, is a portrait of black gay pride. Yet he in no way indicates ways this pride and power are evident in the work. Like most reviewers of the film, what he finds most compelling is the pageantry of the drag balls. He uses no language identifying race and class perspectives when suggesting at the end of his piece that behind the role-playing “there is also a terrible sadness in the testimony”. This makes it appear that the politics of ruling-class white culture are solely social and not political, solely “aesthetic” questions of choice and desire rather that expressions of power and privilege. Canby does not tell readers that much of the tragedy and sadness of this film is evoked by the willingness of black gay men to knock themselves out imitating a ruling-class culture and power elite that is one of the primary agents of their oppression and exploitation. Ironically, the very “fantasies” evoked emerge from the colonizing context, and while marginalized people often appropriate and subvert aspects of the dominant culture, Paris is Burning does not forcefully suggest that such a process is taking place.

Livingston’s film is presented as though it is a politically neutral documentary providing a candid, even celebratory, look at black drag balls. And it is precisely the mood of celebration that masks the extent to which the balls are not necessarily radical expresssions of subverive imagination at work undemining and challenging the status quo. Much of the film’s focus on pageantry takes the ritual of the black drag ball and makes it spectacle. Ritual is that ceremonial act that carries with it meaning and significance beyond what appears, while spectacle functions primarily as entertaining dramatic display. Those of us who have grown up in a segregated black setting where we participated in diverse pageants and rituals know that those elements of a given ritual that are empowering and subversive may not be readily visible to an outsider looking in. Hence it is easy for white obsevers to depict black rituals as spectacle.

Jennie Livingston approaches her subject matter as an outsider looking in. Since her presence as white woman/lesbian filmmaker is “absent” from Paris is Burning it is easy for viewers to imagine that they are watching an ethnographic film doumenting the life of black gay “natives” and not recognize that they are watching a work shaped and formed bya a perspective and standpoint specific to Livingston. By cinematically masking this reality (we hear her ask questions but never see her), Livingston does not oppose the way hegemonic whiteness “represents” blackness, but rather assumes an imperial overseeing position that is in no way progressive or counter-hegemonic. By shooting the film using a conventional approach to documentary and not making clear how her standpoint breaks with this tradition, Livingston assumes a privileged location of “innocence”. She is represented both in interviews and reviews tender-hearte, mild-mannered, virtuous white woman daring to venture into a contemporaty “heart of darkness” to bring back knowledge of the natives.

A review in the New Yorker declares (with no argument to substatiate the assertion) that “the movie is a sympathetic observation of a specialized, private world”. An interview with Livingston in Outweek is titled “Pose, She Said” and we are told in the preface that she “discovered the Ball world by chance”. Livingston does not discuss her interest and fascination with black gay subculture. She is not asked to speak about what knowledge, information, or lived understanding of black culture and history she possessed that provided a background for her work or to explain what vision of black life she hoped to convey and to whom. Can anyone imagine that a black woman lesbian would make a film about whete gay subculture and not be asked these questions? Livingston is asked in the Outweek interview, “How did you build up the kind of trust where people are so open to talking about their personal experiences?” She never answers this question. Instead she suggests that she gains her “credibility” by the intensity of her spectatoship, adding, “I also targeted people who wer articulate, who had stuff they wanted to say and were very happy that anyone wanted to listen”. Avoiding the difficult questions undelying what it means to be a white person in a white supremacist society creating a film about any aspect of black life. Livingston responds to the question, “Didn’t the fact that you’re a white lesbian going into a world of Black queens and street kids make that [the interview process] difficult?” by implicitly evoking a shallow sense of universal connection. She responds, “If you know someone over a period of two years, and thay still retain their sex and their race, you’ve got to be a pretty sexist, racist person”. Yet it is precisely the race, sex, and sexual practices of black men who are filmed that is the exploited subject matter.

So far I have read no interviews where Livingston discusses the issue of appropriation. And even though she is openly critical of Madonna, she does not convey how her work differs from Madonna’s apropriation of black experience. To some extent it is precisely the recognition by mass culture that aspects of black life, like “voguing”, fscinate white audiences that creates a market for both Madonna’s product and Livingston’s. Unfortunately, Livingston’s comments about Paris is Burning do not convey serious thought about either the political and aesthetic implications of her choice as a white woman focusing on an aspect of black life and culture or the way racism might shape and inform how she would interpret black experience on the screen. Reviewers like Georgia Brown in the Village Voice who suggest that Livingston’s whiteness is “a fact of nature that didn’t hinder her research” collude in the denial of the way whiteness informs her perspective and standpoint. To say, as Livingston does, “I certainly don’t have the final word on the gay black experience. I’d love for a black director to have made this film” is to oversimplify the issue and to absolve her of responsibility and accountability for progressive critical reflection and it implicitly suggests that there would be no difference between her work and that of a black director. Undrlying this apparently self-effacing comment is cultural arrogance, for she implies not only that she has cornered the market on the subject matter but that being able to make films is a question of personal choice, like she just “discovered” the “raw material” before a black director did. Her comments are disturbing because thay reveal so little awareness of the politics that undergird any commodification of “blackness” in this society.

