Day: October 12, 2018

Glancing through the notes on this, I can’t help but be kind of glad again that I do seem to have missed out on most of the more recent hair straightening pressure in the US.

A while back, I watched one video that showed up recommended on YouTube out of curiosity, with a younger black American guy talking about some of the things he noticed while visiting the UK. (Don’t have the spoons to try to find that now, and most of it isn’t relevant anyway.)

One thing that did unexpectedly jump out at him, though? Seeing a lot more variety of hair textures on women. Not just a decent bit of natural hair on black women, but also much more curly/wavy hair in general that other women were not routinely wearing straightened.

I mean, I don’t know much about that guy’s frame of reference at home, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he had a point there. Some people do straighten their hair here, but it really doesn’t seem to be a base expectation to look even vaguely put-together in anything like the same way.

(And I am suspicious of some of the racial not even undertones with it sometimes. Non-straight hair just doesn’t seem to be racialized in the same ways here, longer term. Coming from a pretty mixed background, I may have noticed even more.)

From what I’ve kept gathering from some discussions, that pressure really seems to have picked up over the past 10 years or so, since I last spent any time back in the US. And it does keep surprising me.

This time, I was particularly struck by more than one person in notes mentioning unsolicited advice to straighten toddler girls’ hair so it would look neater 😵 I mean, I grew up with a (very badly managed out of ignorance) snarly mop of hair that stuck out all over the place, and some adults got just plain abusive about it. But, some expectations seem to have gotten more rigid since then, and applied much earlier.

(Toddlers? Really?! Their hair is just starting to really grow in, and basically never looks neat. Beyond the issue of treating curly/wavy as inherently messy. Why anyone would expect it to be Under Control, I have no idea. Much less think it’s reasonable to use hot appliances and/or chemicals on a squirmy toddler head. Talk about some messed up priorities.)

algrenion:

kahavave:

yourweeaboobs:

weloveshortvideos:

there’s a goat! why is there a goat!? oh my god! there’s a fucking lama!

PLEASEEE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD UNMUTE THIS HE’S SO PERPLEXED

For anyone who still hasn’t seen the details on this; zoo break out.  Those are zoo animals.  Which is why they’re so comfortable around humans and the goat came looking for food.

the way it cuts at the end with that grunt of confusion

gokuma:

transboysunited:

transadvicegroup:

spyhops:

stephrc79:

howler32557038:

Since joining Tumblr, I’ve met a lot of young queer people. Look, I’m a bisexual man in a gay relationship, and I’m approaching 30. I was still a kid when Matthew Shepard’s story was being covered on the news. I remember thinking, “I better keep my mouth shut about these feelings I’m having.”

And then I met Dominic when I was 12, and people could see how in love we were. And we got the shit beat out of us. The year I met him, some kids in the grade above me held me down against the bleachers in our gym and stomped on my hand until my fingers broke. Instead of sending me to the nurse, the teacher sent me to the assistant principal to explain the situation. She asked why the kids had beat me up. I said, “They were calling me gay.”

Her response was, “Well, are you?”

My, “I don’t know,” earned a call to my parents, and I was outed. Efforts were made to keep me from seeing Dom. Throughout high school, Dom’s stepmother intensified these efforts. He slept in the basement of the house. Although he was an incredibly talented student, he was prohibited from participating in any extracurriculars. He suffered a lot of physical abuse during those years.

The day he turned 18, he packed up everything he had and walked to my house, and we’ve lived together ever since. Things are better, but they’re not perfect. I’ve had trucks pull up next to me at stoplights and, seeing the pride sticker on my car, through old drinks and garbage into my window. I no longer speak to my dad’s side of the family. I haven’t been to see them for Christmas or Thanksgiving in years. One of my uncles had cornered me at Thanksgiving when I was 17 and said, “I’m not going to judge you, but I’d be happy to break your neck so God can do the judging a little sooner.”

I joined a support group for trans and intersex people. When I joined, 40 people attended regularly. Within the year, the group was half the size it had been. Some couldn’t make it anymore, because they were staying at the shelter, where their stay hinged on them agreeing to instead to attend homophobic sermons. Some were put in correctional therapy. Five of them died. Three of those, I didn’t know, but I knew Alex, the 19 year old who was fag-dragged in Kentucky and died a day later in the hospital, and I knew Stephanie, who went home to Alabama to care for her mom in hospice and was beaten to death with a baseball bat by her mom’s boyfriend.

Tumblr is not reality. The dynamic here does not reflect the dynamic out there. Here’s the part where I finally make a point, and it might be extremely unpopular – but guys, value your allies. Value each other. We are met with enough hate in our daily lives to enter an online safe-space and meet more hate from our own, over petty things. Don’t go after one another over every little thing you find problematic.

Learn to see nuance. Maybe the word “queer” bothers you, and you see a gay man using it as an umbrella term. Maybe someone called a trans man a trans woman because they’re confused about terminology, but the post where they did it was voicing support for the trans community. Maybe someone is just asking a question, wanting to learn more. Stop. Attacking. These. People.

