#she owns a share of uncle Wiley toys

[thinkingabouttheimplications]

alright I’ll talk about my baby girl Lacy Berkeley. Lacy was born on may 18th 1993 in hatchetfield. She has wavy dirty blonde hair and chocolate brown eyes. Lacy had the touch of the gift as a child, Her power was basically that no one could lie to her. For example when she was eight Lacy asked her mom why she put her in daycare even though she doesn’t have a job. Her mom then said very bluntly that she was cheating on her dad with the mailman and promptly forgot that she told her. Lacy really loved the power she had and really abused it. She wanted to know everything about everyone in hatchetfield because it gave her a rush. Lacy met Miss Holloway(who went by Miss Hats at the time) when she was 12 after a practically cruel incident with her powers. Miss Holloway to help Lacy be better but ended up making it worse by the unknowingly giving her the lords of black lore and how to summon the lords in black. She pretended that Miss Holloway helped her and choose to summon Blinky as she gravitated toward him. Lacy became his disciple for more power figuratively and literally over everyone in hatchetfield. Fast forward to modern day, Lacy is owner of watcher world and most of the buildings in hatchetfield and is one of the richest people in hatchetfield. She is often seen in a light purple power suit and sunglasses. Some people swear that her eyes glow purple. Lacy is currently trying to buy CCRP out from under Charles Coven much to his dismay. (rivals with benefits) Highkey sadist. Everyone in hatchetfield loves her or hates her no in between.

anyone wanna hear about my hatchetfield ocs *crickets*

[privilegeasatoolofresistance]

On the Violent Fragility of White Men

It has been a while since I have written a piece about the most recent events in the news, but I want to try to get back into it.  Both for myself as a way to process and understand all of the news I am hearing and seeing every day, and to share my ideas with the world to hear insights from others about how these things are sitting with you.

I consider myself a pretty active news follower.  I try to read the local paper (or as much of it as I can stomach) every day, I listen to Democracy Now! and other podcasts that get more in depth with news stories from the people. I get a lot of news from the people and organizations I follow on Facebook, and I listen to public radio whenever I have the chance in the car.  Though my news sources are mostly from my own biased world, I still have a general sense of what is going on in the world most of the time.  I write this to be upfront about where I get my news from and also about what I stand for.  

The catalyzing event pushing me to write this piece is the most recent school shooting in Santa Fe, Texas.  Let me first say that I am saddened, disheartened, and frustrated to see yet another young white man go into a school and kill his classmates.  It has also recently come out that the shooter, Dimitrios Pagourtzis, was motivated to kill his classmates and others, at least in part, by the rejection of a young woman at his school.  Democracy Now! reporting quoted the mother of the woman who he attacked and killed:

“The mother of Shana Fisher, one of the victims in the art classroom where police say Dimitrios Pagourtzis entered and opened fire, told the Los Angeles Times that her 16-year-old daughter had four months of problems with this boy. “He kept making advances on her and she repeatedly told him no,” unquote. Sadie Rodriguez said her daughter recently stood up to him in class, and, quote, “a week later he opens fire on everyone he didn’t like,” she said. Rodriguez also spoke to Houston station ABC13.”

This is not the first time that a young, white man (we will get to the race part in a bit) has killed a woman who either dumped, rejected, or otherwise slighted him.  This is something that is built into the fragility of toxic masculinity.  I feel it inside of myself.  No, I don’t have a desire to go out and kill people, but I have felt a desire to blame a woman if I am somehow not desirable or not wanted.  In fact, at a much younger age, after my longtime female partner broke up with me, I tried on multiple attempts to get her to reconsider.  Thinking to myself, that she couldn’t really mean “no,” and she only needed me to convince her of that.  Sure, I could tell myself that I was in love and heartbroken and just doing anything I could.  Or I could see the reality that my fragile, masculine ego had been broken, and I could not let them happen.  Especially not as a young person (I was around 20 at the time).  