Had Livingston approached her subject with greater awareness of the way white supremacy shapes cultural production -determining not only what representations of blackness are deemed acceptable, marketable, as well worthy of seeing- perhaps the film would not so easily have turned the black drag ball into a spectacle for the entertainment of those presumed to be on the outside of this experience looking in. So much of what is expressed in the film has to do with questions of power and privilege and the way racism impedes black progresss (and certainly the class aspirations of the black gay subculture depicted do not differ from those of other poor and underclass black communities). Here, the supposedly “outsider” position is primarily located in the experience of whiteness. Livingston appears unwilling to interrogate the way assuming the position of outsider looking in, as well as interpreter, can, and often does, pervert and distort one’s pespective. Her ability to assume such a position without rigorous interrogation of intent is rooted in the politics of race and racism. Patricia Williams critiques the white assumption of a”neutral” gaze in her essay “Teleology on the Rocks” included in her new book The Alchemy of Race and Rights. Describing taking a walking tour of Harlem with a group of white folks, she recalls the guide telling them they might “get to see some services” since “Easter Sunday in Harlem is quite a show”. William’s critical observations are relevant to any discussion of Paris is Burning:

What astonished me was that no one had asked the churches if they wanted to be sared at like living museums. I wondered what would happen if a group of blue-jeaned blacks were to walk uninvited into a synagogue on Passover or St. Anthony’s of Padua during high mass -just to peer, not pray. My feeling is that such activity would be seen as disresectful, at the very least. Yet the aspect of disrespect, intrusion, seemed irrelevant to this well-educated, affable group of people. They deflected my observation with comments like “We just want to look”, “No one will mind”, and “There’s no harm intended”. As well-intentioned as they were, I was left with the impression that no one existed for them who could not be governed by their intentions. While acknowledging the lack of apparent malice in this behavior, I can’t help thinking that it is a liability as much as a luxury to live without interaction. To live so completely impervious to one’s own impact on others is a fragile privilege, which over time relies not simply on the willingness but on the inability of others -in this case blacks- to make their displeasure heard.

This insightful critique came to mind as I reflected on why whites could so outspokenly make their pleasure in this film heard and the many black viewers express discontent, raising critical questions about how the film was made, is seen, and is talked about, who have not named their displearure publicly. Too many reviewers and interviewers assume not only that there is no need to raise pressing critical questions about Livingston’s film, but act as though she somehow did this marginalized black gay subculture a favor by bringing their experience to a wider public. Such a stance obscures the substantial rewards she has received for this work. Since so many of the black gay men in the film express the desire to be big stars, it is easy to place Livingston in the role of benefactor, offering these “poor black souls! a way to realize their dreams. But it is this current trend in producing colorful ethnicity for the white consumer appetite that makes it possible for blackness to be commodified in unprecedented ways, and for whites to appropriate black culture without interrogating whiteness or showing concern for the displeasure of blacks. Just as white cultural imperialism informed and affirmed the adventurous journeys of colonizing whites into the countries and cultures of “dark others”, it allows white audiences to applaud representations of black culture, if they are satisfied with the images and habits of being represented.

Watching the film with a black woman friend, we were disturbed by the extent to which white folks around us were “entertained” and “pleasured” by scenes we viewed as sad and at times tragic. Often individuals laughed at personal testimony about hardship, pain, loneliness. Several times I yelled out in the dark: “What is so funny about this scene? Why are you laughing?” The laughter was never innocent. Instead it undermined the seriousness of the film, keeping it always on the level of spectacle. And much of the film helped make this possible. Moments of pain and sadness were quickly covered up by dramatic scenes from drag balls, as though there were two competing cinematic narratives, one displaying the pageantry of the drag ball and the other reflecting on the lives of participants and value of the fantasy. This second narrative was literally hard to hear because the laughter often drowned it out, just as the sustained focus on elaborate displays at balls diffused the power of the more serious narrative. Any audience hoping to be entertained would not be as interested in the true life stories and testimonies narrated. Much of that individual testimony makes it appear that the characters are estranged from any community beyond themselves. Families, friends, etc. are not shown, which adds to the representation of these black gay men as cut off, living on the edge.

