#scant mentions of racism

[mastermindmp3]

If you just want the song analysis, skip to the next banner. However, I do think the context added by my rambling is at least interesting.

Hey, so remember how yesterday, I opened my analysis post with a comment about how I try to analyze the songs without analyzing Taylor Swift's life, because I feel it's limiting to my ability to understand the song. It's not a form of analysis I'm very good at either, frankly.

I feel like that comment goes especially so for But Daddy I Love Him. Because I was certainly there for the rat-filled fortnight, as in, he literally played guitar for Phoebe Bridgers at my show. And there's a lot I could say that has already been said, more eloquently and by people far more qualified.

I'm a biology student, not a sociologist. But as an Indigenous woman, there is a level of hurt that comes from the people we admire tolerating racism within their spaces, and how that can often play into revealing a pattern of behavior. On the opposite hand, I can see the annoyance (and indignation) that she was held more accountable for his actions than he was. Indeed, I believe that this is what the line "[My good name] is mine alone to disgrace" refers to. On the other, other hand, the whole situation leaves a powdery, bad taste in my mouth.

And now to never talk about that again, because I don't feel qualified to give you a conclusion on it. I'm still listening to the music, after all. The rest of my analysis will be from the perspective of the song as a story, not as diary, my preferred modus operandi.

I wanted to say all that as set up in: I didn't know what to think about this song. I was unsure what angle I wanted to talk about this song from, because divorcing it from the backlash was hard. She literally says "Scandal does funny things to pride," and we'll talk about that later.

Initially, I thought about covering against the grain readings. Recontextualizing the song completely, giving it a new meaning. I thought about maybe covering the history of forbidden romance as a genre (and its many evolutions, from ironically, interracial love stories to queer romance.) I even thought about talking about the Little Mermaid, tying the song into one of the pieces of iconic fiction, and tying that back into the idea of forbidden romance as a queer reading of straight fiction (Howard Ashman, the lead lyricist for Disney, ostensibly the heart of the Disney Renaissance, was a gay man whose partner accepted his Oscar after he had passed due to AIDs.)

And... none of that worked. There are like, five versions of this post in my google docs that will never see the light of day.

Sitting in standstill traffic trying to leave last night's Hozier concert, I finally came to a conclusion. Well, I didn't. Jean, who's previously helped me on both Little Tortured Poet's Department and My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys, made a comment that "Without the rest of the album, [But Daddy I Love Him] reads like any 2003 emo song about a sleazy bassist. Sure, we know better, but the singer doesn't."

And that got me thinking: TTPD is an album that is very much in conversation with itself, and Taylor's discography as a whole. I said, "How much does not knowing that wider context change the song?" That's an angle to analyze, baby!

alternative title that wouldn't leave my mind: Dark AU!Love Story, don't like don't read

But Daddy I Love Him is, out of the whole album, the song that benefits from context the most. It is petulant, petty, the speaker digging in her heels on the subject of true love. Indeed, Scandal does funny things to pride. I jokingly referred to it as "Dark Love Story," but the songs are foils ( and likely intentionally, since both songs have to the singer begging "Daddy" to let her have her lover. It also makes sense to foil one of her most popular songs, so that general audiences are likely to make the connection. )

We, the audience, know that the Speaker's romantic interest isn't good for her. We don't like him, because likely, we've already listened to the previous songs on the tracklist, and he's already clearly hurt the singer. The prelude (in the CD and Vinyl booklets) refers to the album as one story, which helps set up this framework in the listener's mind.

However, even in the context of the song, there are scant hints of this. The Speaker, with her rose colored glasses firmly on, still refers to her lover as "crazy."

There's also an interesting tie to her older works, known affectionately on Reddit as Car Lore in the use of cars as metaphor for romance. To quote the seminal essay by u/Alex_Demote, "But for Taylor, being in a car is often the same thing as being in a relationship."

Here, the speaker's lover "[floors] it through the fences" at her request and they only hear "screeching tires and true love" His actions are incredibly dangerous. Even if she's told him to slam through the fence, anyone who actually loves her would say no. A joy ride isn't worth risking your life.

By literal laws of physics, screeching tires are tires that aren't moving. Whether the speaker knows it or not, this romance won't go anywhere, or if it does... well.

I'm an Aston Martin that you steered straight into the ditch (imgonnagetyouback) / Loving him is like driving a new Maserati down a dead-end street (Red) / You were driving the getaway car, we were flying but we’d never get far (Getaway Car)

Though, do we know it's a car? Obviously, this is Car Lore I'm applying here, but our only other references to a land vehicle (aside from the Aston Martin, which is The Speaker) are in So High School, which has it's own parallels to But Daddy I Love Him, see below, and in imgonnagetyouback:

Whether I'm gonna be your wife or / Gonna smash up your bike, I haven't decided yet

And here comes my main point: Driving a car through a fence is reckless, yes, but not likely to be fatal. A bike? A bike? It's only with the context of the rest of the album that the danger our speaker was in comes into clear view. In the song itself, the Speaker only knows he's a bit of a troublemaker, but doesn't mind. She is either blind to the truth of the matter, or looking past it. After all, my boy only breaks his favorite toys. She'd rather burn her whole life down.

But, at the end of the song, her parents "came around" and while the "wine moms are still holding out," the Speaker seems quite happy to be "his lady." Time does give some perspective, but this song doesn't: though the final chorus could be reframed as about a new lover (as she says "Fuck 'em, it's over,") it still reads like everything worked out with her "wild boy."

Like I said on Down Bad, the songs on TTPD are slices of time. This song is the Speaker in a state of blind love, a poisoned honeymoon phase, and without the rest of the album of hindsight, the song just reads... Mean. The teenage prank of "I'm having his baby," refusing to "come to [her] senses," and even referring to herself as "not growing up at all," slamming through fences that someone else will have to fix. It's the exact kind of pettiness that a sixteen year old might pull.

Hey, speaking of sixteen: So High School. If But Daddy I Love Him is a dark take on forbidden love, So High School is its antidote, is that quintessential Boy Meets Girl, and plays deeply into high school cliches. It's also the only other mention of a land vehicle, to my knowledge. The speaker's infatuated with how her lover, "Got [her] car door, isn't that sweet?"

The other, very teenager-y love song on the record is so opposite. It's cheerful, and most importantly, the singer realizes it too. So High School serves to further contextualize But Daddy I Love Him as the speaker's attempt at a rebellious stage, and the rest of the album is her showing how it all crashed and burned.

Conclusion? Her daddy might love him, but he does NOT have land vehicle proficiency. And context can give far more perspective than time ever could.

also hey WDYM GET BACK HERE—

[dailyadventureprompts]

Hi! I really like your other takes on Underdark races, and wanted to ask if you had any thoughts on improving grimlocks? Beyond the permanent blindness they have and the whole being humans who adapted to the underdark, there doesn't seem to be a whole lot else done with them.

Monsters Reimagined: Grimlocks

Would it surprise anyone to learn that a d-list d&d monster has It's roots in 1800s ideas about eugenics and bad adaptations of genre fiction? No? Then you've been paying attention, top marks.

Asker is absolutely right in their assessment that there's not really much to grimlocks. They're one of many "hostile tribal primitives" that have filled out the monster roster ever since the original developers lifted them en mass from the pulp adventure stories they grew up reading.

A common theme among these pulp works and the early scifi that inspired it was devolution, the idea that a people could degrade from greatness back into an animistic nature. The most well known pop culture example would be HP lovecraft's deep ones, where the author's fears of race mixing manifest as monsters that literally push humanity back down the evolutionary ladder to the stage of fish.

There's plenty of different ways to explain the origin of this writing trend, but I like to chalk it up to an anxiety resulting from the widespread acceptance of Darwin's theory of evolution by a society that believed wholeheartedly in scientific racism. If intelligence (read: whiteness) wasn't just a god given right but was infact inheritable, then it could also be disinherited, bred out of a population whether by on purpose or by accident. This made it so important to practice good breeding (read: eugenics), to preserve the pure stock from falling to degeneracy (read: miscegenation) and introducing undesirable traits into the genepool.

We can see fear this with grimlocks, humanoids who were inherently lessened by their "adaptation" to life underground, losing their intelligence and eyesight and descending into a state of barbarism. Given that this is one of the few d&d monsters that mention evolution at all, we can trace this feature to their likely inspiration: The morlocks in H.G. Wells' Time machine, published a scant 36 years after Darwin published The Origin of Species.

I'm not well read enough to know whether Wells pioneered the idea of subhuman descendants, but I can say that most of his imitators missed the point of his writing: Wells saw in his day an increasingly indolent upper class inflicting brutal and dehumanizing labour conditions on the poor to support their own carefree lifestyle. He satirized this in his book by showing that while the descendants of the rich had devolved into beautiful, useless, idiots, the descendants of the workers devolved into subterranean ape-things who maintained the machinery that allowed the eden like existence of the rich while farming them for meat. Say what you will about Wells' race politics (Neither degenerate fop or inbred ape can withstand the smarts and strength of the enlightened colonial Englishman) but his writing was specifically class continuous, and the brutality of the morlocks was a direct result of the exploitation of working people in his own day and age.

When the morlocks were adapted into the grimlocks , the d&d writers kept their canibalistic streak but specifically removed their class based origins as well as their mechanical knowhow. This is a near identical process to what happened with a creature the worlocks helped inspire: Tolkien's orcs, which were likewise turned from a commentary on the brutality of the industrial age into warlike primitives. It's a bit of a trend.

If you wanted to "fix" the grimlocks I'd go one of two ways:

If you want to engage with themes of primality, make them legit underdark dwelling primates/australopithecus type of creatures, just figuring out tool use and language. Make the rumours of them being descended from cave-exploring humanoids a common myth made up by surface dwellers.

If you want to get spicy about it though, give them back their mechanical aptitude and maybe mix in a few more dashes of pulp "lost civilization" ancient aliens nonsense. Have them dwell in great mechanical complexes beneath the earth, worker drones who've long outlived the creatures that enslaved them and scribed mechanical knowledge into their very being. Originally denied understanding of the machines they toiled to build, work, and maintain, the grimlocks jealously guard the science they've spent generations reverse engineering, giving them the reputation of being violently territorial for those underdark travelers who venture too close to the megastructures they inhabit.

Artsource

[fuckit-ficit]

Wildflowers I: A Ball at Hawthorn Hall

Wildflowers is a one-shot series (?) featuring Dutch van der Linde and his lost beloved, Annabelle.

"A Ball at Hawthorn Hall"

In which Dutch crashes a soiree with avaricious intent and encounters an unusual heiress. The two soon find themselves in a potentially compromising position.

******

Genres: romance (f/m), adventure

Rating: pg-13

Wordcount: ~1800

Content Warnings: gun mention, sexual references. Setting is the immediately post-war south, no overt violence or racism but still.

Cover image credit to queerhaw

******

Flecks of gold light cast by gas lamps and candles shimmered on the mirror-dark surface of the decorative pond. A dark-haired man re-situated his top hat before striding forth through the glowing doorway into the stately manor house. Inside, elegantly dressed guests were replete, their expensive perfumes not quite sufficient to disguise the smell of bodies packed into rooms built for opulence rather than airflow. Before the man took ten steps, he was politely accosted by a footman who held out his arm.

               “Sir, if I may take your coat and your name?” The attendant smiled blandly, and the newcomer returned it with a charming grin. He shrugged off his greatcoat and placed it atop the extended arm.

               “Why thank you, sir, my coat you may have but I think I’ll keep my name, as I’m fond of it.” And before the footman could answer, he continued. “It’s Smith, but you won’t find it on the guest register. I’m here on behalf of my employer, one Dr. Patton.” The footman frowned and hesitated, seemingly perusing the list in his mind. Smith took a moment to be impressed with his diligence and memory, and to resolve not to arouse this particular servant’s suspicion.

               “Dr. Patton, yes, from Annesburg, if I recall. He gave no indication that he would be attending tonight, nor that he would send a… colleague in his stead.” The footman said the word as if it pained him a bit, and Smith cursed, not for the first time, the common mannerisms that all his reading and acting could never quite smooth out.

               “Oh no, he much prefers spontaneity, Dr. van Doorne could tell you as much.” Smith replied, chuckling as if the two men had shared a joke. “I hate to trouble him on such a festive and busy night, but I’m certain Dr. van Doorne would vouch for me.” Smith looked at the footman guilelessly. The servant barely spared a thought before replying.

               “No, no. the Doctor need not be bothered with such things. Sign the guestbook, of course, and if you have a letter for the Doctor, any manservant will ensure it’s delivered to him at the earliest convenience.” ‘Any servant other than me’ went unsaid. Smith smiled brightly.

               “Good man. I thank you for your hospitality, and I wish you luck with the rest of the Doctor’s esteemed guests.” He clapped the footman on the shoulder and just then. a gaggle of men entered the foyer, talking loudly amongst themselves. The servant’s gaze slid off Smith like water off a duck’s wing. Smith turned and took in the foyer; the sweeping staircases on either side, the crystalline chandelier above him, the precious paintings and intricate molding lining the walls. He smiled, a warm flush of anticipation sweeping through him.

***

There was a slight swishing sound from well-oiled hinges and the warm light of the hallway washed the room. A figure was silhouetted in the door for just a breath before they stepped inside and closed the door behind. Smith had turned immediately, trying to the tabletop where his tools lay, and he affected a relaxed posture. As the figure stepped toward him, into the scant ring of light offered by Smith’s hand lantern, he could see it was a young woman. Chestnut curls were barely contained in an approximation of a fashionable coiffure; the few wildflowers placed at random throughout gave the sense that the young woman was deliberate in her abandonment of the usual sleek pompadour.

               “Good evening, sir.” The woman offered with a slight inquisitive tilt of her head. Her eyes flicked to the gun at his hip, revealed when his jacket was rumpled by his efforts, and then back to his own. He couldn’t see their color in the dim gas light, but he couldn’t miss the sharp glint in them. More notable, even, was her insistence on meeting his gaze, with no thought for the deference doubtless demanded by her upbringing.

               “And to you, ma’am.” He returned automatically.

               “What reason do I have, sir, not to scream for help. I really ought to report that there is an armed stranger in my dressing room.” Her gaze was cool on his, and her unsual tolerance for his presence did not seem to equate naivete to the precarious nature of their interaction.

               “What, Miss Annabelle, if I name you rightly, and if I may be so bold…” he paused, making sure she was hanging on his words. “may I offer you for your silence?” He’d spotted a curiosity in her, barely hidden beneath her polished façade, and he knew he’d been right when she willingly bit the bait he’d laid before her.  

               “Your name will suffice, I expect.”

               “A trifle. Are you certain you don’t want to ask for a little more?” He stepped a bit closer, holding her gaze and fully obscuring the table behind him. She smiled at him for the first time, a puckish tilt of her painted mouth which accompanied a quick perusal of his figure and finery.  

               “There’s much in a name. A past, a present, perhaps a future” She met his eyes once again “if you’re clever.”

               “What reason do I have not to give you a false name? After all, I have been caught in a truly unflattering position tonight.” He challenged, deliberately insouciant. She gave him a different smile then, a close-mouthed, subdued thing. A secret held there on her lips.