While the deeply entrenched nature of domestic violence in our country (and all across the world) is well-documented, the presence of toxic masculinity does not often get covered when talking about school shootings.  However, we see it time and time again that the young man (usually white) is out to seek either revenge or in some way, protect his pride against the horror of rejection or dismissal.  We saw it explicitly with the Isla Vista Killings in 2014, and have seen it constantly after some investigating has been done in so many other mass shootings.  The killings in Sutherland Springs, Texas were connected to domestic violence and militarism.  Earlier this year Jaelynn Wiley was killed in Maryland after rejecting a male at her school.  And in our local news, there has been coverage of the killing of a young woman in Springfield, Massachusetts with a knife after he broke up with her.  She was stabbed more than 30 times.

The reality is that these things happen all too often, and are the deadly result of boys being taught that they can literally have whatever they want, including women.  There has been a tweet going around facebook about a young boy never being told to leave girls around after they say no:

While this seems so simple, it captures so much of the violence of patriarchy and the ways in which we teach out boys the fragility that they so often internalize and eventually let out in aggressive and violent ways.  

To connect all of this to race, these cases almost always end with either the shooter being taken out in handcuffs (as was the case in Santa Fe most recently, as well as Parkland in February) or them shooting themselves to avoid arrest.  So rarely do we see them being shot down by the police or other law enforcement, we have to ask, how can that happen?  How can that happen when Stephon Clark was literally in his grandmother’s backyard and shot 20 times, including 8 times in the back?  

How can Tamir Rice, a 12-year old boy,  be shot after cops pull up and start shooting after a few seconds?  How do these white men (including Dylan Roof, who killed nine people in a CHURCH in Charleston, South Carolina) be escorted nicely from their killing sprees, while innocent black people are gunned down on the streets?  In order for this to happen our systems, including white supremacy, have done such an effective job at dehumanizing people of color, that we have more compassion for violent, white killers, than we do for black fathers and mothers going about their business.  This is also connected to the litany of instances where white people have called the cops on black people, for such benign things as waiting for a business partner at starbucks, having a BBQ in Oakland, checking out of an Airbnb, taking a nap in a dorm common room, and others.  All of this while the police getting called to negotiate with a violent killer in Santa Fe, Texas.  To negotiate with a violent killer, who has already killed people in his school. I didn’t see the BART officer who killed Oscar Grant negotiating with that unarmed black man.  I didn’t see the NYPD officer who killed Saheed Vassell in Brooklyn.  

Meanwhile in Gaza, Palestinians are literally being killed at long-range for walking to the edge of the concentration camp that Israel has created for them.  Getting shot, for walking to the border with Palestinian flags, and demanding to return to the land that was once theirs.  If Israel had half as much compassion as we have for violent white male killers in the US, these killings could be avoided.  

And the narrative is always the same for the white police officer in the US as it is for the Israeli state: we were doing it in self-defense.  Just how 12-year old children with toy guns are a threat to white people in the US, unarmed protestors with flags and stones are a threat to the existence of Israel.  Anything we can tell ourselves in order to keep ourselves safe, except that these young white men are trained to be violent and aggressive by patriarchy and white supremacy.  

Fragility is built into systems such as patriarchy and white supremacy and these school shootings are the ultimate expression of that fragility.  As men and as white people, we need to do better to teach our boys, our fathers, our uncles, our friends, and anyone else in our lives who will listen, that we are not entitled to anything, and especially not to any other person if they do not want us.  We need to teach this from a young age and talk about it often to reverse these devastating effects of socialization that kill people every single day.  And as white people, we need to realize just how badly we have been hoodwinked into thinking that those people of color around us, are threatening simply because they exist.  Next time we feel this as a white person we really need to meditate on what is truly happening inside of us.  

Let’s teach our people how to reject all of the myths that we have been fed for centuries and to raising boys to have a healthy relationship to rejection.  We can do better, and we need to if we stand any chance at stopping the violence so embedded into our society.