It is useful to compare the portraits of their lives in Paris is Burning with those depicted in Marlon Riggs’ compelling film Tongues Untied. At no point in Livingston’s film are the men asked to speak about their connections to a world of family and community beyond the drag ball. The cinematic narrative makes the ball center of their lives. And yet who determines this? Is this the way the black men view their reality or is this the reality Livingston constructs? Certainly the degree to which black men in this gay subculture are portrayed as cut off from a “real” world heightens the emphasis on fantasy, and indeed gives Paris is burning its tragic edge. That tragedy is made explicit when we are told that the fair-skinned Venus has been murdered, and yet there is no mourning of him/her in the film, no intense focus on the sadness of this murder. Having served the purpose of “spectacle” the film abandons him/her. The audience does not see Venus after the murder. There are no scenes of grief. To put it crassly, her dying is upstaged by spectacle. Death is not entertaining.

For those of us who did not come to this film as voyeurs of black gay subculture, it is Dorian Carey’s moving testimony throughout the film that makes Paris is Burning a memorable experience. Cary is both historian and cultural critic in the film. He explains how the balls enabled marginalized black gay queens to empower both participants and audience. It is Carey who talks about the significance of the “star” in the life of gay black men who are queens. In a manner similar to critic Richar Dyer in his work Heavenly Bodies, Carey tells viewers that the desire for stardom is an expression of the longing to realize the dream of autonomous stellar individualism. Reminding readers that the idea of the individual continues to be a major image of what it means to live in a democratic world, Dyer writes:

Capitalism justifies itself on the basis of freedom (separateness) of anyone to make money, sell their labour how they will, to be able to express opinions and get them heard (regardless of wealth and social position). The openness of society is assumed by the way that we are addressed as individuals -as consumers (each freely choosing to buy, or watch, what we want), as legal subjects (equally responsible before the law), as political subjects (able to make up our minds who is to run society). Thus even while the notion of the individual is assailed on all sides, it is a necessary fiction for the reproduction of the kind of society we live in... Stars articulate these ideas of personhood.

This is precisely the notion of stardom Carey articulates. He emphasizes the way consumer capitalism undermines the subversive power of the drag balls, subordinating ritual to spectacle, removing the will to display unique imaginative costumes an the purchased image. Carey speaks profoundly about the redemptive power of the imagination in black life, that drag balls were traditionally a place wher the aesthetics of the image in relation to black gay life could be explored with complexity and grace.

Carey extols the significance of fantasy even as he critiques the use of fantasy to escape reality. Analyzing the place of fantasy in black gay subculture, he links that experience to the longing for stardom that is so pervasive in this society. Refusing to allow the “queen” to be Othered, he conveys the message that in all of us resides that longing to transcend the boundaries of self, to be glorified. Speaking about the importance of drag queens in a recent interview in Afterimage, Marlon Riggs suggests that the queen personifies the longing everyone has for love and recognition. Seeing in drag queens “a desire, a very visceral need to be loved, as well as a sense of the abject loneliness of life where nobody loves you”, Riggs contends “this image is real for anybody who has been in the bottom spot where they’ve been rejected by everybody and loved by nobody”. Echoing Carey, Riggs declares: “What’s real for them is the realization that you have to learn to love yourself”. Carey stresses that one can only learn to love the self when one breaks through illusion and faces reality, not by escaping into fantasy. Emphasizing that the point is not to give us fantasy but to recognize its limitations, he acknowledges that one must distinguish the place of fantasy in ritualized play from the use of fantasy as a means of escape. Unlike Pepper Labeija who constructs a mythic world to inhabit, making this his private reality, Carey encourages using the imagination creatively to enhance one’s capacity to live more fully in a world beyond fantasy.

Despite the profound impact he makes, what Riggs would call “a visual icon of the drag queen with a very dignified humanity”, Carey’s message, if often muted, is overshadowed by spectacle. It is hard for viewers to really hear this message. By critiquing absorption in fantasy and naming the myriad ways pain and suffering inform any process of self-actualization, Carey’s message mediates between the viewer who longs to voyeruristicly escape into the film, to vicariously inhabit that lived space on the edge, by exposing the sham, by challenging all of us to confront reality. James Baldwin makes the point in The Fire Next Time that “people who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are”. Without being sentimental about suffering, Dorian Carey urges all of us to break through denial, through the longing for an illusory star identity, so that we can confront and accept ourselves as we really are -only then can fantasy, ritual, be a site of seduction, passion, and play where the self is truly recognized, loved, and never abandoned or betrayed.

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