               “I’ll know.” She said. Dutch considered her for a half-moment. Never one to waste time on excessive second-guessing when time was of the essence, Dutch acquiesced.

               “It’s Van der Linde. Dutch, to my Friends.” He stated. In a polite fashion utterly unsuited to the circumstsances, Annabelle dipped into a curtsy.

               “Thank you for your honesty, Sir.” She acknowledged with a graceful dip of her head. “Now, a final bargain.” Annabelle rose and waited for him to agree, which he did with a nod. “Leave the ruby set, it is a favorite of mine, take whatever else you can hold in one hand, and I’ll show you a plausible egress.” She looked at his right hand (which had held the pick before he palmed it away into his sleeve), seeming to contemplate what he could hold there. Slightly wary, but seeing no other option nearly as appealing, Dutch turned to the jewelry case behind him and grabbed a handful of elegantly wrought jewelry, tucking it into one of several small silk purses he’d brought for precisely that purpose. Having done so, he turned back to his erstwhile companion.

               “Lead the way, Madame” He instructed, plucking his glossy top hat from where he’d discarded it and donning it once again. To Dutch’s surprise, Annabelle reached out and grasped his hand in her own. He wondered at the softness of it, the luxuriant lifestyle apparent in her well-maintained nails and unscarred skin. Still, Dutch could feel roughness across her palm, where reins would rest. The father raised and sold horses, that had been obvious in the information he’d meticulously gathered in preparation for this night. And the daughter rode, it seemed.

               The pair emerged into the well-lit hallway, and they were nearing the door at the far end of the hall, which Annabelle had explained led to the servant’s quarters, as well as their designated door.  But before they could disappear into the darkness of the passage, several voices rose from around the corner. Leaping into action, Annabelle dragged Dutch into a small alcove, pressing him against the wall in what could hardly be called a kiss.  

               “Miss Annabelle?” It was a maid, perhaps a few years older than her mistress, with sparkling brown eyes and a slightly untidy uniform. Annabelle pulled away from Dutch to look at the interloper. She had adopted a loose posture and hazy gaze, and Dutch would’ve thought her truly debauched if he hadn’t witnessed the unprompted change.

               “Oh, hello Rose. Don’t worry about me. You go along now.” She assured the servant girl with an unrefined flap of her hand. Dutch angled his face, remaining in the shadows as best he could. Rose smiled conspiratorially.

“Oh I will, I shan’t get between you and your beau.” The last word was drawled pointedly. Annabelle blushed, and Dutch found himself impressed at her ability to do so on command. Or perhaps their discovery was more nerve-wracking than she let on.

“Your mother sent me to find you, something about a Mr. Gray.” She paused for dramatic effect, still eyeing the couple. “But I reckon I’ll tell her I saw you heading for the parlor. That should keep her busy.”

               “You’re a treasure.” Annabelle replied sheepishly. Rose giggled.

               “You just mind you keep your treasures about you, Miss Annabelle.” The older girl teased bawdily. Annabelle blushed deeper, and this time Dutch could feel the heat of her flushed cheeks by their sheer closeness. Rose had no idea how apt her warning was.

               “Rose!” Annabelle scolded, but the maid just laughed, turning on her heel and heading back the way she came. Schooling her features, Annabelle turned back to Dutch, who spoke up.  

               “Forgive my haste but I’ve no desire to wait until someone else comes along and discovers us.” He urged, and the two set off once a again, this time reaching the servant entrance unhindered. Dutch whistled sharply into the night and turned to survey his companion. Annabelle’s gaze was searching, disarming, and she was ethereally beautiful in the half-light. The Count emerged from the grove by the lake where he’d been grazing, and his pale coat glinted under the near-full moon. Dutch greeted the horse with a pat on the neck and made to mount up, but Annabelle stilled him with a gentle hand on his arm.

               “Wait,” she interrupted “allow me to give you a token.” She plucked a delicate snowdrop from where it was stowed behind her ear and retrieved a straight pin from somewhere else in her elaborate updo. She deftly pinned the blossom to his fine woolen jacket, bending close to make out her task in the darkness. As she did, she gave a small gasp, and Dutch watched a single drop of blood sink into the fabric where she’d pricked her finger. Too soon, she stepped back and gave her handiwork a light tap, just over Dutch’s heart.

               “You pay me a dear compliment, Miss Annabelle.” Dutch remarked, low and rumbling. Holding her gaze, he grasped her right hand and bent to kiss it chastely. But soon enough the moment was broken by the sound of kitchen clamor floating from the open windows, and Dutch pulled away. He hoisted himself into the saddle and caught her gaze one last time.

               “Don’t be a stranger, Mister van der Linde.” Annabelle instructed. Dutch granted her an enigmatic smile and turned away, spurring The Count into a canter. He rounded the house towards the broad road out front, hiding him from view. The last Annabelle knew of him then was the steady rhythm of hooves on packed red earth.

[aleelewisharlot]

So I watched wuthering heights (2011) and I have a lot of thoughts.

First this movie/adaption is shot entirely from Heathcliff's pov. Many of the shots of the camera are his eyes and what he sees. What he doesn't see, the audience doesn't either. What he doesn't know, you don't know. I found this change interesting in many ways. Another change is that this movie focuses heavily on Heathcliff and Cathy as children and their relationship. It is interesting to see this entirely from his prospective. We see a lot of Heathcliff's memories of this time when both he and Cathy are adults. The shots of adult Cathy and child Cathy are often interposed between each other. The violence and racism is also not hidden and very much in your face. There are racial slurs used. The reason for Hindley's and Heathcliff's disastrous relationship is that Hindley is racist and doesn't see Heathcliff as his brother because of the color of his skin.

It is faithful in some ways. It has my favorite line of the movie! Isabella telling Heathcliff to go lie on Cathy's grave like the dog he is! It's always cut :(. The film doesn't go into the second generation and doesn't even include Heathcliff's death which I found odd. It ends with him being confirmed as the owner of Wuthering Heights and then he walks out. Cathy jr. is never mentioned but Hareton is there.

Also this movie goes heavily into the gothic imagery and genre. There are a lot of shots with animal death. Heathcliff kills a lamb when Hareton tells him he isn't allowed to speak to Cathy anymore. He snaps a rabbit's neck when he sees Hindley leave and he goes to confront Cathy. It was very interesting as ways to depict his inner turmoil and emotions. I loved it. There is also a thing with blood and desire in this movie. I don't know what really to say about it but I think it fit the film well. Also, Heathcliff has sex with Cathy's dead body which no one mentions when talking about this film. I think it is an interesting idea and it went well with the rest of the imagery and genre of this film.

The one thing I really didn't like that Cathy's character was kind of sanitized. This might be because it is from his perspective so he sees her in a certain light. But she doesn't even really have her temper in this film. The two actresses who portray her do a good job and I don't fault them.

Also this is a film you have to pay a lot of attention to. It does not spoon feed you the story and honestly I would be interested in hearing from people who watched this movie without knowing anything about the story or the book. It is very scant in terms of dialogue and is a movie more with a look and a feel than necessarily a plot. I can see why people don't like this movie. Personally, it definitely up there as one of the better and most interesting adaptations of the book. The 1970 film is still my favorite but there are a lot of echoes from that adaptation in this one so I can see why I like it.

[sburbian-sage]

you’ve BEEN SPEWING A LOT OF NONSENSE, BUT THE THING i actually FIND most OFFENSIVE IS HOW BADLY YOU UNDERSTAND OUR TIMELINE, TO THE POINT OF NOT EVEN UNDERSTANDING THAT WE’VE NOT ACTUALLY TOLD YOU OUR NATIVE CLASSPECTS. so LET ME CORRECT THAT FOR YOU SINCE YOU’RE TOO UNOBSERVANT TO PICK UP ON THE IMPLICATIONS WHEN i say THINGS LIKE “EACH [SESSION] SINCE”.

session 1: this SESSION WAS JUST US. i was THE bard OF time, HE WAS THE prince OF space.

session 2: he CONTACTED YOU FOR THE FIRST TIME. this WAS ABOUT A YEAR AGO. i was THE witch OF hope, HE WAS THE mage OF rage. he TURNED EVERYONE AGAINST ME HALFWAY THROUGH THE SESSION, THANKS TO YOUR MEDDLING.

session 3: i was THE scout OF void, HE WAS THE guide OF light. i’m basically NOT ABLE TO DO ANYTHING, AS HE CORRUPTS OUR COPLAYERS WITH NONSENSE ARGUMENTS ABOUT RACISM AND THE “VALUE OF DESTRUCTION” AND FALSE EQUIVALENCIES WITH DERSE DREAMERS AND SO ON, BEFORE i have THE CHANCE TO EVEN SPEAK WITH THEM.

session 4: i was THE page OF mind, HE WAS THE knight OF heart. again, i’m unlucky, HE’S AWAKE AND i’m asleep UPON SESSION ENTRY, AND HE TURNS THEM AGAINST ME BEFORE i can DO ANYTHING.

session 5: i finally FIND YOU, AND CONTACT YOU. the SESSION HAS JUST STARTED. i’m the ward OF life, AND HE IS THE heir OF doom. i’m sure THAT DESPITE HIS WORDS, HE’LL CUT ME OUT OF THE GAME AGAIN. i’ve had A LITTLE MORE LUCK TALKING TO MY COPLAYERS, BUT WHO KNOWS HOW LONG that’s GOING TO LAST.

anyway, i just WANT TO TAKE A MOMENT TO POINT OUT HOW UNFAIR YOU’RE BEING TO ME. you DISMISSED FAMILIAR THEORY OUT OF HAND, UNTIL SOMEONE ELSE SPOON-FED IT TO YOU, BECAUSE YOU’RE BIASED AGAINST ME. don’t YOU SEE WHAT HE’S DONE? you’ve BARELY SPOKEN WITH ME, AND YET YOU THINK i’m crazy.

and ON THE TOPIC OF FAMILIAR THEORY… you SEE NOW, HOW i was RIGHT? he *was* MY FAMILIAR. now, YOU MAY SAY THAT “TAMING” HIM WAS THE WRONG WAY TO LOOK AT IT, BUT DON’T YOU SEE HOW THINGS GO WHEN HE’S UNCHECKED? he ADMITS THAT HE DOES THE SAME THINGS TO ME, RELEGATING ME TO JUST OUR OWN LAND, AND MAKING EVERYONE FEAR AND HATE ME! mercy WAS NEVER AN OPTION, IT WAS ALWAYS GOING TO BE ABOUT WHO STRIKES FIRST, AND HARDEST.

on THAT NOTE, SADLY, SLAUGHTERING HIS DREAMSELF ISN’T AN OPTION. my EVENTUAL PREDOMINATION IS NEARLY ASSURED ANYWAY, AND IF THE FEW SCANT STORIES ON THE NETWORK ARE TO BE BELIEVED, A FORCED EARLY VICTORY WOULD STUNT MY GROWTH PERMANENTLY. when i FINALLY SUBSUME HIM, IT WILL BE THE PROPER WAY, AND WHEN i finally FIND A WAY TO ESCAPE THIS GAME, MY BODY WILL NOT BE RUINED, AND i will ACHIEVE MY GLORIOUS ADULT FORM. thankfully, GOD TIERING HAS CAUSED NO PROBLEMS. which IS ODD, AS I’VE HEARD TELL THAT IT WAS INDEED SUPPOSED TO TRIGGER THE SUBSUMPTION, OR AT LEAST HAS FOR OTHER CHERUBS.

…finally, i hesitated TO BRING THIS UP, BUT SINCE YOU MENTIONED KNITTING AND HE didn’t BRING IT UP, i think HE MAY HAVE SOMETHING TO HIDE. so i’m going TO SAY IT.

jujus. we HAVE THEM. i’ve a BALL OF YARN, DYED THE SAME BRIGHT GREEN AS MY BLOOD. he HAS A MATCHING ONE IN THE RED OF HIS OWN, THOUGH i’ve never SEEN IT. it IS MY UNDERSTANDING THAT THEY DO SOMETHING SPECIAL WHEN UNITED, BUT OF COURSE NEITHER OF US WOULD EVER TRUST THE OTHER WITH OUR OWN.

i am CURIOUS. did YOU GUESS SOMEHOW? did HE TELL YOU PRIVATELY ABOUT THEM? it SEEMS TOO SUSPICIOUS A COINCIDENCE THAT YOU BROUGHT UP KNITTING IF YOU DIDN’T KNOW.

Okay okay, back up. I'm about to live up to my title and arbitrate this drama with a healthy degree of suspicion towards all parties involved.

First thing's first, curb your paranoia. The only avenue in which I've communicated with your brother was in the public forum of these anonymous asks. I barely get private messages, even though I leave those channels open. The knitting thing was just me being a smarmy dismissive asshole (I've never denied those allegations), and unless you think he used his Rage powers to brainwash me in a public anonymous message, there's another reason for why I seem to predisposed against you. And it's because you're acting like a deranged nutjob.

I dismissed Familiar Theory out of hand when you brought it up, and accepted it when someone else brought it up, because the second person explained what it was, whereas you just namedropped it. You'll note that I'm recalcitrant about rumors and information I have yet to verify, to the point where even now you'll notice I only "accepted" Familiar Theory insofar as it sounds a lot like a parapsychological coping mechanism of sorts. Similarly, you'll note that I've been more hostile to you than to your brother, because his messages have been pretty thoughtful and considerate IMO (he cares more about your wellbeing than you seem to care about his), while you've been rantposting at me. I'm not even doing the "all caps is always screaming" misconception, I've been around the block when it comes to typing quirks, you're just spitting outright venom at me and everyone involved. Call me shallow for it, but I will in fact be negatively inclined towards people who act like assholes in my inbox, and will be more positively inclined towards people who are not. Another thing I very much do not appreciate, in fact, is Player Killers, and you seem like one in the making, sis. Between noting that you "sadly" can't kill him in his sleep because it would negatively affect you, and how your ultimate goal seems to be the outright destruction of his personality. When, keep in mind, he specifically messaged me asking for a way to help make sure you don't get completely dominated like what you want to do to him.

I wouldn't trust you as far as I could throw you, my Mangrit has never been all that impressive, but I'll humor you and say "I believe you when you say that your brother is trying to isolate you from all of the coplayers in your session". You need to provide me with an argument for why this is even a bad thing. All of your arguments thus far has been "he's evil" when you seem like the wingnut here, and "you're so foolish with your compassion and anti-racism", which, pardonne-moi for not being eager to gormlessly swallow that. I will admit, the thought did cross my mind that he could be presenting a false "softboi in need of aid" persona, and you're telling the truth and just so happen to be objectively terrible at talking to people in general. But you understand that even in this framework where your brother IS evil, the dynamic goes from "asshole sister attempts to kill innocent brother" to "sister and brother are both assholes trying to kill each other", right? Even if I accept what you're saying is true, the only thing that changes is that the most evil iteration of your brother is the same as you. And I've never been a fan of "the morality of an action is determined by who performs the action".

