“I think we like to think [as a country] we’re making progress. But in reality, we still get turned away from buses. We still have nowhere to live.”
As one indication, the NHS didn’t even make an effort to look like they were trying with the Accessible Information Standard until over 20 years after the DDA went into effect.
What is life really like for disabled people? The disability diaries reveal all
“The school eventually informed her, she says, that it did not have to abide by her children’s IEPs [and] that her children’s teachers were not even trained in teaching students with disabilities.”
New Report Shows How ‘School Choice’ Puts Students With Disabilities at Risk – Rewire
“More than 1 million Americans are awaiting a hearing with an average wait of two years.”
Suddenly disabled, unable to work and need benefits? Prepare for financial ruin first
Corydoras fry – Day 27 (plus Endler fry)
They’re starting to show some of the bronze cory (C. aenaes) iridescence on their cheeks, as should be just about visible here. So, that mystery may be solved.
Also temporarily sharing quarters: a few Endler fry. I thought they were settled in well enough after the move for the overhead LED not to bother them, but apparently not. Didn’t intend to stress them more.
Separating the males out, I’ve been putting them in a breeding net holding cell until I can be sure the right ones got scooped out of the fry tank. They swarm, and it’s a lot easier (and probably less stressful for everyone involved) than trying to chase the wrong tiny Endlers down in the 180L. There are at least two in Baby Fish Jail right now who need to go back to the other tank, but one move a day is plenty.
This time, I decided to try just putting them in the hang-on tank with the cory fry instead of setting up the net again. Hesitant at first, but they’re close to the same size now. Nobody will fit in anyone else’s mouth, and they should be roommates again soon enough. After watching them carefully for a while anyway, everyone seems fine with the arrangement.
Portland is sick and the sickness is white supremacy and the toxic and myopic smugness of a middle class that doesn’t know it has voted away every support that allowed it to come into existence.
How are you gonna be mad about a homeless shelter…….
😭😭property values 🙄
Just for those of you not from Portland or who don’t know, this is the same city where people posted the private addresses of teachers and school board officials for threats bc of what was essentially the integration of a white school in a high income area with a majority black school only a few blocks farther that was mostly empty bc PROPERTY VALUES
I don’t usually add to posts but since we’re shitting on Portland………I lived downtown for a number of years, right on the boundary of where the Pearl District (richest part of town) and Old Town (epicenter of the homelessness crisis) meet. There are several consecutive blocks of green space there that act as a boundary between the two, and because there are resources in Old Town for people struggling with homelessness, there were usually people sleeping on the benches in this park, or snoozing under the trees on the grass, etc. Well the Pearl is expanding rapidly, so now the wealthy people that live there have to (god forbid) look at/acknowledge the poverty right under their noses. And oh, the complaints! The concern! The self-righteous cries for change! So loud and adamant that the mayor himself declared he was going to come see just how bad the homeless problem is……
Only the dumbass set a time and date for his visit. And, shockingly, about an hour before he was supposed to arrive, the Portland PD swept through the park blocks and cleared out literally everyone that looked even remotely impoverished. So when the mayor showed up? Empty park blocks. Not a scrap of tarp or cardboard to be seen!
And that’s just one incident, but it does a pretty good job of summarizing how Portland operates: all talk, no effective action. Not because we lack the funds, but because for the most part, the wealthy white people that live here don’t actually want to fix the problem–they just want it to go somewhere else.
Haha I didn’t know about this incident. I said it on another version of this post but do you remember when they fenced off the same park blocks bc the wine bar complained that their patrons shouldn’t have to see houseless people?
So what I’m reading is Portland is Satan’s hellspawn?
This will seem pedantic to a lot of you but using language like this detached and disengages the REALITY of structural white supremacy, a huge problem across the country and not just in Portland, and reifies it as a specifically Portland problem, and one that isn’t being replicated in various ways and degrees across the country.
What makes portland DIFFERENT is it’s reputation as a safe and progressive enclave; what I’m attempting to clarify with the original post and this one is that this reputation is a myth that functions to keep Portland’s white supremacy in place.