Allies are being driven away. Members of our own community are being ostracized. Others are feeling nervous and estranged, and it’s largely because of places like Tumblr, where the social justice movement is quickly becoming violent and radical. I am begging you, stop nitpicking “problematic” things and start directing your efforts to create real change. When it comes to comes to your allies, forget the “social justice warrior” mentality and put down your torch. Educate calmly. Be respectful. Be understanding. Be forgiving. And I’m certainly not saying that your anger doesn’t have a good place – when you are met with bigots on the street, congress members who want to pass hateful laws, violent protesters, abusive parents, prejudiced teachers, that is when you need to be a warrior. That’s when it counts. In the real world. When you have the opportunity to protect people from real harm. Attacking your would-be allies via anonymous asks is just going to lose us ground in the long run. And we don’t have time for that, not when trans women of color are being murdered every day, not when states are still fighting against marriage equality, not when there are politicians in office who believe that trans people are possessed by demons, not when we’ve just lost 50 brothers and sisters to one gunman, not when the media won’t even admit that the attack was homophobic.

Please step back. Look at the big picture. Look at where we are, globally. Don’t just log on to your safe space and attack your allies over small missteps. That’s like washing the dishes in a house that’s on fire, kids. Let’s fight on the battlefield, and when we come home to each other, let’s just focus on bandaging up our wounds so we can go out and win the war.

Signal boost to this unbelievably important message.

I’d reblog this a thousand times if I could.

Stop attacking allies. Educate. Not hate. 

This is incredibly important. Please read!

Educate calmly. Be respectful. Be understanding. Be forgiving.


Police interrogate man for being black, lock down campus building

terraalpha:

mostlysignssomeportents:

Reginald Andrade is the consumer manager of disability services at
the University of Massachusetts Amherst. On September 14 he was walking
across campus to work. This scared a bystander who called the police.
Andrade says the police were waiting for him by the time he arrived at
work.

https://boingboing.net/2018/10/11/police-interrogate-man-for-bei.html

Here is the ACLU article in its entirety.

I Was Reported to Police as an ‘Agitated Black Male’ — for Simply Walking to Work

ayeforscotland:

ayeforscotland:

rogue-reign:

benefitscrounger:

ayeforscotland:

Tories, Labour, DUP, and LibDems have been informing on the people they represent in their constituency.

A disgusting and inhumane breach of trust.

why is there an ‘immigration hotline’ to begin with, well i mean i know why, but it doesn’t make it less awful or dystopian

because we need to make sure our immigration is controlled and legal

Bollocks. That’s not the job of a Member of Parliament. The only way they’d know is if a constituent came to them regarding their immigration status, and they’ve then gone and breached that confidence.

It’s not an MPs job to be a snitch.

@rogue-reign The windrush generation are not illegal immigrants, they are victims of draconian immigration policy. The Tories changed the rules on immigration after allowing people to move to the UK, that technically renders them ‘illegal’ immigrants despite originally being invited to the UK.

But let’s take your view to the next step, because what you’re endorsing here is a police-state with snitches, would you have turned your Jewish neighbour into the Nazis?

Genuine question because if your only defence is ‘follow the law’ then that’s where it leads us.

storm-kissed-wings:

swirlymind:

snakedance:

clutchwokeup:

the autistic ping

Look, we’re not actually narcissists

When you talk to us about an emotional issue

And we respond with a personal experience or anecdote

We’re not trying to make the conversation about ourselves.

Most times (at least with me), I have to find an experience within myself that is similar to what you’ve described

So I can furnish an appropriate emotional reaction to what you’re experiencing.

It’s sort of like when you ping an IP address to fix a faulty Wi-Fi connection.

It’s not personal, it’s just how I navigate Feelings™.

This is how many people on the Autism spectrum express empathy.  We don’t say things like “You must have felt so…” like neurotypical people are used to.  To us, that comes across as presuming to know.  We look to when we felt something that seems similar, and offer that experience.  That lets the other person decide whether we truly know how they feel.

When I do this I am trying to show you that I really do know how you feel, and not just saying something arbitrary to make you feel better. Since I’m not good at showing and expressing emotions or even knowing exactly what it is I am feeling, I barely know what others are feeling. But by relating situation to situation, I’m acknowledging what they are feeling now and that I felt a similar way once, so that any advice I give can sound like I’m feeling the right emotion.

As someone who has, historically, been rarely understood, there’s not much I hate more than people telling me how I feel.

So, I LOATHE to act presumptuous in situations like this. Saying “you must feel so…” feels so disrespectful. Saying stock phrases feels hollow. Trying to diagnose how you feel about a situation, instead of letting you tell me, feels like I’m trying to write your thoughts for you.

The only experience I feel any right to is my own. So I share that. Not to shift the attention to me, but to empathize. Because I don’t know what fucking else to say, that doesn’t sound like every motherfucker who says “uwu I’m sorry” when they mean “shut up I don’t care.”

This doesn’t excuse me from being accountable if I’m rude. But intentions do matter, and its important to know that a lot of people work this way when presented with someone else’s emotions.

It is possible to show genuine care for another by talking about yourself. For some, it seems the most respectful way. Whether that’s ok or not, I don’t claim to know. But we’re not narcissists. We wouldn’t rather be talking about ourselves. We use talking about ourselves as a tool to talk about you.