Hell, I'll even humor you on the other point. He's destructive and evil by nature, you're creative and benevolent by nature. My eyes beg to differ, but I do have an anecdote to share about the other species who play SBURB. Consider it a bit of an interracial get-to-know-each-other activity. Human nature has been a philosophical topic so thoroughly discussed that not even Prototype Towers could contain all the debates held about it. In the society I came from, the ruling classes believed that human nature was, more or less, evil, and they needed to humor certain aspects while stamping out others. Expand territory outwards, slaughter and subjugate everyone in the way, it's a genetic tendency. Accumulate infinite resources, even as you exploit man and the planet to do so, even as the resources lose all meaning and they keep pooling into smaller and smaller hands. You can never change society for the better, all claims to compassion are false, the cries of those who just want to put the people on bottom up top, so we should let kings and capitalists rule because they're honest in their cruelty. All those people are dead now. The survivors, SBURB players, succeed because they know how to grow the fuck up, introspect, and work together with other coplayers as equals to make everyone better versions of themselves, even as they bleed and die in pursuit of this goal. The Hemospectrum Trolls subscribe to, I've been told, is also as natural as breathing and dying. The highbloods, with their cool-shaded blood, psionic fortitude, physical strength, and long lives, have their superiority flowing through their veins, the short-lived shitbloods just need to know their place. But as it turns out, psionic powers are fucking awesome, lifespan doesn't mean anything anymore, and the ones who try to enforce a hemo-supremacist hierarchy on the session are doomed to failure, either because it doesn't stick, or because they try to force it and get killed in self-defense. Your conceptions and moral justifications are based in biology and cultural mythos, I assume? You'd think a replayer with five sessions tucked into her belt would have enough maturity to recognize arbitraity when it's elbow-dropping her off of a rooftop, but stranger things have happened. If you're so mentally submissive as to uncritically accept all of that as truth, then maybe you're not the one who's victory is "eventual". Food for thought.

But to cut all the crap short, and do away with all the hostility, I don't actually think you being erased, socially or metaphysically, is a good thing. Your brother doesn't either, which is why he reached out last time. I normally wouldn't waste my breath trying to make appeals towards potential PKers who have already written off other's right to live, but you seem pretty impotent from where I'm standing. By your own admission, you've been on a 3-4 year losing streak in terms of "getting people to like you". And I will admit, for all I know your brother could be lying about his intentions. I have two stories in front of me who don't seem to outwardly contradict one another, outside of who is framed as the villain in each, and I don't have enough information to make an objective arbitration. What I do know is that your brother's narrative is that he doesn't want you dead and buried, while in both of your narratives, you want the same to him. I would advise "apologize and make friendly with him" in either case, whether because you're in the wrong or because you're losing and should pragmatically accept whatever scraps of mercy you can afford. Putting aside the overtly menacing crazyspeak about "eventual predomination", "taming", and the other will to power shit is also advisable, both in terms of mutual understanding with your brother and also not immediately alienating anybody you talk to, because it instinctively sets off red flags for everybody who isn't you, it seems. I pegged your brother as the socially awkward, doesn't know how to talk to people sort, but I unfortunately think you're much the same. I gave him confidence and told him to work on his people skills, as you know, so maybe take the same advice. At the very least, fake it until you make it.

[greatwyrmgold]

Your tags made me curious; what was it you misread in RWBY Volume 1, that 2 proved wrong, that soured your feelings on the show? I'm pretty neutral on it myself, but interested to know more.

TL;DR: I assumed it was a character-focused series more than an action series.

This sounds dumb, but my experience with RWBY went like this:

Someone showed up to a college club Halloween party in Ruby cosplay and showed the Red trailer so that literally anyone would know who she dressed up as

I forget the Red trailer

Someone recommends RWBY to me after Volume 1 wrapped up

I binge Volume 1 twice

I binge the scant supplemental material available and remember seeing the Red trailer before

Depending on how you count, something like 80-90% of the trailers are just the four titular characters kicking ass in flashy ways. That sets your expectations appropriately for most of RWBY. But I'd forgotten the one trailer I'd seen, so my expectations were set by episode 1:

Exposition about the world's mythology and magic things any reasonable author would have called magic

A relatively brief action scene, with beats meant to establish our protagonist's personality

An interrogation scene which establishes her place in the world (and more of her personality)

A brief scene with her and her big sister

Combine that with how many episodes of Volume 1 focus on character drama over action (basically every episode outside initiation), and the impression I had was that action was a secondary focus of RWBY. It's impressive, but it was mostly bait to get you to invest in its character arcs and stuff.

And volume 1 seemed to be setting up pretty good character arcs! Weiss alone got two—she's starting to accept a subordinate role instead of the leadership she expected from her pedigree, and she's starting to confront her internalized racism against faunus.

Anyways, by the start of volume 2 Weiss is basically just nice. I slowly realized that volume 1 wasn't the start of those character arcs, but the entire arc. "And then she wasn't racist any more." Similarly, in volume 1 I assumed that RWBY was setting up some kind of nuanced exploration of racism, but that got harder and harder to believe every season.

I remember making a post on a RWBY message board comparing and contrasting the first episode of volume 2 with that of volume 1. The tone and focus were wildly different, volume 2's putting more time and effort into a fight scene that matters way less, it's just an excuse to include some goofy action. On the character side, we're technically introduced to Emerald, Mercury, and Neptune, but not in anything like the depth volume 1's first episode gave Ruby, nor the mystique it gave Ozpin.

Everyone thought I was making a mountain out of a molehill. But I was vindicated in the end. Also, that message board is the one where mods deleted a thread I made asking a question because they thought the answer was too obvious to need a thread. Fuck that forum.

TL;DR: I assumed it was a character-focused series more than an action series.

P.S. The first time I watched RWBY, I saw Blake for a split-second in the theme song bit at the end of episode 1 and realized she was one of those faunus things the news lady had mentioned. I did not realize she was trying to hide this, which meant the foreshadowing for her Reveal fell kinda flat and Weiss badmouthing the faunus race to her face came off way worse than it was supposed to. I think this is a hilarious story, but a surprising number of people don't believe it. (How was I supposed to know they'd color the inside of cat ears differently? Ruby's skin tone is #FFFFFF and the background characters are silhouettes!)

[army-of-mai-lovers]

in which I get progressively angrier at the various tropes of atla fandom misogyny

tbh I think it would serve all of us to have a larger conversation about the specific ways misogyny manifests in this fandom, because I’ve seen a lot of people who characterize themselves as feminists, many of whom are women themselves, discuss the female characters of atla/lok in misogynistic ways, and people don’t talk about it enough. 

disclaimer before I start: I’m not a woman, I’m an afab nonbinary person who is semi-closeted and thus often read as a woman. I’m speaking to things that I’ve seen that have made me uncomfy, but if any women (esp women existing along other axes of oppression, e.g. trans women, women of color, disabled women, etc) want to add onto this post, please do!

“This female character is a total badass but I’m not even a little bit interested in exploring her as a human being.” 

I’ve seen a lot of people say of various female characters in atla/lok, “I love her! She’s such a badass!” now, this statement on its own isn’t misogynistic, but it represents a pretty pervasive form of misogyny that I’ve seen leveled in large part toward the canon female love interests of one or both of the members of a popular gay ship (*cough* zukka *cough*) I’m going to use Suki as an example of this because I see it with her most often, but it can honestly be applied to nearly every female character in atla/lok. Basically, people will say that they stan Suki, but when it comes time to engage with her as an actual character, they refuse to do it. I’ve seen meta after meta about Zuko’s redemption arc, but I so rarely see people engage with Suki on any level beyond “look at this cool fight scene!” and yeah, I love a cool Suki fight scene as much as anybody else, but I’m also interested in meta and headcanons and fics about who she is as a person, when she isn’t an accessory to Sokka’s development or doing something cool. of course, the material for this kind of engagement with Suki is scant considering she doesn’t have a canon backstory (yet) (don’t let me down Faith Erin Hicks counting on you girl) but with the way I’ve seen people in this fandom expand upon canon to flesh out male characters, I know y’all have it in you to do more with Suki, and with all the female characters, than you currently do. frankly, the most engagement I’ve seen with Suki in mainstream fandom is justifying either zukki (which again, is characterizing her in relation to male characters, one of whom she barely interacts with in canon) or one of the Suki wlw pairings. which brings me to--

“I conveniently ship this female character whose canon love interest is one of the members of my favorite non-canon ship with another female character! gay rights!” 

now, I will admit, two of my favorite atla ships are yueki and mailee, and so I totally understand being interested in these characters’ dynamics, even if, as is the case with yueki, they’ve never interacted canonically. however, it becomes a problem for me when these ships are always in the background of a zukka fic. at some point, it becomes obvious that you like this ship because it gets either Zuko or Sokka’s female love interests out of the way, not because you actually think the characters would mesh well together. It’s bad form to dislike a female character because she gets in the way of your gay ship, so instead, you find another girl to pair her off with and call it a day. to be clear, I’m not saying that everybody who ships either mailee or yueki (or tysuki or maisuki or yumai or whatever other wlw rarepair involving Zuko or Sokka’s canon love interests) is nefariously trying to sideline a female character while acting publicly as if she’s is one of their faves--far from it--but it is noteworthy to me how difficult it is to find content that centers wlw ships, while it’s incredibly easy to find content that centers zukka in which mailee and/or yueki plays a background role. 

also, notice how little traction wlw Katara ships gain in this fandom. when’s the last time you saw yuetara on your dash? there’s no reason for wlw Katara ships to gain traction in a fandom that is so focused on Zuko and Sokka getting together, bc she doesn’t present an immediate obstacle to that goal (at least, not an obstacle that can be overcome by pairing her up with a woman). if you are primarily interested in Zuko and Sokka’s relationship, and your queer readings of other female characters are motivated by a desire to get them out of the way for zukka, then Katara’s canon m/f relationship isn’t a threat to you, and thus, there’s no reason to read her as potentially queer. Or even, really, to think about her at all. 

“Katara’s here but she’s not actually going to do anything, because deep down, I’m not interested in her as a person.” 

the show has an enormous amount of textual evidence to support the claim that Sokka and Katara are integral parts of each other’s lives. so, she typically makes some kind of appearance in zukka content. sometimes, her presence in the story is as an actual character with layers and nuance, someone whom Sokka cares about and who cares about Sokka in return, but also has her own life and goals outside of her brother (or other male characters, for that matter.) sometimes, however, she’s just there because halfway through writing the author remembered that Sokka actually has a sister who’s a huge part of the show they’re writing fanfiction for, and then they proceed to show her having a meetcute with Aang or helping Sokka through an emotional problem, without expressing wants or desires outside of those characters. I’m honestly really surprised that I haven’t seen more people calling out the fact that so much of Katara’s personality in fanon revolves around her connections to men? she’s Aang’s girlfriend, she’s Sokka’s sister, she’s Zuko’s bestie. never mind that in canon she spends an enormous amount of time fighting against (anachronistic, Westernized) sexism to establish herself as a person in her own right, outside of these connections. and that in canon she has such interesting complex relationships with other female characters (e.g. Toph, Kanna, Hama, Korra if you want to write lok content) or that there are a plethora of characters with whom she could have interesting relationships with in fanon (Mai, Suki, Ty Lee, Yue, Smellerbee, and if you want to write lok content, Kya II, Lin, Asami, Senna, etc). to me, the lack of fandom material exploring Katara’s relationships with other women or with herself speak to a profound indifference to Katara as a character. I’m not saying you have to like Katara or include her in everything you write, but I am asking you to consider why you don’t find her interesting outside of her relationships with men.

“I hate Katara because she talks about her mother dying too often.” 

this is something I’ve seen addressed by people far more qualified than I to address it, but I want to mention it here in part because when I asked people which fandom tropes they wanted me to talk about, this came up often, but also because I find it really disgusting that this is a thing that needs to be addressed at all. Y’all see a little girl who watched her mother be killed by the forces of an imperialist nation and say that she talks about it too much??? That is a formational, foundational event in a child’s life. Of course she’s going to talk about it. I’ve seen people say that she doesn’t talk about it that often, or that she only talks about it to connect with other victims of fn imperialism e.g. Jet and Haru, but frankly, she could speak about it every episode for no plot-significant reason whatsoever and I would still be angry to see people say she talks about it too much. And before you even bring up the Sokka comparison, people deal with grief in different ways. Sokka  repressed a lot of his grief/channeled it into being the “man” of his village because he knew that they would come for Katara next if he gave them the opportunity. he probably would talk about his mother more if a) he didn’t feel massive guilt at not being able to remember what she looked like, and b) he was allowed to be a child processing the loss of his mother instead of having to become a tiny adult when Hakoda had to leave to help fight the fn. And this gets into an intersection with fandom racism, in that white fans (esp white American fans) are incapable of relating to the structural trauma that both Sokka and Katara experience and thus can’t see the ways in which structural trauma colors every single aspect of both of their characters, leading them to flatten nuance and to have some really bad takes. And you know what, speaking of bad fandom takes--   

“Shitting on Mai because she gets in the way of my favorite Zuko ship is actually totally okay because she’s ~abusive~” 

y’all WHAT. 

ok listen, I get not liking maiko. I didn’t like it when I first got into fandom, and later I realized that while bryke cannot write romance to save their lives, fans who like maiko sure can, so I changed my tune. but if you still don’t like it, that’s fine. no skin off my back. 

what IS skin off my back is taking instances in which Mai had justified anger toward Zuko, and turning it into “Mai abused Zuko.” do you not realize how ridiculous you sound? this is another thing where I get so angry about it that I don’t know how useful my analysis is actually going to be, but I’ll do my best. numerous people have noted how analysis of Mai and Zuko’s breakup in “The Beach” or Mai being justifiably angry with him at Boiling Rock or her asking for FUCKING FRUIT in “Nightmares and Daydreams” that says that all of these events were her trying to gain control over him is....ahhh...lacking in reading comprehension, but I’d like to go a step further and talk about why y’all are so intent on taking down a girl who doesn’t show emotion in normative ways. obviously, there’s a “Zuko can do no wrong” aspect to Mai criticism (which is super weird considering how his whole arc is about how he can do lots of wrong and he has to atone for the wrong that he’s done--but that’s a separate post.) But I also see slandering Mai for not expressing her emotions normatively and not putting up with Zuko’s shit and slandering Katara for “talking about her mother too often” as two sides of the same coin. In both cases, a female character expresses emotions that make you, the viewer, uncomfortable, and so instead of attempting to understand where those emotions may have come from and why they might be manifesting the way they are, y’all just throw the whole character away. this is another instance of people in the fandom being fundamentally disinterested in engaging with the female characters of atla in a real way, except instead of shallowly “stanning” Mai, y’all hate her. so we get to this point where female characters are flattened into one of two things: perfect queens who can do no wrong, or bitches. and that’s not who they are. that’s not who anyone is. but while we as a fandom are pretty good at understanding b1 Zuko’s actions as layered and multifaceted even though he’s essentially an asshole then, few are willing to lend the same grace to any female character, least of all Mai. 

and what’s funny is sometimes this trope will intersect with “I conveniently ship this female character whose canon love interest is one of the members of my favorite non-canon ship with another female character! gay rights!”, so you’ll have someone actively calling Mai toxic/problematic/abusive, and at the same time ship her with Ty Lee? make it make sense! but then again, maybe that’s happening because y’all are fundamentally disinterested in Ty Lee as a character too. 