What commentary like THIS, yours, does, is once again make Portland a special case, although this time in the opposite direction.
Portland is not special.
San Francisco, LA, NYC, Atlanta, London, Brighton, Paris, to name a few—this is happening all over the world. This is white supremacy and this is part of what it does, to white people as well as people of color.
Small town culture is knowing that there are Old Folks with strange nicknames but never knowing the stories behind them.
Of course, I made the mistake of asking why everyone calls this one guy Brickaday and it turns out that he worked at a brickyard for 40 years, stealing exactly one brick every day and making no particular efforts to conceal the theft. Nobody thought anything of it until years later he was discovered to have built three houses.
His boss is said to have shrugged and made some remarks about the importance of coming up with a plan and sticking to it.
I‘m trying to arrange my face into an appropriate approximation of silent bafflement and failing miserably.
i appreciate brickaday
i had the most baffling encounter at work today.
apparently someone left their iphone in our store. the phone was found by a woman, henceforth known as “Terrible Lady,” when Phone Owner set off the “find my iphone” alarm. the alarm is accompanied by a “please contact this # if found” message. Terrible Lady utilizes this number to text Phone Owner, demanding $100 in return for the phone. Phone Owner says they can’t afford it, there’s some back and forth, etc. etc., and eventually Phone Owner threatens to call the cops.
Terrible Lady brings the phone (which is still making the obnoxious “find my iphone” noise, and continues to do for the duration of the encounter) to my register, complaining about the audacity of Phone Owner, as if refusing to pay the $100 is an egregious personal insult. i “mhm” a lot, silently judging her, but relieved she has sensibly decided to release the phone into the store’s custody so we can return it to Phone Owner without further drama.
LMAO WRONG
fifteen minutes later, after she has checked out, she comes by my register just long enough to say “make sure she pays the $100, i’ll call to see when i need to come pick it up!” and is out the door before i can even process the fact that this women genuinely thinks that the burlington fucking coat factory is going to be the middleman for her definitely unethical and most likely illegal lost iphone extortion scheme. (side note: i looked this up once i got home from work, and it turns out that, yeah, it’s totally illegal in our state)
sure enough, an hour later, Terrible Lady calls: “hi, is this cashier #5? [that’s not my name but thanks] has she brought the $100 yet??”
there are like 2 cashiers on duty and 20 people in line. i beg my manager to take the call, which: smart move. because my manager ends up on the phone with Terrible Lady for 20 minutes, telling her that we will, under no circumstances, require Phone Owner to pay $100 before we give them the phone. eventually, Terrible Lady realizes we mean business, and SHE threatens to call the cops on US because we took the phone from her “under false pretenses”
manager hangs up on Terrible Lady /end
What did I just read?
One of the most accurate depictions of how awful customers can be.
Featuring Carrie Buck, yeah. (Why the State of Virginia Sterilized Carrie Buck — The Eugenics Movement and Buck vs. Bell)
My great-grandmother knew her when she was in a “foster care” placement in our town. (Read: farming out poor kids as domestic servants.) Not sure if it was the same placement where she got pregnant by rape, or not.
They were about the same age, and Granny Lu was lucky she didn’t end up as the big eugenics test case herself after my Papaw was born when she was 14. (Also from rape.) Having family backup and no state involvement was the big difference there, AFAICT. But, this hits pretty close to home in multiple ways.
(More on Virginia’s history of eugenics, with laws on the books up into the ‘70s. )
5 Odd Facts About the Difficult, Tortured History of Virginia Indians – Indian Country Media Network
I’m sorry but why the fuck is the redneck one in there?
@sixth-impact That’s not a “redneck”, that’s an Appalachian student who attends Ohio University. The prejudice in your comment reveals exactly why that poster needed to be included – people from Appalachia, one of the poorest regions in the entire United States, are presumed to be less intelligent, to be “inbred”, “hicks”, and “rednecks” everywhere they go by people like you for the way they speak, as well as for their lifestyle and economic circumstances. As someone who actually helped make these posters and spoke to the Appalachian students who requested its inclusion, I can tell you that this issue is not and should not be a joke.