“I love Ty Lee so much that I’m going to treat her like an infantilized hypersexual airhead!” 

there are so many things happening in y’alls characterization of Ty Lee that I struggled to synthesize it into one quippy section header. on one hand, you have the hypersexualization, and on the other hand, you have the infantilization, which just makes the hypersexualization that much worse. 

(of course, sexualizing or hypersexualizing ANY atla character is really not the move, considering that these are child characters in a children’s show, but then again, that’s a separate post.) 

now, I understand how, from a very, very surface reading of the text, you could come to the conclusion that Ty Lee is an uncomplicated bimbo. if you grew up on Western media the way I did, you’ll know that Ty Lee has a lot of the character traits we associate with bimbos: the form-fitting pink crop top, the general conventional attractiveness, the ditzy dialogue. but if you think about it for more than three seconds, you’ll understand that Ty Lee has spent her whole life walking a tightrope, trying to please Azula and the rest of the royal family while also staying true to herself. Ty Lee and Azula’s relationship is a really complex and interesting topic that I don’t really have time to explore at the moment given how long this post is, but I’d argue that Ty Lee’s constant, vocal  adulation is at least partially a product of learning to survive at court at an early age. Like Mai, she has been forced to regulate her emotions as a member of fn nobility, but unlike Mai, she also has six sisters who look exactly like her, so she has a motivation to be more peppy and more affectionate to stand out. 

fandom does not do the work to understand Ty Lee. as is a theme with this post, fandom is actively disinterested in investigating female characters beyond a very surface level reading of them. Thus, fandom takes Ty Lee’s surface level qualities--her love of the color pink, her revealing standard outfit, and the fact that once she found a boy attractive and also once a lot of boys found her attractive--and they stretch this into “Ty Lee is basically Karen Smith from Mean Girls.” thus, Ty Lee is painted as a bimbo, or more specifically, as not smart, uncritically adoring of Azula (did y’all forget all the non-zukka bits of Boiling Rock?), and attractive to the point of hypersexualization. I saw somebody make a post that was like “I wish mailee was more popular but I’m also glad it isn’t because otherwise people would write it as Mai having to put up with her dumb gf” and honestly I have to agree!! this is one instance in which I’m glad that fandom doesn’t discuss one of my favorite characters that often because I hate the fanon interpretation of Ty Lee, I think it’s rooted in misogyny (particularly misogyny against East Asian women, which often takes the form of fetishizing them and viewing them only through a Western white male gaze)  

(side note: here at army-of-mai-lovers, we stan bimbos. bimbos are fucking awesome. I personally don’t read Ty Lee as a bimbo, but if that’s you, that’s fucking awesome. keep doing what you’re doing, queen <3 or king or monarch, it’s 2021, anyone can be a bimbo, bitches <3)

“Toph can and will destroy everyone here with her bare hands because she’s a meathead who likes to murder people and that’s it!”  

Toph is, and always has been, one of my favorite ATLA characters. My very first fic in fandom was about her, and she appears prominently in a lot of my other work as well. One thing that I am always struck by with Toph is how big a heart she has. She’s independent, yes, snarky, yes, but she cares about people--even the family that forced her to make herself smaller because they didn’t believe that their blind daughter could be powerful and strong. Her storyline is powerful and emotionally resonant, her bending is cool precisely because it’s based in a “wait and listen” approach instead of just smashing things indiscriminately, she’s great disabled rep, and overall one of the best characters in the show. 

And in fandom, she gets flattened into “snarky murder child.” 

So where does this come from? Well, as we all know, Toph was originally conceived of as a male character, and retained a lot of androgyny (or as the kids call it, Gender) when she was rewritten as a female character. There are a lot of cultural ideas about androgynous/butch women being violent, and people in fandom seem to connect that larger cultural narrative with some of Toph’s more violent moments in the show to create the meathead murder child trope, erasing her canon emotionality, softness, heart, and femininity in the process. 

This is not to say that you shouldn’t write or characterize Toph as being violent or snarky at all ever, because yeah, Toph definitely did do Earth Rumbles a lot before joining the gaang, and yeah, Toph is definitely a sarcastic person who makes fun of her friends a lot. What I am saying is that people take these traits, sans the emotional logic, marry them to their conception of androgynous/butch women as violent/unemotional/uncaring, and thus create a caricature of Toph that is not at all up to snuff. When I see Toph as a side character in a fic (because yeah, Toph never gets to be a main character, because why would a fandom obsessed with one male character in particular ever make Toph a protagonist in her own right?) she’s making fun of people, killing people, pranking people, etc, etc. She’s never talking to people about her emotions, or palling around with her found family, or showing that she cares about her friends. Everything about her relationship with her parents, her disability, her relationship to Gender, and her love of her friends is shoved aside to focus on a version of Toph that is mean and uncaring because people have gotten it into their heads that androgynous/butch women are mean and uncaring. 

again, we see a female character who does not emote normatively or in a way that makes you, the viewer, comfortable, and so you warp her character until she’s completely unrecognizable and flat. and for what? 

Azula

no, I didn’t come up with a snappy name for this section, mainly because fanon interpretations of Azula and my own feelings toward the character are...complicated. I know there were some people who wanted me to write about Azula and the intersection of misogyny and ableism in fanon interpretations of her character, but I don’t think I can deliver on that because I personally am in a period of transition with how I see Azula. that is to say, while I still like her and believe that she can be redeemed, there is a lot of merit to disliking her. the whole point of this post is that the female characters of ATLA are complex people whom the fandom flattens into stereotypes that don’t hold up to scrutiny, or dislike for reasons that don’t make sense. Azula, however, is a different case. the rise of Azula defenders and Azula stans has led to this sentiment that Azula is a 14 y/o abuse victim who shouldn’t be held accountable for her actions. it seems to me that people are reacting to a long, horrible legacy of male ATLA fans armchair diagnosing Azula with various personality disorders (and suggesting that people with those personality disorders are inherently monstrous and unlovable which ahhhh....yikes) and then saying that those personality disorders make her unlovable, which is quite obviously bad. and hey, I get loving a character that everyone else hates and maybe getting so swept up in that love that you forget that your fave is complicated and has made some unsavory choices. it sucks that fanon takes these well-written, complex villains/antiheroes and turns them into monsters with no critical thought whatsoever. but the attitude among Azula stans that her redemption shouldn’t be hard, that her being a child excuses all of the bad things that she’s done, that she is owed redemption....all of that rubs me the wrong way. I might make another post about this in the future that discusses this in more depth, but as it stands now: while I understand that there is a legacy of misogynistic, ableist, unnuanced takes on Azula, the backlash to that does not take into account the people she hurt or the fact that in ATLA she does not make the choice to pursue redemption. and yes, Zuko had help in making that choice that Azula didn’t, and yes, Azula is a victim of abuse, but in a show about children who have gone through untold horrors and still work to better the lives of the people around them, that is not enough for me to uncritically stan her. 

Conclusion    

misogyny in this fandom runs rampant. while there are some tropes of fandom misogyny that are well-documented and have been debunked numerous times, there are other, subtler forms of misogyny that as far as I know have gone completely unchecked. 

what I find so interesting about misogyny in atla fandom is that it’s clear that it’s perpetrated by people who are aware of fandom misogyny who are actively trying not to be misogynistic. when I first joined atla fandom last summer, memes about how zukka fandom was better than every other fandom because they didn’t hate the female characters who got in the way of their gay ship were extremely prevalent, and there was this sense that *this* fandom was going to model respectful, fun, feminist online fandom. not all of the topes I’ve outlined are exclusive to or even largely utilized in zukka fandom, but a lot of them are. I’ve been in and out of fandom since I was eleven years old, and most of the fandom spaces I’ve been in have been majority-female, and all of them have been incredibly misogynistic. and I always want to know why. why, in these communities created in large part by women, in large part for women, does misogyny run wild? what I realize now is that there’s never going to be a one-size fits all answer to that question. what’s true for 1D fandom on Wattpad in 2012 is absolutely not true for atla fandom on tumblr in 2021. the answers that I’ve cobbled together for previous fandoms don’t work here. 

so, why is atla fandom like this? why did the dream of a feminist fandom almost entirely focused on the romantic relationship between two male characters fall apart? honestly, I think the notion that zukka fandom ever was this way was horrifically ignorant to begin with. from my very first moment in the fandom, I was seeing racism, widespread sexualization of minors, and yes, misogyny. these aspects of the fandom weren’t talked about as much as the crocverse or other, much more fun aspects. further, atla (specifically zukka) fandom misogyny often doesn’t look like the fandom misogyny we’ve become familiar with from like, Sherlock fandom or what have you. for the most part, people don’t actively hate Suki, they just “stan” without actually caring about her. they hate Mai because they believe in treating male victims of abuse equally. they’re not characterizing Toph poorly, they’re writing her as a “strong woman.” in short, people are misogynistic, and then invoke a shallow, incomplete interpretation of feminist theory to shield themselves from accusations of misogyny. it’s not unlike the way some people will invoke a shallow, incomplete interpretation of critical race theory to shield themselves from accusations of racism, or how they’ll talk about “freedom of speech” and “the suppression of women’s sexuality” to justify sexualizing minors. the performance of feminism and antiracism is what’s important, not the actual practice. 

if you’ve made it this far, first off, hi, thanks so much for reading, I know this was a lot. second, I would seriously encourage you to be aware of these fandom tropes and to call them out when you see them. elevate the voices of fans who do the work of bringing the female characters of atla to life. invest in the wlw ships in this fandom. drop a kudos and a comment on a rangshi fic (please, drop a kudos and a comment on a rangshi fic). read some yuetara. let’s all be honest about where we are now, and try to do better in the future. I believe in us. 

[bylaudelekha]

Not to complain about lorenz in ur inbox but it’s so FRUSTRATING CAUSE LIKE!! To some extent you understand his suspicion in white clouds because this rlly IS some dude who popped up out of nowhere, who won’t tell u a lot and is assuming leadership of the alliance in a few scant years. But in VW *ESPECIALLY* it makes no sense as to why lorenz still thinks like this!!! Claude has SHOWN with his ACTIONS how much he cares for the alliance, he openly confides in his friends, there’s literally no reason for lorenz not to examine his own suspicions and realise there’s a genuine measure of prejudice that founded them BUT WE DONT GET THAT 😭

YES THIS EXACTLY!!

sure, claude showed up out of fucking nowhere and the alliance nobility is supposed to accept that he is the grandson of oswald von reigan (? pretty sure that’s him? going off what i know and what the fandom wiki’s telling me haha), the then-duke of the leicester alliance. and that part makes sense! they would be sus of a foreigner because internalised racism i mean this dude that shows up outta nowhere, with no recorded history in fodlan

claude got his position as duke of the alliance when he was what? 19? and when byleth comes back, he’s 23! he’s lead the alliance for FOUR FUCKING YEARS.

lorenz stayed with count gloucester to help him! 

AND COUNT GLOUCESTER FOR ALL WE KNOW HAS GONE ALONG WITH CLAUDE’S PLAN TO STAY NEUTRAL AND GET RID OF THE IMPERIAL WAR FOR THOSE FOUR YEARS

LORENZ NOW KNOWS WHO CLAUDE IS (to an extent) AND WHAT HE IS PLANNING TO DO (also to an extent, my boy seems to stay pretty vague with this). SO WHY THE FUCK IS HE STILL INCREDIBLY SUSPICIOUS OF HIM? THEY’VE KNOWN EACH OTHER AND (most likely, don’t think they both would have gone along with this) HELPED EACH OTHER IN THE ALLIANCE’S AFFAIRS!

lorenz honestly could have been written a bit better post-timeskip, it feels incredibly weird and character-development-goes-unbrr for his prejudices to not be gone! well not gone but. slowly broken down as he realises that claude isn’t actually like that. and by the end of vw lorenz supports claude completely.

i wrote this with so much claude bias it hurts-

hffdj thanks for the ask tunes! honestly was fun to be able to scream about how lorenz’s character was pretty shit-written.

really fucking sucks that the racism i mentioned earlier is just. not. gone. BITCH YOU'VE HAD FIVE FUCKING YEARS TO CHANGE YOUR VIEWS BUT YOU DONT, DO YOU, YOU LIL SHIT?

[wearejapanese]

By John G. Russell

Abstract: Representations of blacks in Japan continue to be problematic even when the media itself, a prime purveyor of racial misrepresentations, attempts to address the issue. This has become evident in its coverage of global Black Lives Matter protests for racial justice in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by police in the United States. While protests have occurred in a number of Japanese cities, mainstream coverage has ignored them and remained focused on those demonstrations that have taken place abroad. While these demonstrations have prompted a reexamination of anti-black racism in the United States and Europe, the Japanese media has largely avoided introspective discussion of its domestic manifestations, despite its prevalence on the internet, social media, and television, including corporate mainstream news broadcasts that have feebly attempted to examine the issue.

On June 4th Japanese Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Aso Taro, commenting on the low rates of coronavirus infections in Japan, attributed it to the nation’s higher “cultural level,” or mindo. A controversial statement at best, but certainly in keeping with Japan’s penchant for cultural chauvinism in high places. However, in the wake of global protests against social injustice triggered by the police murder of George Floyd, doubts have been raised about how Japan has responded to another global pandemic – anti-black racism.

On June 7, NHK, Japan’s public broadcaster, devoted 26-minutes of its popular youth-oriented current affairs program “Kore de Wakatta! Sekai no Ima” (Now I Understand! The World Today) to a discussion of the protests that featured a one-minute and twenty-second animated clip that purportedly “aimed to show the hardships, such as economic disparity, many African Americans in the U.S. suffer.” However, it was harshly criticized on Twitter for perpetuating black stereotypes. In the controversial clip, a mob of angry black people linger in the street as a dandyish black man sits atop a fire hydrant strumming a guitar. A muscular black man in a wife-beater T-shirt looms into view, exploding in anger as he recites in deep guttural tones the vast economic disparity between black and white America. Behind him, black men and women stomp their feet, little animated dust clouds appearing at their heels, and raise their arms in protest against America’s socio-economic injustice. The clip ends with the blacks looting.

After receiving numerous complaints about the animation, which NHK itself had uploaded to Twitter, the broadcaster took it down and apologized, explaining that it was an attempt to simplify the issues and suggesting that the full program had treated the issue more comprehensively. However, from the outset, the program’s focus was on the rioting and looting rather than the police killing of American Blacks. The fact that the majority of demonstrations have been peaceful receives scant mention. In fact, video footage of rioting opens the studio portion of the broadcast. Afterwards, the camera pans to a large map of the United States that is dotted with flame graphics containing the word “bōtoka” (riotous mobs), representing areas of the country where rioting and looting have taken place. Little time is devoted to exploring the murder of Floyd and the unending succession of incidents of police brutality that sparked public outrage. Instead, the broadcast rationalizes extrajudicial killings as the result of white police justifiably fearing for their lives. Later, the program’s resident expert gives an Arthur Schlesingeresque lecture on the disuniting of America in front of a blackboard on which cut-outs of white Antifa demonstrators and white supremacists face off against each other and blames Antifa for the violence. This despite the fact that an FBI report found no evidence to substantiate such claims. Conversely, no mention is made of the fact, also reported by the FBI, that white extremist groups have infiltrated enforcement (Speri 2017 and Carless and Corey 2019).

But the problem is not merely the NHK broadcast’s apparent tone-deafness and reportorial disregard for facts. Generally, the Japanese mainstream media, particularly television news and infotainment programs, have consistently proven themselves ill-equipped to discuss racism in America and, in those rare instances when they do, Japan. Case in point: some five days before the NHK debacle, BS-TBS’s “Hōdō 1930” aired an interview with Jared Taylor, the white nationalist founder and editor of American Renaissance, a white supremacist online magazine and, until recently, YouTube channel.1 Taylor, who styles himself and his followers “racial realists” who would simply rather live with their own kind without being misunderstood and labeled Nazis, spoke virtually uninterrupted for six minutes. During this time he dismissed the killings of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown as justified acts of self-defense and argued that George Floyd resisted police, even though surveillance cameras in the area showed otherwise. 

Read more...

https://apjjf.org/2020/17/Russell.html

[96thdayofrage]

How History Textbooks Reflect America’s Refusal to Reckon with Slavery

How History Textbooks Reflect America’s Refusal to Reckon with Slavery

Textbooks are a battleground in which the humanity and status of black Americans are contested

“Textbooks shaped how generations of white Americans thought about their black compatriots and how black Americans who read such textbooks thought about themselves.”

Four hundred years ago, a group of about 20 Africans were captured in the African interior, probably near modern-day Angola, and forcibly transported on a slave ship headed to the Americas. After tumultuous months at sea, they landed ashore in the first British colony in North America — Jamestown, Virginia — in late August 1619.

Hazen’s Elementary History of the United States: A Story and a Lesson, a popular early 20th-century textbook for young readers, picked up the story of the first black Virginians from there.

“The settlers bought them,” explained the 1903 text, “... and found them so helpful in raising tobacco that more were brought in, and slavery became part of our history.”

Its barebones lesson plan included just two easily digestible factoids for the year 1619: the introduction of the Africans — with an illustration of two half-naked black people standing on a beach before a pontificating pirate and a crowd of onlookers — and the creation of the Virginia House of Burgesses, the first formal legislative body in the American colonies.

Hazen’s Elementary History of the United States: A Story and a Lesson, published in 1903, included very little about 1619 and the role slavery played in the formation of the United States.

But the history of Jamestown and slavery isn’t that simple. Even though the 1619 landing wasn’t the first arrival of Africans in the Americas, it fits within the history of colonial America, black America, the global slave trade, and ultimately the foundation of our country. So how textbooks summarized this history — one characterized by a scant documentary record and often from the perspective of European settlers and white Americans — matters.

“Textbooks are supposed to teach us a common set of facts about who we are as Americans ... and what stories are key to our democracy,” said Alana D. Murray, a Maryland middle-school principal and author of The Development of the Alternative Black Curriculum, 1890-1940: Countering the Master Narrative.

As textbooks show — through omissions, downright errors, and specious interpretations, particularly regarding racial issues — not everyone enjoys the perks of civic belonging or gets a fair shake in historical accounts. This is even true of textbooks used today — 400 years after Africans’ 1619 arrival, more than 150 years after emancipation — with narratives more interested in emphasizing the compassion of enslavers than the cruelty endured by the enslaved.

Textbooks have long remained a battleground in which the humanity and status of black Americans have been contested. Pedagogy has always been preeminently political.

From fast facts to black inferiority: how slavery has been portrayed historically in textbooks

The Hazen’s textbook framed Jamestown and its role in the development of US slavery as an inevitable matter of labor demand and economic pragmatism, a common argument in US school materials at the turn of the 20th century.

Yet that was just one school of thought. After slavery’s end in this country, many Southern-focused textbooks promoted a Lost Cause approach to Jamestown and slavery writ large, portraying the institution as part of a natural order. White Southerners created ideologically driven narratives that yearned for the Good Ole Days where whites sat atop the hierarchy and African Americans were faithful slaves. In this racist revisionism, they didn’t have to reckon with the new black citizen, voter, or legislator as nominal equals.

Somewhat typical in this distorted history was A Child’s History of North Carolina, circa 1916, which also focused on slavery’s profitability and erased its violence. In this view, the enslaved people were happy, and Southern slave owners were reluctant masters at best.

“White Southerners created ideologically driven narratives that yearned for the Good Ole Days where whites sat atop the hierarchy.”

According to the book, enslaved people “were allowed all the freedom they seemed to want, and were given the privilege of visiting other plantations when they chose to do so. All that was required of them was to be in place when work time came. At the holiday season they were almost as free as their masters.” Moreover, “most people in North Carolina were really opposed to slavery and were in favor of a gradual emancipation. Slavery was already in existence, however, through no fault of theirs. They had the slaves and had to manage as best they could the problem of what to do with them.”

Furthermore, the book argued that abolitionists — never a huge voting bloc — were responsible for electing Abraham Lincoln, and that their unspecified violence made the South “indignant.”

Some Northern writers tried their hand at what they believed was a more nuanced approach in revising children’s history books in light of emancipation. And that included how they talked about that slave ship arriving in Virginia and the people aboard.

Take the example of Children’s Stories of American Progress, published in 1886. Northern white writer Henrietta Christian Wright, known for her popular stories of fairies and magic, described that day in August 1619 as a time when the meadows alongside the James River were “beautiful with summer” — a sight lost on the African captives.

However, Wright also imagined eyes that “looked wearily out from the port-holes of the ship” and saw a new landscape that “only seemed dreary and desolate, a land of exile and death.” She alternated between seeing through their eyes with being the omniscient narrator viewing them from above. She implicated European powers for turning Africa into “the great hunting-ground” and capitalizing off internecine struggles on the continent. Yet the plunder that carried Africans “like dumb beasts across the Atlantic” was “all because the white man chose to use his greater intelligence to oppress instead of befriend them.”

Wright didn’t skimp on moralizing about slavery as an evil, unsuitable enterprise for a putatively Christian nation, but she didn’t see Africans as Europeans’ peers, either. Her portrayal of the inferiority of black people reflected a common belief among white Americans, even some former abolitionists. Accounts like hers shaped how generations of white Americans thought about their black compatriots and, according to a rising cadre of black educators, how black Americans who read such textbooks thought about themselves.

Black voices enter the textbook industry after the Civil War — but barely disrupt it

The benevolent racism that infected textbooks also inspired a new generation of history writers who wanted to inject less bias and more accuracy into instructional materials. African Americans, often women teachers or laypeople with little formal training, began authoring textbooks and creating history pageants that spanned centuries with song, speech, and dance in the decades after the Civil War.

“You have these big textbooks that were in schools, but they had nothing to do with what black people are writing. Black history textbooks and black people had a totally different view of citizenship [in the late 1800s to mid-1900s],” Murray said.

She became interested in how black people wrote their own history when her graduate class on teaching social studies failed to even mention the father of what became Black History Month, Carter G. Woodson. Shocked by the glaring omission, Murray began researching and found women like Dorothy Guinn, a YWCA director, who co-wrote Out of the Dark (1924), a pageant in which spectators and its high school performers got a theatrical tour through the slave trade in Africa, Reconstruction, and then-contemporary moments.

A character named the Chronicler intones about Phillis Wheatley, Benjamin Banneker, and Sojourner Truth. She gets an assist from musical numbers like “Go Down, Moses,” Paul Laurence Dunbar poems, and muse-like characters called the Children of Genius, who represent music, literature, science, and art. They are her Greek chorus, there to enlighten with well-placed tidbits of information.

The zeal to correct and counter other people’s accounts of black history motivated people like North Carolina’s Edward A. Johnson, a black lawyer who released his own textbook, A School History of the Negro Race in America from 1619-1819 in 1890.

In his preface, he wrote of his 11 years teaching and observing “omission and commission on the part of white authors, most of whom seem to have written exclusively for white children, and studiously left out the many creditable deeds of the Negro. … But how must the little colored child feel when he has completed the assigned course of U. S. History and in it found not one word of credit, not one word of favorable comment for even one among the millions of his foreparents who have lived through nearly three centuries of his country’s history!”

“African Americans began authoring textbooks and creating history pageants that spanned centuries with song, speech, and dance.”

Leila Amos Pendleton, a former Washington, DC, teacher, expressed similar sentiments in her A Narrative of the Negro. Dating to 1912, it preceded Woodson’s 1933 pioneering Mis-Education of the Negro, which railed against the American educational system’s failure to teach accurate black history.

Pendleton reframed the Jamestown arrival of those first African Virginians, putting it in a diasporic context that discussed African civilizations (an oxymoron, according to many white authors), the African presence in Mexico, slavery in Muslim countries, and the systematic abuse of indigenous peoples in the colonies.

She also made a direct emotional appeal to black children: “PICTURE to yourselves, dear children, a small group of foreigners frightened and sad, with hearts aching for home and for the loved ones from whom they had been torn …. The early part of the seventeenth century belongs to the dark ages of the world’s history, to the time when men had not yet understood that it is the right of every human creature to be free and that it is the solemn duty of every man and every race to help toward true freedom every other man and every other race.”

LaGarrett King, a professor and founding director of the University of Missouri’s Carter Center for K-12 Black History Education, said it’s hard to know how widely used such texts were. He can say Johnson’s was used in a black Raleigh, North Carolina, high school. Murray, the Maryland principal and scholar, pointed out that Pendleton’s was advertised in the NAACP magazine the Crisis, and that she likely had an unusual advantage: Her husband owned the publishing outfit that produced her book.

But their explicitly political versions of history, which recounted a black past that was more than slavery and sometimes had its own share of romanticism, couldn’t dislodge decades — centuries, really — of white supremacy via textbook. It couldn’t stop such ideologies from being circulated in American schools, even in more recent decades.

From the civil rights movement to today, textbooks still leave a lot to be desired

Even in the heyday of the civil rights movement and beyond, textbooks still failed to capture the reality of what the enslaved endured through their perspective. “In the greater number of textbooks, slave life is pictured as a not too unpleasant condition; in fact, it was often described as having been rather nice in the sheer beauty of relationship between the slaveowner and the slaves,” wrote graduate student James O. Lewis, whose thesis on black representations in textbooks in 1960 influenced the NAACP’s efforts to revamp racist textbooks.

Lewis also concluded that instructional materials were quick to equate blackness with slavery, especially when writing about Jamestown. He noted that all textbooks in his sample included the arrival of the first Africans to Jamestown, and though he observed diversity in how the books described the Africans’ arrival, the majority insisted that slavery began with them in the Jamestown colony.

Lewis, however, supported the view of a minority of those textbooks that these involuntary migrants were indentured servants, a debate that continues today. In 1619, when the Africans arrived, Virginia had no legal framework for slavery in the colony, but moved in successive decades to cement slavery as a hereditary racial institution.

King said that, overall, textbooks have failed to clearly communicate the nuances, questions, and debates about the Africans’ status in early Virginia. And that’s part of a larger, existential problem.

“The way we teach K-12 black history is either oppression or liberation,” he said. “The majority of teachers know that 1619 is a year that we represent the first Africans [to come to British North America] on what would become US soil. But then what’s missing is what happened next. Then, in terms of black history, we just move on to slavery. A lot of textbooks now will center them as both [slaves or indentured servants], but the way we understand slavery is very vague. Our textbooks say they were sold for goods, but they could have been indentured and sold for goods, until their terms [of their labor contracts] were up.”

But few K-12 instructors know enough about the debate over the Africans’ status to be able to sort out what’s what, and many agree that textbooks they use are ineffective. A 2018 report from the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), “Teaching Hard History: American Slavery,” found that more than half of teachers (58 percent) polled weren’t happy with their textbooks and almost 40 percent said that their state offered little or no support for teaching about slavery.

King said there’s also the issue of what teachers themselves learned in the textbooks they read as students because “we regularly saw egregious and racist references to black people as late as the 70s.” The birth of black studies programs and the “new” social history, the popularity of Alex Haley’s Roots, and civil rights activism helped usher in curricular changes. The NAACP, for example, had a textbook committee that monitored how schoolbooks portrayed black communities and history. But sometimes, so did groups such as the Confederate Veterans of America, which released a 1932 report decrying one textbook’s portrayal of Jamestown as a raggedy settlement that didn’t compare well with New England’s early colonies.

Even if most textbooks are no longer overtly racist, it doesn’t mean pedagogy has sufficiently changed. Over the past decade, school districts around the country have come under fire for the way they teach slavery, including incorporating slavery references into math equations.

In 2012, an Atlanta elementary school posed this homework question: “If Frederick got two beatings per day, how many beatings did he get in one week? Two weeks?” And just last year, San Antonio, Texas parents complained about a history homework assignment that asked eighth graders to list positive and negative aspects of slavery. Turns out the activity was directly tied to a textbook used by the school for about 10 years. Prentice Hall Classics: A History of the United States argued that all slaveowners were not cruel: “a few [slaves] never felt the lash,” and “many may not have even been terribly unhappy with their lot, for they knew no other.”

It’s no surprise then that, according to the SPLC report, only 8 percent of high school seniors surveyed knew that slavery was the central cause of the Civil War, 12 percent understood slavery was important to the Northern economy, and just 22 percent could identify how the Constitution benefited slaveowners.

Textbooks remain a reflection of the political climate

Textbooks have been a part of the culture wars for a long time, said King. In the late 1990s, scholar Leah Wasburn analyzed slavery representation’s in US history textbooks used in Indiana, and she noted how the religious right influenced textbooks in the 1980s and’90s. During this period, there were more conservative references to how Christianity got the enslaved through hard times, as well as traditional family rhetoric that said the wives of slave owners (which assumed women weren’t slaveowners themselves) took care of the enslaved in motherly ways.

King explained, “It boils down to money and politics. One of the strategies of conservative politicians is taking over state school boards, where textbook policies are been adopted.” Seats on those boards are often appointed, and large states — those who can deliver big sales to publishing companies and may require school systems to buy particular textbooks — have a massive say in what content makes its way into student’s hands and minds.

Texas, for example, earned a reputation for inserting dubious information and interpretations about the nation’s creation, evolution, and slavery into its school books. In one case, Moses — he of the Ten Commandments — was listed as a Founding Father, and enslaved people were referred to as immigrant workers in a textbook caption a student flagged in 2015. And this is a problem that transcends the Lone Star state; as a New York Review of Books analysis of the state’s curricular curation stated in this epigram: “What happens in Texas doesn’t stay in Texas when it comes to textbooks.”

However, outcry has sparked some change: In late 2018, the Texas state school board decided that public school curricula should be changed to emphasize slavery as a primary cause of the Civil War, when it previously prioritized sectionalism and states rights; those changes are scheduled to go in effect this school year for middle and high school students.

But despite many Americans’ desire to see history as one straight line of progress — and that applies to the timeline of both America the country and American textbooks — King sees a future of hard work ahead.

There are still few textbook authors of color, and in K-12 “more than 80 percent of [public elementary and secondary] teachers are white,” King said. “The curriculum is still Eurocentric, despite the cosmetic diversity. We have quantitatively improved in diversifying the curriculum, though we haven’t qualitatively improved.” This is because so much of black history is defined only through contact with Europeans and American whites, he says.