To anyone who saw my reblog where I said that the inclusion of the white guy was almost certainly about anti-Appalachian bias, I was right. Here it is from someone actually involved in the making of those posters.
Discrimination against people from Appalachia is actually an issue, both historical and modern, and that’s why I always cringe when we intellegent and enlightened whites always take potshots at “hillbillies.” It is not a form of “reverse racism”, it’s a category of discrimination that should be looked at in its own right as a sui generis phenomenon.
Many people of Appalachian origin are the descendants of Celtic, Irish, and Scottish slaves and indentured servants, which, in the words of Ohio University social work professor Susan Sarnoff, means that:
…white Appalachians share histories that are often closer to those of African-American
slaves than of other white immigrants–they were brought
against their will, without family, property, prospects or preparation for
the changes they would face in this country.Historically speaking, Appalachia has also been the victim of a model of natural resource extraction that resembles what’s seen in third world nations, so much so that some scholars have even referred to it as an example of American colonialism. Coal was mined by workers in horrible working conditions and then exported to other parts of the nation for use by exploitative companies, with very little of the benefits ever returning to the workers in the form of either income or infrastructure and economic development. At the same time, there was also widespread extraction by the lumber industry. It’s no wonder that so much of American labor organization has occurred in the mining industry, in order to fight back against these conditions.
As a result of this model of extraction, poverty has always been enormously high in Appalachia, and it remains so today: 16 of the 100 lowest-income counties in America are in Eastern Kentucky. I go to school in the North Carolina mountains, and my county has a 27% poverty rate, almost double the national average of 15%. I once drove no more than 20 miles off campus on some back roads and found a one-room shack that I believe someone was living in.
Appalachians who want to escape this poverty by moving elsewhere faced discrimination by others. According to historian Ronald Eller’s book, “Uneven Ground: Appalachia since 1945″:
Convinced that Appalachians were ignorant, lazy, unclean, and sometimes immoral, community leaders bemoaned their arrival as “a sore to the city and a plague to themselves” and blamed them for rising crime, congestion, and a host of other urban maladies. “In my opinion they are worse than the colored,” complained a Chicago police captain. “They are vicious and knife happy… I can’t say this publicly, but you’ll never improve the neighborhood until you get rid of them.”
Using imagery similar to that applied to other migrant populations, especially African Americans from the Deep South, northerners developed a repertoire of ethnic hillbilly jokes that reflected deep-seated fears and a misunderstanding of mountain culture. Many of the jokes poked fun at the lack of education, sophistication, and resources of mountain migrants; others cruelly implied immorality and ignorance.
Because of this, anti-Appalachian discrimination is recognized by the government of the city of Cincinnati, whose legal code explicitly includes discrimination against people of “Appalachian regional origin” in their legal definition of “discriminate”.
Discrimination of that sort, in fact, led to eugenics programs in this country getting their Constitutional justification. In the Supreme Court case of Buck v. Bell in 1927, a white 18-year-old rape victim and middle school dropout from Virginia named Carrie Buck was ordered to be forcibly sterilized due to her allegedly poor mental capacities (she was actually a woman of average intelligence from what I understand, but it doesn’t really matter). The Supreme Court ruled 8-1 that her sterilization was Constitutional and preventing what was seen as white trash from breeding was in the legitimate public interest of Virginia. In the ruling, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. commented that Buck, her mother, and her child were all “feeble-minded,” and that “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” The case upheld the legitimacy of sterilization programs all over the nation that inevitably went on to be used against women of color, and was even used by Nazi doctors to justify their actions at the Nuremburg trials.
These negative perceptions- lazy, uneducated, uncultured, white trash hillbillies- are still prevalent and accepted in society today. Their association with parts of Appalachian culture (the accent and dialect comes to mind) allows for continued discrimination today. This isn’t “boo hoo why isn’t there a white history month” stuff, this is a group of culturally distinct people who have faced unique forms of historical discrimination and oppression that persists in various forms today.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
You must be logged in to post a comment.