He suggests intentional evidence-based reframing — which complicates assumptions that black people’s reasons for their actions were the same as white people’s. For example, instead of pointing to black Americans’ fighting on both sides of the American Revolution as mere proof of patriotism — as black Americans are constantly required to prove their fealty in history and contemporary politics — he points out blacks were promised freedom, directly or indirectly, if they took up arms.

Still, he explains there are more good resources for teachers to learn from and use today. This includes materials that aren’t hardbound texts, like the recent 1619 Project from the New York Times; Teaching Tolerance’s “Teaching Hard History” series, which has multiple episodes on slavery featuring accomplished scholars and has recently updated content on teaching K-5 students; and online readings lists about a variety of topics dealing with race, such as the Ferguson syllabus.

For her part, Murray says that as a former teacher and now an administrator, she’s always striving to create another alternative canon.

“There’s always a group of teachers who will teach the curriculum. But there’s one teacher in every department who’s engaged in upper-level discussions about how to create a curriculum that matters to their students. For them, it’s not just about how many facts they have to memorize; it’s about how to include LGBTQ history, for example.”

To push forward, she says educators must continue to pull from intellectual descendants like Leila Amos Pendleton, whom she calls “dream weavers and writers, people who were in front of children teaching them and writing for them.” As Murray notes, “They were imagining for them and for us.”

Dr. Cynthia R. Greenlee is a North Carolina-based historian, journalist, and editor. Her writing has appeared in Literary Hub, Longreads, Smithsonian, and Vice, among others. Follow her on Twitter at @CynthiaGreenlee.

This article previously appeared in Vox .

[hellyeahheroes]

And another thing, Cass fans are uncharacteristically passionate about her because we have a history of the character being slighted by editorial, bad writing, bad artistic designs, and scant representation due to her being overlooked and mistreated because blatant favoritism, sexism, racism, and ableism.

I recall when Cass was even depicted a bust more than an A-cup, fans complained to no end. When Cass gets beaten by characters she has no reason losing to for stupid reasons other than to pump up another character, fans flooded DC’s mailbox ie her fight against Tim Drake. I remember when they stripped the mantle Batgirl from her in some shoddy ass writing and handed it to white blue eyed blonde neurotypical Stephanie Brown and this isn’t a shot at Steph fans. It’s the principle of what DC editorial decided that was fucked. We had to deal with her existence being erased due to a reboot that still somehow kept Damian around in spite of him debuting after her.

Every DC animated movie that released recently mentions or has Damian Wayne or one even fucking had David Zavimbe. They even had a telltale series star Tiffany Fox. They had a fucking Batman Ninja movie star with almost every Batfam member but the one East Asian member who most embodies a ninja was not in it. But absolutely no mention of Cassandra Cain. Arkham makes a game featuring her mother and her ties to the League Assassins, Oracle being paralyzed and in a wheel chair, hints of No Man’s Land having happened in Gotham, yet Cass is nowhere to be seen or even hinted at. In fact, the next game is rumored to have fucking Damian Wayne as Batman’s heir. But no fucking mention of Cass.

Cassandra Cain has the longest running solo series of all characters of color and is second only to Shang-Chi. And has only appeared in 2 things and is barely known in Batman circles. So that’s why we are particularly frustrated with Birds of Prey, and are even more annoyed with people calling her a submissive mute Asian girl. Because we heard this before, it was ableist and racist then and it’s ableist and racist now. It also shows that you don’t know the character and are basing her disability as a reason why she is such. Because Cass may have trouble communicating vocally, but she isn’t quiet.

Enough said.

@ubernegro

[ao3-spideypool]

Over The Mountain My Heart Will Be Laid To Rest

read it on the AO3 at https://ift.tt/2p4UqT9

by Leopardtail

Kidnapped during the raids on The Kingdom Of Deminion by The Stark Republic when he was 8, Peter has lived only knowing survival. With only scant memories of his mother, her stories, and his true name he walks through his life struggling to understand himself and his purpose. As a medic in the labor camp, he is doing better than most every other tiefling captured during the raids, but slightly less suffering does not make a just situation.

When a feral demon is brought in from the Capital, Peter's life and world are taken from a formula of survival he understands to one which he can barely stand without falling. Scared for not only himself but the unstable but charming assassin he now finds himself hitched too he looks to the mountains. The land he came from and wished to know all his life. The question is, will he live long enough to see it?

Words: 4653, Chapters: 1/?, Language: English

Fandoms: Marvel, Spider-Man - All Media Types, Deadpool - All Media Types

Rating: Mature

Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings

Categories: M/M

Characters: Peter Parker, May Parker (Spider-Man), Wade Wilson

Relationships: Peter Parker/Wade Wilson

Additional Tags: Demons, Fantasy, Politics, kinda sorta, Mentions of sexual slavery, labor camps, (aka slavery), Fantasy Racism, prisoners of war, Kidnapping, Dehumanization, dehumanization of sentient creatures, that one isn't too intense so far but I thought I'd include it, Alternate Universe - No Powers, but kinda there is because demon magic, you can tell I dm for dungeons and dragons in this fic because of my excessive monster knowledge, some dnd monsters are included but its mainly just tieflings, Tieflings, War, Sorry if you like Tony Stark because he is a grade A bastard in this, Demon!Wade Wilson, Tiefling!Peter Parker, Excessive amounts of lore, This is really self indulgent so if there is some OOC moments I apologize in advance, Discrimination, Feral Behavior, Wade Wilson Needs A Hug, Peter Parker Needs a Hug, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Fantasy religion themes, Canon-Typical Violence

read it on the AO3 at https://ift.tt/2p4UqT9

[weightlessribbons]

The politics of RWBY and its faunus subplot

I love RWBY but every time I think about its politics it gives me a goddamn migraine

disgustingly long post below

So the main conflict of the story is the mostly apolitical struggle against the Grimm, and the largest subplot is the WF arc and the theme of anti-faunus racism

But the show has nearly nothing to say on the subject. Its message is almost utterly vacant.

We have Blake at the start of the show disillusioned with the only civil rights organization in existence, which is also a genocidal terrorist operation (🤔🤔🤔), and is left directionless and without a real idea of what to do.[1] Oobleck asks her how her being a huntress will solve the racism thing and she can't answer him. Okay, that's something: we could have a character arc about her finding direction and deciding to Do Something to Solve Racism.

But when she gives her speech at the end of the WF arc, in Menagerie like four volumes later, she still doesn't know what to do about racism! She scarcely mentions racism at all; all she says with any conviction is that the faunus population in general fails to denounce Adam’s WF. It reminds me of similar rhetoric with regard to Muslims in the US: if you're not loud enough in your denunciations, it's your own fault if people lump you in with the terrorists. Never mind that such demands are never made in good faith and minorities are lumped in with the terrorists anyway. If you're being discriminated against, it's your fault for not being a good enough citizen, and if you were just of better moral character you wouldn't be marginalized. That's all in the way of a plan Blake offers: just be a good person, and the humans will give you your rights!

So that's the message: racism is bad. Also, murdering innocent civilians is bad. Be a good person.

So what does "being a good person" mean?

Well, we can guess. A theme prominent here is forgiveness: Blake forgives Ilia. Implicit: the faunus should forgive the humans.[2]

That's it: forgiveness. Not, you know, any sort of political organization, or any sort of demands for justice, or any overthrow or even reform of corrupt institutions. Just keep playing the game and things will get better. Also, be willing to risk your life for others, and for the unity of the Society, even if they hate you. It’s not fair, but it’s the only way things get better.[3][4]

But is it, really?

We see a similar theme earlier, in V3. At the end of the volume we have narration by Salem to the effect of "unity" and "trust" being the greatest strengths of humanity. The obvious reading is, then, that unity and trust are Good. The Best, in fact. But what does that mean, exactly?

Cinder's monologue gives us an idea. According to her, the people have placed too much faith in their public institutions. Their "guardians" are authoritarian, secretive, and fallible.

There it is, then. The text is clear: distrust of powerful public institutions only helps the forces of evil.[5] (Also, the only people expressing such distrust are foreign chaos agents bent on destroying our freedoms.)

If "you should trust the authorities” seems to contradict the racism theme mentioned earlier, it actually doesn't. Racism in RWBY is never portrayed as an institutional or systemic issue; it's usually called "hatred". This allows for the text to acknowledge racism as an important issue that is a problem of character, rather than of power[6], and therefore attempts to address it should not destabilize existing power structures. 

It’s no surprise, then, that racism, an ostensibly major theme, receives such scant attention. There's Weiss being racist, and Cardin being racist, the two things that receive more than a couple of lines on the topic. There's Blake's WF exposition that actually says very little about racism at all. There's a blink-and-you-miss-it "No Faunus" sign in a Mistral bar. There's Menagerie, some kind of faunus reservation, the nature of which is so vague it’s hard to say anything at all about it[7]. We get little attention to of (say) hiring or housing discrimination, or any other systemic racism; these are issues entirely foreign to the elite paramilitary children with whom the narrative is most concerned[8]. Again, racism presented as a character flaw, rather than a systemic issue of unjust power dynamics.

You can tell what a narrative cares about by what it emphasizes. The racism theme in the Vale arc is chiefly flavor for the hordes of faceless WF goons; the text doesn’t say anything worthwhile about racism itself. In the Mistral/Menagerie arc, the narrative is not about overcoming racism but about the recuperation of marginalized communities into the existing power structure in the name of unity and forgiveness.

What is lacking, I think, is any substantive or satisfying notion of justice. The text doesn’t give us any answer as to what should be done about racism, other than Be a Good Person, and that’s because racial justice simply isn’t that important to the narrative. Before solving a problem you must name it, and the text doesn’t. We have an entire racism/terrorism arc that manages to say nearly nothing on racism at all, because, as Blake says, the answer to the question of justice is complicated, and the text just doesn’t have the time.

[1]One funny thing to look at is Blake’s expository monologue to Sun in V1 about how the WF “turned dark”. The WF performed “organized attacks” by vandalizing discriminatory businesses and expropriating goods from corporations using “faunus labor”(does this mean slavery? or employees? that would be weird). It’s strange that these would be the things that forced her to leave; property crimes aren’t really a big deal compared to the killing of civilians depicted in the black trailer, which she for some reason doesn’t bring up. She says that it was working, and that human fear brought equality, but that such equality was bad since it wasn’t out of respect (and therefore would be fleeting). This is incredible in two ways. First: a government and populace that actually feared the WF would not bring equality, but rapid extermination (of the WF, that is). Fear doesn’t actually help unless you have power, and the WF seem to have no base of material or popular support and no praxis except insurrectionist violence[A]. Second: if it were somehow actually working, then why did Blake leave? What was the purpose of all this action, if not to attain power by making yourself a credible threat? Did you become a liberal out of nowhere? That she talks about property crime and “fear” instead of the killing of civilians is baffling. 

[2]Yes, I know that Blake wants them to specifically go to Haven and physically stop the WF. Yes, stopping a terrorist attack is good, even if these civilians aren't at all fit for purpose. But this doesn't itself help to stop racism, which is why I didn't mention it specifically above.

[3]This mirrors the confrontation between Yang and Raven wrt Salem and the relic.

[4]We do learn later that Blake wants a “new” WF. This means, presumably, that the WF will go back to peaceful protest. But that doesn’t come up in her speech, and no mention, of course, of how it would help them in achieving their goals, or even what those goals are, specifically, other than ending “hatred” in general. March to End Racism. What a visionary.

[5]Also, distrust, anger, and other “negative emotions” attract the Grimm. That’s like metaphysical tone policing right there.

[6]There’s backstory of faunus having been enslaved which would count as systemic racism, but it doesn’t come up later or really affect anything on-screen, and the text doesn’t portray it at enough length or depth to characterize it as such.

[7]Menagerie being crappy must be understood within a wider context: why live in Menagerie, if it sucks, instead of where everyone else lives? Not much attention given to why this happens (other than perhaps “individuals are racist”). And does Menagerie being crappy actually have any consequences? Like economically, or socially? We don’t see them.

[8]The times where it seems the text might make a systemic critique are Adam’s backstory and Atlas in general.  Adam’s trauma isn’t really remarked upon; he’s not a sympathetic figure.  We don’t know much about Atlas since that’s for next season, but limiting your systemic critique to the one racist place seems a bad way to do things. We’ll have to see how it goes.

[A] Also, it’s not clear when the WF moved from “property crime” to “kill all humans”(which is comically over-the-top), and no one remarks on it. It gives one the sense that the narrative sees property crime and genocide as equally objectionable.

[ADDENDUM] Some might object by way of noting that RWBY hasn’t taken us to Atlas yet, where the racism lives, and that the WF arc wasn’t primarily about racism, but terrorism, so one shouldn’t expect the theme of racism to be addressed before Atlas. The problem is, though, that the WF was ostensibly founded as a civil rights organization; you cannot meaningfully conclude an arc on the WF without addressing racism. For example, at the end of V5 says that she wants to build a “new” WF. What does this mean? We never find out, because it’s not that important.

[blackishmirror-blog]

Nosey Neighbors - now in app form!

Ring is one of many companies that are part of the ongoing rise of cyber surveillance.  Its technology has become incredibly popular in suburban neighborhoods, and company executives point to its affordability and inclusivity as the reason for its popularity. However, it can be argued that Ring is an extension of the neighborhood watch program, which accounts for its popularity - and controversy. There are concerns that this technology infringes on personal privacy and encourages racial profiling, which would magnify the issues of police brutality and federal interference.  This technology has seamlessly spread throughout the United States and has been almost universally lauded for its social, streamlined approach to reducing crime rates, however, its existence also magnifies the racist relationship between people of color and the justice system; it can be argued that by crowdsourcing police work, Ring is enabling racial profiling and increasing potential for police brutality incidents.

Ring’s mission is to “reduce crime in neighborhoods by creating a Ring of Security around homes and communities with a suite of home security products”. Their social media platform, Neighbors, came about from the social media distribution of Ring videos, and was created in September 2017. With Neighbors and their home security line, Ring is able to offer affordable and proactive security for the home and neighborhood. In-house studies indicate that one Los Angeles neighborhood saw a 55 percent decrease in home break-ins after Ring Video Doorbells were installed in 10% of homes. Additionally, in an interview with CNET, Ring executives pointed to the spike in activity on the Neighbors app when the Hill Fire and Woolsey fire hit Southern California in November 2017, where post and comment volume surged over 1000 percent in the affected areas. They stated that Neighbors hosted video for “30,000, if you will, camera reporters in the field able to report things were where they were”. As of April 12th, 2018, Ring has been acquired by Amazon which strongly indicates further expansion and development of Ring products. As of the press release, with the assistance of Amazon, Ring doorbell has been discounted at $99.99. Ring had also already been an investment of the Alexa Fund, which allowed for Ring video feeds to be viewed through Echo Show and Fire TV. However, the most impactful takeaway from this collaboration is that Ring is only one part of a suite of home security devices acquired by Amazon, all of which will be able to exchange unprecedented amounts of personal data with other smart home appliances.

 Ring first came out with a home security line, which includes its trademark video doorbell, spotlight cams, floodlight cams, and accessories. In September 2017, Ring launched  Neighbors, an app and social media platform, that allows people to share, view, and comment on crime and security information in their communities.The app has over a million active users, and has quickly become one of the biggest aggregators of crime and safety data. 23 percent of information shared is suspicious behavior, 20 percent is alleged crimes, and 15 percent is safety issues. In response to Medium’s argument regarding the correlation between surveillance and profiling, Ring stated that Neighbors has strict community guidelines that are enforced and flagged by moderators. The vast majority of Neighbors posts meet guidelines, and those that are not are quickly dealt with. Neighbors is intended to facilitate real time communication between communities and law enforcement. This feature of Neighbors moderation was also mentioned in CNET’s review of the app.

Neighbors is one of many surveillance technologies  meant to replace neighborhood watch programs. However, no one is sure that those programs even work. They have mixed results - some see no results, some see less crime and some see more. The origin of neighborhood watch can be attributed to Kitty Genovese's murder in 1964. Her public, gruesome attempted rape and murder was alleged to be viewed by 37 of Genovese’s neighbors. The report on her case led to widespread disdain and fury for the phenomenon of “bystander apathy”. Decades later, the NYT article that detailed this phenomenon had exaggerated many key details, but the impact had already been made. Several volunteer groups arose in the 1970s to serve as quasi-law enforcement. Casual surveillance groups to official neighborhood watch outposts became active during this time. These groups arose due a controversial study that indicated that cracking down on smaller scale crime can prevent more serious crime. Through the 80s and 90s, police and community support kept neighborhood watch alive while actual research was scant and unpersuasive.CCTV  grew in conjunction with neighborhood watch. CCTV allowed cops to magnify surveillance by feeding video from several cameras to a bank of monitors. The promotion of funny clips from surveillance footage to America’s Funniest Home Videos mirrors the promotion of funny Ring videos. As surveillance continued to develop, people of color were arrested in disproportionate numbers for longer and longer sentences. Those underrepresented groups, typically of Black-American or Hispanic descent, extended to the Middle-Eastern community after 9/11. Past and present forms of neighborhood watch programs are shown violate civil rights and encourage racial profiling, and technology can only make it worse.

To learn more about the layman’s review, I looked to Reddit, a website that has been harshly criticized by progressive media for being racist, sexist, and at times abusive, but has also risen among the ranks as a social network yet the same. The videos posted to their /top page have been filtered both through Ring’s and Reddit’s algorithms reflecting the most lighthearted, generic content on the video feeds among the most passionate fans. Of the top 10 videos, 5 feature criminal activity, and upon a brief quantitative study of the top comments of each of those videos, I did not notice a significant amount of vulgar/bullying language, but upon further analysis I saw two patterns: the strong impetus to report incidents to law enforcement and the condemnation of the assailants. The existence of this community reflects Ring’s popularity, but its content only supports the arguments of Ring’s opponents.

Various new outlets have condemned Ring for its promotion of recreational surveillance and the consequences associated with it. A contributor for Medium OneZero, Bea Bischoff,  believes that Ring contributes to the difficult relationship between surveillance and racism. Modern surveillance technologies demonstrated the integral relationship between surveillance technology and racism. In 2011, Nextdoor handled rampant racial profiling by setting of systems to exclude primarily racial content. Despite the controversy and confusion about the necessity of peer-to-peer policing, Canary and SimpliSafe  followed in Nextdoor’s footsteps, and have had enormous financial success . Ring has developed a cult following around videos produced by its doorbell. However, the success of these technologies are a record of the abuses that arise from unlimited surveillance. The online neighborhood watch is a still a neighborhood watch, where neighborhood watch encourages racial profiling, violating civil rights, and infringing on civilian privacy. Caroline Haskins from Motherboard (a publication within the Vice network), explicitly argues why Ring’s protocol is insufficient in today’s alarmist and racist climate. Ring’s executives relish in the resurgence of the neighborhood watch, Chris Gillard, a tech policy expert, argues that black individuals in predominantly white neighborhoods (where neighborhood watches are particularly attractive) are already classified as foreign or suspicious and would be prime targets on the app. Motherboard’s own qualitative analysis of 100+ reports in the Williamsburg area area supported Gillard’s expert opinion, and also revealed the prevalence of bullying  and abusive language, which goes against Neighbors’ guidelines. There is a strong social impetus to report crimes to law enforcement by Neighbors’ user base. Shahid Buttar, the Director of Grassroots Advocacy for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, indicates the potential lethality of that kind of community. In response to Ring’s intention to develop facial recognition technologies in partnership with Amazon, Haskins pointed to the inaccuracies of Amazon’s Rekognition technology, particularly with black individuals. In illustrating the negative implications of this technology with scientific data and expert testimony, these media outlets have provided a comprehensive and convincing takedown.

From both a sociological and technological standpoint, Ring has not proven to be an ethical technology. While they consider safety and risk with regards to their physical products   and social media platform, the current implementation of both components of the technology do not satisfy basic ethical standards due to laissez-faire, socially inconsiderate leadership that does not have their user base best interests at heart. As a person of color, I feel threatened and uneasy by this technology. As a engineer and sociological expert in this technology, I believe that strict limitations must be set on the kinds of reports make by users and the amount of data collected. Ring needs to restructure their regulations and reconsider their business decisions before expanding further.

[turkiyeecom]

How Police Brutality Can Function as Terrorism

Photo: @megoconnor13/twitter Video was made public over the weekend showing Phoenix police officers threatening to shoot members of a black family, which included a child and a toddler. The incident occurred on May 27, when the 4-year-old daughter of Dravon Ames and Iesha Harper allegedly stole a doll from a Family Dollar store. (NPR reports that the child’s parents were unaware of the alleged theft.) Officers followed the family — Ames and Harper, who was pregnant, and their two daughters, ages 4 and 1 — to an apartment complex where the family’s babysitter lived. Officers are seen on cell-phone video shouting at the four to exit their vehicle. One is heard yelling, “Get your fucking hands up” and “I’m gonna put a fucking cap in you,” while another voice — perhaps of the same officer — is heard threatening, “You’re gonna get fucking shot.” The profane tirades turn physical when one officer handcuffs Ames and another tries to yank the toddler from Harper’s arms. The officer with Ames shoves the 22-year-old father against a police vehicle, kicks his legs until Ames falls to one knee, and thrusts his elbow into Ames’s back. The officer with Harper is seen shouting and pointing in her face and pulling on the arm in which she is carrying her 1-year-old baby. He eventually permits the pregnant woman to hand her children to a bystander before arresting her. None of the family members is armed. The confrontation has prompted a $10 million civil-rights lawsuit and apologies from Phoenix’s mayor and chief of police. According to the suit, the 1-year-old was injured when the officer tried to wrench her from her mother; the 4-year-old has been experiencing nightmares and wetting the bed out of distress ever since. As far as accountability, Mayor Kate Gallego has scheduled a public forum where residents can voice their concerns about the incident and called for quicker implementation of body cameras across the Phoenix Police Department — an odd solution given that visual evidence was not lacking here. Aside from that, it is possible that no further legal or administrative recourse will be forthcoming. Officers routinely skate for killing people. Why would black Phoenicians expect them to be held accountable for merely threatening to kill? Official accountability aside, the fear and mistrust sown in black communities via such incidents and the resulting mental-health downsides are well documented. The Phoenix debacle is further evidence that many officers’ interactions with black children in particular are rooted in intimidation and violence, with far-reaching side effects. By most definitions, the brutality applied disproportionately against black people by police across the United States is not “terrorism,” in a technical sense, only because it is permitted by law. That said, it serves a similar end: ensuring that its targets and their communities live in a state of constant stress, mistrust, and fear, practically from the cradle to the grave. By most measures, Ames and Harper are lucky to be alive. The wealth of instances where similar interactions have ended with an unarmed black person dead at the hands of police hints at how easily the encounter could have turned fatal. The fear generated by this possibility is not a matter of probability. Like most Americans, black people are more likely to die from heart disease, cancer, or even violence committed domestically or on the streets than at the hands of a police officer. But the peculiar nature of law enforcement’s relationship to black communities is what makes it so laden with fear. With the exception of Native Americans — who make up a much smaller share of the general population — black people are the most likely racial demographic to be harassed, brutalized, or killed by police in a given year. This can be attributed in part to the relationship’s long-standing function: During the lynching era — roughly the end of Reconstruction to the end of Jim Crow — the primary job of law enforcement, when it came to black Americans, was to contain them at the bottom of the racial hierarchy by enforcing laws designed to criminalize them, while ensuring that white people were not punished for murdering them or robbing them of their land and labor. When black people fled the South en masse during the Great Migration to escape this treatment, the cities and towns to which they fled in the North, West, and Midwest greeted them with a presumption of innate criminality, a presumption driven in part by crime statistics that reflected the extent to which the most trivial aspects of their lives — including riding an empty freight train or “speaking loudly in the presence of white women” — had been transformed into crimes in the South. Police were used to corral new black residents into ghettos depressed by poverty and molded by desperation and limited avenues for mobility. Yet remarkably, the structural ills that were imposed on the black sections of these municipalities were cast as products of their residents’ own pathologies. To this day, many Americans remain convinced that the harsh policing that dogs black communities is a necessary response to something inherently wrong with black people. For those on the receiving end, the result is a state of terror. Terrorism works by convincing its targets that they are always being hunted — no matter where they are or what they are doing, their lives are out of their hands. Its aim is victory through fear. And what better way to ensure that people live in fear than to demonstrate that even the most minor transgressions — a 4-year-old’s supposed theft of a doll from a Family Dollar store — can result in their public execution? And, perhaps as troubling, that nobody will be held accountable for said execution because it is an expression of the public will? The psychological fallout is demonstrated in the data: According to a 2014 study conducted by public-health researchers at Harvard and Boston University, incidents of lethal police violence precipitate a spike in what black adult respondents consider to be “poor mental health days” not just among people close to those victimized but their communities more broadly, judging by metrics established by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The impact is racially asymmetrical: “Mental health impacts were not observed among white respondents and resulted only from police killings of unarmed black Americans,” the study reads. For black children, such negative interactions can be formative. A 2018 survey of research on the subject compiled in The Future of Children, a journal of the policy-research partnership between Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the Brookings Institution, found that many black youth in Chicago view police as “a constant, inescapable, and unwelcome presence” in their lives. Interactions are marked frequently by officers exerting their dominance in the form of offensive questions and degrading directives, causing black children to feel powerless. As a result, by the time they turn 18, many of these youth have a bleak but well-earned outlook on policing: According to a 2014 survey by the Black Youth Project and the University of Chicago’s Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture, more than half of black people between ages 18 and 34 have experienced police violence or harassment or know someone who has. (Thirty-three percent of white respondents and 25 percent of Latino respondents had.) Fewer than half of black respondents said they trust the police, compared to 60 percent of Latinos and 72 percent of whites. It remains incredible, given this documented mistreatment of so many black children by the police, that pundits and politicians continue to attribute negative disparities to some innate black defect — often located in the black family. Broken black homes are blamed for crime in black communities, with scant or ancillary mention of imposed poverty, the ills of segregation, or the role the state plays in rupturing said families using the criminal-justice system. Police violence is dismissed as subordinate to intraracial violence, or “black-on-black” crime — a phenomenon endemic, to varying degrees, within every racial group — as if the two were separate and distinct phenomena rather than twin products of racist policy. If these pundits are correct, then the May 27 incident in Phoenix might be cast as reasonable treatment for a 4-year-old alleged shoplifter, her pregnant mother, father, and 1-year-old sister. But if — as history and the evidence suggest — black families can more accurately be described as victims of violence than its root cause, then the Phoenix police, buoyed by the public will, were culpable in not just an overreaction but an act of terror. How Police Brutality Can Function as Terrorism 22 mins ago Trump the peacenik Facing twin challenges in the Persian Gulf, President Donald Trump said in an interview with TIME Monday that he might take military action to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, but cast doubt on going to war to protect international oil supplies.“I would certainly go over nuclear weapons,” the president said when asked what moves would lead him to consider going to war with Iran, “and I would keep the other a question mark.”Just hours earlier, Iran announced an escalation of its nuclear program, saying that within 10 days it will breach the limit on its stockpile of enriched uranium that was set under a 2015 nuclear deal with world powers.Last week, U.S. officials blamed Iran for attacks against Norwegian and Japanese oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman. Trump described those and other recent attacks attributed by administration officials to Iran as limited. “So far, it’s been very minor,” Trump told TIME. racism How Police Brutality Can Function as Terrorism By Zak Cheney-Rice These incidents, like Phoenix cops drawing guns on a young family, have psychological effects that mirror living under the threat of terrorism. 7:59 a.m. What kid is going to vape if they know it’ll keep them out of the National Honor Society?! So one small Nebraska school district is trying an aggressive new approach: Forcing students in grades seven through 12 to submit to random nicotine testing if they want to take part in extracurricular activities such as speech competitions and the National Honor Society.… Though teenagers and privacy-rights advocates might find it extreme, the new policy is legal thanks to a 2002 U.S. Supreme Court decision that upheld an Oklahoma school district’s policy of randomly drug testing students who participate in “competitive” extracurricular activities ranging from cheerleading to choir. In 1997, the Supreme Court had determined that testing high school athletes for illegal drugs was constitutional.Fairbury Junior-Senior High School, where roughly 60 percent of the 387 students participate in after-school activities, has had a random drug-testing system for two years. Students and their parents are required to sign a consent form agreeing to the urinalysis tests, which are randomly assigned to 10 percent of the students in extracurriculars each month, the Journal Star reported. 7:52 a.m. Reinstating Obama’s environmental policies? Raising the minimum wage for federal contractors? Let’s not get too ambitious here Sen. Amy Klobuchar wants to reenter the Climate Paris Accords, raise the minimum wage for federal contractors to $15 and require publicly traded companies to disclose all political spending over $10,000 to their shareholders — and that’s just three out of 137 ideas she wants to put forward in her first 100 days as president.On Tuesday, the Democratic presidential candidate released an exhaustive list of policy prescriptions — more than 137 bullet points, extending over 17 single-spaced pages — that she would prioritize in the first months of her administration. Klobuchar’s plans run from extending veterans’ benefits to their newborn babies to restoring the Clean Power Plan, a set of Obama-era environmental protections. 7:36 a.m. Steve Bullock doesn’t need the Democrats’ stinking debate. His campaign has town halls and unexpected profanity Gov. Steve Bullock of Montana, after failing to qualify for the first Democratic presidential debates, announced on Tuesday morning that he would be participating in locally televised town halls in Iowa and New Hampshire on the days of the dueling events next week.Bullock will appear June 26 on Iowa’s WHO-TV with Dave Price, and June 27 on New Hampshire’s WMUR with Adam Sexton. The appearances will be televised ahead of the debates in Miami rather than concurrently.Bullock and his campaign have been hustling to turn his debate-outcast status into an advantage, with a round of free media coverage prompted by his willingness to attack the Democratic National Committee for its rules on polling and donor thresholds.“DNC is saying Governor Bullock doesn’t qualify for the debates. That’s horses**t,” one Montana voter said in a campaign web ad released last Friday. 7:20 a.m. New York narrowly passes law that gives undocumented driver’s licenses The New York State Senate approved a bill on Monday to grant driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants, a deeply polarizing issue that had splintered Democrats and stirred a backlash among Republicans in New York and beyond, who have already vowed to highlight it during next year’s elections.The vote, together with the Assembly’s passage last week, thrust New York into the center of the explosive national debate over immigration. It would reverse a nearly 20-year-old ban and end years of political paralysis on the issue.It also signaled the strength of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, which for months had pressed moderate legislators to support the bill despite concerns about alienating swing voters, especially among first-term Democrats who flipped seats on Long Island and helped their party win a majority last year. mueller report This Summer’s Hot Beach Read: The Mueller Report By Mark Walsh With more than 300,000 copies sold, the damning document is a certified publishing sensation. migrant crisis Trump Announces ‘Removal’ of ‘Millions of Illegal Aliens’ Starting Next Week By Matt Stieb Trump announced by tweet that ICE will begin removing “millions of illegal aliens,” surprising officials who didn’t know he would broadcast the plan. 6/17/2019 As of April, Bernie Sanders was leading Democrats with $20,688,027 Per pool report from Biden’s NYC fundraiser tonight, Biden told donors his campaign had 360,000 donors with an average contribution of $55. If correct, that math comes out to about $19.8 million since he joined the race on April 25. pic.twitter.com/0vxhsGd3Z1 —@myhlee politics Mitch McConnell Calls Statehood for D.C. and Puerto Rico ‘Full-Bore Socialism’ By Matt Stieb The quote is certainly consistent with Mitch McConnell’s block-anything-blue legacy, but not all Republicans agree with their leader in the Senate. 6/17/2019intelligencer chats intelligencer chats How Worried Should We Be About Escalation With Iran? By Benjamin Hart and Heather Hurlburt Intelligencer staffers discuss whether tit-for-tat provocations between the two countries will lead to something much scarier. 6/17/2019presidential pardons presidential pardons Supreme Court Won’t Stop States From Prosecuting Federal Defendants By Ed Kilgore By leaving an exception to double-jeopardy rules in place, the Court did not make it easier for Trump to keep people out of jail via pardons. 6/17/2019past is prologue past is prologue How the 1969 Mayoral Primary Changed New York City Politics By Ed Kilgore Liberal icons in both the Republican and Democratic primaries both lost to conservatives, leading to a sea change in party politics. 6/17/2019 There was a shooting at the Raptors’ victory celebration in Toronto SHOOTING: Nathan Phillip’s Square-Bay St and Albert St-Police have located 2 victims-Injuries serious but not life threatening-2 people in custody-2 firearms recovered-Investigating^dh —@TPSOperations 6/17/2019 A reminder that many of the presidential contenders also have day-to-day jobs to do News: Pete Buttigieg will no longer travel to CA for a series of big fundraisers on Tuesday & Wednesday in order to handle the fallout from an officer involved shooting that happened in South Bend early on Sunday morning, a spox for the campaign tells CNN w/ @vyurkevich & @DJJudd —@merica education West Virginia Republicans Are Still Trying to Punish Striking Teachers By Sarah Jones West Virginia teachers demonstrated again on Monday as GOP lawmakers pushed school choice and penalties for striking teachers after recent walkouts. the tweet beat Elon Musk Has Deleted His Twitter Account, According to … His Tweets By Madison Malone Kircher Uh, buddy. 6/17/2019 BuzzFeed workers put pressure on management to recognize union BuzzFeed News employees on Monday afternoon staged a walkout in an attempt to pressure the company to recognize their union.Approximately 115 to 125 employees were expected to participate in the demonstration, a representative for the NewsGuild of New York, which represents the staffers, told CNN Business.The walkout took place at all four of BuzzFeed News’ US bureaus in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington, DC, the NewsGuild of New York said in its press release. 6/17/2019 Incredible and frightening image of the man who was killed in a shootout with police in Dallas today donald trump All the Weird New Details About Trump’s Infamous Escalator Ride By Adam K. Raymond Four years later, Trump’s campaign launch sounds even stranger. But at least Michael Cohen’s call for elephants and bikini-clad women was scrapped. gerrymandering Supreme Court Dashes Virginia GOP’s Hopes for New Map in Racial Gerrymander Case By Ed Kilgore An unusual 5-4 majority held that Virginia’s GOP legislature did not have standing to sue to overturn a gerrymandering decision that helped Democrats. 6/17/2019 Dallas gunman appears to have trafficked in right-wing conspiracies In a post from a day before the attempted shooting, Clyde posted a picture of a sword, saying that he was a “gladius” about to “defend the modern Republic.” His last post before the shooting featured a picture of his bare legs.Clyde’s Facebook page is otherwise filled with vague warnings of an upcoming attack, conspiracy theories about the U.S. government, memes from far-right internet subcultures like 4chan, and misogynist memes.In a video posted June 9, he warned that “the storm is coming,” a phrase frequently used by anti-government internet conspiracy theorists, and said he didn’t know how much time he had left. The video ends with Clyde saying he’s “ready,” and holding up a long gun.References to incels, or the “involuntary celibate” internet community that is prominent on extreme misogynist message boards, are frequently posted in memes on Clyde’s page. 6/17/2019 Tragedy averted A man in a mask, combat gear and glasses who opened fire Monday morning at the Earle Cabell federal courthouse in downtown Dallas was shot and killed by officers before he could injure anyone.FBI Special Agent in Charge Matthew DeSarno identified the shooter as Brian Isaack Clyde, 22 at a news conference on a street corner outside the federal building. 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[pnwdoodlesreads]

The year-long 50th-birthday party for this pioneering suburb on Long Island is winding down. The parade drew 5,000 marchers. Crowds came for candlelight church services, an antique-car show, exhibits, seminars and tours of the fabled Levitt houses that started it all.

There were even Potato Day festivities honoring the flat farmland here where Levitt & Sons began mass-producing single-family tract homes in 1947, heralding the wave of migration from cities that lasted for decades.

But not everyone touched by the Levittown experience has been celebrating.

''The anniversary leaves me cold,'' said Eugene Burnett, who was among thousands of military veterans who lined up for their green patch of the American dream here after World War II. But he was turned away because he is black. ''It's symbolic of segregation in America,'' he said. ''That's the legacy of Levittown.

''When I hear 'Levittown,' what rings in my mind is when the salesman said: 'It's not me, you see, but the owners of this development have not as yet decided whether they're going to sell these homes to Negroes,' '' Mr. Burnett, now a retired Suffolk County police sergeant, recalled. He said he still stings from ''the feeling of rejection on that long ride back to Harlem.''

The salesman was not honest with Mr. Burnett. Blacks and other minorities had no chance of getting in, because Levitt had decided from the start to admit only whites.

Housing denied

Delano Stewart, editor of The Point of View, a Long Island biweekly on black affairs, said of Levittown: ''It's something we'd like to forget rather than celebrate. It's a black mark on the Island, or maybe I should say a white mark.''

The whites-only policy was not some unspoken gentlemen's agreement. It was cast in bold capital letters in clause 25 of the standard lease for the first Levitt houses, which included an option to buy.

It stated that the home could not ''be used or occupied by any person other than members of the Caucasian race.''

That clause was dropped in 1948 after the United States Supreme Court, ruling on another case, declared such restrictions to be ''unenforceable as law and contrary to public policy.''

Ignoring the law of the land, however, Levitt continued adhering to its racial bar. Levittown quickly filled up with young white families. Minority residents trickled in during the 1950's, but the pattern was set.

Today Levittown has changed, but only a little. While the community has more minority residents than ever, it remains overwhelmingly white -- 97.37 percent in the 1990 census.

''It's certainly not a melting pot, but it is a community in transition,'' said James A. Edmondson, the chief executive of the Yours, Ours, Mine Community Center in Levittown, who is black. ''Ethnically it's changing every day, and in 25 years it won't look like it does today.''

Although blacks account for 8 percent of Long Island's population, they are scarce here. Of Levittown's 53,286 residents in 1990, there were  51,883 whites, 2,184 Hispanic people, 950 Asians and Pacific Islanders, 137 blacks (0.26 percent), 31 American Indians and Aleuts and 285 ''other.''

Most blacks intent on moving to Long Island ended up in the few ''open housing'' communities, which became predominantly minority pockets. ''We didn't have many other choices,'' said Mr. Burnett, who lives in Wyandanch, in Suffolk County.

As a result, ''Nassau County is the most segregated suburban county in the United States,'' said Dr. Andrew A. Beveridge, a sociology professor at Queens College. He based that view on a computer study of national census data, in which he calculated what portion of the population of each county would have to move to achieve racial integration.

Living by Rules They Did Not Make

Whenever historians, planners and sociologists plumb the lessons of Levittown, race always looms. The debate is not simple or comfortable, especially for people here. Early Levittowners moved here under rules favoring them that they did not make. Later arrivals inherited a history that they did not create.

''There is a sensitivity to it, because the community has for many years tried to overcome that image,'' said Louise Cassano, a co-chairwoman of the Levittown 50th-Anniversary Committee and a resident since 1951. ''There was that lingering prejudice,'' she said, ''but I think we've come a long way.''

At the outset, some whites here fought racism, forming the Committee to End Discrimination in Levittown. There were protests and a leaflet against ''Jim Crowism,'' Mrs. Cassano said. ''Some people moved in very unaware of the Caucasian clause and were disturbed when they found out,'' she said.

In the second Levittown, near Philadelphia, angry white mobs threw rocks in 1957 to protest the prospect of blacks moving in. In the response back here, the Levittown Democratic Club, Jewish War Veterans and a Protestant minister all spoke up for open housing.

But this Levittown has had its share of bigots. The Levittown Historical Society's president, Polly Dwyer, recalled one incident: ''An Asian family moved in, and some people moved out because of them. It's so silly. They were good, quiet, decent people.''

A Hofstra University political science professor, Dr. Herbert D. Rosenbaum, who lived here from 1953 to 1965, said: ''In those years, even liberal people like ourselves tended to take residential segregation for granted, without approving it. None of us went out into the street to change it.''

Levittown's history seems especially jarring, experts say, because the community was founded as segregation was beginning to crumble. While the first Levitt houses were being built, Jackie Robinson was breaking the color barrier in baseball. A year later, President Harry S. Truman integrated the military.

Hopes Dissipated For Black Americans

Another paradox was that although Levittown was built for World War II veterans, who had fought tyranny and racism, its doors were opened to at least one former German U-boat sailor, while black American soldiers were turned away.

The role of the developer, the late William J. Levitt, is debated. He defended his actions as following the  social customs of the era.

''The Negroes in America are trying to do in 400 years what the Jews in the world have not wholly accomplished in 600 years,'' he once wrote. ''As a Jew, I have no room in my mind or heart for racial prejudice. But I have come to know that if we sell one house to a Negro family, then 90 or 95 percent of our white customers will not buy into the community. This is their attitude, not ours. As a company, our position is simply this: We can solve a housing problem, or we can try to solve a racial problem, but we cannot combine the two.''

Indeed, the official Federal Housing Administration policy back then called for ''suitable restrictive covenants'' to avoid ''inharmonious racial or nationality groups'' in housing.

''To paint Levitt as a villain would be unfair: the whole system was villainous,'' said Dr. Herbert Gans, a Columbia University sociology professor who lived in Levittown, N.J., and wrote ''The Levittowners.'' ''Levitt strictly reflected the times,'' he said.

Dr. Kelly said, ''To single Levittown out on racial covenants, as if it weren't going on everywhere else, is unfair.''

But critics say Mr. Levitt was no passive bystander. His company branded integrationists as Communist rabble-rousers and barred them from meeting on Levittown property. It also evicted two residents who had invited black children from a neighboring community to their homes.

Building the third Levittown in New Jersey, the company openly defied that state's antibias laws and opposed a lawsuit from two blacks seeking to buy homes. Levitt capitulated to integration there in 1960, though by then much of the development was sold out.

As late as the mid-1960's, Mr. Levitt was still defending segregated housing, at that time in Maryland. And blacks were not the only targets. Although he was the grandson of a rabbi, Mr. Levitt also built housing on Long Island that excluded Jews.

Assembly-line houses

No one disputes William Levitt's visionary talent in applying assembly-line methods on a grand scale. Called the Henry Ford of housing, he spurned unions to organize an army of 15,000 workers into dozens of specialized crews, including one to apply red paint and another, white. His company made its own nails and bought forests to supply lumber.

At its peak, Levitt built 36 houses a day, each on a 60-foot-by-100-foot plot. The original Cape Cods had two bedrooms and an unfinished attic. Some models had a 12-inch Admiral television set built into the staircase. Drawn by prices of about $7,000, or monthly payments of around $60, hundreds of buyers flocked here.  When the last nail was driven in 1951, Levitt had created 17,447 homes.

But critics say that Levittown could also have been integrated, endowing suburbia and the nation with a social vision as innovative as Levitt's construction technology and marketing.

''Levittown was an opportunity tragically lost,'' said Dr. Kenneth T. Jackson, a history professor at Columbia. ''There was such a demand for houses -- they had people waiting on lines -- that even if they had said there will be some blacks living there, white people would still have moved in.''

Whatever the past concerns or prejudices, there is scant evidence of problems involving the minority residents who finally trickled in.

''First there's fear, then there's somebody who makes friends with the new family and says they're very human, they keep nice houses,'' said John A. Juliano, a real estate agent here for 32 years.

He chuckled about finding a rental for a black woman whose absent landlord did not learn her race till three years later. When the landlord found out, Mr. Juliano recalled: ''He said, 'John, she's black.' I said, 'Yeah?' He said, 'She's a terrific tenant.' If I had mentioned it at first, there might have been a problem.''

Few blacks in Levittown are eager to talk publicly. A couple who lived here for 20 years agreed to comment if their names were not printed. ''We had a problem getting in,'' said the husband. But his wife added, ''After we moved in, we didn't actually have any trouble. I never felt excluded.'' Since retiring, they have left the state, but return every year to visit their Levittown friends.

George Nager, a lawyer and longtime local activist, welcomes the growing mix of black, Hispanic and Asian Americans. ''These are mostly upward-bound, entrepreneurial people,'' he said. ''They're absolutely great neighbors. There are no rednecks here and never any cross burnings, I can tell you that, and I go back almost to the Year One here.''

The Levittown Tribune's new editor, David Mock, is black. He said that although race may lurk as an issue, he has been accepted as a professional. ''They opened up to me,'' he said of the residents. ''I don't have any problem at all; it's been an absolute pleasure.''

Mr. Edmondson, the black community center official, stood out when he started working here 28 years ago.

''I can't tell you the bad words that were scrawled on the walls,'' he recalled, and the police sometimes stopped him to ask why he was in the neighborhood. Although he never moved to Levittown, living instead in Hempstead, he became a respected community leader here.

''The black families I know here have not had a bad experience,'' he said. ''The thing is, I've watched the children. They really get along in a most fantastic way.''

''Because Levittown promised affordable housing, with no down payment, it offered hope to the African-American working class when no other community did -- but that hope was quashed,'' said Dr. Barbara M. Kelly, Hofstra University's director of Long Island Studies. ''After the war, blacks thought things had changed, but they hadn't, and Levittown became a microcosm of that frustration.''